His family was angry with me, which I didn’t like but completely understood. I was angry with myself.
At the same time, I knew I needed to live my own life. I didn’t want to be tied to anyone else. I was young and wanted to have fun.
I had tried the conventional route of dating and marriage and it hadn’t worked. When I looked around me, in the era of the late 1960s, I saw that male-female relationships were all rapidly changing. The traditional roles, the pathways to companionship, to emotional fulfillment were all being thrown out the window. Words like friend, boyfriend, and husband did not have the same sharp boundaries around them that they once had, and we would need to come up with a whole new vocabulary to describe who we were to each other. What our responsibilities and commitments looked like.
Men and women my age were living together and foregoing the step of marriage. One-night stands were more and more commonplace both in Hollywood and beyond. People were living on communes and raising children together.
I left my marriage with Tim with a very heavy heart filled with the sense that I was taking my first steps into the unknown, unsure if I was feeling anxiety or anticipation. Or both.
After moving out of the Laurel Canyon house, my first job was a guest spot on Gunsmoke in an episode called “Lyle’s Kid” with Robert Pine (father of actor Chris Pine).
I played Iris Wesley, a saloon girl who’d fallen on hard times.
On the set, I remember facing a particularly challenging set-up. It was a long, continuous shot with Robert in which we were walking and talking across the “Main Street of Dodge” set for about two minutes, which in television is so long it’s practically avant-garde.
I remember going through the blocking and trying to keep it all straight. Robert was a great scene partner with a lot of subtlety and focus to his approach.
When the director said “Action,” Robert and I talked for a while at a hitching post on one side of the street and then walked slowly across the set doing dialogue and reactions, keeping the camera in sight of the corner of my eye, and finally hitting our marks on the far side. Meanwhile all around us extras were milling about, horses pulled wagons and all kinds of activity. And the whole thing worked in one take.
When the director said “Cut,” a new, beautiful, potent realization poured through me. For the first time in my professional life I thought, “I can do this.”
Not: “Holy shit, what am I doing?”
Not: “Good God, if they only knew I have no idea that I’m totally lost.”
All those questioning, belittling voices had, for that one moment at least, gone silent.
I could handle this. Performing complicated scenes was something I did for a living — something I had been doing successfully for 10 years.
It was the first time I remember feeling confident, grasping that I actually had what it took.
Not that this feeling of adequacy cascaded into my personal life. Nor was it always present when I was on set. No. This was not the moment I was transformed from caterpillar to butterfly; but it’s fair to say that it felt like I’d turned a corner.
It wasn’t until years later that I put the pieces together that this moment only came after leaving a marriage in which I’d been plagued by a sense of inadequacy and second-rate importance.
Coincidence? Hard to say.
Chapter 5
The Liquid Butterfly
A cultural change is easy to see in hindsight but not terribly obvious when you’re swimming around in the middle of it. Like a lot of people my age I had been undergoing a transformation — in my case from the sunny pixie blonde of the early 1960s to a long-haired, braless hippie chick. The last time I’d worn a suit with a knee-length skirt was in 1965 on my honeymoon. After that Tim and I had both became what you might call city hippies, letting our hair grow and being a lot more informal in how we dressed.
I moved out of Gail’s parents’ house into a bungalow her sister had just vacated, a one-bedroom guesthouse on Lexington Avenue in Hollywood. An artist named Delana Bettoli would room with me on and off. She was funny, having various obsessions, the biggest was with Jim Morrison; she produced countless drawings of him as the alluring Lizard King, with full pouty lips and perfect cheekbones, which we had fun putting up throughout the house.
I didn’t necessarily share the obsession but I saw it all around me and understood it. Music was changing. New voices were speaking directly to those of my generation — those of us born during or just after World War II. The music that our parents had listened to spoke of overly sweetened, idealized takes on love and life. Think of popular songs like “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” or “Paper Moon.” The music icons of the 50s and early 60s like Louis Prima and Frank Sinatra were sounding dated; the swing-inspired sound of that era was being superseded by music that was raw and defiant and spoke to the uncertainty of a world in flux. Many of the new voices in music, as it turns out, lived just up the street from me. The neighborhood included Frank Zappa, Mama Cass from the Mamas and the Papas, David Crosby, Steven Stills, and Graham Nash.
Joni Mitchell, who’d become a friend, didn’t drive so I often gave her a lift to recording sessions or gigs at the Troubadour and other clubs in Hollywood. It was a pretty incredible time in her life. When she was younger Joni had thought she was going to be a painter but started singing in Canada where she was from. She found some success as a folksinger and ended up in Los Angeles performing around town and making records. When I first met her she was working on her Blue album, which Rolling Stone would rate as one of the best albums of all time. The song “River” on Blue offers lines like:
“I made my baby cry…he tried hard to help me, put me at ease, and he loved me so naughty made me weak in the knees…I wish I had a river I could skate away on…so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad, now I gone and lost the best baby I ever had…Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on…”
It’s like she’d pulled the mish-mash of longing and self-loathing right out of my heart and set them to music. Me and many other 20-year-olds at the time.
