In October 1893, San Francisco society was rocked by the secret marriage of millionaire Charlie Fair and Maud Nelson, a well-known madam. The couple quietly crossed the bay to Oakland intending to elope without attracting attention. Instead, their wedding became front-page news.
Charlie was the son of Comstock silver millionaire and former U.S. Senator James G. Fair, while Maud had built a reputation and a business of her own in the city’s notorious late-nineteenth-century underworld.
The newspapers turned the marriage into a scandal, with increasingly outrageous stories about the couple. The San Francisco Examiner, in particular, crossed the line from sensational reporting into outright fabrication, even publishing a story that Charlie had been arrested for insanity.
Yet beneath the headlines was a much more complicated story. Maud appears to have become a stabilizing influence in Charlie’s life, eventually helping him reconcile with his family and take their place among San Francisco’s wealthy elite. Their remarkable story takes us from the city’s parlour houses and high-society mansions to European travel, the emerging world of automobiles, and a final chapter that would leave millions of dollars—and the question of what really happened—to be fought over in court for years.
TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to Frisco: The Secret History. I’m your host, Knox Bronson.
I have a wonderful episode for you today, the story of San Francisco madam Maud Nelson and her marriage to Charlie Fair, son of ex-Senator and silver mining multi-millionaire James G. Fair in October of 1893.
Before we get going, I want say thank you to Walter Haas at Graffeo Coffee Roasters at 735 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco.
Graffeo was founded in 1935 and has been selling coffee beans to the public and the best restaurants near and far ever since. I have been drinking Graffeo Coffee since I lived around the corner on Mason Street back in the Seventies. Graffeo offers a dark roast, light roast, and a Swiss-water decaf bean. If you can’t get to North Beach, you can go to Graffeo.com, that is g r a f f e o dot com and order there. They sell whole beans, or will grind to your request. I love starting my day with a huge mug of dark roast. I am really happy to say that Graffeo Coffee is a founding sponsor for the Frisco: The Secret History podcast. I am thrilled to be associated with such an historic and iconic San Francisco brand. Graffeo beans are, as it says on the package, “Simply the finest coffee in the world.” It’s true. Give Graffeo a try. You will thank me.
Maud and Charlie had taken the ferry on October 13th over to Oakland for the purpose of getting married quietly, secretly, without fanfare, in other words, eloping, for Charlie was to be a very rich heir and Maud had sold her parlour house just three days prior.
The marriage would be news.
And somehow the news got out. When the stories were not salacious enough for William Randolph Hearst, he simply made them up.
The Oakland Tribune reported that Charles, shortly after noon on Friday, October 13, 1893, had wedded a “tall and exceedingly stout blonde as prominent in her own social world as was Charles in his.”
The Tribune felt it necessary to add, “Fair was perfectly steady and did not appear to have been drinking.”
San Francisco papers were not as circumspect.
The Francisco Call displayed a banked, that is, a stacked headline on the front page.
WEDDED IN HASTE
CHARLES L. FAIR MARRIED IN OAKLAND
HIS WIFE CARRIE SMITH
SHE IS KNOWN IN THIS CITY AS “MAUD NELSON”
A DISGRACEFUL MESALLIANCE
THE EX-SENATOR’S SON THOUGHT BY HIS FATHER TO HAVE TAKEN THE STEP WHILE WILD
Wild being a euphemism, of course,
for drunk.
The paper reported:
Mrs. Fair, as she is now termed, is a handsome blonde of considerable embonpoint and was attired in a complete traveling suit of blue material. She wore a great number of rings which scintillated during the process of fixing on the wedding circlet. The groom wore a gray cutaway coat and light trousers and a white four-in-hand ornamented with a pin, but omitted the usual boutonnière. Both parties were apparently perfectly steady and fully alive to the gravity of the occasion.
After the ceremony, the paper reported,
“Mr. Fair was thirsty, and so was his bride, and the former contended there was nothing so good to quench the thirst as beer. Mrs. Fair protested feebly that that beverage was hardly à la mode on such occasions, but gracefully gave way to the man she had promised to obey. So beer it was. A quart bottle was ordered and quaffed in the garden at the rear of the restaurant, and then Mr. Fair asked what time the next train went to San Francisco. It was then a few minutes after 1 o’clock, and learning that a train was just due, Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. Fair left the restaurant (having paid for the beer) and entered the train en route for this city.”
