Templeton Crocker

Charles Templeton Crocker was born September 2, 1884 in San Francisco, California, the only son of Charles Frederick Crocker & Jennie Easton Crocker. Both parents died when he and his sisters were young, his mother dying shortly after the birth of the youngest sister Jennie. He and his sisters continued to live in the family's Hillsborough estate with their maternal grandmother, their inherited fortune put in trust until they came of age. At 21, Templeton was worth an estimated $5 million, which grew with investments to $15 million. Templeton attended Yale, where he palled around with Cole Porter, and returned to San Francisco to live a Cole-Porterish sort of life, based out of a thirty-seven-room Italian villa on a 118-acre estate in Hillsborough.[1] Templeton married Helene Irwin, heiress to a large sugar plantation fortune, at the home of her father in San Francisco on February 28, 1911.

Crocker collected rare books and in 1922 refounded the California Historical Society. A few years later, the multi-faceted multi-millionaire made history, as a librettist. He wrote the lyrics for an opera "The Land of Happiness," a Chinese fantasy-extravaganza that premiered on August 4, 1917. After the success of this Bohemian Grove opera, written with composer Joseph Redding, Crocker was encouraged to mount an ambitious, professional production. After the end of World War I, Crocker and Redding visited Paris in search of talent to design and produce his opera renamed "Fay-Yen-Fah". They created a partnership with Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev hired a youthful George Balanchine as choreographer. [2]Dancers included legends Ninette de Valois and Alexadra Danilva. The brilliant dancer/painter Hubert Julian "Jay" Stowitts, aka “America’s First Ambassador of International Culture,” was employed to create authentic and sumptuous costumes and sets. The research and development phase of the project took three full years.

In February 1925, Crocker and Redding traveled to Monte Carlo where their opera had its European premiere at the Opéra de Monte Carlo. It was the first time in the history of music that a full-length opera composed by an American, on a libretto written by an American, was produced in Europe. [3] In mid-January 1926, Gaetano Merola, founding director of the San Francisco Opera Company, gave Fay-Yen-Fah its American debut at the Columbia Theater. San Francisco society appeared in large numbers, making the performance a dazzling success.

A music critic from the San Francisco Chronicle, praised Crocker and Redding’s accomplishment calling the opera “a refreshing breeze in a hothouse of artificiality.” Crocker brought it back to Monte Carlo in 1932 with Balanchine and Stowitts and danseuse Tamara Toumanova in the principal role. It was revived in the spring of 2009, again in Monte Carlo, for a special performance using the original costumes. Two hundred members of the Bohemian Club came to the opening. Redding and Crocker received the Ribbon of the Legion of Honor from France for his opera in 1926.

Templeton was one of the millions of fair-goers who became enamored with the geometrical motifs of Art Deco at the Paris Exposition of 1925. He would return to France a few years later to commission fashionable furnishings and objects for his bachelor getaway in the Russian Hill section of San Francisco.

Templeton hired none other than Jean-Michel Frank, Pierre Legrain, Jean Dunand and Madame Lipska to execute the decor for his modernist apartment. French Art Deco at this level was rare in the United States at the time and rarer still in the hills of San Francisco. Crocker ordered wall reliefs, screens, furniture and accessories — some 400 objects in all. [4]

When everything was installed and his divorce from sugar heiress Helene Irwin became final, Templeton, nicknamed “Prince Fortunatus” by his classmates at Yale, moved into the apartment with longtime friend and valet-butler Thomas Thomasser. Thomas, Templeton and his Green Street apartment became the talk of the city’s social elite. The building sat atop a steep flight of steps. The glass-enclosed penthouse offered spectacular vistas of San Francisco Bay. Guests marveled at Crocker’s stunning aquariums of exotic tropical fish, dramatically lit and set beneath the level of the floor. Shark and camel skinned furniture highlighted the living room, while sheepskins served as wall hangings. The dining table, composed of crushed eggshells, was baked and carefully lacquered. Especially alluring, Crocker’s personal bathroom, had been built around a semicircular black tub with matching toilet fixtures.

