A San Francisco socialite coined 'sugar daddy' and used her wealth to change the city

Only the sound of faint whispers could be heard in the San Francisco courtroom when Klondike millionaire Charles Anderson took the stand.

Anderson, a man in his 40s, was feeling rather smug that morning in February 1902 as he waited for the questioning to begin. He sat, arms crossed, in utter boredom while he scanned the room of onlookers. When he locked eyes with someone admiring the massive diamond brooch pinned to his shirt, Anderson’s thin lips broke into a wry smirk that further emphasized his dark, curly mustache.

Alma de Bretteville, a statuesque 20-year-old art student, sat quietly next to her lawyer. After a whirlwind romance that didn’t end in matrimony, de Bretteville was accusing Anderson of breaching his promise to marry her. She was a woman scorned, and sought $50,000 in restitution fees for having her good name besmirched.  

“He told me he wished me to become his wife,” a downtrodden de Bretteville told the jury the day before. “I promised to become his wife.”

Throughout the course of their romance, Anderson gifted her with lavish garments, furs and spending cash for many occasions. She was treated to stiff cocktails and decadent luncheons at the Cliff House, among other prominent restaurants of the time. The de Bretteville family also benefited from the courtship, as they enjoyed the $60 opera box Anderson secured for them. 

Anderson had grown resentful of the young woman’s desire for material goods, he told the court, and so he decided to cut the entire de Bretteville family off cold turkey. He never imagined it would land him in court months later.

“I spent about five weeks with her and it cost me $1,500,” Anderson said bitterly.  

‘Big Alma’ wins the case

So begins the story of Alma de Bretteville, who became one of the city’s prominent philanthropists and the recent inspiration behind a San Francisco pop-up, Big Alma. The trial of 1902 turned her into somewhat of a celebrity, after she successfully won the case against Anderson and was awarded the sum of $1,250 (about $43,048 today) in damages.

De Bretteville’s case, known then as a “heart-balm suit,” wasn’t uncommon in the 1900s, when women could successfully win lawsuits if they could prove that they were swindled out of an engagement. The implication of a failed engagement was sometimes that the woman was no longer a virgin.  If a couple had premarital sex without eventually walking down the aisle, a woman’s social standing could forever be ruined. Conversely, the man could carry on scot-free. Finding a new suitor after a failed engagement would prove to be harder — if not impossible — for a woman, so these suits, in some ways, worked as a form of justice.   

Back in the courtroom of 1902, de Bretteville told jurors that Anderson grumbled about how much he’d spent on her, but also once threatened to end his life if she ever left his side.  

But Anderson had a different recollection of their fling. It was his assertion that de Bretteville pursued him, even when it came to their first kiss. He told jurors that while they were on a drive, she leaned in to steal a kiss, which he said caught him by surprise. The second time she kissed him, Anderson contended he couldn't avoid her advances because she was 6 feet tall — a towering figure compared to him. 

“She was too tall,” Anderson said, according to a 1902 report by the San Francisco Call. “She just stooped down and kissed me and then straightened up again.”

Despite the gifts and kisses, Anderson staunchly denied that he ever intended to marry de Bretteville, even after he bought her a pricey $375 marquise ring. Anderson alleged that he had a problem saying no, and only agreed to buy it after de Bretteville “gave him no peace” until he did.

“When he gave it to her, she put it on her finger, and holding it up to the light in a transport of joy, said: ‘Ain't it grand?’ ‘It ought to be, it cost enough,’ was Anderson’s reply,” the Call reported.

Years later, de Bretteville looked back on the trial, rather pleased that it was “the time I sued for personal defloweration, and by God, I won.”

She could have easily been one of the unlucky ones, however. Given de Bretteville’s social standing before she met Anderson, it’s a wonder that her name wasn’t tarnished after the trial. Before the young woman met the wealthy miner, she was living a meager life with her family. Born and raised in San Francisco, de Bretteville dropped out of school at age 14 to help her mother run her laundry business, which also housed a bakery and massage parlor. Her task was to pick up and deliver laundry for members of the city elite.   

Ironically, the de Brettevilles were of noble blood, said to have ancestral ties to Marquis Louis Claude le Normand de Bretteville, a nobleman who was at the head of the French army after the fall of Napoleon, a 1968 San Francisco Chronicle article reported. But when the Danish family arrived in San Francisco, they had little money to their name.  

In the evenings, young Alma took courses at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco, where she studied miniature painting and eventually took a gig as a nude model at the school to help pay for her education. Many of those images were found within dingy watering holes that lined the scandalous Cocktail Route, according to a deep dive by FoundSF. A favorite of the artists who sketched her, de Bretteville quickly earned the moniker “Big Alma,” due to her towering stature. As the legend goes, de Bretteville was the muse who inspired artist Robert Aitken to design the sculpture on top of the Dewey Monument in Union Square after her.  

Alma finds her 'sugar daddy'

A year after the 1902 trial, de Bretteville met millionaire Adolph Spreckels, a man more than 20 years her senior and the son of sugar tycoon Claus Spreckels. The Spreckels family had amassed an enormous fortune in the beet sugar trade and operated a sugar refinery plant in San Francisco, beginning in the late 1800s. The family was so well-off that Claus founded Spreckels, California, in 1898 (about 100 miles south of San Francisco), where Spreckels Sugar Company employees dwelled.   

