BEEBE ON BEEBE

Lucius Beebe, Life Magazine, January 16, 1939

I have been a fan of Lucius Beebe ever since the day in Reno, many years ago when my grandmother gave me a copy of 1949’s “Virginia and Truckee: A Story of Virginia City and Comstock Times”. With family history in railroading in Nevada and Washoe County in particular, how could I not become an admirer?

As available from Biblio. Co. UK.

Anyone who owned and traveled aboard, not only one, but two private railroad cars was a man to be admired. Having adopted the Silver State as his home and reopened operations of The Territorial Enterprise newspaper while in residence in Virginia City, he was indeed one of Nevada’s own sons.

Loyal readers of this space may recall that I share a fondness of the “terminal nostalgia” of the late Herb Caen, San Francisco’s legendary newspaper columnist. He had a way in describing San Francisco (and San Franciscan’s) that no one has yet to match. One Sunday, February 13, 1966 to be exact, the focus of his column on the Sunday Punch page of the San Francisco Chronicle was, as he titled it, “Beebe on Beebe”

While recently going through a few boxes, here at home during the quarantine, I discovered that I had saved a Sunday Punch section from the Chronicle, dated February 17, 1991. It features a reprint of the column mentioned above. As I cannot find a copy of it online to share with you, I will do so here.

“Beebe On Beebe”

SOME SIX YEARS AGO, Lucius Beebe sent to me from New York a most unusual document. – a sort of autobiographical assessment of his dreams and aspirations, neatly typed on pink paper. “Publish it as you see fit,” he shrugged when I asked him later about the manuscript. Since it contrasts so sharply with his self-written obituary, printed after his unexpected death a week ago, perhaps this is the fit time he had in mind. Here, then, is the Compleat Lucius Beebe, as seen through his own eyes.

* * *

“I ADMIRE MOST of all the Renaissance Man, and, if it can be said without pretentiousness, like to think of myself as one, at least in small measure. Not a Michelangelo, mark you, but perhaps a poor man’s Cellini or a road company Cosmo d’Medici. The Medieval Man and the Renaissance Man did a number of things, many of them, well, beautifully. He was no damned specialist.

“I like to think that Chuck (Charles Clegg, his collaborator – Ed.) and I do a number of things that have no special relationship to one another. In ‘The Territorial Enterprise,’ we ran a paper of outrage that only incidentally is the largest weekly west of the Missouri. Anyway, it’s the best of its kind. Our books on the West and railroading are the best we can devise, always beautifully produced and sometimes intelligent. That they appear from time to time as best sellers isn’t particularly pertinent. It may even be a liability to the perfectionism we aim at.

“We admire to give good parties, and the measure of their success is the number of empties, the size of the restaurant bill and the number of screams for bail during the night.

“If anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing in style. And on your own terms and nobody goddamned else’s. I like nice clothes because they are an item in an overall facade. In themselves they are something silly and foppish. I like big houses and hotel suites and a big dog because they become me. Not for ostentation, but because they give me personal pleasure and satisfaction.

“I PREFER Rolls-Royces and Bentleys simply and without equivocation because they are the best. Not just runners-up or compromises, but the best, like Bollinger’s. Colt firearms, suits by Henry Poole and traveling Cunard.

“Chuck and I keep a private railroad car because it has style and comfort and maybe railroad touched in the haid, and anyway, the dog likes it. Also there is no bartender to say, ‘That will be all for you, sir.’

“We like people who never give a passing thought to public opinion or the suffrage of society, not who desperately antagonize it, but simply are unaware that it exists. We like Gene Fowler’s aphorism, ‘Money is something to be thrown off the back of trains.’ If we cease to have the money or the trains, either, we’ve got memories and may get good obits if the competition isn’t too keen that day. I’d like the obits to say: ‘Everything he did was made to measure. He never got an idea off the rack.’

* * *

“IT IS MY conviction that there are more Renaissance Men and Women who have been abroad in the land in my happy time than my folk suspect. I cite Harold Ross, Monty Woolley, Gene Fowler, Amy Lowell, Bernard de Voto, Spencer Penrose, Senator J, Ham Lewis, Evalyn Walsh McLean, Tallulah Bankhead, Timothy Pflueger, Ogden Reid, Dave Chasen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Noel Coward, W.C. Fields, Bill MCGeehan, Amon Carter, Henri Soule, William A. Brady and John Drew. Not a radio commentator of TV comedian in the lot.

“All these people who were Renaissance Men and Women in that they did something well, in many cases more than one thing, and never in their lives thought to consult anybody else as to how to conduct their persons. Some of them were rich, most of them gentlemen, and all of them possessed that one radiant qualification: the knowledge of excellence. Not the damned reference mind, which IBM will do better for you anyway, but a knowledge and appreciation of excellence. They wrote, edited, acted, whored, drank, sang songs, served the nation, wrote history and made enemies in their own pattern.

“I take leave of you with an aphorism of the late Michael Arlen, in his own way too a Renaissance Man, although he only did one thing well and that only once: ‘I require very little of life. I want only the best of everything, and there’s so little of that.’ “

* * *

THAT LAST solves a minor mystery in the obituaries on Lucius’ death – the attribution of that quote to him when it was well known as Arlen’s (the author of “The Green Hat”). Anyway, I like his own line better, for truly everything he did was made to measure – he never got an idea off the rack.

The Virginia City, Beebe and Clegg’s second private railcar, in Napa in 2013 during the American Association of Private Railroad Car Owners annual convention.

Beebe and Caen were both products of different eras and different coasts. Beebe the east and Boston; Caen the west and San Francisco. Yet, they both came to be a part of life here by the Bay that continues to draw people to live and visit. As anyone who has spent any length of time here will tell you, that ain’t bad…