Jean Dunant, still widely considered the most important designer of French Art Deco, was charged with finishing the bedroom, dining room and breakfast room. The Crocker/Dunant collaboration was ground breaking.

Vogue Magazine declared in 1929 that it was, “perhaps the most beautiful apartment in the world.” It was the French master’s most important commission in the United States and one of the earliest luxury apartments in America completed in the modern style. [5]

Templeton devoted himself intermittently to the management of the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square, which the Crocker family financed and built just before the Earthquake. He went on to hire brilliant San Francisco architect Timothy Pflueger to turn the Patent Leather Bar and Orchid Room at the hotel into a sleek and curvaceous Art Deco lounge. He hired Ansel Adams to take publicity shots (Crocker’s uncle Ansel Easton was Adams’s uncle by marriage and his namesake). Templeton made a sizeable mark in art history as an early innovator in bringing the French Art Deco movement to the U.S.

After his childless marriage failed, Crocker lived an increasingly alternative, Bohemian lifestyle and indulged in numerous flights of fancy. In the late 20s, Crocker commissioned Garland Rotch to design and build an extraordinary two-masted, 118-foot-long, black-hulled schooner. Her galley and interior furnishings were the finest in pleasure craft equipment and she had a considerable spread of canvas. It was christened "Zaca" a Native American word which means “Peace” on April 12, 1930 by Academy Award winner Marie Dressler.

The yacht provided the ever-restless Crocker a unique, luxurious escape and boasted sleeping accommodations for 18. Staterooms, glamorous hotel-like apartments reflecting favorite Art Deco motifs were done in combinations of imported woods, including beams of Alaskan cedar and panels in teak and primavera. The total cost was over $200,000.

Garland Rotch was Zaca’s first captain. With Rotch, Templeton sailed his yacht around the world covering 27,152 miles and calling at 50 ports including Marquesas, Tahiti, Cook Islands, Pago Pago, Trobriands, Bali, Java, Singapore, Ceylon, Aden, Arabia, Egypt, Malta, Cannes, Teneriffe, Puerto Rico, Panama, Guatemala, Manzanillo, and Ensenada. It was the first time a private yacht circumnavigated the globe from the West Coast. Crocker sailed smiling seas. The weather was perfect with only 43 hours of gale in the Mediterranean.

“It must have been the most perfect yachting adventure that anyone ever had,” Crocker said. In 1933, Templeton wrote a narrative of his one-year journey cruising around the world in his grand yacht under the title "The Cruise of the Zaca." [6]

After the globe spanning odyssey, the “Commodore,” as Crocker insisted on being called while at sea, ordered the yacht transformed into a floating laboratory for scientific expeditions. The yacht lost completely the appearance of a pleasure craft. Four temperature controlled tanks with running sea water were installed on her decks to bring back live fish. Six voyages in all between 1932 and 1938 transported ichthyologists, ornithologists, anthropologists, zoologists, botanists, and photographers from the California Academy of Sciences, the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Zoological Society and other academic institutions.

During an expedition to the Galapagos Islands for the California Academy of Sciences in 1932, Crocker and crew explored some of the previously untouched areas in the interior of several islands. Together they compiled collections of 400 stuffed or frozen birds, 3,000 plant specimens and 331 live fish. Artist Toshio Asaeda painted over three hundred water colors of fishes, crabs and marine life and took over 1400 photographs. Academy officials declared the expedition of great and permanent value to science. The perpetually tanned Templeton described the journey as “full of adventures,” and promptly offered to host a follow-up expedition that would pass through the Galapagos in 1934 on its way to Polynesia.

