Except, of course, you can't see them.
Signs abound: No Thru Traffic. No Trespassing.
Members and Guests Only. No Turn Around. Sentries
scan the paths from above with binoculars, helped
out by infrared sensors.
And what are those important men doing out
there for 17 days behind that elaborate security?
Slipping into frocks and putting on pageants.
The Bohemian Club, a beguiling mix of ultra-power
hangout and high school play, is one of several
elite private clubs in San Francisco, curious
islands of conservatism amid a forest of Kerry for
President signs.
Of these, the Big Four are the Bohemian Club,
the stodgy Pacific-Union Club atop Nob Hill, the
gigantic sports-minded Olympic Club, and the tiny
ultra-exclusive San Francisco Golf Club straddling
the line between San Francisco and Daly City.
Two admit women. Two do not. One admits women
in town, but not in the country -- and not after
dark.
None admits the poor, except in white jackets.
Or so sources say. Information is not easy to
come by. It's secret stuff, very hush-hush.
Members consent to talk to a reporter only if
their names are withheld, and then say only the
most laudatory things. They're just following the
rules. The bylaws for the Pacific-Union Club, for
example, read: "No information regarding any
Club activity or function shall be released by
anyone to the media."
Also, one suspects, secrecy is part of the fun.
It's impossible to talk about private clubs in
this day and age without sounding censorious, but
people have always liked having the right to
choose who joins their private associations. Mills
College in Oakland resisted a demand to let male
students in. Many book clubs ban men because the
women want to read "The Hours" and the
men would want to read the new Alexander Hamilton
biography. There are a number of fancy women's
clubs here, such as the Town & Country (said
to be the female Pacific-Union Club).
We all like to gang together with people like
us, and men seem to like it even more than women
do. If there were only five men in all of North
America, three of them would sneak out behind the
house and start a club. The other two would not be
asked to join.
Clubs are reproved for excluding various sets
of people, but excluding is, after all, the point.
If there is to be an "us," there has to
be a "not us." (Or your club is Costco.)
And as one member remarked, when it comes to
women, "It's not excluding. It's getting away
from."
When Augusta National in Georgia was pressured,
unsuccessfully, to accept women two years ago, the
appropriately named Mary Anne Case, a professor at
the University of Chicago Law School, couldn't
think of a reason for its refusal to admit females
"that doesn't involve somehow girls having
cooties."
These relics of the age of exclusion seem to be
in no danger of going the way of other 19th
century institutions. John van der Zee, who lives
in Healdsburg, posed as a waiter at the Bohemian
Grove one summer and wrote the 1974 book "The
Greatest Men's Party on Earth." "When I
did the book," he said, "I thought it
would be valedictory. A way of life that was
ending."
That was 30 years ago. Today these clubs have
long waiting lists. Paul B. "Red" Fay
Jr., former undersecretary of the Navy who's on
the roster of the San Francisco Golf Club (SFGC),
the Bohemian Club (BC) and the Pacific-Union Club
(PU), said, somewhat tautologically but sincerely,
"The reason there's such a big demand is
because everybody wants to get in them. "
"PU is the pre-eminent club," said
Sally Debenham, a San Francisco socialite.
"The crème de la crème. Big, big heavy
players in the PU Club. They take it seriously,
the little darlings." The Pacific-Union's
prohibitions have been characterized, said Merla
Zellerbach, as "no women, no Democrats, no
reporters."
It's old guard, old money -- and many of the
members are just plain old. The joke is that guest
speakers must stop "when you hear the canes
rattle." It's housed in what travel writer
Jan Morris described as an "inconceivably
gloomy" mansion standing on a block by itself
on the crest of Nob Hill.
Belonging to a club like this says a lot about
who you are. Tell someone you're a member of the
Pacific-Union Club, and you are saying you made it
through a rigorous vetting to filter out the
"not us."
One local intellectual property lawyer joined
seven years ago when he was 40. The selection
process included a preliminary statement on his
behalf by a Proposer and Seconder after which he
got 12 sponsoring members and then took 10 members
of the committee to dinner individually.
One member described how it feels to play
squash at the Pacific-Union Club and have a glass
of wine afterward with his male friends.
"It's an incalculatingly wonderful feeling,
that of belonging," he said.
