by Robin Green
Over that year and those to come, I didn’t see Ronnie much. I visited her at a basement apartment in Boston when she was briefly studying acting at Emerson College. I visited her at McLean, the psych hospital outside that city made famous by James Taylor’s and his brother’s times there and fictionalized in the 1999 movie Girl, Interrupted, with Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. It was a breakthrough role for Jolie, who stole the show—and the Oscar. And though Ronnie was, like Ryder’s character, a girl from a privileged family at odds with her parents and their mores, sad enough for a half-assed wrist-slash-suicide attempt, she resembled Jolie more—wild and soulful and ballsy and bursting with anger and life force and, as we’d all later understand and before her illness had the name bipolar and better meds to treat it, in horrible mental pain.
It was grim when I went to see her in her locked ward. She was on the edge of tears. She didn’t want to meet my eyes. She seemed ashamed of herself. All she would say, over and over, was that she felt dead and empty. I didn’t know what to do or say. When I left that day, I felt that I had failed her. At the same time, I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
I never visited her at McLean again, not that time or the second time she was locked up there. I heard that when her parents no longer wanted to pay or could no longer afford its hefty price tag, Ronnie was transferred to what she later referred to as Mass Mental—the psych wards of Massachusetts General Hospital located in Boston on, true fact, Fruit Street.
I didn’t see her again until 1973, when she was out of Mass Mental and living with Richie, a boy she’d met there. I spent a few days with them at the third-floor flat they shared in Eastie, or East Boston, in its pregentrification days, an area at the edge of Boston Harbor and in the shadow of planes landing at Logan, connected to Boston proper by, fittingly for Ronnie, the MTA Blue Line. I’d see Ronnie only twice again—at Canochet Beach with Richie in 1977, and then again in Los Angeles in 1979, two weeks before she shot and killed herself.
At that time, the third-to-last time, I was east researching the story about the Kennedy children, the one that would pretty much end my time at Rolling Stone. But that would be later. Now it was 1972; George McGovern was running for president and I’d write a few things about that for the magazine plus my next two cover stories, and I was still the girl in the photo on the beach with the shit-eating grin—unlike Ronnie even then, juicy and healthy and productive and riding high.
* * *
Chapter Nine
Poison Pen
“Drive over to the Hippopotamus,” Henry instructed, the Hippopotamus being then a slick Upper East Side nightclub in New York City and Henry being Henry Diltz, celebrity photographer, telling the driver of our Lincoln limo where to carry David Cassidy, the girl with him, his friend/valet, plus Henry and me late one night in the late winter of 1972. The quote was the lede of my cover story on Cassidy, in town to perform a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden the next night. But when we got to the Hippopotamus, the guy at the door wouldn’t let us in, in fact had absolutely no idea who David Cassidy was, which was pretty much the point of the ten-thousand-word cover story that would follow.
Cassidy’s PR man had approached Rolling Stone about doing a story. David was getting old for The Partridge Family, a TV sitcom in which he played—and then became—a teen idol. The Partridge Family was getting old period, and David now wanted to be considered an adult talent. Since the media had created the teen heartthrob he was in the first place, it seemed logical, I supposed, to call on the media to transmogrify his image. And what groovier vehicle than a cover of Rolling Stone? So we gave it to him.
And I was the one assigned to do it.
If the PR man or Cassidy himself had taken the time to read anything I’d written in Rolling Stone, we could all have been spared a whole lot of trouble. The Esquire editor hadn’t called me the new bitch for nothing. I can see now that I was, in much of my writing, at least, on a one-woman crusade to out the pretentious, the phony, the self-deluded, the boorish, the cruel.
David Cassidy wasn’t any of those. He was merely lame. He wore his heart on his sleeve. He and the industries from which he sprang were such easy targets. I wrote the shit out of the thing, not just about him in his little androgynous white jumpsuit, but about the teen-magazine, poster, and lunch-box businesses that profited from him.
