<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/07/18/SFCLUBS.TMP>
San Francisco Chronicle - July 18, 2004
Members only S.F.'s exclusive clubs carry on traditions of fellowship, culture -- and discrimination
Adair Lara, Chronicle Staff Writer
On Saturday, some 2,000 CEOs and politicos and arty types arrived at the cool redwoods and lily-choked lake of the Grove, the famous Russian River playground of the powerful Bohemian Club.
They say it's the place to be seen in America in July.
Except, of course, you can't see them.
Signs abound: No Thru Traffic. No Trespassing. Members and Guests Only. No Turn Around. Sentries scan the paths from above with binoculars, helped out by infrared sensors.
And what are those important men doing out there for 17 days behind that elaborate security?
Slipping into frocks and putting on pageants. The Bohemian Club, a beguiling mix of ultra-power hangout and high school play, is one of several elite private clubs in San Francisco, curious islands of conservatism amid a forest of Kerry for President signs.
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"The Bohemian Grove is woodsy," said Astrid Hoffman of Tiburon, whose husband belongs to the St. Francis Yacht Club. "They have these little houses or clubs. They're like Cub Scouts with their dens. They try to outdo each other in drinks and food, have private concerts and get-togethers."
There are 125 different camps -- Toyland, Dog House, Sons of Toil, etc. George H.W. Bush will be in Hill Billies, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The bylaws say that at least 100 members must be connected professionally with literature, art, music or drama. Such "associate" members pay much less -- but must sing for their supper, in an arrangement worthy of a Medici.
"If you're a theatrical type, you shoot to the top of the list," Debenham said. "The Bohemian Grove is marvelously eclectic."
Every year at the Grove, a freshly written play with a cast of hundreds is performed the last Sunday of the retreat. "We know in advance that the hero will be a king or commander adored by his men, and that he will see his duty and do it," said Healdsburg author van der Zee of what he calls "these lumbering pageants."
One year, San Francisco novelist Herb Gold said he was offered an associate membership if he would help write the Grove play. Gold took fellow writer Earnest Gaines ("A Lesson Before Dying"), an African American, to a Wednesday night entertainment at the six-story downtown club. Five members, he said, were in blackface. One member clapped Gaines on the back. "Looks like you've played a little football," Gold heard him say. Shortly thereafter, the writers took their leave. "I guess I'm not clubbable," Gold said wryly.
Those who are clubbable find themselves strolling past faces any American would recognize. "Never mind just plain CEOs and presidents," Hoffman said, "they have president presidents" -- such as former President George H.W. Bush, who has brought his sons.
William F. Buckley was a member until he resigned last year. He'd play Bach pieces on the harpsichord at dusk on Friday nights (to campers who'd have preferred the Cal fight song, one member told me).
The arts are a genuine part of the spirit of this club. But a bit more goes on. In 1971, President Richard Nixon, a member since 1953, was to be the lakeside speaker, but reporters had finally raised a ruckus about a sitting president giving an off-the-record speech at the Grove. Nixon sent sugary regrets in a telegram that hangs in the city clubhouse today, saying that anyone could be president of the United States, but only a few could aspire to be president of the Bohemian Club.
Privately, he said to John Ehrlichman and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman (and the hidden tape recorder) in the Oval Office that May: "The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time -- it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco."
That testy remark could have been pique. He didn't get to deliver his speech, and, as van der Zee noted, the Grove, its powerful members pledged to secrecy, provides an ideal audience on which to test a major policy address. "Every elected official knows there's no place more conducive to the conduct of political affairs than a gathering that has been declared nonpolitical," he said.
Many have taken advantage. At www.sonomacountyfreepress.com, the Web site of the protest group called the Bohemian Grove Action Network (their logo depicts a tuxedoed patrician in a top hat swilling a martini as he straddles an MX missile) shows that speakers who have "given a Lakeside" include Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, George H.W. Bush and Michel Rocard, former prime minister of France.
