Christian de Guigné IV

Christian de Guigne IV with Prince Charles 1
Christian de Guigné IV with the Prince of Wales, April 2006

 

Floating around my office was this little manual for the Lettera 22. The owner had typed his name on the cover, and it occurred to me that I’d never looked it up.

L22 manual

The first Christian de Guigné was a French count who moved to California in the 19th century and founded two successful companies, Stauffer Chemical and Leslie Salt. Leslie Salt, which had evaporation ponds on the shores of San Francisco Bay, was once the biggest landowner in the Bay Area. I remember the mountains of salt lining the bay south of the city behind chain link fences in the early 1980s. Members of a club I was interested in, the Suicide Club (named after a story by Robert Louis Stevenson), once dressed all in white, scaled the fences, and climbed the salt mountains just for fun, their pure white costumes helping to hide them from guards and passing motorists.

Christian de Guigné IV worked at Stauffer Chemical (his obituary says “Labor Relations”), but you get the idea he was mostly a socialite. He collected antique weapons and wristwatches. He was most famous for living in one of the most impressive mansions in the Bay, Guigné Court: 16,000 square feet, seven bedrooms, eight and a half bathrooms, a ballroom, a flower-arranging room, a servants’ wing with four maids’ rooms and two chauffeurs’ rooms. Plus a pool and a pavilion. The 47-acre grounds include private hiking trails and a reservoir. The house was designed by the architects of San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel, now the Westin St. Francis, and was in the Guigné family for 150 years.

Mansion 1

Mansion 2

Mansion 3

CGIV dated mega-author Danielle Steel before marrying Hills Bros. coffee heiress Vaughn Hills in 1984. When the two divorced eighteen years later, Christian’s plan was to pay for the settlement by dividing the 47-acre property into 25 parcels, but the plans were nixed as a result of strong opposition from neighbors. In 2014, de Guigné put the estate on the market for $100,000,000 — with the proviso that he continue to have exclusive use of the house until his death. He was 76 at the time.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, no one wanted to pay a hundred mil for a house with an old man in it, and the very next year, de Guigné dropped the proviso and lowered the price to $40,000,000. In 2017, that figure decreased again to $29,850,000, and the property was bought six weeks later by a buyer who wished to remain anonymous. 

Christian de Guigné IV died on October 20, 2019, aged 82. In 2021, the mansion was put up for sale again for $37,500,000. The seller? Elon Musk.

The CGIV Lettera 22 came to me that same year.

See more pictures of the house and grounds in London’s Daily Mail….

…and more pictures posted after redecorations under Musk.

In 1971, a 34-year-old Christian IV and his father, Christian III, visited the White House for a five-minute meeting and photo op with President Richard Nixon. Nixon spent much of the rest of that day discussing the Pentagon Papers and complaining about the New York Times with H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and friendly congressmen. See the subject listing for conversations recorded by Nixon’s secret taping system on June 17, 1971.

Mark Twain’s (last?) typewriter up for auction

Mark Twain’s 1908 Williams No. 6 typewriter is up for bid at Heritage Auctions. Twain had been using typewriters since the 1870s — and actually delivered a typewritten manuscript for his 1883 memoir Life on the Mississippi — and obviously retained an interest in the machines, since this example was purchased just two years before he died in 1910.

As of February 6, the bidding stands at $15,000.

Celebrities and Others

The writer Robert Caro, widely regarded as the best American biographer of his time, has donated much of his archives to the New York Historical Society, who have enshrined his Smith-Corona Electra 210 typewriter with the solemn reverence more commonly accorded to Egyptian sarcophagi or the astrolabes of pre-modern astronomers. (Not to worry; he has at least nine others.)

Machine of the Mysteries

“The typewriter continues to play a fundamental role in Caro’s writing process,” assures the accompanying plaque. “This is less motivated by an aversion to technology than a recognition of the typewriter’s utility as a tool that slows down his writing, in line with the sage advice of his Princeton professor, [name] to ‘Stop thinking with your fingers.'”

I’m amused by the empty ribbon spool carefully displayed on its own little pedestal, as if this somehow would help explain the workings of the device to someone unfamiliar with it. (The spool is identified as “Typewriter ribbon” on the plaque.)

Did Caro tell the Society that he uses the typewriter because it “slows down his writing?” If so, I’m surprised, to say the least. (It’s easier for me to believe that an institution that would call a spool a ribbon, use the phrase “utility as a tool,” and separate a prepositional phrase from its subject with an unnecessary comma—in public copy!—would simply make this up.) David Thewlis, the actor’s actor, novelist and typewriter user, tells the Financial Times that people “usually tell me how slow it must be (it’s not). And anyway, good writing isn’t about speed. You don’t say, ‘How fast did you write that?’ You ask about how bloody good it is!”

Paul Auster wants his typewriter back.

Thewlis explains that it was borrowing the author Paul Auster‘s Olympia SM9 that made him realize that a typewriter could be superior to a computer as a creative tool. Now he’s got 40. Like me, he no longer trolls eBay looking for others “like I used to. Enough is enough. It would be weird if I got more. In fact, it’s already weird – I store my 40 in the attic. And they’re heavy, you know. I should be worried about my roof coming down.”

But on to that flagbearer of typewriter-related news, Optometry Today, the website for British optometrists and dispensing opticians, which reports in its “Secret Life” column about a man with an unusual hobby. Mr. Russell Peake, who in his day job is Head of Contact Lens Operations at Specsavers, offers a telegram service. “It is mainly done through the website or Instagram (@spatelegram),” says Peake. Someone sends me a message, I type it up and then deliver it on my bike. There have been a mix of messages and people of all ages have been sending them.”

Sorry, Leamington and Warwick areas only.

“People have sent some really significant messages – it has been a privilege to deliver those,” Peake adds. He doesn’t charge for the service, asking those who want to pay to make a donation to Guide Dogs UK.