Stephen G. Bloom

Stephen G. Bloom is the author of The Audacity of Inez Burns: Dreams, Desire, Treachery, and Ruin in the City of Gold (Regan Arts, 2017). He is an award-winning journalist and author of Postville, Inside the Writer’s Mind, The Oxford Project (with Peter Feldstein), and Tears of Mermaids. He has been a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Dallas Morning News, and a senior writer in San Francisco for the Sacramento Bee. Bloom’s work has appeared in many magazines, newspapers, and websites, including Smithsonian, New York Times Magazine, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, London Guardian, Salon, Best New Writing 2016, National Public Radio, and The Atlantic. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a professor of journalism at the University of Iowa since 1993.

Born in the slums of San Francisco to a cigar-rolling alcoholic, Inez Burns 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 millionaire, seducing one man after another, bearing children out of wedlock, and bribing politicians and cops along the way to secure her place in San Francisco’s firmament. 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 former California Governor Jerry Brown—used Inez to catapult his nascent career to national prominence.