Nelson Rockefeller gave up a run for the presidency after his speech failed to move his fellow campers. And this is where, according to van der Zee and many other published sources, Bush asked Cheney to be his running mate in 2000, where Nixon advised Ronald Reagan to stay out of the coming presidential race in 1967, where Edward Teller and others in the Manhattan Project mapped out the atomic bomb in the autumn of 1942.
Mary Moore of Occidental, a founder of the Action Network, which has helped organize demonstrations outside the Grove since 1980, said the speeches -- sorry, talks -- have been hard to acquire because her source inside moved on and the club took to locking the texts of the speeches in the guardhouse. (She did send us the 2002 membership roster.)
The club would like all this secret stuff to stay secret, which means that the curious are always breaking in (Mother Jones, National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, CBS).
Media CEOs have had to interrupt their conversations to throw out their own reporters. When Dirk Mathison, San Francisco bureau chief for People magazine, sneaked onto the grounds, a Time Warner executive recognized him and walked him to the gate. The piece never ran.
In fact, whole newspaper empires have been flung out. The club has an offshoot called the Family that came into being after the Hearst-owned Examiner ran a 1901 piece in which Ambrose Bierce predicted the assassination of President William McKinley. When McKinley was assassinated soon after, the club threw out its Hearst people and removed its newspapers from the clubrooms. The Family flourishes to this day, letting all kinds of people in and supporting a hospital in Nicaragua. Its new members are called Babies, and the president is the Father. "There is no mother," a member said. "The babies are brought by the stork."
Curiously, the Bohemian Club was started by newspapermen much like the ones now landing in a heap of dust outside the gate. In 1872, an editorial writer for The Chronicle proposed a club so reporters could meet somewhere other than saloons.
Van der Zee said, "It's not uncommon for founding principles to become institutional embarrassments, but few social clubs have made such a turnabout."
It is called "social" because business is the last thing on anyone's mind at this club to which hundreds of CEOs and former government officials belong.
"Oh, please," Debenham said. "The contacts are amazing."
The late John Ehrlichman, domestic affairs adviser under Nixon and a guest at the Grove, once told a reporter, "Once you've spent three days with someone in an informal situation, you have a relationship -- a relationship that opens doors and makes it easier to pick up the phone."
(This is reportedly called the "Mandalay effect," after the camp where the Bechtels stay, along with Kissinger, Colin Powell and our own George Shultz.)
Women don't get to experience the Mandalay effect because they aren't allowed in, except on certain family weekends, and then they must be off the grounds by dusk. It's not clear what will happen to them if they're not. Maybe it has never happened.
"Periodically a wife makes noise, and then it dies down," Hoffman said.
She believes men need retreats like this. "It's that Masonic thing, the touching of the ring. Goes back to before the Crusades. The men feel safer without women. It's the same thing in a way when women get together. First it's jolly and then gets weird. Clannish."
The importance of male bonding aside, it seems wrong to some for all this political talk to be going on with the press and half the population absent. Case finds it alarming that no women are at the Grove, especially when the policy discussions concern them. "People I know -- definitely not friends of mine -- say they've discussed the role women should be playing in the armed forces at the Grove."
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------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bohemian Club
Addresses: 624 Taylor St, and the Bohemian Grove, 75 miles northwest of San Francisco and just downstream from Guerneville
Membership: 2,700 (1 member per acre)
Waiting list: 3,000
Average number of years on waiting list: 15 to 20
Members: George H.W. Bush; Gerald Ford; Henry Kissinger; Donald Rumsfeld; George Shultz; Alexander Haig; Colin Powell; rocker Steve Miller; Clint Eastwood.
Slogan: "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here."
Books to read about it: "The Bohemian Grove" by G. William Domhoff and "The Greatest Men's Party on Earth" by John van der Zee.
Accept minorities: Yes, especially if they can play an instrument.
Best place to spy: Put your canoe in the Russian River at Northwood, just west of Johnson's Beach in Guerneville, and head downstream past their floating boathouse. The Bohemians couldn't buy the whole river. One suspects they are irked by this fact.