A City and Its Prophet

Almost everybody I know is dead already, but as long as they keep moving around, hardly anybody notices.

--San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, Dec. 1, 1985

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For an old man--no, for any man and, for that matter, woman, child or beast--Herb Caen was having quite a spring. First, San Francisco’s highest flying socialites threw an elaborate party to honor the columnist on his 80th birthday. Next, he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in recognition of his half-century as “voice and conscience of his city.” Then, seemingly on a whim, he married his longtime girlfriend.

“It was just a great way to do it instead of building it up,” said a member of the hastily formed wedding party. “What more could you ask for: a birthday, Pulitzer and ‘Hey, let’s get married.’ ”

Since San Francisco is at heart more small town than big city, and since Caen has long been the biggest fish in the tank--the maker and breaker of politicians, restaurants, stage shows; “God,” as one actor put it--each of these milestones received front page coverage. It was almost comic. Seemingly every day brought a new Caen bulletin. Readers could only wonder what might come next: Caen to play on Olympic basketball squad? Caen cashes $20 million lottery ticket? Caen fathers quintuplets?

The question was answered, and not so funnily, two weeks ago by the columnist himself: “The point,” he wrote, after a stammering preamble, “is that life has a way of evening out, as I’ve often said. The point is that ‘the luck, she is running good,’ in one of the favored phrases of Ernest Hemingway. The luck, she was running too good, I thought nervously. One celebratory event after another, like nothing I’d expected to experience. . . . Oh hell. The point, dear friends and beloved enemies, is also like nothing I’d ever expected to experience. I have lung cancer.”

*

My introduction to Herb Caen came via a staff memo posted in the Associated Press bureau here. We staffers were instructed not to pick up any Caen item without first verifying its accuracy. One of his bits--something about an inmate being summoned from San Quentin to break into a locked car, thus saving baby, dog or whatever--had turned out to be, in one of Caen’s phrases, “all too exclusive.” It didn’t happen.

This was 20 years ago and, fresh out of journalism school, I found Caen’s less-than-rigid grasp on the facts shocking at first. Youth. What I came to understand later was that Caen was stalking bigger game than who, what, when, where and how. He was after the larger truths about San Francisco. In fact, he was not actually covering San Francisco in a journalistic sense. He was creating it.

“San Francisco,” a Chronicle editor once noted, “is a concept. It is an idea, a legend, a myth and Herb Caen is the prophet, the high priest of the mystique.”

Five mornings a week, Caen would ramble through a couple dozen items of news, tidbits and melancholy musings. On Sundays he would write essays about the city. Collectively, his work provided a sort of operators’ manual for San Franciscans, a primer in Caen’s “don’t-call-it-Frisco” ethos.

In his San Francisco, there was no dress down Friday. Men wore suits and hats. Bartenders were nobles, to be tipped well. Pigeons were flying rodents, to be shooed from town. Eccentrics were to be embraced. And the ‘burbs and burgs were cannon fodder. Perhaps Caen’s most memorable line was his put-down of Chico as a place where Velveeta is sold in the gourmet food section.

*

And so on Friday several thousand San Franciscans--but doubtless no Chicoans--streamed down to the waterfront to salute Caen and dedicate a promenade named in his honor. Singers sang. Dancers danced. Fireworks exploded. Testimonials came from old friends and column subjects, ranging from Robin Williams to Walter Cronkite to Willie Mays, who observed brightly: “Any time you can get a street named after you when you are still living, hey, that’s great. Every street I see . . . they are named after dead people.”

It was a sweet ceremony, almost unthinkably so in these kill-the-messenger days. And yet it inevitably felt a bit funereal at times. Caen himself told a pointed little joke about a San Franciscan who dies, goes to heaven and observes: “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.” The spectators weren’t sure how to respond. Some chuckled. Others lowered their heads, as if in prayer.

Finally, an orchestra played “Sentimental Journey,” and the columnist shuffled off the stage and down Herb Caen Way. A frail old fellow in a jaunty brown fedora, he was grinning as he disappeared into the crowd.