Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story

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ANYTHING YOUR

LITTLE

HEART

DESIRES

An American Family Story

PATRICIA BOSWORTH

For Tom Palumbo

Contents

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

PART TWO

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

PART THREE

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

PART FIVE

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PHOTO GALLERY

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

My father, Bartley C. Crum, right after Truman appointed him to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine, circa December 1945.

Only part of us is sane; only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set life back to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations …

—REBECCA WEST

PROLOGUE

THE NIGHT BEFORE MY father committed suicide, my mother gave a dinner party. Of course the dinner party wasn’t mentioned in subsequent accounts of his death. A New York Times headline dated December 11, 1959, read

BARTLEY C. CRUM,

LAWYER, 59, DIES

Acted in Cases Involving

Civil Rights—Won Million

in Rita Hayworth Divorce

The obit went on to say he’d bought the New York tabloid PM from Marshall Field and was a liberal Republican who’d been a Wendell Willkie campaign aide.

The fact that he’d killed himself by swallowing an entire bottle of Seconal washed down with whiskey wasn’t mentioned either, but then we’d kept it a deep dark secret; not even our relatives knew the truth.

Actually, Mama had called some mysterious person at United Press International to hush it up—the same mysterious person my father had telephoned years before when a frat buddy of his had walked into the East River and the family wanted it kept quiet.

My father could do that sort of thing. He knew a lot of people. Earl Warren, Robert Kennedy, Cardinal Spellman, Henry Luce. On the walls of his New York law office there were photographs of himself laughing it up with President Truman and two Secret Service agents in a Chinese restaurant. And on his desk he kept color snapshots of himself with Chaim Weizmann and Golda Meir.

His association with Israeli leaders was referred to in only one eulogy, which appeared in the American Zionist and called him a fighter for justice—a man who spent his prime years fighting for a homeland in Palestine for uprooted European Jews.

During the winter of 1946, President Truman had appointed him to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine. The committee’s task was to discover if it was feasible to allow one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors into the Holy Land. Great Britain’s foreign minister Ernest Bevin promised he’d follow the committee’s recommendations in spite of an immigration restriction to the contrary.

My father toured filthy, crowded internment camps all over Eastern Europe, interviewing scores of DPs frantic to get to Palestine. He tried to give them reassurances that they would, but he knew that the State Department wanted to protect American oil interests in the Mideast so they secretly supported the Arab campaign to keep the Jews out. And Great Britain secretly supported the Arabs, too.

Later Daddy helped persuade the committee to agree to a policy (supported by Truman) that would issue one hundred thousand immediate-entry certificates to Palestine for the Jewish refugees, and once back in the United States, when the committee’s recommendations were ignored and Bevin went back on his promise, my father ended any chance of a government career for himself by publicly pointing to what he considered the double-dealing of our State Department and the British foreign office.

He wrote a book about his experiences on the Committee; it was called Behind the Silken Curtain and it was a near best-seller. He would often tell me that his work with the committee was the most rewarding thing he’d ever done.

For a long time he approached life with supreme self-confidence and an attitude of entitlement. He glided through experiences seemingly undaunted by disappointments or fears, or even doubts.

He juggled corporate accounts like Crown Zellerbach paper along with pro bono cases: Chinese immigrants, unwed mothers, teachers unjustly fired for refusing to sign loyalty oaths.

Then, at the start of the Cold War in 1947—when fear of Communism let loose a wave of political oppression in this country that seems almost incomprehensible today—my father became one of six lawyers defending the Hollywood Ten, that group of screenwriters and directors accused of larding their films with anti-American propaganda. They had refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and testify as to their political beliefs.

My father spoke out frequently against the blacklist and against the FBI, which was fueling the anti-Communist obsession by identifying alleged subversives through wiretapping, informers, and guilt by association. He kept pointing out that all this Red-baiting was inconsistent with American ideals.

His critics labeled him a show-off and a self-promoter for getting his name in the papers so much. Mama used to call him my high-wire artist. She respected his crusading, but she wished he would stay home. Which he did on occasion, especially when we were having a party. My parents were party people. They loved the ritual of collecting groups of friends and acquaintances and mixing them—priests with labor leaders; fashion designers with journalists; landscape architects with politicians and spies. They moved in and out of our homes, first in California, and then in New York.

Mama produced the parties, while Daddy virtually consumed them. The older I got, the more I wondered, where did this wild assortment of people fit in—into the larger scheme of things that made up my parents’ lives?

The guest list rarely included any of Daddy’s relatives from Sacramento or college buddies or even the radical lawyers he drank with—and some of these people were actually closer to him than the so-called rich and famous he courted.

I can still see him standing in the center of our living room in San Francisco, a slight, natty figure in a pin-striped suit, greeting an unending stream of people. There was a dash about him, a lean elegance. He had large, dreamy brown eyes and slick black hair cut short on his neck. His rosy cheeks accentuated the delicate incisiveness of his profile.

Men invariably surrounded him when he spoke. It was almost a sexual thing, my mother said, because he exuded a real power in his prime. He had an access to power—to the White House, to media—albeit a limited access to power, but power nonetheless. He was like an actor. He had the capacity to become every role he played—lawyer, radio talk-show host, author, crusader, friend of the controversial and the famous.

During some of these parties, I would be at the entranceway—watching, watching. I must have been about eight or nine years old when I was allowed to do that. And my father would catch sight of me and call out, Hey, baby! Give your old man a kiss!

I would move hesitantly through the crowd in my black velvet dress, black velvet bows in my hair—so proud to be drawn into his enchanted circle.

Have you met my daughter? he would ask whomever might be standing next to him—it could be the playwright William Saroyan, wild-haired and wild-eyed; or the brooding, somber novelist John Steinbeck.

Then his arm would creep around my shoulders and he would continue, This is my daughter, Patricia …

And to each man I’d curtsy as I’d been taught, and then my father would demand, Isn’t she beautiful, you guys?

I believed I was the cherished one, the favorite.

In another corner of the living room, Mama would be watching, too. Mama—tiny, blond, sparkling with imitation jewels. Later I would skip over to her and whisper, I’m going to marry Daddy when I grow up.

And Mama would laugh very gaily and say, Oh, no, you’re not!

Eventually, I stopped insisting I would marry Daddy, but for years I thought I wanted to be like him. I remember that as I was climbing the stairs to my parents’ brownstone for the dinner party on that last night before he committed suicide, I still imagined I could be at least as glamorous as he was. At twenty-five, I’d already been married and divorced and was earning my living as an actress. I had just finished making The Nun’s Story with Audrey Hepburn.

I found my father in his usual place, standing in the center of the living room. He was talking with New York Senator Jacob Javits and his wife, Marian, while fashion designer Pauline Trigère—hoarse-voiced and wearing blue-tinted glasses—hovered nearby. Mama had invited them over for cocktails before the actual dinner. She’d wanted a few extra friends around to toast Daddy’s fifty-ninth birthday, which had occurred two weeks before, on November 28.

Daddy didn’t look fifty-nine. Oh, he had a slight paunch, but his grin was still boyish. I watched him light Pauline’s cigarette and then rush over to freshen her drink. He was famous for his manners. During the blacklist, whenever he obtained a clearance for a client, he’d write thank-you notes to everyone who had given evidence pro or con.

He usually made an effort to be nice. I never heard him pass judgment on anybody. Nobody is worthless, my darling, he’d say to me, but nobody is that terrific either.

I wondered what he thought of the people who had arrived just after I did: Al Steele, the chairman of Pepsi-Cola, and his wife, movie star Joan Crawford, followed by Maître Suzanne Blum, a coarse-skinned dumpy woman who was one of the most powerful lawyers in France, representing the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Rita Hayworth’s European interests. My father used to confer with her about Rita whenever he was in Paris.

He introduced the Steeles to Blum; I think he was hoping the three of them would hit it off. They didn’t seem to.

I remember that he started to cough. He did smoke four packs of Pall Mall cigarettes a day, so he invariably coughed a lot. But when he saw me, he stopped. Hey, baby! he called out. Give your old man a kiss!