Not to be outdone, The Examiner posted this four-column wide stacked headline that read like a vaudeville bill:
CHARLES FAIR TAKES A BRIDE WITH A HACK-DRIVER FOR HIS BEST MAN
THE YOUNG MILLIONAIRE WEDS CAROLINE D. SMITH
A CEREMONY WITHOUT MUSIC OR USHERS OR FAVORS AT ST. JOHN’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN OAKLAND
BEER FOR THE BRIDAL BANQUET
UNDER MANY NAMES THE BRIDE HAS BEEN KNOWN
THE EXTRAORDINARY FAREWELL TO BACHELORHOOD OF THE GROOM
A DROP INTO A CREEK AND AN EARLY MORNING TRIP OVER THE HILLS OF MARIN COUNTY CLAD IN A SINGLE GARMENT
SENATOR FAIR HOTLY RENOUNCES HIS SON
The article featured a drawing of the bride and a facsimile of the marriage license.
So much for keeping a low profile.
Strangely, the San Francisco Chronicle did not report on the wedding at all.
The marriage might have seemed sensational and strange, but even stranger were the stories the papers made up.
Well, the ending of the story is pretty strange as well, if not surprising.
[intermezzo]
Charles Nelson Fair was the second son of Comstock Lode millionaire and Nevada Senator Charles Lewis Fair. Senator Fair, or ex-Senator by the time Charlie got married, was a loathsome man. In 1883, Charlie’s mother divorced him for his endless and compulsive philandering. He was the least liked of the four “Irish Silver Kings” out of the Comstock. After he died, the publisher of a local newspaper, the San Francisco News Letter, wrote, “”Since James G. Fair died last week his name has been on everyone’s lips. I have yet to hear a good word spoken of him.”
Curt Gentry put it this way:
He was a bragging, miserly, strongly opinionated, self-righteous egotist, given to fiendish but unusually practical jokes (as when he once suggested that his wife secretly invest in a certain mining stock, knowing she couldn’t resist telling her friends, also knowing the stock to be worthless, then, when word was out and the market value rose, quickly disposing of his own shares).
A real peach of a man.
In the divorce, his wife got five million dollars, about $185,000,000 today, and custody of their daughters, Theresa and Virginia, who later married America’s richest bachelor, William K. Vanderbilt, Jr..
James got custody of their two sons, James and Charlie. He gave them each a $1000 a month allowance and, beyond that, had little to do with them, allowing them to run free across the very lively and hedonistic terrain of late nineteenth century Frisco.
Both James and Charlie were serious, dedicated alcoholics. James would die by his own hand at the age of twenty-seven in 1892, so weary was he of battling the bottle.
Charlie had a reputation as an habitual drunk, but he was apparently able to keep it a little more under control than his big brother.
With the passing of James, Charlie was set to inherit both his brother’s share along with own, $2,000,000, about $74,000,000 today, if he managed to make to age thirty.
Père Fair spent a lot of money on Charlie, hoping to curb his drinking, on such things as a European tour with a baby sitter, the well-known Keeley cure upon his return, a quack treatment of the day for alcoholism and opium addiction, which seemed to work for a while, a $70,000 string of racehorses to keep him busy, even a bodyguard hired to keep him confined and sober at his residence, the Maison Riche at Geary Street and Grant Avenue.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Frisco was know as the Paris of the Pacific, and The Maison Riche was one of a number of establishments to offer a world-class French restaurant on the ground floor for men and their families, lavishly appointed private rooms upstairs for meals and assignations for rich men and their mistresses, an exquisite high-stakes casino, other private rooms where a gentleman could engage a courtesan for an evening’s company. Lastly, there were luxurious apartments for wealthy bachelors on the uppermost floors.
Not the greatest place to attempt sobriety.
In turn, each attempted cure or diversion had failed to right Charlie’s floundering ship, beyond that brief period of sobriety after Charlie took the Keeley cure, much to the surprise of all..
