My mother was the only child of a cattle rancher. Her father’s thirty-thousand-acre ranch was called the Yerba Buena, situated in Nogales, Arizona, a border town just north of Sonora. Tom Griffin chose to raise Santa Gertrudis cattle, a risky venture for a city slicker from Chicago, but at last he’d fulfilled his dream to return to Arizona’s high desert, where as a child he was sent to cure his weak lungs.
Tom was born into a socially prominent family that had made its fortune in the Griffin Wheel Company, which manufactured wheels for all the Pullman train cars that crossed America. His uncles were playboys and philanderers whose shenanigans often found their way into the gossip columns of the Chicago dailies. In the mid-1920s, my great-great-uncle George Griffin died of a heart attack while in bed with his mistress aboard his yacht off the coast of Palm Beach, Florida. The mistress was Rose Davies, sister of the movie star Marion Davies, who happened to be the mistress of the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, so elaborate measures were taken to prevent a national scandal. Ms. Davies was snuck ashore in the dead of night and caught the next sleeper car to Los Angeles, with actual Griffin wheels whirling beneath her berth. Meanwhile, George Griffin’s steadfast crew dressed him in pajamas, loaded him onto a tender, and checked his corpse into the Breakers Hotel. After tucking him in, the vice president of the Griffin Wheel Company solemnly called George’s wife to say that her husband had just died peacefully in his sleep.
His wife, my great-great-aunt Helen Prindeville Griffin was no stranger to wealth, having been a doyenne of Washington, DC, society who summered in Newport, Rhode Island. At the moment when Mrs. Griffin had been notified of her husband’s death, she was in bed with her lover at the Hotel del Coronado in California, and took the news that she was a widow rather well. She untwined herself from the arms of Admiral Paul Henry Bastedo who served under Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, and proposed they get married in the morning so he could be her date at her late husband’s funeral. To the tabloids’ delight, the newlyweds took Helen Prindeville Griffin Bastedo’s private railway car to Lake Forest, Illinois, to attend the service. The act so outraged the Griffin family that they used their juice with Union Pacific to divert the train and the unlucky passengers coupled to Helen’s private car. The train choo-chooed deep into Wisconsin, denying the newlyweds their grand entrance to the funeral. The family were less successful trying to have Helen cut from George Griffin’s will, and she inherited every cent of his enormous fortune.
Scandal visited the next generation of Griffins a decade later, on the day of Tom’s wedding to a woman from an equally prominent family. Approaching the church in the back of a limousine, he watched the crowd of guests and photographers awaiting his arrival and told the chauffeur to keep driving, all the way to Chicago Union Station. Once there—still in top hat and tails—he boarded a Pullman car (on Griffin wheels) and headed westward to begin his new life as a rancher in Nogales.
AS KIDS, we loved when Mom took us to Nogales. My younger brother and sister and I used to cross the border into Mexico on foot with a pack of cousins, as easily as going through a subway turnstile. We rambled up a hill to reach a restaurant called La Roca, set on top of a large rock. At the bottom of the rock, a cave, once a prison, used to shelter a cantina called La Caverna. La Roca was built above only when La Caverna burned down under suspicious circumstances. Tom Griffin was long dead by then and was spared the demise of his favorite haunt, where he famously sat at his usual table, with a parrot on his shoulder who’d bite anyone who got too close. As muc
