America's Secret Aristocracy (27 page)

For one thing, as far as the French families were concerned, here was the German-descended Mr. Busch trying to act like an Englishman. For another, there was the sheer, almost vulgar, vastness of Mr. Busch's wealth. His fortune has been estimated to be as much as $300 million, though he has periodically pooh-poohed that figure as being $200 million too high. August Busch has gone to none of the right schools. In fact, he has had very little formal education at all, which, he cheerfully admits, is because none of the right schools or even the wrong ones would take him. “Without a doubt,” he says, “I was the world's lousiest student,” though the University of St. Louis finally awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Laws degree in 1969. Then there have been his well-publicized marital adventures. He has been married four times—widowed once, divorced twice—and his third wife, whom he married when he was fifty-three, was the daughter of a Swiss restaurant manager and was only twenty-five. For this and other reasons the Busches have never been given the nod by the
Social Register
.

Meanwhile, August Busch enjoys living in a truly imperial style. His estate at Grant's Farm, a 281-acre tract encompassing the farm and log cabin where Ulysses S. Grant was raised, includes a thirty-four-room French Renaissance château, air-conditioned stables where he keeps his prize collection of Clydesdale horses, barns to contain a million-dollar collection of antique carriages, and a private zoo with chimpanzees (which are often dressed up in costumes), deer, buffalo, longhorn steer, and other animals that are allowed to roam freely in their natural habitat, as well as an elephant named Tessie. Not the least bit modest about his immodest surroundings, August Busch opens Grant's Farm to the public on a daily basis, and visitors can tour the place on miniature trains, all free of charge.

Busch's flair for self-promotion—and the promotion of his
beer—has been prodigious, and he is famous for the huge parties he has tossed at the farm for wholesalers, retailers, and even saloon-keepers, who are exhorted to keep pushing his beers across their counters to customers. He is a man who clearly loves to be in the spotlight and to see his name in public places. Though he may regard himself as an aristocrat, he is hardly a secret one. When he bought the St. Louis Cardinals in 1953, the old Sportsman's Park was promptly renamed Busch Stadium. He claims to hate the nickname Gussie, but the newspapers persist in calling him that, which gives him a chance to deliver broadsides at the press, which get his name in the papers all over again. He is also famous for his hot temper, for loving to raise particular hell if things don't go his way at the brewery, and for his barnyard humor.

There was, for example, a scene at Bridlespur a number of years ago that Busch still roars over. “I remember once,” he says, “the hounds found a fox over at Grey's farm, and they ran for an hour without check. One by one, the quitters dropped out, and finally there was no one left but Julius Van Ralde and myself. Van Ralde's horse hit the top rail of a fence and went down, and Van Ralde landed face first in a cow pie. He sat up and put his hand to his cheek and yelled, ‘I'm bleeding!' I could see the son-of-a-bitch wasn't hurt. So I tossed him my handkerchief and left him to figure out the problem for himself!” Then there have been innovations at Bridlespur that would make members of older and more sedate hunt clubs in Virginia and Maryland blanch with horror. At Bridlespur's annual horse show, Busch introduced a “costume class” competition, and one year it was won by Andrew W. Johnson, the head of the International Shoe Company, who came as Lady Godiva, wearing a wig and a sheer flesh-colored body stocking, with his toenails and fingernails painted red, riding bareback on a white horse. August Busch roars at that one, too.

For several years, the rivalry between the Bridlespur set and the Country Club set merely simmered, amounting to little more than mutual disdain. But then, in 1932, things heated up considerably when it was learned that Prince Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern, the grandson of Germany's former kaiser, would be touring in America and that one of the cities the prince planned to visit would be St. Louis.

With bona fide royalty looming on the social horizon, the competition over which club would have the privilege of
entertaining His Royal Highness became fierce. To the chagrin of the Country Club, and to the everlasting joy of Bridlespur, the prince responded that he would rather do some fox hunting than play golf. And even though the prince himself showed up for the hunt in shockingly improper attire—an ordinary business suit, a foulard tie, and a brown felt fedora—it was a resounding victory for Bridlespur and August Busch, and a humiliating defeat for the Old Guard.