In 1892, Charlie met Maud Nelson, as she was known in Frisco and was immediately smitten with her. She soon accompanied him to Europe along with Charlie’s babysitter. When Charlie returned to his old old drinking ways, he did so with great relish and great effect. Those around him blamed Maud.
And who was Maud Nelson?
She was born Caroline Decker Smith, born 1863 in New Market, New Jersey. Her father died when she was very young. Her mother remarried and the family moved to a small town in New Hampshire.
At sixteen she decided to make her way out in the world and moved to Chicago, where she worked as an actress, according to very intermittent letters she sent home. At last she moved out West, where the action and money was.
Curt Gentry tells it best:
[typewriter]
She was a smart woman, too, one who knew how to talk and how to dress. Consequently, she became very well known in the half-world, and at various times the names of several prominent men in this city were connected with her.”
She had used a variety of names: in 1889, when she resided on lower Powell Street, she called herself Mrs. Carrie Smith; in 1891 it was Miss Maud Thomas, her occupation “tailoress,” a designation that for a brief period was felt to be a more suggestive synonym for her calling than the long-popular “seamstress,” which, when listed in a city directory or telephone book, often attracted as many unsuspecting females as knowing males. She had also, at other times, used the names Maud Corrigan, Maud Ulman, and finally, in 1892, when opening her “lodgings” at 404 Stockton Street, Maud Nelson. It was about this time that she began keeping unsteady company with Charley Fair.
In the fall of 1892 she neglected her business long enough to take a trip to Europe with him. Upon their return, Charley’s escapades and drinking increased noticeably; both the Call and the Examiner generously gave Maud full credit, although habit and the failure of his horses at the eastern tracks undoubtedly contributed.
The week before the marriage had been a bad one for Charley, alcoholically speaking. (The elder Fair denied the period was of such short duration, explaining that the boy had been drunk for three months; whether he was bragging about his progeny or merely exhibiting his usual intolerance of the faults of others remains in question.)
Charley spent the early part of Wednesday evening in nearby Sausalito, gambling and drinking with friends. About midnight, he wandered off and fell from a bridge into a creek. About three the following morning, he was discovered wandering over the hills of Marin County in his underwear. Returned to his rooms at the Maison Riche, he slept most of Thursday, visited Madam Nelson that evening, and eloped with her the following day.
[end typewriter]
For reasons unknown, Maud and Charlie decided to get married on the downlow. Without telling a soul, they got on the ferry to Oakland in the morning.
I think I’m going to let the San Francisco Call of October 14, 1893, tell the story.
I already quoted the day’s headlines earlier in the episode. I do want the listener to remember the phrase, “A Disgracel Mesalliance,” which was tucked in middle of them.
The Call wrote;
[typewriter]
The fashionable and other worlds will be startled to hear of the marriage of Charles Lewis Fair, son of ex-Senator James G. Fair, to Miss Caroline D. Smith. No cards were issued, and the affair was so quietly conducted that not even the groom’s father was cognizant of its imminence.
There were no bridesmaids or groomsmen, no flowers, no formal breakfast or reception. The list of wedding presents is not available, nor the account of the floral decorations and the regulation description how the “happy pair left on a trip to Del Monte and the south.” Everything was strictly without ceremony. In fact, Charles L. Fair, after making considerable trouble for the last three weeks at his half-residence, half prison, the Maison Riche, left that hostelry on Thursday night with a healthy disgust on him, and determined to settle down in life. Yesterday morning he crossed the bay by the 10 o’clock boat, accompanied by his prospective bride, Miss Caroline D. Smith. Alighting at Washington Street, they strolled up that thoroughfare, and just at Eighth Street espied an empty hack. It was Patrick Mullan’s hack, and hailing that veteran, Mr. Fair engaged him to take himself and his fiancée to the City Hall, where the ardent lover got out. Returning to the hack, after a brief absence within the municipal headquarters, Mr. Fair had evidently ascertained that he could not be supplied there with the document needful to complete his happiness, for he instructed Pat to drive to the Hall of Records, where marriage licenses are issued by the County Clerk.
There Charlie procured the license.
“Say, old man,” cried the young swain to Patrick Mullan, who, of a romantic turn of mind, was already beginning to take quite an interest in these “fares” of his, “now, I want you to take us to some minister’s.”
