San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Heiress embraced counterculture
It was after Miss Burke’s School for girls and Vassar College for women, after the Debutante Ball, after the wedding at Grace Cathedral and after two kids were born that Beatrice Bowles became bored with San Francisco high society.
First she got divorced, then she replaced the doors in her Russian Hill home with beaded curtains and started throwing parties. She became a storyteller in grade schools, published a book and recorded six audio storybooks.
That was during the day. At night, she danced the tango.
Throughout her transformation, “Bea” or “Bebe,” as she was alternately known, was warm and funny and generous with her time and money, which derived from two of San Francisco’s oldest empires.
Bowles died Oct. 19 after complications from minor outpatient surgery. She was 78. Her death was confirmed by her son, Cannon Michael of Los Banos (Merced County).
“She sort of missed the ’60s, but she found a way to drag them into the ’70s,” Michael said. “It was an interesting way to grow up. She was full of love and creative energy.”
Bowles moved in and out of two distinctly San Francisco worlds — the culture and the counterculture — and she endeavored to mix them together when she could. Her parties were notorious, with the likes of Gov. Jerry Brown, state appeals court Justice Tony Kline and a variety of forward-thinking authors.
“She had a broad circle of friends, everyone from her tree trimmer to Charles Reich,” the author of “The Greening of America,” a classic psalm of the counterculture, said her brother, Henry Bowles of Alameda.
“She connected up everyone in the city — artists, photographers, dancers, filmmakers.” When Bowles took up tango dancing with her longtime partner, fiction writer Terence Clarke, she went at it the way she went at everything: full tilt and with maximum enthusiasm.
“They went to Argentina and danced in the clubs of Buenos Aires,” said her brother, “which was pretty bold for a couple of old Irish people.”
Beatrice Virginia Bowles was born Aug. 29, 1943, in New Jersey, where her father, Henry Miller Bowles, served as a captain in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II. Her mother, Constance Crowley Bowles, was a homemaker and volunteer. Both the Bowles and Crowley families date to the 1850s in San Francisco.
On her father’s side, Bowles descended from Henry Miller, who emigrated penniless from Germany in 1850. His modest beginnings as a butcher flourished over time: He would eventually be known as “the cattle king” and became one of the largest landowners in California. Part of that legacy lives on as Bowles Farming, 9,000 acres of vegetables overseen by Cannon Bowles, the sixth generation to be involved in the family business.
One her mother’s side was Tom Crowley, who started out in a rowboat delivering supplies to ships anchored in San Francisco Bay. He built it into Crowley Maritime, a familyowned shipping company based in Jacksonville, Fla.
During her freshman year at Vassar, Bowles was introduced to San Francisco society at the Cotillion Ball, an exclusive black-tie-and-white-glove affair held at the Palace Hotel. She completed her degree in English literature in 1965 and began writing short stories when she came home to San Francisco.
Soon thereafter, she married Peter Z. Michael, whom she’d known since she was a senior at Miss Burke’s School and he was a freshman at UC Berkeley. The newlyweds lived in a flat in Pacific Heights, with concert impresario Bill Graham as their upstairs neighbor. This got the couple invited up to parties with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, in rooms heavy with marijuana smoke.
“Bea was always open to interesting people and ideas,” Michael said.
They left that scene so Michael could fulfill a two-year obligation to the U.S. Army in Fort Sill, Okla. Afterward, New York City was the couple’s next
stop, and they had a daughter, Amanda, in 1968. They lived in a dormitory at New York University, where Micheal pursued a master’s degree in tax law. Their dinner table was an ironing board.
They returned to San Francisco in 1970 and bought a shingled craftsman above the Broadway Tunnel that had been owned by her uncle, Thomas Crowley, the tugboat magnate. A son, Cannon, was born in 1972. The couple were divorced in 1974, leaving Beatrice with two young kids, and her original name of Bowles.
That’s when she replaced the doors with beaded curtains, and replaced all of the furniture with oversize cushions.
“She’d build a fire in the fireplace, and we sat on cushions to eat dinner out of wooden bowls,” said Amanda Michael, who did the baking in the family. She now owns Jane, a cafe bakery group with four locations in San Francisco. “I learned from my mom to follow what your passion is,” Michael said. “I use food to connect people, and my mom was one of the great connectors of people.”
Some of her mom’s connections came from the San Francisco Botanical Society and Earth Island Institute, Bowles’ two main charitable causes.
She’d also invite people she met at tango nightclubs. There was room for a hundred or more in her garden.
A good source of attendees was her niece Nellie Bowles, former Chronicle and New York Times tech reporter. For several years, Bowles lived in her aunt’s downstairs in-law unit. The two of them collaborated on parties. Dry martinis were served upstairs. Dry ice Negronis were downstairs.
“Upstairs was the older crowd, and downstairs were a bunch of 22-year-olds just out of college,” Nellie Bowles said. “Tante Bea would have us upstairs for food and dancing, and then when it got too rowdy she’d send us back downstairs,” she said, employing the French term for “aunt.”
Bowles was disciplined about her writing, done in longhand on legal pads at her desk with a view of the bay.
She’d take a Greek myth or a tale of California history and modernize it in a way that kids would understand.
Before she took a story into schools, she would memorize it. It was more an animated performance than a strict reading. She booked her own tours in both independent and public schools in the city, the Peninsula, Marin and public libraries.
“She would tell three or four stories and then open it up to questions,” her daughter said. “She was very much about respecting all views and teaching kids to be open and accepting.”
Bowles was paid from time to time, but she’d also do it for free if money was an obstacle. A collection of her stories was published as “Spider Grandmother’s Web of Wonders,” in 2020. She was eager to get out and read from it when COVID-19 closed the schools and libraries. Even then, she recorded her stories, and they live on her website, beatrice bowles.com.
“Bea was magic. She really was,” her brother said. “She had a way of befriending people from every walk of life, and they all loved her.”
A public memorial will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 23, in the San Francisco County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park. Donations in her name may be made to the San Francisco Botanical Garden and Earth Island Institute.
In addition to her son and daughter, Bowles is survived by her brothers, Henry Bowles of Alameda and Philip Bowles of San Francisco, and five grandchildren.