Mabel — madam, mayor and mischief-maker
From
JOHN HUTCHISON,
in San Francisco
She was a woman of many names both real and fictitious, many clashes with the law, and. when she died, many millions. The quarrel has begun over the wealth she left behind. The Lady of the House is dead.
Christened Mabel Janice Busby, a name she discarded when she was 16, she was known to San Francisco since the 1920 s as Sally Stanford. It was a name she' invented for herself, she said, because it had class. From about 1925 until after World War II she was the city’s most notorious madam.
She was tough, resourceful and capricious. Somewhere back in her brothel days she began to refer to herself privately as Marsha Owen, and in 1971 she went to court and made that her legal name. Owen is the last name of an orphan she adopted 50 years ago. As Marsha Owen she amassed an estate reputed to be worth $2O million and when she died early in February, the event dominated the front pages here. The latter-day de Maupassants of San Francisco journalism have had few subjects inspire them like the passing of this outrageous old woman who fought, bought, blustered and elbowed her way to what
finally passed for respectability. Sa’lly Stanford was jailed when she was 16 for passing a bad cheque. (She was pardoned 25 years later.) In her turbulent life she was arrested 17 times, mostly for operating bawdy houses. Once on such a charge she was fined $5OO. Once she was fined and jailed for violation of rent control laws. But on other occasions, Sally escaped trial and went on prospering. For a quarter of a century she skipped contemptuously along the margins of the law, protected by her wits, clever attorneys and cozy understandings with the Right People. An illustrative anecdote, just revived, recalls that a young and conscientious policeman burst into her luxurious bordello one evening and declared all its occupants under arrest. Sally regarded him with amusement and advised him not to do anything hasty until he had consulted his - father — a police captain who at that moment was having a cup of coffee in her kitchen.
Her marital life was chequered with husbands and tainted once with bigamy; one of her marriages was annulled after discovery that a previous one was still in force. In her long series of alliances ' she espoused a swindler, a lawyer and three businessmen, one of them a prominent social figure. She remained in wedlock with one man for 12 years; another union lasted only nine months.
More than 39 years ago she closed her infamous establishment and appeared as author of a ghost-written book. “The Lady of the House," which became a television motion picture and made her a national celebrity. She opened a restaurant which prospered, as did her real-estate investments.
She entered municipal politics in Sausalito, an arty and unconventional suburb on San Francisco Bay. She served as a councillor, then as vice-mayor (a title of some ambiguity which stimulated local wits) and finally as mayor — a distinction which made it difficult for
some of her colleagues, on the first day she first presided. to maintain their official composure while addressing her, properly, as “madam.”
She was popular with voters because of her uninhibited and salty public comments and her’reputation for her generosity to needy causes and needy folk. She bought a licence as a minister and occasionally performed marriages. She presided over her restaurant while seated in a barber’s chair. And she shook off with some disdain 11 heart attacks in recent years.
Sally had an impish talent for mischief, which may explain why, within days after her death at the age of 78. six wills, several codicils altering some of them, and a tangle of litigation over numerous properties have sprouted in the courts. A woman friend, a police chief, two waiters, her adopted son and various other relatives are among claimants to her fortune. Mabel Janice Busby, also known as Mrs Dan Goodan. Mrs Ernest Spagnoli, Mrs Louis Rapp, Mrs Richard Gump, Mrs Robert Kenna, Marsha Owen and Sally Stanford, is still giving the folk around her plenty to talk about.
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Bibliographic details
Press, 9 March 1982, Page 21
Word Count
705Mabel — madam, mayor and mischief-maker Press, 9 March 1982, Page 21
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