I strongly suspect it is the latter that people can be a member of. The Bohemian Club began as a San Francisco institu-tion in 1872, founded by journalists and kindred lowly scriveners as an excuse for late-night boozing. Near the end of the last century the cult of the redwood grove as Natures cathedral was in full swing and the Boho-businessmen yearned to give their outings a tinc-ture of spiritual uplift. "He's dead." She said, 'Your fly's open. Visit some corporate suite in San Francisco in June or early July and if you see the CEO brooding thoughtfully before his plate-glass window overlooking the Bay Bridge, the chances are he is not thinking about some impending take-over or merciless down-sizing. They'd built special platforms in the trees for men with binoculars. Mr. Ford and Mr. Kissinger this year were .guests of Mandalay, whose members include Stephen Bechtel Sr., Stephen Bechtel Jr., Leonard Case Firestone and Edgar F. Kaiser, among the industrialists; former C.I.A. "Tom Johnson is here." Rudyard Kipling, romantic colonialist and exponent of the masculine spirit, is, naturally, one of the Grove's heroes, and "Mandalay" is a triumphant white man's-burden song. One day I drove up to the front gate and got a daunting glimpse of what looked like the Grove sheriff, a barrel like figure in a Smokey the Bear hat. Theres endless dominoes the Groves board-game par excel-lence. I used my real name. My first full-strength dose of Bohemian culture took place two weeks earlier, the first Saturday night, when after a long day in the Grove I took a seat on the grassy lakeside among 1,500 ocher men for the encampment's famously surreal opening ritual. The scene was permeated by a kind of kitsch Black Forest imagery, and the setting seemed very Wagnerian -- though the music was sometimes undercut by the soft drumming of tinkling urine off the edge of the porch, where the beer drinkers went one after the other. The Bohemian Grove hires young men. A friend of mine, big in Reagan time, has been on the doorstep for 15 years. And the sand at the Russian River beach is traversed by coconut-fiber mats and rich figured squares cut from the carpets in the "City Club," the five-story brick Bohemian building in downtown San Francisco. "My grandmother always said, 'You can find sympathy in the dictionary,'" a guy with a cigar said, walking on the River Road. Thus equipped, I came and went on 7 days during the 16-day encampment, openly trespassing in what is regarded as an impermeable enclave and which the press routinely refers to as a heavily guarded area. A few years ago KGO radio, out of San Francisco, had an interesting talk show in which callers with first-hand Grove experience told their tales. "Most of it. It tasted like lighter fluid sprinkled with mint flakes. The cremation took place at the man-made lake that is the center of a lot of Grove social activity. The Field Circle seats are steeply canted; sitting in one feels like being inside a megaphone. Indeed, I was able to enjoy most pleasures of the Grove, notably the speeches, songs, elaborate drag shows, endless toasts, pre-breakfast gin fizzes, round-the-clock "Nembutals" and other drinks -- though I didn't sleep in any of the camps or swim naked with likeminded Bohemians in the Russian River at night. Of course, just about anybody could hate the Grove. One Bohemian, a patrician fellow with silver hair, wheeled in rage, saying, "I'll be goddamned." During the day, idleness is encouraged. According to 1979 figures, the average age of Bohemians is 55. Tycoons vie eagerly for the privilege of shifting a stage prop or securing the bestcomputerized lighting system that money can provide. I heard a 50-ish Bohemian, the "captain" of Pow Wow camp, call out one day as young George went to pee off the deck. Many years ago a doctor called it a Nembutal, and the name stuck, so much so that one Fore Peak camper wears a stethoscope and a white lab coat with Dr. Nembutal stitched on it. A week after the encampment, a Washington correspondent for a French paper insisted to me that the last time the prime minister had visited the U.S. was a year and a half ago. Nonetheless, the ideal of equality is comforting. Just the same, the club needed such "men of use" to support their activities. Here Henry Kissinger made a bathroom pun on the name of his friend Lee Kuan Yew, who was in attendance -- the sort of joke that the people of Singapore, whom Lee rules with such authoritarian zeal, are not free to make in public. "Who was going to offend the president?" Of course there are gay waiters and gay bohemians too, discreetly cruising River Road, but it seems that it was back in the 1970s things got somewhat out of hand. ", "They're always an the periphery of radicalism. It urged its followers to form "Boho Clubs" to study members so they could be "held accountable by the American People" for participating "in the maintenance of the process of plutocratic patriarchy which threatens the planet Earth with omnicide from the nuclear menace." No radios or television sets are allowed. Former President Ford told us what he would do to save the country. How? I wanted to visit the former president. But comes next July 14 and every self-respecting member of