San Francisco Loses Its Poet Laureate

When I first met Herb Caen, the legendary San Francisco columnist, it was as a minor character in his tales of the city that he made love to for half a century. That was in the early ‘60s. I was an aspiring author and a graduate school dropout, a shaggy figure selling books till around midnight at beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore.

Having spent the evening fending off the stoned, the crazed and the felonious who swirled around North Beach, I must have seemed a misanthropic figure to the ever-dapper Caen, pink, cherubic and smiling, who appeared with writer Herb Gold and an offer of a drink at Vesuvio’s bar next door.

Most likely it was after taking in the opera that he’d hopped a cab to continue his rounds, scooping up anecdotes for his daily column. After an incongruous martini with the beatniks--the name that a much bemused Caen had bestowed on the hordes howling poetry to jazz--he would be off to a quiet nightcap at the Top of the Mark to reassure some fat-cat friends that the barbarians were not about to take over. Whether they lived on Nob Hill or in the Mission, bankers or bikers, everyone read Caen and learned to love the town as he saw it.

So it went for more than 50 years, until he died from cancer last week at the age of 80, still churning out copy that defined San Francisco in ways large and small. A Caen sighting at a restaurant or play was a make-or-break opportunity that kept investors and actors scanning his column for days, hoping for yet fearing a mention in one of a stream of items punctuated by his trademark three-dot pauses.

The dots disguised the fact that Caen was a serious journalist and often there was more hard news in his column than in the rest of the Chronicle. Occasionally he delivered a moving essay on the issue of the day, as when he inveighed against the death penalty, recounting the terror that seized him while witnessing an execution at San Quentin as a young reporter. But he generally eschewed heavy punditry, wrapping his earnest civic cautions in amusing stories. He wrote in the guise of gossip, mostly innocent and deft, certainly classy by today’s standards, but gossip nonetheless.

Caen could be hurtful but almost always on target, as when he went after Lenny Bruce, who was boring even his most dedicated fans with nightclub readings from the endless depositions in his tangled lawsuits. Bruce had been the courageous battler for free speech, but it remained for Caen to warn him that by surrendering humor, he was losing the war.

Caen was the city’s arbiter of taste, and through his exposure of the forces that are always set to ruin a good thing--running superhighways through lovely old neighborhoods, arresting people because they are different--he helped establish the town as one of the true outposts of world culture. He did this by thrilling to the quirky, contradictory but inherently tolerant spirit of the city’s bohemian core.

What Caen’s column celebrated was not merely San Francisco’s fine food or trendy lifestyles but the diversity that has characterized the city since the Gold Rush. He wrote of the Chinese and Latinos who did so much of the work, the Irish and Italians who battled for turf, the famous Jewish merchants who brought their wares around the Horn, the African Americans like his best friend Mayor Willie Brown who escaped segregation in the South, and the gays who also moved there for freedom.

Respecting the bloody battles that marked San Francisco as a strong union town, Caen was close to longshore leader Harry Bridges, coming to his defense when the federal government accused Bridges of being a Communist and tried to deport him to his native Australia. Bridges had paid his dues as a San Franciscan, and that’s all Caen needed to know to defend him.

Caen was so staunchly union that when the San Francisco Chronicle went on strike, he donated his column to a special daily strike edition of Ramparts magazine, which I was then editing. In the paper’s most recent strike, Caen took his turn walking the picket line.

For all of the power of his pen, Caen was a modest man who felt privileged to chronicle the life of a city that had long thrived on its independence of spirit, a city truly deserving of this poet laureate’s love. Caen had no desire to rule San Francisco, because he was infatuated with its inherently unruly nature. He was the perfect lover, one who never sought to kill the thing he loved.