TRANSCRIPT
Hi, this is Knox Bronson at The Secret History of Frisco podcast. This bonus episode is about legends: specifically the infamous San Francisco madam Sally Stanford, movie star Humphrey Bogart, and how she barred him from her infamous bordello, and swashbuckling scalawag and movie star Errol Flynn, who enchanted her and all her girls with all the considerable charm he possessed while hiding there for two weeks, weathering a storm of bad publicity for decking a United States Marine at Finnochio’s nightclub in North Beach, known around the world for its dazzling array of singing, dancing, and lip-synching female impersonators.
[intermezzo]
Born into poverty in Baker County, Oregon, in 1903, Mabel Busby’s wild spirit showed itself early. She eloped at the age of 16 and accidentally ran straight into a life of crime, landing herself in prison for cashing checks that her husband had stolen. She had professed her innocence, claiming that she didn’t know the checks were stolen and I believe her. She was, after all, only sixteen. The county prosecutor promised her probation if she pled guilty. He was lying and, after she entered her guilty plea, the judge put her away. During her two-year sentence, she learned the art of bootlegging.
She also decided to never be broke or dependent on a man again.
When she got out, she moved in with an uncle in Ventura, California and opened a speakeasy, selling bathtub gin. She saved her money and, at 21-year-old moved to San Francisco, and immediately opened a brothel at 693 O’Farrell St. in the Tenderloin. Soon thereafter, she took the name Sally Stanford, having gone through any number of aliases in the years prior.
In her 1966 autobiography, The Lady of the House, she said “The politics of the town were dominated by Mayor Jimmy Rolph. He was a doll, a political dreamboat … Not only did Jimmy do OK, but the rest of us did pretty well too. For if there ever was a live-and-let-live type, it was Mayor Sunny Jim Rolph.” She continued: “At this point [in the 1920s], it was easier to come by professional female company in San Francisco than it was to catch a rash in a leper colony.”
By the early 1930s, Stanford had opened a second bordello in the Tenderloin, this one at 610 Leavenworth. She made such a success of her first two establishments that, by the end of the decade, she had opened four more: 837 Geary, 1526 Franklin, 929 Bush and 1224 Stockton in Chinatown. There could be other addresses we cannot discover due to Sally’s prolific use of aliases. She kept multiple houses going because she believed the police couldn’t hit all of them at once.
Sally had no problem finding women who wanted to work for her either.
“Starving jobless dames? Forget it,” she wrote. “They wanted to have intercourse with men for money … Some were just plain lazy. Others had the strange idea that any activity illicit in nature was glamorous.”
Sally built her flagship establishment at 1144 Pine Street in 1941. I’ll let her tell the story.
She wrote:
Loving thy neighbor is sometimes pretty hard to do, particularly when the jerk blows the whistle on you, and this is what some of my pedigreed neighbors on Russian Hill began to do.
The house was best known as the old Verdier place, and the neighbors were some of the wealthiest, socially prominent people in the Bay area. One charming matron who had moved a few doors from me, being completely unknown except for a tremendous wealth, had just finished redecorating her new home.
Feeling friendly and neighborly, she decided to give an evening “At Home.” She wanted to meet her neighbors and show them her lovely new house. So she tucked little invitations under each door, inviting the neighbors to drop by. I said to the girls, “Well, let’s go. It may be a lark.” And so, as her party was going full swing and the orchestra was playing soft music, we arrived and were received royally.
Naturally, many of my guests were there, and with the wine and the music and the laughter, some joker with a leaky mouth dropped the word that Sally Stanford and her stable of fillies were attracting most of the male guests. The hostess disappeared, and the party died of its own volition. The girls had a ball; the men loved it; business boomed, and complaints of unspecified goings-on at the big house at the top of the hill flooded the switchboard of the police station.
One day I received a visit from Captain Emmett Moore of Central Station, a really nice guy, and he made it clear that he was getting more and more telephone squawks. He felt that some of them were going to the Chief, and perhaps higher.
I decided to move to another house in just as deluxe a district and set up camp where the neighbors had more to do than to peep through their draperies and put a stopwatch on the visits of my guests. Besides, the roof had begun to leak and there were complaints during the rainy season from those who didn’t appreciate the sensuous delight of a trickle of water on a bare bottom.
So it was in 1941 that I bought the house at 1144 Pine Street.
That was a wonderful place, and there I was to remain until November of 1949, when I left the business and became a legitimate square.
