Rebels in Paradise

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Bell quickly became the gallery’s rising star. Blum explained, “Arnold Glimcher came and said, ‘This guy’s a genius.’ Because he was the youngest, it didn’t sit well with the others.”22 Glimcher needed ten boxes for a 1964 show at Pace, his New York gallery. Blum asked Bell how long it would take him to make twenty of the boxes—ten for Glimcher and ten for himself—and what it would cost. Bell reported that it would take six months and cost $20,000. Glimcher sent a $10,000 check to Blum, who in turn secured a $10,000 loan from his backer Sayde Moss. With $20,000 in hand, an excited Bell went to work.

  Bell confided news of this astonishing windfall to Bengston, who immediately stormed into Ferus. “Irving,” he said, “I want $20,000.”23 Blum explained that it was not possible. There was no waiting list for Bengston’s paintings, no impending show in New York. An indignant Bengston threatened to quit the gallery and, in a fury, attempted to convince others to leave as well, but his friends were unmoved. After that, Bengston left Ferus and was no longer the ringleader.

  Bell was confused and troubled by his friend’s reaction. He was even more upset by the fact that Bengston had confronted Robert Irwin and the two had wound up in a brawl that concluded their testy friendship. “You either had to play the game Billy’s way or not play,” Irwin said. “At one point I grabbed him and threw him up against a wall and told him to get the fuck out of my life.”24 When Bell tried to patch things up, Irwin told him not to bother. The artists, who once had had lighthearted fun at Barney’s together, were each now on a more urgent course.

  Bell made friends with Donald Judd and other rising artists in New York. In 1965 his reflective glass boxes sold briskly at Pace. “I made more money when I was twenty-five than my dad made in his whole life. I was totally unprepared,” Bell would later say. Success came at a cost. “It gave me a nervous breakdown by the time I was thirty and turned me into an alcoholic.”25 He grew rich while his Los Angeles friends remained broke. “I felt really guilty about it. A lot of the money I made I just pissed away, just because I didn’t feel that I should have it.”26

  Meanwhile, Glimcher took on Irwin and Kauffman. “They were giving us money and my first show back there, gee whiz, they paid for a first-class airline ticket,” Kauffman said. “I didn’t know how to deal with all that.”27 Glimcher rented a loft for Bell to pursue his glass sculpture in New York. Kauffman rented one on Seventeenth Street in Manhattan that he shared with John McCracken, who also showed with Pace. McCracken, Kauffman, and Ruscha were selected for the Cinquième Biennale de Paris at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1967. The same year, Kauffman, McCracken, Bell, and Ron Davis were shown with Judd and Flavin in A New Aesthetic at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. In her catalog essay, critic Barbara Rose claimed their work “portends a brilliant world of color, light, and direct experience.”28

  After Bengston’s diva departure from Ferus, he broke his back in a motorcycle accident, which left him paralyzed for four days. He had remained friends with the soft-hearted Bell and, unable to live on his own, slept on Bell’s couch for four months, utterly alienating Bell’s new wife. “He was awful, cranky,” Bell recalled. “His mother knitted me a beautiful afghan, which I still have, for taking care of him.”29

  Disciplined in his physical habits, Bengston rehabilitated himself by putting on his motorcycle leathers and boots and running up and down the stairs to his studio thirty times a day. He’d then ride his bike for four hours. A few months later, he began an even less conventional form of physical therapy by going out dancing at the different clubs on the Strip. “I was sort of a dance hall slut at the time. I’d work out in the day and go dancing at night. At that time, the Whisky, Gazzaris, Ciro’s were dance clubs. Primarily rock ’n’ roll, Ike and Tina Turner, the Temptations, stuff you could really wing with,” he later said.30

  Bengston was on hand for one of the legendary performances of Otis Redding, who stomped the stage so hard that the whole club filled with dust rising from the floor. In 1966, Whisky a Go Go owner Elmer Valentine had Redding and his ten-piece Memphis band for four nights of performances that were remembered as legendary after the twenty-six-year-old Redding died the following year in a plane crash. Ry Cooder played in the opening act, Rising Suns, and recalled that it was a “super hot show, nothing like anyone had seen in Los Angeles.”31