Still and once again, other writers were traveling with the Stones, the Dead, Dylan, and here I was for five days in New York City and then Bangor, Maine, with this kid and his stepmom, Shirley Jones, who always seemed to be somewhere around.
After the article was published in the May issue, there was fallout for Cassidy. The PR guy got fired; endorsements dried up; Cassidy himself retreated to Hawaii for a while. But what I wrote wasn’t even the half of it. It was Annie’s naked photos, both on the cover and in the center spread, that finished the job.
“It pissed off everybody that was really profiting from the business of David Cassidy,” Cassidy later said. “I had fan letters that came to me—and there were hundreds of thousands of them, literally—in defense of me by fans of mine that said, ‘Oh David. I know that you couldn’t possibly have done this because I know that you would never have posed nude for photographs.’ And the fact was I had, had willingly done so, had thought about it. I scratched my head and thought, You know, this David Cassidy business has really gotten outta hand.”
He’d told this to an interviewer in 1992 on the occasion of the publication of a book of iconic Rolling Stone covers. But I was there that day in 1972 at his house by the pool when the photographs were taken, and I had seen Annie coax him into it—he wanted to be cool, didn’t he?
Well, sorry, I guess. I can’t speak for Annie, but in those days I didn’t think much about the damage anything I wrote might do, how it might hurt feelings, careers. It comes back to what Joan Didion wrote about our brand of journalism in the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.”
In November, I’d have another story on the cover, “Joe Conforte, Crusading Pimp,” about the owner of a legal brothel outside Reno, Nevada, an article that resulted in a grand-jury investigation and then a prison sentence for Conforte for tax evasion: in the wee hours of the morning, I’d watched him oversee the burning of the night’s receipts in a backyard and make a joke of it.
I’d spent a day and night in the brothel (a collection of interconnected trailers in a compound surrounded by chain-link fencing topped with razor wire), hung out with the prostitutes in a snack room overflowing with sugary treats, stood by in the dank double-wide-trailer parlor to observe them as they lined up in their bikinis so the customer could choose the one he wanted to follow back to her little cubicle in the trailer.
Annie flew in to photograph the scene, and the two of us spent a few nights behind the walls of Conforte’s garish home in Sparks and joined him on his rounds—to a party at the governor’s mansion in Carson, to the county seat to see about a vanity plate for his new custom car, to a nightclub he owned a piece of. He relished showing up with an entourage, trotting us out, but it wore on me, all this putting my own self aside to enter somebody else’s life, with Conforte at the whorehouse and even before that, with David Cassidy, with Victor Baranco, with Dennis Hopper.
It wore on Annie, too, when she went on tour with the Stones, and instead of maintaining her distance, she began to behave like a Stone, taking up their lifestyle and habits, including a drug addiction—hers cocaine—that almost did her in.
For last year’s Victor Baranco and Morehouse story, I’d gone undercover, pretending to be just another lost soul enticed by a cult that, in this case, was kind of the low-rent, Oakland version of the Mel Lyman celebrity-filled and decidedly more ominous pre–Jim Jones Boston cult covered by David Felton’s story in Mindfuckers. Baranco had devised a scheme whereby he bought decrepit houses and then recruited runaways and refugees from the Haight to fix them up so
he could sell them at a hefty profit; at the same time, these recruits were paying him two hundred dollars a month each for room and board and the companionship of others at loose ends, a setup so lucrative Baranco had begun to franchise it, and he was soon known around the Bay Area as the Colonel Sanders of the commune scene.
In addition, his Morehouse Institute of Human Abilities offered pricey if low-watt classes in the bullshit philosophies he’d developed, like Basic Sensuality, a course on pleasuring another person; it involved practice sessions with plaster-cast replicas of penises and vaginas. “Doing” the other person was “a sure-fire way to a perfect orgasm every time.”
