S.F. protocol chief touched the world
Charlotte Mailliard Shultz, a savvy socialite who as the city’s chief of protocol helped San Francisco put its best foot forward for more than five decades, died Friday morning at her Stanford home of complications from cancer. She was 88.
Stanlee Gatti, an events planner who worked with Shultz for decades on a variety of civic events, confirmed her death.
Shultz, who hailed from a small town in the Texas panhandle and adopted San Francisco as her hometown in the 1960s, was perhaps the city’s longest-serving unelected public official, with a career that saw her working under 10 mayors for a total of 51 years, all of them unpaid.
Her husband, former Secre
tary of State George Shultz, died in February at their home on the Stanford University campus. The couple were a fixture in San Francisco’s social scene after their 1997 wedding in Grace Cathedral.
Shultz “was a woman of unparalleled grace and generosity who loved San Francisco like no other,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a statement Friday. “We have lost our Grande Dame. The bright lights of San Francisco are forever diminished with the loss of Charlotte, but her impact, legacy, and love will live with us for generations.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom called her an “exceptional civic leader, dedicated public servant and treasured friend.
“Charlotte was the quintessential San Franciscan — defined by her eye for the fantastic and the flourish with which she welcomed visiting dignitaries, foreign consuls and San Franciscans from all walks of life,” Newsom said. “She helped make the city of San Francisco the vibrant, international city it is today.”
The flags at the Stanford Mansion and Governor’s Mansion will be flown at half-staff in her honor, officials said.
Shultz was considered San Francisco’s premier party-giver, but she was more than that. None other than former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a longtime friend, characterized her not only as a “dynamo,” but also as a “diplomat” for her work assisting more than 80 consuls general with their missions; cementing bonds with 18 sister cities; promoting business, education and cultural initiatives with visiting dignitaries; and arranging the mayor’s travels nationally and abroad.
Among the international figures she received in San Francisco over the years were Queen Elizabeth II of England in 1983; Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang on his first official visit to the U.S in 1984; Pope John Paul II in 1987; Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990; and Prince Charles and Camilla in 2005, to name a few.
Shultz was married three times. Her first husband was businessman and rancher John Ward “Jack” Mailliard III, who died of cancer in 1986. Her second marriage was to real estate developer Melvin Swig, who owned the Fairmont Hotel and with whom she donated and raised funds for the building of the new San Francisco Public Library. He died of cancer in 1993.
Her proudest achievement, she recalled in a May 2018 interview, was the visit of Queen Elizabeth, for whom Shultz arranged a Broadway-style show with choirs, bands and singers from the musical revue “Beach Blanket Babylon,” and to whom, as a tongue-in-cheek joke, she served Cheerios cereal at a farewell breakfast. “That was over-thetop wonderful,” Shultz told The Chronicle in 2018.
It apparently made an impression. In 2007, the queen named Shultz an Honorary Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in a ceremony at the British embassy in Washington, D.C.
Shultz also smoothed over several international crises related to China during the tenure of then-Mayor Newsom, related to a meeting of the world’s mayors for World Environment Day in 2005 and the San Francisco leg of the torch run for the Beijing Olympics and protests over China’s human rights record in 2008.
Shultz helped to build bridges between the Democratic mayor and two high-ranking Republicans at the time — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and President George W. Bush — assisting the city with state and federal funding, all while keeping her office a nonpartisan one.
Shultz approached her job like the chief executive of a major corporation, engaging in research that would allow her to understand a visitor’s interests and point of view to better forge common ground and broker partnerships and deals, former California first lady Maria Shriver told The Chronicle in an interview in May 2018.
Shriver, who was first lady of California when Shultz was the chief of protocol of California, said in a tweet thread on Friday that Shultz was one of her longtime “dearest, closest, most loving, loyal friends” who stepped into a role as her “earth mother” when Shriver’s mother died. Shriver called her a “force of nature, a shining star in her own right,” and said her knowledge of San Francisco and “her service to it is one for the history books.”
“Today, I sat with her as she departed this earth. I held her hand & thanked her for her love, her kindness, her service to CA & the country,” Shriver wrote on Friday. “It is an awe inspiring honor to sit with someone as they transition from earth, & it was a awe inspiring honor to walk beside her in life.”
Shultz raised hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from private citizens through the nonprofit San Francisco Host Committee and the San Francisco Event Committee to fund protocol office events and gifts. She also quietly spent her own money to ensure things were done to her satisfaction, and hosted dinners for many foreign leaders in her own home.
With a schedule that often had her working from 8 a.m. until late in the evening, Shultz also managed to find time to sit on the boards of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Ballet, the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center and the Commonwealth Club. She had also been a board member of Grace Cathedral and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She chaired the longrunning, now defunct Valentine’s Ball at SFMOMA, and in April of 2018, co-chaired that museum’s Modern Ball.
She technically worked for 10 mayors — John Shelley, Joseph Alioto, George Moscone, Dianne Feinstein, Art Agnos, Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, Ed Lee, Mark Farrell and London Breed. Although Mayor Frank Jordan appointed Richard Goldman as protocol chief during his term from 1992 to 1996, Shultz continued to lend a hand when needed during Jordan’s time in office.