Over the years, Bridlespur has made it a point to entertain distinguished horse people from out of town along with other visiting celebrities, and all this has resulted in fulsome coverage of Bridlespur—and Busch—in the local press. The club has never quite topped its historic coup with Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, but it has tried, and on at least one occasion it has been host to a bogus nobleman introduced to St. Louis as Lord Forkingham of Duncington.

Lord Forkingham was the sly creation of Bridlespur members James Busch Orthwein (August Busch's nephew) and Andrew Shinkle and was actually Mr. Russell Forgan, a stockbroker from New York who had agreed to go along with the prank. Forgan was able to muster a passable English accent, and as Lord Forkingham, he spent several days being wined and dined by
le gratin
of St. Louis, who never bothered to consult an atlas, where they would have found that there was no such place as Duncington. On the morning His Lordship (who St. Louis had decided should be addressed “Your Grace”) was scheduled to join the hunt, Orthwein and Shinkle, knowing that Forgan had not sat on a horse in decades, supplied him with the most reliable and best-mannered mount in Shinkle's stable. In his borrowed pink coat and topper, His Grace set off after the hounds. He managed quite well until he reached his first fence, where horse and rider unceremoniously parted company. While the other members of the hunt gathered solicitously around, His Grace picked himself up, dusted himself off, and said, “Certainly the worst beast that I have had the misfortune to ride in twenty years!”

The result was that the joke backfired on Mr. Shinkle. “For weeks afterward,” says James Orthwein, “everyone went around talking about that marvelously sporting Lord Forkingham and that lousy horse of Shinkle's. Shinkle was wild, but it was like the priest who shot a hole in one on Sunday. The joke had gone over so well that we were afraid to tell the
truth. The others might have made trophies out of our backsides.”

As St. Louis expanded after World War II, the Bridlespur Hunt was forced to look for further, less settled land beyond the city. This they found to the west, in the rural reaches of the town of New Melle, where the club purchased a hundred pristine new acres in 1954. At about this time, too, since a number of Bridlespur members—including August Busch—had comported themselves with distinction in wartime service, the two principal clubs in St. Louis decided that they might as well bury the hatchet. And so the mountain came to Mohammed: the St. Louis Country Club issued a gracious invitation to August A. Busch, Jr., to join its membership. Mr. Busch accepted with equal graciousness.

It was, they say in St. Louis, the only thing he really wanted in the first place. It was also proof that it is usually folly to try to impede the momentum of big money in America. And it was proof, as has been demonstrated again and again throughout America's history, that if old money is to survive with even a shred of dignity, it must, at some point, come to terms and make its peace with the new.

17

O Pioneers!

“Everyone knows,” says Mr. Gorham Knowles of San Francisco, “that Jimmy Flood's grandfather was a bartender, and that his grandmother was a chambermaid. That doesn't matter here. What matters today is that the Floods are ladies and gentlemen.”

In just three generations' time, the Floods of California have become an aristocracy—of sorts. Like moneyed families in Chicago, Denver, Dallas, and Oklahoma City, this California aristocracy is not very old, not very secret (indeed, quite conspicuous), and has decided to turn what might elsewhere be considered a minus into a plus. San Francisco's elite may, as they say here, all be “descended from prospectors and prostitutes.” But they can also take pride in the fact that the aristocracy that has evolved from this is older than that of either Los Angeles or San Diego.

The Floods of San Francisco are one of the city's Irish Big Four families, otherwise known as the Silver Kings: James C. Flood, William S. O'Brien, James Graham Fair, and John William Mackay, four men who were not so much unscrupulous as plain lucky. Big Jim Flood, described by social historian Dixon Wector as a “poor gamin of the New York Streets,” came to San Francisco with the gold rush and found work as a bartender at the Auction Lunch Rooms, so called because the gold exchange was right around the corner. In the kitchen of this establishment worked Will O'Brien, who earned local renown for his Irish fish chowder, which he made extra thick with potatoes. Out in front, Jim Flood was known for serving generous slugs of whiskey, and the Auction Lunch
Rooms became a popular watering hole for prospectors coming in from the fields. Neither Flood nor O'Brien knew anything about prospecting for precious metals, but, as drinks flowed—and tongues were loosened—Jim Flood kept his ears open. It wasn't long before he had heard of a promising site in the Comstock area near Virginia City, Nevada. Recruiting two other Irishmen, John Mackay and Jim Fair, to provide additional financial backing for the trip, Flood and O'Brien set off for Virginia City to stake a claim.