As I moved toward him, I could hear our Chinese cook, Toy, talking to himself and sharpening knives in the kitchen at the far end of the room; the guests pretended to ignore the noise.

Toy had been our cook on and off since we lived in Berkeley during the 1940s; back then he’d just prepare delicious meals and appeared quite serene. But lately, whenever Daddy invited a prospective client to the brownstone, Toy would begin talking to himself and sharpening knives.

On that last night, the knives were clanging so loudly that Daddy had to run into the kitchen; soon the clanging and clashing stopped. Toy spoke only broken English, but somehow he and my father were always able to communicate; they often had long incomprehensible talks together.

Toy adored my father. Daddy had gotten Mrs. Toy out of Shanghai years ago, and Toy felt indebted; he worked for my parents a couple of times a week; the other nights he cooked for some millionaire on Sutton Place.

I don’t remember much more about that evening except the friends invited for cocktails drifted off and the dinner party proceeded. It was typical of most of the dinner parties my parents had given over the years—filled with a mixture of trendy guests and close friends. The parties fitted perfectly into the highly pressured worlds in which they both lived.

Neither of them liked to be by themselves for too long, so they arranged their lives so that they wouldn’t be. The result was, as far as I was concerned, an increasing inability to relax. I had wanted to talk to Daddy alone that night about my engagement to a man Mama violently disliked, but I didn’t have the chance.

More friends dropped by for brandy and coffee after dinner. The last guest—one of Daddy’s oldest buddies from San Francisco, Peter Cusick (a former CIA agent)—left around 1:00 A.M., calling out to my father that he’d see him at the Council on Foreign Relations the following afternoon.

All of that was forgotten the next morning when Mama summoned me back to the duplex. I lived not too far away in a studio apartment off First Avenue on 66th Street, so I arrived in time to see Daddy being carried out the door in a body bag.

Then came the phone calls. I answered most of them. Some of them were guests from last night’s dinner party who wanted to say what a great time they’d had, and wasn’t Bart in fine spirits?

There would be a pause and I’d have to answer, My father is dead.

I WAS told by one of Daddy’s law partners that I chose the coffin at Campbell’s; I have no recollection of that, but I do remember wiping makeup off my father’s cheeks so he wouldn’t resemble a transvestite when friends came to pay their respects.

Mama and I attended the funeral mass and managed to get through a lunch afterward at the Harvard Club; after that was over we had to wait huddled on the street for a long time to get a cab. It was freezing cold.

We returned to the brownstone in the late afternoon, exhausted. Toy greeted us. He always arrived like clockwork to prepare dinner; there he was, standing in the center of the living room, his arms full of groceries.

Mama took one look and whispered to me, "You tell him. I can’t." Then she bolted upstairs.

Toy gazed after her in bewilderment. Where Mr. Crum? Daddy was often home from the office by this time, and, drink in hand, he would greet Toy effusively and then often follow him into the kitchen to observe how he prepared our next feast.

My father is dead. How else could I say it? My father is dead.

With that Toy threw the bags of food into the air and they fell on the rug, splitting apart. The ducks rolled out—absurdly pink and naked (roast duck was Daddy’s favorite)—and there were the ingredients for a lemon pie, which Daddy would have prepared himself. He loved to bake.

And then Toy began wailing like a banshee. He fell onto the rug and began writhing back and forth, clutching his stomach and screaming as if he were in terrible physical pain.

I stood there wishing I could join him on the floor and writhe back and forth myself, experiencing the spasms of emotion I knew were inside me but that I could not release.

Minutes went by, and then Toy stopped wailing and grew very still. Without a word he rose, picked up the food—including the lemons, which had rolled past the umbrella stand—and disappeared into the kitchen.

I went over and sat down on the big white couch facing the fireplace. Surrounding me were familiar objects that had accompanied us on our many moves—from Berkeley to San Francisco to various apartments and brownstones all over New York.