the Secret World government will be in a gloomy grove of redwoods alongside the Russian river in northern California, preparing to Banish Care for the 122cnd time, prelude to three weeks drinking gin fizzes and hashing out the future of the world. "It was a free ride," the other friend explained. Vaguely homosexual undertones suffused this spectacle, as they do much of ritualized life in the Grove. The camps are decorated with wooden or stone sculptures of owls, the Grove symbol. The screens get pretty fine. The reporters that Mary Moore had helped spirit into the Grove for hours at a time had come out with vague, watered-down versions of what went on, or their news organizations had suppressed the accounts. Even the prickly Lee Kuan Yew hastened to visit the club, only to have the mortification of being mistaken for a waiter. Henry Kissinger? TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. "We looked around and saw we were becoming an old-men's club," a member said, explaining recent efforts to recruit fresh blood. Bohemian Grove, 1991. This year's speaker was Henry Kissinger on The Challenge of the '80s." Maclean's magazine, March 23, 1981 reported: "Each summer, for three weekends - this year's will be the 103rd - nearly 2,000 Bohemians, with guests in tow, speed in by car and corporate jet to their guarded Grove, close by the hamlet of Monte Rio (population 1,200) on the . . The encampment's rules about dealing with waiters reinforce the heartless but egalitarian values of the Grove. ", "You know, they've got a lot of liberal faculty. It was at the Bohemian Grove that Americas nuclear weapons program was first devised by physicists such as Ernest O. Lawrence and Edward Teller, both members, meeting with other members who were then in govern-ment, all confident of the security of the redwood club-house built by Bernard Maybeck (one of our favorite American architects) in 1904. By 1988 the gauntlet of hippies and solarheads and woman-identified women whom the Bohemians had been forced to maneuver their Jags and limos around to get to the gate had disappeared. Some anthropologists of Boho culture even believe that the Grove is now encircled with gay resi-dential suburbs that have inevitably sprung up to ac-commodate these migrants. In the afternoon I walked up Kitchen Hill Road to Owl's Nest camp. No one was supposed to know he was peering up at ospreys and turkey vultures and hearing Soviet speakers along with former American secretaries of State and the present secretary of the Treasury. In 1981, for instance, Dan Rostenkowski, Ed Meese and former president of CBS News Van Gordon Sauter attended (Sauter as the guest of former California governor Edmund "Pat" Brown, Jerry's father). But best of all, there are the talent revue and the play. The scene brought to mind the reputation for prostitution that hangs around the Grove. Within a very few years the lowly scriveners were on their way out except for a few of the more presentable among them to lend a pretense of Boho-dom and Mammon had seized power. In midsummer the phones are often crowded. A waiter in a red jacket dropped an uneaten chunk of the bright red cod into a waste bin, and the Bohemians at my table talked about presidents. Now and then, though, a Bohemian sits down in the ferns and passes out. Instead of Deltas and Pi Etas there are camps, some 120 in all, stretching along River Road and Morse Stephens canyon. You can't describe it," he explained. Although the talent shows put on by Merv Griffin and Art Linkletter were reckoned at least in past years to be good, the plays are pretty awful, heavily freighted with double-entendres about swollen members and the like. More than 1,500 people are on the waiting list, and one man waited 10 years before becoming a member. If the avenging posses mustered by the Bohemian Grove Action Network manage this year to burst through the security gates at the Bohemian Grove, they will (to extrapolate from numerous eyewitness accounts of past sessions) find proofs most convincing to them that here indeed is the ruling crowd in executive session: hundreds of near-dead white men sitting by a lake listening to Henry Kissinger, plus many other near-dead white men in adjacent landscape in a state of intoxication so advanced that many of them had fallen insensible among the ferns, gin fizz glasses gripped firmly till the last. In my informant's opinion, there was bad blood; Nixon's resignation 15 years ago had offended the club's honor -- it had been so un-Bohemian. And my attempts to get a job as a waiter or a valet in one of the camps failed. A poster for one Grove play, Pompeii, featured a mighty erection under a toga, modelled no doubt on the redoubtable organ in the Pompeiian fresco photographed by many a touring tycoon. The encampment got even looser as the third and last weekend approached. Although golf, skeet shooting and canoeing are available, merely relaxing in the physical splendor of the 2,700 acres of redwood trees and the camaraderie of the fraternity are sufficient entertainment for most of the grove's campers. Colin Powell pictured at the Bohemian Grove in a photo hacked by Guccifer The sociologists who had studied the place were right; there was no real security. Big business shows up: Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, billionaire John Kluge of Metromedia. When they reached the water, they extinguished their torches. Every year since 1879, the club holds its two-week Annual Summer Encampment, dubbed by President Herbert Hoover "the greatest men's party on earth." The gathering takes place on the exclusive. Every year there are new wrinkles on the cremation ceremony. Also, it seemed possible that Ronald Reagan himself might make a triumphant return to his longtime camp, Owl's Nest. Many older men die waiting. Hugh said that an old college friend came to stay in Bohemia and took over the mixing of the drinks. There's a feeling of both great privilege and rusticity. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. The peeing is ceaseless and more than a little exhibitionistic. "Are you going to show it?" That's the picnic scene at Russian River, where whitecaps and condoms meander down the foul brown estuary swirling amongst filthy young men who entertain disgusting Old Jew Pervs from Fire Island, Key West and West Hollywood. Everything felt peaceful and sweet, like death, the good things they say about it: the end to striving, & sunlight-dappled heavenliness. Hookers came to a certain bar in Monte Rio at ten each night, he said. He is probably worrying about the cut of his tutu for the drag act for which he has been rehearsing keenly for many months. The encampment became controversial in the early Reagan years when reporters, still suffering the hangover of Carter populism, questioned club executive appointees about the club's sexist practices. The club has a fa-mous motto, weaving spiders not come here, meaning No shop talk, but Tom laughs. Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. According to the guest list, this year's attendees include George H. W. Bush, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and several former CIA directors. The priests turned in desperation to the owl. Bush, William F. Buckley Jr. and former astronaut and ex-Eastern Air Lines chairman Frank Borman.) That did it. In 1982 reporters followed German chancellor Helmut Schmidt co the Grove gates, and the front page of the Christian Science Monitor termed the Grove "the West's hidden summit." The sensibility of the Grove recalls an era before the surgeon general's report on smoking, before the death of God and duty, before the advent of cholesterol and Sandra Day O'Connor (whose husband, John, bunks in Pelicans camp). A "heifer" asked him why he was there. You know you are inside the Bohemian Grove when you come down a trail in the woods and hear piano music from amid a group of tents and then round a bend to see a man with a beer in one hand and his penis in the other, urinating into the bushes. "You know," he said, for he started every comment with that phrase, "I haven't said this publicly before. Was there one secret government or two? Come out and play! Soon the ancient redwoods, hated by the Pomo Indians of the area as clammy and sepulchral, rang to the laughter of the disporting men of commerce. Though he was no career man at the Grove Tom had al-ready taken on a caustic loyalty to his camp. His new book is The Big Heat:Earth on the Brink co-written with Joshua Frank. So are Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon -- though club directors are said to be miffed at Nixon, a longtime Bohemian Grover, who's still listed as sleeping in Cave Man, one of the Grove's 119 curiously and sometimes appropriately named camps. Rex Greed, an effeminate gallery owner who sells toilets ("a counterpoint of mass and void"), tries to convince artist Jason Jones Jr. that his future lies in sculptures composed of garbage. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was invited this summer and, according to club officials, had planned to attend, but he canceled. I would like to make the two-year congressman's term four years, to reduce the number of elections that we have, because I think that's one of the reasons that only about 53 percent of the people vote. They all got a big kick out of this. "I call it dangerous," he said and told of how a dropped cigar had once ignited a batch. The club's famed annual gathering has been held for more than 100 years at the 2,700-acre Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, about 70 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. He wore western gear all the way, a gray-blue checked western shirt, a white braided western belt, cowboy boots and, in his left breast pocket, an Owl's Nest pin with an owl on it. Early club menus offered dolled-up western dishes such as "boiled striped bass au vin blanc" and "cafe noir." If nine of the 11 men on the membership committee favor a candidate, he may be admitted, upon payment of $2,500 initiation fee and monthly dues of $41. Cronkite, as the owl, said that the only way Care could be cremated was to use fire from the Lamp of Fellowship before him, an "eternal" gas flame that burns day and night while the encampment is on. The long-range planning commit-tee of the club decided to buy a grove some sixty miles north of the city near the town of Monte Rio.

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