They played golf, swam and went skeet shooting. All day long there is music in the Grove, and at night in some camps there are programs of entertainment: comics, singers, actors. With its dense concentration of extravagant war- and money-mongers, it's an easy object of protest, and 72 left-wing groups eventually joined Moore to form the Bohemian Grove Action Network. For example, at one point a Little League team came out that included Bohemians Bob Lurie and Peter O'Malley, the real-life owners of the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, in uniform. At dinner I sat across from a young broker who shared his wine with me and complained about his girlfriend. The Bohemian Grove is unique in American clubdom because it puts 2,000 to 3,000 mostly elite men together in the forest for up to sixteen days every summer, Phillips wrote. It's easy to imagine that many early Bohemians started out as laborers and had to remind more aristocratic visitors that social mobility was a cherished ideal. They're going to have Pavarotti there in November. Then an old friend came up and snagged his attention. . Hacked pictures of Powell partying with elites and actors at the top-secret resort were leaked by the original Guccifer in 2013. When they reached the water, they extinguished their torches. . Reporters seeking to write about the Grove had rarely been inside, and then usually for only a few hours at a time, but I was determined to have a good, long look, so I took care to blend. Started for the promotion of good fellowship among journalists and the elevation of journalism to that place in the popular estimation to which it is entitled, the club initially banned membership to publishers. There's a feeling of both great privilege and rusticity. The poster outside Monkey Block camp advertising this year's Grove play, Pompeii, featured a gigantic erection under a toga. The camps are decorated with wooden or stone sculptures of owls, the Grove symbol. One afternoon, for instance, the Valhalla camp deck was crowded with men drinking Valhalla's home-brewed beer and listening to singers. "What do you call this?" In the end I entered by stealth. "Well, I should give up putting it on my face and arms and spray it on my prick -- see if that'll do any good.". Of the top 800 corporations in the U.S. in 1980 30% had at least one officer or director at . Title. The rest of the questions were about the world outside the Grove. Membership in the Bohemian Club is by invitation only, and no women are allowed, either as members or guests, except for an occasional picnic for club wives. Today AIDS has put a damper on the Grove's River Road pickup scene, which Herb Caen used to write about in his San Francisco Chronicle gossip column. Two of the buses bore vanity license plates commemorating the 1989 presidential inauguration -- they had the words Kinder and Gentler stamped on them. "Owner slash developer," a man dictated to his secretary one morning. The club says it serves as a "refuge" from the strivings of the marketplace, and though it's true that actual deal-making is discouraged, I heard business being done on all sides. It was just past noon on Sunday, the middle weekend at the encampment -- the busiest weekend, with attendance approaching 2,200 men. To quote the sacred script of the grove's notorious Cremation of Care ceremony, which includes the requisite summer-camp assembly of robed men, a 40-foot . The friend and I leaned closer. (Then the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who had copies of his newspaper shipped up every day.) The club's nemesis here is the state of California, which keeps chipping away at the Grove's maleness, lately threatening to take away its liquor license and its tax-exempt status because it discriminates against women. The Grove had been a major factor in his "homesickness when you are forced to be away, as I was, for eight years." He was surely influenced by Prime Minister Rocard's Saturday afternoon Lakeside Talk, in which he dangled the most sanguine business expectations of the new European order. In the first 50 years of the club's existence the Bohemian Grove was comparatively accessible to outsiders, but in the 1930s, as the club gained influence and its redwoods provided a haven for Republican presidents, it grew quite secretive about its rituals and membership -- you won't even find the Grove on public maps. Chaperonage for adult women. When Ronald Reagan came to the green parasol the next day, the organ player broke into "California, Here I Come." Came the reply: "Now, don't be modest, George." Building a, Left and Right in Thinking, Personality, and Politics, Alternative Theories: Pluralism, State Autonomy, Elite Theory, Marxism, C. Wright Mills, Floyd Hunter, and 50 Years of Power Structure Research, Teaching about Corporate Power (London et al. Bohemians talk about roughing it, but at a privy in the woods near the river, there is a constantly renewed supply of paper toilet-seat covers. This morning we went bird-watching. These men were interested in something more than pseudo-Druidic rituals. