Sally calls her lawyer.

Sally calls her lawyer

Former San Francisco madam Sally Stanford.

By Doris Berdahl

In the past few weeks, this column, assisted by a bulging file of newspaper clippings in the SHS archives, has recalled the 20-year period in the 1960s and ’70s when former San Francisco madam Sally Stanford did her star turn on the Sausalito political stage. In the early years, running for Sausalito City Council under her legal name, Marsha Owen, Sally frequently employed one of her favorite campaign strategies: threatening to sue. In fact, once it was more than a threat.

After her narrow defeat in her first run for council in 1962, it didn’t take Sally long to pick herself up, dust herself off and plan her next assault on those she perceived as her enemies. Within a month of the ’62 election, she was asking that the voter registration list and the ballots of that year be impounded, claiming that her “interests and prerogatives” had been “flagrantly violated.” Writing to the city manager, she declared “there’s something rotten in Denmark” and demanded to see for herself if everything had been run “fair and square.”

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, she pointed out that 589 of her mailing pieces had been returned by the post office. She charged that her poll watchers had been “pushed out the door” of the Sausalito Woman’s Club and Christ Episcopal polling stations. A week earlier, the Chronicle had reported complaints from polling officials at those sites, who claimed that Stanford’s poll watchers had “sat down at the counting desks” and proceeded to “lean over the backs of the workers and breathe down their necks.”

In 1962, no legal action was attempted by Sally’s forces. But two years later, in the 1964 election, she again ended out of the winner’s circle, losing to Carl Gabrielson, a corporate executive; Mel Wax, a San Francisco newspaperman; and O’Hara Chapin, homemaker and member of the Sausalito Library board. The context of these losses is noteworthy. Both in ’62 and ’64, she took a dual approach to campaigning — unabashedly exploiting the vote-getting power of her former profession, at the same time running on a strong civic betterment platform. For the most part it contained conventional public improvement ideas and even some favorite planks of the environmentalists, normally her sworn enemies. More fire protection. Better policing. A local medical facility. More recreational areas. Limiting the spread of high-rise, multi-unit dwellings. Preserving the open beauty of Sausalito’s waterfront. (On the last two goals, her motives were clearly mixed. It certainly didn’t hurt that, if achieved, they would help preserve the bay views from her Valhalla restaurant. But, to give her credit, she ultimately put up much of the funding that kept development off Sausalito’s southern waterfront.) Included were several of her laissez-faire, pro-development themes, disguised in thinly veiled euphemisms , e.g., “fair and equitable” zoning laws. And in the splashy half-page ads she ran throughout her campaigns, her no-nonsense voice always came through, loud and clear: “Put a stop to some of the city council’s more outlandish follies!!”

In fact, so sober and businesslike was her campaign rhetoric that Chronicle columnist Lucius Beebe, long a fan of her earlier persona — before she abandoned San Francisco for solid citizenship in Sausalito — lamented that she’d had to embrace a “dreary standard of civic virtue, a melancholy degree of morality” in order to satisfy the demands of “that largely cheerless suburb across the Golden Gate Bridge.”

However, no amount of civic virtue and morality deterred a feisty Marsha Owen from filing suit in Marin Superior Court on May 12, 1964, claiming that the victorious candidates in the council election of that year were ineligible to take their seats, that illegal votes had been cast and that certain precinct boards were guilty of misconduct. She demanded that the ostensible winners relinquish their seats and be required to pay her court costs.

Her lawsuit came to nothing, and the defendants ultimately served their terms of office. But Beebe was no doubt heartened by the sight of the ex-madam sallying forth to do battle with the “sanctimonious ancients,” the “bogus artists, unsuccessful practitioners of belles letters, and self-identified aesthetes” of Sausalito who’d opposed her candidacy.

It took Sally three more tries before she won the chance to test his firmly-held conviction: that her presence at City Hall would profit Sausalito far more than the “gaggle of failures in beards who are now the town’s chief claim to Bohemian fame.”

Next time: Persistence pays off.