These forays led him to suggest that CBS executives incorporate art ideas into The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. He added his “Classical Gas” sound track to a three-minute film of three thousand works of art, from cave painting to Picasso, compiled by UCLA film student Dan McLaughlin. It concluded with the statement: “You have just had all the Great Art of the World indelibly etched in your brain. You are now cultured.”
Williams recalled, “I think I took influences from Ed’s world of art, and I was the primary troublemaker on the show.”20 He engineered comedian Pat Paulsen’s pseudo-presidential campaign by hiring former governor Edmund Brown’s consultant and demanding debates. In keeping with the late sixties, the show’s writers grew more eccentric and political, satirizing mainstream America and criticizing the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War. At that point, Williams and the Smothers Brothers ran afoul of CBS executives. As CBS attempted to dictate appropriate fare for prime-time entertainment, the Smothers Brothers tried to push the boundaries of acceptable speech on the medium. On April 4, 1969, one week before the end of the season, CBS threw the show off the air. The Smothers pitched a fit, accusing CBS of infringing on their First Amendment rights. They would not appear on CBS again for twenty years, though they continued to perform live and Williams continued to work for them. They often appeared at events protesting censorship in the media, but Williams retreated from celebrity in the 1970s. “I wanted to be more like God. In the beginning, God had a creative life. Along came religion and he had a career.”21
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Love-ins and Outs
By 1968, Rudi Gernreich was considered such a notable figure that he was included in a photograph staged by Los Angeles County bureaucrats of the city’s cultural elite. On the steps leading to the entrance of the L.A. County Museum of Art, he posed with artists, designers, critics, and curators. Altoon, Bengston, Kienholz, Ruscha, and Kauffman posed with Tuchman, Coplans, and others.
Gernreich had brought his alternative model, the leggy beauty Léon Bing, who had replaced Peggy Moffitt after she and William Claxton moved to London. Bing was wearing the same plastic tunic that she had worn on the cover of Time, with a clear plastic panel running down the front from collar to hem. Some of the artists were standing next to their paintings, and Bing recognized the big canvas with the word “Spam” and the chiseled, intense artist holding it. She insisted Gernreich introduce her to Ruscha. After that, as she put it, “It was on.”1
Ruscha, who had just completed his now-famous screen print of the Hollywood sign in a searing orange sunset, could not resist the advances of the long-legged cover girl. Their torrid affair continued for the next four years. Bing said she was surprised that such a cool character could be “such an ardent and inventive lover.”2 They made love about four times a week in his studio on Western Avenue in Hollywood. She introduced him to her friends in the music and film scene, bringing him to the home of her good friend Mama Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas, where joint papers were imprinted with the Louis Vuitton logo, and had sex with him in the swimming pool. She brought him to producer Harry Cohn Jr.’s ranch in Joshua Tree, a place of remote beauty about one hundred miles east of Los Angeles, where the artist later built a house and bought extensive acreage. She gave him engraved business cards: Ed-werd Rew-shay, Young Artist. He gave her a gunpowder drawing of the word “Slap,” a reference to the professional’s term for a model’s heavy makeup. He introduced her to his artist friends and asked her to pose for his photographic novella of Mason Williams’s story “Crackers,” which he later made into the 16 mm film Premium.
In both, Bing is the date of a nattily dressed Larry Bell riding in Mason Williams’s own 1933 Pierce Arrow, driven by Tommy Smothers wearing a chauffeur’s uniform. Gernreich makes an appearance as a hotel bellhop. Bell escorts Bing to a seedy, cheap hotel room where she undresses and gets into a bed covered entirely with lettuce. To her surprise, Bell douses her with salad dressing and announces that he must leave to get crackers. Premium Saltines, of course. He then goes to an exquisite, expensive hotel room and enjoys his crackers while alone in bed. This whole adventure could have been considered a warning. When Bing’s affair with Ruscha came to an end, he gave her a painting of words in ketchup red on a yellow background: “Listen, I’d Like to Help Out, But—.” Ruscha and Danna Knego divorced then later remarried.
