Go see for yourself.
CULTURE, PLACE, PLANET ("The sense of smell explores." - Brillat-Savarin)
Sunday, March 20, 2016
It's underway, and riveting
Go see for yourself.
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Taste is tricky in wine country
She said they got a lot of it from castles. I believed her.
"The feng shui isn’t the best—too much chi running around.”
The statue on her newel post had wings and a shield, and seemed Mediterranean, while those in the dining room alcoves were definitely Asian. A Spanish chandelier overhung a huge vase of exotic dried flowers. The angels on the heavy mirror frames in the sitting room, blowing horns, might have been Italian, their silent heraldry reverberating amid all the marble. “We did some odd things,” she admitted, like the phone room with the big chair.
Another small room was “a perfect shape. They call it bagua,” one side representing money, one representing relationships, a third side representing something indeterminate. She shrugged. “Yada yada yada. I don’t want to know too much about feng shui. Then you get crazy.”
Nell Sweeney had bright blond hair cropped short, a very large diamond, and a Southern accent. She could be very amusing, but her gaze behind steel-rimmed glasses was unswerving. She spent a lot of time at home and abroad looking at and buying furniture and other things in quantity, and some of these ended up here and some in rooms of the Embassy Suites, owned by her husband.
The large painting of a peasant on a horse was bought in Hong Kong, where “in the translation from English to Chinese I ended up with a barnful of stuff I didn’t want.” She designed this house herself, to reflect various cultures. “I call it French and Italian. I “just put everything together and hoped it would come out with some style.”
The house was roughly the length of two basketball courts and clung to the edge of a near-precipice overlooking the Silverado Trail and the breadth of the valley. The fig arbor out back flanked the swimming pool; in the loggia was another massive chandelier. Shrubs, trees, and flowers in heavy terracotta planters were backed by the distant flanks of the Mayacamas and by blue sky. “Our emphasis is on the views—you can see the fires in Dry Creek from here.”
The framed sheet of a Gregorian chant on the music room wall may or may not have been old. “I don’t know, I just bought it.” The living room tapestries were of indeterminate age and provenance. Nearby stood another statue. “I don’t know who she is. I just buy and buy. We have to outfit all those suites.”
Such omnivorous practicality extended to the wine cellar, where she kept her fur coats, too. In addition to California wines, “we do some French, some Italian. We go to all the auctions.” The reception room outside the cellar had a vaulted ceiling painted with a phoenix, symbol of the winery, Vine Cliff. “The artist mixed the paint with eggs to make it look like stucco.”
A party was about to get under way. The chef, brought in for this occasion, wore the traditional black-and-white-checked trousers and white blouson; she gingerly touched the coffee service already arranged on the presentation island. The expected guests, all women, regularly gathered to view one another’s property enhancements, and it was Nell Sweeney’s turn. Her enhancements entailed the removal of a wall between the culinary and consumption chambers (kitchen and breakfast room) and the installation of modern, and ancient, conveniences. The aromatic essence of hot scones escaped the silent authority of the interior environmental controls, while out front, beyond the potted palms, tires whispered in the pea gravel.
Her husband, Chuck, worked for a quarter of a century in the hotel business when suddenly it came to him: travelers—businessmen, vacationers, whatever—didn’t have to be stuck in a cubicle. For a little more money they could have a suite, and feel special. It was, he liked to say, “a novel product. Suites, not rooms.”
He had been coming to Napa Valley since the seventies and bought the site of the historic “Vine Hill Winery in the eighties. The Embassy Suites chain proved so successful that he and Nell decided to move to the valley; they had vineyards put in and applied for a winery permit when those were still easy to get, since the old Vine Cliff had burned long ago. Soon they were making fifteen thousand cases, split evenly among cabernet, merlot, and chardonnay.
They saved a spot up on the hill for a five-bedroom house, and had to dynamite to get it in. The plan and then the house were very controversial. Citizens from all over the valley stood up in public meetings and complained of having to look at it every time they drove up Silverado Trail. Chuck, a big man who waved his hands a lot, wasn’t easy to intimidate. He often told his wife, “These people are looking for spotted owls and three-toed frogs. They’re on a mission. Ignore them and they’ll go away.”
“Why would anyone be foolish enough to spend millions of dollars on a house that would slip down a hillside? It’s jealousy. I told Chuck I was going to drive up and down the Silverado Trail taking photos of old car bodies and make a big deal of that!”
The new space was full of attractive women: several gold belts and pashmina scarves, a disproportionate number of blondes. “I don’t like kitchens that look like kitchens,” Nell told them as they helped themselves to coffee and the chef’s delicate baked fare. Indeed, this kitchen looked as much like a combination library and food display unit, with leather-bound volumes of Cook’s voyages, high-backed padded chairs arranged on harlequin tiles, a chandelier made of stag anders. “The pizza oven takes forever to get going . . . This exhaust fan is strong enough to pull your hair out.”
The handsome antique rotisserie was turned by an elaborate device suggesting a cuckoo clock, with spinning cones and a heavy stone counterweight. “We saw this thing in some castle, and Chuck said he had to have one. We tracked the guy down.”
A guest asked about the saucers. “I never saw a piece of china I didn’t like. I’m looking for something in gold and green that can be put into the dishwasher. I sent Thomas to England, but he couldn’t find it.”
No one asked who Thomas was; it didn’t signify. Talk was of other shopping venues, the flea market in St. Tropez. The party moved incrementally into the marble foyer and adjoining rooms, chatting, balancing saucers, an egalitarian bunch: a heavy contributor to the local arts, the wife of the owner of one of the largest wineries, the wife of the owner of a large wine distributorship, the wife of a builder of nursing homes, two caterers whose services would be needed eventually but who now were indistinguishable from the women who would be hiring them. One white pantsuit told another, "We just built two houses, but we’re not living in either of them. Yours in yet?”
“Half.”
“Are you a kitchen person or a garden person?”
“Oh, I’m both.”
A downturn in the stock market could be seen in a switch from decomposed granite to arbor mulch, but for the moment there was no dearth of decomposed granite. There was concern about criticism in the valley—of development, even of vineyards. “Their complaints are so stupid,” said the hostess, of the critics. “They criticized us building on a hillside. We’re on top . . . Why don’t they talk about the nice things?”
She listed them: the new iris farm near Lake Berryessa, the skeet-shooting club, another club called Second Growth for lucky spermers, a retired race car driver living in the valley . . .
“And the beekeepers!”
“And that woman who witches wells!”
The store of scones, French butter, and marmalade had been seriously impacted. This was just the first round of a prearranged tour that would take them all to a house in St. Helena, for a viewing of the plantings and a lecture. But not everyone knew where it was. “Just follow the red Jag,” said a pashmina.
They mounted their respective SUVs, bright in the California sunlight, and in a flurry of air kisses and Palm Pilots hied off to the ornamental town garden.
( From The Far Side of Eden )
*
To order my novel, Nose, click on:
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Inglenook: a glimpse of what was to come
(From The Far Side of Eden. Related posts in the menu to the right.)
The emphasis was on sales and on the look of the place. Enhance the merchandise. Enrich the visitor’s experience. Creative consultants put the decision makers at Niebaum-Coppola in touch with designers of various sales emporiums; a woman responsible for exhibits at the San Francisco airport was hired. Another woman was brought in who could “source” special merchandise—a buyer’s buyer. Meanwhile, Skupny went through all the old tax records and folders full of old photographs, and saw some that gave him goose bumps. He thought of two immigrant families—Niebaum and Coppola—ending up in the same place, at different times, with nothing else in common. But Francis worked the symbolism, calling Skupny on the telephone from all over—New York, Lisbon—with new ideas for exploiting the Niebaum connection.
