by John Glatt
Soon after arriving, Graham interviewed a quiet-spoken brunette called Bonnie MacLean for a secretarial job. The attractive twenty-two-year-old, who wore heavy-framed black glasses, had recently moved to the West Coast.
“He had big lips and was very conservative-looking,” recalled Bonnie. “That’s probably my first impression of Bill.”1
After a short interview, Graham hired her for the office secretary pool. But he soon recruited her for his pet project, to combine the two Allis-Chalmers offices into one and halve the staff.
“That was his big job at the time,” said Bonnie. “He rented a bigger place and planned how it would be laid out. Apparently he did a very good job and [his boss] was very pleased.”2
Graham now concentrated on honing his business and managerial skills, deriving great satisfaction from raising office morale while getting the most work out of his staff.
Soon after Bonnie began working there, her new boss asked her out on a date.
“It was out of the blue,” she said. “I didn’t see that coming, and I went out with him. That was the beginning of our relationship.”
During the next few months, Bill and Bonnie enjoyed a discreet office romance. Most days after work, Bill would take Bonnie on the back of his 1956 Lambretta motorcycle through the streets of San Francisco for dinner, followed by a movie and a show.
“Which was not really my style,” she explained, “but he’s a persuasive kind of guy.”
After almost a year of dating, Bonnie decided their relationship was going nowhere. So she quit Allis-Chalmers and moved back to live with her mother in Philadelphia and found a job. During the next few months, Bill pursued her with several letters a week but refused to commit to their future.
“Finally, it was decided that I would go back,” said Bonnie. “I wasn’t happy in Philadelphia, so I probably prompted it through my griping.”
During Bonnie’s absence, Graham had become frustrated with Allis-Chalmers. Although he was on the fast track, making $21,000 ($160,000) a year with bonuses, he felt creatively unfulfilled. He had also begun producing plays for the radical San Francisco Mime Troupe, and when its founder, Ronnie Davis, offered him $120 ($916) a year to became business manager, Graham jumped at the chance. Even though it was a massive pay cut and he would have to live off his savings, he saw it as a unique opportunity to combine his two passions of the theater and business.
After giving notice, he flew north to Philadelphia to bring Bonnie MacLean back, to be his girlfriend and secretary. He had arranged with a drive-away agency to deliver a car back to San Francisco for their return trip.
“It was a fun trip,” Bonnie remembered. “We drove across the country together and alternated driving. And we went like mad and made it in twenty-four hours.”
Founded in 1961 by Ronnie Davis, the San Francisco Mime Troupe was creating quite a stir. The ultra-left-wing group performed Italian commedia dell’arte plays in the parks in and around the City by the Bay, and they had a large following.
When Bill Graham arrived in 1964, the troupe’s Howard Street loft was headquarters for the post-beatnik poets, musicians, and hippies now springing up all over the city. Surviving on handouts from wealthy admirers, the members of the troupe, who each received $5 per show, traveled around in an old truck full of threadbare costumes and props.
“We’d steal and swindle and do what we had to,” said former Mime Troupe actor Peter Coyote.
Davis, who had also waited tables at Catskills’ resorts, was impressed with Graham’s business acumen, hiring him and Bonnie on the spot.
“I decided I’d still rather be in the world of theater even if I weren’t performing,” Graham later told Billboard. “So for the next two years I looked for gigs at schools and little theaters, made the deals, printed the posters, drove the truck, put up the lights and carried the spear.”
By now, Bill Graham was a familiar sight in San Francisco, driving around on his ancient Lambretta in a three-piece suit while aggressively promoting the Mime Troupe.
“[He] was just phenomenal, very high energy,” said Peter Coyote. “He was very, very different from the rest of us. Not real long on revolutionary content but incredibly smart, energetic and ambitious.”3
Under Bill Graham’s management the Mime Troupe became more professional. Now shows always started on time, and Graham introduced organization. He worked out of the back of the Mime Troupe’s loft, efficiently directing operations. There was even a brass nameplate on his desk bearing the name of his hero, the famous Russian promoter Sol Hurok.
