West of Eden

by Jean Stein

  Hope you are well and the deal goes but most of all that you miss me a little. Betty Bogart came through from Klosters on her way to London with her two children in hand and she told me I was pushing my luck. That you are a very attractive guy and in her words there are plenty of dames in wait for an attractive guy. I said I was less concerned since she had left California but I realized the danger, only I had to continue this work with Dr. Meier. Her reply was, if you can take it, exactly as follows. “F——— the Doctor, go home and get yourself l——— and you won’t need doctors or diets. Greatest thing in the world for the complexion.” So speaks the expert, the little mother.

  Adieu with xxxx’s,

  Jennifer

  —

  BOB WALKER: What was the essence of David? He was such an accomplished fellow, and yet, physically, he was a basket case. I remember he did a little croquet and a little tennis, but always with a cigarette in his mouth. Between puffs he was hitting the tennis balls.

  I guess Mother was trying to give me father figures here and there. She sent me to her psychiatrist, Dr. Meier, after she had seen him in 1958, when I was eighteen years old and going to a boarding school in Zurich. I remember the dust motes lingering in the light in the library like gold dust. He was Carl Jung’s right-hand man and had the classic psychiatrist’s face, with this wonderful beard and bushels of hair growing out of his ears, and he smoked a very romantic pipe with this great Dutch tobacco. He was very erudite, very Jungian. I did meet some wonderful people through her love affair with therapy.

  As the sixties began, I was just turning twenty and back in Malibu. I was spending a lot of time with Dennis Hopper. We had been very close when we were younger and we hung out with the same people. He was constantly going to these art shows on La Cienega Boulevard and dragging me along. Dennis and I were both into photography and I made a series of pictures of him lighting up a cigarette by a Dr Pepper sign.

  Credit 4.5

  Dennis Hopper.

  Dennis, Teri Garr, and Toni Basil had a happening in the parking lot right by the merry-go-round in Santa Monica. Ivan Moffat’s mother, Iris Tree, had an apartment above the merry-go-round, and Claes Oldenburg also lived up there. The world was our oyster. We were like, “Look at that billboard, wow!” It was always, “Wow, look at that! Dennis, Dennis, oh, wow, did you see?” Everything was a “wow,” everything was exciting, the atmosphere was just vibrating with potential. I remember being wild and horny. I mean, just noticing all the girls and the crazy people, and probably the good smoke, and I felt like I was with my tribe, long-haired, bearded maybe, bead wearing, wild-eyed. And the merry-go-round was going, so that added to the excitement, the passion of those moments. Whenever I hear that carnival music, all I think about is my dad in Strangers on a Train. That music, it comes up in me a lot. There are certain things that become markers in life, and that’s one of them for me. The scene at the carnival, as wild as that was, matched my father’s psychic wildness. Dad gone wild.

  Bob Walker.

  Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim rented the house next door. They had this incredible Fourth of July party in 1963 where she invited the Byrds to play. It was wall-to-wall young and interesting people like Terry Southern, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, great writers, actors, directors, and artists. Bob Dylan’s kids were always over. Richard Pryor’s kids were friends with our kids, and so Ellie was friendly with Dylan’s wife, Pryor’s women, the whole thing. We were all drinking Lafite Rothschild 1959 by the caseload and smoking all the best Michoacán. Lafite Rothschild was twenty-six dollars a bottle in those days. Of course we wouldn’t have known, everybody was so loaded they wouldn’t have known if they had been drinking Gallo. Our house had a wonderful sloping shingled roof and at the intermission, the Byrds came over to hang out on the roof, along with Fonda and Hopper and whomever, puffing away, looking at the stars and enjoying life. We were all feeling celebratory, like cosmic warriors.

