Making the Riffle

SILVER PLATTER (454 pp.)--Ellin Berlin --Doubleday ($4.95).

"Marie Louise Antoinette Hungerford. Downvill. Entree le 15 Janvier 1857. Agee de 13 ans."

These words, written by a Belgian nun in the register of St. Catherine's Female Academy at Benicia, Calif., were as important to Louise Hungerford as if they were inscribed in the Almanach de Gotha. They were her cachet of respectability, her inner answer to the poverty of childhood and the gossiping envy that surrounded her later life. Her father could afford to keep her at St. Catherine's for only a single term. But it was enough. In her 85th year, when she had been a friend of the former Queen of Spain and the Prince of Wales, her proudest boast was still: "I was educated at Benicia." It meant nothing to most of her listeners. It meant everything to Louise.

In this fond biography of her grandmother. Author Ellin Mackay Berlin tells how Louise made the leap from being a tenement child to becoming the 19th century's hostess with the mostes'. The child of a Manhattan barber and his seamstress wife. Louise used to deliver her mother's embroidery to the fine houses on Washington Square and St. John's Park. Her one ambition was to break into that glittery world and call it her own. She made it. Today more and more social climbing is merely the ascent from one suburban foothill to a slightly higher hill ; in Louise's day more dramatic mountaineering was frequent, and her own climb was a veritable conquest of Everest.

The Lode. Louise's luck was phenomenal. She got to the freewheeling West when her father, after serving in the Mexican War, settled in tiny Downieville, Calif., where his earnings went into worthless mining stocks. Louise, her mother and grandmother joined him after a journey of 5,000 miles by boat and muleback. At 16, pretty, dark-haired Louise made a disastrous marriage to a local doctor who was as calamitous a speculator as her father. When he was found dying at Poverty Hill, Calif., riddled by drugs and alcohol, 22-year-old Louise was left penniless with a crippled child to support. Like her mother, she became a seamstress.

Then John William Mackay met and married her. The ablest of a syndicate of shrewd Irishmen who pickaxed their way from the mines to mansions on San Francisco's Nob Hill, he was a husky man who stuttered when angry and had an ambition as single-track as her own: to become the master of the Comstock Lode. Mackay broke the Bank of California's hold on the land, and the earth's hold on its riches -- burrowing 1,200 feet into the lode to uncover the Big Bonanza vein. "By God now that we've made the riffle you're entitled to your share, old lady!'' he cried to Louise.

Silver Flood. She returned to Manhattan on a flood of silver that seemed potent enough to sweep everything before it. But high society stood firm. At a devastating party the women closed ranks and turned on Louise the glacial stare that the elite reserves for the brash newcomer. Sniffed one dowager: ''Mackay? Oh, Irish, of course. They don't even pronounce it properly" (i.e., Mackey instead of Mckye).

Bitterly hurt, Louise retreated to Paris, where John Mackay bought her a mansion on the Rue de Tilsitt that was ''like the Palace Hotel, only on a smaller scale." She was quick to see that to Europeans it was completely unimportant that she had been snubbed in Manhattan. London and Paris expected lavish entertainment from Americans, not lineage. For two decades Louise Mackay supplied the entertainment. Her parties had a Babylonian magnificence, from "eighteen footmen on the stairs to the bowls of out-of-season violets in the blue salon." Her guests included the British royal family, the royalist and Bonapartist nobility of France. The Americans who had treated her so cavalierly in Manhattan had finally got their comeuppance. John Mackay was a patient and devoted husband; cushioned by an income of "a million dollars every thirty days," he encouraged Louise in all her extravagances. When he was not engaged in a death struggle with Financier Jay Gould over the Postal Telegraph system he had set up to rival Gould's Western Union, John liked to spend his vacations as an amused observer at his wife's parties.

Perhaps the highest moment of her life came when she was presented to Victoria, Queen not only of England but of everything that Louise Mackay most admired. In Author Berlin's simple account of that occasion, two symbols can be glimpsed: the Kohinoor diamond on the Queen's breast and the Comstock Lode that had carried Louise to Buckingham Palace. The fabulous diamond and the fabulous silver mine, the power of empire and the American frontier thus met; they could scarcely be expected to understand each other, but their meeting nonetheless seemed to have about it a touch of destiny, even of continuity.

Sense of Place. Louise's ride on the carrousel was nearly over. Her oldest son. Willie, was killed in a riding accident at his French chateau. Daughter Eva married an Italian count who proved to be a blackmailer. And on a summer evening in 1902, Louise sat by John Mackay's bedside and watched as he died of pneumonia.

Author Ellin Mackay Berlin (Lace Curtain, Land I Have Chosen) wrote this book as a kind of sentimental duty to the past. By the time the upstart Mackays had become aristocratic, she herself outraged her Roman Catholic family in 1926 by marrying Songwriter Irving Berlin, son of Russian Jewish immigrants. She notes with wonder that her grandmother was born in an East Side slum only a few blocks away from where, 50 years later, Irving Berlin spent his childhood. With just such a sense of place she moves competently from the mining disasters in the Comstock to the horrors of fire that time and again leveled the ramshackle towns of the West. In contrast there are the glittering balls in London's Marlborough House, yachting at Cowes and the stately bacchanals of the Rue de Tilsitt. It was a time when men grabbed for the main chance, when the difference between obscurity and unfathomable wealth could simply be the lucky stroke of a pickax. If John or Louise Mackay had a thought beyond material success, the book does not suggest it. They knew what they wanted and were content when they got it, even though Louise may have partially agreed with Mrs. Paran Stevens, who said to her: "Odd, isn't it, how hard we work to get into a world which isn't after all very amusing?"

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