The audacity of Inez Burns
By: Stephen G. Bloom
Edition: First Regan Arts hardcover edition.
Publisher: Regan Arts
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 428
ISBN-13: 9781682450093
Subjects: Clinic managers; Abortion; Abortion services; History
Description: 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.
Notes: "First Regan Arts hardcover edition, February 2018."

"Dreams, desire, treachery & ruin in the city of gold"--Jacket.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 393-425).
Table of contents: title: Prologue: pinky, bootsie, and fats; title: Dreams. Misfortune in the promised land ; The wonderful wizardress of the Palace hotel ; Wayward girls and lecherous rogues ; Men with resources ; Money soap, Italian potion no. 12, and the Brazilian Beleza ; The earth moves ; Pickled in Pittsburgh ; Dreamland, the pleasure palace, and a pair of dead bodies ; Luxury heels ; All and everything that fashion gives; title: Desire. Mean little bastard and proud of it ; No piece of cake ; Off her back ; The nature of the beast ; Pillars of money, fountains of payoffs ; Unapologetic; title: Treachery. Traitors! ; The other shoe ; Buster Brown to the rescue ; Ambition feeds on strange foods ; Distrust ; The bridge of sighs ; Hypocrites!; title: Ruin. Stiff upper lip ; Always fight with a fist ; The plight of women and the pleasure of men ; "No, I never bribed anyone"; title: Coda. Still stylish and feminine after all these years ; Down the hatch ; She was too audacious.