Skupny still had to dispose of the old Rubicon wine. And there remained the big question of grapes. Niebaum-Coppola vineyards could supply only a fraction of what was required for the new, cheaper wines, so where would the rest of the fruit come from? Francis and Maher wanted to ramp up fast, but no wine that contained less than seventy-five percent of Napa Valley fruit could qualify for the coveted Napa Valley appellation. Napa Valley grapes were too precious and hard to find to put into inexpensive new lines, but there was another route: cheap Central Valley and central coast fruit trucked in and made into wine sold with just the Napa Valley address on the label. Heublein had done it in the past, and so presently were Beringer, Mondavi, Sutter Home, and many others. Invent new brands under the proprietary name, since most buyers don’t notice or don’t care, and watch the revenue roll in.
The day of the Christmas party, Dick Maher told Skupny he was fired. Holiday time, season of good will, adios. Skupny had by then taken care of all the tough stuff, including moving old Rubicon, and if truth be told was tired of it all. Niebaum-Coppola had gone from sixteen to seventy employees in one year, and in the process Skupny had missed a lot in his children’s lives. Maher had convinced Francis, or so Skupny surmised, that concern with “the right thing” would lead to failure. And Skupny was tired of Maher’s posturing, what he called “the Marine thing, all that bullshit.” Skupny knew as much about the business as anybody, he would do fine on his own, and he went home.
This treasure, this Inglenook, might survive in perpetuity because of all the commercialism, Skupny reasoned. The heavy merchandising and publicity were bullets in the war for tourist dollars. But at other times he thought of what Inglenook could have been, and he shuddered.
To order Napa, the first book, go to:
Skupny still had to dispose of the old Rubicon wine. And there remained the big question of grapes. Niebaum-Coppola vineyards could supply only a fraction of what was required for the new, cheaper wines, so where would the rest of the fruit come from? Francis and Maher wanted to ramp up fast, but no wine that contained less than seventy-five percent of Napa Valley fruit could qualify for the coveted Napa Valley appellation. Napa Valley grapes were too precious and hard to find to put into inexpensive new lines, but there was another route: cheap Central Valley and central coast fruit trucked in and made into wine sold with just the Napa Valley address on the label. Heublein had done it in the past, and so presently were Beringer, Mondavi, Sutter Home, and many others. Invent new brands under the proprietary name, since most buyers don’t notice or don’t care, and watch the revenue roll in.
The day of the Christmas party, Dick Maher told Skupny he was fired. Holiday time, season of good will, adios. Skupny had by then taken care of all the tough stuff, including moving old Rubicon, and if truth be told was tired of it all. Niebaum-Coppola had gone from sixteen to seventy employees in one year, and in the process Skupny had missed a lot in his children’s lives. Maher had convinced Francis, or so Skupny surmised, that concern with “the right thing” would lead to failure. And Skupny was tired of Maher’s posturing, what he called “the Marine thing, all that bullshit.” Skupny knew as much about the business as anybody, he would do fine on his own, and he went home.
This treasure, this Inglenook, might survive in perpetuity because of all the commercialism, Skupny reasoned. The heavy merchandising and publicity were bullets in the war for tourist dollars. But at other times he thought of what Inglenook could have been, and he shuddered.
Thursday, February 11, 2016
Winery as department store, with make-up
From The Far Side of Eden:
(Nero)
The final price was just over nine million dollars. Heublein would take back about half that amount in a note; Francis’s cash would all come from Dracula.
After a day in San Francisco with the lawyers, when it was a done deal, Skupny drove up to the old carriage house through a setting little changed in a century. Navalle Creek, lined with stone by Chinese laborers, wound down to the broad plain of Rutherford. He told the winemaker, “A year from now we won’t be able to remember what this was like,” and called the staff into the library above the stable and told them, ”Everything’s going to change.”
The final agreement was six inches thick; Skupny’s hand grew tired signing it. Francis didn’t get the Inglenook name, but he got everything else he wanted—vineyards, property, architecture, Rubicon . . . tutti.
He told the winemaker, “A year from now we won’t be able to remember what this was like,” and called the staff into the library above the stable and told them, ”Everything’s going to change.”
The final agreement was six inches thick; Skupny’s hand grew tired signing it. Francis didn’t get the Inglenook name, but he got everything else he wanted—vineyards, property, architecture, Rubicon... tutti.
The logo was redesigned and all labels made similar. That was the fun part. Francis constantly came up with creative ideas: a rum from Belize to be stored in old Rubicon barrels, a grappa from Oregon, bottled water from a spring up on the mountain. Not all of it worked out. Any profits were to go to the mother ship, Zoetrope, but meanwhile there were huge expenses involved—renovating old Inglenook, replanting, redesigning. The money had to come from somewhere, and it had to come fast.
When the winery was stripped, before all the new equipment went in, Francis threw a party and invited everybody in Rutherford, St. Helena, and Oakville. The comedian Don Novello was the master of ceremonies. There was a battle of the bands, fireworks, and two cakes—one for the Coppolas’ acquisition of the Niebaum house, the other for the acquisition of the winery—both devoured.
Francis hired Dick Maher, a short, feisty former Marine who drank soda from a customized Howitzer shell. Maher was supposed to build the business, to go from zero to sixty in about a year. He had a long, spotty history in the wine business. While working for Heublein, Maher had been the brand manager of the cola-flavored bubbly wine called I Love You, and while working for Seagram had earned a reputation as a corporate ass-kicker, capable of either affability or unpleasantness, whichever was required. Maher had headed up Christian Brothers after it was bought by Grand Metropolitan, another swallowing-up of an old Napa property by the alien conglomerate.
Maher hired a winery manager not from the wine business but from a large retailing company, and the writing was on the wall, Skupny thought. In addition, Francis always had some guru type around, first a studio guy, then a young economist, then somebody else idea-oriented, enthusiastic. This person would say, “I’ve been thinking about something, Francis. Why don’t you . . .” And Skupny would think, “Who the hell owns this place, anyway?”
Traveling with Francis was great fun. He was a world-class gourmand, a consumer of life. In New York, Skupny watched Francis being interviewed by Charlie Rose and five other journalists. Francis taught Skupny the importance of the journalistic file, by which he meant any newspaper or magazine story that became part of the public record. He taught Skupny to make sure he was always the source of a story, never the story, a crucial distinction. Francis was, of course, always the story.
Together they staged a Niebaum-Coppola celebration party at the Four Seasons, and it sold out. Francis sat up on the dais, surrounded by ingenues, and confided to Skupny, “I feel like a Roman emperor.
Skupny concentrated on the the “hospitality” issues, getting customers into the chateau while the renovation was being done. Everything was to be “related”; synergy was the high concept. For instance, guests at Francis’s lodge in Belize would watch Francis’s movies while drinking Francis’s wine. Gift packets at Niebaum-Coppola might include a Coppola movie and a Coppola wine of the same vintage, along with a Niebaum-Coppola T-shirt.
There were things they couldn't do legally, part of the controversial winery definition passed a few years before that prevented the sale at wineries of anything unrelated to wine. But historical structures had a great advantage, one that would prove decisive: whatever had been sold before, whatever had been done, was grandfathered—that is, exempt.
Skupny was told, as he later recalled it, “to access the rights to everything ever sold here, to establish precedents.” He pored over all the old Inglenook inventories. There had been a cheese deli then, so they could sell cheese now. A knife had been used to cut the cheese in the old days, so presumably today they could also sell cutlery. That was the idea. But where, Skupny wondered, were the limits?
(Continued)
To order the first book, Napa:
The final price was just over nine million dollars. Heublein would take back about half that amount in a note; Francis’s cash would all come from Dracula.
After a day in San Francisco with the lawyers, when it was a done deal, Skupny drove up to the old carriage house through a setting little changed in a century. Navalle Creek, lined with stone by Chinese laborers, wound down to the broad plain of Rutherford. He told the winemaker, “A year from now we won’t be able to remember what this was like,” and called the staff into the library above the stable and told them, ”Everything’s going to change.”