“Charlotte was literally like a sister to me in every way,” former Mayor Brown said Friday. “My entire career had Charlotte somehow involved at every level. She was so incredible in terms of her creativity. She literally kept me out of trouble — and she kept a number of people out of trouble.
“While the city obviously lost one of its gems, for those of us who were very close to Charlotte — we lost Charlotte. And there is absolutely no replacement for Charlotte.”
Shultz was born Charlotte Smith on Sept. 26, 1933, and raised in the small town of Borger in the Texas panhandle. Her parents ran a five-and-dime. She went to college but when her father’s store burned down, she returned home to help out. She eventually graduated from the University of Arkansas with a degree in marketing, merchandising and fashion design.
Shultz lived in Houston, Dallas and Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco with a girlfriend, and fell in love with the city and its treasures, including Grace Cathedral. After peering inside, she decided, she said, that “unless I’m thrown out of this town, I’m not leaving.”
She worked briefly for SPUR, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research association and, on the side, campaigned for Shelley during his successful 1963 run for mayor. After Shelley’s swearing in, Shultz began in the protocol office alongside Cyril Magnin, president of the Joseph Magnin department store chain. Magnin headed the office from 1964 until his death in 1988, when Shultz was officially given the title of chief of protocol by then-Mayor Feinstein.
Shultz organized public events, including 49ers’ Super Bowl parades; San Francisco Giants’ World Series parades; and the 50th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1987 which drew 1 million people for the celebration, 300,000 of whom crowded onto the span and caused it to flatten.
But Shultz’s primary duties consisted of assisting the city’s 80 consuls general and hosting celebrations for each country’s national days and attending events hosted by those consulates as well. Such work was not superficial or indulgent, especially in the most diverse state in the nation, George Shultz told The Chronicle in May 2018.
“It isn’t just a symbol — it’s an actual recognition of that country,
where they fly the flag at City Hall,” the former secretary of state said. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Welcome, we recognize your country, we respect the diversity it brings to San Francisco as to its flavor, and we are glad to have you live under the golden dome of San Francisco.”
Most major American cities have protocol chiefs. Few had one as warm, gracious, fun-loving, painstakingly proper or as accomplished as Shultz, according to Shriver.
In fact, Charlotte Shultz told The Chronicle in May 2018, other American cities and even the State Department had often phoned her for protocol advice. Her ability to handle every situation came from books, time on the job, and later in life, what she described as her “secret weapon” — her knowledgeable third husband, who learned diplomatic ins and outs while serving as secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan.
Shultz, always coiffed and elegant in designer clothes, also had another side: a roll-up-yoursleeves, down-home side. She pushed brooms on street-cleaning efforts, got wet going out into storms to fix flags inadvertently hung upside down before visits from foreign royals, and often stayed into the wee hours of the morning to help with cleanup after galas.
Along with that came a sense of whimsy and creative verve.
In hosting the queen, she told The Chronicle in May of 2018, she was nervous. In Los Angeles, Frank Sinatra had the Hollywood film industry help with entertainment. In San Francisco, “it was just me,” she said.
She learned that the queen enjoyed Broadway shows, so she created a performance at Davies Symphony Hall that wrapped singers Tony Bennett, Mary Martin, a Marine band and the UC Berkeley marching band into a 17-minute musical revue with the cast of “Beach Blanket Babylon.”
For a dinner at her Russian Hill penthouse for visiting Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, she enlisted a man to wear a bear costume and dance, a play on the symbolic Russian bear and the California bear flag. Medvedev, she said, was delighted.
When England’s Prince Charles and Camilla came to visit, she treated them to a performance of “Beach Blanket Babylon” and sneaked away quietly with her husband, only to appear moments later flying overhead on a guy wire in a Wonder Woman costume with her husband in a Superman costume by her side. “S is for Shultz!” he cried out.
She was also proud to have brought back the city’s Black and White Ball, a multi-venue party for 20,000 revelers in black tie in and around City Hall, in 1982, after a 13-year hiatus.
Shultz fought back against breast cancer. She was diagnosed with it in 2002 and underwent treatment, but it returned several times over the ensuing years, and spread to her lungs. She told friends she thought it had spread to her bones when they became increasingly fragile: She suffered a broken sternum, clavicle and hips at various points from 2013 onward.
Still, she kept working, without complaint. She got into that Wonder Woman harness with a broken sternum for the 40th anniversary of “Beach Blanket,” her chest bones held together with surgical glue applied by her doctor. Despite a broken clavicle, an arm in a sling to take the pressure off the collarbone, she also gamely suited up in a referee’s costume for a two-hour Chronicle photo shoot for a story on etiquette in 2014.
It was the sort of undying devotion that one might expect in a spouse, but not from a public servant. She lived for the city, she liked feeling helpful and being needed, and when she was, she gave it her all.
Observed George Shultz, in an interview in May 2018, “She’s wonderful and I love her. She’s a great, wonderful wife and person. She’s married to me. But she’s also married to San Francisco.”