Mason Williams was not married and was ever more popular. With his hazel eyes, dimpled chin, an income of $500,000, and ultrahip friends, he recalled having about forty girlfriends between 1969 and 1970 and thinking, “Man, that is out there.”
“The joke I have is that people say, ‘You have had about 10,000 girlfriends.’ I say, ‘That’s ridiculous. It couldn’t be more than 6,500.’”3
The Hoppers’ marriage, however, couldn’t take the strain of the late sixties. After six years, as Dennis’s drug use and infidelity took their toll, Brooke left him. He had taken to terrifying the children—her two sons from a previous marriage as well as their daughter—by chasing them around the house with a six-shooter in each hand. Brooke had to drive them to her friend Jill Schary’s house to stay until Dennis passed out. The separation was bitter. Most of their sizable art collection was sold or kept by Brooke so Dennis was left with few assets, apart from a barely coherent script that he had written with Peter Fonda called Easy Rider. Brooke did not bother asking for any percentage of that project, she was so certain that it would be a flop. (Costing $340,000 to make, it grossed $30 million in the United States alone.)
The availability of the birth control pill, approved for use in 1960, a growing awareness of the erotic desires of women, and widespread experimentation with drugs accelerated rampant sexual freedom. In the spring of 1967, Griffith Park was the site of several love-ins. The Doors played the February love-in and some six thousand flower children congregated for the Easter event.
By then, the so-called studs of Ferus were minor celebrities who attracted groupies just like rock stars. Kauffman, who would marry seven times and have countless girlfriends, attended the Easter love-in and fell under their spell. Vivian Kauffman recalled, “It was a boys’ club and I think it was pretty difficult to live with those people. They had to be so concentrated, they led very selfish lives, and all the women were left in the wake.”4 Vivian divorced Kauffman in 1967 and went to work for Blum. (She remained friends with Kauffman, however, and often invited him to dinners that she made for visiting artists, such as Carl Andre and Frank Stella, while working for Blum. She later married PAM trustee and collector Robert Rowan.) Robert Irwin and Nancy Oberg divorced for the second time. Ed and Avilda Moses divorced. Larry and Gloria Bell divorced in 1971.
The greatest shock in the art world, however, was the divorce of Walter and Shirley Hopps.
After three years as director, Hopps was spending as little time at the Pasadena Art Museum as he had at Ferus. Curator James Demetrion noticed that in the last six months of 1966, he would be at the museum just two or three days a month. “It was a problem in terms of morale for staff—very loyal people who felt let down, you might say.”5 As one wag put it, he was a presence but he wasn’t present.6
Neither was Hopps at home since he was often with other women. Kauffman recalled, “Walter cheated on Shirley. She caught him a couple of times. I think Shirley found him in bed with a girl and Walter jumped up and said, ‘This girl is very mixed up and I was counseling her.’”7
Shirley was dismayed. “I heard him say we had an open marriage and I didn’t know what he was talking about,” she said.8 “He disappeared all the time. Many a time I would not know where he was for two or three days. He was really involved in drugs—uppers and downers—and that is how he managed. He was always behind so he’d work twenty-four or thirty-six hours straight through on uppers and downers, none of which I knew. I never suspected because he was such a different species of person and able by his own will to do such things, you could believe he could stay up those hours.”9 She added, “Walte
r had limits. There is only so long you can do it. He’s too erratic and needs someone to take care of him. I loved him but didn’t want to have anything to do with him.”10
Shirley left him in 1966. Despite her rise as an art historian at UC Riverside, having received her doctorate in 1964, she had remained involved in Ferus and been in regular contact with the perennially charming and well-mannered Blum, who was all sympathy for her frustrations. “You could say there was a very strong attraction to Irving. It was a question of being together all the time and Walter being away all the time.”11 Shirley preferred the library to the social whirl of the art scene, and Blum provided a nice balance. “Irving was so outgoing, it was a part of the attraction. He was comfortable with people so I didn’t have to deal with it too much.”12
Hopps, in considerable denial about his own condition, was stunned when Shirley moved out. “I think Walter really never got over it,” she said.13
Irving and Shirley eventually married at the Maple Drive home of Don and Lynn Factor in what Irving described as “a hippie wedding” with everyone wearing beads and flowing robes. They moved into an apartment on San Vicente Boulevard in West Hollywood decorated with the Warhol Campbell’s soup-can paintings. In 1969, they had a son, Jason Ferus Blum.
