The Rich Weren’t So Very Different, After All--if You Cooked for Them

Dorothy Freeman was talking about the times she drank coffee in the kitchen with her incredibly wealthy bosses, such as Harry Guggenheim, Aristotle Onassis, Alfred Vanderbilt and Walter P. Chrysler Jr., just to name the richest.

“I can’t say a bad word about any of them,” she said, but noted that Guggenheim was the nearest thing to a perfect gentleman she had ever met. “I couldn’t say anything ugly about him if I tried.”

She said they all would discuss world events and some would even offer her advice on the stock market, especially Guggenheim.

She and her husband, John, also worked for actor Glenn Ford and his wife, the late Eleanor Powell.

“I’ll never know why they divorced,” she said. “They seemed to love each other so much.”

Dorothy Freeman did all the cooking while her husband worked as a steward and sometimes as a valet and butler from the early Depression times to the 1970s, when they both retired.

Her husband of 61 years died in May.

“Now it’s a lonely life for me,” said Freeman, 82, in the four-unit apartment house she owns in Anaheim, the result of a wise investment. “We were together all the time.”

The memory of being surrounded by wealth is still fresh in her mind. “You know I never ever washed a dish in all those years,” she said. “I just cooked. Now I just cook for myself and some friends.”

She said she would regularly prepare buffets for 60 people and once prepared food for a cocktail party of 600 people.

“I never had to stint on the cost of any of the food I prepared,” she said.

Before marrying, she worked as a seventh-grade math teacher but later went to a French cooking school in New York. She later found a job with her husband, who was a steward for a man in Philadelphia.

“We worked there for four years, and John wanted to move on,” she said. “He felt he was being owned and didn’t want to be one of the family, because he knew he never would be.

“We only worked four years for The Greek,” she said of Onassis. “That was before Jackie Kennedy married him.”

The need to move on held true with the bulk of their wealthy employers. “The longest we stayed was eight years with Glenn Ford and Eleanor Powell,” she said. “She was the nicest person who ever lived. She was my favorite.”

Working for the wealthy didn’t necessarily mean a big paycheck.

“During the 1940s, my husband and I would each make $100 a week, but that was good for those times,” she said.

The most they made was in the 1960s when they each earned $250 a week. “But that also included room and board,” she said, “in a very nice house.”

There are world records for everything, it seems, so Zeb O’Breen is going to be in the Guinness Book of Records because he has a world-record 64 beer taps at his Goat Hill Tavern in Costa Mesa.

“I actually set the record earlier with 44 taps last year, so I added another 20 taps to make it a better record,” said O’Breen, whose real name is Robert Zimer. “I changed it because that doesn’t sound so good for a bar, especially one that has a name of Goat Hill.”

All but 10 of the taps are working, and the rest are being set up for refrigeration at the bar on Newport Avenue. He said he has 20 taps that flow imported draft beer and most of the time has 100 beer kegs stacked three-high in the tavern’s walk-in cooler.

“The Guinness guys sent me a letter saying the record will be included in the next big edition,” said O’Breen, 56, who lives nearby.

But while he serves a lot of beer, the Guinness book probably won’t list his favorite drink. “I like white wine,” he said.

The Aug. 1 benefit golf tournament sponsored by Friends of Canyon Acres Society--Anaheim Hills and the Yorba Linda Country Club, where the event will take place, has the clever name of “Par Fore Kids.”

Acknowledgments--Officer John Kirby, a two-year veteran of the San Clemente Police Department, was named “Uniformed Officer of the Year” by the Orange County Narcotics Officers Assn. He formerly served as a narcotics officer in the Marine Corps.