The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  Synanon’s holdings in West Marin consisted of three separate parcels: the Maggetti Ranch, the Walker Creek Ranch, and the Marconi Property. The last, a beautiful sixty-three-acre site facing out over Tomales Bay, was so named because in 1905 RCA had developed it as a radio research facility, apparently hoping to lure over Guglielmo Marconi, the then-famous inventor of the “wireless telegraph.” But he never came, and something of that sense of wistful incompletion still lingered about the old inn and the outbuildings that occupied the gorgeous grounds. It was the type of place ideally suited to an artist colony, an Esalen-like therapy center, or a terminal disease hospital—the sort of place where the inner turmoil of the visitors would be both soothed by and absorbed into the ominously lush natural setting—and that was indeed the kind of use for which the foundation planned to reserve it. So the Marconi Property was not to be turned over immediately, and only the two ranches were up for possible sale.

  This was complicated, however, by the fact that Synanon, or some remnant of it, was still occupying the ranch properties. How this essentially urban program got to the ranches in the first place was one of those typically fluky tales (typical of that period, I mean). The Synanon Foundation had begun as a drug rehab program in Los Angeles, where winos and heavy drug users would be taken in off the streets, cleaned up, and enabled to resume relatively normal lives. At one time—perhaps this is still true—Synanon held the record for getting people off drugs and preventing recidivism; it was by far the most effective program in the field. Somewhere along the line, though, it begin shifting from a rather curiously ideological drug treatment program (not that any of them aren’t ideological—a strong and often eccentric moral stance seems to go with the territory) to what its detractors labeled a cult. Precisely what defines a cult has been the subject of much discussion in California, particularly since the Jonestown catastrophe, and I am not interested at the moment in placing Synanon in a carefully constructed definitional box. Suffice it to say that the group’s founder, Charles Dederich, came more and more to view himself, and to be viewed by Synanon’s members, as a father/king figure ruling over a self-contained society. This tendency increased with shocking rapidity after the death of Dederich’s second wife, a well-liked woman who had reportedly been the moral and emotional center of the organization; and Dederich was eventually indicted on a number of criminal counts, amid a buzz of gossip that included stories of wild booze parties and indiscriminate sexual pairings. To this day many Californians who hear the word Synanon think first of a rattlesnake in a mailbox—an incident that may have been either a dastardly deed aimed at a Synanon “enemy” or a natural hazard of suburban life, depending on whose story you believe.

  As Synanon grew more “ideological” and less “therapeutic” (for lack of a better pair of oppositions), it also came to appeal to a different class of customer. Instead of the helpless, poverty-stricken street addicts, it was now attracting professional people: lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, and tax accountants who, with their wives and children, wanted to flee the drug-afflicted, crime-ridden urban environment for a secure, uncorrupted, isolated community. That and the chance to vent their psychological spleens in the highly charged Synanon encounter groups known as “Stews” seem to have been what brought in the upper middle classes. Synanon became a place to live permanently, not just a place to be treated. And, somewhat in the manner of an Israeli kibbutz, the nonprofit Synanon Foundation took over all the resources of its individual members, which had by now become considerable. These lifetime savings and proceeds from the sales of houses and cars, plus ongoing salaries from high-paying professional jobs, when added to the income from Synanon’s “industries” (mail-order office supply sales and so forth, for which the resident “employees” were of course unpaid), gave Dederich and his fellow leaders quite a tidy sum to play with. It was at about this stage in its history, I think, that Synanon consolidated its entire operation by moving everything to West Marin.

