He’s the Heart of San Francisco

Night has fallen on what the poet George Sterling called “the cool, gray city of love.” The music and laughter rise and the town yawns, stretches and begins to wake up. The late-night crowd heads to North Beach and finds its way to Moose’s on Washington Square.

The jazz is smooth, the lights are low. You might see Rep. Nancy Pelosi, 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo or Robin Williams. And one famous face is always here, with its halo of curly gray hair, attentive eyes and familiar beak.

OK, so not really. The proprietor, Ed Moose, keeps a painting of Herb Caen perched on the balcony, surveying the scene below. This place is one of Caen’s regular stops as he prowls the city on a nocturnal search for news and gossip for his daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle, a municipal institution that he began writing an astonishing 58 years ago.

Lately, the real Caen has been stepping a little more jauntily into Moose’s and his other haunts. There is a new mayor, the effervescent Willie L. Brown Jr.--Caen’s lunch buddy and now his unassailable best source--and the town seems to be perking up again after a dull season.

For Caen, who is approaching his 80th birthday, this is a second spring of sorts. A birthday bash for 500 guests at the Palace of the Legion of Honor is slated for April 3. He’s healthy, he has a wonderful girlfriend and his column has a noticeable bounce thanks to his 30-year-long friendship with the new mayor.

The mayor’s plans to redecorate his office, his romantic escapades and actual news--such as being the first in print with the name of the mayor’s press secretary, Kandace Bender--have provided the columnist with a steady stream of mini-scoops. “Willie exudes a lot of optimism and confidence,” Caen says. “He’s a bouncy fellow, and the honeymoon is still on.”

He’s cultivated this well-placed source for years, but other items come from the daily grind. Caen’s capacity for night life strikes his friends with a sense of wonder. One of them, writer Barnaby Conrad Jr., is the artist who painted the faux Caen that presides over Moose’s.

Conrad, who wrote “Time Is All We Have” about his alcoholism, speaks reverently of Caen. “He is very disciplined,” Conrad says. “He doesn’t drink in the day, but come nightfall he drinks along with everybody. I don’t know how he does it. He never misses getting to the office on time, never leaves early.”

The column, which debuted on July 5, 1938, normally has about 20 items, separated by the three proverbial dots, comprising newsy tidbits, snippets of overheard witticisms, barbs for those who offend Caen’s sensibilities

“Nobody has that gracefulness of delivery, or timing of phrase,” says former Chronicle reporter J. Michael Robertson, who teaches journalism at the University of San Francisco. Robertson remarks, as have others before, that Caen “creates a vision of a San Francisco of many years ago, where everybody worth knowing could be known by one man. You get a picture of a good-looking guy, sauntering up the boulevard, with a good-looking woman on his arm.”

*

Herb Caen looked even more animated than Conrad’s portrait when he sauntered into Scala’s Bistro on Sutter Street one recent afternoon, jaunty under a fedora and crisply tailored in an elegant navy Brioni blazer.

Caen was born in Sacramento. But, as he likes to say, he was conceived in San Francisco when his parents were in the city for the 1915 International Exhibition. When he moved here as a kid reporter in 1936, Walter Winchell was the king of the three-dot columnists and Caen admits adopting his style. Winchell had Broadway; Caen, the Barbary Coast.

“This was a wide-open town in the ‘30s,” he recalls. “Every weekend we would get the Lark, a very deluxe train from L.A. S.P. [Southern Pacific] wasn’t known for its imagination, but it [had] a good one there. The train would arrive, and half the stars in Hollywood would debark. And they’d go back Sunday night in terrible shape.”

After World War II, Caen turned down an offer to take over Louella Parsons’ column, which would have taken him to Hollywood and away from Baghdad-by-the-bay, the name he coined. It was a heady time as four newspapers in San Francisco battled for readers. “There is no competition now,” he says, hardly lamenting the situation. “There are no guys out to kill me.”

In 1949, Caen’s biggest rival was the late Bob Patterson of the Examiner. “They hired him out of jail,” Caen remembers. “They misunderstood his letter. They thought he was with Time in Atlanta. Well, he was doing time in Atlanta.

“He was very hard to write a column against because he’d print anything. I said, ‘Bob you’re really killing me.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but I’m killing myself, day by day, because I’m not going to have any sources left by the time I’m through. Give me three years, kid, and the town’s yours again.” And, true enough, he didn’t last three years.

“I’ve outlived so many columnists,” Caen says, proudly displaying ink stains on his fingertips from unjamming the keys of his old Royal manual typewriter. “These guys would drink themselves out to start with. Most of them couldn’t handle the sheer pressure of the daily deadline.”

Caen jumped the Chronicle for the Examiner and a big pay raise in 1950, but returned eight years later. He carried on. He mellowed.

He passes on dessert and orders coffee as a cable car rattles outside, then considered changes in the business. “They don’t kill items anymore, they ‘suggest.’ They say, ‘Take another look at the seventh item there and if you think it’s funny enough to justify all the hell we’re going to get tomorrow, leave it in. But it’s your call.’ ”

Caen, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Nob Hill, climbs Mt. Deadline every day with an invariable routine: “I get up at 7:15 and get down to the office about 9:30. It takes much longer to write the column now because of the e-mail, faxes, tons of letters.”