Larry Bell observed one singularly odd outcome of their marriage, since his wife, Gloria, was Shirley’s sister: “I’ve had the dubious distinction of having both Walter Hopps and Irving Blum as my brothers-in-law.”14
During his years at the Pasadena Art Museum, from the 1963 Duchamp retrospective to the 1967 Joseph Cornell retrospective, Hopps had brought a considerable amount of attention to the museum despite his eccentric behavior. Artists adored him and accepted all his irregularities. It was due to his friendship with Jasper Johns that the tiny PAM became one of the museums to host his coveted 1965 show organized by Alan Solomon for the Jewish Museum in New York. A few days before the Johns opening, Hopps told everyone to be at the museum at nine at night to install the show coming from the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Demetrion recalled, “He strolled in after midnight, and we were there all night. Still, the show looked great.”15
Though the Johns show came with a catalog, Hopps wanted to produce his own and told Demetrion to compile a chronology. Knowing that Hopps found writing to be extremely taxing, Demetrion inquired about the progress of the essay. Hopps reassured him that the essay was on track right up to the night of the opening reception when Demetrion arrived and was horrified to see a stack of cards featuring a reproduction of Johns’s White Flag with a note on the back stating that a definitive catalog written by Demetrion would soon be available. “I blew my top quietly,” Demetrion recalled. “I told him ‘What was behind all that, ruining my reputation?’ I explained to Johns, but it bothered me. I’m still not sure I’m over it. Yet, Walter was so easy to forgive, even against your will sometimes. He had a certain charisma.”16
Hopps’s true gift was his acumen in targeting talent and selecting the best work by certain artists. His cachet with artists also helped secure work for a few Los Angeles collectors at a time when there was increasing competition for the best pieces. He acted as an adviser to Pasadena real estate mogul Robert Rowan, chairman of the board of trustees at PAM, who built a noteworthy collection of color-field painters and Ferus artists. Yet Hopps had zero administrative skills. Demetrion recalled, “Walter was not able to control the financial situation, so Rowan became the main support of the museum, putting up about $50,000 a year, which was a ton of money in sixties.”17 When Don Factor joined the PAM board, he was distressed to find that Hopps “was supposed to be out doing the things museum directors do and he’d be sitting around with his artist friends. The board got fed up.… He … should never have been made director.”18
In 1966, Hopps’s amphetamine addiction led to a breakdown and he spent several weeks recovering in the psychiatric ward of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “From the late fifties until 1966, I was quite thoroughly addicted to speed,” he said. “I’ve never been an alcoholic. But I’m a night person, and there were all those times I’d have to start early in the morning, going out to earn money, and I began using amphetamines.”19
Rowan asked for Hopps’s resignation, and Demetrion was promoted to acting director but invited Hopps to stay on to install his Cornell retrospective.
