Raising Caen to the Level of an L.A. Idol

Fifty years ago, Herb Caen wrote his first column for the San Francisco Chronicle. Except for a lapse of eight years, when he wrote for the Examiner, he has been doing it ever since, six days a week on his old Royal typewriter. Statistically, the output is staggering: Caen has written 13,824 columns containing 267,322 items separated by 516,492 dots; end to end, his columns would stretch 4.9 miles.

Recently the Chronicle published a special Herb Caen section in celebration of this improbable performance. A Page 1 editorial said, “Herb Caen has been looking at the world, the city, the Bay area, over these 50 years, with verve, panache, brilliance, incisiveness, humor, sympathy . . . nouns fall short and run out.”

Caen never ran out of nouns; he made them up. One column lists some of his inventions: Baghdad-by-the-Bay, for San Francisco; the Car-Strangled Spanner, for the Bay Bridge; Beatnik, a word he coined in 1958, just after Sputnik went up; pernicious Armenia, what William Saroyan suffered from; Bawdway, the Broadway strip joints.

Probably no man and city have ever been better matched. Certainly neither would have been the same without the other. He was green and brash when he came to Frisco from Sacramento in 1938--the Sackamenna Kid, as he sometimes still calls himself. “Dumb as they come.”

By 1940, he was entertaining Saroyan, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and J. Robert Oppenheimer in his $40-a-month house on Russian Hill. He recalls that Oppenheimer hated swing music. One night he played a Goodman quartet for the physicist and said, “Not much different from a Mozart quartet, really.” Oppenheimer said: “How would you know?”

The section is loaded with praise from other writers. Niven Busch measures his clout: “A few years ago a theater closing notice had been pinned up backstage, but someone begged Herb to see the show, and he did and liked it, and said so, and, instead of closing, the show ran three years.”

Danielle Steel says, “He is one hell of a fine writer and one hell of a nice man, and he works harder than any of us realize. . . . I am in awe of a man who can write that column day after day, month after month, year after year, and keep us reading, and amused, and caring. . . .”

John Steinbeck wrote: “He has made a many-faceted character of the city of San Francisco. It is very probable that Herb’s city will be the one that is remembered. It is interesting to me that he has been able to do this without anger and without venom and without being soft.”

The Chronicle asked me to write a piece for the section, and I did, but they didn’t use it. Every writer hates to write anything for the wastebasket. So here’s my contribution, in shortened form:

“Herb Caen’s distaste for Los Angeles is instinctive. He can’t help it. We must forgive him, even for such gaucheries as his approval of a license plate that said NUKE L.A.

“Though we have been accused of inventing and perpetuating the newspaper columnists’ feud between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Herb Caen and I are good friends. I think he’s a very nice man. Perhaps the worst thing I can say about him is that over the years he has come to love Los Angeles.

“Some years ago Herb called to say that he was coming down to Los Angeles and wanted to take me and my wife to dinner. ‘You can get us into Chasen’s, can’t you?’ he asked. ‘Sure, Herb,’ I said. ‘I’ll just call them and use your name.’

“Over the years I have received several notes from Herb. They betray a warmth toward L.A. that he rarely reveals in his column. After one visit he wrote: ‘Yes, we enjoyed Los Angeles. I couldn’t come right out and say so, but we did.’ ”

I also have the following revelation, which might shock Herb’s fellow San Franciscans. I had been taken to task for calling San Francisco “Frisco,” and Herb came to my defense.

“I think ‘Frisco’ is a fine, salty, irreverent word, known and loved around the world (the rest of the cliche being ‘wherever free souls gather’). I’m not so sure we deserve that loving nickname any longer.”

Maybe that’s why they didn’t print my piece.