I fully expected to spend my evening at the Bohemian Club soaking in the surreality of a room full of rich and powerful white guys in their element. To be sure there were moments, overheard conversations, unlike anything in my every day life:
A man with an indistinct European accent stopped to say hello to my host:
“Oh hello and how is your son?”
“Great, great! He's a member of parliament now.”
Or:
“So if I put in my three and you go with forty I think we might really have some momentum.”
Millions.
Or my table mate, a man with Brezshnev like white eyebrows and a bow tie. I have seen him on television somewhere but cannot remember when or why. I think he must have been talking about money.
But honestly I was derailed by the sheer delight of the surroundings. Oak paneled elevators, hallways, subway tiled bathrooms, marble-fronted fireplaces. Climbing a set of stairs and entering into a small, high-ceilinged hallway, a sculpture. A life sized winged bronze woman arching back with the poise and posture of a gymnast. At her feet was an Egyptian, Beau-Arts style motif. A plague stated that it was cast in 1907 in Paris. I wanted to write down the artist's name but taking notes would not have been in place. It was a marvelous, soaring piece, with the power only a good bronze has to transcend its own weight and portray a fluid, living thing.
On the floor below, another bronze of Artemis holding an arched bow, pointing toward her feet. It was so clean of line and exquisite in pose that I could imagine the bowstring move with breath.
The building itself was built in 20s or so, grand in scale but modest in decoration. It had the hallmarks of the apex of the Craftsman era—love of handmade detail but disdain for ostentation or fussiness.
Here and there, decorative carved oak flourishes on the crown moulding or banisters. The doors were huge oak slabs. The library was everything a library in a dusty old club should be. Wavy glass cabinet fronts, a laddered catwalk second story, a locked section of books by club members. On the way to the club, my host and his son were especially keen on showing me this room. I told them I hoped there would be an overstuffed chair somewhere with an ascotted gent nodding gently. Sure enough, sans ascot, an old professorial looking man was taking a cat nap on the far side of the room.
The halls were decorated with 100 years of limited run playbills for the club dinner events and arts functions. Friendly portraits of Jack London, one of the club founders, hung in an ante-chamber. The full club orchestra was tuning up in the theater below. We snuck back stage for awhile and watched them tune.
As would seem to be my own particular magnetism, I was seated for dinner next to perhaps the least powerful looking man in the room. He was gnarled up with what looked to be arthritis, twisted into his chair like a screw. His face was a tableau of pained disapproval. Immediately, he leaned toward me and started complaining about how etiquette over claiming a seat had changed, how he had been stuck here for a good long while waiting on food. Across the table, someone called for his glass and filled it overly full. He reminded me of Laszlo Carreidas, the unsmiling millionaire in the Tintin book Flight 714.
We talked about whiskey, which I make as a hobby, and it turned out that his crabby attitude was really not much deeper than his twisted limbs. He was a retired attorney and had lived atop Nob Hill for many years. What I mistook at first for bewilderment at having been stuck next such an oddity—a young man in shabby clothes talking about whiskey and fiction—proved to be thoughtful consideration. He told me how he had once studied in Ireland and recalled a great variety of whiskeys now gone. I pretended to have a grasp on what it would take, financially, to start a distillery. He asked if the market had stayed up today. Oh sure I replied.
The dinner play was quite amusing and the swordfish moist and tasty. But I found myself getting up to wander the halls looking at the bronzes, reading some of the caricature playbills. I would say the surprise of my visit was the earnestness with which the Bohemians talked of and made art. I can think of a number of explanations for this, for the idea of a club in this vein, some of the reasons charitable and some not. Perhaps it is a way of placing themselves into the center of a kind of endeavor not otherwise for sale. But there were too many legitimate musicians and writers in attendance to believe that entirely. Or maybe it is just and organizing principle which men, otherwise immeshed in their places of empire and importance in life, can find common, neutral ground.
Whatever the case, it does not much matter to me. I love pre-WWII buildings and good bronzes, I can excuse much in people, such as my host, whom I respect. It was a good and free dinner, and once in a blue moon I like to wear a tie.
On the way home we were stuck in traffic next to two women moving boxes out of a pick up truck. They were overdressed for the job, as if they had been called from a good dinner to take shipment of a storage container of clothing. The woman in the back of the truck wore a flouncy, short skirt and moved in fluid but contorted motions so as not to bend too forward, give the passing traffic too much of a show. She handed a large box over the bedrail, arching out like a ballerina to drop the box low without bending. I have no idea why the beauty of the motion struck me as a fitting end to the evening, but it did. Someone should make a bronze of her, Beauty Unloading Boxes.
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