Ep. 2 ~ The Hawaiian Princess Who Wanted To Sing

I have a wonderful episode for you today, the story of the Hawaiian princess who came to San Francisco to open a nightclub where she could sing. We will again encounter lawyer Jake Ehrlich, of course. The McDonough Brothers, who controlled all the vice in the city, Chief of Police William Quinn and his corrupt Captain Fred Lemon at Central Station, also make appearances.

The Princess came to California in 1930. In 1933, she opened the Club Kilokawa on Bush St., full of pictures of Diamondhead and Waikiki Beach, palm fronds, coconuts, and prostitutes in grass skirts. It was very popular place.

However, the Princess refused to make the payments to the McDonough Brothers' graft machine and drama ensued. Ultimately, the Princess made some remarks to the press after a Grand Jury appearance. Her short speech led to the creation of Atherton Report of 1937, which shook Frisco to her core almost as badly as the great quake of 1906.

Transcript

Welcome to the Secret History of Frisco Podcast. I’m your host, Knox Bronson. We have a wonderful episode for you today, the story of the Hawaiian princess who came to San Francisco in 1933 to open a nightclub where she could sing. We will again encounter lawyer Jake Ehrlich, of course. The McDonough Brothers, who controlled all the vice in the city, Chief of Police William Quinn and his corrupt Captain Fred Lemon at Central Station, also make appearances.

Alice Kamokilaikawai Campbell was born in Honolulu on March 17, 1884, from very illustrious stock.

Her father was James Campbell,   born on February 4, 1826, in Derry, Ireland. At the age of thirteen, he boarded a ship and joined his brother John in New York City, where they followed in their father's footsteps as carpenters. 

In 1841, at the age of 15, James joined a whaling crew bound for the South Pacific; the vessel was shipwrecked in the Tuamotu Islands there. He and two shipmates survived by clinging to debris and floating to a nearby island. They were captured by natives and held as prisoners. Quite resourceful even at that very young age, James persuaded the chieftain of the tribe he could be useful by using his skills to make repairs. The chief spared their lives. After a few months, James managed to escape on a ship bound for Tahiti, where he settled and lived for several years.

In 1850, the young Irishman boarded another whaling ship which took him to the port of Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui. James took up carpentry again to make a living. He married Hannah Barla, who died in 1858, when he was 32.

In 1860, James formed a partnership to build a sugar processing plant. In short order, he became one of the wealthiest people in Hawaii.

On October 30, 1877, James, then 51-years old, married a 19-year-old royal woman, a daughter of the Kingdom of Hawaii, descended from the Kalanikini line of Maui chieftains, Abigail Kuaihelani Maipinepine.

In 1878, they moved to Honolulu. In 1884, the Princess gave birth to the third of eight children, Alice Kamokilaikawai Campbell.

The family was close to Queen Liliʻuokalani and Alice, as a child,  often played at the Iolani Palace during the reign of King Kamehameha. After her father's death, she inherited part of her father’s estate, one of the largest in the Hawaiian islands. Her annual income, at times ran as high as $200,000, (almost five million dollars today), made her one of the wealthiest people in Hawaii, though she once shocked the Campbell Estate trustees by applying for public welfare when they tried to withhold her monthly allowance.

At 21, Princess Alice married a sugar plantation owner, Walter Macfarlane on June 15, 1905. They had five children. They divorced in 1929.  

She made her way to California, where she attended The College of Notre Dame in San Jose. I cannot ascertain what she studied there or if she earned a diploma, but within a few years, she moved to San Francisco. She wanted to open a nightclub where she could sing.

I am going to let the Master himself, Jake Ehrlich, Esquire, whom we’ve encountered before and will do so again many times, tell the story himself. In his 1966 autobiography, “A Life In My Hands,” he writes:

Ordinarily one is privileged to run into a lady like Princess Kamokila not more than once in a lifetime. Ordinarily this is enough.

The Princess was strictly hundred-proof royalty; half of her at least, and it would have been difficult to decide which half, as all of her was equally attractive. Her mother had been Princess Kualhelana of Hawaii’s royal ruling house, and her father was James Campbell, a ten-millionaire sugar and pineapple king.

If the Princess, who called herself Mrs. Alice Campbell in her less regal moments, was comely and charming, she was also a little strange and naive in respect to non-Polynesian ways. Her life in San Francisco was complicated, unpredictable and insensate in a daffy, feminine sort of way.

