Among her many accomplishments, she persuaded her first husband, sugar magnate Adolph B. Spreckels, to donate the California Palace of the Legion of Honor to the city of San Francisco.

Viggo descended from Franco-Danish nobility through his grandfather who emigrated during the French Revolution (one of Napoleon III's generals was his uncle) and used that as an excuse to avoid working[2] while simultaneously deriding the "nouveau riche" of California.

[4] Alma de Bretteville met her future husband thanks to the rumor she modeled for the Dewey Monument by Robert Aitken, which can be found in Union Square.

[6] Regardless, this statue was selected from a number of entries and only barely made the cut, thanks to the crucial vote of the chair of the Citizens' Committee, Adolph Spreckels.

Alma makes an appearance in Chapter VI as ‘Ella Crockford, the wife of the California Street Sugar King’, and is blackmailed for various entertaining but disreputable actions.

Although attended by local celebrities such as author Jack London and sculptor Earl Cummings, there were a number of people who were disdainful of her earlier infamy and snubbed her invitations.

With Fuller's encouragement and contacts, Alma Spreckels eventually became one of the more influential art collectors in the U.S.[3] She returned from Paris right after the beginning of World War I.

It was there that Spreckels fell in love with the French Pavilion, which was a temporary building constructed only of a wood frame covered with staff, a kind of faux stone made from a mixture of plaster and burlap-type fiber.

As Spreckels envisioned it, the building is an almost exact, full-scale replica of the French Pavilion from the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, which in turn was a three-quarter-scale version of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur in Paris designed by George Applegarth and H. Guillaume.

[3] Spreckels continued her charity rummage sales during the Great Depression, this time expanded to thrift shops, which were eventually given to The Salvation Army to operate.

Awl moved to San Francisco, but the hotel was not particularly successful and Spreckels sent him back to Santa Barbara to manage the business, but he was also unable to stem the losses.

[12] When the U.S. was drawn into World War II, Awl, as a member of the United States Coast Guard Reserve, was called to active duty.