  Ann Marshall in front of Billy Al Bengston painting at actor Sterling Holloway’s house in 1965

  Photograph courtesy of Billy Al Bengston

  One night, Bengston went to Ciro’s to hear the Byrds, who were friends with Mary Lynch Kienholz and involved with the Ferus scene. Bengston hung out with Teri Garr, Ann Marshall, and Toni Basil. Though romantically involved with Garr, he was such close friends with all of them that he eventually combined their initials to name his daughter: Blue Tica—standing for Teri, Toni, Isherwood, Cliff, Ann, and Altoon. “They were tremendously energetic those girls, they were real trouble,” he recalled.32 Garr and Basil were professional dancers working in beach-party movies and television shows such as The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, but they were happy to meet him several nights a week to continue dancing into the early morning hours.

  They were not strangers to the art world. Through Hopper, years earlier, Garr had been drafted to read Michael McClure’s The Beard in the loft above the carousel on the Santa Monica Pier. Bengston already knew Hopper, Dean Stockwell, and Peter Fonda but then grew friendly with Jack Nicholson through Garr and Basil, who took acting classes with him. Nicholson wrote the slim script The Trip for Roger Corman. Largely a montage of psychedelic special effects, the movie starred Fonda as a director of TV commercials—bad karma from the POV of the sixties—who is given acid by his friends Hopper and Bruce Dern. Nicholson also wrote a part for Garr in his next psychedelic movie Head, a vehicle for the Monkeys. Nicholson remained in touch with the Ferus artists through Ann Marshall, who became his girl Friday in the late sixties after her friend Michelle Phillips had left him. (Nicholson rarely collected contemporary art, preferring Picasso or the erotica of Tamara de Lempicka. However, one Christmas, he bought a large suite of watercolors from Bengston to send to friends as presents.)

  Bengston, who titled his radiant enamel paintings after Hollywood personalities—Humphrey, Zachary, Busby—went on to date Diane Varsi of Peyton Place and Bobbi Shaw, who had a role in Beach Blanket Bingo. Bengston introduced Shaw’s roommate Babs Lunine to John Altoon, who was divorced by Fay Spain in 1962. Lunine’s upper-middle-class East Coast background was more boarding school than bohemian, though she majored in art history at the University of Miami before moving to Los Angeles in 1964. She was seventeen years younger than Altoon and was so wholesome and blonde that both Bengston and Altoon referred to her affectionately as “Fluffy.” She married Altoon in 1965.

  Bengston, too, settled down. His girlfriend, Penny Little, was registrar of the Pasadena Art Museum. After leaving Ferus, Bengston represented himself, showing and selling out of his studio as well as loaning work for gallery and museum exhibitions. Little helped him organize a system for keeping track of his work. (He had had such difficulties getting work returned that he asked the Whitney Museum of American Art to pay him for loaning his work to their prestigious biennial exhibition. The museum refused.)

  Handsome and charismatic, Bengston had little difficulty selling his own work for sizable sums. The work was strongly backed by critics such as John Coplans, who wrote, “It would not be too much to say that by the early sixties Bengston had probably extended the notion of a complex synthetic order of color far in advance of anyone else working at the time.”33 After he had finished a group of what he termed “Dentos”—sheets of thin metal that he had beaten with a ball-peen hammer and then sprayed with lapidary-colored patterns of lacquer—he agreed to a show in 1970 with Riko Mizuno, who had split from a partnership with Eugenia Butler to open her own gallery at 669 North La Cienega Boulevard. Bengston insisted that the show be lit only by candles on stands that he had built so tha
t flickering illumination would cast changing shadows over the glistening, irregular surfaces of the Dentos. Unfortunately, the paintings could barely be seen at all. “That went over like a turd in a punch bowl,” he said.34 It was his only show there. “I always felt that I was the best,” he later said, with a dry laugh. “I think everyone would agree with me that I had a very inflated opinion of myself.… I burned a lot of bridges and was very, very stupid.”35