Her music and lyrics emerged out of Joni’s life — her ups and downs, relationship and break up with Graham Nash and other guys — and people gravitated toward that kind of authenticity. She, her voice, and her music had a mix of tenderness and grit, girlish dreaminess and emotional toughness, which certainly appealed to me as it did to many others my age.
In her house she had a bulletin board on which she’d pin words and phrases as they came to her. Once I remember seeing “The bed’s too big and the frying pan’s too wide.” And I thought what a beautiful way to talk about loneliness. These words later showed up in her song “My Old Man.”
To be able to write and perform something so personal and so universal was nothing short of brilliance. It was more than just pop music. It seemed revolutionary and important. It seemed like the music of people my age had the power to change the world.
Because of this, it was an era when a group of friends would put on a record — the needle hitting the vinyl with a lovely hiss — dim the lights, sprawl on the furniture and the floor, pass a joint and listen to the whole album. Maybe more than once. I’m so glad that was part of my life. I see people going through their lives now plugged into ear buds and it makes me wish they could have that experience of communal listening.
From hanging out with Joni Mitchell, I met her manager Elliot Roberts, who I fell pretty madly in love with. We saw each other on and off unofficially for a long time. While Elliot was a guy of average looks he had eyes that locked onto you, absorbed you, and shut out everything that was going on. He could create an orbit of two no matter where you were, no matter what else was going on, no matter who else was in the room. I loved that about him. Also, Elliot was the kind of guy who seemed to move through the world in the middle of his own personal hurricane. Wherever he was, things of noisy significance were happening. When I went out with him, I never sat in the audience. I was always backstage or in the
wings. I remember once at the stage door of the Troubadour, someone from the club asked who I was and Elliot blustered, “She’s my old lady,” and I was shown right through along with all the other cool kids. The Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard was tiny, maybe 150 seats, but it was the epicenter of everything happening in music at the moment. On a given night you might see performances by Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young, Elton John, Neil Diamond, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Carole King, Kris Kristofferson, or Judy Collins.
Besides managing Joni, Elliot also managed Neil Young, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash and between him and his business partner David Geffen, he turned those guys into long-haired millionaires in their mid-20s. Which was a little odd. The whole hippie vibe was about not being into material things, living on communes, bombing around in VW buses, living off the land, setting up food co-ops, keeping things simple.
But here these guys were, icons of the hippie age, sitting on big old-fashioned piles of money. And ultimately they did what anyone else would do — they bought a lot of stuff. Neil Young split off from Crosby, Stills and Nash, started his solo career and bought a big ranch just south of San Francisco, where he built a barn and filled it with his beloved Lionel trains. Graham Nash bought a big place up there too. David Crosby bought boats. A lot of them bought expensive cars, homes, and various pricey toys though, of course, they didn’t advertise any of this.
The thing that kept a lot of these guys on an even, semi-normal footing was their wives. They didn’t marry actresses or super models. They married really smart, grounded women, who sewed their own clothes, made sound decisions about money, and were really great moms. In the case of Neil Young’s wife Susan, I think she even sparked a fashion trend. She used to patch all of Neil’s jeans and when he appeared in a heavily patched pair on the cover of his album After the Gold Rush, it sparked the big-time ‘70s trend of patched jeans. Patched jackets. Patches on everything.
Friendships like this take lots of forms. I often found myself backstage at the Troubadour with Elliot learning my lines for a show like Mannix or Gunsmoke, hanging out with Neil Young and his band while Joni or some other great act was on stage.
At one point Stephen Stills borrowed my Country Squire Station Wagon and no one knew where he was for two days.
In other cases, we went through some pretty dark moments together. One night in August 1969 I was with Joni and Graham Nash at Dallas Taylor’s house in Benedict Canyon. Dallas was a drummer for Crosby, Stills and Nash. As I was about to head home for the night, David Crosby burst through the door with a gun shouting that killers were loose murdering people in Benedict Canyon and no one could leave. He wanted us to hole up there and protect ourselves.
The reason David was freaking out was because a pregnant Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring and others had been brutally murdered two nights before in Benedict Canyon on Cielo Drive — a killing eventually tied to Charles Manson and his followers. The barbarity of the killings had sent shockwaves through Hollywood. Now two days later the bodies of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca had been discovered also stabbed to death in their home with similar messages scrawled in blood on the walls. Later I would realize that those murders had taken place in Silver Lake, not Benedict Canyon, but still it was horrific and jarring.
The thing I had to deal with is that I did in fact have to leave. I had a 6 a.m. call at Warner Brothers to film an episode of crime show The F.B.I. Against David’s strong wishes I drove myself home feeling panicky and more alone than usual in my bungalow.
Just as the Troubadour and new friends’ houses became a big part of my life, Elliot’s office also became a favorite hangout. He was in the second story of The Clear Thoughts Building (so named by its 90-year-old owner who lived behind the building) at 947 La Cienega Blvd, about a block south of Santa Monica Blvd.
Electra Records was located across the street, where Elliot’s clients had contracts. It made his office a hub for some of the most exciting names in music at the time.
