Come with me to my canyon. Let us climb down, down. Parting the laurel and the wild bank rose, riotous in its beauty. Down to this still spot. This bed of a mountain stream in winter. This place of rejoicing birds in summer. And in spring, — this place for the dancing of our souls. — Margaret Erwin Schevill, 1922
Berkeley’s intellectual community discovered Inverness in the early 1920s. These families mostly lived north of the University of California’s Berkeley campus. One such street, Tamalpais Road, was home to several university families who would also become Inverness fixtures.
The Schevills were one of those families. Rudolph Schevill had been lured to Berkeley from Yale in 1912 to start a department of romance languages. He was a leading Cervantes scholar whose definitive edition of the Spanish writer’s complete works was underwritten by Phoebe Apperson Hearst. His wife, Margaret Erwin Schevill, had graduated with honors from Wellesley College in 1908 and spent time teaching in Arizona before meeting Rudolph on a trip to California.
The Schevills lived in a brown-shingle house whose backyard garden overlooked the wild canyon of Codornices Park and its beautiful native trees. In 1923, they commissioned the renowned craftsman architect Charles Sumner Greene to design a “big room” that attached to their home’s south end. Brown shingle houses were the party houses of the era, designed for entertaining. The Schevills used the big room as a social salon, hosting concerts, lectures and poetry readings. In 1924, Pablo Casals performed a cello recital there. Casals had befriended Rudolph in Spain, and he referred to him as “mi hermano del alma”—my soul brother.
Their comradeship extended to political activities. It was at the request of Casals and Fernando de los Rios, who later served as Spain’s ambassador to the United States, that Rudolph created the West Coast Committee for the Defense of the Spanish Republic. Rudolph’s fundraising activities in support of the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War drew him into the orbit of physicist Robert Oppenheimer, Haakon Chevalier and other prominent Berkeley leftists. It also later landed him on the blacklist of the Tenney Committee, California’s version of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Margaret and Rudolph’s son James described his mother as a “special mixture of aristocratic Republican conservatism and anarchic, artistic impulse.” During a stay in Chicago in 1923, Margaret was introduced to the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. She and Wright became romantically involved for nine months before she broke off the romance and returned to Berkeley. The two would nonetheless remain friends throughout their lives.
Margaret knew lots of people in the arts. One of her artist friends was Alexander Calder, whose sister Peggy lived several doors up from the Schevills on Tamalpais Road. Sandy, as Alexander was called, attended Margaret’s famous New Year’s parties, dancing with Margaret and his sister. Sandy later gifted Margaret a necklace he designed made of brass wire. The necklace is known today as the “Margaret Schevill Necklace” and has been exhibited in museums throughout the United States.
Margaret was an artist in her own right. She studied painting with William A. Gaw and taught in San Francisco’s Presidio School and privately at her home. In her family memoir, Peggy Calder Hayes remembered assisting Margaret in teaching art to young people in the Schevills’ home in Berkeley.
Beginning in the 1920s, Margaret studied with Carl Jung in Switzerland. It was likely through her studies with Jung that she deepened her interest in Navajo myths. She accompanied Jung on his field trip in 1924-1925 to the Southwest, where she interacted with Native American elders. Her published works include retellings of Navajo stories.
The Schevills spent summers in Inverness from the early 1920s onwards. They lived initially in a shingle house on Douglass Street that Margaret had designed with builder James Malstrom. After Margaret and Rudolph divorced in 1939, she remarried. She and her second husband, University of Chicago professor George K.K. Link, purchased the Eastman house at 10 Inverness Way North. Present-day Inverness resident Carmen Violich-Goodin grew up on Tamalpais Road in Berkeley and remembered visiting the 10 Inverness Way house as a young girl with her friend Susie Schevill, Margaret’s granddaughter. Carmen recalled Susie referring to her grandmother as “Nouni.”
The Schevills were part of a close-knit group of university families who summered in Inverness. The lives of these families were a tapestry of intersecting connections. Kate and Ivan Linforth, a professor of classics, lived next door to the Schevills in Berkeley. The Schevills’ son Karl would marry Janis Kent, the sister of TJ “Jack” Kent. In turn, James Whitney would marry Deborah Tolman, the daughter of Kathleen and Edward Tolman, a professor of psychology. Across the street from the Schevills in Berkeley lived Jack Kent, an urban planning professor, and Mary Tolman Kent. Each of these families had summer homes in Inverness.
One summer in 1934, Rudolph and Margaret’s son James had a formative teenage experience. His parents had arranged for an attractive teenage girl with theatrical ambitions to babysit in Inverness for a few weeks. The babysitter was Olivia de Havilland, whose family the Schevills had become acquainted with during stays with mutual friends in Los Gatos. In Inverness, 17-year-old Olivia and her then-boyfriend Peter Whitney led a group that read Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” Olivia and Peter cast 13-year-old James as Feste.
As James related in his autobiography, the experience of reading Shakespeare alongside Olivia set his direction in life. Though his parents had hoped the Shakespearean venture would coax him into returning to boarding school in Colorado that fall, it had the opposite effect. “I, Feste, would not be subdued, even though I would have submitted gladly to Olivia, as she read her lines with melodic ambitious fire,” he wrote. Within a year of her stay, Olivia became a Hollywood star following her appearance opposite Errol Flynn in “Captain Blood” in 1935. James later became a prominent poet and playwright, teaching both subjects for decades at San Francisco State University and Brown University.
Courtney Linn is an executive with a Sacramento-based credit union. He thanks Susie Schevill, Carmen Violich-Goodin, and Daniella Thompson for their assistance.