Consecrate the Bond of Obedience

That time I was invited to join the Bohemian Club

In mid-July each year, San Francisco’s secretive Bohemian Club hosts an encampment of rich and powerful men at their Grove retreat in Monte Rio, California, near the Russian River. Members and guests have included everyone from former Presidents Richard Nixon, H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, to Jack London, Henry Kissinger, Clint Eastwood, Newt Gingrich, astronauts, professors, celebrities, cabinet officers, CIA directors, on down the list to Kid Rock and Tony Danza. Each season, private jets clutter up the tarmac at the Sonoma airport, bringing in A-, B-, and C-list guys from all over the world. Rumors persist of secret rituals at the Grove, from theatrical sketches to drunken sing-a-longs, peeing against trees, running around naked, and limousines full of prostitutes. The Club actually does admit a planning meeting which took place in 1942, for the Manhattan Project, because hey, that led to the atomic bomb, and isn’t that cool?

Many journalists have snuck into the Grove over the years to take photos and video, from Mother Jones, People, and Spy magazines, to sweaty crackpot Alex Jones. Books, documentaries, podcasts, all keep the conspiracy theories churning along. I’ve met several people who’ve seen the Grove, but I have not. I did get invited to lunch at the Bohemian Club on Nob Hill, with an undercurrent that I might possibly be invited to join. The following is a description of that visit. A version of this originally appeared in SF Weekly in 1995.

At the intersection of Sutter and Taylor streets are the imposing double doors of the Bohemian Club, most prestigious private club in the city, and playground to presidents, court justices, and other flatulent white males who enjoy cracking the bullwhip of influence and sending the commoners whimpering to their knees. 

Inexplicably, I am invited for lunch.

First stop is a bar as large as a saloon from an old Western. On one side is a stage with grand piano and drum set. Walls are covered with paintings from Bohemian Groves past. There are 30 or so men in suits, drinking and smoking, most with white hair and spectacles. A particularly ancient gentleman hunches over the piano, noodling at the keys. Much to my disappointment, none have catheters.

My guide offers a cigar, which I gleefully accept, and we stroll over to a two-foot-high cast-iron cigar clipper with a handle like a Vegas slot machine. We order a martini, which arrives as 1) a glass of vermouth, and 2) probably 1/3 of a bottle of vodka in a separate glass decanter. We swagger to a table for some club history, and the speech which says I have a lot of potential.

Apparently the organization began in the 1870s as a hangout for local newspapermen, and since journalists are financially illiterate, membership was soon extended to businessmen in order to survive. Everyone is supposedly a performer of some sort—singer, musician, writer—all dedicated to the joy of bohemia, loosening that windsor-knot tie and skipping through the meadow of creativity, improvising sonnets on the fly.

Astonishingly, no business conversation is allowed. God knows how this is enforced, especially when you’re up at the 3,000-acre Grove, standing in the bushes peeing on Henry Kissinger’s foot, biting your lip and trying not to ask him about Cambodia. Also, there are no women members. San Francisco mayors are automatically included, however, so Dianne Feinstein apparently once crashed the joint with some women friends for lunch. The scene was tactfully tolerated.

After a punishing amount of vodka, it’s time for a walking tour of the plush carpeted compound. The two-level library offers collected works of Faulkner and Milton, conveniently collected in embossed-cover anthologies with gold-gilded pages. Let’s face it, they just look better. On the “recent arrivals” table is a book by Richard Nixon.

An in-house theater, hallways with ashtrays, room after room of oil paintings and grand pianos, all of which are empty. A sitting room of easy chairs faces the big windows of Taylor Street, where a few geriatrics have settled in for the afternoon nap. I imagine coming to the third-floor restaurant for lunch three days a week, slugging vodka in my thrift-store tie, pumping hands and slapping backs: “Ha ha, Weinberger, I KNEW you were behind that covert intelligence building!” True Bohemia!

Later, as we’re both in the rest room, weaving in front of our urinals, I mention to my guide how strange it would seem, going to the meetings, coming here for lunch, and also being, say, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright. My liaison pauses for a moment and then replies softly: “There are no bohemians here.”