But Graham’s obsessive need for control soon created problems, and his tough abrasive New York business manner grated on many. At one point he insisted that “Bill Graham Presents” be put on all Mime Troupe’s posters and handbills, mimicking his mentor, Sol Hurok.
And Ronnie Davis’s refusal to allow it led to many rows.
“They were quite a show,” said Jim Haynie, then a Mime Troupe actor.4 “They used to sit about three feet apart and yell at each other all day.”
By the summer of 1965, the San Francisco Mime Troupe was almost broke, and Bill Graham was having little luck raising any money. The season was due to start with the sixteenth-century play Il Candelaio by Giordano Bruno, about an elderly candlemaker worried about impotency. Then Graham suggested they sensationalize it with violence and swearing to provoke a confrontation with the San Francisco Parks Commissioners. He wanted the troupe to get arrested.
“Bill couldn’t raise any money through his resources,” said Chet Helms, who would later manage Big Brother and the Holding Company and run the Avalon Ballroom. “So the tactic was to get busted to generate publicity and money.”5
It worked. Parks Commissioner James Lang attended the free opening performance and was disgusted by the foul language, the brutality, and an actor simulating urination onstage. The next day he called an emergency meeting of the Parks Commission, which banned the play for vulgarity.
Bill Graham was at the meeting, where he told the Park Commissioners that he had heard the same “objectionable word” one hundred and forty-seven times at a recent theater performance downtown. It came to an abrupt end when Davis stormed out shouting, “We will see you in the parks and in the courts.”
Later at the Mime Troupe headquarters, Graham called for a confrontation with the San Francisco police to protest the Parks Department ban. He argued that the Mime Troupe had a duty to protect First Amendment rights, not only for themselves but for the whole of San Francisco. He was then ordered by Davis to get as much publicity as possible for the showdown.
Bill Graham immediately called all his media contacts, inviting them to Lafayette Park that Sunday afternoon for the Mime Troupe protest. So the stage was set for the troupe’s most spectacular show to date, The Great San Francisco Mime Troupe Bust, directed by Bill Graham.
On Sunday, August 7, Bill Graham and Ronnie Davis led all fifty members of the Mime Troupe in full costume into Lafayette Park for the afternoon confrontation. At one o’clock the park began to fill up with police and Park Department officials. Then Mime Troupe supporters arrived with large signs saying “Mime Troupe Si! Park Commission No!” Graham had done his job well, and there were about a dozen reporters and several television crews waiting.
“We had decided that I was to be arrested for this ‘showcase spectacular,’ ” said Davis. “And it couldn’t have been staged better—Sunday and a full house.”
The show began with Graham debating the ban with Davis and Park Department representative James Lang. Enter stage left: the troupe’s attorney, Marvin Stender, followed by a contingent of police.
Then, clipboard in hand, Bill Graham delivered an emotional address to the crowd, followed by Lang, who was booed by the excited audience. By this time the cops were becoming uneasy, fearing a riot.
Suddenly everyone went quiet as Ronnie Davis danced into the perf
orming area like a fairground barker and announced:
Signor, Signora, Signorini
Madame, Monsieur, Mademoiselle,
Ladieeees and Gentlemen,
Il Troupo di Mimo di San Francisco
Presents for your enjoyment this afternoon . . .
AN ARREST!!!
On the word “arrest,” Davis leapt at an astonished cop, who arrested him on the spot. Then a riot broke out, with Mime Troupe actors and supporters attacking the cops. Two other troupe members joined Davis under arrest and were driven away in the waiting police van. Two hours later they were charged with performing in the public parks without a permit and released on bail.
“I think they arranged the bust to polarize the issue,” said Coyote. “The idea of publicity would not have been lost on Bill.”
On November 1, Ronnie Davis was found guilty after a four-day trial and defiantly pledged to “Fight until the parks are returned to their rightful ‘owners,’ the people of San Francisco.”