I didn’t live in a Morehouse; I was a day student. Even so, it was hard not to feel kinship with the other young people around me, harder and harder to hold myself apart as an observer. Also, it was hard not to be brainwashed. More than once, David Felton would pick me up after a day of classes and take me to my treetop room and to bed and talk me back to myself.
It was difficult in this way at the whorehouse too. I felt such sympathy for the women, even as they played me, fabricating obvious lies about themselves. But I felt like a liar too, sure that as professionals in the field, they could see through me, could tell that I was an inauthentic human being, a sexual fake who didn’t know who or what I was or what sex was.
I’d made some progress since my days and nights of fakery with David Leach, beginning with the night I found myself in the loft bed at Fox Court with Andrea while David was off driving a taxi—the one job I’d known him to have. It didn’t last long, what with the peanuts he felt he made for the hours put in and the fact that the Zodiac killer was on the loose and was thought to have murdered a cabdriver.
Sex with Andrea was wonderful—to touch her breasts and feel what a man must feel when he touches yours, her clitoris too, and mine when she touched it, wonderful to know that you were giving as much pleasure as you were feeling (see Morehouse sex class, above). That was as far as we went that night in the loft bed, but at least it was something to go on. And I had gone on to love sex with David Felton in much the same way.
But fucking remained a mystery. Clitorises were becoming all the rage; vaginal orgasms were declared a myth, and clitoral orgasms “the feminist orgasm.” Still, here was Germaine Greer in her 1970 The Female Eunuch saying otherwise. Masters and Johnson, she said, and their Reproductive Biology Research Foundation promulgated dull sex for dull people. Real gratification, she said, was enshrined not in a tiny cluster of nerves but in the sexual involvement of the whole person.
“If women are to avoid this last reduction of their humanity, they must hold out not just for orgasm,” she wrote, “but for ecstasy.”
This sounded exactly right to me. Still, how exactly is a girl supposed to go about finding it?
Ms. Greer had also cautioned against the Jackie Collins model of sex. “Women who understand their sexual experience in the way that Jackie Collins writes of it,” she said, “are irretrievably lost to themselves and their lovers.”
“He took her to the bedroom and undressed her slowly,” Collins wrote, “he made love to her beautifully. Nothing frantic, nothing rushed…took her to the edge of ecstasy and back again…She floated on a suspended plane, a complete captive to his hands and body…”—Really?
In college in 1965, though I had been among the first in line at the infirmary for birth control pills, I was very conscious of wanting to keep the number of guys I slept with to a minimum: David Leach, Bumpy (my Greek-American townie boyfriend when David was away at college whom I dropped like a hot potato whenever David came home), and a black-leather-jacket-wearing hipster at Brown named Teddy something, one of the first dope smokers on campus, who became interested in me only after I became known as the Girl Writer.
After that, in Boston’s Back Bay after Bumpy and I broke up, a one-night stand with the Brit in the next apartment, a traveling wallet salesman with white nylon wash-and-wear dress shirts dripping dry in the bathroom; another one-night stand in New York with a junior editor I met at the deli where I got my linzertorte cookie; my friend’s sister’s husband in Berkeley. Then, in the year after I left Fox Court, a sexual tear that included just about every male that crossed my path—Felton; L. M. Kit Carson; Kit’s brother in Texas; my Tamalpais Road roommate’s famous anthropologist father; the photographer Danny Lyon, who was crashing at the Tamalpais house for a night; Jann Wenner.
Jann, I went to bed with when I was in New York for the David Cassidy story. I was staying at the Plaza and he called from his room at the Sherry-Netherland across the street to ask how the tour was going. There was a pause on the line and then he said, “You want to come over?”
I went. It was weird and weirdly uncomfortable in that posh room, a weirdness explained when he came out as a gay man years later—for once the lack of passion and engagement hadn’t been entirely mine. He took a phone call, I did some yoga on the carpet, we dropped quaaludes and went to bed. He managed the act: missionary position, striving for orgasm (his), followed by a drugged sleep. Sometime before dawn, I got out of bed and went back to the world’s smallest hotel room across the street. No mention of the incident was ever made by either of us again.