There was my grandfather Bosworth’s Chinese screen, several old clocks ticking wildly, the strange pale-green marble bust of my mother done during the 1920s. There were piles of newspapers and magazines on a side table, and walls of books. And there was the Italian Renaissance desk, a present from my father to Mama on their tenth wedding anniversary; its glistening tawny wood was polished to a fine sheen. On it was a jade inkwell and a small blackened china figurine of a horse, the only remnant from a fire that had engulfed our house in Berkeley long ago. The horse had been a gift from my grandfather Bosworth to Mama; she’d placed it on a shelf in the nursery directly above my brother’s bassinet, but the flames hadn’t touched the china figurine, though it was so badly stained with smoke that the stains could never be removed. Whenever I saw that tiny blackened china horse, I was reminded of how Daddy had saved my brother’s life in the fire—my brother, Bartley C. Crum Jr., was three and a half weeks old; I was two and a half.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

I REMEMBER WATCHING MY FATHER’S pale naked form disappear up into the crackling flames that had suddenly destroyed the nursery on the third floor of our house in Berkeley. I remember hearing his frantic cries of The baby! The baby! grow fainter and fainter while my mother and I stood as still as statues in the garden outside.

It was a clear, cold California night. Full moon. The hills looked black above our house. The trees seemed even blacker. Acrid smoke billowed toward us, mingling with the pungent scent of the eucalyptus groves rustling nearby. Presently, the smoke covered the moon.

Mama and I waited for what seemed like hours, gripping each other’s hands until, just as the wailing fire engine arrived on the steep drive below, my father emerged panting from the house. His entire body was covered with soot, and he couldn’t stop hopping up and down because the soles of his bare feet were badly burned, but he was smiling a goofy, triumphant smile because my brother—my three-and-a-half-week-old brother, Bartley Crum Jr.—was safe and miraculously sleeping in the crook of his arm.

Still standing next to me, Mama made little mewing sounds in her throat; then she tore off her blue satin robe and ran to my father and tried to wrap it around him. I ran after her, and for one brief second we huddled close together—a family unit—one of the few times I ever remember us being literally close. Mama kept dropping the robe because Daddy was jumping up and down with the pain, but she kept trying to cover his nakedness and he wouldn’t let her. I’m okay, Cutsie, he murmured, using the nickname he often used for her (her real name was Anna Gertrude), I’m okay. His eyes glittered out of soot-blackened rims, but they were staring not at her but into the distance.

His expression seemed haunted, almost crazy, as if he’d witnessed a holocaust and survived it—indeed he would later tell us that the experience of running across the glowing coals of the nursery floor to the baby’s bassinet and feeling the fire racing after him was like running away from death.

He didn’t even seem to notice that our garden was filling with neighbors from adjoining houses on the hills. Firemen appeared dragging rubber hoses through the ivy beds so that they could shoot geysers of water directly into the windows of the blazing nursery.

It was a wonder there was so much movement in the night, so much purpose. Flames streaked through the dark cool air, sparks fell and then melted away on the ivy beds. My cheeks felt burning hot.

An ambulance arrived. White-coated medics bearing a stretcher pushed through the crowd. One of them tried to take my brother out of my father’s arms, but he refused to give him up. I’ll take Bart to the hospital, thank you very much.

And with that, he literally danced across the grass—he was in such agony—and Mama ran after him holding up her blue satin robe like a shield.

The fire roared orange in front of me, jiggling powerful heat. I stood transfixed by the blaze, trembling with excitement, and after a moment someone knelt at my feet and a kindly face pressed close to mine. It was our nurse, Nell Brown, who had incredibly plump freckled arms and a warm stomach I loved to cuddle on.

She hugged me so close I could taste her tears. Don’t you ever forget this night, little doll. Your papa is an awful brave man.

THE fire in the nursery became family lore along with the time Mama saved my life at Lake Tahoe, where we were vacationing. I’d been crawling around our cabin, nosing into wastebaskets and nooks and crannies, and she noticed something bluish around my mouth; she stuck her finger down my throat, and once I’d vomited she rushed me to the Reno hospital, where my stomach was pumped out and the doctors announced, Your daughter swallowed enough rat poison to kill eleven men!

