THE VIVID, SCANDAL-FILLED STORY OF A SHREWD, RAGS-TO-RICHES
MILLIONAIRESS AND THE RUTHLESS POLITICIAN WHO PURSUED HER, TOLD AGAINST
THE EFFERVESCENT BACKDROP OF AMERICA'S GOLDEN CITY--SAN FRANCISCO.
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.