Mostly, the members are old white guys. They
want younger faces at all these clubs, but by the
time people work their way up the waiting lists,
the dew is off the bloom. The lawyer who went
through the lengthy process to join the PU is also
on a waiting list for the Bohemian Club. He's been
on it for 20 years.
Even stringent latter-day lunch policies
haven't discouraged membership. Like many clubs,
the PU has always asked members to dine there so
many times a quarter. But members can no longer
deduct the meals as a business expense. That's
illegal if a club discriminates based on age, sex
or race. In fact, club rules forbid talking
business at all -- or even reading the business
page. Architect George Livermore, who belongs to
this club, the Bohemian Club and the Olympic Club,
said, "They recently put out a notice saying
it's been called to the attention of managers that
papers have been brought to the table! " He
said the place is now almost empty at lunch.
Women can't lunch in the main dining room, only
in a side room. When venture capitalist Annette
Campbell-White worked for Hambrecht & Quist,
the firm had a luncheon at the PU Club to welcome
new partners and told her she couldn't attend --
then she could, but had to come in the back door.
One partner accused her of ruining the party and
suggested, she recalled, that next time she
"take a business trip."
Even the wives of members are asked to come in
by the back door, Debenham said. She had foot
problems once and used the front. It felt strange.
"I was so trained to come in the back
door."
Livermore doesn't know why women can't come as
guests. "Anything you include women in is
always exciting," he said, noting the Olympic
Club was smart to always allow women as guests.
"Now that women are almost people," he
joked, "why don't the other clubs do
that?"
The San Francisco Golf Club is so shy, Debenham
said, it won't give out directions. "Even
members get lost trying to find the place."
Notice to lost members: You can find those
undulating greens and gingerbready clubhouse
behind those unnaturally tall eucalyptus trees in
back of the "John Daly Blvd" freeway
sign on I-280 just past San Francisco State. Slow
at the sign for Thomas Moore Church and drive past
the discreetly blocking shrubbery until you see
the small sign: "SF Golf Club, Private."
This club wishes to continue to fly way, way
under the radar. Calls were not returned. So our
information has not been confirmed or denied by
anybody representing the club.
David Burgin, former editor in chief of the San
Francisco Examiner, said, "All your tycoons
are over there." But that's not true. The
club recently said no to one tycoon -- Scott
McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems. He was named
the best CEO golfer in the country by Golf Digest
magazine. Whatever this club is holding out for,
it's not members with a great swing.
Neither the club nor McNealy cared to comment.
One should note, though, that McNealy's other
sport is hockey, and computer money is new, not
old. And, as you see, he brings the attention of
the press with him.
"It's the most difficult club to get
into," said Paul Fay Jr., member since 1946.
"It's just impossible," said
Livermore, who has tried to get friends in.
"They say, 'Forget it!' "
Which means forget using the club's fabled fast
course overlooking the windy Pacific. Designed by
the revered A.W. Tillinghast, it's ranked among
the best in the world.
"The women are allowed to play on certain
days at certain times," Fay said. "I
think Thursday is their special day when they play
in the morning, and then Sunday afternoons they
can go out there and have their social activities
and everything they want to run."
Fifteen years ago, this club lost its role as
host to PGA golf events because it had no minority
members, either. It has not returned to hosting
public tournaments.
But clubs make sacrifices to keep their
membership the way they like it. Farther south,
Cypress Point, which Burgin described as
"stinking rich," withdrew from the
AT&T Pebble Beach tournament it had hosted for
years. "Rather than admit minorities, they
shattered their own tradition. How could you have
that tournament without TV pictures of the 16th
hole at Cypress Point?" Burgin asked. The
16th hole there is 230 yards airborne across an
inlet.
The San Francisco Golf Club, tiny and with no
public functions, can be as persnickety as it
likes about whom it lets in. And whom it keeps
out.
"They don't take Jewish people, which is
outrageous," Livermore said. Others familiar
with the club said this is true. Fay preferred not
to comment on the policy but, when asked if there
were any Jewish members, said, "I don't think
they have one right now."
"The Bohemian Grove is woodsy," said
Astrid Hoffman of Tiburon, whose husband belongs
to the St. Francis Yacht Club. "They have
these little houses or clubs. They're like Cub
Scouts with their dens. They try to outdo each
other in drinks and food, have private concerts
and get-togethers." There are 125 different
camps -- Toyland, Dog House, Sons of Toil, etc.