She was a great admirer of vocal music, especially her own, so she decided to open a night club featuring herself and her singing. Prohibition was on its way out and the Princess expected to cash in on this new development, although the procedures for conversion from speakeasy drinking to more open public entertainment had not been accomplished and no one was sure what was legal and what was not.

Her establishment was called the Club Kamokila, and she had located it in what had been the basement Sunday School of a defunct Methodist church on downtown Bush Street, a thoroughfare known as Lysol Alley. The number of young ladies who lived there made their livings—as the idiom of the time had it—"the best way they knew how."

The Princess came to see me early in her career as a dispenser of Hawaiian hospitality.

"Jake, I want to run a lively place," she said, with all the sophistication of a ten-year-old who announces that she intends to make mud pies, "and I expect to pay my way. Who are the people who usually get paid?”

I told her about the McDonough brothers but I also told her she'd be foolish to pay off simply because others did. I advised her to meet only her legitimate bills and to stay away from matters where cash-and-carry "juice" was required. Il they attempted to squeeze her I'd take them on. I welcomed a chance to get a handhold on the McDonoughs, and twist.”

The Master continued, “The Club Kamokila's former churchly atmosphere had been well disguised with palm fronds, coconuts and art studies of grass-skirted ladies, as well as pictures of Diamond Head and Waikiki, and the lights had been turned down and nearly out. There were abundant soft music and hard drinks, and many of the young ladies from the nearby apartments no longer had to risk pneumonia and police attention on the damp Powell Street pavements.”

Due to her association with Jake along with her refusal to make the payoffs the police demanded, she became the target of ongoing harassment. 

First to come after her was The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, the organization which collects royalties for the music written by its composer members. All nightclubs and concert halls pay an annual fee to ASCAP, even businesses with just jukeboxes or DJs. ASCAP claimed she'd been singing "You're Gonna Lose Your Gal" without fee payment, and they made it clear that she was going to lose her club if it continued. 

She went to Jake and he made short work of setting things straight. The question was, “Who tipped ASCAP off?” No one knew, but as soon as that was settled, the police showed up once again demanding money. Per Jake’s advice, she refused.

The harassment really bothered her. She and Jake knew that the police never bothered the hookers working out of lavish upstairs rooms along nearby Lysol Alley, but that was most likely due to the fact that they were making the required payoffs to the McDonough machine. Not that Princess didn’t employ equally friendly women in grass skirts from the local sidewalks, she just didn’t like to be unfairly singled out.

  To increase the pressure on her, special-duty officers arrested her bartender and manager one evening for selling alcohol at the club. Even though Prohibition had been repealed, there was still a California law on the books and the legalities of selling booze were up to interpretation, let’s say.

But Central Station Captain Fred  Lemon wasn’t done: he stationed a permanent detail of six uniformed officers in the club’s doorway to discourage customers. Can you even imagine that happening today? The police stationing six, count them six, police officers at the door of a nightclub they were trying to shake down for a monthly protection pay-off?

In court, Jake easily got the charges against the bartender and manager dismissed. He asked around and found that not one other drinking establishment in San Francisco had been harassed like that and it was then he realized that, as he put it in his book, “They”were working Alice in Blunderland over. And me, by indirection.” Alice in Blunderland was a term of affection of his for the Princess. They was the McDonough Brothers and the complicit cops.

The police encouraged the neighbors to file complaints that the music from the club was too loud.

People who had made no outcry at having their Sunday morning slumbers violated by "Nearer My God to Thee" in prior years found nightly versions of "The Cockeyed Mayor of Kaunakakai" on the steel guitar more than they could bear. 

The Princess simply turned the music down and that was that.

But the harassment continued as did the demands for payoffs. They came after her for not having a dance permit for Club Kamokila. This was serious.

In each of the San Francisco’s fourteen districts, two to four special-duty men, referred to as “bucket men,” operated as bagmen for the district captains. 

San Francisco Police district captains of that era were not only unsupervised but answerable to no one as to their whereabouts at any hour, even in emergencies. The bucket men, being accountable to only their unaccountable captains, were enthusiastically ripe for graft and so they were bound together in a joyful and very profitable frenzy of greed.

Captain Fred Lemon, the bull-necked commander of Central Station and a good friend of the McDonoughs, decided to turn the heat up. 

He burst into the pages of the San Francisco Examiner with a statement, “The Kamokila Club is a dive, one of the worst in town. This woman is not fooling anyone with this society bull and I’m going to close the place every night.”