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Glamour Gains Ground

  In the early 1960s, Larry Bell worked part-time at the Unicorn coffeehouse on Sunset Boulevard, walking distance from Barney’s. The Kingston Trio and Judy Henske performed regularly at the Unicorn, but the acoustic scene was about to give way to electric rock. It was at the coffeehouse that a well-to-do young man with a tenor voice, David Crosby, met producer Jim Dickson, who put him together with Jim (later Roger) McGuinn, Gene Clark, Michael Clarke, and Chris Hillman, an electric folk-pop group conceived of as the “American Beatles” but known, by 1964, as the Byrds. Dickson was friends with Dennis Hopper, also a regular at the Unicorn. “That is where I first heard ‘Howl’ read by Ginsberg. And Freddy Engelberg was playing guitar,” Hopper recalled.1 Engelberg also acted in The Beat Generation with Fay Spain, Altoon’s first wife, before releasing two albums of his own music.

  Occasionally, Bell played his own twelve-string guitar at the Unicorn and hung out with the musicians. Since he watched the door, he would slip in friends for free, including the Grinsteins. Hopps had brought them to Bell’s studio with the warning, “Listen, this is going to look really weird to you but you have to believe it’s art.”2 The Grinsteins embraced the artist and the era. Elyse declared, “We were straight Westsiders but we were changed by the sixties.”3 Though raised on jazz and swing, they had no problem moving on to rock and roll when Johnny Winter played the Whisky a Go Go.

  At Bell’s suggestion, they dropped by the Unicorn one night to watch comedian Lenny Bruce, his sharp features softened from alcohol and drugs. He was friendly with Altoon, who lived near the club. Hopper, a staunch supporter of Bruce’s incendiary monologues, was there that night. He was infuriated when authorities intervened. “They dragged him off the fucking stage,” Bell recalled.4

  Bruce was determined to use obscenity in his stand-up act, and the police in various cities were just as determined to stop him. Sherman Block, who later became L.A. County sheriff, arrested Bruce on the charge of violating California’s obscenity law at a 1962 performance at the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. Less than two weeks later Bruce faced charges in Chicago following a show at the Gate of Horn. Later in 1962 he was arrested again in Los Angeles for a performance at the Unicorn. “Here I am, living up to my public image,” wrote a defiant Bruce. “A true professional never disappoints his public.”5 Bruce’s many influential friends included magazine publisher and freedom of speech champion Hugh Hefner, who serialized Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People in Playboy. Bruce’s greatest supporter was twenty-five-year-old record producer Phil Spector, whose “wall of sound” was perfected in Los Angeles with the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.”

  Spector had moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1963 because he had “tired of the condescension of East Coast session men, and now welcomed the chance to work with the younger, hipper musicians of Hollywood.”6 There were more independent labels recording folk, pop, and rock music in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the country. Spector saw his opportunity and broke the rules of recording by “pushing volume levels way into the red, packing the studio with musicians and instruments, devoting hours to each song.”7 He scorned conservatives fighting Bruce’s scathing free-form monologues about religion and race in America. (After Bruce was found dead of a heroin overdose in 1966, Spector bought the paparazzi photographs of his bloated body to outmaneuver the media. Spector himself went to jail in 2009 for the murder of actress and House of Blues hostess Lana Clarkson.)

  Hopper identified with Bruce’s expressed feeling of persecution. Like Bruce, he had a reputation for escalating drug use. After eighty-five takes of one scene in the 1958 film From Hell to Texas, director Henry Hathaway spread the word that he was difficult. By the early 1960s, Hopper was not getting as many offers to act and, inspired by Kienholz, started to make collages and assemblages. The opening of his show at the Primus Stuart Gallery brought out friends Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. It was as a photographer, however, that Hopper’s true talent emerged.

  Before marrying Hopper in 1961 at Jane Fonda’s New York apartment, his fiancée Brooke had bought him a 35 mm Nikon camera for his birthday. She recalled, “It turned out that he was as natural a photographer as he was an actor, constantly taking pictures of everything and everyone he came into contact with that intrigued him.”8

  After Hopper lost his paintings in the 1961 Bel Air fire, he dedicated himself to photography. “The artists wanted to be photographed,” he recalls, “while the actors were used to it and I, for one, felt like it was often intrusive.”9 He spent his considerable free time hanging around Ferus and taking photographs of the artists. “Light” artist Irwin with a lightbulb in his mouth, luxe Bell wearing striped trousers and two-tone spectator shoes, cool Ruscha posed in front of a shop with a neon sign. In 1963, Hopper’s photographs were reproduced in Artforum with the bravura endorsement: “Welcome brave new images!”

