SILVER PLATTER (454 pp.)—Ellin Berlin —Doubleday ($4.95).
"Marie Louise Antoinette Hungerford. Downvill. Entrée le 15 Janvier 1857. Agée de 13 ans."
These words, written by a Belgian nun in the register of St. Catherine's Female Academy at Benicia, Calif., were as important to Louise Hungerford as if they were inscribed in the Almanach de Gotha. They were her cachet of respectability, her inner answer to the poverty of childhood and the gossiping envy that surrounded her later life. Her father could afford to keep her at St. Catherine's for only a single term. But it was enough. In her 85th year, when she had been a friend of the former Queen of Spain and the Prince of Wales, her proudest boast was still: "I was educated at Benicia." It meant nothing to most of her listeners. It meant everything to Louise.
In this fond biography of her grandmother. Author Ellin Mackay Berlin tells how Louise made the leap from being a tenement child to becoming the 19th century's hostess with the mostes'. The child of a Manhattan barber and his seamstress wife. Louise used to deliver her mother's embroidery to the fine houses on Washington Square and St. John's Park. Her one ambition was to break into that glittery world and call it her own. She made it. Today more and more social climbing is merely the ascent from one suburban foothill to a slightly higher hill ; in Louise's day more dramatic mountaineering was frequent, and her own climb was a veritable conquest of Everest.
The Lode. Louise's luck was phenomenal. She got to the freewheeling West when her father, after serving in the Mexican War, settled in tiny Downieville, Calif., where his earnings went into worthless mining stocks. Louise, her mother and grandmother joined him after a journey of 5,000 miles by boat and muleback. At 16, pretty, dark-haired Louise made a disastrous marriage to a local doctor who was as calamitous a speculator as her father. When he was found dying at Poverty Hill, Calif., riddled by drugs and alcohol, 22-year-old Louise was left penniless with a crippled child to support. Like her mother, she became a seamstress.
Then John William Mackay met and married her. The ablest of a syndicate of shrewd Irishmen who pickaxed their way from the mines to mansions on San Francisco's Nob Hill, he was a husky man who stuttered when angry and had an ambition as single-track as her own: to become the master of the Comstock Lode. Mackay broke the Bank of California's hold on the land, and the earth's hold on its riches — burrowing 1,200 feet into the lode to uncover the Big Bonanza vein. "By God now that we've made the riffle you're entitled to your share, old lady!'' he cried to Louise.
Silver Flood. She returned to Manhattan on a flood of silver that seemed potent enough to sweep everything before it. But high society stood firm. At a devastating party the women closed ranks and turned on Louise the glacial stare that the elite reserves for the brash newcomer. Sniffed one dowager: ''Mackay? Oh, Irish, of course. They don't even pronounce it properly" (i.e., Mackey instead of Mckye).