From Dad’s point of view, he had discovered pot at just the right time. The drug helped him segue into the life he was just beginning in California and into the alternative lifestyle of the 1960s that he found in LA and which suited him perfectly. He loved the hippie look: he grew a moustache; he wore flowery peasant shirts and bought his first pair of what became his signature rose-colored glasses. His mantra was and always would be: DON’T WORRY! BE HAPPY! FEEL GOOD! Those six words meant so much to him that my mother had them etched on his bathroom mirror.
* * *
Dad was a good networker before the phrase was invented. He connected with all the people he worked with back east, and one of them was Brandon de Wilde, whom Dad had worked with in the theater and with whom he had just finished the movie In Harm’s Way. Brandon was eleven years younger than Dad and had made enough money to buy a house with some land around it in Topanga Canyon. The stoned and laid-back vibe at that house was so different from the far more uptight atmosphere we’d experienced while staying with friends of the family in their grand country houses in Connecticut. Those homes had manicured lawns for playing civilized games like croquet, but the scruffy California landscape was wild and untamed. Topanga is still much as it was in those early days of the hippie movement, with shops selling tie-dyed clothes and handcrafted leather goods, and lots of vegetarian restaurants and colorful flags flying. To get to Topanga, you drive east from Malibu along the Pacific Coast Highway for a few miles and then take a winding road up into a canyon that rises high above the ocean. The topography makes the place feel like you are getting out of town even though it is less than an hour from Hollywood. Whenever I drive through Topanga Canyon, I always find myself thinking of our visits to the de Wilde home when I was a child. Brandon’s wife was a good friend of Susan Fonda, Peter Fonda’s wife. Susan vividly remembers the day that she walked into the de Wildes’ living room and found Dad, who was on his first acid trip with his trip “guide” Larry Hall, who had just given my dad a little “trip gift” to help him remember the experience. It was a mother-of-pearl muscle shell that had a hinge and a clasp on it so it functioned as a lovely little box.
Though Dad had met Peter in New York several years before, it was not until Susan got together with my mother that our families truly bonded; when they became reacquainted, Dad had just recently worked with Peter’s father, Henry Fonda, on a movie. The two men became lifelong friends, and they had a lot to talk about since Dad’s mother, the musical comedy star Mary Martin, was as famous on Broadway as Peter’s dad was in the world of films. And Mary and Henry had something in common outside the sphere of performing, for—though few people know this—both were avid and talented painters.
Our two families spent a lot of time together. I always think of the Fonda kids, Bridget and Justin, as my younger siblings once removed.
When Susan and I were reminiscing together about this time in our lives, we both recalled spending a lot of time at Brandon’s place. Susan remembered him as a quiet man who spent a lot of time practicing guitar because he had a sincere desire to become a serious musician. I remember him surrounded by musicians, and the details of one particular party at his house remain as clear to me as the shell box “trip gift” is to Susan. It was a sunny day, and we were playing outdoors, painting a mural on the high walls of the handball court. As night fell, we stayed on. It was then that some wonderful musicians like David Crosby started showing up with their instruments and began playing their brand of folksy rock. Those who didn’t know how to play pounded on drums or danced. I was that awkward age when I no longer was one of the younger children present, but I was still a long way from being an adult. The euphoria of the crowd was in some ways like the gatherings of theater people who had hung out at my parents’ apartment when we lived in New York. But the mood was different: it was younger, druggier, more raucous, and as the night wore on, though I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, I became transfixed by the slender women with long straight hair dancing to the live music while wearing short go-go dresses that looked like sexy, shiny chain mail and were ingeniously constructed out of the flip tabs from the many cans of beer. The dancing took on an even more dreamlike quality as I watched through the smoke haze, pot mixed with cigarettes, and the stoned onlookers pointed the newly invented handheld laser lights at the dancers, causing the strong red light to flash on and off, illuminating the undulating women. It was like being in a movie, and I must have been stoned too, given the fact that I was surrounded by all that pot smoke. And I was fascinated: these women were beautiful; they redefined my idea of how grown women should look and behave. They were so different from the more conventional grown women I knew back home in New York. Lost in the rhythm and caught up in the group euphoria, I joined the dancers and must have looked pretty funny—a chubby little girl trying to emulate the go-go dancers’ style, gyrating my hips and shimmying my nonexistent chest, but dancing was pure joy to me. My own kids have seen me dance so many times that they have gotten over being embarrassed by their middle-aged mother who still moves to the music whenever possible. Time has not changed the little girl inside me who learned to dance with wild abandon at Brandon de Wilde’s hippie palace in the Topanga hills. Dad loved the relaxed energy of his young friends, and it was a relief for him not to have to struggle to fit in as he had with his mother’s older, sophisticated New York crowd. Gone were the formal dinners and nightclubs, and in their place were the energy of youth and folk rock music and new perspectives on everything under the sun.
