Current mood:	tired
Current music:	Malice Miser -- "Merveilles"

Ernest Beall, Prince of Ties
Ernest Beall is an enigmatic figure in my life. I never met him (he died in 1980, five years before I moved to San Francisco) but his life and work have been an interest of mine for the past ten years. This is entirely because of the neckties he designed and made from about 1952 to 1970 at his atelier in San Francisco.



Other than some anecdotes that I’ve discovered in Herb Caen’s columns and the society pages of the local newspapers, there’s very little I’ve been able to learn about the man, despite countless hours of searching. I know that he was born Ernest J. Beall, somewhere in the deep south in 1914. to a minister and his wife. Ernest served in WWII, then returned home. But not long after this, he left the south--apparently because he dared to date a black girl, earning his family’s disapproval. Moving to Los Angeles, he took a job at Capital Records, eventually becoming an executive. Then, in the early 1950s, dissatisfied with the routine, he chucked it all in and moved to San Francisco.

The few old newspaper photographs I’ve seen of him show a handsome, cultured man; an aesthete as well as an amateur athlete. On a whim, he discovered some bolts of raw silk in interesting colors and irregular stripes at an import shop, brought them to his tailor and asked for some ties to be made up. Mr. Beall was so pleased with the results that he not only wore them, he passed them out to friends. Soon his friends—who were well-placed in society—created such a demand for more ties that Mr. Beall recognized a business opportunity. His searching turned up a limited amount of the same fabric, so he found local artisans who could weave fabric to his design, and construct ties to his exact specifications.

I presume that he considered his given name insufficiently interesting, so he shuffled it around and became “Beall J. Ernst”, and his ties, he simply labeled “Ernst”. In 1952, Ernst leased an old brick warehouse South of Market Street and threw himself into his work. His ties were immediately snapped up by such local institutions as Gump’s, I. Magnin, The White House and the City of Paris. They were seen on models in Esquire, Playboy and Gentleman’s Quarterly. Ernst could scarcely keep up with demand. His new success allowed him to became a benefactor of the arts, collect Asian antiques, jet-set around the world. He bought a house near the top of Twin Peaks and lived the bachelor dream. Life was good.

Then, one night as he slept, two men broke into his home. They tied him up and locked him in a closet while they ransacked his house, stealing a chest of jewelry, some $20,000 in cash, and eventually fleeing in Ernst's brand new Jaguar. After nearly a day of confinement, Ernst finally managed to call the police, even though he was still tied up (dialing with his nose!). They eventually responded, but apparently their investigations proved fruitless. The experience seems to have deeply scarred Ernst. In 1970, he accepted a million-dollar offer by a group of investors, and he bade farewell to the tie business.

At this point, Ernst seems to have undergone some unknown and drastic reversal of fortune. In 1978, the city directory shows that he was no longer living in a house on Twin Peaks, but rather in an apartment in the Tenderloin. Two years later, he was found dead, in Nevada, apparently of natural causes, at the age of 64.

But his ties remain. I found my first Ernst tie in about 1997, at a thrift store in Mill Valley, where I lived at the time. It was unlike any tie I had seen. About 2-1/2 inches wide, with square ends and horizontal stripes in an odd combination of Technicolors. Given that I frequent estate sales, I started finding more and more of the curious neckties at the homes of wealthy people who had moved on to the hereafter. After a few years, I had a couple dozen of them, in a surprising variety of colors and patterns.

About five years ago I hit the Ernst jackpot in a house atop Russian Hill. It had belonged to a couple with exquisite taste, and a large walk-in wardrobe for each of them. The woman was fond of Marchesa di Gresy wool suits and dresses (some of which came home with my wife), and the man, of Ernst ties. Maybe 250 of them. I spent about three hours going through them, starting with an enormous pile on a bed, and eventually winnowing out a hundred or so that were too similar to others to justify buying. The remaining 150 now live on three tie racks in my closet. I don’t think I’ve worn them all yet, and I’ve worn very few of them more than once thus far.

This is what 150 Ernst ties look like. I ran out of room on the table to display all 180 I have.


Some of them are remarkably bright, with contrasting silk linings. Think David Hockney in his prime.


Others are subtle and muted. Ernst had great color sense.


Some of my favorites are Ernst’s hairline-stripe ties with hundreds of different colors of thread.


His ties came in an amazing variety of fabrics, from raw silk to mohair to rayon, both knit and woven.


The rarest and most special of his ties must be these hand-silkscreened models. They were “normal” ties, but had images printed atop the striped fabric. The one on the left shows Fisherman’s Wharf, the one on the right depicts the Golden Gate Bridge. The tie in the center has masks on it, and probably reflected the tiki craze of the time. I like to picture Ernst wearing it to Trader Vic’s in about 1959 or ’60, with a debutante on his arm.