After a late lunch, he returns to go over the following day’s column with his full-time researcher, Carole Vernier, and a part-time aide, Jennifer Asche. Then it’s off for the ritual of party crawling, with his “Vitamin V,” the ever-present vodka. “I go to some very boring parties,” he explains. “And it’s pretty hard to do that stone-cold sober.”

He limits himself to two drinks a night. “And I haven’t smoked in a long time. I broke three ribs once; that was the most serious thing that has ever happened to me. I don’t know how to think about age. Age is a mystery to me.”

Caen’s work has taken its toll on three marriages. The first was to a showgirl from Chicago, Beatrice Matthews, who filed for divorce with the quip that she was naming San Francisco as corespondent. His second wife was Sally Gilbert, a homemaker and occasional writer, and his third, literary agent Marie Theresa, with whom he had a son, Christopher, now 30.

Current companion Ann Moller, 55, has been the love of his life for nearly 10 years and is an investor and consultant in reverse mergers who appears frequently in the society pages. They met, she says, about 10 years ago when he was bartending at a fund-raising cocktail party. “She likes baseball, and it’s very hard to find a woman who likes baseball,” he says. “She’s also beautiful.”

“Herb stays so young because he’s doing what he’s always done,” she says. “We play a lot of tennis and he plays to win. We play board games. And every Sunday afternoon we go to a movie.”

Amid Caen’s golden years, a few dark days have come. In recent months death has taken friends: bandleader Ernie Heckscher; Scott Beach, a radio personality and bon vivant; former Gov. Pat Brown, once district attorney here; and columnist Jack Smith, his friendly rival from this newspaper.

But he doesn’t linger over personal losses, usually bidding the departed farewell in a piquant paragraph or two. And he’s just as matter-of-fact about his own mortality. “I plan to die in the saddle,” he says, “with my boots on, my cliches at the ready.”

*

It’s easier to find San Franciscans who admit they don’t read Caen anymore than to find someone willing to criticize him in print--one measure of his influence. Critics whisper that Caen never picks up a tab (he denies it) or that they can tell whenever the column is ghostwritten (never, he swears). Some newspeople around town make book on how much of his newspaper’s circulation of 517,000 will evaporate, or even whether the paper will survive, when he departs.

But even if the critics are right, says Jack Shafer, editor of the San Francisco Weekly, the only valid way to judge him is to compare him with Winchell. “And Winchell was the most vicious, lying, deceitful, conniving, wicked [journalist] who ever wrote three dots,” Shafer says. But where Winchell was mean, Caen is usually kind.

“Yeah, Caen shills. Yeah, he’s a perpetual plugger for his friends and punishes his enemies, but he does it all out in the open. I think those are real ‘30s or ‘40s standards,” Shafer says, adding that when Caen’s column was recently moved to the front of the classified section, it left him in his own little world. “He’s like a journalist trapped in amber from another time.”

As for Caen, since he has his health and a long, heady romance, what more could he ask for? Merely 20 more of those news bits a day, five times a week. And he has authoritative help there. “Even if Caen doesn’t have anything to write about, Willie will give him two or three good items a day,” saloonkeeper Moose says.

Caen describes the typical te^te-a-te^te: “He gives me the inside word about what’s going on in politics, then we all make bad jokes about it, a lot of bad jokes. I don’t try to ask him too many reportorial questions. He wants to relax, use four-letter words. And he knows I won’t misquote him. If I can help it.”

Brown, in turn, appreciates the writer’s “incredible ability to turn a phrase and poke fun at himself and the customs of the city. Herb Caen in writing is like Johnny Carson on late night.”

Not that they always agree. For instance, Caen has lately been unable to hide his distaste for Brown’s fondness for baseball caps reading “Da Mayor.” He circulated a rumor that Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris was getting one of his own, labeled “Duh Mayor.”

But this is de rigueur for the mayor of a cosmopolitan, fun-loving city. Says Da Mayor, “He writes about things that are interesting and are uniquely San Francisco, and he doesn’t make any bones about it. And if you’re not interesting, he doesn’t write about you.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Some Herb Caenisms

This morning I got up, stumbled into the bathroom and peered into the mirror at the face of a man 40 years old. “Happy birthday,” I croaked, holding onto the washbasin to steady myself. It has always been a dreadful experience, meeting myself head-on in the morning. But this time it was worse. I was 40. Unshaven but washed up. A has-been who had never arrived. I studied the ravages of four decades of clean living, hard work and bum scotch. Under the heartless glare of the fluorescents, I counted the laugh lines with tears in my eyes. They are there to stay, even when I cry. I examined the vertical crease between my eyes. It looked like Yosemite Valley from the air. I spent a few minutes trying various hair arrangements, but it was no use. The point on the top of my head still shone through, shiny as Fujiyama in the moonlight. With a sigh that rattled the windows, I brushed my teeth with Jack Daniel and prepared to face the few remaining dismal years.

--Daily column, April 3, 1956

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A moment’s silence, heads bowed, for Jack Smith, who wrote a column for the L.A. Times almost as long as I’ve written this lesser screed. He died yesterday morn, deeply mourned. How charming was Jack? Every time we had dinner in L.A. he asked me to make the reservations “because nobody down here has ever heard of me.”

--Daily column, Jan. 10, 1996

*

I miss all the good parties. Frexample, the news staff of a major station held its annual blast at Pier 39, during which the wife of a top exec showed a lot of spunk and zeal by dancing in the altogether. What’s more, there are photos, which should be of interest to hubby. He disappeared before the performance.

--Daily column, Jan. 24, 1996