Between them my parents had saved both our lives—my brother’s and mine—and then almost immediately shifted their attention back to what they were really interested in, themselves and each other. I don’t mean they didn’t love us—I think they loved us very much—but they approached parenthood as they approached every other experience, with the intention of doing the best job in the shortest possible time. They wanted to fit parenthood into the wider scheme of things.

While Daddy’s feet healed at Peralta Hospital in Oakland, he kept notes of every new word I ever uttered when I visited him, but he also saw clients and used the time to begin writing a long, distinguished essay on Mr. Justice Edmonds and some recent trends in the law of civil liberties, which was eventually published in a California law journal.

As for Mama (also known as Cutsie Bosworth—former crime reporter for the San Francisco Call Bulletin), she kept on struggling to finish a novel she’d been trying to complete since her honeymoon. But she also organized her schedule so she would be home in time to help our nurse, Nell, feed and diaper my baby brother, Bart, and to play a bit with me.

Sometimes they went away without us on weekends, and when they came back Mama would show us snapshots Uncle Carl had taken of Daddy riding horseback in Grass Valley or Daddy kissing her passionately on top of a sun-baked hill. I’d never seen them kiss that passionately in real life.

These snapshots were glued into a leather album along with pictures of a lavish costume ball in Piedmont—Daddy dressed as a swarthy Rudolph Valentino, Mama posed as a sexy Sadie Thompson in Rain.

I used to pore over that album when I was a little girl, studying my parents’ expressions—radiant, self-confident. Their smiles were dazzling, but finally impenetrable. I could never figure out what was going on in their heads.

In my memory we seemed to exist always in a state of constant drama, of perpetual excitement. And no matter what the crisis, Daddy always made it more than bearable.

Once he insisted we hide out in our garage during an earthquake. I remember my brother and I huddling in the backseat of our roadster convertible while our parents sat in front. We were surrounded by pitch darkness and an eerie, greasy smell. Far away, we could hear a rumble and growl from deep within the earth. Pure waves of energy moved under our feet, and Daddy explained to us that San Francisco was on the tip of a peninsula squeezed between two of the most active earthquake faults in the world; to the west of the city, the San Andreas fault, which dived into the Pacific; to the east, the Hayward fault, which happened to form smack at the base of the Berkeley hills—less than a mile from our home.

We are living very precariously, my darlings, he announced. We will always live precariously if we stay here, but I think it’s much too beautiful to leave.

OUT of the blue he would sometimes say, Develop your five senses.

Is there a sixth sense, Daddy?

Sure, there is, he’d answer. There’s panic. I thought he was joking until after I grew up and realized he must mean the terrible sense you have inside yourself when you’ve taken on too much and you feel irresponsible—to your talent, or to your family, and certainly to yourself—and it’s too late to do anything about it.

Daddy must have experienced a lot of panic in his life. Of course, everybody experiences panic. But Daddy considered himself first and foremost an Irishman and a Catholic, meaning that beyond his ebullience and charm he was a master of concealment. "What will you do? What will you do? Mama would cry when some problem arose—another money crisis; another murky political harassment—and Daddy would either remain silent or answer, Never explain—never complain." This was a maddening little ditty he had picked up from his mother, Mo Cavanaugh, the most self-protective and hidden of women.

I was never sure whether I should value my father’s elusiveness or beware of it. Actually, his talent for concealing was a trait he undoubtedly inherited from his maternal grandparents, Bartholomew Cavanaugh and Kate McTernan, a wily couple with a lot of moxie (as Daddy used to say) who’d escaped the potato famine in County Sligo by immigrating to Boston in the 1850s. Then, like thousands of other Irish immigrants, they had journeyed to California during the gold rush.

For a while, legend had it, Bart Cavanaugh panned for gold in places named Piety Gulch and Puke Ravine before moving with Kate to San Francisco when that city was the gaudiest and most violent place in the nation. (Five thousand unsolved murders in one year, a newspaper account said.)