In going to bed with these men, I was looking for something, but I didn’t know exactly what. Whatever it was, I didn’t find it with ex-Jesuit Kit. Kit’s brother, however, proved to be a randier breed of cat.
I was on my way back from New York and David Cassidy when I decided to make a stop in Dallas to see Kit. After New Mexico, Kit and I had had a relationship of sorts. We’d gone to bed in my treehouse room; we’d gone on a trip north in his Morgan sports car to visit his director on David Holzman’s Diary. When I called from the Dallas airport, Kit’s mother said he wasn’t home—he’d gone to Austin for some kind of film festival—but I should come on over, he’d be back that night.
When I got to the motel-like apartment complex in Irving where they lived, everyone was busy with his or her Sunday morning. Kit’s father was out tending cattle he kept on some land outside town, a kind of hobby, Kit’s mother explained. She was making sandwiches that Kit’s brother would bring out to him after he dropped his own wife and kids at church. Maybe I’d want to take a ride out there with him, keep him company and see some of Texas.
Kit’s brother and I sped down the highway at Texas speeds in his family station wagon. It was hot and I had the window down. Kit’s brother looked over at me in my leather sandals and jeans and little white peasant blouse.
“C’mere,” he said. “Sit closer.”
I did. Dark and wiry and rangy, he looked nothing like the ethereal Kit. He gave me a sideways glance and smiled, almost to himself. He reached down and unzipped his fly and took out his already-erect penis. He put his hand behind my head and held it there, with a nod indicating what he wanted me to do. Which I did, bending over and blowing him, and it happened fast—he came in my mouth going ninety miles an hour. I was so surprised I sat up and swallowed.
We got to the land where Kit’s father kept cattle and there he was among them on horseback. He waved and Kit’s brother got out and climbed a fence and gave him his sack lunch, then pointed me out to his father, who smiled and gave me a wave. Kit’s brother got back in the car and asked if I knew how to ride a horse.
Soon we were in some woods on horseback. It was hot and I was sweating. Kit’s brother said I’d be a lot cooler if I took my blouse off, so I rode bare-chested and, as I went in those days, braless.
“Let’s take a break,” he said, so we stopped and tied the horses and had some water. Then he unbuttoned my jeans and pulled them and my underpants down. He pressed me against a tree, had his hands all over me. But I didn’t respond. I was frozen—not frightened, just at a loss. He stopped and looked at me and in that instant knew something about me that I didn’t know myself, for he grabbed me by the wrist and started to pull me somewhere.
“Wha’? What are you doing?” I said, tripping along after him. He didn’t
answer, just continued pulling me by the wrist, and because my pants were down around my ankles, I could take only these tiny, mincing steps. It was embarrassing and humiliating. And then it occurred to me.
“Hey!” I called to him, “Is this bondage? Is that what this is?”
He just yanked me harder along with my frantic tiny little steps until the embarrassment and humiliation changed into something else—something like anger—and I rose up against him to…what? Fight him, I guess, and I have to guess because now I wasn’t at all in my head anymore, and he was inside me and we were madly fucking in what felt like midair, all of which I realized only when we were done and I had landed panting and breathless on the ground. I had come.
Well, my, my. So that was arousal. And fucking. And coming while fucking.
It is only now that I look back that I can see some humor in the situation. Me mincing along with my jeans around my ankles. With a student’s brightness and eagerness asking, hey, was this bondage?
We drove wordlessly back to the apartment complex and he dropped me off. Kit was home. We had dinner with his parents and Kit and I went to bed in his room. We had sex and I faked it like I always did and Kit didn’t seem to notice or mind. I said nothing to Kit about what had happened with his brother, and I didn’t say anything about it to anyone else for a very long time.