The final agreement was six inches thick; Skupny’s hand grew tired signing it. Francis didn’t get the Inglenook name, but he got everything else he wanted—vineyards, property, architecture, Rubicon . . . tutti.
He told the winemaker, “A year from now we won’t be able to remember what this was like,” and called the staff into the library above the stable and told them, ”Everything’s going to change.”
The final agreement was six inches thick; Skupny’s hand grew tired signing it. Francis didn’t get the Inglenook name, but he got everything else he wanted—vineyards, property, architecture, Rubicon... tutti.
The logo was redesigned and all labels made similar. That was the fun part. Francis constantly came up with creative ideas: a rum from Belize to be stored in old Rubicon barrels, a grappa from Oregon, bottled water from a spring up on the mountain. Not all of it worked out. Any profits were to go to the mother ship, Zoetrope, but meanwhile there were huge expenses involved—renovating old Inglenook, replanting, redesigning. The money had to come from somewhere, and it had to come fast.
When the winery was stripped, before all the new equipment went in, Francis threw a party and invited everybody in Rutherford, St. Helena, and Oakville. The comedian Don Novello was the master of ceremonies. There was a battle of the bands, fireworks, and two cakes—one for the Coppolas’ acquisition of the Niebaum house, the other for the acquisition of the winery—both devoured.
Francis hired Dick Maher, a short, feisty former Marine who drank soda from a customized Howitzer shell. Maher was supposed to build the business, to go from zero to sixty in about a year. He had a long, spotty history in the wine business. While working for Heublein, Maher had been the brand manager of the cola-flavored bubbly wine called I Love You, and while working for Seagram had earned a reputation as a corporate ass-kicker, capable of either affability or unpleasantness, whichever was required. Maher had headed up Christian Brothers after it was bought by Grand Metropolitan, another swallowing-up of an old Napa property by the alien conglomerate.
Maher hired a winery manager not from the wine business but from a large retailing company, and the writing was on the wall, Skupny thought. In addition, Francis always had some guru type around, first a studio guy, then a young economist, then somebody else idea-oriented, enthusiastic. This person would say, “I’ve been thinking about something, Francis. Why don’t you . . .” And Skupny would think, “Who the hell owns this place, anyway?”
Traveling with Francis was great fun. He was a world-class gourmand, a consumer of life. In New York, Skupny watched Francis being interviewed by Charlie Rose and five other journalists. Francis taught Skupny the importance of the journalistic file, by which he meant any newspaper or magazine story that became part of the public record. He taught Skupny to make sure he was always the source of a story, never the story, a crucial distinction. Francis was, of course, always the story.
Together they staged a Niebaum-Coppola celebration party at the Four Seasons, and it sold out. Francis sat up on the dais, surrounded by ingenues, and confided to Skupny, “I feel like a Roman emperor.
Skupny concentrated on the the “hospitality” issues, getting customers into the chateau while the renovation was being done. Everything was to be “related”; synergy was the high concept. For instance, guests at Francis’s lodge in Belize would watch Francis’s movies while drinking Francis’s wine. Gift packets at Niebaum-Coppola might include a Coppola movie and a Coppola wine of the same vintage, along with a Niebaum-Coppola T-shirt.
There were things they couldn't do legally, part of the controversial winery definition passed a few years before that prevented the sale at wineries of anything unrelated to wine. But historical structures had a great advantage, one that would prove decisive: whatever had been sold before, whatever had been done, was grandfathered—that is, exempt.
Skupny was told, as he later recalled it, “to access the rights to everything ever sold here, to establish precedents.” He pored over all the old Inglenook inventories. There had been a cheese deli then, so they could sell cheese now. A knife had been used to cut the cheese in the old days, so presumably today they could also sell cutlery. That was the idea. But where, Skupny wondered, were the limits?
(Continued)
To order the first book, Napa:
Saturday, February 6, 2016
How to buy a historic winery cheap... if you're a movie director
The Far Side of Eden dealt with many of the issues now playing out on a large scale in Napa Valley. Earlier related postings can be found in the menu to the right, starting in June 2015.
The Prize
John Skupny worked for Caymus Vineyards and there earned a reputation as an effective, straightforward, pleasant administrator, a blond Californian with a degree in fine arts and that rarity among winery managers, a sense of humor. Down there by the Napa River, a few stones’ throw from Inglenook, he had dealt with the irascible old Charley Wagner and his son, Chuck, and with Randy Dunn, fresh out of Davis and not yet on the heights of Howell Mountain, and had learned most everything about power cabernets, from production to marketing to the delicate managing of myth and reality.
Skupny went to work for Francis in 1992, before the Inglenook winery was purchased. Niebaum-Coppola had some assets in addition to the vineyards that had come with the house, including a good winemaker, Tony Soter, of Spottswoode fame, a new press, and a determination on the part of the owner to develop a more elegant style of cabernet. Liabilities included limited working facilities—the wine was made where carriages had once stood, and it shared storage space upstairs with reels of film—and a lot of inky, older Rubicon that badly needed selling.
Wine had to be moved through an old-boy network of distributors, the narrow part of the hourglass. The producer was on top and the consumer on the bottom, and the old boys in the middle didn’t like aged wine without stellar rankings by Robert Parker or Wine Spectator. Skupny’s challenge was to find someone willing to bet that Rubicon would improve and, until it did, to move the present inventory. Francis was gracious when Skupny brought the distributors and big names in the trade by the house, entertaining them, making them feel special. And Skupny pointed out that Niebaum-Coppola intended to increase the quality of the wine while cutting production, making the wine rare and raising the price at the same time.
Production of Rubicon went down to two thousand cases, very small, but that meant another Coppola brand had to be invented to broaden the market. A wine consultant and the new winemaker sat down together and fashioned something from cabernet franc and merlot, and they called it Francis Coppola Family Wine. Skupny put it out for eighteen dollars a bottle, and it sold like crazy during a recession. They also decided to make a brand of zinfandel called Paternino, a tribute to Francis’s Italian grandfather. The winery had trouble with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms because there was to be a picture of the Statue of Liberty on the bottle, but the label was finally approved because, Skupny thought, the BATF got preoccupied with Branch Davidians down in Waco.
At that point wine was small potatoes in Francis’s larger financial basket. But he told Skupny he wanted to be on first base if Heublein ever decided to sell Inglenook, the regal chateau standing out there to the east facing Highway 29, and they could move into the big time. Skupny knew Heublein’s history and all the baggage it carried in the valley, symbolized by the big, ugly storage facility built in front of the winery shortly after Heublein acquired it, spoiling the view from the highway. He knew Heublein could never recover from decades of bad decisions and that someday the corporation would have to unload a property also burdened by an unhappy family history.
Niebaum’s great-grandnephew, John Daniel, a conservative pillar of rectitude, had been married to a woman known variously as beautiful, talented, and destructive. Her name was Betty, and she had made much of John Daniel’s life miserable. Her hatred of the winery contributed to his decision to dump the family heirloom in the sixties; in Daniel’s eyes, Heublein soon devalued the Inglenook name, which had been carefully made into a symbol of excellence, by producing a great deal of cheap wine and plastering it with that proud name. Daniel had refused to sell any wine that was not first rate, a standard that had prevented him from ever making a profit, and otherwise hewed to the line laid down by Niebaum in bygone times. After selling out he had to watch an invasive corporation use out-of-valley grapes to fill jugs—sacrilege, in his view, and a possible factor in Daniel’s subsequent suicide.
John Skupny knew all this. He knew that the corporation would now like to unload Inglenook, but assumed the price would be unapproachable by an independent operator like Coppola, even with his occasionally massive cash flows. But Skupny, like others in the valley, dreamed of the old chateau’s passing again to “local” control, and feared its being taken over by another corporation more ambitious than Heublein.
