Sister Mary Joseph of the Trinity
Socialite and mother of 10 who left her hard-partying life behind to become a cloistered nun
SISTER MARY JOSEPH OF THE TRINITY, who has died aged 92, was a nun of the cloistered Order of Discalced Carmelites, or was for the last 30 years of her life; before renouncing the world, however, she had been Ann Russell Miller, one of the “Rockefellers of the West Coast”, as a friend put it, a hard-partying, highdiving, fast-driving socialite with a shoe collection that made Imelda Marcos’s seem “pitiful in comparison”.
She also had 10 children.
In her heyday she was friends with Nancy Reagan and Loretta Young, the film star, and sat on the board of 22 charitable organisations. She had her hair done four times a week by Elizabeth Arden, covered her parasols with Hermès scarves and had her spectacles coordinated with her outfits. She smoked, drank, played cards and spent five hours a day on the telephone, though she did once give up the instrument for Lent.
Forty guests regularly sat down to dinner at the nine-bedroom house overlooking San Francisco Bay where she and her husband Richard made their lives. But in 1984, he died of cancer.
At two separate lunches at Trader Vic’s, for her five sons and her five daughters, Ann Russell Miller – a devout, not to say dogmatic Roman Catholic – told her children of her decision to take the veil. She had decided, she said, to devote the rest of her life to taking care of her soul.
She spent the next years doing all she wanted to do and giving away all her wealth (the house was bought by one of the members of the rock group Metallica).
Then in 1989, on her 61st birthday, she threw a farewell party at the Hilton for her 800 closest friends. Guests listened to music by two orchestras and nibbled at a coquille of seafood as Ann Russell Miller moved through the crowd, trailing a helium balloon bearing the words “Here I am.”
The next day, she flew to Chicago and knocked on the door of the convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. According to her friend Marie Gallo, of the winemaking family, when the door opened Ann Russell Miller said: “Here I am. Trick or treat!”
Asked by reporters at the time for a comment, the Mother Superior replied shortly that there was no story in a nun entering a convent, but there might be in someone remaining there.
It was said that some friends of Ann Russell Miller thought she would “flunk out of nun school”. But after five years as a postulant she was allowed to take her final vows and join the other 17 resident sisters.
Sister Mary Joseph now slept on a thin mattress and a bed made of planks. She wore a brown habit, black veil and sandals, and spent 23½ hours of the day in silence.
The order is a secluded one, so she never again went out into the world.
She was permitted one visitor a month, and even then meetings were conducted with her sitting behind two sets of bars. In a series of tweets after her death, her son Mark revealed that he had only seen her twice in three decades and she had never met many of her grandchildren, let alone great-grandchildren.
Life in the convent was not perhaps what she expected. Sister Mary Joseph, said Mark Miller, often had to ask forgiveness for being late for her duties and for breaking the rules by throwing sticks for the nuns’ German Shepherd.
Yet she had never lost her spark and had maintained a lively correspondence with her friends, for many years by fax. Through some of her daughters, she also retained control of a rural family property from which she banned those of her children who divorced and remarried.
An only child, Ann Russell was born in San Francisco on October 20 1928. Her father was chairman of Southern Pacific, which ran the railways in much of the US West.
Petite and vivacious, she was educated at the Spence School in New York and at Mills College in Oakland. At 20, she married Richard Miller, whose family had founded Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility company. In the reception line at her wedding, a rival admirer, George “Corky” Bowles, kissed Ann on the cheek and told her: “I will wait for you.”
By the time she was 27, she had had five children, with five more following.
Undeterred, 40 years later, following her husband’s death and aware of her desire to become a nun, Bowles took her on a cruise in the Mediterranean. One evening under the stars, he slowly knelt on the deck of the yacht and asked Ann Russell Miller to marry him.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
Her children survive her.