Had I designed it myself, the house could not have been more perfect. From the outside it was known as “The Fortress”; and on the inside it had been described as breathtaking, magnificent and unbelievable. Bob Hanford had built it for his third lover, the beautiful and talented Anna Held. It was said to have been designed by Stanford White, the famed New York architect who was killed at the old Madison Square Garden by Harry K. Thaw because of some non-architectural designs he carried out on his wife.
On the Pine Street side, this building was buttressed by a high stone wall of hand-hewn rock created by Chinese coolies of the early San Franciscan days. The same type of wall surrounds the famous Mark Hopkins Hotel. The only entry was through a huge wrought-iron gate which would have kept out a regiment of Marines. (Not that I would have barred their way had they come for the right purpose and bearing money.) Behind the iron gate was another one equally invulnerable to assault.
This house was built on the site of the old Fair mansion and at the time the Fairs were building the Fairmont Hotel when the Fire came along. Upstairs there was , a lovely split-level living room the full width of the house.
The fireplace would have stabled a quartet of Clydesdale horses. Adjoining the mammoth drawing room was the Pompeian Court, which held a marble pool where Anna Held, for whom the house was said to have been built, had supposedly taken her milk baths. This marble plunge would have held a helluva lot of milk, but that we never used. We held some very interesting social aquatic events, however.\Considering my many splendid plans for it, the house couldn’t have been better. It was two blocks from the fashionable Fairmont and Mark Hopkins hotels; a short brisk walk from the St. Francis and Sir Francis Drake hotels. Equally close were the best men’s clubs: the Pacific Union, the Bohemian, the Olympic, and the Union League, to say nothing of the Press and University clubs that were also nearby. We were handy to practically everything except the Central Police Station, and you can bet I didn’t complain about that.
I furnished it with nothing but the best and launched it with a magnificent masked ball. It was magnificent, and invulnerable.
No one-almost no one, that is—ever entered without invitation and permit.
World War II was under way and there’s something about war that booms the brothel business. Young officers and cost-plus war contractors graced our parlors and bedrooms day and night. Kaiser set records in shipbuilding, working in shifts around the clock. Not to be outdone in a national emergency, we followed his good example. No sacrifice was too great to make for one’s country.
The Establishment ran ’round the clock. I adopted two orphaned children. I took their name and became Marcia Owen, as I didn’t think Stanford would help this pair of waifs just starting out in life. My at-home name became Marcia Owen and has been that ever since. I sign checks and legal documents that way and it’s been a wonderful name in those occasional moments when it might have been inconvenient to be Sally Stanford.
Meanwhile, 1144 Pine became- as connoisseurs from all over the world tell me-the finest and most distinguished pleasure house in the world. Maybe the universe. We had the most desirable customers and the most desirable girls. The girls were refined, beautiful and well behaved, and they created a stir wherever we went. I had driven a bevy of them down to the beach one day to inspect some property I own.
While in that neighborhood a charming middle-aged matron tenaciously forced her acquaintanceship upon us. She was a schoolteacher visiting relatives. She approached me as I was leaving and said, “My goodness, I have never seen such lovely and charming girls in my whole life. You must be running a famous finishing school for such delightful debutantes.”
“Oh, yes, something like that,” I murmured, as I moved toward the car and the girls.
She followed, saying she hoped she could ride to town with us. She was very large and the car was already crowded with my dainty debutantes.
“Oh, it will be just lovely,” she insisted. “I’ll just squeeze in here in the back and these two lovelies can sit on my lap.”
During the short ride it developed that she was so impressed She wanted to teach at my school, saying she specialized in French literature, proper English, and of course etiquette. I explained there was no vacancy on our staff at the moment, but I would certainly keep her in mind. We dropped her off and she pressed a bit of paper into my hand with her name and address neatly written in her prim schoolteacher’s handwriting.
“Do keep me in mind,” she implored. “I’m so impressed.”
You should have heard the girls laughing and screaming all the way back to Pine Street. Debutantes, yes. Finishing school?
Maybe.
So, in 1941, Sally stepped up as the pre-eminent madam in San Francisco. The thirties had belonged to Dolly Fine, but with the release of the Atherton Report in 1937, Dolly had to leave town to avoid prosecution. We will tell the fascinating and, in some ways hilarious, Dolly Fine story in a future episode.
