I owned a four-plex below Coit Tower for many years. I lived in one of the apartments. One autumn day an older gentleman, a museum director who was a close friend, brought a woman about his same age over to visit. The woman was Sally Eccles, the widow of Mariner Eccles, a mormon originally from Ewetaw who was a primary architect involved with the creation of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He eventually served as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, appointed by FDR and retired in 1948.
Sally was interested in my four-plex because it was the building her father had built and owned after the 1906 earthquake. And it was where she had grown up in. So it was sort of nice to have someone come by and look over a money pit that I'd had to extensively renovate. I led my friend and Mrs. Eccles upstairs to my apartment and invited them in. At that point in time a major feature of the front living room was a six foot blow up vinyl penis with giant weighted anatomically correct testicles keeping the penis standing up. It had been a gift from someone. And after a recent Hallowe'en party it also sported a rather dashing Stetson cowboy hat that no one ever reclaimed. So I left the Stetson where I found it, on the enormous blush pink vinyl glans penis.
I gave my friend and Mrs. Eccles a thorough tour of my home and gardens, ending with all of us enjoying glasses of wine and Perrier on the front porch We relaxed for several hours enjoying the unusually sunny view that afternoon across the bay of Berkeley Oakland. Mrs. Eccles and I immediately sparked as if we were close and dear friends. My friend, a gay and semi-famous museum director, often used Mrs. Eccles has his "beard" for social events when raising funds for his museum. He was obviously mortified all afternoon. When they left, Mrs. Eccles warmly shook my hand and advised, "Take good care of that Stetson. It's an expensive one.' And they were gone.
Later that evening I received a phone call from my older friend who did his best to rip me a new asshole, because he was so embarrassed by the vinyl blow up penis. But the joke was on him. A week after their visit I received an invitation to join Mrs. Eccles and friends for Thanksgiving dinner. I dressed appropriately, with jacket and tie, (which was rare for me in those days), and amazed and somewhat amused to discover Mrs. Eccles lived at 950 Mason Street in a ten-room residential pent house suite of the The Fairmont Hotel on top of Nob Hill. I must have been a good guest because she also invited me to her annual Christmas party the following month, usually held on December 28th. My older friend who had introduced us had not attended either event.
Sally was Mariner Eccles' second wife, not a mormon, and he had left her a minimum of $80 million in 1974 dollars (that's the year I met her) before he moved to the rock orchard. She was a very interesting woman with black eyes (not brown) that seemed to see through stone. And she had a great sense of humor. I listened and acted on any advice she might share regarding San Francisco. She also became a wonderful dinner guest, always offering to bring along her kitchen maid to help make my dinner parties move smoothly. If one of my guests showed up in leather chaps, Sally was just as gracious as if the guest wore Armani.
I still have the Stetson (it never fit me) and one of my favorite material possessions is a tastefully framed and very large photograph. It was a signed and matted original self-portrait of Mapplethorpe that showed up unexpectedly one day. Attached was a card asking, "Are you taking care of that Stetson?" She had bought and offered it to my museum director friend as a donation to the museum's collection. He had declineid it, so I ended up with it hanging on a south wall of a room that I had converted into a library. That's about the crudest thing we ever shared -- the name "Stetson."
The blow up penis finally had too many holes in it to remain inflated. But the Mapplethorpe photo certainly attracts a whole bunch of uninvited comments. I think it's how the end of the bull whip is inserted.
