The 'Fisties: Best San Francisco Celebrity
We here at SFist like our celebrities like we like our men: insane, rude, dirty, and fabulous. Oh, wait, that's NOT how we like our men anymore (that's 12 years of therapy finally paying off, folks.) But any celebrity who seems too classy, clean, or "just like us" is not who makes us buy that Us magazine at the Cala point of purchase.
Our attitudes about celebrities mesh nicely with our attitude about our fair city, which we also love for its funk and circumstance -- hey, if we wanted the geographical equivalent of that tasteful Armani Oscars dress, we'd move to Menlo Park. And there's no local celeb who personifies San Francisco better than our own Dede Wilsey.
Chronicle photo by Michael Macor
We remember when we first heard of Dede Wilsey, when we read a W magazine article about her fearless fundraising for the New de Young. Unfortunately there's no link we can share, but we can paraphrase the part that stuck in our head: apparently, Wilsey would call on donors (and her "friends") by saying "so-and-so is donating 5 million, and you're only donating 2.5. What are you, poor?!" "What are you, poor?" We can't get over "poor" being used as an insult by anyone other than Eric Cartman. It might be one of the more disgusting things we've ever read (and we just owned up to reading W magazine, so you know our grossness threshold is pretty high). Even the author of what we assume was intended to be a flattering article seemed both revolted and fascinated by Wilsey, and so were we.
The article alluded to a book that said some unflattering things about Wilsey, but we didn't make the connection until we recieved Friend of SFist Christine's recommmendation to read Oh The Glory of it All, the memoir by McSweeney's editor, SF native, and Dede's stepson Sean Wilsey.
And, wow, we read and read and read some more (dude, it's almost 500 pages long -- we haven't read a book that long that didn't involve an oppressed teen and a magical school..wait, OTGOIA did have that! It's a Harry Potter book in disguise! Holy Crap! But we digress), and came away with a new appreciation for Dede Wilsey. Sean Wilsey's book is an unflinchingly brutal portrait of a cruel, wicked, and greedy monster (well, he nails a lot of folks, but Dede definitely gets the worst of it). If someone wrote a book like that about us, we don't know what we'd do. Move back to Indiana? Don a disguise? Both?
But Dede Wilsey did none of these things. She ended up deciding not to sue the s**t out of her stepson (thus causing some to assume that if she wasn't suing, everything written about her must be true). She didn't retreat to Napa to lick her scandalous wounds. She kept on doing her thing, going to her fancy pants shindigs, hitting the town, and, by the way, nearly singlehandedly raising ther funds for our gorgeous new de Young.
Dede got the shit (likely justifiably) kicked out of her in a most public fashion, and she got back up and kept on going. She's been described as capable of great cruelty and great generosity, a walking, talking contradiction in terms. We've never met Dede Wilsey, so we don't have any idea what she's like. We suspect that she's more like her press than not -- but we also suspect that she doesn't give a s**t what we suspect. If descriptions of her are to be believed, she's more than a little dark and dirty -- but she's the kind of dark and dirty we can't look away from. All of that makes her, to us, the very personification of all that's both great and horrible about San Francisco, and what earns her the 2005 'Fistie for Best San Francisco Celebrity.