But the biggest crowd pleaser was Bubbles Boobenheim, a showgirl turned patroness who rubbed her prosthetic behind against the elevator doors at stage left. Bohemian reminiscences describe such bizarre initiation rites as escorting new members to the redwood at which one of the founders "did his morning ablutions." "Honey, I lost my ring and I want to sell the house," the third one said, mocking a homecoming speech. The Mandalay camp roster told the story, with its grizzled veterans of the Reagan-Bush years. Bohemian Grove Dates 1991 Container box 778, folder 5 Physical Location Library of Congress Conditions Governing Access. START or Stop: Do Nuclear Weapons Treaties Matter? Cutting in line is distinctly un-Bohemian behavior. ", With that, Care spat upon the fires, extinguishing them. The grove is divided into 127 camps, each with its own members. I said I was a guest of Bromley camp, where unsortable visitors end up. In midsummer the phones are often crowded. Individual melted into group, but what a group: George Shultz was seated below me, and word in the camp was that a year and $75,000 or so had been spent for a production that would be seen just once, just by them. It boasts that the Cremation of Care ceremony derives from Druid rites, medieval Christian liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespearean drama and nineteenth-century American lodge rites. But in fact, class and status differences among camps are pronounced. In its place the flame of eternal friend-ship is ignited and three weeks of Boho-dom are underway. Here William Buckley described how he had sat at his desk and cried upon learning of Whittaker Chambers's death. He said, 'What are you talking about?' But he was perfectly charming, and we talked about music and the Kennedy Center for a long time.. This has been especially true in the last ten years as Bohemia's stunning roster has waxed ever more statusy, as Kissinger and Rockefeller and Nick Brady have joined, drawing the attention of left-wing protesters, scholars of elites, and reporters. I felt like a member of the greatest nation ever, the greatest gender ever, the greatest generation ever. Mr. Nixon was scheduled to give a second talk in 1971, which would have made him the first President to have spoken while in office, but he canceled when the White House Press Corps insisted on following him into the strictly guarded campsite. The men of Faraway had captured the rearranged-woman's-torso sculpture from the Low Jinks and now displayed it against a wall, having wedged a fern leaf in "her" crack. The getup stood out because it was so fastidious among men who had let themselves go. The main priest wore a pink-and-green satin costume, while a hamadryad appeared before a redwood in a gold spangled bodysuit dripping with rhinestones. Ronald Reagan reportedly met with Mr. Nixon in 1967 and agreed to stay out of the Presidential race unless Mr. Nixon faltered. Everything in the encampment is sheltered by redwoods, which admit hazy shafts of sunlight, and every camp has a more or less constant campfire sending a soft column of smoke into the trees. The size also variesonly 10 to 15 persons can be accommodated at some, while others range up to 150. "It was a free ride," the other friend explained. The Bohemian Grove hires young men. The long-range planning commit-tee of the club decided to buy a grove some sixty miles north of the city near the town of Monte Rio. This was about the highest security I saw inside. The scene brought to mind the reputation for prostitution that hangs around the Grove. Come out, Bohemians. "Oh thou, great symbol of all mortal wisdom, Owl of Bohemia grant us thy counsel!". The younger members brown-nose shame-lessly, making contacts. By midmorning its another day in Bohemia, with Toms hands never idle as he runs up Old Fashioneds and Manhattans. On the first weekend, for instance, Associated Press president Louis Boccardi, addressing his listeners as men of "power and rank," gave them more details than he said he was willing to give his readers about the plight of Terry Anderson, the Middle East correspondent held hostage since 1985. Richard Nixon, like Hoover a mem-ber of Cave Mans camp inside the Grove, got a raptur-ous reception in 1967 and pressed forward to the nomi-nation and the White House. You know you are inside the Bohemian Grove when you come down a trail in the woods and hear piano music from amid a group of tents and then round a bend to see a man with a beer in one hand and his penis in the other, urinating into the bushes. Some said all the big decisions were taken in England, at Ditchley, not so far from the Appeasers former haunts at Cliveden and only an hour by Learjet from Davos, which is where jumped up finance ministers and self-inflating tycoons merely pretend they rule the world. The play, about greedy gold miners who came to California during the middle 1800's and kicked the Spaniards off their land, was written by Lou Felder, a Bohemian Club member who plays a fraudulent consumer advocate on the new TV show Fernwood 2Night.. The following list of Bohemian Club members includes both past and current members of note. They'd built special platforms in the trees for men with binoculars. They're going to have Pavarotti there in November. What the Bois de Boulogne was to the ancien regime, the Grove is to America's power class. I said we might have a deal for him. "This is for the campless, not the homeless," he was saying. On July 21 of this year Henry Kissinger sat at one of them, chuffing loudly to someone -- Sunshine, her called her, and Sweetie -- about the pleasant distractions of his vacation in the forest. Rocard was Michel Rocard, the prime minister of France, and this was a secret trip. The country was still steeped in the aw-shucks authoritarianism of the Reagan years, and if there is any place to study the culture of our ruling class it is here among the Grove's benevolent, string-tie aristocracy. Upon arriving to the United States, he excelled academically and graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. This amalgam of pop Druidry, Klan kitsch and Fraserian mumbo- jumbo stems from the nineteenth-cen-tury passion for ancient ritual. Two thousand miles away, at the other end of the continent, the same impulse produced Mardi Gras in New Orleans, with its Mystick Krewe, its Elves of Oberon and the tribute paid by Rex to Comus. "Speaker: To Be Announced," it said, raising the question of what dignitary might be thought more important than Prime Minister Rocard, who was listed as the speaker on the middle Saturday. Members wash up in dormitory-style bathrooms and eat breakfast and dinner collectively in the Dining Circle, a splendid outdoor arena with fresh wood chips covering the ground and only the sky above. That day as I sat writing a letter (actually my notes) at the Civic Center, a one-story building in which various amenities (Grove stationery, laundry facilities) are available to Bohemians, I overheard a large fellow in cranberry-colored shorts on the phone, bragging to someone back at the office. Larry Kramer is a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner. Teddy Roosevelt was a member. In one, The Eldorado, if viewers looked closely, they could. "You can't," he said. checks to shame. The friend and I leaned closer. It ends with the symbolic burning in effigy of a wooden skeleton in a coffin that represents the end of the cares of the world. A man from Monte Rio said he was only one of several towns-people renting cabins every year to prostitutes traveling from as far as Las Vegas to renew the Bohos spiritual fibers. So what are you responsible for," the KGB asks him. That's right, the Bohemian Grove. But Tom worked for an independent con-tractor supplying food and help and got $125 a day plus tips (officially banned at the Grove) and ended up with $3,000 for his three-week stint. They spoke of "fairy unguents" that would free men to pursue warm fellowship, and I was reminded of something Herman Wouk wrote about the Grove: "Men can decently love each other; they always have, bur women never quite understand. There's a kind of emotional experience with an election year, that between state elections, local elections, and besides, with a two year term, a congressman gets elected and the next day he starts campaigning for the next election." It would seem that this year's encampment was useful to him. "We had rope trick. Membership in the Bohemian Club is by invitation only, and no women are allowed, either as members or guests, except for an occasional picnic for club wives. There are few rules, the most famous one being "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" -- in other words, don't do business in the Grove. Bohemian Jack London was a socialist; Bohemian Henry George, a radical reformer. No one would be surprised. The two of them were camping in Mandalay, the most exclusive bunk site in the encampment, the one on the hill with the tiny cable car that carries visitors up to the compound. Wine gets passed around (though members must sign for the bottles on a chit). Meese, by the way, is about the only major Reaganite who didn't end up as a member. Ronald Reagan and George Bush are members. Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. ", It was in the phone circle that Henry Kissinger alienated some brother Bohemians on the middle weekend. In the end I entered by stealth. A tenet of Grove life is noncompetitive egalitarianism: all men are equal here. The club's famed annual gathering has been held for more than 100 years at the 2,700-acre Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, about 70 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. Many older men die waiting. We shook hands firmly (his: small, bony) and chatted. The site's annual secretive meeting takes place for two weeks in July, with Powell writing that he was present at last July's event. The girls were all played by men, and every time they appeared -- their chunky legs and flashed buttocks highly visible through tight support hose -- the crowd went wild. Comments by Ronald Wilson Reagan, said placards on the wooden signboards. Like all such institutions the club has its rituals, its ceremonies, its hallowed rules. "Are you going to show it?" "You got it too late." Bush, William F. Buckley Jr. and former astronaut and ex-Eastern Air Lines chairman Frank Borman.) A poster for one Grove play, Pompeii, featured a mighty erection under a toga, modelled no doubt on the redoubtable organ in the Pompeiian fresco photographed by many a touring tycoon. I would like to make the two-year congressman's term four years, to reduce the number of elections that we have, because I think that's one of the reasons that only about 53 percent