  —

  JANE FONDA: As I wrote in my memoir, I had a lot of time off during the filming of The Chase and decided I would throw a Fourth of July party on the beach. I had never given a big Hollywood party before, but as usual I took it on to full bore. I asked my brother, who unlike me was into the new music scene, what band I should hire. “The Byrds,” he said without hesitation. The Byrds included David Crosby and Roger McGuinn, and there was an underground cult of Byrd Heads who followed them from gig to gig. They were just about to hit big with their version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Peter’s instinct was right on target; they were perfect. We put up an enormous tent with a dance floor right on the beach. I invited Hollywood’s old guard, and Peter, wanting to make sure there’d be good dancing, got the word out to assorted Byrd Heads. Think “Big Sur meets Jules Stein,” “dreadlocks meet crew cut.” Dad set up a spit, where he spent the evening roasting and basting an entire pig, glowing in the attention his unusual culinary skills brought him. It was called the party of the decade and was talked about for a long time to come.

  —

  MARIN HOPPER: I would go with my parents every weekend to Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim’s house in Malibu. Malibu was so interesting. It had a certain amount of glamour, because of the amount of money and the kind of people that hung out there. But it’s never been visually that interesting. It’s not like being in the Hamptons, where you have this fabulous beach, with the sand dunes and the color of the sea, that steel gray–blue as opposed to the Pacific, which is a lighter color. Malibu’s a shantytown! A strip on the highway! It’s a crappy beach with shanty houses for the most wealthy, amazing, glamorous people in the world. And the colony has the dirtiest beach in the world. So you’re swimming with sewage and you’re living in little shanty houses. I just remember that, even as a child. I thought, Yeah we’re all here and we’re glad to be here, where are we exactly? Oh, right on the highway!

  My parents would be invited to go to Larry Hagman’s house in Malibu on Sundays. I remember going there, and it was so strange, because every Sunday he took a vow of silence, so he wouldn’t speak to anyone. I always saw him in some kind of caftan with a hood, and he’d be marching in silence up and down the beach with a big flag and then other people following him in a procession, walking silently with different kinds of flags, medieval flags, flags with very splashy colors, big flags. I think this was something that he would just do every Sunday, like a ritual. It didn’t matter if all of us went with him or not! It was what was going on, it was very serious. He was very determined, very strong-minded in his thoughts. I don’t remember him as a religious man. I didn’t really ever understand it. It’s something that his children probably grew up with, knowing that on Sundays he just didn’t speak.

  —

  BOB WALKER: Around that time, my brother, Michael, showed up with this girl. He’d been through a lot by then. He’d already tried to commit suicide and been institutionalized a few times. He just didn’t weather things well. Part of his way of dealing with life was not to take care of himself. I mean, he never saw a doctor, he never ate properly, he smoked cigarettes constantly, he just didn’t lead a healthy lifestyle. He was living in Europe when he cracked up the first time. A farmer found him out in the country in France, bleeding at the wrists, near death out in some forlorn place. There happened to be a hospital nearby that could treat somebody near death from loss of blood.

  He was brought back to the States, and he was in different institutions here, all trying to save him from himself. He had been at Yale, interested in archeology and anthropology. And then we both started doing some acting. I don’t think he had ambitions to be an actor, really. I don’t think he ever really enjoyed it. He went to a lot of acting classes, Strasberg and so on. He tried, you know, but he never felt comfortable doing it.

  Then he got married to a sweet, wide-eyed little blond sprite named Jennifer Duteil, who was actually named after Jennifer Jones. They had a daughter, Amy. But the marriage didn’t last long. After it broke up, Michael was really out t
here, drinking and carrying on. He gave up acting and just took jobs, whatever he could grab. He had major problems that prevented him from being a functioning human being, from being able to be places on time and hold a job. He just couldn’t ever break out of his own mind. Michael just carried everything with him, mulled it over, digested it, regurgitated it, and digested it again. A nightmare of cerebral mayhem. I just can’t imagine. I know one thing that affected him very strongly was when he was three he walked in, unannounced, into Mother’s bathroom when she was standing there unclothed, and she freaked and screamed and slammed the door in his face. You know, people weren’t all that used to walking around naked in front of each other in those days. For Michael, that was quite a shock. Maybe he suffered the rest of his life from a little post-traumatic stress syndrome due to that one incident.

