For the true eccentric is like an orchid: slow to bloom, shy, delicate, often hidden until one stumbles on a flash of color against the monotone background of mundanity. The great dampener on unusual lifestyles in Britain is that confounded modern innovation-the need to earn a living. Or have they found something in California missing from the ever-increasing rationalism of post-Thatcher Britain? Perhaps the estimated 300,000 Brits in the Southland are merely occupying what is, after all, rightfully theirs. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate what might have happened if the British had stayed on. The links between these two hotbeds of eccentricity stretch back many years, to 1586, when Sir Francis Drake landed at Point Reyes, named the country Nova Albion and claimed it for the English crown. But what is almost more interesting than the highly speculative theories being advanced are the personalities of the touts-and the fact that many of them are either English or Californian. Others are Queen Elizabeth I, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, and Christopher Marlowe-virtually everyone who was anyone in those days, except, perhaps, Tommy Lasorda. As a result, Wrigley voluntarily downgraded herself from the “mad Baconian” category to being merely “dreadfully pro-Bacon.” In an area densely populated by the intellectually unhinged, such objectivity is unusual.īacon, for instance, is but one of many who have been touted as the real authors of Shakespeare. This enterprise was funded by art collectors Walter Conrad Arensberg and his wife, Louise Stevens Arensberg, members of the East Coast establishment who had settled comfortably in Los Angeles.Įventually, Wrigley concluded that Bacon was not the playwright, because, in her opinion, Bacon was far too busy with other things. She had devoted herself to the study of whether the works attributed to William Shakespeare were, in fact, written by Sir Francis Bacon, an English lawyer and philosopher who died in 1626.

A few weeks ago, Elizabeth Springer Wrigley, formerly president of the Francis Bacon Foundation in Claremont, died at aged 81.

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