Nearby Areas Seek to Share Riches : Widow’s Bequest Spawns Marin County Headache

When Beryl H. Buck died a childless widow a decade ago, she left a generous bequest to the people of Marin County that has meant trouble ever since.

She thought she was leaving them stock worth $10 million. But she was way off. Now it appears it will take more than $10 million just to pay for the lawyers who are arguing whether Buck would have left all that stock for use in the second wealthiest county in the United States if she had known its true value.

The stocks, in a small, privately held oil company, turned out to be worth $300 million, making the Buck estate one of the largest anywhere and arousing the ire of people involved in worthwhile causes in other Bay Area counties who think it is ludicrous that all that money should be spent in affluent Marin.

Last week, more than a dozen lawyers hunkered down for the start of what, barring a surprise settlement, promises to be a six-month Superior Court trial over whether the San Francisco Foundation, custodian and dispenser of Buck’s legacy, can, in effect, break her will and parcel her money out in other counties.

The foundation contends that it is highly unlikely that Buck would have left her money to Marin--a county of 220,000 residents that is often caricatured as home to a lot of old hippies and young professionals--if she had known the true extent of her holdings.

It contends that Buck, being a charitable person, probably would have wanted her wealth spread around the five-county Bay Area the foundation serves. The lawsuit seeks to obtain court permission to do just that.

Not surprisingly, Marin County officials have taken a dim view of sharing their inheritance.

They say that Buck meant what she said in her will: that the money “shall always be held and used for exclusively nonprofit charitable, religious or educational purposes in providing care for the needy in Marin County, California, and for other nonprofit charitable, religious or educational purposes in that county.”

” . . . 37 simple, clearly stated words,” said Marin County Counsel Douglas J. Maloney. “There is probably no one living, other than lawyers, who could not understand exactly what these words say and mean.”

Maloney said the foundation is bound to abide by Buck’s words unless it literally cannot.

He said there are plenty of good uses for the money in Marin, even though it is home to a lot of well-off people--a characteristic Buck knew well.

For instance, why not fund a major medical research center, Maloney asks.

Obstacles Envisioned

The foundation’s answer, through a spokeswoman, is that no medical research center has been formally proposed. Also, there would be many obstacles. One would have to be started from the ground up. And the foundation generally does not fund capital projects.

Critics charge that the foundation has been unimaginative and inflexible--or worse, that some of its officials intended to sabotage the Marin-only provision of Buck’s will from the beginning.

Their alleged motive? A way to save the foundation’s identity as an organization that responds to the needs of a five-county area, not merely Marin.

Foundation officials dismiss such criticism as “paranoia.” They say they have been flexible and have tried to spend the money wisely in Marin. When they found they could not, however, they decided that Buck would have wanted them to end a “cruel joke,” as one foundation lawyer put it.

Changed Circumstances

At the trial, Judge Homer Thompson, imported from Santa Clara County by direction of the state Supreme Court, would have an easy time if the foundation could show that it had become illegal or impossible to go on spending the money in accordance with Buck’s wishes.

The law has an ancient remedy for those situations called cy pres comme possible, from the Norman French, or cy pres for short. The cy pres doctrine provides for complying with a dead person’s wishes as nearly as changed circumstances allow. For example, a bequest to pioneers in covered wagons might be rerouted to more modern travelers.

But the law is not clear when those in charge of administering a bequest decide that changed circumstances make it not impossible but unwise to comply with the wishes of the dead. That is what this case is about, with the foundation contending that it cannot spend the money effectively when it is restricted to spending it in Marin County, and the foundation’s opponents charging it with a lack of bold vision.

Mutual Agreement Urged

Thompson has repeatedly indicated that he would prefer that the parties settle the case themselves. But it has been hard to clear the air with the Marin side at one point accusing the foundation of having a grave robber’s bad faith.

The foundation has been under pressure from the moment it got the Buck trust. Overnight, it went from the nation’s 50th largest to the 11th largest foundation. It became the largest of all foundations formed to serve a specific community--in this case, the five-county area.

This one bequest has skewed things. It alone is six times larger than the 90 other trusts the foundation has administered for the benefit of all five counties. Yet it was restricted to the least needy of them.

Pressure came quickly from the news media, which poked fun at the notion of all that money going to buy more hot tubs in Marin, where the median household income last year was estimated at $32,776. Pressure also came from community organizations in other Bay Area counties, frustrated by their inability to get grants at a time of government cutbacks in social services.

Frivolities Cited

“We would put in a proposal and it would be a good proposal--for instance, to help people being thrown off disability rolls, which means they could die--and we would get back a letter saying, ‘We don’t have enough to go around,’ ” said Sidney M. Wolinsky, a partner in the San Francisco public interest law firm, Public Advocates. “And then we would read about the San Francisco Foundation funding a bicycle path in Belvedere, which is like funding a parking lot for Mercedes-Benzes in Beverly Hills.”

Some complained that grants were going to Marin County for frivolities. There was the time, for instance, when some aging hippies in Bolinas, an isolated hamlet in western Marin, got a grant to learn gardening the French way. Money for low-cost housing went to buy berths for houseboats in Sausalito. And there was a multimillion-dollar purchase of ranch land in a county that has, if anything, a surplus of open space.

But the San Francisco Foundation had to spend the Buck money quickly. The will said income from the trust had to be spent within a year after it was received. Income was pouring in at the rate of about $30 million a year, and all of that had to be funneled into Marin.