Brandon and his easygoing lifestyle really appealed to Dad, who said he too wanted a home where people could come to play and make music and be themselves. Sadly, that friendship ended a few years after that memorable party. Brandon died in a car accident at the age of thirty and, like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, will be eternally young and hauntingly beautiful.
* * *
Dad’s drug taking was a huge part of his search for some kind of spiritual life that would not restrict his behavior but would instead set him free. He wanted to break all the rules he had been taught as a child and find a new way of living.
In pursuit of this new life, in addition to registering with the Peace and Freedom Party, he read Alan Watts’s The Joyous Cosmology; he read the Whole Earth Catalog, Siddhartha, and The Urantia Book. He listened to Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan; I was with him when he had drinks with his fellow Southerner Janis Joplin at his favorite hangout on Sunset Boulevard. All his life, Dad had the habit of finding a restaurant where his friends would know they could find him on a given day or time, and for many years that place was a Chinese restaurant with a beautiful courtyard protected from the busy boulevard by a high wall. For years, even long after he had finished his work in the hit TV show I Dream of Jeannie, Dad held court at Mr. Luck’s restaurant for late lunches on Friday or Saturday. He would sit at a big, round table with a lazy Susan in the middle that was constantly refilled with food, ordering bottle after bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé (he liked how the Chinese waiters pronounced the name of that wine). We never knew who would show up, though Peter Fonda and Bill Hayward were regulars.
Over lunch, they talked about all the news of the day, and at one point, the Fondas, both Peter and Jane, became convinced they were on some kind of government surveillance list, and Dad figured he must be on that list too. I think the prospect of it truly excited him. He marched for civil rights and campaigned to have minorities on his show. He was a regular at the happenings of the era, among them peace rallies and music festivals.
* * *
One lasting image I have of him was formed in my late teens when I went with some friends to a Grateful Dead concert. I was dancing to the music when I felt someone’s eyes on me. I looked up and saw Dad standing some thirty feet away. He was looking at me lovingly; he loved to see me dance. He didn’t seem like a parent in that crowd. He just seemed like another Deadhead. I could tell from the grin on his face that he was totally stoned.
* * *
&nb
sp; He so completely embraced the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll ethos of the era that he lived it to the end of his days. When he died at the age of eighty-one, his refrigerator was packed with marijuana brownies.
* * *
My first experience with pot came when I was eight years old and found a batch of brownies that had been hidden away. I thought my mom was trying to keep the sweets away from me because she had me on another one of her diets; she and Dad were always trying to get me to lose some weight. As soon as I found them, I jammed two of them in my mouth and gulped them down before anyone could see me. Pretty soon I was very high and confused. I remember feeling very emotional. I began sobbing uncontrollably about my grandpapa Ben who had just died a few days before, and the next minute I was falling over with laughter at stuff I saw on TV. There was a new dance called the Pony, and I began prancing around. Next, I became mesmerized watching James Brown wailing and contorting as he sang. At some point, I must have passed out because that is all I can remember. The next day, Mom and Dad explained what had happened to me, and I was frightened of pot after that. I would stand with the grown-ups when they formed circles to pass joints around, but I always passed the roach on without toking on it. When I was in high school, everyone in my peer group smoked pot, but I never liked the feeling of being out of control, and by the time I got to college, I had pretty much phased marijuana out of my life.
Dad never pushed me to join him, but I knew he thought I was a square; he teased me about it in front of his friends. He could not understand why I wouldn’t want to mellow out and be part of the fun. Occasionally, in adulthood, I tried to drink with him. I like having a glass of wine at the end of the day while talking with good friends over a meal, but more than two glasses of wine and I know I am unsafe to manage a car or, for that matter, make good decisions. When smoking pot, I felt even more intensely out of control, and I did not want to be that way around him and his buddies.
* * *
But after he died, I felt I might have been too critical, too uptight. He had resented it when I tried to encourage him to not indulge by refusing to drink or smoke with him. As a result, I had missed out on being with him on many occasions, missed having fun with him, and, at times, I had lost his trust because he saw me as judgmental. It’s probably not possible—or at least not likely—for a child of any age to influence a parent to change his or her behavior in ways that could make him or her healthier. As time went on, I knew that Dad’s continued drinking and drugging would compromise his fragile immune system, and it was hard to watch him hurt himself. I talked to therapists and went to Al-Anon meetings where I was encouraged not to be an enabler and to voice my concerns about his drinking. I did that, but the only result was that it just pissed him off. I went to a few AA meetings, and the takeaway from them was that I could have little or no influence on whether he drank to excess or not; my father was the only person who had any control over his drinking habits.
