marriage, they were listed in the bible of society, the Blue Book. Unlike those in eastern cities, San Franciscans were proud not to attach a negative stigma to personal preferences and took their attitude as an outward sign of their sophisticated nature.5
Marion responded to her father’s remarriage by adopting an “I don’t care” attitude that culminated in her dismissal from school a few months later. She turned more than ever to her adored great-aunt and -uncle.
Aunt Jane, in her early sixties, was an amateur spiritualist and held weekly séances in the parlor. With the lights down low, up to a dozen elderly women held hands around the large round table and the sessions opened with a rendition of “Nearer My God to Thee.” Young Marion played the part of the channeler, using her free-floating imagination to give voice to historical figures and friends and relatives who had passed on.
Uncle George was a retired seaman with a full white beard and a vocabulary honed by his years at sea. He barely tolerated his wife’s dabbling with the other world and disapproved heartily of involving Marion in it. To give their niece what he considered a needed balance in her education, George took her with him to visit his old seafaring friends in the saloons of the Barbary Coast, where she listened to their stories of shipwrecks and the voyages of their youth.6
A bout with polio kept Marion at home for several months and she became a prolific reader. Tutors for Spanish, French, and music were brought in, but most of her waking hours were consumed with reading and writing in her daily diary, which she kept hidden under her mattress.7
While the family encouraged original thoughts, it was made clear that they should be kept to oneself to avoid offending others. Many evenings, the dinner table was enlarged for her mother’s guests and Marion learned early to be comfortable in an adult setting and how much easier things were for women and girls if they simply smiled and kept quiet. At the end of the day, there was always the diary to record what she really thought.
When Marion recovered from her polio, her mother decided it was time for her to be sent fifteen miles south to St. Margaret’s Hall Boarding School in San Mateo. With a reputation as an excellent preparatory school for the elite eastern women’s colleges, St. Margaret’s offered a strict academic curriculum, and the annual tuition of $500 assured economic exclusivity.
Established by the Reverend and Mrs. George Wallace in 1891, St. Margaret’s advertised aim was “to prepare its pupils to adorn the family and social circle, not only with intellectual culture, but also with graceful manners, refined tastes and Christian character” and to “secure a foundation for the super-structure of a noble womanhood.” While christian character with a small “c” would always come naturally to her, the daily dose of Episcopalian liturgy failed to inspire her. “I belong to no established faith—I never have,” Marion would make clear to anyone who asked.8
While schooling society’s daughters in their simple white uniforms, St. Margaret’s itself was rather stark, consisting of several wooden buildings fronting a wide dirt road laced with fruit and palm trees. The girls wrote and staged plays and were frequently taken to local lectures, allowed to visit the stores of San Mateo when chaperoned, and invited to dinners and dances at the large estates nearby.
Marion took the train to San Francisco on occasional weekends and school vacations. She and her brother and sister were welcome at her father’s new home at 3232 Jackson Street, but the addition of two half brothers, Edgar, born in 1902, and Francis the following year, made Marion uncomfortable and gradually she reduced her visits.9
In the summers, she traveled with her mother, going to Alaska one year and Mexico the next. Marion was becoming an astute observer of human nature and developing a radar for hypocrisy in all its forms. The stark contrast between the poverty of the people of Mexico and the riches of the churches seeded a lifelong resistance to organized religion, but she was thrilled to trek into the mountains with a group of Yaqui Indians, learning only afterward they had journeyed farther from the cities than any white women had previously dared. She took pride in improving her Spanish and furthering her belief, first instilled by her mother in particular and San Francisco in general, that women could go where their interests led them, as long as they outwardly appeared to behave themselves.10
In boarding school, Marion excelled at languages and music and blossomed as an artist under the tutelage of Charles Chapel Judson. When Judson, a respected painter active in the San Francisco Art Association, was asked to join the faculty of the newly created Mark Hopkins Art Institute, Marion begged her parents to allow her to transfer there.
After three years at St. Margaret’s, Marion was chafing to move on. She was drawing constantly, sketching every face she saw, as well as writing poetry and short stories. Family friends like the writers Jack London and Ella Wheeler Wilcox encouraged her to send off samples of her work to various publications and her poem “California’s Latest,” by Marion B. Owens, an ode to Luther Burbank’s daisy and illustrated with her own drawings, took up an entire page of Sunset magazine’s May 1905 issue.11
That fall, the sixteen-year-old Marion was accepted at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute and the fact that it was housed in San Francisco’s most stately mansion and run in cooperation with the University of California at Berkeley gave it increased credibility in her parents’ eyes. She moved back in with her mother, Maude, Len junior, Aunt Jane, and Uncle George, where she was able to be a part of her parents’ society, spread her wings with her fellow students, and participate in the burgeoning Bohemian community.
San Francisco in 1905 was the largest city west of the Mississippi. One third of the population of 400,000 had been born on foreign soil, one third were children of immigrants. Almost 20,000 Chinese lived crushed into five square blocks and knew better than to go beyond Powell or Broadway. Danish, German, Polish, and various other recent European immigrants were almost as densely packed into tenements south of Market Street.
The rival Hearst and de Young families owned two of the three morning newspapers, and five weekly magazines provided a showcase for local writers. With its numerous theaters and urbane attitude, Will Irwin called San Francisco “the gayest, lightest hearted and most pleasure loving city in the western continent.”12
The Mark Hopkins Art Institute, quickly earning a reputation as one of the finest art schools in the country, became a magnet for society’s children, students from the new Leland Stanford University and the University of California and the literary and artistic hopefuls who migrated west seeking kindred spirits in the city that would become known as Baghdad by the Bay.
The art institute occupied an entire city block, its castlelike structure standing five stories high, topped by an elaborate tower with a magnificent view of the entire bay. Marion took her classes in the smaller rooms upstairs while the large first-floor salons were used as galleries. The murals on the walls, painted originally for Hopkins by the same Italian artists imported to decorate the saloons and brothels of the Barbary Coast, added a unique dimension to the decor and in the fall and spring, all of society flocked to the art institute’s major exhibitions.
In her off hours, both with friends and alone, Marion explored the city. She found the Italian area of North Beach provided reasonably priced three-course meals and bottles of table wine for twenty-five cents, and in the saloons and dining halls of the Barbary Coast, the buffet lunch was free when you bought a glass of beer for a nickel. Delmonico’s had a downstairs dining room, a second story with rooms for private parties, and a third floor with a discreet row of bedrooms for customers who couldn’t or didn’t want to go home, but the grandest of all establishments was the Palace Hotel. Built around a courtyard with an interior sparkling with cut glass and marble, it boasted telephones and bathtubs in every room. And from the Ferry Building at the end of Market Street, boats crossed the bay to the small towns of Oakland and Berkeley or over