When Princess could hold out against the Captain’s Central Station extortionists no longer, she finally greased the necessary palms, but she wondered if she had been over-charged. Her $150 payment would be about $3700 in today’s dollars.

The next day, she dialed the SFPD headquarters and demanded to speak to the Chief of Police. Royalty has its privileges. The switchboard operator buzzed the Chief, informed him who was on the line. Naturally, he took it. When he got on the phone, she said, “Chief Quinn, this is Alice Campbell, owner of Club Kilokawa and I want to check on the bribe I just paid to your men. I want to be certain I haven’t been overcharged.” 

Quinn was flabbergasted. He could not believe what he had just heard her say.

  “Overcharged?” asked Quinn.

  “Well, you tell me. Is $150 the right amount to pay six policemen for protection? Should I have demanded a receipt?”

  Quinn hung up the phone in an apoplectic fit. Vice, graft, and corruption were the tried and true order of the day, but it simply was not spoken about openly at certain levels of the commonwealth and certainly not in the searing light of day. 

By municipal law, the receipt of this information, no matter how unexpected, no matter how much more unwanted, dropping as it had like a load of bricks onto the Chief’s shoulders, required him to call the Mayor and the District Attorney immediately to alert them to the accusations of graft against his men on the force.

Instead, he called the good Captain Lemon of the Central Station, under whose purview lay the Club Kamokila. The Captain was a great friend of Tom and Pete McDonough. The Chief would call the Mayor and the DA later. He knew what the priorities were in this moment.. 

The McDonough brothers ruled much of the city’s underworld through their bail bonds business. They extorted, threatened, refused, approved, and obliterated as needed anyone who impeded their brutish management of the city’s gambling, dope, graft, and organized vice rings. 

We will go into the far-reaching McDonough Brothers operation in future episodes.

Let’s enjoy The Master’s take on the situation:

The Princess exploded a small test-size nuclear bomb that shook us all up. With her own lovely hula hands, she made certain cash dispositions and then put in a call to the Hall of Justice. She got Chief William J. Quinn on the phone. She had a perfectly reasonable question. She asked it with her usual naïveté.

"Is a hundred and fifty dollars the right amount to pay six policemen for protection?" she murmured sweetly into the phone, after identifying herself. $150 would be about $3600 today.

After they'd calmed Quinn down, he provided action. He called the captain at Central Station, whose sensitivities had been so offended at the Kamokila Club. He called District Attorney Matt Brady. He called Mayor Angelo Rossi. He called for an immediate investigation-the standard, drearily familiar immediate investigation that is always demanded when the fat falls into the fire.

I phoned the Princess and requested an audience, and she came down to my office. She just couldn't for the life of her understand why she shouldn't have paid the cops and checked on the payment afterward, just to make sure she hadn't been overcharged.

"Yes, and you could have demanded a receipt and a money-back guarantee, too," I said. "What I want to know is where you got the idea and when you stopped taking advice from me?”

She waggled her head mysteriously. "Well, there was this fellow who knew this automobile salesman who had this friend in the mayor's office. He said I should pay. And after all, it's only money. And he also said that unless I got rid of you I might have problems for a long, long time. He said you were ... what was it he called you. a 'hard-nosed bastard,' and that you wouldn't play ball with the right people.”

"You can tell him he's right," I said. "When I play ball, it'll be with the Giants and I'll pitch. And when you start playing ball with the right people, Princess, you can turn in your grass skirt and head for the showers as far as I'm concerned.  No more ad-libbing or it'll have to be with a new lawyer.”

She promised to behave and and we got ready for the next moves from the opposition: those from the Hall of Justice, from Central Station, from the mayor's office, but particularly those from the seamy little office at Kearny and Clay, the McDonough Brothers’ saloon, The Corner, from which they wrangled the levers of Frisco power. 

They weren't kept waiting long. 

Over the course of one single day,  the Grand Jury subpoenaed the Princess, she received notice that the police commission was temporarily tabling action on the very important dance permit, and someone telephoned a threat against the life of her young daughter, Pineapples McFarland. The Princess acquired a pistol and a bodyguard and restricted young Pineapples to the upper floors of the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill, where they lived. 

The monthly rate for a suite at the Fairmount in this era could go as high as $800 a month, or $19,000 today. I cannot ascertain whether the Princess rented just a suite or a floor, or what.

Remember that this was the height of the Great Depression and her annual income was in the neighborhood $200,000 a year.