“Right you are, sir,” replied that accommodating jehu, archaic slang for a fast driver. “Have you any preference for any of the cloth?”
“Nary a bit,” replied Mr. Fair carelessly, “somewhere near, though, eh Carrie?”
“Father Akerly’s ‘ll do, then, I guess,” considered the ready driver, and receiving an acquiescent, “Father Akerly’s goes!” he whipped up the 3:50 plug for St. John’s Episcopal Church on Grove Street, near Eighth.
[end typewriter]
Now, the phrase “3:50 plug” threw me. Ofttimes, in scanning these old newspapers, I encounter strange results. I was certain this was one of them. But, no, it was correct, so I googled the term. It turns out it was a nineteenth century slang term for a broken-down carriage horse and the reporter was endeavoring to make a joke. Later in the article, he referred to the horse as a tireless thoroughbred.
The article went on:
[typewriter]
Arrived at the church, Dr. Albert Church was luckily, or perhaps under the peculiar circumstances unluckily, found disengaged in the sacred edifice and at once pronounced his willingness to tie the knot, the license being all regular. But a little hitch occurred in the needed presence of two witnesses.
Pat, in his eagerness to aid in making the course of true love run smoothly, readily consented to be one, and Mr. Church suggested that at Mr. Trew’s residence, where he was studying, a young lady would be found who would act as the other. So Pat Mullan ascended the box again and fairly flew over to Dr. Trew’s house, where Miss H. M. Trew willingly accorded her consent to be witness No. 2.
It was now high noon—the fashionable hour for weddings—and Mr. Church, still ignorant of the identity of the pair, summoned them before him and performed the solemn rite of matrimony. Young Mr. Fair was noticed to be somewhat nervous and husky in the responses, but his bride was smilingly at ease.
The ceremony over, The register was duly signed and the signatures attested by the oddly assorted witnesses, and then Mr. Church asked a few questions. The newly made husband admitted without hesitation that his father was James G. Fair. The young man then pressed the customary $5 fee upon the minister, and after receiving the latter’s good wishes for himself and his wife jumped into the hack, where Patrick Mullan was once more waiting.
“Take us to Barnum’s,” shouted the young benedict, whom the dry formalities had evidently made thirsty. To Barnum’s restaurant, therefore, on the corner of Seventh Street and Broadway, Mr. Mullan drove his tireless thoroughbred, and there he was paid off and dismissed.
After a couple of beers, the couple made their way back to San Francisco.
[intermezzo]
When asked about his son’s nuptials, old man Fair did not disappoint. The Call reported him as saying;
“I never heard of that woman. Now, if you told me it was Maud Nelson, I should not be surprised. I have known the boy was running with a woman of the latter name. I recall the name because it is the same as an English admiral’s. Some time ago she was trying to get him to marry her, or rather trying to marry him, but I hardly thought he would be fool enough to be caught. Perhaps she may find she hasn’t made such a good financial match as she expected.
“Shall I attempt to break the wedding? Not I. I dare say the thing could be broken without trouble, as the boy has been wild for a week past, and had no idea of the step he was taking.
The Examiner spun it a little differently:
“Mr. Fair is a man of abundant self-control, yet last evening he could not conceal his distress and agitation when speaking of his son. His handkerchief was crushed between his hands, then laid upon the table before him, and again gripped as he spoke of the events of the day.”
Fair first informed his audience that he, of course, had learned of the wedding long before they had. “I sent out to learn who the woman Caroline D. Smith is, and I am told that she is that common woman known as Nelson. She came from New Jersey, I am told. I know nothing more. The boy is now nothing to me. I should not speak to him if I should meet him.”
The pair had gone into hiding. They had hoped to avoid the news coverage their wedding might generate. It had far exceeded their worst expectations.
This did not stop the Examiner. With no sightings of the two, and no real news to report, the paper simply fabricated some stories.
Curt Gentry claims this was a practice run for future William Randolph Hearst fictions that would have severe real world ramifications.