To raise money for Davis’s legal expenses, Bill Graham was put in charge of organizing an Appeal Party in the Mime Troupe’s loft. One of the first people to offer their services was a new band with the unusual name of Jefferson Airplane, who regularly rehearsed in the troupe’s Howard Street loft. Poets, jazz musicians, and artists also rallied to the cause, and soon Bill Graham had an impressive lineup for his Saturday, November 6, appeal.
As all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place for Bill Graham, it is ironic that a peaceful hippie commune called the Family Dog, whose members despised business, would play a crucial role in his meteoric rise to success. The Family Dog included Luria Castell, a vivacious young woman who wore Benjamin Franklin wire-rim glasses and favored long “granny dresses”; Ellen Harmon, who had dropped out of her “straight” job in Detroit to come to the West Coast; and Alton Kelley, an artist who dealt marijuana. They had started the Family Dog, named in memory of Harmon’s dog, who had recently died in a traffic accident, to liven up San Francisco’s dull nightlife with dances.
“San Francisco can be the American Liverpool,” Castell told San Francisco Chronicle Music columnist Ralph J. Gleason. “There’s enough talent here, especially in the folk-music field. We don’t have any particular group to present, just a plan to get started, to acquire knowledge, information and have fun with a rock ’n’ roll sound.”
Gleason, a veteran jazz critic, was impressed and thanked the Family Dog for invigorating the city’s stale music scene.
The Family Dog’s first event, “Tribute to Dr. Strange,” was held in the Longshoreman’s Hall near Fisherman’s Wharf just two weeks before the scheduled Mime Troupe Benefit. It was a great success, featuring Jefferson Airplane, The Marbles, and The Charlatans. The opening act was a brand-new group called The Great Society, playing only its second performance, featuring a stunningly beautiful singer named Grace Slick.
CHAPTER FOUR
Grace
Grace Barnett Wing was born on October 30, 1939, in Illinois—although she’s uncertain if it was in Highland Park or Evanston. More importantly, however, she does know it was in the Chinese Year of the Rabbit.
Her father, Ivan Wilford Wing, an Anglicization of the Norwegian name Vinje, was a successful investment banker, and her mother Virginia Barnett’s ancestors had sailed to America on the Mayflower. Born in Idaho in 1909, Virginia had moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s to become a movie star. But she got only as far as understudying for leading lady Marion Davies, the longtime girlfriend of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Virginia enjoyed more success as a nightclub singer, appearing at the RKO Pantages Theater on Hollywood and Vine, as well as small clubs around Los Angeles.1
Virginia quit show business after marrying Ivan Wing, whom she had first met several years earlier at the University of Washington in Seattle, where they were both straight “A” students.
“It was looked down on for an investment banker at the time to be married to a nightclub singer,” explained their daughter Grace. “[They] did what they were told.” 2
As a little girl, Grace idolized her maternal grandmother, Annie Mary Sue Neill Barnett, whom she called “Lady Sue.” The vivacious old lady spun tall tales about being a champion skater, with special skates with electric lights. It would be years before Grace discovered this would have been mechanically impossible when her grandmother was a young girl. 3
Grace’s parents, meanwhile, were Republicans of the ultraconservative variety.4
“I think being a screwball jumps generations,” Grace would later explain, “because I’m a screwy but my mother was kind of regular. She wasn’t too out there.”5
As a young child, Grace loved listening to Lady Sue’s colorful tales of her illustrious family. A mixture of Celtic, Irish, and Scottish, her ancestor John Whitman had arrived in Weymouth, Massachusetts, as one of the original Puritans. The Barnett family tree also boasted the poet Walt Whitman and her musical great-grandmother Elizabeth Auzella Barnett-Whitman, a tough frontiers-woman who rode wagon trains to the Northwest Territory, with her violin and guitar.