In San Francisco the Cavanaughs raised eight kids (Mo Cavanaugh among them), and Bart Cavanaugh saw to it that his family became the prime unit for emotion and survival as he slaved away as a boiler maker. For a time, he worked at the United States Mint. Every so often he’d sneak off to a bar and get roaring drunk; he usually carried his shillelagh with him.

By the late 1860s, he and Kate moved everybody to Sacramento, where he became county sheriff. They built a two-story frame house at First and I streets opposite the state capitol. Sisters and brothers took turns bathing in the kitchen on Saturday nights behind a screen. There was an outhouse in the yard.

Not long after the move to Sacramento, Bartholomew fell ill with tuberculosis, so Kate took over the family finances. For extra money she rented out the ground floor of their house as a bond office; later it was transformed into a bar (this was before Prohibition), and finally into a coffee-grinding establishment.

Just before World War I the eldest Cavanaugh son—my great-uncle Black Bart Cavanaugh (who was already a successful bookie at the age of twenty-one)—turned the basement of the house on I Street into a betting parlor, complete with steam bath. The place soon became a very popular private club for most of the police in Sacramento as well as some of the local politicos. Supposedly the ballots of several elections were counted there.

As the years went by my great-uncle forged many friendships and loyalties with his cronies and obtained patronage jobs for various relatives, including a job for his favorite sister, Mo, a slender girl with soft dark hair and thin lips. She became the first female stenographer in the state of California. Mo kept the job until 1896, when she married James Henry Crum, a burly bronco buster.

For a wedding present the couple was given a pretty little ranch on the banks of the Feather River, where Mo had a Chinese cook and raised peacocks. Their first child, a daughter named Estelle, was born in 1895; five years later, a son (my father) was born. It all seemed perfect and harmonious until James Henry ruined everything by gambling the ranch away in a drunken poker game, and he and Mo were forced to move to Sacramento and live with the Cavanaughs at the tumbledown house at First and I.

Mo never reconciled herself to living in reduced circumstances. She was so angry about losing the ranch that she had her sister Kate sneak down to St. Mary’s Cathedral and ask the priest to baptize her baby boy Bartley Cavanaugh instead of James Henry, as had originally been planned. And my father grew up in that house on First and I, until he left for college in 1918. He was raised by his mother, Mo, and her spinster sisters Maggie and Kate, who shared a bedroom off one of the parlors.

James Henry lived there, too, a silent, often drunken, presence. At some point, he managed to get a job as a telegrapher for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and he would amble down to the train station early in the morning and come back after dark; the Cavanaugh sisters would serve him supper, but there were few words exchanged. He lived in a state of perpetual disgrace for thirty years; he was never forgiven for gambling the ranch away (his own father refused to speak to him on his deathbed).

Nobody ever said anything out loud, but James Henry was thought to be a failure. Daddy once told me that he loved him, but that they were never close.

UNTIL recently, I knew nothing about any of Daddy’s relatives. The collective memory of the family was avoided because my mother, who had very grand pretensions about her beginnings, thought Daddy’s family was shanty Irish and beneath her. As a result, we never spent a single holiday with either the Cavanaughs or the Crums.

In fact, my brother and I traveled to Sacramento only once; I believe it was in the late 1930s and this was because my grandfather was recovering from some sort of stroke and Daddy wanted us to meet him.

I remember us all standing in a big backyard, the grass tickling our legs. We sipped iced tea from heavy green glass tumblers while Mo, slightly disheveled in a baggy print dress, hung on Daddy’s arm. I remember staring at my grandfather’s beautiful snow-white hair and wondering why his ruddy face was all twisted. He didn’t say a word, he just held my hand.

It was so hot in the backyard I could hardly breathe. And there was a brownish haze around the Tehachapi Mountains and the Sierra Nevada range; we could see the mountains from the yard. When we left a short time later, Daddy hugged his father very tight and then told us we would be taking a walk before we returned to the hotel.

Mama had stayed behind in our suite; she’d been felled by a migraine and we’d left her lying on top of the bed with a wet sheet over her nude body and her eyes covered with cotton pads soaked in witch hazel.