One night in 1994 he received a call from a friend in the “One night in 1994 he received a call from a friend in the business who told him, “Your worst nightmare is about to be realized. Heublein’s being sold to Canandaigua.”
Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing had just come out. Francis had seen it, and Skupny thought he was influenced by the notion of doing the right thing. Francis invited everybody to meet on his porch late one morning, to sit out there as if on the deck of a crenelated white ship sailing through a sea of vineyards, all very cordial and low-key. But the Heublein people were tight with information. If they agreed to sell, they would still demand the right to buy grapes from the prized Inglenook terroir, and that Francis replant the vineyard. Also, they would demand a lease-back on the ugly storage facility out front, to house their barrels.
They wouldn’t come up with a dollar amount and wanted Francis to make an offer. He and Skupny thought they were being used to push up the price while Heublein shopped Inglenook around among other potential buyers. Francis came up with another strategy—preemption. The chief financial officer of Zoetrope, Francis’s company headquartered in San Francisco, part of the Coppola team, worked out how Inglenook would fit in with Francis’s other businesses, while the staff in Rutherford studied the inventories provided by Heublein. And the attorney who acted as Francis’s guardian had to be convinced that it was all a good idea.
At last a purchase agreement was produced, and Francis wrote a check for a million dollars in the little house near the stable that served as his office. Skupny walked the check over to the big house so Eleanor could countersign it, then walked it back again. Francis was giddy, Skupny would remember. He asked if Skupny played poker, and when he answered yes, Francis said, “Good.”
Skupny delivered the purchase agreement and the check to Heublein. The next day the guy called and said okay, and Skupny got into his car and drove over to Inglenook and stood out in the courtyard, under the massive façade overgrown with ivy, and called Francis on his cell phone. Skupny told him, “It’s yours.”
(Continued)
*
The first volume, Napa: The Story of an American Eden, is available at:
The Prize
Skupny went to work for Francis in 1992, before the Inglenook winery was purchased. Niebaum-Coppola had some assets in addition to the vineyards that had come with the house, including a good winemaker, Tony Soter, of Spottswoode fame, a new press, and a determination on the part of the owner to develop a more elegant style of cabernet. Liabilities included limited working facilities—the wine was made where carriages had once stood, and it shared storage space upstairs with reels of film—and a lot of inky, older Rubicon that badly needed selling.
Wine had to be moved through an old-boy network of distributors, the narrow part of the hourglass. The producer was on top and the consumer on the bottom, and the old boys in the middle didn’t like aged wine without stellar rankings by Robert Parker or Wine Spectator. Skupny’s challenge was to find someone willing to bet that Rubicon would improve and, until it did, to move the present inventory. Francis was gracious when Skupny brought the distributors and big names in the trade by the house, entertaining them, making them feel special. And Skupny pointed out that Niebaum-Coppola intended to increase the quality of the wine while cutting production, making the wine rare and raising the price at the same time.
Production of Rubicon went down to two thousand cases, very small, but that meant another Coppola brand had to be invented to broaden the market. A wine consultant and the new winemaker sat down together and fashioned something from cabernet franc and merlot, and they called it Francis Coppola Family Wine. Skupny put it out for eighteen dollars a bottle, and it sold like crazy during a recession. They also decided to make a brand of zinfandel called Paternino, a tribute to Francis’s Italian grandfather. The winery had trouble with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms because there was to be a picture of the Statue of Liberty on the bottle, but the label was finally approved because, Skupny thought, the BATF got preoccupied with Branch Davidians down in Waco.
At that point wine was small potatoes in Francis’s larger financial basket. But he told Skupny he wanted to be on first base if Heublein ever decided to sell Inglenook, the regal chateau standing out there to the east facing Highway 29, and they could move into the big time. Skupny knew Heublein’s history and all the baggage it carried in the valley, symbolized by the big, ugly storage facility built in front of the winery shortly after Heublein acquired it, spoiling the view from the highway. He knew Heublein could never recover from decades of bad decisions and that someday the corporation would have to unload a property also burdened by an unhappy family history.
Niebaum’s great-grandnephew, John Daniel, a conservative pillar of rectitude, had been married to a woman known variously as beautiful, talented, and destructive. Her name was Betty, and she had made much of John Daniel’s life miserable. Her hatred of the winery contributed to his decision to dump the family heirloom in the sixties; in Daniel’s eyes, Heublein soon devalued the Inglenook name, which had been carefully made into a symbol of excellence, by producing a great deal of cheap wine and plastering it with that proud name. Daniel had refused to sell any wine that was not first rate, a standard that had prevented him from ever making a profit, and otherwise hewed to the line laid down by Niebaum in bygone times. After selling out he had to watch an invasive corporation use out-of-valley grapes to fill jugs—sacrilege, in his view, and a possible factor in Daniel’s subsequent suicide.
John Skupny knew all this. He knew that the corporation would now like to unload Inglenook, but assumed the price would be unapproachable by an independent operator like Coppola, even with his occasionally massive cash flows. But Skupny, like others in the valley, dreamed of the old chateau’s passing again to “local” control, and feared its being taken over by another corporation more ambitious than Heublein.
One night in 1994 he received a call from a friend in the “One night in 1994 he received a call from a friend in the business who told him, “Your worst nightmare is about to be realized. Heublein’s being sold to Canandaigua.”
Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing had just come out. Francis had seen it, and Skupny thought he was influenced by the notion of doing the right thing. Francis invited everybody to meet on his porch late one morning, to sit out there as if on the deck of a crenelated white ship sailing through a sea of vineyards, all very cordial and low-key. But the Heublein people were tight with information. If they agreed to sell, they would still demand the right to buy grapes from the prized Inglenook terroir, and that Francis replant the vineyard. Also, they would demand a lease-back on the ugly storage facility out front, to house their barrels.
They wouldn’t come up with a dollar amount and wanted Francis to make an offer. He and Skupny thought they were being used to push up the price while Heublein shopped Inglenook around among other potential buyers. Francis came up with another strategy—preemption. The chief financial officer of Zoetrope, Francis’s company headquartered in San Francisco, part of the Coppola team, worked out how Inglenook would fit in with Francis’s other businesses, while the staff in Rutherford studied the inventories provided by Heublein. And the attorney who acted as Francis’s guardian had to be convinced that it was all a good idea.
At last a purchase agreement was produced, and Francis wrote a check for a million dollars in the little house near the stable that served as his office. Skupny walked the check over to the big house so Eleanor could countersign it, then walked it back again. Francis was giddy, Skupny would remember. He asked if Skupny played poker, and when he answered yes, Francis said, “Good.”
Skupny delivered the purchase agreement and the check to Heublein. The next day the guy called and said okay, and Skupny got into his car and drove over to Inglenook and stood out in the courtyard, under the massive façade overgrown with ivy, and called Francis on his cell phone. Skupny told him, “It’s yours.”
(Continued)
*
The first volume, Napa: The Story of an American Eden, is available at:
To order Napa:
Monday, February 1, 2016
Don Corleone's desk: 2
My second book about the valley, The Far Side of Eden, was published in 2002. What follows is a series taken from it that helps explain some of the issues and personalities that still bear heavily on the present. Earlier postings can be found in the menu to the right, starting in June 2015.
(see also: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2015/12/don-corleones-desk-1.html)
Grand Illusions
Francis Ford Coppola and his wife, Eleanor, had already purchased the old Inglenook winery from the Heublein Corporation. “Francis brought in specialists from the films,” the tour guide added, and had concept drawings for the staircase done by the production designer who worked on Apocalypse Now and The Godfather. The display cases for his wine, on sale, were designed by a movie conceptualizer, and those for his T-shirts by yet another.
