It’s the List That Counts, Socially Speaking

Herb Caen’s widow was outshone by a blond art dealer. Mayor Willie Brown got half the ink of a politician he beat six years ago. Danielle Steel (with a score of 10) made Amy Tan (5) look like a puny footnote, but then got comeuppance from an ex-husband who bagged an 11. A wealthy environmentalist snagged three times as much limelight as Sharon Stone.

There are probably more constructive ways to start a new year than to count boldfaced names in the society columns. But for the last week this biggest of small towns has been doing it anyway. In what has become a minor sport for Bay Area people-watchers, the Nob Hill Gazette, the area’s social calendar of record, published its annual ranking of who was mentioned how many times last year in the pages of the January 2002 edition.

Nearly 1,000 people, from George Lucas, the well-known Bay Area filmmaker, to George Lucas, an opera-supporting retired tailor with the same name, had made it into the publication at least twice.

The Gazette’s Tote Board has run for 11 Januaries, launched as a lighthearted sendup by the monthly’s owner. In recent years, however, it has approached cult status as economic forces and journalistic fashion have shrunk society coverage in the city’s daily newspapers.

Local pundits joke about it, socialites vie to get onto it and philanthropists discreetly scan it for their own names and standings.

“Hail, Anti-Social Losers!” the left-leaning SF Weekly joked last year in an item announcing that “supersocialite” Ann Moller Caen had “easily carried away the coveted crown” with 16 Nob Hill Gazette mentions in 2000. The list for 2001 tallied 17 mentions for Caen--high, but not high enough to beat Heide Betz, an unmarried and socially active art dealer, who pushed her score to 19 when the Gazette reported her appearance at a reception at Caen’s “lovely Pacific Heights home” with an appeals court justice.

This time, the widow Caen shared third place with the city’s chief of protocol Charlotte Mailliard Shultz, wife of former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, who said she had been hearing about her notoriety all week.

Runners-up Patricia Sprincin and Richard N. Goldman tied with 18 mentions. (Sprincin, for non-San Franciscans, is past president of the city’s Opera Guild and president-elect of the Symphony League, and Goldman, a retired insurance executive and Republican fund-raiser, is a backer of environmentalist causes and the widower of a Levi Strauss heir. He said he learned of his accomplishment when he called the Gazette’s editor Sunday to invite her to a reception for former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, whom he is backing in the gubernatorial race.)

The Gazette’s owner and publisher, Lois Lehrman, says the Tote Board originated as “a tongue-in-cheek competition” and a joke on the Gazette’s own reputation as a repository for Bay Area-status anxiety. If the 23-year-old tabloid is frankly elitist, it also has a campy, only-in-San Francisco feel to it. It features page upon page of benefits, receptions and private parties, and its debutante-riddled wedding section is titled “Mergers & Acquisitions.”

But it is also one of the few publications in which pictures of partying Gettys collide with candids from the annual ball for pet lovers and their four-legged escorts.

The April issue carried an account of a local party at which the butler passed around an after-dinner tray of marijuana and a blurb on the baby shower for Brown’s love child, complete with a photo of mother Carolyn Carpeneti and “Da Daddy,” as “Da Mayor” was re-nicknamed.

The December issue opened with a shot of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh at a benefit for arts education, and closed with a masquerade party for the city’s new American Trial Lawyers’ Assn. president.

For most of its history, the Gazette was a secondary player on the social scene in San Francisco. Then-Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, the city’s most famous name-dropper, died in 1997, followed by the death of the newspaper’s prolific society editor Pat Steger in 1999. The following year, the Chronicle was sold to the Hearst Corp., which, in turn, sold the rival Examiner to the Fang family.

The changes in ownership, combined with the worsening Bay Area economy, prompted a rethinking of the newspapers’ styles and editorial priorities. Society news--like local news in general--is labor- and space-intensive and has become less popular in an era of round-the-clock global celebrity gossip.

But San Francisco is an intensely social and self-interested city, and Merla Zellerbach, the Gazette’s editor, said the sudden falloff in mainstream coverage prompted almost immediate increases in advertising at the publication, which has a controlled--or targeted--circulation of about 75,000. Few would accuse the Gazette of hard-hitting journalism, and it still employs columnist George Christy, who resigned from the Hollywood Reporter last year amid allegations that he had received sham movie credits from producers he covered, thus enabling him to qualify for Screen Actors Guild benefits. (“He’s a good writer, and we haven’t had any problem with him, and he brings a quality of glamour and glitter,” said Zellerbach. “Also,he’s the only one who really has access to Danielle Steel.”)

“The Nob Hill Gazette has filled a void,” said John Traina, a Pacific Heights shipping executive, Faberge collector and Steel’s ex-husband. “San Francisco has always been a city of characters, and people here have gotten used to finding out who those characters are.”

The Tote Board is a partial--and, for some, coveted--roster of those characters. Its method is rudimentary: A point is awarded for each time a person is named as a first reference in an article or item and for each time that person is pictured in a photograph. Staff members compile an issue-by-issue count as the year progresses and arrive at a grand total at the end of the year.

Until recently, Zellerbach said, the count was decidedly uncontroversial, but in the last few years, some scores have been disputed. Two years ago, she said, a local woman privately complained that someone at the publication must have it in for her because her own count was significantly higher than the one in the year-end tally.

Last year, a man corraled Zellerbach at a cocktail party with the charge that he had been unfairly cropped from a party photo, thus diminishing his Tote Board status. On Monday, the editor said, “We got a call from a lady who was very upset because all her friends were on it and she wasn’t.” Lehrman said she plans to run a “whoops column” in February to mollify the caller, an industrialist’s wife, and any other victims of an undercount.

“It’s the craziest thing, but it really seems to mean something to people,” Zellerbach laughed, adding that neither complainant was so disgruntled that they objected to seeing their names in print thereafter. “I suppose it’s the old identity thing--it validates people if they see their names in print, and the more times they see it, the merrier.”

Local philanthropists note that the mentions are more than mere ego boosters. Though the Gazette runs articles on wine, real estate, books and fashion, its main bond with its audience is the coverage of charitable events. Like most society pages, it is relentlessly flattering and upbeat, and is one of the few outlets for advance publicity on fund-raisers.

“They’re wonderful at helping promote philanthropy in this city,” said opera and symphony backer Sprincin, who said she hadn’t realized she’d been mentioned an average of 1.5 times per issue last year. “They’ll almost always step forward when you’re having trouble selling out [at an event].”

That said, it can be hard to resist a peek at any ranking, especially one that might involve famous--or familiar--names. Who can ignore news, for example, of Stone’s 5-3 edge on her husband, Chronicle Executive Editor Phil Bronstein, even after he was bitten by a Komodo dragon? Or the fact that Mayor Brown was mentioned only half as often as Frank Jordan--the ex-mayor who made headlines after a campaign stunt in which he posed nude in the shower with two radio deejays? Or the possibility that someone you know might be listed? “I can’t imagine anyone takes it seriously, of course, but my kids pointed it out to me--’Oh, mom, look--you’re mentioned more often than dad!’ Although 15 times? That means I was in there more than once a month, which I can’t imagine,” laughed Dagmar Dolby (16), wife of the founder and chairman of Dolby Laboratories, Ray Dolby (12).

“But whatever. I came back from Tahoe last night, and there it was. And I confess, I took it to bed and read the whole thing.”