My brother and I moved with my father through the silent shady streets. Although it was late afternoon, the parks and sidewalks were empty because of the terrible glare of the sun. Eventually we approached the American River, where gold had been discovered, Daddy told us, and where he’d swum naked as a kid. He said Mo had caught him swimming there once, when he was supposed to be taking a piano lesson; she’d plunged into the river up to her hips and dragged him onto the bluffs and then twisted his ears—like she wanted to twist them off.

Oh, Jesus, she hurt me, my darlings, he told us, laughing. But I never cried out.

IT’S perhaps an apocryphal story that Daddy had nursed at Mo’s breast until he was four years old, but it was common lore among our family. It was the beginning of all his troubles, Mama said.

I never heard of such a notion, my cousin Jim Wiard (Daddy’s nephew) wrote me. But, he added, Mo did dote on Bart. And sometimes his older sister, Estelle, nicknamed Sally, was ignored. Mo loved Bart to distraction. She was determined he would be special. She fed him stories about Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison, poor boys who came from nothing and achieved greatness. She paid for extra piano lessons and he was tutored in Latin and German. Didn’t Bart use his German when he attended the Nuremberg trials?

Meanwhile, his aunt Katie was teaching him about his soul and how it was a violent battleground for good and evil. Your entire life is about saving your soul, she would say. Your entire life is about redemption.

And he attended daily Mass with her and he read the Gospels; he was an altar boy; he appeared very devout. Bart has the gift of faith, Aunt Katie would say.

For a while he toyed with the idea of becoming a priest, but in the end, the law won out; it was more flexible and more logical than the Church; it was about moral and emotional transactions.

As a teenager, my father took all sorts of odd jobs to earn extra money for college. He delivered mail in a horse-drawn cart; he tutored friends in English grammar and Latin.

At eighteen, summering at Inverness with his family, he courted a girl named Billie. She had red hair and freckles and she was older than he was—by some four or five years.

Women loved him. He was a tease; he was funny, he was touching. He had a smile that made you smile right back, an old friend, Helen McWilliamson, said. And he was always giving you compliments. ‘You look wonderful,’ he’d say. ‘You look marvelous!’ But with such intensity you couldn’t quite believe it. Later you would think, ‘Did I really look that good?’

As a young man, he positively radiated good nature (as later on he would negatively radiate stress). He was the first person to buy you an ice cream cone; he always remembered birthdays and anniversaries; he loved giving presents; he’d go out of his way to do something for you—run an errand—arrange for tickets to a concert. But he’d make rash promises too; once he told me, ‘I’m going to take you up in a private airplane,’ Jim Wiard remembers, but he never did.

He charmed everybody but his own mother. You can’t pull the wool over my eyes, Mo would say when she caught him in a fib or an exaggeration. She was terrified he’d grow up to be like her brother Black Bart, a charmer if there ever was one, but master of the Irish switch—he could shake hands with a friend while soft-soaping an enemy with the other.

Daddy had plenty of opportunity to observe his uncle weaving his magic spell; as a teenager, he would hang out in Black Bart’s betting parlor with his first cousin, also named Bart Cavanaugh, who later went on to become a powerful city manager of Sacramento during the 1940s and was one of Earl Warren’s principal confidants. Together the two boys would observe their uncle playing cards or taking bets or schmoozing with his cronies about California’s future.

Much of the talk centered around the Southern Pacific Railroad. California then was virtually dominated by the railroad, and corruption prevailed. The Southern Pacific controlled the legislature and newspapers and individual senators—that is, until Hiram Johnson became governor in 1910; he was such a tough, honest governor, he put a stop to it. It was an incredible story, since his father, Grover Johnson, was the chief lobbyist for the railroad. That struggle—between public and vested interests; between a lone crusader, Hiram Johnson, and a corporation; not to mention the battle between father and son—these were dramas the two Barts could and did recite by rote. I have often thought that hearing these stories in that smoky, cramped betting parlor might have fueled my father’s fascination with politics and supported his deep feelings for the mysteries of power. (In politics you can have what you have in religion, he wrote Mama from the Willkie presidential campaign train in 1940. You can have a sense of incarnation. All the guys I’m working with—along with Wendell—Cabot Lodge, Russell Davenport and Paul Smith—we’re all searching for a meaning in life.)