According to Jérôme Kagan, who authored “Alma de Bretteville Spreckels: The Art of Extravagance,” de Bretteville and the younger Spreckels crossed paths after one of Big Alma’s relatives, who worked at the Spreckels Sugar Company, introduced the pair. Other accounts say that Spreckels admired the angel featured on the Dewey Monument so much that he insisted on meeting the woman who inspired it. Whatever the case, de Bretteville, who was desperate to climb the social ladder, didn’t reject Spreckels’ romantic advances. The couple dated for five years before they married in 1908 and had three children together. She nicknamed Spreckels her “sugar daddy.”

To show his devotion, Spreckels hired local Bay Area architects George Applegarth and Kenneth MacDonald Jr. to design a spectacular residence with a panoramic view of the city. To begin construction of the Spreckels Mansion in 1910, a few existing homes would need to be torn down. De Bretteville refused to allow the destruction of the historic Victorian-style homes, so the dwellings were uprooted intact and moved elsewhere. When the Spreckels Mansion at 2080 Washington St. was finally completed in 1913, it was the site of opulent parties that launched de Bretteville into high society at last.

It became the largest private residence in the city and, decades later, home to romance novelist Danielle Steel, who notoriously camouflaged the mansion with shrubs.

The makings of a San Francisco socialite

De Bretteville had finally felt a sense of belonging in San Francisco, but it didn’t stop other affluent families in the city from viewing her with disdain. Most famously, the de Young family rejected her.

It didn’t hinder Big Alma’s fighting spirit. But just for good measure, the Spreckels commissioned Applegarth once more to design the California Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum to upstage the less opulent de Young Museum. (Later in 1972, the Legion of Honor and the de Young museums merged.)

Fascinated by French culture and art, the couple was given permission by the French government to design their San Francisco museum after the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris. Parisian architect Henri Guillaume joined the project.

Upon opening, the museum was dedicated to the thousands of Californians who lost their lives during World War I in France. Spreckels wasn’t alive when his museum opened, having died six months earlier. According to a 1924 San Francisco Chronicle article, Spreckels’ cause of death came as a surprise: Following a long cold, he had had a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 67.

The widow threw herself into work by donating her vast personal art collection to the Legion of Honor, which included porcelains and silvers from the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as a copy of “The Thinker” statue by Auguste Rodin. She would eventually earn another moniker “the great grandmother of San Francisco” for her devotion to the arts.  

Behind closed doors

In her private life, Big Alma's family was falling apart at the seams. Their family feuds regularly made headlines over the years, including the time her son Adolph B. Spreckels Jr. sued her for $1.5 million for allegedly mishandling his father’s $19 million fortune.

“Under the terms of his will, the late Adolph Spreckels left the income of his estate to his widow and three children for the widow’s lifetime,” the San Francisco Examiner wrote in 1947. “She receives half the income and they divide the rest. ... The action will be based on a technical question as to whether the $1,500,000 involved in the threatened action should have been distributed as income or left in the estate as principal.”

A few years before that scandal, de Bretteville Spreckels met and fell in love with a cowboy named Elmer Awl. The couple was together for only a few years before they divorced in 1941. De Bretteville Spreckels discovered that Awl was having an affair with her niece, Ulla de Bretteville, but she would tell the media that the official reason for divorce was due to “his uncouth manners and habits of intoxication.”

When Big Alma died in 1968 at the age of 87 after a battle with pneumonia, she gifted many of her paintings to the Legion of Honor and donated antiques and other artworks to the Maryhill Museum in Washington. She gave the mansion to her daughters Dorothy Spreckels Munn and Alma Spreckels Hammel; Munn would also receive the furniture inside the Spreckels Mansion.

“She made no additional provisions for Mrs. Hammel ‘as she has received substantial gifts from me,’” the will said, according to the Examiner. 

'Big Alma' lives on

More than five decades after her death, de Bretteville Spreckels’ name lives on, this time at a pop-up restaurant near Union Square. Big Alma Bar Americain debuted this summer inside the Villa Florence Hotel, and is expected to run through Oct. 31. Gregory Don Nasser, CEO of marketing and consulting company Borne, told SFGATE that he hopes the restaurant can move into a permanent location in the area. A separate representative with Borne explained why they wanted to pay homage to de Bretteville Spreckels.

“The fact that she rose out of seemingly nothing into a socialite,” the representative said. “It’s the American story to climb that ladder.”

De Bretteville Spreckels could have spent her life soaking up her riches but instead, she was instrumental in bringing world-class art to San Francisco and beyond. Her last project was to help secure the launch of the San Francisco Maritime Museum in 1951. She also donated paintings, sculptures, and tapestries to smaller museums, including some in Sacramento, Salinas, Santa Rosa and Stockton.

Even in death, she was surrounded by art. Her funeral was held at the Legion of Honor, where she was encircled by her beloved Rodin sculptures. 

"She was a magnificent woman whose love for San Francisco shall endure eternally," former Mayor Joseph Alioto said. "Mrs. Spreckels enhanced this city by her vision of beauty and artistic achievement, and generations yet unborn will salute her memory for the splendor of all she bestowed on San Francisco."