George H.W. Bush will be in Hill Billies, along
with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The bylaws say that at least 100 members must
be connected professionally with literature, art,
music or drama. Such "associate" members
pay much less - - but must sing for their supper,
in an arrangement worthy of a Medici.
"If you're a theatrical type, you shoot to
the top of the list," Debenham said.
"The Bohemian Grove is marvelously
eclectic."
Every year at the Grove, a freshly written play
with a cast of hundreds is performed the last
Sunday of the retreat. "We know in advance
that the hero will be a king or commander adored
by his men, and that he will see his duty and do
it," said Healdsburg author van der Zee of
what he calls "these lumbering
pageants."
One year, San Francisco novelist Herb Gold said
he was offered an associate membership if he would
help write the Grove play. Gold took fellow writer
Earnest Gaines ("A Lesson Before
Dying"), an African American, to a Wednesday
night entertainment at the six-story downtown
club. Five members, he said, were in blackface.
One member clapped Gaines on the back. "Looks
like you've played a little football," Gold
heard him say. Shortly thereafter, the writers
took their leave. "I guess I'm not
clubbable," Gold said wryly.
Those who are clubbable find themselves
strolling past faces any American would recognize.
"Never mind just plain CEOs and
presidents," Hoffman said, "they have
president presidents" -- such as former
President George H.W. Bush, who has brought his
sons.
William F. Buckley was a member until he
resigned last year. He'd play Bach pieces on the
harpsichord at dusk on Friday nights (to campers
who'd have preferred the Cal fight song, one
member told me).
The arts are a genuine part of the spirit of
this club. But a bit more goes on. In 1971,
President Richard Nixon, a member since 1953, was
to be the lakeside speaker, but reporters had
finally raised a ruckus about a sitting president
giving an off-the-record speech at the Grove.
Nixon sent sugary regrets in a telegram that hangs
in the city clubhouse today, saying that anyone
could be president of the United States, but only
a few could aspire to be president of the Bohemian
Club.
Privately, he said to domestic affairs adviser
John Ehrlichman and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman
(and the hidden tape recorder) in the Oval Office
that May: "The Bohemian Grove, which I attend
from time to time -- it is the most faggy
goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that
San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with
anybody from San Francisco."
That testy remark could have been pique. He
didn't get to deliver his speech, and, as van der
Zee noted, the Grove, its powerful members pledged
to secrecy, provides an ideal audience on which to
test a major policy address. "Every elected
official knows there's no place more conducive to
the conduct of political affairs than a gathering
that has been declared nonpolitical," he
said.
Many have taken advantage. At
www.sonomacountyfreepress.com, the Web site of the
protest group called the Bohemian Grove Action
Network (their logo depicts a tuxedoed patrician
in a top hat swilling a martini as he straddles an
MX missile) shows that speakers who have
"given a Lakeside" include Vice
President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger, Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia, George H.W. Bush and Michel Rocard, former
prime minister of France.
Nelson Rockefeller gave up a run for the
presidency after his speech failed to move his
fellow campers. And this is where, according to
van der Zee and many other published sources, Bush
asked Cheney to be his running mate in 2000, where
Nixon advised Ronald Reagan to stay out of the
coming presidential race in 1967, where Edward
Teller and others in the Manhattan Project mapped
out the atomic bomb in the autumn of 1942.
Mary Moore of Occidental, a founder of the
Action Network, which has helped organize
demonstrations outside the Grove since 1980, said
the speeches -- sorry, talks -- have been hard to
acquire because her source inside moved on and the
club took to locking the texts of the speeches in
the guardhouse. (She did send us the 2002
membership roster.)
The club would like all this secret stuff to
stay secret, which means that the curious are
always breaking in (Mother Jones, National Public
Radio, the Los Angeles Times, CBS).
Media CEOs have had to interrupt their
conversations to throw out their own reporters.
When Dirk Mathison, San Francisco bureau chief for
People magazine, sneaked onto the grounds, a Time
Warner executive recognized him and walked him to
the gate. The piece never ran.