  Marin County is burdened with the image of affluent, spoiled, California-weirdo suburbia, an image which unfortunately rests on a sizable measure of truth. West Marin, however, is somewhat different. On the Pacific side of the coastal range that divides the county in half, civilization thins out, and its discontents are accordingly lessened. Towns are small and far apart; they are likely to contain only a single main drag with a post office, a grocery store, a variety store, and perhaps a coffee shop. People live close-knit yet isolated lives: they trust each other but resent or fear “outsiders” (which means anyone from over the mountains), and they have their own ways of doing things. Houses are thinly sprinkled among trees and craggy hillsides, property values and tax revenues are lower than in the rest of Marin, and public services are correspondingly sparse. There is a rural self-sufficiency, a kind of heartland independence, among the residents here. It seems odd to find this characteristic perched on the very edge of the Pacific Ocean, as if these people had succeeded in clinging to prairie values in the face of that enormous cauldron of anomie. Perhaps the reason for it can be found in the fact that many West Marin residents are farmers.

  When I was growing up in Palo Alto, the tract house I lived in was originally surrounded by fields and orchards. But that setting disappeared when I was about five, eaten up by suburban development. It wasn’t until I took on this West Marin assignment, twenty-five years later, that I realized there were still major agricultural pockets in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first few times I drove out of San Francisco and over to Tomales Bay, I couldn’t believe how incredibly rural it was. I don’t mean the wilderness areas, like the federally owned Point Reyes National Seashore or the acres of undeveloped land on hillsides around the highway; those I had seen before. I mean the dairy ranches and cattle ranches and horticultural farms that were still being run as family-owned operations.

  Most of the families who farmed in West Marin were of Italian ancestry. (Synanon’s Maggetti Ranch, obviously, had originally belonged to one such family.) People like the Grassis and the Giacominis were third-and fourth-generation Marin residents, ranging from grizzled old guys with beer bellies and few words to handsome, articulate young men who had studied the latest agricultural techniques at UC Davis. A surprising number of them had what seemed to me to be slight Italian accents—not the harsh Brooklyn Italian accent, but a softened, barely detectable California version—as if they had spoken to no one but their own relatives for the past ninety-five years.

  With a few exceptions (an old German-Jewish couple who raised flowers, for instance), most of the agricultural people in West Marin were cattle ranchers, and a high proportion of them raised dairy cattle. West Marin was apparently one of the choice dairy-ranch spots in the state, because its naturally moist, fog-filled climate meant that the ranchers didn’t need to use much irrigation; the cows could simply graze off the hillsides all year round. It had been a choice spot, that is, until the federal government established the Point Reyes National Seashore in the mid-1960s. What had been a tremendous boon to the rest of us Californians was a hardship for the dairy ranchers, as they helplessly watched acres of prime agricultural land being converted into a wilderness area. By the early 1980s some of them were operating ranches on land temporarily leased back from the government. Others were doubling up with fathers or older brothers, hoping that someday a newly available ranch might make it possible for them to run their own places. Hence the enormous interest when the two Synanon ranches suddenly came on the market. Even the possibility that the local foundation might resell one or both, deed restrictions and all, brought out so many West Marin ranchers that we had to organize group tours of the properties.

  Before the first of these tours, I called up Sally, my contact at Synanon, to check out the date with her. I had never met Sally in person, only talked to her over the phone, but even so it was clear to me that she was the perfect public relations officer for Synanon, a combination of friendliness, efficiency, and almost invisible guardedness.

  “Yes
, that will be fine,” she said in her crisp British voice. (How did she ever hear about Synanon? I wondered.) “How many ranchers did you say—about eight or nine? Fine. Just make sure you all arrive in one group. You can park your cars in the lot at Maggetti, just inside the main gate. I’ll tell the guards you’ll be here at ten o’clock Thursday morning.”

  The guards, I had heard, were there to keep people in as well as out. There were stories of Synanon members—teenage boys, I think—who had fled the compound, struggled through the brushy wilderness, and emerged tired and bleeding to beg the neighboring farmers to take them in. These boys apparently reported beatings, starvation techniques, and more exotic tortures as part of the Synanon routine. But they had been recaptured (or so the stories went) by Synanon, which insisted that they were unreliable drug addicts lying about the circumstances of their cure. I wasn’t even sure the runaways had ever existed. I only knew about them third-hand, from West Marin residents who knew someone who might have lived near the people who found them, or some such convoluted connection.