Still, Princess Alice Kamokilaikawai Campbell, a determined woman, Hawaiian royalty by blood, wanted a nightclub where she could sing and spread Hawaiian culture and cheer to the mainland United States. 

Jake concentrated on watching the McDonoughs and their insidious machinations and came to the conclusion that, as he put it, “they were in a remarkably disturbed frame of mind for a set of veteran professionals and that they had taken an extraordinarily dedicated attitude toward the task of ejecting me from the picture. I liked that and planned to make it a contest.”

The Princess duly reported to the Grand Jury. It was largely a standoff. The Princess admitted that she'd made a pay-off but couldn't for the life of her remember whom she'd actually paid off; the policemen all looked alike to her. 

The policemen who might logically have been the ones to have been paid, according to Chief Quinn's still furious cerebrations on the matter, were subpoenaed and questioned under oath but refused to answer the questions and were fired. 

The friend of the friend of the friend who had advised making disbursements to the police from his lofty perch in the mayor's office denied making such counsel but admitted that he had suggested that The Princess “get rid of Ehrlich" and things would run smoother for her.

Jake decided to take the fight right to the Police Commission itself. One evening, on the way to a formal dinner at the Palace Hotel, The Master instructed his driver to take him and his wife to the Hall of Justice where the commission was convened. There, he arrived unannounced.

Let’s let The Master again tell the story himself. I think only Bob Patterson, aka Freddie Francisco, could give Jake a run for the money in the word-smithery department. It just occurred to me as I write this that it is very likely that Bob himself ghostwrote Jake’s book. I cannot find any evidence of that at the moment. I will keep looking. 

This is what the Master said about dropping in on the Police Commission on behalf of the Princess:

The upcoming meeting of the police commission was more diverting. It occurred on an evening when Marjorie and I were scheduled to attend a formal party at the Palace Hotel.

I was in white tie and tails and saw no reason to hide them because of a brief appearance before a covey of officials who might be critical of such attire. I descended from my car and crossed the sidewalk into the Hall of Justice between the ranks of a hastily drummed-up guard of honor composed of half-schnockered cops and newspapermen who had Tumbled wildly out of Cookie Picetti's Star Bar next door upon the announcement of my arrival. An impromptu and spontaneous cheer was wrung from this raucous crew and a speech was demanded, but I pressed relentlessly onward.

The San Francisco Examiner described the event with real journalistic fervor: "He rolled up in a black car a half a block long, dressed like a ringmaster for a circus, attended by a South Seas giant and hula dancers."

I don't remember the giant but there were some young ladies in the party, borrowed from the Club Kamokila for the evening. Together with my claque and an augmentation from Mr. Picetti's clientele, I entered the room where the board was meeting. 

Before the president could reach for his gavel I got the floor, and politely acknowledging the presence of all the members, the chief, the deputation from the Star saloon and my entourage, I launched into my statement.

"Careful study of the Constitution, convinces me that its provisions and protections extend to people who operate and work in night clubs as well as to runaway, Negro slaves, citizens deprived of due process by illegal arrest and seizure, and policemen who invoke the Fifth Amendment when asked delicate questions. 

Guests of the Kamokila Club have been deprived of the right to the pursuit of happiness, as guaranteed in the Constitution, if their choice of happiness takes the form of disporting themselves to the beat of music—in other words, dancing. All other San Francisco night clubs have dancing and we are going to have dancing, too... beginning tonight. 

The police have made a circus of Princess Kamokila's attempt to start an honest business in San Francisco, and it is going to have to stop. This is to advise you that the police are going to have to break down the doors of the club if they want to get in from now on."

I departed, leaving behind me a wake of frustration, anti-Ehrlichism and near apoplexy.

  The police and even the MeDonough Brothers were temporarily unsure of themselves and did nothing to disturb or disrupt the Club Kamokila. There was dancing on that and subsequent nights at the Bush Street nightclub.

But the general public was unsure as well. It was unsettling to seek an evening of music, drink, and pleasure in an establishment where so many bad things had happened at the hands of Frisco’s finest and could, obviously, happen again, always with such damning publicity. Business suffered. 

The Club Kamokila finally closed, a delayed-action victim of all the harassment from the corrupt police and the McDonough machine.

The Princess was finished in Frisco, but she couldn't merely leave town. Oh no. She called a press conference where she said San Francisco was one with Sodom and Gomorrah in corruption. It reeked of bought illegalities, official venality and under-the-table deals. 