Peter Plagens has noted that Hopps always struck him as “the Blanche DuBois of the art world in that he depended on the kindness of strangers and always had the support of some rich person.”20 After being ousted from PAM, Hopps was awarded a fellowship at the Washington think tank Institute for Policy Studies in 1967 where he wrote a proposal to have the Washington Gallery of Modern Art taken over as the contemporary art wing of the Corcoran Gallery. Within a year, Corcoran director James Harithas resigned and Hopps was named acting director, then director, of the Corcoran. His tardiness became such an issue that his staff made pins stating “Walter Hopps will be here in 20 minutes.” Hopps still found it difficult to work in an institution. In the early 1970s, when he was working at the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Arts, his boss, Joshua C. Taylor, was sometimes heard to say, “If I could find him, I’d fire him.”21
Despite Hopps’s many failings, his departure from Los Angeles was felt keenly among his many supporters. It was a further blow to learn that Artforum was moving to New York. “There was a tremendous sense of betrayal in the L.A. art world,” recalled Plagens.22 This abandonment by the magazine that had come to embody all the aspirations of an increasingly self-confident community of artists was seen as traitorous. The artists had been pushing Philip Leider to provide more coverage of Los Angeles and less of New York. Leider recalled that Ruscha “thought that we were basically biased against West Coast artists, that we never gave them the kind of splash that we gave New York artists. He once said to me very readily, ‘Look Phil, I know what you think of me. You think I’m a tenth-rate Pop artist.’ And I remember just looking up, we were both at the light table, and I just looked up at him and our eyes met, and he knew and I knew. I couldn’t say anything.”23
Paradoxically, Leider’s decision was the direct consequence of taking a trip to New York with Blum, who convinced Leider that he would be able to get better writers there—writers who would be familiar with the New York artists he was representing. Blum introduced Leider to Stella, Rose, Castelli, Kelly, Warhol, and Lichtenstein. “And it was as a consequence of that trip that I just wrote off Los Angeles,” Leider said. “I had no longer any patience with people like Billy Al Bengston and his attitude—very strangely adolescent. If a dealer came to his studio or if a museum person came to his studio and wanted a painting for an exhibition, Billy would want rent.”24
Such a move was never Blum’s intention, and he was deeply disturbed by Leider’s decision. “I kind of had the feeling that if it went East that would be the end of it, the end of it for me. As a West Coast dealer.”25 Charles Cowles accepted the verdict of his editor and moved to New York with the magazine. Ruscha flew out to New York once a month to continue as the publication’s art director until 1969.
John Coplans, who had been contributing some of the magazine’s more insightful articles, was hired as curator at PAM by Demetrion. “John was very energetic, ambitious, wrote a lot, but there was tension. I think he wanted to become director. When I left he was made acting director.”26
Coplans clarified the ongoing problem at PAM. “I had a budget of $5,000 a year for West Coast artists, compared to a budget of $40,000 for shows of East Coast artists.”27 Despite this perpetual poverty, Coplans and Demetrion made a point of exhibiting more young Los Angeles artists than Hopps had done: Neil Williams, Dennis Hopper, Terry Allen, Paul Sarkisian, Billy Al Bengston, Judy Chicago, and the Light and Space triumvirate: Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Charge of the Light Brigade: Irwin, Wheeler, and Turrell
In January 1968, when Robert Irwin had his show at PAM, he was fo
rty years old. His clean-cut look had given way to a beard and long hair just as his abstract paintings on the covers of jazz albums had given way to experiments with light and perception. By constantly questioning the purpose of painting, in less than a decade he had eliminated the traditional format of a canvas to spray automotive paint in thin, transparent layers of pastel over a silver-white convex spun-aluminum disc. Mounted on a clear cylinder to float some six inches away from the wall, each disc was illuminated by two floodlights on the floor as well as two on the ceiling in a symmetrical arrangement. The lights cast shadows like the petals of a flower behind the glowing disc to create “the effect of a painting with no formal beginning or end, the central area of which had a field density that operated on the eye in much the same way as a ganzfeld,” he said.1 Another series of clear acrylic discs, sprayed opaque white at the center, gave way to translucency at the rim, “thus achieving an immediate integration of painting and environment.”2 Irwin spent hours isolated in his studio and came to each aesthetic decision through dedicated intuition and attentiveness to his own perception. An autodidact by nature, Irwin was practicing phenomenology without having undergone any course of study.
Meanwhile, two younger artists, Doug Wheeler and James Turrell, were pursuing these very same notions. The three shows at PAM started the so-called light wars, an internecine tussle over who did what first that would continue for decades to come.
Rebels in Paradise Page 21