Sally attracted the rich, powerful and famous to her beautifully appointed Pine Street digs which she had filled with beautiful furnishings and the most attractive women in the game. It is an article of faith that the finer details of the formation of the United Nations were hammered out in her living room. Delegates from around the world gathered there nightly after the negotiations of the day had concluded at the War Memorial Opera House, the official site of the conference.
[intermezzo]
In October of 1941, the clouds of war in Europe were gathering on the horizon. The Japanese had not yet attacked Pearl Harbor. There was still an element of blythe innocence in the newsreels shown in movie palaces around the country.
[newsreel]
Though there was a fair amount foreshadowing of what was to come.
[newsreel]
The movie of the moment was The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet.
The most popular song of the moment was Tommy Dorsey’s “Blue Champagne.”
[blue champagne]
Humphrey Bogart was one cool guy, or so I have always thought. He’s been a hero of mine since I was a teenager and saw “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, “The Maltese Falcon” and “Casablanca,” especially Casablanca, on late night television in the Sixties. In my mind, he was the dapper everyman who always stood up to big guys and the bad guys, whether they were corrupt cops, gangsters, or Nazis, and always stood up for the little guy and the defenseless in our midst. An old-school American hero. A guy with his own righteous moral code.
He was a famously bad drunk. Before he headed out to Hollywood, he was fired from a number of Broadway plays in New York City for showing up so hungover that he blew his lines. It has been said that he got his trademark upper-lip scar from shooting off his mouth in one Big Apple saloon or another.
The problem was easier to hide once he came out west, due to the nature of movie production schedules. While shooting a movie, he reigned in his drinking dramatically, as well, limiting himself to one beer during the day on set. At night, it was a different story.
On one occasion he was to give a public speech at an Easter Service at the Hollywood Bowl. At four in the morning, when he was supposed to show up, his wife at the time, Mayo, called the studio to report Bogart was still out drinking. They tracked him down to a friend’s house, “drunk as a skunk, unshaven and smelling badly.” Once at the Bowl, however, he got up on stage and recited the Lord’s Prayer with such sublime emotion he moved the huge congregation and assembled clergy to tears. When he was swarmed by the crowd afterwards, his only comment was, “Where can I puke?”
Another time, after a night of drinking, Bogart found himself at dawn dawdling along an unfamiliar street in Hollywood. Still drunk, unshaven and disheveled, he noticed a light burning in one of the windows of a stately house. He approached the house, drawn by the smell of frying bacon, and looked inside to see a woman cooking breakfast for her family. He stood there a while, perhaps swaying a bit, until the woman noticed him and exclaimed, “My God! It’s Humphrey Bogart!”
“What about him?” her husband asked.
“He’s standing in our front yard.”
“Well, invite him in.”
Bogie sat down with the family, enthralling them with ribald tales of Betty Davis, Errol Flynn and James Cagney. He finished breakfast, called a cab and left the family with a story to tell.
Booze was important to Bogie. He loved the effect, as all drunks do, and the boozing lifestyle as well. There is something to be said for saloon drinking, I know from much experience, although that was another long ago life.. He did not seem to suffer from self-recrimination over bad drunken behavior as many drunks do.
In 1950, he famously proclaimed.“The whole world is three drinks behind. If everyone in the world would take three drinks, we would have no trouble. If Stalin, Truman and everybody else in the world had three drinks right now, we’d all loosen up and we wouldn’t need the United Nations.”
Lauren Bacall once said she did not trust a man who didn’t drink. She clearly trusted Bogie.
While Bogie had been in San Francisco, shooting “The Maltese Falcon,” he had visited Sally’s house a number of times.
Unfortunately, Bogie had taken his sometimes boorish drunken behavior there more than once. She did not tolerate such antics and his fame did not protect him from her wrath.
In her 1966 book, The Lady of the House, she wrote:
“A ham with a different flavor was Humphrey Bogart who dropped by on many of his visits to San Francisco, usually to no one’s rapture or delight. The common concept of Bogie as a tough and rugged good guy, with plenty of class, proves again my point. Some actors need directors when they’re let off the studio leash. We found him to be a foul-mouthed, pugnacious drunk who came around to badger, belittle, and insult the girls.
When I put it to him that he was strictly not for people, he was always surprised.
“Doesn’t everyone come on like this in a whorehouse,” he said, “so long as they can pay big and tip larger?”
He never really got the idea. We finally had to “eighty-six” him. No class.”