  And balanced against stories like these were the ones about Synanon’s helpfulness to the ranching community: the time they had sent their fire truck to put out a barn fire when the nearest town’s truck was out of commission, the day they had taken a hurt child to the hospital. (West Marin is notoriously short on ambulances.) It was as if Synanon represented Organization, with a capital O, and while that sometimes frightened the locals, they could also see its occasional advantages.

  I instructed the ranchers to meet me at Marconi (neutral turf, since Synanon had already vacated it) at nine-thirty, so that we could all drive over to Maggetti together. When the ranchers showed up, they were appropriately dressed in ranch clothes—denim overalls, flannel shirts, heavy work boots. I, as is my wont, was in-appropriately dressed in open-toed, high-heeled sandals, black jeans (which pick up every mote of dust), and a silk shirt. They tolerated me.

  Sally met us at the Maggetti parking lot, which, in addition to our cars and trucks, held several huge farm vehicles, a school bus, and a number of Synanon-owned cars. A woman close to my own age, with an attractive if somewhat severe face, Sally wore denim overalls, heavy boots, and a haircut about a quarter of an inch long. A companion she brought along to help with the tour—a short, round-eyed, middle-aged figure of initially indeterminate sex—wore the same outfit. Both sported silver medallions around their necks. I looked from them to the ranchers and back: except for the medallions, they were dressed identically, even to the haircuts.

  One of the ranchers whispered to me, as we trailed behind the rest of the tour, the perhaps apocryphal history of the closely cropped heads. Originally, it seems, head-shaving had been a punishment for drug addicts who broke any of the numerous and strict Synanon rules. Then one day Dederich’s son broke a rule and had to have his head shaved. After that Dederich shaved his own head and declared that all Synanon members, male and female, should do the same. It reminded me of a fairy tale, or the old story about how the King of Spain forced his subjects to adopt his lisp.

  Sally first took us through the enormous dining room, which was decorated with schlock chandeliers and egregiously ugly wall mosaics. Then she led us to an institutional kitchen larger than anything I have ever seen, before or since: rows and rows of gleaming metal stove-and-oven units and metal counter spaces sat in front of ten-foot-high wall-unit refrigerators. The dairy ranchers professionally admired the refrigeration capacity, and then we moved on to the dwelling spaces. Prefab units furnished with bunk beds and cheap plywood doors, they had ceilings made of some kind of blotchy rough material, as if someone had thrown mud or mortar upward from the ground and let it stick. In the children’s rooms, an occasional crayon drawing was taped to the walls; otherwise the decor was exceedingly bare, though an iconographic photo of Dederich and his wife hung just beside one of the exits. As we walked in and out of the various buildings, Katie—it turned out that was the indeterminate person’s name—kept up a constant stream of barely pertinent conversation with whoever happened to be near her. It struck me that she had been assigned to “help” Sally for her own benefit and not Sally’s.

  “What’s that?” One of the ranchers was pointing to a giant polyhedron with an arched roof that Sally had walked right past.

  “Oh, that’s our Stew room,” she said. “I’m afraid I can’t take you in there.” I recalled the horrific Stew descriptions published by disaffected ex-members, and pictured Satanic rites taking place at that very moment in the holy of holies. But as far as I could tell from the outside, the building was completely unoccupied.

  She led us along the tanbark path to the “factory” (deserted now, but formerly filled with pencil-packers, box-assemblers, and other employees in the office-supply industry) and then to the barns. “A lot of these structures would have to go,” I heard one rancher mutter to another. “Taxes would be too high if you kept them all.”

  We passed an enormous stack of firewood—an army’s ten-year supply, or so it seemed to my uneducated eyes.

  “Why so much wood?” I asked.

  “Oh, some of our people got interested in survivalist doctrines, and we decided to have at least a year’s supply of everything on hand,” Sally answered. “But the wood’s not worth trucking away, so we’re just leaving it here.”