In fact, whole newspaper empires have been
flung out. The club has an offshoot called the
Family that came into being after the Hearst-owned
Examiner ran a 1901 piece in which Ambrose Bierce
predicted the assassination of President William
McKinley. When McKinley was assassinated soon
after, the club threw out its Hearst people and
removed its newspapers from the clubrooms. The
Family flourishes to this day, letting all kinds
of people in and supporting a hospital in
Nicaragua. Its new members are called Babies, and
the president is the Father. "There is no
mother," a member said. "The babies are
brought by the stork."
Curiously, the Bohemian Club was started by
newspapermen much like the ones now landing in a
heap of dust outside the gate. In 1872, an
editorial writer for The Chronicle proposed a club
so reporters could meet somewhere other than
saloons.
Van der Zee said, "It's not uncommon for
founding principles to become institutional
embarrassments, but few social clubs have made
such a turnabout."
It is called "social" because
business is the last thing on anyone's mind at
this club to which hundreds of CEOs and former and
current government officials belong.
"Oh, please," Debenham said.
"The contacts are amazing."
Ehrlichman once told a reporter, "Once
you've spent three days with someone in an
informal situation, you have a relationship -- a
relationship that opens doors and makes it easier
to pick up the phone."
(This is reportedly called the "Mandalay
effect," after the camp where the Bechtels
stay, along with Kissinger, Colin Powell and San
Francisco's own George Shultz.)
Women don't get to experience the Mandalay
effect because they aren't allowed in, except on
certain family weekends, and then they must be off
the grounds by dusk. It's not clear what will
happen to them if they're not. Maybe it has never
happened.
"Periodically a wife makes noise, and then
it dies down," Hoffman said.
She believes men need retreats like this.
"It's that Masonic thing, the touching of the
ring. Goes back to before the Crusades. The men
feel safer without women. It's the same thing in a
way when women get together. First it's jolly and
then gets weird. Clannish."
The importance of male bonding aside, it seems
wrong to some for all this political talk to be
going on with the press and half the population
absent. Case finds it alarming that no women are
at the Grove, especially when the policy
discussions concern them. "People I know --
definitely not friends of mine -- say they've
discussed the role women should be playing in the
armed forces at the Grove."
What's the law on this? The Supreme Court has
held that the Constitution protects two kinds of
associations: private or intimate associations
(fewer than 400 members, such as the SFGC) and
expressive associations formed to put forth a
principle or idea. "You have to look at how
big the club is, how committed to an ideology, and
how exclusion is necessary matters to its
purposes," Case said. "The Bohemians are
principally Republicans. They discuss politics.
They have, as it were, a point of view. That may
qualify them as an expressive association."
And don't forget this club has artistic leanings.
It expresses itself in a Druid-like opening
ceremony called Cremation of Care that features
red pointy hats, torches and Care getting badly
singed.
Case has heard about that and has her own
theory about why the club is all male. "The
things they do would look too silly if women saw
them."
The huge athletic Olympic Club, with two golf
courses by the ocean and a more tie-and-suit
headquarters downtown, is the oldest and one of
the most famous clubs in the country, and one of
the biggest.
Of the three clubs he belongs to, this is
George Livermore's favorite. He lives across the
street from the downtown site. "I go swimming
at the Olympic Club and get drunk next door at the
Bohemian Club," he said, merrily.
His grandfather, Horatio P. Livermore, was a
founder of the Olympic Club back in 1860 in a
downtown firehouse and added two gorgeous 18-hole
golf courses by the ocean in the 1920s. It has
since hosted four U.S. Open championships.
Like many clubs, it was begun by people who
couldn't get in elsewhere -- in this case,
Germans, Italians, Irish and Catholics.
"I used to play golf there with a florist
and another guy who sells vegetables and hauls
lettuce and celery around the backseat of a
Rolls-Royce," said Burgin, a member since
1969. "It's not a place merely for the rich
and the swells."
There's a 10-year wait for golf memberships.
The lakeside clubhouse was designed by Arthur
Brown, who designed San Francisco's City Hall and
the Opera House.
The club has lots of sport teams, bay swims,
dinners, power pacing classes, an annual hike and
dip on Ocean Beach, relays around Lake Merced and
crab feasts. "It's the best club in the
world," said Stuart Kinder, president last
year. "We have a broad-based membership that
crosses all social and economic lines. You don't
have to be a blue blood to be a member. You don't
have to be wealthy."
