Adventures in England
Recovering the lost treasures of San Francisco.
The picture captured our imagination almost as quickly as it did our attention. This particular page of the San Francisco Chronicle's Wednesday edition showed a gleaming object in an elegant box of red velvet. A caption identified it as William Sharon's last opium pipe; we were hooked.
We'd possessed a life-long fascination with the lure and lore of opium, derived from our father's occupation as a Federal Narcotics Agent in the more innocent San Francisco of pre-hippy days. From the end of the war up to the mid-'60s, drug use tended to focus on certain ethnic communities, with various degrees of overlap. Mission District Mexicans smoked marijuana, Fillmore negroes shot heroin, Chinatown residents smoked opium, and a hardcore of white dope fiends in the Tenderloin and South of Market indulged in them all.
In those days, a fed wielded a degree of power unknown today; if a druggie informed regularly and reliably, he claimed a free get-out-of-jail status that rendered him almost immune to charges by local or state authorities. A phone call to the bureau and confirmation that you were under a fed's protection set you free almost immediately. A desperate need for drugs could as well be satisfied; if the connections weren't clicking and you couldn't score, a fed might bestow a fix or two in order to help a doper avoid the dreaded withdrawals.
Father maintained a large stable of such dependents, many well-situated in the business and social life of Chinatown. Such a man headed one of the district's largest clan associations, and over the years a rather close relationship developed between the men; as a result, we annually found ourselves as the only Caucasians at the lavish Chinese New Years celebrations that rolled around every February or so. We sat at a table of honor, where we were fawned over by an endless parade of well-wishers.
Following the banquets of many courses, the family would walk to one of the back alleys of the neighborhood, where we'd present ourselves at an iron door set in a brick wall lined with battered steel garbage cans. The portal cracked open a few inches, and, our identities established, we were allowed to enter the richly furnished salon of a private Chinese club. A beautiful Chinese girl in a slinky silk dress sang unintelligible lyrics to the discordant music provided by a small band, and we sat on low divans where we consumed the beverages offered. Father's friend was by then gambling for high stakes in a back room; he appeared every half-hour or so, handing out twenty dollar bills to us in a customary expression of gratitude. It wasn't really bribery, Father explained; he was obligated to accept gifts in order for his friend to maintain face.
That all ended when someone shot our friend in the head one night over a gaming table, probably in that same venue where we savored such memorable evenings. The front page story in the papers of the day said a gambling dispute led to the murder, but Father harbored other suspicions. After the funeral he commented on the coin someone had surreptitiously placed in the corpse's mouth, indicating an informer; the expression "dropping a dime" on someone derived from the pay phone call a snitch would make to the authorities. A cross-cultural referrence, apparently.
As a result of such associations, Father came to accumulate certain objects we found fascinating, none more so than the collection of opium paraphernalia. The primitive ivory balance beam scale suspended by little red tassles; the brass peanut-oil lamps used to cook the pea-size balls of the black, gooey drug; the long-stemmed pipes, with their over-size bowls and tiny holes for sucking in the smoke.
These latter bore no resemblance to William Sharon's opium pipe, a delicate-looking thing of nickel which turned out to be a mere eight inches in length. Indeed, we'd never considered that Sharon might have engaged in the vice, but we weren't surprised; he seemed to practice every form of rascalry, albeit in a manner consistent with his sense of propriety and status.
We'd only become aware of Sharon in the last year, as a result of a growing obsession with the development of the West, and he emerges as one of the great, shadowy characters of San Francisco history, a subtle, ambiguous man looking always for the main chance and well-disposed to seize it.
A midwestern lawyer, Sharon came to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, opened a store selling mining supplies and speculated in real estate, accumulating a small fortune in the 1850s which he subsequently lost to bad mining stocks in the Nevada silver boom of the early '60s. Rescued by Billy Ralston in 1864, Sharon was installed as the manager of a new Bank of California branch in Virginia City; within a few years they controlled the Comstock Lode.
William Ralston had founded the bank a few years earlier, and San Francisco and California had no greater booster. He certainly wanted to get rich, but Ralston was motivated as well by an almost irrational desire to make San Francisco one of the world's great cities. When he embarked on construction of the Palace Hotel in the early '70s, he not only specified the finest materials, he also created entirely new industries to furnish it: to build furniture, to make locks, clocks and blankets. Ralston's increasingly grandiose schemes derived from a pathological tendency to make deals and do magnificent things, exaggerated by a long-demonstrated ability to achieve almost any goal he targeted. Unfortunately, it also encouraged him to badly overextend himself, as happened tragically in 1875. A run on mining stocks led to a collapse of his bank and a demand for his resignation; he complied and died the next day of a stroke. William Sharon by then had become Ralston's most-trusted protege; whether he precipitated the stock panic is open to question. Regardless of such details, however, Ralston was ruined and dead and Sharon ended up with everything; he presided over the opening of his Palace Hotel a few months later and soon moved into Ralston's estate at Belmont. By the end of the decade, William Sharon was the richest man in California, with a fortune approaching a hundred million. He crowned his career as absentee senator from Nevada and the defendent in an ugly legal suit involving his greedy mistress. That he would smoke opium is no surprise at all.
Not long before his death, Sharon's daughter daughter Florence--or "Flora"--married a young English aristocrat during a San Francisco sojourn on his round-the-world yacht tour. Thomas Fermor-Hesketh came from a well-established family of landed gentry situated in Northhamptonshire, near the town of Towcester--"Toaster"--about 70 miles north of London. The ancestral estate--Easton-Neston--comprises some 600 acres, including a horse-racing course, sheep pastures and a formal garden surrounding the manor house. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the building is the quintescense of an intimate mansion, containing only a couple of dozen rooms. A corridor running its width bisects the house on its two main floors, ending at both ends in large windows looking onto classic English countryside; the statue-studded garden walkways close to the house give way to expansive lawns lined by large trees regularly placed, creating a receding perspective focused on a distant point. One side, village church, from the other, endless green pastoral.
Estates of the sort cost millions to maintain, though, and Thomas Fermor-Hesketh's 50-something great-grandson Alexander tired of the two-million-dollar-a-year maintenance costs. A one-time Formula-1 racer, motorcycle manufacturer and member of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet, Alex decided to liquidate the estate, putting it all up for sale within the last year or two for ninety million or so. No takers. The resulting contingency plan called for a subdivision of the estate, the sale of the house and its immediate acreage, and the auctioning off of its contents. It was the biggest such auction in a generation, and it was scheduled to span 1500 separate lots and three days. The auction was due to begin on a mid-May Tuesday, following three days of open house for viewing. It became evident that many items relevant to San Francisco history might be available.
Such was the genesis of the article in that Wednesday's Chronicle we perused at the legendary coffee house at First and Main . It also included exerpts from a journal kept by one of the young aristo's friends along on the cruise. We were irrepressibly intrigued by the prospect that objects of little interest to Brits might be had cheap, but more importantly, that we might connect with the descendents of Sharon and discover more about the man and his motivations. Could there be other journals and papers?
We really had no alternative but to satisfy our curiosity. The following Saturday we boarded a jet for London's Heathrow Airport.
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