One afternoon after ballet class, instead of taking the bus to art school, I walked across the street to the museum to stare into the eyes of Matisse’s Woman with the Hat. “Hello,” said a voice behind me. “We’re showing great films here Friday night. What’s your name? I’ll leave you a ticket.”

This young man who thought the museum a great place to pick up young women introduced me to his friend who was running the Art in Cinema program, Frank Stauffacher.

Movies were Frank’s passion; our first date was at the Clay Theater to see Les Enfants du Paradis.

I was 17, living with my mother, Lil, in the Marina; Frank was 30 and he lived in his family home in wealthy San Mateo, surrounded by rustling eucalyptus, a well-established garden, and wood paneling. If Switzerland had had an aristocracy, it would have been his family, the Stauffachers. With William Tell, they had rebelled against the Austrian Empire, and fought to make the Swiss free.

Sundays, we walked through meadows around Crystal Springs Lake, protected from the Pacific fog by oaks and madrones. Then we’d drive in Frank’s big green Packard to a friend’s Frank Lloyd Wright house in Hillsborough to lie on the radiant-heated carpet and play records—Mahler, Satie, Stravinsky—in front of the fire.

Frank had left Stanford to study commercial art at Art Center School in L.A. Then came the War. He was drafted. Frank liked the Army, the camaraderie, the mindless physical exercise, getting away from people expecting him to do brilliant things. He never saw action. When his unit shipped out to fight the Battle of the Bulge, he stayed behind with a classic case of athlete’s foot. After the war, Frank moved back with his widowed mother, whom he loved. She soon died. He stayed on to watch dry leaves blow through the French doors onto the Persian rugs and play Delius, Bartok, and Richard Strauss to the eucalyptus.

Frank had two younger brothers, twins, opposites: Jack, a printer of fine books, and Bob, a dashing plumber/bike-racer. The big house was sold, the money divided, and Frank and Jack moved into a small apartment on Russian Hill in San Francisco. Lee Mullican, Jack’s sergeant in the army, a tall, talented painter from Oklahoma, came for a visit and moved in. Jack cooked, Lee painted on the kitchen table, and Frank paid the rent, $30 a month. The apartment had a small front room with a table and cot, a middle room with two cots, and a back kitchen with a toilet hung off the back porch. They shaved in the kitchen sink and showered at friends, but music thundered out the front door down Russian Hill as guests, from Henry Miller to my mother, climbed the steep front stairs for spaghetti-and-meatball dinner parties.

Postwar San Francisco: Doelger covered the white sand dunes with wavy lines of white houses. Barges and ferryboats were converted. Modern architects got their chance. Businessmen commissioned skyscrapers topped with cocktail bars. Artists painted huge canvases for socialites to party in front of. Women painted their toenails. People worked hard all day to party hard all night. Each invitation was a mandate. Each party, a performance.

Dr. Grace Morley, the founding director of the Museum of Art in 1935, considered serious drinking the companion to serious art; she had a long bar set up in the main gallery for openings. Martinis were free. By the end of the evening, the alcohol-soaked soles of art lovers’ shoes painted the white marble floors into abstract expressions.

Dick Foster, the film buff who had introduced me to Frank, rented a redwood-and-glass showplace high in the Berkeley hills just to attract glamorous women to his parties.

Poet Kenneth Rexroth gave parties, called “Poetry Readings,” in his Richmond District flat, celebrating cheap red wine, poetry, anarchy, and sex.

Robert Duncan read his poems celebrating open homosexuality in his Western Addition pad.

Weldon Kees, a coffee cup of whiskey a permanent extension of his hand, presented the “Poet’s Follies.”

Weldon and Frank loved jazz. We went to hear Kid Ory at Handbone Kelly’s in El Cerrito, Turk Murphy at the Blackhawk in the Tenderloin, and Billy Holiday at The Fillmore on Fillmore Street. (Six days before Frank died in 1955, Weldon left his car near Golden Gate Bridge—and disappeared. No one believed he jumped. He cut out for Mexico, someone said at a party.)