William A. Swanburg, in his book Citizen Hearst, published in 1961, observed that,
[typewriter]
“In truth, Hearst was not a newsman at all in the conventional sense, He was an inventor, a producer, an arranger. The news that actually happened was too dull for him, and besides it was also available to the other papers. He lived in a childlike dream world, imagining wonderful stories and then going out and creating them, so that the line between fact and fancy was apt to be fuzzy.” Sometimes, as in this case, there was no line at all.”
[end typewriter]
Interestingly, the Pulitzer Prize nomination committee recommended Citizen Hearst for the prize but the Columbia University trustees thought that Hearst was not dignified enough to be the subject of the award. It was the first time in 46 years that the trustees rejected a recommendation from the advisory board, and the news caused sales of the book to soar.
This is a quote I wish I had had when I wrote my last episode, on the Examiner’s 1947 campaign to portray the penniless writer Henry Miller and his friends living in the coastal hills of Big Sur as threats to Western Civilization. If you haven’t listened to it, I recommend it.
But back to Charlie and Maud.
The first story the Examiner created was that Charlie and Maud had taken the train to Los Gatos in the South Bay to hide out for a few days and had not registered in the regular hotels but were hiding out in smaller resorts, andthat for breakfast Charley had eaten his usual repast, consisting of four eggs so soft-boiled that he could drink them with beer.
The paper attributed a fictional quote to Charlie: “I don’t care. She is my wife now, and the public can think what it likes. I like her, and that is all there is to it. I have married her—not the whole public.”
The other story was a shade darker. The paper reported that Charlie had been arrested on a train in the east bay. The headlines read:.
ARRESTED AT PORT COSTA / FAIR IS CHARGED WITH INSANITY AND BROUGHT BACK TO THIS CITY
The article stated that a deputy sheriff had removed Charley Fair from the train at Port Costa after having received a wire from the Society for the Protection of Persons Charged With Insanity, and that he was at this moment under custody and en route back to the city.
The Society for the Protection of Persons Charged With Insanity knew nothing about the telegram, which claimed the Society had issued a warrant for his arrest. Indeed, it had originated in the offices of the Examiner. One of Hearst’s minions had wired the sheriff purporting to be from the Society, instructing him to board the train on which Charlie and Maud were traveling, and arrest him for being crazy.
As reporters and artists scrambled to get to Port Costa from San Francisco, quite a trip in those days, the young sheriff had boarded the train armed with the telegram to effect the arrest. He was only able to delay the train’s departure for two hours and, finally, Charlie and the railroad officials convinced him, rightly, that he had no authority, without an actual warrant, to arrest Charlie.
The train left the station and the Examiner crew got there fifteen minutes later. So, no Charlie, no arrest, no bringing him back to Frisco.
The next day, the San Francisco Call gleefully pilloried the Examiner for the fake headlines and story. William Randolph Hearst didn’t care. His front page headlines read:
CHARLEY FAIR DISINHERITED / HIS FATHER CUTS A BEQUEST OF ABOUT FIFTEEN MILLION TO ALMOST NOTHING / A CODICIL LEAVES THE YOUNG MAN $100 AS A PENALTY FOR MARRYING A DISREPUTABLE WOMAN
The story went into great detail about how many times Charlie had tried his father’s patience and this, the marrying of Maud Nelson, well-known madam, was the final straw.
But even this wasn’t true, although sometime later, Senator Fair wrote Charlie out of his will.
Charlie and Maud traveled Europe for almost a year. Upon their return, it seems William Randolph Hearst no longer considered them circulating-boosting news. They bought a flat on Van Ness Avenue.
Friends noticed something peculiar. The couple seemed quite happy together. Maud was a moderating influence on Charlie, including his drinking.
Ultimately, a reconciliation with his father occurred and Charlie was back in the will, an heir to his father’s vast fortune.
On December 29, Ex-Senator and Comstock Silver King James G. Fair died, leaving the bulk of estate, valued at 45 Million dollars, almost two billion dollars today, to Charlie and his two sisters.
Curt Gentry wrote:
[typewriter]
Within the next several years, more than a dozen suits were filed by persons asserting themselves to be secret wives or illegitimate children of the deceased. Several of the Fair millions went into defeating these claims.