When Grace was three, her father was transferred to Los Angeles, and he relocated the family there. Three years later, the family moved to San Francisco when the bank transferred Grace’s father again.
Then Grace, whose favorite color was black, started drawing with a passion. She loved sketching the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park and the nearby bridge. Once she drew an angel, which her parents used as their family Christmas card that year.6
Even as a young child, Grace was headstrong, refusing to ever take no for an answer. Her family nicknamed her “The Grouser.” 7
There was always music in the Wing home, and her mother hired a piano teacher for her daughter, who hated the lessons.
“I play by ear,” Grace once explained, “so I would say to the piano teacher, ‘Why don’t you just play that for me one time so I can get a feel of it.’ I didn’t want to learn to read music. It bored me. I’d rather just play it.”8
Her parents read her bedtime stories, her favorite being Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Grace related to Alice’s bitter experiences of growing up in drab Victorian England, which bore striking similarities to her childhood in the Eisenhower era.
“That’s why I identify with Alice in Wonderland,” she explained. “It came out of Victorian England, which was a very straitlaced time.” 9
A month before Grace’s tenth birthday, Virginia gave birth to a baby boy they named Chris, who would complete the family.
Soon afterward Ivan Wing got a raise and moved the family to Palo Alto in Marin County. The Wings soon became friendly with Bob and Betty Slick, their next-door neighbors, who had three young sons named Jerry, Darby, and Danny.
“[Grace was] a fat little girl with buck teeth and a foul mouth,” recalled Darby, who was five years younger. “She took piano lessons [and] spent hours and days alone with her music and her dolls, living in magic worlds.” 10
Grace was now busy writing and starring in her own plays, as well as making the costumes and sets. Her various roles included Alice in Wonderland, Maid Marian, and Wonder Woman, which she performed for her parents and their friends, or sometimes just for herself.
Alcoholism ran deep in Grace’s family. Her father was naturally shy and drank to loosen up and relax. Her mother drank constantly, although nobody ever knew, as she never showed any signs of it.
“My father was an alcoholic,” said Grace, “but he was a kind one, a funny one. The trouble is he drank all the time, and it pissed off my mother.”
Grace remembers walking into the living room to find her mother haranguing her father, who had passed out on the couch in his three-piece suit, complete with fob watch.
“His head was tilted to the side and he had a little drool coming out,” Grace told Vanity Fair in 2012. “She stood in front of him and said, ‘You s
tewbum.’ ” 11
When she was ten years old, Grace had a life-changing experience when she was taken to see the new Preston Sturgis romantic comedy, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, starring Betty Grable. She would later adopt Grable’s character, a larger-than-life Wild West saloon singer called “Freddie” Jones, as her outlandish role model when she became Grace Slick.
“I guess Betty Grable set me up,” she later explained. “I learned that a woman can defy stereotypes and do anything she wants.” 12
In September 1951, Grace began attending the David Starr Junior High School in Burbank, California. The overweight twelve-year-old decided to create a tough new image for herself in order to gain acceptance by the school’s in crowd. She began smoking cigarettes and drinking hard liquor, as well as going on a diet and becoming a basketball cheerleader. But after she invited her new school friends to her birthday party and nobody came, Grace decided to rethink her popularity strategy.
Four years later, Grace made a fresh start at the Castilleja School for Girls, a private finishing school in Palo Alto. During her two years there, Grace dated and became a cheerleader for a local boy’s school football team. At sixteen, she lost her virginity after her boyfriend got her drunk at his parents’ house. She woke up the next morning with a severe hangover, remembering little of it.13
Grace was now drinking straight gin from her parents’ liquor cabinet. And when Darby Slick came over to babysit her younger brother Chris, he could not believe how much she had changed.
“[She was] now thin and cute,” he recalled. “Hot stuff to me.”
After graduating from the Castilleja school, Grace persuaded her parents to send her to the refined and very expensive Finch College on New York’s Park Avenue. In September 1957, she started her freshman year at “the easiest school in the world,” and never looked back.14