The Comstock Lode was a unique event in mining history: a bonanza discovered by a prospector on his very first dig. What the boys unearthed was the biggest single pocket of silver ever found in the entire world, a long vein of shiny metal fully fifty feet wide. When it was discovered, the Comstock Lode was estimated to be worth $300 million. That estimate proved to be on the low side. From the time of its discovery in 1859 until the mine's depletion ten years later, the Comstock poured some $500 million worth of silver into the pockets of the four original investors.

San Francisco's other Big Four royalty, the so-called Railroad Kings of the Central Pacific, were Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. They were a truly unsavory quadrumvirate without redeeming social value who fit into the robber baron category of the era comfortably. It was Huntington who, as the railroad's lobbyist in Washington, persuaded Congress to pay his company, out of taxpayers' money, $16,000 per mile for track laid over flatland and $32,000 per mile for track laid over foothills and mountains. It then occurred to Huntington to redraw the map of California, adding mountain ranges all over the place, on the gamble that nobody in Washington knew anything about the state's actual topography; his hunch was quite correct. It was Mark Hopkins, the bookkeeper of the foursome, who proposed that the Central Pacific pay its imported Chinese coolie labor force in cash, thus eliminating the need to keep any books. It was the huge, red-bearded Crocker who was the company's muscle man. He kept the railroad's workers in line by marching up and down their ranks with a pistol in one hand and a bullwhip in the other. The dignified-looking Leland Stanford was in charge of political matters in California. He was a useful front man because he at least
looked
honest. As governor of the state, he kept Sacramento out of his company's hair. Though it was hard to say, exactly, since no
books were kept, it was estimated that the Central Pacific cost about $27 million to build. The railroad foursome was able to divide up about three times this sum without ever having to invest a penny of their own money.

These men may be said to have laid the groundwork, financially and socially, for modern California and its famous freewheeling style. From them, it seems only a short step to the land of freeways, oil wells, backyard pools, custom-built cars parked along South Rodeo Drive, and power lunches in the Polo Lounge. But there is also an older, much more grand, and much more gracious California that some California families remember. This was a world that came into existence nearly a hundred years before the gold rush and lasted until well after it was over: a world of vast tracts of land stretching for miles along the seacoast and for miles inland to the Sierra foothills, land covered with golden grass and wild mustard where huge herds of beef cattle grazed—twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand head was the size of the average herd—where Thoroughbred horses were corralled, and where jackrabbits the size of dogs leapt through the underbrush. It was a world of week-long family fiestas and
ferias
, of rodeos and roping contests and horse races. It was a world of vast adobe haciendas with ballrooms big enough to hold three hundred dancing couples, where string ensembles provided mood music at mealtimes, where desserts were frappéed with ice imported from Alaska, where women's gowns were fitted by
couturières
from Paris and where men's tweeds were ordered from Savile Row and Bond Street. We are talking, of course, of the century-long era of the true
Californios
, the first white settlers, the
rancheros
who brought with them in their veins the true
sangre azul
of the Catalan and Castilian grandees of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain and who used the ennobling titles of Don and Doña. Many of their descendants still do, because, as elsewhere, the original aristocracy has not died out. It has just gone underground.

“Each of these families knows who the others are,” says Mrs. Michel François Amestoy II of Los Angeles, a descendant of one of the first California families, “but you don't read about their doings, unless it's for charity. Many are certainly successful, but the brash competitiveness that sets the business tone in California is not their tradition.” These are the families who brought their proud Spanish culture to
California, who introduced agriculture to the region, who founded the major cities, and who forged the state constitution. And, though their domain, which once stretched from San Diego in the south to Monterey in the north, has shrunk considerably, it is not true, as is often assumed, that the old Spanish land grant families “lost all their land,” though some did, and for a variety of reasons, as we shall see. Many were able to keep their land, and there are Spanish families in California today that are collectively richer than the Floods and Crockers.