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Although the talent shows put on by Merv Griffin and Art Linkletter were reckoned at least in past years to be good, the plays are pretty awful, heavily freighted with double-entendres about swollen members and the like. -- GWD.] After that I began working a dead West Coast relative's promise to have me out to the Grove one summer into a shaggy-dog story about my invitation. "Tom Johnson is here." Its mem-bership was dignified by Jack London, Mark Twain, Bret Harte and other literary roustabouts who had fetched up in the city after the Gold Rush. Members have cited their privilege to walk about in "various states of undress." Jeffrey St. Clairis editor of CounterPunch. According to 1979 figures, the average age of Bohemians is 55. Bohemian Grove is a place where men who grew up with their names on buildings can pee on trees and perform bacchanalian rites, unfettered by the pesky presence of women, unlanded gentry or any. The Grove's keenest adversary is Mary Moore, who lives in a counter cultural shantytown in nearby Occidental. Everything in the encampment is sheltered by redwoods, which admit hazy shafts of sunlight, and every camp has a more or less constant campfire sending a soft column of smoke into the trees. If he fails, he must wait three years to try again. The papers are open for research. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists. The owner of the lotion sighed. Dick Cheneys a Grover. This amalgam of pop Druidry, Klan kitsch and Fraserian mumbo- jumbo stems from the nineteenth-cen-tury passion for ancient ritual. Two thousand miles away, at the other end of the continent, the same impulse produced Mardi Gras in New Orleans, with its Mystick Krewe, its Elves of Oberon and the tribute paid by Rex to Comus. You know you are inside the Bohemian Grove when you come down a trail in the woods and hear piano music from amid a group of tents and then round a bend to see a man with a beer in one hand and his penis in the other, urinating into the bushes. Some years ago a gay writer called Ron Bluestein described his stint waitering at the Grove in a very funny pamphlet, A Waitress in Bohemia, in which he evoked the below-the-stairs homosexual culture fostered by a workforce mostly recruited from San Francisco. It would seem that this year's encampment was useful to him. But when again ye turn your feet toward the marketplace, am I not waiting for you, as of old? He sneered at nearby Abbey, a lowly place equipped merely with tents and believed to have a tradition of unmentionable prac-tices. I wrote "How do you feel about government and legal efforts to force the Club to admit women?" (Cronkite camps in Hill Billies along with George H.W. "Oh, Rocard is having a ball." Its only landmark is a kick-ass bar called the Pink Elephant, but a half-mile or so away from "the Pink," in the middle of a redwood grove, there is, strangely enough, a bank of 16 pay telephones. I never liked Kissinger when he was in office, said one guest. One featured a spurious design for a commemorative stamp of club member U.S. Postmaster General Anthony Frank relieving himself on a redwood. Hes spared the heftysign-up fee of around $10,000 and annual membership duesm and only has to pony up when hes invited, which is every two or three years. Down by the lake I saw three men lying on the ground, talking. The size also variesonly 10 to 15 persons can be accommodated at some, while others range up to 150. I said I was a guest of Bromley camp, where unsortable visitors end up. Two weeks later he plunged into Sir James Goldsmith's battle to take over B.A.T. Where else could such men hope to chat privately with the head of IBM, a cou-ple of Rockefellers, bankers galore, a Justice of the US Supreme Court and Charlton Heston? Even one-on-one he has that habit of smiling and cocking his head and raising an eyebrow to encourage you. On hikes I'd taken, my impression had been that the only people patrolling the ten miles of Grove perimeter were a guy at the Guard House on Smith Creek Road who spent a lot of time whittling a walking stick and ancient Bohemians taking the daily 10:00 a.m. open-backed bus tour. He did take a crack at toilet humor: "You know, I got to take a second to do something naughty here, since this is an all-stag arrangement. Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford 2d, Robert Trent Jones, the golf course architect, and former California Lieutenant Governor Ed Reinecke have all been stage hands, and actors have included Bing Crosby, David Niven, Ray Bolger, Edgar Bergen, Phil Harris and Dan Rowan. During the day, idleness is encouraged. There are few rules, the most famous one being "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" -- in other words, don't do business in the Grove. "You know, the press conferences were adversarial bouts -- they were there to trap me in something or other.". ", "My son was in Santiago, and David sent him letters of introduction to seven leading bankers in seven countries. The Bohemian Club began as a San Francisco institu-tion in 1872, founded by journalists and kindred lowly scriveners as an excuse for late-night boozing. Why the evidence that a significant portion of the Secret Government appear to be involved in some theatrical production, involving the use of womens clothes and lavish application of make-up? On his visit to the city, Oscar Wilde gazed around at the fleshy faces and handsomely attired members and re-marked, I have never seen so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-like looking bohemians in all my life.. "It's more than it's cracked up to be. The sudden appearance of men in striped jackets shows what a bouillabaisse of traditions the Grove is. The Bohemians will be hard-pressed to prove that they are a purely private club that falls outside the legal definition of a business, when clearly so many members participate for business-related reasons. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. Kissinger at the Bohemian Grove in 1991 with A-1 Steak sauce right behind him. One day I drove up to the front gate and got a daunting glimpse of what looked like the Grove sheriff, a barrel like figure in a Smokey the Bear hat. "We had rope trick. Bohemian Grove is an Elite men's Only! They told of how a man's heart is divided between "reality" and "fantasy," how it is necessary to escape to another world of fellowship among men. The peeing is ceaseless and more than a little exhibitionistic. According to the guest list, this year's attendees include George H. W. Bush, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and several former CIA directors. "Most of it. "I got slightly inebriated -- slightly! The contours of the Republican Party had changed, in a manner not entirely suited to the Club. A waiter in a red jacket dropped an uneaten chunk of the bright red cod into a waste bin, and the Bohemians at my table talked about presidents. Here, of an evening, Grovers can hear a banker or a Treasury official wend his way through the intricacies of Third World debt rescheduling, or listen to a European leader who will offer himself up for inspection. There is at least one officer or director from 40 of the 50 largest industrial corporations in the country, and an officer or director of 20 of the top 25 banks in the country, according to G. William Domhoff, author of The Bohemian Grove: A Study in the Ruling Class Cohesiveness.. More than 1,500 people are on the waiting list, and one man waited 10 years before becoming a member. When one character; a PR executive, expressed a desire to make his mistress an honest woman, she objected, reminding him of an old Bohemian saying: "If it floats or flies or fools around, don't buy it, rent it." The guest list can be revealing as well. Meanwhile, the Bohemians' new favorite son had arrived in camp the night before. It takes place on the Field Circle stage, which is wedged in between two camps, Pink Onion (notable for its pink sheets) and Cave Man (notable for big-deal right-wingers and a plaque commemorating Herbert Hoover). Monte Rio is a depressed Northern California town of 900 where the forest is so thick that some streetlights stay on all day long. He received his MA and PhD degrees at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively. Many an empire has of course been run by drunken men wearing make-up. For a while, in the early 1980s, Moore and BGAN thought they might actually liberate the redwoods. Others mentioned barbed wire and electronic monitoring devices at places where the Grove abuts Monte Rio, and helicopters patrolling the "ridge roads" that traverse the 1,000-foot hills and form the Grove's perimeter. In years past speakers at the lakeside chats have included Dwight D. Eisenhower, before he was President; Robert F. Kennedy, when he was Attorney General; Arnold Palmer, the golfer; Nelson A. Rockefeller; former Chief Justice Earl Warren; David Sarnoff, former chairman of RCA; Herman Wouk, the writer; Dr. Wernher von Braun of the space program; Neil Armstrong, an astronaut, Richard M. Nixon, who is a club member, and Mr. Kissinger. The camp has a false outer door and two overlapping walls that form an S-shaped entry. We talked about his guest days at the Grove, before he became a member in 1975 (two months after he left the California governorship, a week after George Shultz joined). One Bohemian, a patrician fellow with silver hair, wheeled in rage, saying, "I'll be goddamned." We were a few feet from the Lamp of Fellowship, and after looking me over he said he didn't know, this was pushing it. It was the sort of analogy I was to hear often in the nearly 60 hours I spent inside the Grove. For a good half hour the band warmed up the audience, playing the fight songs of many California colleges and the armed services and culminating with "The Star-Spangled Banner." Several of the Hoots jokes were at the expense of the homeless. That's the picnic scene at Russian River, where whitecaps and condoms meander down the foul brown estuary swirling amongst filthy young men who entertain disgusting Old Jew Pervs from Fire Island, Key West and West Hollywood. A guest card was out of the question: club bylaws have stated that a member-sponsor's application "shall be in writing and shall contain full information for the guidance of the Board in determining the merits and qualifications of the proposed guest." For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House. The encampment