Arts grants were made and social services grants were made for the middle-class and the estimated 7,000 Marin residents who are poor. Well over $100 million was handed out, but there always seemed to be plenty of money left.

Those who contend that Buck’s will should be honored as is say she knew there was not much poverty in Marin County when she made her will.

Among them is John Elliott Cook, the lawyer who drafted the will. She was “interested in supporting education and religion and in ameliorating the suffering of average people who had done everything possible to help themselves but, because of circumstances beyond their control such as disease or accident, were in need of assistance,” Cook said through his own lawyer, Ronald Hayes Malone.

Finds Early Memo

Cook, now 87, dug out a note that Buck sent him, responding to one of his drafts. It “isn’t as specific as I think it should be for Marin County only, and for middle-class people for illnesses-rehabilitation so they won’t lose their homes, automobiles, et cetera, which they have saved for all their lives,” she wrote.

Exactly why Buck restricted her bequest to Marin is not known. But lawyers and their staffs are trying to research it. One, who asked for anonymity, said he had learned one possible reason, which seemed rather petty in retrospect: That Buck, who was overweight, had felt rejected by San Francisco society in her youth.

Was Cellist and Nurse

Buck was a cellist and a nurse who reportedly met her husband, a San Francisco pathologist, when they were both called to a medical emergency. After a time in San Francisco, they built a mansion in Ross, about 10 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, where she lived for 40 years until her death at age 79.

Buck’s money originated with her late husband’s father, who owned part of the hills that became Beverly Hills and some desert land in Kern County that held the undeveloped oil reserves of the Belridge Oil Co.

Shell Oil Co. bought out Belridge in late 1979--four years after Buck’s death--at a price much higher than anticipated, thanks to turmoil in oil prices and some other factors. Thus the Buck estate turned out to be extraordinarily large.

Malone, representing the drafter of her will, is one of the foundation critics who contends that “certain members of the foundation intended to break the Buck trust even before the foundation accepted the trust.”

Officials Deny Accusation

Foundation officials deny that and say they did the best they could in living up to the will. “We found ourselves constantly in a defensive position,” Martin A. Paley, its executive director and the first witness in the trial, testified last week.

Because of the size of the trust, the foundation had to make a basic choice: Whether it would swallow the trust or let the trust swallow it.

“We decided in 1979-80 to maintain the character and strength of the San Francisco Foundation,” Paley recalled in an internal memo in 1983. “ . . . The possibility of a separate and distinctly managed Marin unit . . . was discussed and rejected.”

By 1983, Paley continued, he could see the strains on “policies, procedures and staff” from maintaining “two rather disparate standards of operation between Marin and the rest of the Bay Area.”

Organizations Moved to Marin

The double standard boiled down to this: It was easy for charitable, social services and arts organizations to get money if they were based in Marin County, tough if they were based in Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo and Contra Costa counties. There is evidence that, in response to the disparity, some organizations moved to Marin.

Paley told the distribution committee that it faced a choice: Restructure the foundation or modify the nature of the Buck trust. The committee chose the latter course, and reportedly agreed to invoke a provision of the foundation’s charter--a “variance provision” that said it had the authority, on its own, to alter the use of funds when a donor’s wishes became undesirable, impractical or impossible to fulfill.

Foundation officials then decided to see how the state attorney general’s office would react if it actually took such action.

The attorney general’s office has responsibility to make sure that charitable trusts are not frittered away. It had gotten involved with the Buck trust early on, expressing repeated concerns about whether pumping so much money into Marin was efficient, and raising the question of whether the cy pres doctrine would apply.

Official ‘Dumbfounded’

But Deputy Atty. Gen. Yeoryios C. Apallas said the head of the attorney general’s Charitable Trust Section told him she was “dumbfounded” that foundation officials thought they could “vary” from a will on their own.

“We said you can’t invoke the variance without cy pres being shown in court,” Apallas said. And cy pres is tough to show; it applies only when compliance with a will has become illegal, impossible, or so difficult that is is almost impossible, Apallas said.

Unanimity on the distribution committee dissolved once members were told of the attorney general’s position, and members voted 4 to 2, with one abstention, to take the matter to court. The lawsuit is technically a petition to the court for permission to alter the terms of the will.

In the trial, the attorney general’s office is opposing the foundation, accusing it, in effect, of having painted itself into a corner with a lack of bold vision.

‘Missed the Boat’

The foundation “missed the boat” by deciding that the money had to be spent both in Marin County and for the primary benefit of Marin residents, Apallas said. The will, he noted, does not require that Marin residents be the primary beneficiaries.

The foundation’s approach foreclosed some options that some Marin officials say they favor but did not formally propose: grand schemes such as creating a world center for research into Alzheimer’s disease.

Marin County Counsel Maloney said the foundation’s traditional approach was like fitting a “square peg into a round hole” in wealthy Marin, where service needs are relatively modest and even the public buildings are splendid. The courthouse where the case is being tried, for instance, was designed by the noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Some “arguably dumb” programs resulted, Maloney said. They indeed appear ludicrous when compared on a scale of social justice to the massive social-services needs of, say, East Oakland. But, Maloney said, “what they need over there is another Mrs. Buck.”

Maloney prefers a comparison with J. Paul Getty, who left his fortune to art.

“Is Getty’s an efficient trust?” he asked. “It spends millions on museums. You could argue that you could find better uses for that income. But it’s Getty’s dough, and if he wants to spend his money on art, he can do that. . . . It’s Mrs. Buck’s dough, and if she wants to leave her money to Marin, she should be able to do that.”