  Maybe Michael felt that he was the second in Mother’s esteem. Maybe he felt that he never quite measured up to whatever her expectations would be, or my expectations. See, I don’t feel that there were any expectations that I had to live up to. But I’m sure that Michael felt criticized by Mother and David a lot, that they didn’t support him. I think he was intimidated by the abilities and the intellect, for instance, of David. David was really smart. He could question you and talk you or anybody under the table.

  —

  DANIEL SELZNICK: My father got angrier as he grew older, because he was more and more frustrated by his inability to have the level of control over his own career that he used to have. Nothing was working for him. Fox bought him out of producing Tender Is the Night in 1962, and he was trying to dream up something. And he hid all this from Mary Jennifer.

  Toward the end of my father’s life, he managed to be in New York quite a bit of the time. He was living at the Waldorf Towers. Mary Jennifer was living with him, Emily Buck in tow. And Mary Jennifer was quite happy there. She and David had a very close relationship.

  Meanwhile Jennifer was often in India on various spiritual journeys. The only person who talked to me about her spiritual journeys with any perception was Christopher Isherwood. Chris wrote a play with Don Bachardy adapted from his novel A Meeting by the River that James Bridges directed. It is about two English brothers going to India and one of them becoming a monk. Jennifer, all her life, had sought spirituality.

  My father was still on Benzedrine. He was addicted to it. And he was smoking three to four packs of Kent cigarettes a day. He was with his lawyer when he died in 1965. He had gone to his office to discuss a pending deal, I’m not sure for what. Producing new things, or distributing new things. His doctor later told me that he would have lived to be ninety, except that he damaged his heart through the smoking and the drugs. He was only sixty-three.

  I flew the next day to L.A. to see Mary Jennifer at Tower Grove. She had no idea that David had any physical problems. I’d been talking with Jennifer for a couple of hours when Mary Jennifer came into the living room, her face so tear-stained. She had been given some sort of sedation, and she was almost unable to talk.

  —

  SUSAN SPIVAK: Jennifer was my friend and I represented her as a lawyer. I only remember one thing she told me about Mary Jennifer when she was young. She was in London with David Selznick, and she remembered him holding Mary Jennifer up to the window and saying, “See, Mary Jennifer, there’s the moon. You want the moon? I’ll get you the moon. There are the stars. Do you want the stars? I’ll get you the stars.”

  —

  BOB WALKER: After David died, my mom began an affair with another shrink. I think his last name was Newton. She called him Fig as a term of endearment. He would give her little frogs. That was their little totem together. I thought he was rather nondescript, could have been a Fuller Brush man, a vacuum cleaner salesman. He was a suit, you know? Short. He would just blend in with the scenery, but he must have had some charm, something that intrigued Mother. He was doing the classic no-no. You can’t screw the crew. Don’t have an affair with your patient. It may have been something there that went wrong that caused her to go over the edge. Mother tried a couple of times to commit suicide. That time she was near Malibu at Point Dume, on the beach, but I don’t remember the details.

  —

  DON BACHARDY: You know that attempt to drown herself in the ocean? Chris and I were very shocked and dismayed. Chris wrote her a charming postcard saying, “Jennifer dear, next time you go swimming, won’t you invite us to go with you?” She loved that and immediately had us to dinner, to reassure us that she wasn’t feeling suicidal. She was very embarrassed by all the fuss and the headlines. She wanted to assure us that she wouldn’t be silly again. I think she just probably got depressed. As we all do.

  —

  DANIEL SELZNICK: For those of us who remember A Star Is Born, it was all so ironic. The front page of the Los Angeles Times had Jennifer walking into the sea, like Norman Maine in the film, one of David Selznick’s most famous images.