I must say that learning this has substantially diminished his luster in my mind. I have no respect for a man who abuses women, verbally or physically, although it seems like Bogie was simply guilty of loutish behavior. ’Tis a pity.
I have a feeling he was a drunk of “Instant Jerk, just add booze” variety. AA groups were just springing up around Hollywood in the early forties, but I doubt Bogie would have seen any need for sobriety. Fame and the celebrity machine were and are great barriers designed to protect stars and starlets from the repercussions of bad drunken behavior. America was a heavier drinking place back then, as well, with a commensurate laissez-faire attitude about booze.
One movie star Sally loved was Errol Flynn, himself no stranger to intoxicants of all kinds: alcohol and cocaine in prodigious amounts, along with an addiction to opium at the end of his life.
By the age of 17, Flynn had been expelled from his latest exclusive boy’s school and was running with the infamous “Razor Gang” of young toughs in Sydney, Australia. Determined to make something of himself, and with his family’s seafaring blood coursing through his veins, in 1926 he took off for the island of New Guinea.
Flynn’s improbable journey to stardom began in New Guinea, when a film executive named Joel Swartz chartered a boat so that he could shoot B-roll while traveling on the treacherous Sepik River. Swartz was impressed by the boat’s flashy young captain, and eventually cast Flynn as Fletcher Christian in 1933’s In the Wake of the Bounty, which filmed partly in Tahiti. Filming this low-budget movie sparked something in Flynn and made him determined to escape the South Seas for England.
After stealing loose gems from his wealthy sugar mama and hiding them in the hollow of a shaving brush, Flynn began his trek to England with an equally amoral Dutch doctor. The two blundered across the world, cheating at cockfights in the Philippines, getting scammed by a beautiful, opium-smoking sex worker in the casinos of Macao, and defecting from the Royal Hong Kong Army Volunteers. Finally, in England, Flynn found work as a stage actor, and was discovered by Warner Brothers at the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival.
By 1935, Flynn was a swashbuckling Hollywood sex symbol. He often came to San Francisco.
Sally Stanford, along with all her girls, loved him.
In late 1945, Errol was in town again. The war was not yet over.
[newsreel]
The hit song of the day was Perry Como’s, “The End of Time.” I know the man was huge, but I find his voice to be very unpleasant. I know, it’s just me.
[the end of time]
The movie of the moment was Spellbound, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman.
[trailer]
It included the infamous dream sequence Hitchcock had hired surrealist Salvador Dali to conceptualize and design. This sequence was crucial to the plot, in that it held clues to a murder and Edwards’ true identity. Dalí’s original designs were highly ambitious and, at times, impractical for filmmaking. These included ideas like 15 grand pianos suspended over dancers’ heads in a ballroom scene, or Ingrid Bergman’s character morphing into a statue covered in ants. Even though Hitchcock cut it down from twenty minutes to three, it was still pivotal to the film’s plot.
[dream sequence]
The war would soon end, to the delight of the whole wide world.
Sally Stanford describes how Errol got into a fight at Finocchio’s one night. Finocchio’s was a notorious nightclub on Broadway in San Francisco’s North Beach. Entertainment was provided by a troupe of female impersonators doing what we now call vanilla drag: male drag queens singing or lip-syncing to the popular songs of the day along with various ethnic-inspired performances such as geisha-style routines. Kind of hokey, but hugely popular. This, combined with the unspoken but very clear queer-friendly atmosphere attracted a racially diverse crowd, remarkable in that long gone era.
Finocchio is Italian for fennel, but it is also a slang term for a young male prostitute. In New York City, the word was a derogatory slang term, equivalent to fairy or faggot.
I find it hard to believe that Finocchio was Joseph Finocchio’s real name and that it was just a coincidence that he had the brilliant idea to open a nightclub featuring female impersonators, but I cannot find any indication that this was not the case.
Most of the performers were prostitutes. A man would tip a waiter a minimum of $5, the equivalent of about $100 today, and tell him in which performer he was interested. The $5 tip indicated that the customer was willing to pay $50 for a date, including sex, with the desired dancer.
Many believe that Finocchio’s was the catalyst for the art of modern drag in the western world. Celebrities who attended shows at Finocchio’s throughout their years of operation included Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes, Ava Gardner, Tallulah Bankhead, David Niven, Errol Flynn, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe,Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Lena Horne, Joan Crawford, Barbra Streisand, Mae West, Carol Channing, William Haines, Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Liza Minnelli, Cher and Bette Midler among others.