The parade of claimants served one beneficial purpose—the Fair children were brought back together. In this, the former Maud Nelson played a considerable part; “by what miracles of diplomacy, tact, and shrewdness can only be imagined,” Lewis marvels, “she not only had kept the erring Charley under reasonable control but had gradually won, first the toleration, then the friendship, of her sisters-in-law and their friends.”
It couldn’t have been easy; Charley was prone to slip back into his old habits, and many doors remained closed to them. In February 1896, the trust provisions of the original will were broken, and Charley came into his share of his father’s estate, fourteen months before his thirtieth birthday.
[end typewriter]
Maud and Charlie were now happy and very rich. Charlie, under Maud’s guidance, seems to have evolved into what we call in AA, a binge drinker, as opposed to a maintenance, or daily, drinker.
He seemed to have acquired a zest for speed over land, starting with the race horses his father had lent him the money to buy, in hopes of distracting him from the bottle.
He began buying speed boats known as naphtha launches, a kind of steam powered boat, but soon was obsessed by the horseless carriages that were now being sold in Frisco. When a faster one came on the market, Charlie bought it. Curt Gentry describes him as being addicted to the thrill of speed.
In 1897, Charlie inherited his share of the other half of the family fortune from his mother and he and Maud were fully welcomed back into high society.
They spent the summer of 1902 in France, visiting Charlie’s sister and her husband, William Vanderbilt, of the American steamboat and railroad fortune Vanderbilts, at their estate in Trouville on the coast of the English Channel in the northwest of France.
Charlie had bought a new car a Mercedes Simplex, with an unheard of sixty horsepower engine and a reputed top speed of eighty-five miles an hour. It was very popular with the European aristocracy.
Charlie was determined to beat William’s two-and-a-half hour record for the drive to Paris from the estate.
In August, Charlie, Maud, and a chauffeur left for Paris one sunny morning. Charlie was driving. Maud sat next to him. The chauffeur sat in the back.
While France maintained the best road system in Europe, roads were still unpaved dirt or crushed stone, designed for horses and carriages.
Outside of Évreux, about half-way to Paris, Charlie lost control of the car and veered off the road. The chauffeur was thrown free and lived.
Charlie and Maud were still in the car as it collied with a large tree and died quickly.
Because of the size of the fortune involved, some ten million dollars, almost four hundred million today, it was argued ad nauseam as to who died first, for the family of the second one to die would be the heirs. Nearby peasants had heard the car crash and hurried to the scene. One saw Charile’s foot jerk before he he died. Another claimed to have seen Maud’s hand tremble right after that. Challenged, some would change their stories.
Needless to say, litigation went on for years and years, as claimants to the fortune continued to materialize until 1917, but that is a story for some other podcast.
[intermezzo]
It is said, and it is true, that all we have is today.
The dissolute disinherited scion and the runaway parlor house madam surmounted the obstacles, defied the naysayers, and proved the fabricators wrong. No newspaper ever mentioned how happy they were. They built a life together for ten years of days, one day at a time.
Charlie Fair was 35, Maud Nelson Fair was 39 when they died.
[intermezzo]
Oscar Wilde wrote, in “The Picture of Dorian Gray, “It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.
It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world.”
The picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890. Oscar loved the American West and San Francisco in particular, which he claimed to be the second-most beautiful city after Naples, Italy, and certainly the most free. He had visited in the early 1880s. He planned to return to live here but never made it back.
My focus here are primarily the last two decades of the San Francisco that Oscar and the rest of the world loved.
Please consider joining me on Patreon to support the Frisco:The Secret History podcast. There are perks and there is a free membership as well. I know, everybody’s got their hand out now. You can find the podcast on the website and anywhere fine podcasts are served, where you can subscribe for free and receive all episodes.
If you enjoy the podcast, please tell your friends about it, especially those who enjoy San Francisco or true crime history. Word of mouth is the absolute best means of promotion for any creative endeavor in this world of algorithms and the ceaseless barrage of ads, notifications, and appeals on every digital platform. If you are aware of some particular aspect of San Francisco history in the thirties and forties you would like me to research, or a story to tell, please let me know. If you are an expert in some aspect of that same era and would like to share that expertise on the podcast, also please let me know.
Once again, I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Thank you for listening. Until next time, get a little crazy and call it Frisco.