  I thought it ironically humorous, or humorously ironic, that the newspapers concluded that she was still mourning the loss of David Selznick, and that’s why she did it. But she was mourning the loss of Fig Newton, who broke off their affair. I heard that she had walked into his dining room when he was sitting with his wife and children at dinner and said, “I’ve waited long enough. It’s time you get up and leave this household.” And he threw her out of the house. It’s part of the family legend. You must be pretty confident as a woman if you think you can confront him and his wife and children. It was shocking. He must have promised her, as many men do when they’re in extramarital relationships, “I’ll leave my wife. Just wait for me.” It does sound familiar. You can imagine how often David said that to her in the mid-1940s. Dr. Newton probably made these promises to her and wasn’t keeping them. So not long after, she walked into the sea. Mary Jennifer, who was then about fourteen, knew the affair was going on. She said to me, “Did you notice that she managed to call her therapist just before she went into the water? Wasn’t that clever of her?” Obviously Jennifer didn’t entirely mean to be lost at sea.

  Credit 4.6

  Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1967.

  Newton was intelligent, charismatic, and magnetic. He was very interested in the subject of multiple personalities. I heard he got Jennifer to donate a substantial amount of the money that she had inherited from my father’s insurance policy for Fig’s film documentation of multiple personalities. Pretty persuasive shrink. She had played Nicole in Tender Is the Night, which is the story of an analyst, Dick Diver, who is unfaithful to his wife, Nicole. The fact that she would now live out the Dick Diver story from Scott Fitzgerald was completely spooky. She was very good in Tender Is the Night, very convincing as a psychiatric patient.

  —

  SALLY KELLERMAN: Jennifer told me stories—later on, not when she was seeing him—about this guy, a therapist named Fig Newton. The impression I got from her was that he was short and not very attractive. When I asked her what he looked like, she said, “Well, he is no Cary Grant.” But she was completely enamored of him. She would have picnics in his office. She’d bring lovely things to eat and then have a session with him. You know she would. Right? Oh my god! Oh my stars! One time she went to his house and climbed over his fence in order to spy on him. She was a little rascal. I mean she really was. Remember her in Duel in the Sun? That’s all I gotta say. I just have this image of her crawling up the side of the mountain. You know, nothing would have stopped her. She had a passionate affair with him.

  —

  ALICE WEXLER: My father became Jennifer’s analyst around 1967 and remained so for forty years. I was kind of horrified by the story of her coming to Dad to get his approval of Norton Simon before she married him. I wouldn’t ask my therapist about things like that. And that he would make the decision for her, he had an arrogance about him. People called my dad “the guru.” He was very courtly, Dad was. And very gracious. Although he could be very stern and very tough, very angry. Oh, we had many battles. He stood up to Nort
on Simon, I remember. I know that he disagreed with Norton about some issues. And told him so. Norton was a tough customer. Dad could match him. He was pretty fearless. I mean, Dad had a lot of self-confidence, and he was not easily intimidated. And I think he sometimes felt that he was the wisest, or he was going to save the world, or save other people. And he didn’t have a good sense of limits. Dad was kind of unconventional in terms of his relationships with some people. There were a few patients that he became friends with. You’re not supposed to do that. He could be cavalier about that, in my opinion. I think he rationalized that it was good for the patient, when maybe it was good for him.

  “LOVE AT FIRST ANALYSIS TURNS TO CHARITY,”

  Los Angeles Herald Examiner:

  When Norton Simon met Jennifer Jones, it was their mutual “profound involvement” in psychiatry that attracted them to one another—rather than her obvious beauty and fame, or his obvious wealth. They “didn’t connect” on the first date, at a small Los Angeles party, she recalls, because “Norton was preoccupied with his art project.” A renowned collector, Simon founded the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena. “On the second date, however, I brought along my psychoanalyst, Milton Wexler, to look him over,” she says with a grin. “I was gold-digging for a project I was working on, [Wexler’s] Hereditary Disease Foundation.” Later, Simon brought his own psychoanalyst into the budding romance, to assess Jennifer. They were married three weeks later—with a prenuptial agreement. “Norton said to me, ‘I’m a crook and you’re a crook. What do you want?’ ” Both smile. “So he gave a sum to the Hereditary Disease Foundation and didn’t get much from me but a dowry of chipped china and worn Porthault sheets.” “Oh yes, I did,” Norton says softly. “We had a lot in common.”