It seems that Errol Flynn was the only one who managed to create a scene disruptive enough that it brought the police to the club. He got into a fight with a Marine.
What Errol In-Like-Flynn and a member of the United States Marine Corps were doing at Finocchio’s that night near the end of World War II is anybody’s guess. The upshot of their altercation was that Errol had to hide out for a couple weeks. Newspapers around the country picked up the story that Errol had decked a man in uniform, fanning flames of public outrage nationwide.
Let’s let Sally tell the story.
She wrote:
On the other hand, an especially sweet guy was Errol Flynn.
He arrived at 1144 Pine late in the night as a sort of fugitive. It was toward the end of the war and he had wandered into Finocchio’s, a bistro famous for its entertainment, advertised as presenting the world’s most fabulous female impersonators.
While there, a Marine had asked for Flynn’s autograph in an insolent way. When he declined, the serviceman responded with a term that specified oral copulation as a Flynn weakness and preceded the phrase with the word “yellow.”
There was a scuffle. Flynn flattened the yokel and departed.
The wire services and newspaper headlines broke out in a hue and cry.
Flynn arrived in a taxi with his coat collar pulled up to his eyes and his hat lowered over them. I’d known him over the years and recalled many pleasant visits with him. He had tried to get into his hotel, but his room was barricaded with reporters and photographers. When he called his studio the next morning, he was told to lay low. He stayed at 1144 Pine for two weeks.
We talked a lot during his stay, and for all of his humor and easy gaiety, he was most obviously an unhappy man. He was full of the many things he didn’t want to do. He didn’t want to work in pictures. He didn’t want to grow old. And he did not want to remain married to any one woman.
“A terrible thing about getting married, Sally,” he said, “is the children. Children are wonderful. They can’t stay that way.
They grow up to be people. And that is usually a tragedy when you think about the kind of people most people are. Right?”
But for all of his melancholy, screwy beliefs, he was an attractive, uninhibited male with a helluva lot more courage than he was given credit for. He was extremely active in the realm of amorous endeavor.
And then Sally shared the important part of Errol’s story:
She wrote: “Most probably he was the only customer I ever had who tested all of the talent, including both shifts, twice. He went through the place like a dose of salts.” Meaning very quickly.
Errol was a Trickster, like Bob Patterson, on global scale. His mother considered him to be a devil in a boy’s clothing. Arriving in California as an adult, he was perfect for the Hollywood dream machine, as flamboyant in real life as he was on the screen. His memoir, “My Wicked Wicked Ways,” opens with the invocation, “Dedicated to a small friend.”
I will leave it to you to suss that one out. The book is a great read, by the way, although I cannot attest to its accuracy.
Not everybody was charmed by Errol’s errant ways. David Niven once remarked,”You can always count on Errol: he’ll let you down every time.”
And Errol, in his memoir, stated, “I am dangerous to be with because, since I live dangerously, others are subject to the danger that I expose myself to. They, more likely than I, will get hurt.” Based on the rest of the book, this did not seem to bother him much at all.
[intermezzo]
So there we have it: legends. Sally Stanford, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and their escapades at Sally’s fortress like house of frolic at 1144 Pine Street on Nob Hill.
I’m not sure if we will encounter either Bogie or Errol again, so we will bid them adieu.
There are plenty more of Sally Stanford stories to tell, the force of nature and friend to many rich and powerful men that she was.
And we shall.
You now have an idea about from where she came and some of the events that shaped her world view. Her origin story, as it were.
[intermezzo]
The Secret History of Frisco is a listener supported podcast. Main episodes will always be free. Our website is www.thesecrethistoryoffrisco.com. Please join us on Patreon at www.Patreon.com/Frisco. Visit the website for show notes, references, and bibliographies. Please take advantage of our free membership option on Patreon. Paid tier members, starting at as little as $1 a month, will receive ad-free and bonus episodes and other perks of membership.
If you enjoy the podcast, please tell your friends about it, especially those who enjoy San Francisco or true crime history. Word of mouth is the absolute best means of promotion for any creative endeavor in this world of algorithms and the ceaseless barrage of ads, notifications, and appeals on every digital platform. If you are aware of some particular aspect of San Francisco history in the thirties and forties you would like me to research, or a story to tell, please let me know. If you are an expert in some aspect of that same era and would like to share that expertise on the podcast, also please let me know.
Once again, I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Thank you for listening. Until next time, please get a little crazy and call it Frisco.