When he was gone, I wondered if we might have been closer throughout his life if I had just kept my mouth shut. I wanted to experience a connection with him, so I sought out some of his pot-smoking friends whom he thought of as family. Dad had so many friends. I admired his ability to just hang out. I always need to be doing something, cleaning house or making a painting or cooking, as if my world would fall apart if I weren’t working. But Dad lived like he had all the time in the world to play. His Santa Monica friends met once a week in an old Victorian-style beach shack one block from the sand where they played poker and smoked pot and ate huge, delicious home-cooked meals and told stories and laughed a lot. Even as my mom became more out of it as her Alzheimer’s disease progressed, Dad still brought her along, and everyone made her feel comfortable and welcome.
I went with Dad a few times and met his friends, who were quite a diverse group: there was a lawyer, a retired flight attendant, a jeweler, some lovely ladies, and a warm, jolly, white-bearded guy who must have been quite a looker on his motorcycle a decade or two earlier. On my forays into their world, I would savor the aromas of the feast to come—roast chicken with all the fixings or herb-encrusted salmon—but I never stayed long. The haze of dope made me uncomfortable even though I liked his friends and was always grateful he had kind people who supported him and fed him, especially after Mom was too far gone to be good company. He needed lots of companionship. He did not like to be alone.
One afternoon, a few months after Dad died, when my kids were away, I called an older married couple, some folks who were part of the group Dad played poker and smoked pot with every week. They had reached out to me at Dad’s birthday party the year before. I had had a ball dancing with the husband, and they had both marveled at what a wild dancer I was and were surprised that I could be so much fun; I guessed that Dad had told them I was a stick in the mud. I was surprised when they welcomed me over the very same evening. The house was filled with the luscious scent of a Thanksgiving meal, though they hadn’t been expecting me and there was no special occasion. Of course, they knew I didn’t smoke; Dad had told them how not into it I was. I told them that I had been regretting not being more a part of Dad’s life. I had been so busy keeping my kids on track with school and sports, and I had paid more attention to my mom in her decline than to Dad, who always seemed so happy. Now he was gone, and I missed him so much; I could see they did too. Could I try some pot? Could we get high together as a toast to the old man? If he knew somehow, he would get a chuckle out of it.
They were sweet and amused by my awkward handling of the joint they passed, and I took a sputtering toke while sitting on a step stool in their kitchen, where the walls were covered in memorabilia that looked like it had not been changed since the early 1960s. There were plates from world’s fairs hung on the wall, pictures of motorcycles, and old photos of Muscle Beach, just down the street from where we were sitting, as it had looked in the old days. When they saw how quickly I got stoned, they kindly helped me to the couch, where they fed me. As I ate the delicious food, they talked to me in soft, reassuring tones about what a cool guy my dad was and how much fun they had playing poker and playing practical jokes on their friends together. We watched a Monty Python movie, and as I am an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of person, the wife could see I was getting tired, and so she suggested we walk on the beach together to make sure I was okay to drive. She was so kind to me. I think she wanted to give me some time alone with her in case I needed to talk about losing Dad. I would have liked to have talked about him, but I was still in the topsy-turvy stage of confusion that had set in when he died. I could not form any coherent words or thoughts about my feelings. I was simply relieved to be in the moment; being high, I felt very deeply the warmth of their kindness. All I could express was how glad I was that they had been so good to him and to my mom. Though I did not have much to say, the fresh air and the walk made me more alert.
I went home comforted.
* * *
After that evening, I had much more appreciation for the unusually supportive community with which Dad had surrounded himself. When you live with a famous person, you cannot help but be a bit cynical about the people he or she attracts. Most of these folks were, I believe, much like the couple who’d been so welcoming to me. These folks were not just hangers-on. They were not looking to bask in Dad’s reflected glory but simply enjoying the light of his personality. Everyone was aware of his fame, but they were also part of the strange tribe that was like an extended family to him. I was grateful that they had been so kind to me in the depth of my sadness.
Over the years, I had come to demonize pot, feeling that the drug had come between my father and me. Smoking it made him forgetful and distant. Though I did not want to continue to indulge in the drug-induced intimacy, it was also true that smoking with Dad’s friends allowed me to experience the communal quality that was one of the things that drew Dad to marijuana. Being with them, I had relaxed in their comfortable home. I had melted into their couch; my body had felt all soft, as if I had
no bones. I giggled and did not feel my usual, burning need to do something. I was in the moment. My mind told me be here now like Baba Ram Dass wrote in the books Dad and I read together. Most of all, I had fun, and fun was what Dad was all about.
He made no apologies for his joyride through life. I know how hard he studied his script; he never went on set without knowing his lines, and he always rehearsed diligently. He was very disciplined, but somehow he always had time to party.
Growing up with my parents, I’d had a hard time keeping up with my schoolwork while all the drinking and dinner parties were going on all week. Participating in family dinners was too much fun. I was encouraged to stay and dance instead of going up to my room to focus on my studies. I was often tired at school, but Dad always seemed to have an amazing amount of energy. I know he did cocaine sometimes (his friends convinced me to rub some of it on my teeth when my braces hurt), but the type of energy Dad had was intrinsic to him. He had a natural dose of some special life force.
The Eternal Party Page 4