of the people vote. Let my friends remember me by it when i am gone, Continuing Corporate Dominance (No, the Corporate Elite Is NOT Fractured), An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%, How Corporate Moderates Created Social Security. When I got to Monte Rio, only a couple of signs of protest remained. Demonstrations outside the Grove a few years back often centered around the "Resurrection of Care.". '", The only surprises came when he took questions. This dick-fussing often manifests itself as that starkest of male nostalgias, the hankering for the punctual erections of boyhood. These men were interested in something more than pseudo-Druidic rituals. We didn't do it that way, but it turned out that Grove security isn't quite what it's reputed to be. Of the top 800 corporations in the U.S. in 1980 30% had at least one officer or director at . And they do talk to each othersometimes ignoring the injunctive to leave business behind. Title. Just as the priests set out to torch the crypt, a red light appeared high in a redwood and large speakers in the forest amplified the cackling voice of Care: "Fools! Then everyone hushed as a column of hooded figures carrying torches emerged solemnly from the woods 100 yards away, bearing a corpse down to the water. . One old-timer said that Nixon was feuding with the board of directors. The most dignified had arrived. "There'd be a lot more preening and peacocking than there already is," a big gay Bohemian told me. It tasted like lighter fluid sprinkled with mint flakes. As for Jews, old membership lists suggest that they have taken a very small part in the club for decades. It's only a matter of time before the club gets sued under either California's civil rights act or San Francisco's civil rights ordinance, both of which bar sex discrimination in business establishments. "Your agricultural policy.") They talk business here all the time. And inside the Grove the guest list was well guarded. "No, but I've heard a lot about him and I'd like to meet him." And the sand at the Russian River beach is traversed by coconut-fiber mats and rich figured squares cut from the carpets in the "City Club," the five-story brick Bohemian building in downtown San Francisco. He got the pa-pers San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. The state has established a beachhead at the Grove's front office, a hundred yards outside the main gate, where, under legal pressure, seven women have been employed. Nudity was more common then. This year's Low Jinks was called Sculpture Culture, and the humor was not just lame but circa-1950s college follies lame. . In 1953, when he was vice president, Nixon led a ceremony honoring Herbert Hoover's 40th year as a Bohemian. Owl's Nest is sort of an old Hollywood-corporatist camp. Typical attendees range from high-profile big boys like former Nixon cabinet member Henry Kissinger to powerful corporate chieftains whose names wouldn't draw a twitch of recognition from most folks on the street. But when again ye turn your feet toward the marketplace, am I not waiting for you, as of old? Also, it was Walter Cronkite talking. This is not the first time Clinton, Powell or Kissinger have been linked to the Bohemian Grove. Reagan was mixing it up with a bunch of old-timers a few feet away. My imposture included misrepresenting myself in conversation with other campers, and my story kept changing as I learned more about how life inside was organized. The jokes fit right into the Grove's Ayn Rand R&R mood. In the afternoon I walked up Kitchen Hill Road to Owl's Nest camp. It was set at crotch level, so you had to sort of crouch. "He really put the balls into it. Dick Cheneys a Grover. The avenging posses may find some puzzling elements within the Grove. Some day the walls will fall, though it's hard to see why any woman would want to join a crowd of old Republicans chewing cigars and reminiscing about potency. There is at least one officer or director from 40 of the 50 largest industrial corporations in the country, and an officer or director of 20 of the top 25 banks in the country, according to G. William Domhoff, author of The Bohemian Grove: A Study in the Ruling Class Cohesiveness.. Noted and hoary writers and personalities are members: Herman Wouk, Art Linkletter, Fred Travalena. They all got a big kick out of this. Every summer for more than a century, the all-male Bohemian Club of San Francisco has led a retreat into a redwood forest 70 miles north of the city, four and a quarter square miles of rugged, majestic terrain that members consider sacred. Then, eerily picked out by torchlight, robed tycoons move slowly into a clearing with a bier supporting the effigy of Care. During the day there are enviro-strolls with some biologist from Stanford or Berkeley lecturing his retinue on successional stages in redwood regenera-tion. On hikes I'd taken, my impression had been that the only people patrolling the ten miles of Grove perimeter were a guy at the Guard House on Smith Creek Road who spent a lot of time whittling a walking stick and ancient Bohemians taking the daily 10:00 a.m. open-backed bus tour. Carried by pallbearers and high priests in bright red hoods and flowing robes, the coffin burns as chants give way to a band playing There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight..
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