  Hopper was hitchhiking on Sunset Boulevard one day when William Claxton, driving his Ford convertible, stopped to pick him up. They had not met previously but synched quickly over their mutual love of photography and jazz. When they reached Hopper’s house at the top of steep Kings Road, Hopper invited Claxton in and Claxton spent the afternoon photographing the rebellious actor. Both were fans of Charlie Parker, whom Claxton had photographed countless times at the Tiffany Club. “The Bird” fascinated Claxton with his tough demeanor and angelic face. Hopper, too, hung around jazz clubs, including the Renaissance opened by Benny Shapiro.

  Dennis Hopper, Double Standard, 1961

  Photograph by Dennis Hopper, © The Dennis Hopper Trust, courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

  Once, after Thelonious Monk had played the Renaissance, Shapiro asked Hopper to take Monk to the airport. “I went to pick him up and he was in this Victorian house in Watts,” Hopper said. “I went three hours early because he loved to miss planes and just get high at the airport and watch people. He was in bed and high and had pills all over the floor.”10 Referring to William Parker, the hard-nosed chief of the LAPD, Monk took a long, stoned look at Hopper and asked, “Dennis, how could a man with the name of Parker be down on jazz?”

  “So anyway,” Hopper continued, “we missed the airplane.”11

  Claxton’s acclaimed pictures of jazz musicians earned him a position as art director and photographer for Pacific Jazz Records. A Pasadena native, Claxton had attended UCLA with Hopps and was a regular at Ferus, where he befriended many of the jazz-loving artists, especially John Altoon. On more than one occasion, Altoon would borrow money from Claxton and, to secure the debt, give him a painting. A few days later, Altoon would sneak into Claxton’s studio and retrieve the painting without ever telling him. Claxton solved the problem by commissioning Altoon and Irwin to create album covers of their abstract paintings.

  The tall, fair Claxton married short, slight Peggy Moffitt in 1961. A Los Angeles native who initially considered a career in acting, Moffitt became one of the top models of the era with her black eye-liner, pale makeup, and glossy dark hair—the absolute opposite of the California girl popularized by television and pop music. Thanks to her association with the radical young Los Angeles fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, she became a recognizable icon of the sixties.

  Moffitt and Blum, both extroverts, bonded over their love of the theatrical gesture. One day, she rounded up leggy model Léon Bing and a few other girls. With Blum and Claxton, they all went to the marina for a special photo shoot. Claxton mounted adhesive letters spelling “FERUS GALLERY” on the stern
of a cabin cruiser borrowed from his brother. Moffitt and her girls were outfitted in Gernreich bathing suits on loan from the Beverly Hills boutique Jax, where Moffitt had worked as a teenager. Moffitt was furious when “one of the models destroyed one of the bathing suits with a cigarette butt, which I had to pay for.”12 Claxton took a glamorous shot of the pretty girls clustered around Blum, who was wearing his customary blue blazer and assuming an attitude of prosperity. When the photo went out as a gallery announcement, few recipients knew anything about the impoverished Blum. He said, “You have to look like you are doing well and I think we pulled it off.”13 Shirley Hopps recalled that it was all smoke and mirrors. “It was not glamorous. No matter how it looked, Irving was living on about one hundred dollars a month. He had no money but he was a great showman, all facade.”14

  Blum, who had aspired to be an actor, could not restrain such indulgence in fantasy. When he spied a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce parked on La Cienega, he called Seymour Rosen, a photographer who had taken pictures of the Watts Towers and of various artists, and asked him to hurry over to the gallery. When Rosen arrived, Blum hustled him across the street and assumed the pose of the putative Rolls owner. “I need to send a photo to my mother in Phoenix to show her I am doing all right,” he said with one of his hearty laughs.15 Clearly, Ferus had moved on from its chaotic Beat origins.