  “Comes free with the ranch, eh?” one of the men asked, interested only in the practical implications. I, however, had gone off on a train of thought about survivalists. Weren’t they the ones, I vaguely wondered, with the caches of guns in their rural hideouts? (Remember, this was fifteen years before Waco and the Michigan Militia; to anyone outside California, my suspicions would have sounded like just another brand of West Marin paranoia.) I tried to banish the thought. But there was undeniably something creepy about the place. Perhaps, I reasoned, it was only that it was so empty. Most of the Synanon membership had already moved to the new compound, at an isolated spot near a small California town called Badger.

  When we finished with Maggetti we got in our cars and drove across the highway to Walker Creek. More prefab buildings, more bare bunks, more hot, dry, dusty ground. It reminded me of nothing so much as sleep-away summer camp—even in terms of the way certain places were obviously designated for certain functions, to be performed at prearranged times of day: the bunk house, the rec area, the craft building, the dining room. Again, the issue was Organization. But sleep-away camp was for children, and this was supposed to be a community of adults.

  By now everybody was getting hot and tired. The ranchers had seen all they needed to. “Is there any place we can get something to drink?” they asked.

  “Of course,” said Sally, and conducted us to a dining room much like the one on Maggetti, but smaller and less formal, less “elegant” (if sprayed-on insulation and folding chairs can be said to have degrees of elegance). The choices were water and tea. I chose tea, and sat down at a table where Katie was talking to three of the ranchers.

  “So you see, I come from eight generations of character disorder,” she chirped, smiling up at the grey-haired rancher next to her, staring into his face with her bright, round eyes. He smiled back and patted her hand, which was resting on the table, then silently picked up his water glass in both his own hands. I excused myself and went to the bathroom, which Sally had pointed out as we came in. The door to the bathroom was labeled “Examiner,” and it took me a while to figure out the joke: the San Francisco Examiner was the paper that had really gone after Synanon about the rattlesnake. I went into a cubicle, sat down, and reached up to lock the door. There was no lock. That was the Synanon rule, no locks on any doors. Everybody must be available at all times, I thought, for scrutiny by the omnipresent eye of the Examiner.

  After the tour was over, the ranchers told me that Maggetti would make a great dairy ranch, but Walker Creek was too flat and too dry. In the end the foundation sold Maggetti to a Marin-born rancher of Italian descent and divided Walker Creek up among several deserving nonprofi
t groups. The Marconi Property sat empty for a number of years, waiting to be developed into something useful—just as it had waited eighty years earlier, filled with visions of a brave new technology, for Marconi himself to arrive. Meanwhile, Dederich lived out his “retirement” in Badger, dying of old age just a few years ago. And West Marin is still largely agricultural.

  In the “strange meeting” of Wilfred Owen’s war poem, the dreamer finds his ghosts coming to life:

  Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

  With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

  Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless…

  “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.”

  Nothing quite that dramatic happens when I think back on the encounter between the agriculturalists and the cultists. Still, even without the wartime guilt Owen was evoking, I am aware of an uncanny discomfort associated with this memory. At the time, I know, I vaguely viewed Synanon as “the enemy,” and there was certainly more than a little fear mingled with my curiosity. What surprises me now, as I look back and examine those weird Synanon spirits who so hated to be examined, is how ambivalently sympathetic I feel toward them.

  In the stereotypical vision of California (in my own stereotypical vision, I should say), the rural ranchers are the good guys—the real thing—and the kooky ideologues are the unwelcome outsiders. But that encounter forced me to question that simple opposition. In a funny way, Synanon and the ranchers had more in common with each other than I did with either of them. They both existed as relatively self-sustaining communities, isolated from the urban center less than an hour away. They both had gripes against the federal government (the ranchers for the loss of Point Reyes, Synanon because of IRS trouble). And they both premised their form of life on a daily commitment to hard physical labor and a strict attention to the correct way of doing things. Oddly enough, this very rigidity seems to have been what made it possible for them to exercise a generous degree of tolerance, both toward each other and toward the eighth-generation character disorders they made a home for.