Just before he left for Berkeley and college in 1918, my father and his cousin took a trip together to Reno and the ghost towns nearby, and they weekended at Lake Tahoe, which was still surrounded by falling-down mining camps.

How Daddy loved the land his relatives had helped discover. As soon as he could afford a car, he crisscrossed the state, taking trips to places as diverse as Death Valley and Sugar Bowl, long before it became a ski resort. He explored Big Sur; he drove to Hollywood when it was still mostly orange groves; and he kept returning to San Francisco.

He could get wildly drunk if he wanted to; San Francisco had more speakeasies than any other city in the country—little bars along Union Square and in the Tenderloin, near California and Hyde streets. He could stagger drunk into the wide-open gambling that went on in the alleys of Chinatown, or he could visit a bawdy house and then careen down to the waterfront on a cable car.

Mostly he wandered the hills, ending up more often than not in Pacific Heights. Sometimes he’d stand outside the Spreckels Mansion perched on Octavia and Washington streets, a big white elephant of a building with ornate columns and verandas overlooking the bay. Daddy told me he had fantasized about living near that house—and one day we did.

CHAPTER 2

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA opened up new worlds for my father. His letters to Mo were filled with enthusiastic descriptions of Berkeley’s winding streets and breathtaking vistas. And he wrote as well about his favorite teacher and first mentor, Max Radin, an elegant, mustachioed attorney originally from Kempers, Poland, who taught constitutional law and wrote mystery novels on the side.

After the rituals of hazing, Daddy became a member of the Kappa Alpha fraternity in 1919, and later of Phi Delta Pi. He joined the Army Reserves and went on maneuvers. (I have a nutty, blurred photograph of him being thrown into the air from a blanket by his buddies.) By his junior year, he was one of the most popular bachelors on campus. The San Francisco Examiner took a picture of him escorting silent-movie star Clara Bow to a prom.

He wasn’t a leader—he was too unconventional—but he had ideas about everything and he was good at executing them. He was a catalyst. A classmate, Portia Hume, told me he had a bravado—a kind of cocky assurance. He and Portia took public speaking together in Doc Smithson’s class. Bart loved making entrances and he loved to rage. Once he regaled his classmates to helpless laughter with a speech about how the shimmy had recently been condemned by the Catholic Archdiocese of Ohio.

To help pay his tuition he started teaching English at the extension division of the university, and he taught international law there as well from 1922 to 1926. In the summers he worked as a cub reporter for the Sacramento Bee and served as a stringer for United Press. He ended up working at the morgue of the Oakland Tribune, which Silk Hat Joe Knowland owned.

After he graduated from Bolt Hall and began practicing law in San Francisco he continued to live in Berkeley.

ONCE a month, Mo would come down from Sacramento on the train and clean the apartment my father had rented, two cramped dark rooms high in the hills on Panoramic Way. She would dust and sweep, and then she would search the place for liquor. It was the beginning of Prohibition, and deaths from consumption of undiluted alcohol were frequent, but chances are Mo was more worried about how problem drinking ran in our family.

Daddy would come home from work and see what his mother was doing, and he would chase her around the living room, but not before she managed to hurl the latest bottle of bathtub gin into the fireplace. Then she methodically began to clean up the mess.

I’m just going to go out and get more, Mother, Daddy would say.

Not while I’m here you won’t, she’d cry and throw herself dramatically against the door. And Daddy would laugh and laugh. You remind me of Mary Pickford as Little Nell.

He would keep on teasing and cajoling her until she began to melt by the door, and finally he would lead her to a falling-down couch and regale her with his latest adventure: he had flown in a private plane over the Santa Cruz mountains; he’d gone on to play golf at Pebble Beach.

Mo never met any of his friends; she didn’t think he saw many girls. He kept saying he wasn’t going to get married for a long time. Too much