“There have been so many changes”—the removal of the modest fountain once out front to a nearby hillside, the parking of a red Tucker, star of another of Coppola’s films, in the second-floor gift shop until the finishing of the Memorabilia Room, a showcase of cinematic marginalia. Fifteen woodworkers had been brought in from Nevada just to build the winery’s central staircase and were living in the winery’s shell. The three-story modified Gothic edifice hummed.
Out in the courtyard, men were putting the final touches on a concrete reflecting pool and pergola. Nearby sat the gunboat that appeared in Apocalypse Now, its plywood showing through flaking gray paint, to be redone and moved into some undecided public viewing space. Francis—it was the sanctioned reference for employees—had rechristened grand old Inglenook chateau “Niebaum-Coppola,” thus associating the early symbol of the valley’s ability to produce fine wine with the new owner’s unrelated vocation.
This was to be symbolized by placing Don Corleone’s desk across the entrance hall from Gustave Niebaum’s oak-paneled Captain’s Room. Costumes from Bram Stoker’s Dracula were to be draped on mannequins arranged on the stairs, the guide added, to greet visitors who made their way to the second floor on risers made of poisonwood imported from Belize, where Coppola owned a resort.
The balustrades would be of Belizian jobillo, the carved fruit bowls on the newel posts of Belizian granadilla. The design would be “Europeanish,” said the master carpenter, an imposing bearded figure in new Carhartt coveralls. “We got the concept and sort of massaged it . . . We opted to do it all by hand because, when Francis looks at it, he wants to be able to see the craftsmanship.”
The tasting room on the second floor would be fitted with movie screens for a “multimedia tasting experience,” including a film about Niebaum-Coppola. There was more than one Tucker available for viewing, and a large trove of movie paraphernalia elsewhere on the property, ready to be brought forward when the exhibits needed refreshing. Visitors would pay to get a tour of the winery, and pay again for the tasting and for some souvenir from what promised to be a large trove of wine-related products, and some very distantly related.
If the valley’s stunning, often jarring new architecture symbolized the remove between new arrivals and locals, so had the historical buildings when they first went up. Inglenook was, in contemporary parlance, a nineteenth-century steroid structure that once reigned over a gorgeous, totally rural landscape dedicated to the creation of one idealized product—wine—and modeled on Old World antecedents. Designed by a Vermonter, Hamden Mclntyre, who was not an architect but a talented builder with an eye for classical form, Inglenook had belonged to the wealthy Niebaum, seafarer and fur trader, and for more than a century had reflected the aspirations and vulnerabilities of a New World Eden.
Now Napa Valley ranked second only to Disneyland in popularity among tourists. Most of the five million annual visitors were accustomed to spending more than five dollars for distraction, and at Niebaum-Coppola they would certainly have the chance. Selling T-shirts and wine was a common practice all over the valley—some other historical structures, notably Beringer, had also been burnished beyond the luster of their former selves—but at Niebaum-Coppola, née Inglenook, this commerce took on heightened intensity.
A patina of the past appealed to visitors who wanted a brush with wine culture and a few mementos but none of the scruffiness associated with true agriculture. There were many devices in the valley for luring visitors—Sterling’s ski lift, Mondavi’s concerts—and winery tours had become increasingly important as avenues to further profits from direct sales of wine and clothing. Niebaum-Coppola was in a unique position to capitalize on another—the most—romantic California industry, movies.
Inglenook’s intransigent stone and towering symmetry resisted this reinterpretation, however. The winery’s proportions had been carefully worked out as functional, if not beautiful, and the renovations struck some old-timers as incongruous. No wine was to be made here; the alterations all suggested crowd control, and the imperial reflecting pool would mirror a structure devoted as much to Hollywood as to Bordeaux.
Francis told a newspaper reporter that in planning the retrofit he had tried to imagine what Gustave Niebaum would do, but Niebaum had allowed no tourism and no deviation from the narrow path of a great wine estate. He had strode through the winery in a pair of white gloves, searching for dirt, and the idea that this traditionalist would have allowed costumes from a melodrama to be placed on a theatrical central staircase, or would erect a movie prop in the shadow of hard-wrought Victorian sensibilities, was absurd. But today no one seemed to care.
(Niebaum)
Francis and his wife, Eleanor, had already purchased and moved into Niebaum’s house when they acquired Inglenook. A lovely Victorian with Eastlake influences and a broad wraparound porch reminiscent of a ship’s deck, the house sat a quarter of a mile west of the old winery. Francis had wanted a retreat from the pressures of filmmaking, or so he told people at the time, and he wanted to make a little wine from his own vineyard, a reminder that his father had once pursued the same hobby in a Brooklyn basement.
In the Niebaum house the Coppolas entertained lavishly, using what they referred to as “natural” servers, people from the valley who dispensed food with a smile. Most of the arrangements were made by outsiders, and restaurants in San Francisco were often paid to come to Rutherford and prepare feasts, from Italian to Moroccan, and caterers brought in. Everything had to look just so, the same factotum system that surrounded the making of films prevailing at these events. More than one person was on hand to make sure the candles on the porch were lighted at precisely the right moment and spaced properly to assure “continuity” in every detail, and make sure everything seemed spontaneous.
The pay was good, the labor unending and exhausting. Some locals were thrilled by the presence of celebrities like Madonna and George Lukas, Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Anthony Hopkins once stopped by the kitchen before departing and, seeing some leftover fava beans, slipped into his role as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. The thrilled kitchen workers watched Hopkins disappear into the darkness and felt a tinge of fear even as they laughed at the idea of a cannibal in the house built by the conservative, strait-laced Niebaum.
When Eleanor had women friends over, Francis insisted on being included, the center of attention, and the guests found him childish, if winning. His financial difficulties were often discussed by acquaintances and by staff. Francis used the house, with its ancient, overspreading live oak out front, to impress potential investors in movies and other enterprises. Strangers were immersed in family activities as if they belonged, Francis himself cooking the pasta, everything abbondanza: food, wine, talk, Napa Valley bounty of all sorts ladled up in a kitchen that had served the relatively meager needs of the Niebaums and their heirs, the “Daniels.
The renovations in the house, like those in the winery, showed how much California and the world had changed in a century. Francis had used the old stable to make the first vintages of Niebaum-Coppola wine, which he called Rubicon, the beginning of the methodical transformation of a movie director into a founder’s spiritual heir, and after he bought the winery, too, he needed all the help he could get.
(Continued)
*
(see also: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2015/12/don-corleones-desk-1.html)
Grand Illusions
Francis Ford Coppola and his wife, Eleanor, had already purchased the old Inglenook winery from the Heublein Corporation. “Francis brought in specialists from the films,” the tour guide added, and had concept drawings for the staircase done by the production designer who worked on Apocalypse Now and The Godfather. The display cases for his wine, on sale, were designed by a movie conceptualizer, and those for his T-shirts by yet another.
“There have been so many changes”—the removal of the modest fountain once out front to a nearby hillside, the parking of a red Tucker, star of another of Coppola’s films, in the second-floor gift shop until the finishing of the Memorabilia Room, a showcase of cinematic marginalia. Fifteen woodworkers had been brought in from Nevada just to build the winery’s central staircase and were living in the winery’s shell. The three-story modified Gothic edifice hummed.
Out in the courtyard, men were putting the final touches on a concrete reflecting pool and pergola. Nearby sat the gunboat that appeared in Apocalypse Now, its plywood showing through flaking gray paint, to be redone and moved into some undecided public viewing space. Francis—it was the sanctioned reference for employees—had rechristened grand old Inglenook chateau “Niebaum-Coppola,” thus associating the early symbol of the valley’s ability to produce fine wine with the new owner’s unrelated vocation.
