San Francisco's Top 10 sex scandals

April 1, 1947 - Sally Stanford April 1, 1947 - Sally Stanford Photo: Ken McLaughlin, The Chronicle Photo: Ken McLaughlin, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close San Francisco's Top 10 sex scandals 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

San Francisco was one wild town in the mid-1800s when it lurched into prominence as a Gold Rush creation of loose pistols, loose wallets and loose women. Brothels proliferated and illegal homosexuality was winked at. Sex wasn't so much a hush-hush Victorian taboo as it was an open way of life.

Such an environment didn't really breed sex scandals so much as chuckles. The scandals came later, as the community matured enough to be embarrassed - and when they came, they were doozies.

From nymphomaniac lawsuits and Satanic passion rituals to politicians dipping too deeply into their personal wells of satisfaction, the City by the Bay has carved a rich and sometimes entertaining, sometimes tragic, legacy of lusty wrongdoings. Here is an unofficial Top 10 list of those that made headlines in the 144 years that The Chronicle has been paying attention to them:

He said, he dead

The late 1870s birthed one of the most infamous sex scandals in history, with all the trappings of power, lust and deadly gunplay.

It began when minister Isaac Kalloch moved here from back East to become a pastor. Tales of illicit sexual exploits trailed him, and when he ran for mayor, Chronicle Publisher Charles de Young went on an opposition warpath. "Driven forth from Boston like an Unclean Leper, his trial for adultery, his escapade with one of the Tremont Temple Choristers," read one of the headlines. Kalloch railed back that de Young was, according to "The Magnificent Rogues of San Francisco" by Charles Adams: "The bastard progeny of a whore, born in the slums and nursed in the lap of prostitution."

An infuriated de Young shot Kalloch in 1879, but Kalloch recovered and was elected mayor. Kalloch's son was a better shot: He gunned de Young down in the newspaper office the next year, killing him.

Ding Dong Daddy

There's bigamy, there's polygamy - and then there is the Ding Dong Daddy of the D Car Line.

Officially named Francis H. Van Wie, the pudgy, balding man with thick glasses earned his moniker when he was jailed in 1945 for having 15 wives, the most ever in the state at the time. Chronicle writer Stanton Delaplane coined the nickname (Van Wie actually was a conductor on the Municipal Railway's F Line, but D rolled off the tongue better, Delaplane explained), and in later years Van Wie used it as a stage handle in a burlesque act. He also didn't learn his lesson: In 1953, Ding Dong Daddy was jailed in Los Angeles for taking wife No. 16 without having divorced No. 14, and in 1959 he did another stretch for having wives 17 and 18 simultaneously.

Cable car nymph

It was supposed to be a routine trip on the Hyde Street cable car in 1964, the 29-year-old woman said. But when the car lurched and she was heaved against a pole, the collision "somehow unleashed emotions hidden deep in the dark closet of her mind," The Chronicle reported - and thus was born "The cable car nymphomaniac" who took a trip on the "Cable Car Named Desire."

The woman sued Muni for $500,000 six years later, saying her injuries had triggered an insatiable sexual desire that drove her to take 100 lovers, leaving her perpetually unsatisfied. Reporters left her name out of news accounts, to protect her privacy, referring to her instead by her nickname, or as "the buxom blonde" from Michigan. She was awarded $50,000 by a jury, whose members said they hoped she would use it for counseling.

Yes, madam

There are few better embodiments of the city's tolerant oddities than Sally Stanford - a high-toned bagnio madam with a long arrest and conviction record from the 1920s to the '40s who went on to political fame.

Stanford was so alluringly defiant she wound up on the Johnny Carson talk show, and was played in a TV movie by Dyan Cannon. "To the aficionados of local bordellos, Sally's girls were the prettiest and most elegantly gowned, her place the most sumptuous, her patrons the most select," The Chronicle wrote in her 1982 obituary after she died at 78. "She was the friend and confidante of many an important figure in the life of the city."

After giving up the night trade in 1950, she ran a successful restaurant and - most surprisingly of all - was elected mayor of Sausalito in 1976.

Crushing passion

North Beach's Condor nightclub was best known for a well-endowed erotic dancer named Carol Doda, but in the predawn hours of Nov. 23, 1983, its most notable milestone was carved when beefy Assistant Manager James "Jimmy the Beard" Ferrozzo was crushed to death by a hydraulic piano while lying atop his naked stripper girlfriend, Theresa Hill.

Ferrozzo, who was clothed, evidently kicked the "up" switch on the piano with a pointed-toe boot while in the throes of passion, and the instrument - long used as an entrance prop by Doda - rose 15 feet to the ceiling and crushed him. Firefighters freed the screaming Hill and her dead partner four hours later.

Bad cop-ulation

Seldom has a bachelor-party-style shenanigan gone so wrong as when the 1984 graduation bash at the Rathskeller restaurant for the 156th class of the San Francisco Police Academy hazed one of its own. While 60 officers looked on in varying degrees of mirth or discomfort, a male police recruit was handcuffed to a chair and orally copulated against his will by a female prostitute. When word got out, the brouhaha led to a copycat episode on the TV show "Hill Street Blues," and the firing of two San Francisco cops accused of booking the "performer."

Love nest for a Getty

So what do you get a man who has everything? Try a mistress, three additional daughters, and a secret romantic life 350 miles from home. That's what billionaire socialite Gordon Getty revealed he had in 1999 when the three daughters he had with Cynthia Beck filed to change their names to Getty, in honor of their clandestine pop. It turned out the 64-year-old Getty, then the 82nd-richest man in America, had been living a double life for 15 years as he shuttled between the home he kept in San Francisco with longtime wife Ann and the love nest he built in Los Angeles with Beck.

Wrong aid to aide

Mayor Gavin Newsom notched himself a spot in San Francisco's sex history in February 2007 when he made the blockbuster public admission that he had had an affair with his appointments secretary, Ruby Rippey-Tourk. The revelation of a secret office romance was embarrassing enough on its own, but this one had a kicker - Rippey-Tourk was the wife of Newsom's friend and campaign manager, Alex Tourk. Newsom apologized profusely, and the next week he announced that he was entering treatment for alcohol abuse.

True to the city's history of acceptance of most things amorous, voters handily re-elected Newsom as mayor a mere nine months later.

Digitally naughty

Marilyn Chambers made history for porn kings Artie and Jim Mitchell when she starred in their pioneering 1972 X-rated classic "Behind the Green Door," but the serious headlines came in 1985 when cops - a curiously large squad of 13 - burst into the Mitchell Brothers' O'Farrell Theater and dragged her nude from the stage. According to police reports, Chambers had allowed 20 members of the audience to perform "digital penetration of body orifices" on her during her act. Chambers, whose first brush with fame was as a model hawking Ivory Soap, explained she was only appreciating her fans. "It's a thrill for them to touch me up close," she said.

Whiskey A-no-no

Think you can't mix lust, politics, religion and ethnicity on stage? Try this: Steven Leyba, Church of Satan priest with a pentagram carved into his back, bent over in front of city luminaries in 1997 as he was first urinated upon by a woman dressed like Pocahontas - and then sodomized with a whiskey bottle by the same faux Indian princess.

Leyba said his act was a metaphor for how alcohol was forced upon Native Americans. Political consultant Jack Davis, whose pals booked Leyba's performance as the centerpiece of his 50th birthday party, eventually called it going too "far." Sheriff Michael Hennessey, among the attending bigwigs who also included District Attorney Terence Hallinan and Board of Supervisors President Barbara Kaufman, called it "disgusting."