She also contributed heavily to charities such as Guide Dogs for the Blind, still leaving an estate of roughly $20 million to the organization when her 12th heart attack killed her in 1982. Van Meter, for instance, remembers that she funded a Rotary Club scholarship program for the trades. Stanford was also known for her philanthropy. (Courtesy of Sausalito Historical Society) Sausalito restaurateur Juanita Musson, Sally Stanford’s frenemy, wields a rolling pin like a weapon - but with a smirk. “But I never heard of any of Sally’s girls working there - or of them becoming members of the Sausalito Woman’s Club.” “The big question always was if the red light in the second story window of Valhalla, her restaurant, was more than just a decoration,” Taylor says wryly. No matter how civic-minded she became, or how generous, or how many celebrities she mingled with at the Sausalito waterfront restaurant she owned in the latter half of the 20th century, her stained reputation just wouldn’t disappear.

(Courtesy of Robin Sweeny and the Sausalito Historical Society) The other councilwoman pictured, Robin Sweeny, served for 28 years. Sally Stanford may have hoped to escape her past as a San Francisco brothel madam from the late 1920s to the late 1940s when she became Sausalito’s mayor at age 72 in 1976, but she couldn’t.Įven though she’d “reinvented herself as something else,” observes Jerry Taylor, president of the Sausalito Historical Society, “there were always mixed opinions about her - you might love her or hate her or both.” When in March 1978 Peter Van Meter (center) and Fritz Warren (left) were inducted as Sausalito City Council members, Rene “Buddy” De Bruyn (right) succeeded ex-madam Sally Stanford (second from left) as mayor.

Sally Stanford by Alton Pryor