This was to be symbolized by placing Don Corleone’s desk across the entrance hall from Gustave Niebaum’s oak-paneled Captain’s Room. Costumes from Bram Stoker’s Dracula were to be draped on mannequins arranged on the stairs, the guide added, to greet visitors who made their way to the second floor on risers made of poisonwood imported from Belize, where Coppola owned a resort.
The balustrades would be of Belizian jobillo, the carved fruit bowls on the newel posts of Belizian granadilla. The design would be “Europeanish,” said the master carpenter, an imposing bearded figure in new Carhartt coveralls. “We got the concept and sort of massaged it . . . We opted to do it all by hand because, when Francis looks at it, he wants to be able to see the craftsmanship.”
The tasting room on the second floor would be fitted with movie screens for a “multimedia tasting experience,” including a film about Niebaum-Coppola. There was more than one Tucker available for viewing, and a large trove of movie paraphernalia elsewhere on the property, ready to be brought forward when the exhibits needed refreshing. Visitors would pay to get a tour of the winery, and pay again for the tasting and for some souvenir from what promised to be a large trove of wine-related products, and some very distantly related.
If the valley’s stunning, often jarring new architecture symbolized the remove between new arrivals and locals, so had the historical buildings when they first went up. Inglenook was, in contemporary parlance, a nineteenth-century steroid structure that once reigned over a gorgeous, totally rural landscape dedicated to the creation of one idealized product—wine—and modeled on Old World antecedents. Designed by a Vermonter, Hamden Mclntyre, who was not an architect but a talented builder with an eye for classical form, Inglenook had belonged to the wealthy Niebaum, seafarer and fur trader, and for more than a century had reflected the aspirations and vulnerabilities of a New World Eden.
Now Napa Valley ranked second only to Disneyland in popularity among tourists. Most of the five million annual visitors were accustomed to spending more than five dollars for distraction, and at Niebaum-Coppola they would certainly have the chance. Selling T-shirts and wine was a common practice all over the valley—some other historical structures, notably Beringer, had also been burnished beyond the luster of their former selves—but at Niebaum-Coppola, née Inglenook, this commerce took on heightened intensity.
A patina of the past appealed to visitors who wanted a brush with wine culture and a few mementos but none of the scruffiness associated with true agriculture. There were many devices in the valley for luring visitors—Sterling’s ski lift, Mondavi’s concerts—and winery tours had become increasingly important as avenues to further profits from direct sales of wine and clothing. Niebaum-Coppola was in a unique position to capitalize on another—the most—romantic California industry, movies.
Inglenook’s intransigent stone and towering symmetry resisted this reinterpretation, however. The winery’s proportions had been carefully worked out as functional, if not beautiful, and the renovations struck some old-timers as incongruous. No wine was to be made here; the alterations all suggested crowd control, and the imperial reflecting pool would mirror a structure devoted as much to Hollywood as to Bordeaux.
Francis told a newspaper reporter that in planning the retrofit he had tried to imagine what Gustave Niebaum would do, but Niebaum had allowed no tourism and no deviation from the narrow path of a great wine estate. He had strode through the winery in a pair of white gloves, searching for dirt, and the idea that this traditionalist would have allowed costumes from a melodrama to be placed on a theatrical central staircase, or would erect a movie prop in the shadow of hard-wrought Victorian sensibilities, was absurd. But today no one seemed to care.
Francis and his wife, Eleanor, had already purchased and moved into Niebaum’s house when they acquired Inglenook. A lovely Victorian with Eastlake influences and a broad wraparound porch reminiscent of a ship’s deck, the house sat a quarter of a mile west of the old winery. Francis had wanted a retreat from the pressures of filmmaking, or so he told people at the time, and he wanted to make a little wine from his own vineyard, a reminder that his father had once pursued the same hobby in a Brooklyn basement.
In the Niebaum house the Coppolas entertained lavishly, using what they referred to as “natural” servers, people from the valley who dispensed food with a smile. Most of the arrangements were made by outsiders, and restaurants in San Francisco were often paid to come to Rutherford and prepare feasts, from Italian to Moroccan, and caterers brought in. Everything had to look just so, the same factotum system that surrounded the making of films prevailing at these events. More than one person was on hand to make sure the candles on the porch were lighted at precisely the right moment and spaced properly to assure “continuity” in every detail, and make sure everything seemed spontaneous.
The pay was good, the labor unending and exhausting. Some locals were thrilled by the presence of celebrities like Madonna and George Lukas, Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Anthony Hopkins once stopped by the kitchen before departing and, seeing some leftover fava beans, slipped into his role as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. The thrilled kitchen workers watched Hopkins disappear into the darkness and felt a tinge of fear even as they laughed at the idea of a cannibal in the house built by the conservative, strait-laced Niebaum.
When Eleanor had women friends over, Francis insisted on being included, the center of attention, and the guests found him childish, if winning. His financial difficulties were often discussed by acquaintances and by staff. Francis used the house, with its ancient, overspreading live oak out front, to impress potential investors in movies and other enterprises. Strangers were immersed in family activities as if they belonged, Francis himself cooking the pasta, everything abbondanza: food, wine, talk, Napa Valley bounty of all sorts ladled up in a kitchen that had served the relatively meager needs of the Niebaums and their heirs, the “Daniels.
The renovations in the house, like those in the winery, showed how much California and the world had changed in a century. Francis had used the old stable to make the first vintages of Niebaum-Coppola wine, which he called Rubicon, the beginning of the methodical transformation of a movie director into a founder’s spiritual heir, and after he bought the winery, too, he needed all the help he could get.
(Continued)
*
To order Napa:
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Death after folly at Malheur
He was the very visible cowboy hat
who served as spokesman for a phony cause.
(http: /www.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/us/oregon-armed-group-arrest-bundy.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&hp).
who served as spokesman for a phony cause.
(http: /www.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/us/oregon-armed-group-arrest-bundy.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&hp).
*
His accomplices are modern-day dupes
of once-viable realities: limitless free
land, and guns.
There's an aspect of the range that still exercises extraordinary influence on the imagination — six-shooters and those who wield them. Public lands have supported as much lawlessness as any domain in the West, but finding a contemporary gunfighter seemed to me an unlikely prospect in an age of universal jurisprudence. However, midway through the trip, I heard a story about a body found in the desert with its head resting on a red rock. Actually it was more a rumor than a story and involved several bodies instead of one, all rustlers caught too far out in the wilds to be brought to justice. A rock under the head had been the hallmark of a certain nineteenth-century lawman, and supposedly was used by his reincarnation, Ed Cantrell.
I began to hear other rumors about Cantrell: he could ride for days without eating and bring down a horse or a man at a thousand yards with a rifle; some personal misfortune had driven him to the brink of despair; he could quote long passages from Hemingway; he was near-deaf from practicing every day with a revolver; he had the eyes of a rattlesnake, and quicker hands.
I didn't believe them, of course.
East of the Wind River Range the plains break against the mountains in big, rolling swells. To the south lies the Great Divide Basin and a lot of BLM land with a sad, colorful history of creaking prairie schooners, dispersed tribes, and gaunt cowboys pushing famished animals toward what was left of the grasslands. Parts of the old Oregon Trail are still visible in ghostly meanderings across marginal grassland and broad drainages.
To the north of U.S. Highway 20/26 lie the Bighorn Mountains, a maverick thrust of the Rockies and one more tectonic wrinkle in mostly dry, difficult country. The road passes through Shoshoni and along Poison Creek above the Rattlesnake Hills, through Hell's Half Acre and the town of Powder River. From there, headwaters of the river of the same name flow north past the old Hole-in-the-Wall, once the roost of unrepentant badmen, and on up into Montana.
