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company’s former designation—M. & J. LeBaron, Vintners—was unmemorable and hard to pronounce. “Vintners,” she said, “with a t between the two n ’s, is hard to say. ‘Vineyards’ has a nice romantic sound, and ‘Baronet’ gives a high-class name to what, let’s face it, is a middle-class wine.” Who knows how much that small change, alone, may have had to do with the company’s surge in sales during the fifties and sixties?
    Still, though she is—always has been—a definite stickler when it comes to such matters as balance sheets and profit-and-loss statements and fractions of percentage points, her reputation for tightfistedness is undeserved. On the contrary, she is loved in many circles for her generosity—generosity of the strictly personal kind. For example, she is one of the few women in San Francisco who regularly tips her favorite salespeople at Gump’s and Saks and Magnin’s and all the rest, and the checks that go out from her at Christmastime to employees and others who she feels have given her good service add up to thousands of dollars. Take the case, too, of Miss Sophie, who sells lingerie at Magnin’s. Miss Sophie mentioned to Sari LeBaron one day that the motor on her Deepfreeze had burned out, and she had had to throw out all its contents. The next morning, on Miss Sophie’s doorstep, there arrived a new Deepfreeze, packed with fillets of beef, turkeys, Columbia River salmon, and other fancy comestibles. Are these the actions of a penurious or hard-hearted woman?
    At times, she can display an almost total personal disregard for money. One example will suffice. Sari LeBaron has an estimable collection of jade pieces, which are displayed in various vitrines and on tables around her house. One night in—I think the year was 1971 or 1972—at one of her dinner parties, a male guest who had indulged in a bit too much John Barleycorn decided, as a joke, to slip a jade piece off one of the tables and drop it into the pocket of his dinner jacket. It was a pink jade jackal with emerald eyes. The next morning, regretting his action, he sent the piece back to her in the center of a flower arrangement. Sari, who had not noticed that the piece was missing, merely glanced at the arrangement and ordered that it be sent to Children’s Hospital. Two days later she received this letter from the hospital:
    My dear Mrs. LeBaron:
    I want personally to thank you for your generous gift to Children’s.
    The flowers are beautiful, and the jade tiger [ sic ] is exquisite. We have had our art appraisers examine it, and are assured that it will bring in excess of $25,000.
    We thought you would be pleased to learn that we are adding your name to the bronze plaque in the entrance foyer.
    Sincerely yours,
    Richard J. Walters
    Director
    Of course, she could have asked for the piece back, explained that it was a mistake. But she laughed the whole thing off, took it as a great joke.
    George Hessler, who pilots her 727, calls her “Nugget” because she periodically gives him nuggets of unrefined gold, knowing he collects them, from her own collection of souvenirs of the Gold Rush days. She gave him a particularly large one after that episode which she and Gabe Pollack spoke of on the very February morning we have been talking about. Well, you might argue, he deserved it, since what happened was Sari’s fault entirely. Still, if she hadn’t interceded, George could have lost his license.
    You will hear a lot of idle gossip and speculation about the LeBarons in this town, and you will hear much malicious fun made of the way the LeBarons seem to have worked so hard to erase, and renounce, their national origins and have tried to invent new ones for themselves. Well, this was mostly Papa Julius. You will also hear that, for all their airs, the LeBarons somehow always manage to “marry down.” It is true that, for all his