Marcus Musante, 25, is glad to have joined as a
junior member, though he got scolded for wearing
cargo pants to a golf lesson. "People are
talkative. It's a social atmosphere. When you're
young, just starting out, there're few things as
valuable as talking to an older professional. It's
nice to pick their brains, and at the club they're
willing to be open and share their pearls."
When Musante told an older member that he was
interning at a district attorney's office,
"he recommended for me to go into a
government agency right out of school and try to
cure the world of its problems until you realize
you can't."
Until 1992, women could golf but not go to the
downtown club. That year it was discovered the
club had three holes on public property. Louise
Renne, then city attorney, said, "We told
them, 'Stop discriminating or play with 15 holes.'
" Women now are full members.
"These days, athletic clubs would be mad
to exclude women -- they're so much more involved
in athletics than they ever have been," said
Ron Fimrite, who's at work on a history of the
club. The club is building new facilities on
Sutter Street, largely for the women.
Burgin doesn't go to the Olympic Club much
anymore. "When girls come in, it flat
changes," he mourned. "Used to be, you'd
go in and the ballgame's on, tablecloths are
plain, no flowers on the tables. You can sit down
at anybody's table without formality, yell across
the room and talk dirty. So goddamn annoying.
Breaks my heart.
"Ferchrissakes, can't a man have a place
to go?"
Bohemian Club Addresses: 624 Taylor St., and
Bohemian Grove, 75 miles northwest of San
Francisco near Guerneville
Membership: 2,700 (one member per acre)
Waiting list: 3,000
Average number of years on waiting list: 15 to
20
Members: George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Henry
Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, George Shultz,
Alexander Haig, Colin Powell, rocker Steve Miller,
Clint Eastwood.
Slogan: "Weaving Spiders Come Not
Here."
Books to read about it: "The Bohemian
Grove" by G. William Domhoff and "The
Greatest Men's Party on Earth" by John van
der Zee.
Accept minorities: Yes, especially if they can
play an instrument.
Best place to spy: Put your canoe in the
Russian River at Northwood, just west of Johnson's
Beach in Guerneville, and head downstream past
their floating boathouse. The Bohemians couldn't
buy the whole river. One suspects they are irked
by this fact.
San Francisco Golf Club Address: Brotherhood
Way and Junipero Serra Boulevard
Founded: 1895
Membership: 300
Good movie for them to watch: "Gentlemen's
Agreement"
Historical tidbit: Hole 7 is site of the last
official duel in California, between Sen. David S.
Broderick and California Supreme Court Justice
David S. Terry in 1859
Pacific-Union Club Address: 1000 California St.
Founded: 1881, when the Pacific Club (1852) and
the Union Club (1854) joined ranks.
Membership: 775
Members: David Packard, Ronald Pelosi, Peter
McGowan, Henry Kaiser, Walter Haas, five Bechtels
General manager: Tom Gaston Jr.
Admit women: No
Slogan: None
Dues: "They keep raising them because
nobody cares," said member George Livermore.
Protests: Four years ago, the Sisters of
Perpetual Indulgence carried huge altered
portraits of the members dressed in gowns to
complain that the city's transvestites had no
access to the club. "After all, just because
you have a dress on doesn't mean you don't like to
enjoy the club's osso bucco and Grgich reds,"
noted Supervisor Tom Ammiano.
Movies: Has a cameo in "Vertigo."
Olympic Club Addresses: 524 Post St. and 599
Skyline Blvd. on Highway 35 near Palo Mar Stables
Membership: 6,000
Founded: 1860
Slogan: "O Realm Where Stalwart Manhood
Rules."
Stalwart womanhood: Yes, since 1992
Web site: www.olyclub.com
Fun facts: The women's Metropolitan Club and
the Olympic Club talked about merging about 20
years ago. The Metropolitan Club (formerly the
Women's Athletic Club) turned the boys down.
This week's question: Should private clubs be
discriminating on the basis of sex, race and
religion when choosing members?
-- Yes. Through fund-raisers and donations, the
benefits of these clubs extend far beyond their
memberships.
-- Yes. Members of these groups receive no
government funding and are allowed to choose their
associates.
-- No. Because many members are influential in
government, law and business, it is unfair that
their discussions are private.
-- No, but these clubs are relics and probably
will die of natural causes within a few years.
Vote at sfgate.com/polls
E-mail Adair Lara at alara@sfchronicle.com.
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
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