The Audacity of Inez Burns: Dreams, Desire, Treachery & Ruin in the City of Gold
448The Audacity of Inez Burns: Dreams, Desire, Treachery & Ruin in the City of Gold
448Hardcover
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Overview
San Francisco, until the mid-1940s, was a city that lived by its own rules, fast and loose. Formed by the gold rush and destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, it served as a pleasure palace for the legions of men who sought their fortunes in the California foothills. For the women who followed, their only choice was to support, serve, or submit.
Inez Burns was different. She put everyone to shame with her dazzling, calculated, stone-cold ambition.
Born in the slums of San Francisco to a cigar-rolling alcoholic, Inez transformed herself into one of California’s richest women, becoming a notorious powerbroker, grand dame, and iconoclast. A stunning beauty with perfumed charm, she rose from manicurist to murderess to millionaire, seducing one man after another, bearing children out of wedlock, and bribing politicians and cops along the way to secure her place in the San Francisco firmament.
Inez ruled with incandescent flair. She owned five hundred hats and a closet full of furs, had two small toes surgically removed to fit into stylish high heels, and had two ribs excised to accentuate her hourglass figure. Her presence was defined by couture dresses from Paris, red-carpet strutting at the San Francisco Opera, and a black Pierce-Arrow that delivered her everywhere. She threw outrageous parties on her sprawling, eight-hundred-acre horse ranch, a compound with servants, cooks, horse groomers, and trainers, where politicians, judges, attorneys, Hollywood moguls, and entertainers gamboled over silver fizzes.
Inez was adored by the desperate women who sought her out—and loathed by the power-hungry men who plotted to destroy her.
During a time when women risked their lives with predatory practitioners lurking in back alleys, Inez and her team of women, clad in crisp, white nurse’s uniforms, worked night and day in her elegantly appointed clinic, performing fifty thousand of the safest, most hygienic abortions available during a time when even the richest wives, Hollywood stars, and mistresses had few options when they found themselves with an unwanted pregnancy.
Inez’s illegal business bestowed upon her power and influence—until a determined politician by the name of Edmund G. (Pat) Brown—the father of current California Governor Jerry Brown—used Inez to catapult his nascent career to national prominence.
In The Audacity of Inez Burns, Stephen G. Bloom, the author of the bestselling Postville, reveals a jagged slice of lost American history. From Inez’s riveting tale of glamour and tragedy, he has created a brilliant, compulsively readable portrait of an unforgettable woman during a moment when America’s pendulum swung from compassion to criminality by punishing those who permitted women to control their own destinies.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781682450093 |
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Publisher: | Regan Arts |
Publication date: | 02/06/2018 |
Pages: | 448 |
Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Author's Note vii
Prologue: Pinky, Bootsie, and Fats xiii
Part I Dreams
1 Misfortune in the Promised Land 3
2 The Wonderful Wizardess of the Palace Hotel 28
3 Wayward Girls and Lecherous Rogues 40
4 Men with Resources 52
5 Money Soap, Italian Potion No. 12, and the Brazilian Beleza 59
6 The Earth Moves 68
7 Pickled in Pittsburgh 89
8 Dreamland, the Pleasure Palace, and a Pair of Dead Bodies 99
9 Luxury Heels 118
10 All and Everything that Fashion Gives 130
Part II Desire
11 Mean Little Bastard and Proud Of It 149
12 No Piece of Cake 156
13 Off Her Back 168
14 The Nature of the Beast 188
15 Pillars of Money, Fountains of Payoffs 191
16 Unapologetic 204
Part III Treachery
17 Traitors! 217
18 The Other Shoe 232
19 Buster Brown to the Rescue 241
20 Ambition Feeds on Strange Foods 258
21 Distrust 268
22 The Bridge of Sighs 278
23 Hypocrites! 293
Part IV Ruin
24 Stiff Upper Lip 309
25 Always Fight with a Fist 327
26 The Plight of Women and the Pleasure of Men 345
27 "No, I Never Bribed Anyone" 354
Part V Coda
28 Still Stylish and Feminine After All These Years 369
29 Down the Hatch 373
30 She Was Too Audacious 378
Acknowledgments 387
Endnotes 393
Image Credits 427