became controversial in the early Reagan years when reporters, still suffering the hangover of Carter populism, questioned club executive appointees about the club's sexist practices. The brewer finished tearily, his arms high above his head, fists clenched, "Take me back to Mandalay-ah. Some anthropologists of Boho culture even believe that the Grove is now encircled with gay resi-dential suburbs that have inevitably sprung up to ac-commodate these migrants. The Bohemian Grove hires young men. Big business shows up: Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, billionaire John Kluge of Metromedia. But best of all, there are the talent revue and the play. The club has a fa-mous motto, weaving spiders not come here, meaning No shop talk, but Tom laughs. Its members have included Herbert Hoover, a dedicated Bohemian who was known to fellow campers as the Chief'; Mr. Nixon; Lowell Thomas; Eddie Rickenbacker, and Eugene Pulliam, an Indianapolis newspaper publisher. Gray, who this year had brought along Union Carbide boss Robert D. Kennedy. The mood was American and bellicose. Bohemian discourse is full of oblique organ worship as well. The woman on the line now asked about the friend. Today the Grove is stocked with Reaganites. The main priest wore a pink-and-green satin costume, while a hamadryad appeared before a redwood in a gold spangled bodysuit dripping with rhinestones. Will California Save the Iconic Joshua Tree? That day as I sat writing a letter (actually my notes) at the Civic Center, a one-story building in which various amenities (Grove stationery, laundry facilities) are available to Bohemians, I overheard a large fellow in cranberry-colored shorts on the phone, bragging to someone back at the office. This rule is strictly adhered to. My imposture included misrepresenting myself in conversation with other campers, and my story kept changing as I learned more about how life inside was organized. At certain times of the year women are allowed to enter the Grove -- but only under "chaperonage," according to a 1980 statement by the club president. "Who was going to offend the president?" But there were none left; Bohemians had taken them all hiking. If nine of the 11 men on the membership committee favor a candidate, he may be admitted, upon payment of $2,500 initiation fee and monthly dues of $41. Eddie Albert is there, and United Technologies chieftain Harry J. I outfitted myself in conservative recreational wear -- a pressed plaid shirt, PermaPrest chinos, Top Siders, a sport jacket -- I always carried a drink, and I made it a point to have that morning's Wall Street Journal or New York Times under my arm when I surfaced (though television is against the rules, newspapers are sold at the Grove Civic Center). A "heifer" asked him why he was there. And the sand at the Russian River beach is traversed by coconut-fiber mats and rich figured squares cut from the carpets in the "City Club," the five-story brick Bohemian building in downtown San Francisco. "We had rope trick. Music sounded softly. She put at my service a mountain guide who demanded only that I keep the methods he devised for me confidential. We didn't do it that way, but it turned out that Grove security isn't quite what it's reputed to be. He never invited the chum back. He said it was a big shot in the arm for Monte Rios ailing economy. Though he cursed now and then, he seemed uncomfortable with the word damn, which he said almost sotto voce. This morning we went bird-watching." "This is for the campless, not the homeless," he was saying. And membership comes dear. At the opening of each summer season proper, on July 14 this year, there is the traditional masque, representing the banish-ment of Care. Holding meetings in the back room of a San Francisco Barbary Coast bar called The Jolly Corks, the club later extended membership to artists of all kinds, but the club symbol, to this day, is an owl, typifying the nightworking journalists, as well as wisdom. . There are increasingtly popular science talks at the Bohemian Groves museum. In 1971, when the press corps forced him to cancel his speech at the Grove, President Nixon had wired the club to say, "Anyone can be president of the United States, but few have any hope of becoming president of the Bohemian Club.". Upon arriving to the United States, he excelled academically and graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. Mr. Kissinger surprised everyone he did not speak, although he did spend time chatting with the members and their 200 guests (the number is strictly limited) about all manner of topics. Informed sources discount these stories somewhat. Bohemian Grove, 1991. The jokes fit right into the Grove's Ayn Rand R&R mood. Of course you must be with us," I heard his summons, too. MONTE RIO, Calif.When Gerald R. Ford, Henry A. Kissinger and A. W. Clausen joined 2,000 of the richest and most powerful men in the country at the annual ritual known as the Summer Encampment at Bohemian Grove near this sleepy hamlet of 997 last month, did they make decisions that will shape America's destiny, or was It merely the greatest men's party on earth?.
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