Powder River is little more than a Texaco station and a bunch of pronghorn antelope looking at it. The traveler can buy a few groceries there, as well as gas, and drink a cup of coffee at the table in the corner before continuing on to Casper. The table was occupied when I arrived by three men and two women in Levi's, who regarded me with more skepticism than my out-of-state license plates seemed to warrant. But then rustling is still a recognized vocation in this part of Wyoming, where lack of water means spreads of a hundred square miles and larger, from which livestock is often taken to slaughter in Colorado and Nebraska, against the owners' wishes.
When I mentioned the name Cantrell, the biggest of the men said, "What do you want with Ed?"
"I want to talk to him." I added that Cantrell's lawyer had given me a phone number but no one had answered there.
One of the women said, "Ed was drunk at the sheep fair. We didn't think we'd see him for a few days, but he came through this morning."
"They don't have that telephone no more," said the man. He got up and moved behind the cash register. "You have to use the radio phone."
He showed me how. The operator had to place the call and call us back; only one person can speak at a time on a radio phone, so conversations tend to be short and to the point. Mine was listened to with something akin to rapture by the coffee drinkers, while wind rattled the Texaco sign out front.
The voice at the other end was cautious, a bit hoarse, gentlemanly. "You've caught me unawares," it said, as if that was more than a little unwise. Then it said, "All right, come on out. What kind of vehicle are you driving, and how many are you?"
Not everything I knew about Ed Cantrell was rumor; there were some facts. He had shot a man to death in Rock Springs in 1978, during the wild days of the oil boom, when Cantrell ran that town's law enforcement agency, such as it was. The dead man was one of Cantrell's own officers. Cantrell was tried for murder and acquitted after a dramatic courtroom battle in which he demonstrated the speed of his draw. The publicity made Cantrell famous in the intermountain West, but afterward he could not get a job in official law enforcement. Since he had worked as a free-lance range detective before going to Rock Springs, he went back to the range, dropping out of sight with a rare collection of guns, telescopes, and experiences.
Finding him had not been easy. I had called a security agency in Rock Springs where Cantrell worked for a time after the trial. Ed was a good man, said the one who had hired him, but he liked to work alone. He gave me the name and number of a lawyer. The lawyer said he would check with Cantrell, but couldn't reach him. Finally a secretary came up with an old telephone number and mentioned the name of a ranch outside Powder River.
It belonged to a Casper banker — 170,000 acres, about half BLM land, north of the highway. The dirt road split and after ten miles split again, without houses or trees or landmarks other than fence posts with an occasional sheep skull on top. There were thirty thousand sheep out there somewhere. If a person didn't pay attention to directions he might find himself out of gas and luck, stared at by antelope down from the Bighorn Mountains to look for water, and maybe by Ed Cantrell.
A sheep rancher had once told a newspaper reporter that he hired Cantrell to kill some sons of bitches and that Cantrell had stopped the rustling on his range. "Rustlers aren't afraid of the courts," the rancher said, "but they're afraid of Ed." What they were afraid of was his gun. Most everyone in the West had one, but Cantrell supposedly used his.
From the top of a ridge in huge, empty country, I looked down on a lambing shed and a dozen old herders' wagons. The abandonment of the herding system in this part of Wyoming had meant greater loss of unsupervised sheep, which rustlers supposedly loaded onto trucks in remote canyons at night. In front of a little prefab house stood a pickup painted military green. Even the cottonwoods out back had the harsh radiance of an overexposed photograph. I drove down and parked. The screen door opened and a wiry man with a full white mustache appeared on the porch, squinting in the sun. His denim shirt was gone at the elbows, and unbuttoned to reveal dog tags on a metal chain. "I'm Ed Cantrell," he said, shaking hands tentatively. It seemed as if he didn't want the right one tied up loo long. "Come on in."
He sat on the couch and fished a Camel from his pocket, moving with the care of someone prodigiously hung over. Ed Cantrell had a recruit's buzz cut and a recruit's body, but his face looked every bit of its fifty-seven years. While we talked he never took his bloodshot, cornflower blue eyes off mine. The room was spare as a barracks, with a television set and copies of the Bible, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Gun Digest, and Guns and Ammunition on a shelf. Eleven rifles and shotguns stood propped against the wall.
"I travel with them," he said. "They keep me from being so lonely. I touch then, and, well... they've been with me a long time. They give me a little stability."
There were two .30/06's, a legendary Weatherby, a Remington 12 gauge shotgun he had given to his father, now dead. The others had come to him gradually over thirty years of law enforcement, starting as an MP in Germany in 1948. He had few other mementos. The afghan on the couch had been knitted by his mother in Illinois. On the wall hung a framed Grandfather Achievement Award.
I asked if he had to shoot people in his present line of work. "Why do you think I'm here? Not because I teach Sunday school. This man hired me because he wanted something done about sheep stealing. You have to make it in the world, and this is all I know how to do. The sheep that come out of this country go somewhere. They don't disappear. It's my job to find out what happens and stop it. The fact that you're talking to me north of Powder River doesn't mean I might not be sitting in Texas tomorrow. I follow a lead anywhere. There are some pretty hard people involved in this. If I stay more than two nights in a place, I get nervous."
He gestured toward the four walls. "This is a good place for me to rest. Some of these rustlers I know, but they all know me." The question had not exactly been answered, but then Cantrell didn't care for direct inquiry. You had to work up to the point with him and then sit through some profound silences. "I'm a renegade," he said. "You have to understand that. I'm more vulnerable working alone, but I'm also more effective."
"What would you say if someone asked you about bodies in the Red Desert?"
"I'd say I didn't know what the hell he was talking about."
His father was a preacher. Cantrell worked for the Indiana State Police after the war and came west in the early fifties, looking for space. He found it in Wyoming, where he assisted various county sheriffs and gradually learned the trade of range detective. The ranchers apparently liked his style. "I don't just work for rich people, but if you can't afford me, you can't afford me." That meant twenty thousand a year, plus expenses. "This rancher is a good Christian man. I told him I wouldn't sign a contract. If I didn't like the way things were going, I'd roll my bed and move. I don't have any strings on me."
One of his two sons was killed by a drunk driver, Cantrell said, about the time Rock Springs boomed. He was offered the job of police chief, and accepted, to get away from his own misery. "It was the biggest mistake of my life."
The town had tripled in size, with thirty bars and reportedly twice as many pimps. "It was a zoo. People were lined up outside the bars twenty-four hours a day. The police would go in and get beat up and thrown out onto the street. We got rid of the pimps first. You know what a pimp looks like? Big floppy hats, big cars. I'd go up to one, and say, 'You know me, don't you? You know what my job is, don't you? You're not going to be here after today. I'm going home to dinner, and if you're still here when I come back I'm going to start shooting at you.' "
He did not get along with his undercover narcotics agent, whom Cantrell suspected of pocketing the contraband. One night, sitting in a squad car outside the Silver Dollar saloon, the two men fell into an argument, in the presence of two other cops. Cantrell shot the narcotics agent. His name was Mike Rosa and his death galvanized a city already charged with corruption and unbridled, murderous behavior. Cantrell said he shot Rosa in self-defense when he saw him reach for his gun; the two cops remembered it differently. Cantrell was in jail for three weeks before the ranchers of eastern Wyoming came to his rescue. "I had no money. They flew over from Casper," and hired an attorney to defend him. "The bond was five hundred thousand and those fellows just happened to have it."
The prosecution claimed that Cantrell had threatened to kill Rosa before; the charge was murder, since Rosa had no gun in his hand when it finally happened. The defense claimed that Rosa had reached for his gun, after cussing Cantrell, and that Cantrell flat outdrew him. "I had to demonstrate three times in the courtroom," Cantrell said.
He showed me now, reaching for an imaginary pistol in an imaginary holster and aiming at my head. "Can you imagine the pressure? After the first draw, you could see the jury relax, because they saw I was fast enough. Then they understood what had happened that night, and they all sat back and crossed their arms.''