While she had not consulted Jake about the press conference, it was fine, as far as it went, in terms of his plans and policy. He was still trying to get a bead on the McDonoughs, but felt it would lead absolutely nowhere because the fuzzy-minded little lady, as he put it, had no precise information to offer. Where it did lead was to another Grand Jury subpoena.

He writes: Now the Princess became coy again and didn't want to attend the party that she had invoked ("They're just trying to entrap me, Jake" She said), but I convinced her that she should put in an appearance, explaining in some detail the penalties for contempt. She answered the subpoena and murmured a mass of shapeless, faceless generalities that added up to zero.

The jury had nothing upon which to base a true bill, although they obviously were convinced that all this smoke meant a little fire. They let her go.

When the press got to her in the corridor, she made a suggestion that wound up on Page One and that ultimately had more effect on the Grand Jury than anything she'd said inside.

"San Francisco is on trial," she declared. "When the community is not courageous it must expect vice and crime. When one has to pay for respectability it does not seem fair. Let all good and patriotic citizens band together, raise a hundred thousand dollars, hire a private investigator and clean up the city. 

The little chanteuse from Honolulu had just done the most effective singing of her career. The Princess didn't stick around for the fireworks. She suddenly decided to marry her voice coach, a gentleman named Blickfelt, and took off for her native Hawaii.

The Grand Jury thought it over and got $100,000 with which to hire Edwin Atherton, a former FBI agent and now a private investigator. Atherton knew precisely what to do with $100,000 and a city that was wide open for a practiced peeper.

District Attorney Brady, without notifying Chief Quinn or the Police Commission, enlisted Atherton to conduct a secret graft inquiry of the SFPD. Atherton was a handsome former G-man with the “open smile of a casket salesman,” as one newspaper reported. In rapid succession, Atherton set up posh headquarters in the Keystone Apartments on Nob Hill’s west side and began spending the city’s money as fast as he could. 

Atherton even bugged Jake Ehrlich’s office. His style was to get as close to his quarry as he could, “wheedling, flattering, threatening and promising,” and then snap the trap. Stealthily, Atherton set to work like a mouse gnawing a live electrical cord.

We will be going into the predatory preoccupations of Edwin Newton Atherton and his crew as well as the Atherton Report’s vast ramifications for Frisco in future episodes. Suffice it say, they were far-reaching and cataclysmic for the cool grey city of love.

A few years after her return to Hawaii, The Princess served in the territorial Senate as the Democratic senator for Maui 1942 to 1946. In 1943, she became a Democratic national committeewoman. 

While serving in the territorial legislature, The Princess hosted, by some estimates, more than 350,000 servicemen at her Ewa Beach estate, "Lanikuakaa,” meaning “the last bit of heaven,” for their rest and recreation. I cannot ascertain as to whether or not there were friendly wahines in grass skirts as she had had at the Club Kamokila to entertain the lonely troops. I like to think so.

After the war, she argued against Hawaiian statehood at a congressional hearing. She said, “I do not feel we should forfeit the traditional rights and privileges of the natives of our islands for a mere thimbleful of votes in Congress, that we, the lovers of Hawaii from long association with it should sacrifice our birthright for the greed of alien desires to remain on our shores, that we should satisfy the thirst for power and control of some inflated industrialists and politicians who hide under the guise of friends of Hawaii, yet still keeping an eagle eye on the financial and political pressure button of subjugation over the people in general of these islands.”

Throughout her life, The Princess worked to keep the traditions of her native Hawaii alive and strong. The Club Kamokila was but one facet of this lifelong dedication and today is largely glossed over in current biographies of her. This is not surprising, I’m afraid.

She recorded dramatic readings of moʻolelo (traditional narrative stories which she had rewritten) along with the original music compositions of Jack de Mello in the fifties and sixties. These were released as an album, “Kamokila: Legends of Hawaii.” It’s available on Apple Music and, I would imagine, other streaming services. You can still find it used on cd and vinyl.

She left Hawaii again in the 1960s to live near her sons. She died in Menlo Park, California, on October 23, 1971.

Let’s let Jake Ehrlich have the last word about the princess.

When I was last there, visiting in Maui, I heard strange rumblings at night from the big island to the south of us. I was told that they came from the live volcano of Kilauea, but I'm not convinced that this is true. When last heard of, The Princess was in that general area.

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Once again, I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Thank you for listening. Until next time.