One species of finch not known since the time of Charles Darwin and supposed to be extinct was found to have survived on some of the islands. The birds of these islands were of exceptional interest, not only because of their many remarkable peculiarities, but because the study of them was largely responsible for the formulation of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The most important single accomplishment of the expeditions according to some was the penetration of Indefatigable Island (now called Santa Cruz) and the ascent of its main volcano. The challenge was not one of delicate mountaineering technique, as it was only a 2,690-foot mountain, it was a matter of perseverance and endurance in fighting through tangles of upland rain forests, dense thickets of dark green mangroves, and a most extraordinary forest of 20-30 feet cactuses. The mountain was named after Crocker in honor of his conquest of that peak. [7]

Crocker crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean from California to Asia and from the Arctic to Antarctica contributing much to the world of science. A new species of sea snake, found while exploring a brackish lake on Rennel Island, was named “Laticauda crockeri” after Templeton Crocker following his expedition to Western Polynesian and Melanesian Islands.

Crocker went on two oceanic adventures along the Pacific Coast from Baja California to Columbia with William Beebe, renowned naturalist, marine biologist and world deep sea record holder. Beebe described his two expeditions on board the Zaca in his books "Zaca Venture" and "The Book of Bays," in which he emphasized his concern for threatened habitats and his dismay at human interference with ecosystems.

In 1934–1935, Crocker went on a sea borne investigatory enterprise with Harry L. Shapiro, anthropologist extraordinaire. Shapiro set out to measure mixed-race islanders, including the descendants of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island. The study came to influence U.S. racial thought, adding impetus to the condemnation of racism in science.

Scholars accompanying Templeton determined that the Commodore was troubled with an eccentric and compulsive personality. He was indeed a complex character. Templeton grew up pampered, in an exceedingly wealthy family. He had a scenic town in California’s wine county named after him at aged two. Templeton, however, suffered the loss of both parents by aged ten and thereafter struggled to feel worthy of his great fortune. The victim of intense mood swings and prone to alcoholic binges, Crocker could be both a generous and entertaining host and a demanding Captain Bligh. “It is curious,” Shapiro observed, “that so introspective a man with ultra-sensitive feelings should be so callous about inflicting torture on others.” [8]

William Beebe, in spite of some tensions, dedicated his second book to Crocker writing, “Not only must Mr. Crocker be given full credit for the inception and carrying out of the expedition and for the constant care that he took to see that every wish of ours was provided for, but especial thanks are due to him for his active part in capturing, sorting, labeling and preserving specimens, thousands of which passed through his hands.” [9]

Due to a lack of available patrol ships, the US Navy seized all privately-owned ships over 70 feet in length after World War II broke out, fearing that the Japanese might attack California. The Zaca was again converted, this time for military use; she was outfitted with anti-aircraft machine guns and stationed off the California coast to patrol for enemy ships and rescue downed pilots. At war’s end, the craft was sold to motion picture actor Errol Flynn, who allegedly sailed her with “full cargos of passionate women.” [10] Zaca became the true love of his life. It is featured prominently in the 1947 Orson Welles film The Lady from Shanghai. A documentary short film "Cruise Of The Zaca" which features Errol Flynn aboard his vessel was made in 1952. Press reports referred to the storied vessel as “the sexiest yacht in the world.” [11]

Templeton was the grandson of Charles Crocker, one of the four chief builders of the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. His uncles were banker and investor William H. Crocker, president of the Crocker Bank and George Crocker, second vice-president of the Southern Pacific Railroad. His cousin was the mystic, princess and author Aimee Crocker. His great uncle Edwin B. Crocker built Sacramento's Crocker Art Museum.

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*In the Wake of the Zaca, 2009

• Slevin JR (1934). "The Templeton Crocker Expedition to Western Polynesian and Melanesian Islands, 1933. Notes on the Reptiles and Amphibians, with the Description of a New Species of Sea-snake". Proc. California Acad. Sci. 21 (15) 183-188. (Laticauda crockeri, new species, p. 186).

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• California Historical Society - official site