Cantrell was acquitted, but as part of the bond deal he had to be out of Sweetwater County within four hours. "Four hours! Let that sink in. I had just bought a corner lot and house. I went back and threw my camping gear in the back of the Bronco and took off. I won't say my wife wasn't supportive — that would be cheap, and she's not here to defend herself " — but they had lived separately ever since. "I've paid a terrible price for what I am," he said. "I don't run with anyone, I don't trust anyone. It goes with the territory."
There was something appealing about Cantrell that went beyond the hangover and the pain in the eyes and the anachronism — a vulnerability associated with age, and isolation. Like so many Westerners he grew up in Webb's "humid regions," shooting squirrels out of leafy green trees and imagining an open, arid frontier. He had become the dream of every ten-year-old boy who went into a Saturday matinee between 1920 and the time television killed the Western.
"I want to tell you something about what my life is like."
Cantrell was driving his pickup toward a sheep camp, up a narrow winding road. He sat forward, hugging the steering wheel, watching the ridgelines, looking more like a Prussian artillery officer than a detective, with his mustache and gray crew cut. The immense landscape, undifferentiated to the urban eye, took on subtle variations in color: pinks and pale lavenders, and dark shadows on the edge of sunlight.
An unlit Camel dangled from Cantrell's lips. He wore no gun, but several were packed in the truck, which growled unnaturally, trailing water from a leaky radiator. He preferred a horse to pickups or all-terrain vehicles because a horse was quiet and did not raise a cloud of dust.
"From time to time I like to drink a few beers," he said. "I get a little unconscious. There's a bar in Shoshoni I go to. The owner's a friend of mine. I know the people there, they know me; I feel comfortable. I can sit and listen to the juke box and ogle them ole dried-up gals, like I like to do.
"One night this guy comes in and sits up at the bar. He's a cowboy-looking guy. He stares, which starts to bother me. Then he comes over and says, 'I know who you are, and I know you're after me.' Well, he's drunk, and I'm not. I say, 'I never saw you in my life.' He keeps on pushing. It gets heavy. I say, 'I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I never heard of you, and I'm not after you.'
"He goes out into the parking lot and comes back with a pistol under his jacket. I can see it. He sits up at the bar and keeps turning around and looking at me. Finally I tell the waitress to call the sheriff and get him out of there before I blow this son of a bitch off his stool. It turns out —now get this —that he's the former son-in-law of an old friend of mine. He beat up my friend's daughter, and my friend told him he was going to take out a contract on him with Ed Cantrell. Only trouble was, he never told me about it."
He laughed at the irony. "No matter what I do, I'm in a bad position." He added, almost wistfully, "People use my name." I had the impression that a multitude of arguments hung out there in the middle distance, waiting to be resolved.
"I'll tell you a story. I was riding down the road and saw this fella pushing some cows. I stopped to watch. He rode up and said, 'I know who you are, you son of a bitch! Don't screw with me,' and rode off again. His daughter was roping, so I drove over and asked her what was wrong with her daddy. She said, 'Who are you?' I said, 'I'm Ed Cantrell.' And she said, 'You're what's wrong with him.'
"I went to my boss and told him about it. 'I want you to know the situation,' I said, 'because if that son of a bitch talks to me that way again, I'm gonna blow him out of the saddle.'"
The road looped and rose some more; evergreen appeared — a sign of moisture. "You never know when somebody's watching you in this country,'' he said. "That's why I thought you might want to drive your own vehicle." He carried two sets of binoculars, one of them for night work, and a telescope on a gun stock. "Every time I look through it, I wonder if somebody's looking at me. Don't worry, this isn't the right time of year to get shot."
The right time was autumn — slaughter season for lambs, and maybe a human or two.
"Why hasn't some rustler already shot you?"
"I've often wondered that myself."
After reflection, he said, "It's dirty, boring, tedious work, but I keep coming back to it. I've laid up on these ole ridges many a cold night. I like to ease into a place, and stay a few days, watching. You get where you know who the people are, or you have strong suspicions. It's a close-knit bunch here, old-timers. They learned rustling from their dads. It's so isolated they get a bunch of sheep out there and shear 'em so there's no paint brand. All that's left is the earmark. They take 'em to another state and change that. It's easy."
The sheep camp consisted of a knockdown corral, a beat-up trailer, two saddled horses, and two Mexicans standing warily by, waiting to see if I worked for Immigration before they bolted. The ranch foreman came out and shook Cantrell's hand. He was Chris, a born-again Christian who worked as lay pastor of the Home of Our Shepherd nondenominational church in Powder River as well as ranch foreman. He invited me into the trailer to have coffee with an Anglo herder while Cantrell dipped water from the spring for his radiator.
"Ed's made a difference," Chris said. "Last year we lost three hundred sheep, down from a thousand. This year we haven't lost a one."
A thousand sheep were worth sixty thousand dollars, not counting wool and lambs. The economics of rustling made sense, when several hundred sheep could be packed into one cattle truck.
"Just having somebody on the place helps. That, and Ed's name. The price of lamb has turned some honest ranchers into thieves. It's a hard old way. Now Ed makes 'em think. If he catches you, will he arrest you or will he shoot you? I wouldn't want him to catch me rustling sheep."
"He's pretty quick," said the herder, watching Ed through the window. The herder wore a leather holster for his Skoal tin, above greasy chaps. "He can stand up and spin around like that." He snapped his fingers. "He can look right through you and make you feel like you've done something wrong." He sucked coffee through his mustache. "You'll be out working in the middle of nowhere, thinking you're all alone, and you'll turn around and there'll be ole Ed."
The murder trial in Rock Springs had raised both men's estimation of Cantrell. "After his arrest," said Chris, "he never tried to hide his face or anything. And it was hard on ole Ed."
On the way back down the mountain, Cantrell told me he had created his own job security. "I'll run the rustlers off this place, and they'll go next door. Then that rancher'll hire me. The winters are tough, though. You really feel 'em when you get older."
He planned to retire in three years, he said. He wanted to buy a little house on a quiet street in Casper and maybe help raise his daughter's son. He hoped people would let him be.
He stopped on the hill above the house, then rolled the pickup slowly down. He took a worn black holster from beneath the seat, and strapped it on after he had gotten out of the truck. He unloaded the revolver, a .38 with custom grips made of mesquite. "People are too rigid with handguns," he said. "You have to be fluid, and use the same motion every time you reach for it."
He moved his hand in circles, like a conjurer, starting at the bottom of the holster and coming up with the pistol. "It's a muscle-mind thing." He repeated the process twice, pulling the trigger each time. Snick.... snick.... "If you do something once, it's one thing. If you do it ten thousand times, it's something else. You don't stab. Just reaching for the pistol can get you into trouble — you break the motion and have to start again. This way I can begin to pull the trigger as I come up to here."
Snick....
"We're talking milliseconds. You drop your shoulder a little and shoot from the hip. It's the opposite of the FBI crouch, which is supposed to help your balance but really's bullshit because it takes too much time. My way, you don't have to absorb any lead. Don't shoot for the body, it's a waste of time. If you have to shoot him, shoot him in the face."
He turned to me, five feet between us. "This is knife range. Now the natural tendency is to shoot low. I have special grips, to level the gun when my finger's on the trigger. Automatics are especially bad because you have to bring them up. I can shoot with just the feel of this gun. That's why I like a heavy six-inch barrel. I shot Rosa with a six-inch barrel."
"Where?"
"Right between the eyes."
He reloaded and holstered the pistol, and turned as if to go into the house. Suddenly the gun was in his hand again, cocked, his wrist pressed against his hip. I looked at this slight, wiry man with his very blue eyes, and saw in them a natural, utterly impersonal force that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The gun went off with a terrific roar, throwing up dirt a dozen feet away. The bullet had nicked the upper edge of a red rock the size of a half dollar.
"Shooting high today," said Ed Cantrell.
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