Every night was party time at The Matador on Broadway, more a private club than public saloon. The proprietor, artist/writer Barnaby Conrad, tall, smiling, and already losing his blond hair like many a charming socialite, had The Matador decorated with Spanish bullfight posters featuring himself, The American Matador, in pink tights. Before Barnaby left San Mateo to fight bulls in Spain, he and Frank had been friends. Frank and I sat around a small round table with Barnaby, his good friend San Francisco Chronicle gossip columnist Herb Caen, and photographer Tony Steinheimer.

When Frank decided he hated commercial art and wanted to make movies, he bought a 16-mm Bolex camera, tripod, lights, and editing equipment, and leased a studio at Montgomery and Gold; he rented some of it to Tony Steinheimer. The term “beautiful blonde” might have been invented for her. Her LIFE photographer-husband had died in the War. She missed him. She missed him so much she married the famous tort lawyer Melvin Belli twice—while she slowly drank herself to death. Most of the time I found Frank and Tony across the street drinking at the long wooden bar at Ernie’s. If they had an affair, I didn’t know, and since each died young and beautiful, I hope they did.

Meanwhile, a Spanish guitarist played Albéniz.

There was a New Year’s Eve party at George Draper’s apartment on Nob Hill. Son of society decorator Dorothy Draper and raised running around the White House, George rebelled and ran off to work as a circus roustabout, fight in Spain, and become a tough Chronicle reporter. Tall, thin, and elegant in an old tweed jacket and frayed Brooks Brothers shirt, a cigarette dangling from his lips, George strolled among guests pouring martinis. I watched the scene with the young assistant district attorney Jack Berman (before he married Dianne, before she divorced him and married Dr. Burt Feinstein, before she became our senator).

Frank and Tony sat outside, at the top of the steep stairs, to watch for cops. Tony had double-parked the light-blue Austin Healy convertible Belli had just given her. She didn’t want to get a ticket. The apartment was small, thick with cigarette smoke, and crowded with people reporting news, or appearing in it.

Chronicle reporter Pierre Salinger—later JFK’s press secretary— had a red-headed wife who that night locked herself in the only bathroom. Guests took turns knocking at the door, trying to get her out. Willie de Pedraza insisted she wouldn’t get out because Salinger had a loaded gun in his pocket. Willie could spot a gun. Like George, he’d fought in the Spanish Civil War, but as a cavalry officer for Franco, against George and the Loyalists. However, this was a San Francisco party. Peace and love.

Willie was at George’s party because: 1) after fighting with the Nazis on the Russian Front, 2) walking in defeat back to Spain, 3) having a mother in Madrid (Baroness Dorothea de Pedraza de Borchgrave, who happened to have been born in San Francisco, 4) and traveling with her there, Willie, with the legerdemain and good manners of a superb horseman, charmed and married a San Franciscan, Barbara Chevalier. Barbara’s first husband had been Haakon Chevalier, the communist French professor who tried to persuade J. Robert Oppenheimer to spy for the Russians.


y-out-west movies, art, and lives, would have been different without the odd twists provided by this special breed of European exile, survivors with sufficient connections, talent, money, will, or all four, to escape Hitler’s Europe and flee into California’s golden sunshine, to the magnet of Hollywood’s money or San Francisco’s craze for culture. We took them into our world; they took us in with their worldliness. We were fascinated by their erudition. They were flattered by our enthusiasm. Frank ate ham-and-eggs with Wonder Bread toast for breakfast. They served us croissants, café au lait, and cognac. Lil made instant Kraft noodles. They served pasta al dente. We had prints of modern masters on our walls; they had originals. It was the education of the innocents. We were wowed.

Some Americans we knew, Henry Miller and Man Ray, had so successfully reinvented themselves in Paris before the War, we forgot they were both born in Brooklyn.

Hitler caused a lot of genius-dust to float down on California. Igor Stravinsky, one European temporarily in L.A., had a lawyer who was one of my Aunt Sadie’s boyfriends. Sadie cooked up a meeting between Stravinsky and me, hoping the master would introduce me to his friend and fellow exile in L.A., set-designer and artist Eugene Berman. Stravinsky was conducting the S.F. Symphony in a performance of his work.

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