San Francisco socialite left behind caviar, yachts and her household to grow to be a nun at age 61

Ann Russell Miller was most of 20 years pregnant and more than 60 years rich – really rich.

The San Francisco celebrity gave birth to 10 children – five boys, five girls – and raised them in a Pacific Heights mansion, spent nights at opera and charity events, and enjoyed extravagant vacations on Mediterranean yachts.

Then, one day after her 61st birthday, Miller traded her Imelda Marcos-like, cedar-lined shoe cabinet filled with the likes of Givenchy and Versace for a pair of Birkenstocks and entered a nunnery, the austere, austere, and monastic Order of the Discalced Carmelites just outside of Chicago.

She died on June 5 after a series of strokes after gardening, ironing, cleaning, praying and sometimes breaking the rules, including punctuality rules, there for nearly 31 years. She was 92 years old and had no physical contact with her 10 children and 18 grandchildren over the decades.

The night before she left for the nunnery, Miller – who had been widowed five years earlier – hosted a farewell party for 800 guests at the San Francisco Hilton, where caviar, seafood and chicken were served in a pepper and beurre blanc sauce.

Friends and family thought she would eventually give up the life of silence, solitude, and housework. Or get kicked out.

Her days were filled with at least eight hours of prayer, the rest of her life was limited to the confines of the monastery, where she slept in a cell on a thin mat. The once talkative doyenne was silent for up to 22 hours a day.

She wasn’t the perfect nun. She could not sing, so she was a disturbing addition to the choir, and the mother superior noticed that she was kneeling in a slight indentation in the floor in penance. Even in a monastery, Miller was always late for anything, her family said.

In 1994, five years after her arrival, Sister Mary Joseph of the Trinity took her vows and became a bride of Christ.

Sister Mary Joseph never hugged her family or friends again. They could visit them, but only with a staggered double row of iron bars in between. She never kept many of her 28 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.

Her oldest child, Donna Casey from San Francisco, remembers the day after the farewell party when the family gathered in their hotel room for mass and said goodbye.

“She couldn’t believe she had so many crybugs in the room,” Casey said.

Her decision and her departure were “very dramatic,” she added.

“I’ve been trying to explain it for 30 years,” said Casey.

Miller was born Mary Ann Russell on October 30, 1928, the daughter of Donald Russell, future chairman of the board of the Southern Pacific Railroad, founder of a gas and electricity company that became Pacific Gas & Electric.

Her ancestry includes the Folgers coffee family and the founder of Wells Fargo.

She was often featured in society’s columns and numbered Marie Gallo (California Wine Empire), singer Loretta Lynn, Nancy Reagan, and comedian Phyllis Diller in hundreds, if not thousands, of friends. She drank, smoked and played cards. And she was very fond of shoes. She was an open water diver and drove far too fast in her cars, which for years included a pinto.

Raised a Catholic, she and her husband were Goldwater Republicans, which scandalized the John F. Kennedy Democrats. But she liked to throw large dinner parties that could be attended by foreign dignitaries or friends – at least a third of whom were gay, her family said – and priests.

She also traveled around the world often, always with a priest in tow to make sure she didn’t miss the daily mass.

Miller and her husband, according to their daughter Donna, were trying to raise a bevy of conservatives with their 10 children.

But God and the Catholic Church were at the center of their lives. Both she and her beloved husband were pious and had spoken of joining a religious order that accepted couples once their children were married.

Richard Miller, chairman of the San Francisco Opera Association, died of cancer in 1984. The renowned mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade sang at his funeral.

But as sociable and generous as Miller was to her friends, she also challenged her children and insisted that they lead righteous lives and marry within the Church.

If they did not get divorced or did divorce, they were shunned, or at least their non-Catholic spouses and children.

Their ninth child was kicked out of the house at the age of 18 because of an affair with a girl.

Mark Miller hasn’t seen his mother in years. He was 24 years old when she entered the monastery and he visited her twice in the intervening years.

His relationship with her, he said, was complicated.

Her oldest, Donna, said the decision to live in cloister was the right one.

“She would not have been happy with the way our children and their children had led their lives,” she said. Instead, she could spend her life praying for them.

Son Mark said he understood her desire to devote himself to God but still cannot imagine that three decades ago she traded a glamorous and privileged life for a thin mat.

It was “the absolute opposite of how she had lived her life until then,” he said.

And in San Francisco it was shocking.

“When people think of San Francisco and Nun, they think of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” said Mark Miller, referring to the Order of Queer and Transactive Nuns.

Before her departure and the last farewell party – where one participant stated that it was like “a funeral, a tragedy, only the victim looks relaxed and happy” – she traveled around the world to say goodbye. These included a cruise to Malta, a trip to Palm Springs to visit Bob and Dolores Hope, and trips to Hong Kong, Tokyo, and an English country mansion for a ball.

Perhaps, said her ninth son, one thing was missing in her life: peace and quiet.

She has three decades of it.

Sister Mary Joseph will be buried in the Carmelite compound in Des Plaines, Illinois, and private funerals will be held on Wednesday, the family said.

“I’ve been told how wonderful I was all my life and I believed it,” Miller told friends before leaving San Francisco to go to the monastery. “This is the next part of my life.”

The author Peter Hartlaub contributed to this story.

Jill Tucker is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker