The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  But when I actually got to know Kate, her famous father and stepmother and their notorious love affair were not what interested me. Kate was the best thing that happened on the beach that summer. I was drawn to how solid she was, how she seemed to be a girl who’d had the kind of meticulous and careful upbringing my parents, with their freewheeling lifestyle, had not given me. Her mother, Sybil Burton, was British and had been an actress, though she had given up acting soon after she married to focus on her husband and their children. After their very public and messy divorce, she continued to be a devoted mother while at the same time becoming the queen of New York nightlife. At the height of the disco era, she created one of the hippest discotheques in the city, called Arthur, where all the stars went to drink and dance.

  Though her mother was not with her in Malibu, I took note of how often Kate said things like, “I have to rinse my hair after being in the ocean; my mom says it is not good to have salt water in your hair all day,” or “I can’t play right now; Mom says I have to read several books before I go home,” or “I shouldn’t eat chocolate because it’s bad for my complexion.”

  I did not have anyone giving me instructions like this. I was something of a wild child. I paid attention to everything about her: Kate did not wear flashy clothes, but there was something very cool about the way she put things together. The quality of her outfits and the way she looked fascinated me. As we became better friends, she told me she had a small role in one of her dad’s movies, Anne of the Thousand Days. It was the story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and Kate had a part as a servant girl. She was long gone from Malibu by the time I saw her in that film. I got my parents to take me to the theater to see it a couple of times, and I’ve never forgotten how classy she was.

  Over the years, I have watched her consistent success as an actress while at the same time raising her children. I was so happy to see that she got rave reviews in important plays like Hedda Gabler and The Cherry Orchard. She also did a lot of noteworthy work on TV in Grey’s Anatomy and later as the vice president in Scandal. I am sure that she must still be the wonderful person I knew that summer.

  Because Kate had gotten to work with her dad, I started asking my dad if I could work with him. He knew how important it was to me, and he made sure I appeared in a movie with him the very next year. It was a movie that Peter Fonda directed and starred in, and it was called The Hired Hand. The film was being shot in New Mexico; Dad played a bearded sheriff, and one day, I came on the set to watch him work. As soon as I arrived, the costume lady smiled at me, took my hand, and led me over to a big truckful of Western costumes. Half an hour later, I had been transformed into a Western girl from the late 1800s. I did not have a speaking part; I was just sitting on a barrel as my dad’s character walked by, but it was still a thrill to be in the movie. The film was called a hippie Western by reviewers, but it was still a special experience, and to this day, I cherish the photos of the two of us together, looking happy and full of love for each other in our Western costumes.

  * * *

  After I Dream of Jeannie wasn’t renewed, Dad’s income became more unpredictable again. That is why we started to rent our beach home out. We didn’t need to move out permanently because renting it out for just a few months each summer, when the Colony became filled with what we called “summer people,” paid enough to cover our basic expenses for the whole year while we took off to live in a tent somewhere. Summer also happened to be the time of year when TV production was on hiatus, so Dad would not be working on a pilot or TV series. Sometimes I wished we could enjoy the beach when school was out, and the annual ritual of packing up all my private things and having someone else sleep in my room altered the way I felt about home. It gave me the belief, early on, that home was where my family was rather than it being whatever structure we lived in. There were some years when we did not leave the LA area while the house was rented, and I would find a way to get to the beach so I could walk by the house and look up at it longingly. Mom was always making improvements to the beach cottage, and my room eventually had a big window and French doors that opened onto an oceanfront balcony through which the sounds of the waves lulled me to sleep every night. It was a beautiful room, and I appreciated it all the more because I had to leave for a few months every year. As summer approached, I became anxious because I never knew where we would live till we were in the car and on our way. In preparation for the renters, Mom would remodel the house, doing a lot of the hard physical work herself with her own hands. She loved building homes even more than she liked making clothes.

  Mom poured the prodigious energy that she had previously focused on being a dress designer into rebuilding our Malibu house. Often, money was tight for making the home improvements she envisioned, so she would tear down walls with her own hands and build them up again as she saw fit. Dad bought her power tools as birthday and Christmas presents. I liked working with her to rebuild and redecorate. While Preston and Dad were out hunting, Mom and I bonded over building things. We would go to the lumberyard together, where everyone knew her, and she would ask lots of questions about how to put a specific thing together. She knew how to select the straightest boards and just the right balance of ingredients to make grout for tile so it would withstand bad weather.

  She had transformed every place we had ever lived in, from pulling out the drawer in hotel rooms to turn it into a crib for me, to knocking down walls in our New York apartment, to building my beloved room in Malibu.

  Mom liked the feeling of exhaustion she felt at the end of a hard physical workday. Dad proudly spoke of how she had remodeled our apartment back in New York City by carrying each bucket of plaster down the five flights of stairs to discreetly deposit the debris into public waste bins so no one would know she was tearing down walls.

  Our house in Malibu became her passion, and using the excuse that it needed to be spruced up for the renter, she made it more beautiful year by year. Slowly, she changed everything about it, and in 1982 she tore the whole place down and built a new stunning home of her own design on the site.

  But there was one thing she didn’t tear down, and that was her masterpiece, the Jacuzzi. The Jacuzzi was the heart of our home; it was literally and figuratively in the center of it, and the new house was built around it. We had had it since we’d moved to Malibu in the I Dream of Jeannie days.

  Mom had heard about the Jacuzzi brothers, engineers who had found a way to use the healing power of hot water to care for their family members with arthritis. They had invented a hydrotherapy pump that mixed air and water to massage your body while you were in a hot tub. Mom was intrigued, but she wanted to incorporate the spa into our home as if it were bubbling out of a grotto. Somehow she got in touch with the Jacuzzi brothers and told them about our family’s love of natural hot springs. She said she did not want to buy a plastic box fitted with Jacuzzi pumps; she wanted to build an environment that had the flowing, gently curved lines of waterworn rocks found in nature, and she wanted to place the pumps to their best advantage. They worked with her and made the pumps available for her custom use. She decided that the heads would be placed at different heights and that the tub would be so deep in places that you could stand up and still be submerged in water as more water spurted from the Jacuzzi heads.

  She then found a company that had a device that shot concrete out of a hose so you could attach it to a metal armature and create free-flowing shapes. Ultimately, what she created was a magical, organically shaped, black-bottomed pool that had the sensual curves of a Henry Moore sculpture. As far as I know, no one else ever made anything like it. We all went into the Jacuzzi before going off for the day and then again before bed each night. We all loved it, and bathing together became central to our lives.

  Another regular part of life with the industrious women in my family was that we were always making things that Dad would then use to stage his happenings. One month, we sewed a hundred flags, no two of which were alike, for Dad to pass out to everyone
willing to carry one when he held his flag parades on the beach every Sunday at sunset. What that meant was that each Sunday, as the afternoon light began to fade, our house would empty out, and we would all walk down the beach with armloads of tall flagpoles topped with multicolored flags. These flags were very colorful, and some had antiwar slogans or civil rights slogans written on them. I remember one proclaiming the Age of Aquarius, but mostly they were just props to get people to have fun. Dad would play the flute and encourage people to come out of their houses and join us. There was no set meaning or purpose for these parades, though they did have a pattern. Once he had assembled a good number of people, maybe twenty or more, we would all walk down the beach with our flags flowing overhead, with Dad at the helm, making music and turning himself into a beach-bound Pied Piper. At the end of the Colony’s private beach, he would get everyone to temporarily plant their flags and join hands, and then he would instruct them all in “gong bong.” I have no idea where he got the idea, but it became a tradition; we would hold hands and take ten very deep, loud breaths together as Dad counted them down; then, on the tenth breath, which he tried to coordinate with the sun tipping over the horizon, every one of us—now completely hyperventilating—was to yell out, “Gong bong!” Then we stumbled around giggling until we could find our balance again and walk home happy, collecting the flags as we went.

  Another tradition Dad had was silent Sundays. For this, he created an alter ego he called Hagmananda Listens. As I sat down to write about this, I wanted to find a description of it in Dad’s own words. First, I picked up his autobiography, but neither Hagmananda nor silent Sundays were listed in the index, so I went to the Internet. Hurray for the Internet! I did a search for “Hagmananda Listens” and found an interview in which Dad described how he’d had a throat infection and the doctor recommended he stop talking for a while. He told the interviewer that “not talking was gloriously therapeutic,” and he also told her that I was not thrilled with him after his first silent day. It seems I had written him a note that read, “As you know, I love you very much, but yesterday you were a big s——.”

  What he did not tell the interviewer was how demanding he had been that day. When he was filming a TV series, he worked long hours during the week, and it was the household policy that when he was home on the weekends, we were to do everything we could to make him happy and help him rest for the week to come. We made him any meal he wanted or just simply fetched things for him so he did not have to get up; he called us “gofers,” which meant, “You go for this and go for that.” Being silent did not mean that Dad was any less demanding; instead of saying go fetch something or sweetly asking us to make him one of his favorite tuna melt sandwiches, he did elaborate pantomimes so that we had to stop what we were doing and spend a half an hour playing charades with him so that one of us could finally decipher just exactly what he wanted. He found these interactions so entertaining that he came up with more things he needed and more and more elaborate menus for us to serve him; my playful father commanded our total attention and he did all he could to make the game last longer. On one such occasion, he wanted to have caviar on little triangular pieces of thin white toast topped with sour cream and decoratively sprinkled with chopped egg and red onion, served on his grandmother’s gold-rimmed china from storage. If I did not get something right, he made a big fuss and gestured that I had to start from the beginning again. When I became frustrated, he laughed at me. As usual, there was no sense in talking to him if you were upset about something; he would just tune you out by whistling, which was one of the nonverbal ways he communicated even on his silent days.

  After we moved to Malibu, we had the help of our live-in maid, Rosa, to clean up after us, the women of the household—Mom and I—continued to do all the cooking aided by my aunts who had moved close by and spent every weekend with us. Our home was always filled with delicious smells and bustling with activity as we made things—cooking, sewing, painting, and hammering. Mom would say the Swedish answer to depression or boredom was to keep busy, and Dad knew that a productive wife was a happy wife. He would order up some wild thing that caught his fancy—a satin cape, or a pirate outfit, or a box to hold his flutes—and Mom would whip out her sewing machine or her toolbox and make it before the day was over. If it was something she did not know how to do, the aunts and I would figure it out. In addition, I painted murals for him, and one of my aunts made a special stand to keep extra-large books at chest height for comfortable browsing and opened to a certain page.

  All the ladies would decorate the table for special dinners with themes like the Indian raj dinner. As we cooked, Dad would tell the story of how the British raj would have elaborate dinners with handsomely dressed serving boys standing at the back of everyone’s chair ready to present another exotic condiment. We did our best to re-create the luxury of the image he conjured for us. When the curry was presented on the table, it was covered in Indian cloth with matching napkins, incense, Indian candleholders, and exotic flowers. There were also twelve bowls of condiments: chutneys and chopped egg, peanuts, banana, raisins, onion, chilies, parsley, cucumber, grated orange rind, coconut, and candied ginger.

  We had people over for dinner several nights a week. Dad held court in a little open bar between the Jacuzzi and the dining hall that was mainly stocked with lots of inexpensive champagne, wine, and beer. The huge dining hall had a table that sat twelve comfortably. After dessert, we would dance in front of a nine-by-twelve-foot stained glass window depicting wild, giant, psychedelic flowers, mushrooms, and butterflies that my aunt Lillimor had made according to my dad’s specification. It was lit from behind at night. To enhance the dance palace atmosphere, and in keeping with the disco craze of the 1970s, Dad had someone put up a rotating mirrored ballroom ball with a spotlight that sent white sparkles whirling around the room.

  Last I heard, Sting, who bought the house from us, has kept this room just as it was when we lived in the house. I hope people are still dancing there after dinner.

  * * *

  My personal favorite dance partners were Joel Grey and his daughter, Jennifer. They lived just two doors away. We loved to dance to Harry Nilsson’s song “Coconut”: “Put the lime in the coconut, then you’ll feel better…” I haven’t seen Jenny in years, but I had breakfast with Joel not long ago, and we talked about art and family and love. Sitting with him, I felt comfortable in the way that one only feels with someone after having shared a piece of one’s true self. The lime in the coconut is like the password that brings us back to those fun evenings spent singing and dancing for no special occasion and only for the grateful celebration of the joy of life.

  * * *

  My parents were great hosts. The combination of my father as magician/master of ceremonies and my industrious mother, who did everything she could to create the exotic environment he dreamed up, made our home a truly transformative place. People would arrive with all their emotional baggage, and bit by bit, they would put it down as they went for walks on the beach or played Frisbee and took a few tokes on a joint and drank some champagne. Time melted away.

  There was lots of pot and wine, and there was lots of food too. We were always preparing delicious things, and I frequently ran barefoot to the nearby grocery store to buy more food. People loved coming to our house. You could see them unwinding after spending an hour or two in our home. Everyone would have a long soak in the Jacuzzi, and after a relatively short time, those who had entered our home had changed completely from the harried, encumbered people they had been to happier versions of themselves. Now they were calm and free of inhibitions. Almost everyone who ever walked through our door was someone I saw wet and naked before they left our house.

  When our guests came out of the Jacuzzi, their nude bodies were kept comfortable and warm by the beautiful terry cloth robes my mother and aunts made. Mom had used her clothing designer skills to make robes in many different sizes and colors with decorative gold-embroidered trim. Dad called them monks�
� robes, but the trim made them look more regal than religious. Mom hunted for these special trims in all the fabric stores near the clothing factories in downtown LA, and I went with her just as I had when I was a child.

  These robes had hoods like monk’s robes, and they were wide and flowing so everyone could maintain their newly felt sense of freedom; at the same time, these robes were a uniform that allowed any group of disparate people to merge into one.

  Even now, when I run into my friends from high school, they tell me—forty years later—that the best and wildest parties they ever went to were at my house with my parents.

  * * *

  There is a photograph that was published in Vogue of me entering naked into the Jacuzzi with my parents and my brother, Preston, in the tub, all of them looking up at me; Dad, who always knew where the camera was, looked somewhat hazily at the photographer, but it really wouldn’t have been any different if the photographer were not there at all. This picture was a slice of our everyday life. The caption next to the picture was a quote from my dad: “The family that bathes together stays together.” That idea is radical even today. At that time, it had never occurred to me that there was anything the least bit unusual about our family being naked together. The nakedness was part of the era, but it was also part of how our family interacted; it was natural.

  Dad was not concerned with moral issues like whether nudity was appropriate. He worried about big issues like nuclear holocaust and natural disasters. He always had backpacks filled with shoes and eyeglasses, first aid kits, and water filters. This was true from my early childhood and continued until the day he died. In Malibu, we had a big space under the stairs in our house where he stashed away twenty-gallon tubs of dried food, beans, rice, pasta, as well as space blankets, cash, and a high-frequency radio. He loved living by the beach but talked frequently about his fear of tsunamis. BB the nurse put together the emergency kits that were kept by the front door because he was always talking about the need to be prepared for earthquakes and for the tsunami that he was certain would come from Japan one day.