Next door to Elliot’s office, I struck up a friendship with a model-beautiful blonde name Dani Senator, who ran an incense- and ganga-scented clothing shop called The Liquid Butterfly. She made gorgeous tie-dye dresses and shirts and she also restored antique clothing, which was all the rage. Miles Davis was a fan of her clothes and would drop by the shop for a shirt or two — or just to hang out. The more I talked to Dani, the more I realized we’d have a great time going into business together.
I’d loved to sew since I was a kid. My sister, Barbara Jean, had taught me the basics and by the age of nine I was making my own roller skating costumes. Later in my 20s I made some of my own dresses and I sewed Tim probably a dozen collar-less tunics that he loved, a style popularized by the Beatles.
I showed Dani a couple of my patchwork peasant dresses and cowboy shirts and proposed the idea that we partner up, each sell our own clothes, split the $100 monthly rent and all the more mundane tasks of running a business. We shook on it and started working together to make a success of our store.
Everything post-marriage seemed to explode beautifully around me. I was surrounded by exotic and boundary-pushing artists, musicians, drugged-out visionaries, models, filmmakers, and hangers on. People camped out at my house; I crashed at theirs. It was like Hollywood was one big college dorm. I was getting a lot of work in TV and commercials, studying acting at The L.A. Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, sitting in on history-making recording sessions, and learning to use cocaine as an aid to help me drink more.
In the midst of finding my feet, I was cast as a young woman who’d just gotten engaged in an episode of Medical Center called “The Crooked Circle.” Medical Center was a hospital show starring Chad Everett — I’m not sure anyone remembers the show or Chad now, but it was a big deal at the time.
What really sent me into a spin, though, was when I got on set and learned that my character’s husband-to-be was being played by Tim Considine. A true WTF moment if there ever was one.
I’m guessing the producers thought it’d be a great promotional idea for the show to cast the two of us. No one knew that we were in the early stages of divorce. To keep the atmosphere on the set as relaxed and convivial as possible Tim and I quietly agreed not to tell anyone. Which meant we were not only acting in front of the camera but behind it as well. It was painfully awkward for both of us and a relief that it only lasted a few days.
Around that same time I landed a role back at Desilu on the crime drama Mannix and loved getting to know its handsome star Mike Connors, whom I liked a great deal. His real name was Krekor Ohanian, from an Armenian family, born in the Central Valley, so like me had arrived in Hollywood as a complete newbie and had to make his way. Mike was a sweetie, we had a dressing room fling, and he wanted to see me again. I said of course — he could find me anytime at The Liquid Butterfly.
Within a day or two I was having breakfast on my own at a café on Santa Monica Blvd and reading the newspaper. A good-looking blond guy at the next table leaned over to say something like how impressed he was to see a pretty girl reading the business section. Well, I’d actually been reading the comics and told him so, which he thought was pretty funny. He turned out to be Jon Voight, the star of Midnight Cowboy, a film that also starred Pasadena Playhouse alum Dustin Hoffman.
Jon was having a moment in the sun with the release of Midnight Cowboy, a dark, risk-taking, beautiful film, which the previous April had earned the distinction of being the first and only X-rated movie to win the Best Picture Oscar (the X-rating had stupidly been given due to its references to homosexuality, and was changed to R in 1971). It also won best director and best screenplay. Jon was nominated for best actor, but wound up losing to John Wayne for True Grit.
And here he was talking to me.
Jon was sweet, flirty, chatty, and I was over the moon. I was only too happy to tell him — when he asked — that he could find me at The Liquid Butterfly if interested.
Assuming that was the last I’d see of him, I said good-bye a
nd went on with my day.
Later on though both Mike Connors and Jon Voight walked through the door of The Liquid Butterfly one right after the other.
Both looking to hook up.
Gulp.
I plastered on a smile, having no idea how to make this work.
Mike glanced at Jon and then at my frozen smile and sized up the situation. He grinned at me conspiratorially and ducked out. I ended up going out with Jon and spent the night at his place. We saw each other on and off for about three months but by January or February of 1971 our friendship came to a sudden halt when a gossip columnist wrote about one of our dates — a date that had taken place out in public, anyone could have tipped the writer off. As soon as the column appeared, I never heard from Jon again. Though I can only speculate, I’m guessing he thought that I, or my PR rep, had contacted the columnist as a way of promoting my career by attempting to tie my wagon to his. It had certainly been done before (and still happens today) though not by me. I never slept with anyone to get a part; I didn’t date anyone to get my name in the papers. I didn’t play that game. I hadn’t used Jon and was sorry to see things end in the way they did. But I understood. In Hollywood, “staying hot” is a big part of long-term success. Most people who are famous are not famous by accident. It’s a lot of work and requires a team of PR people, assistants, and so on, who assume a take-no-prisoners position when it comes to image.
Before the year was out I heard Jon had gotten married and a few years after that I happened to walk by a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley and saw him sitting at a table near the window making sweet, funny faces to a baby in his arms. I tapped on the glass and smiled and waved. He gave me a great smile in response and waved Angelina Jolie’s tiny hand back at me.
Back at The Clear Thoughts Building on the first floor there was another clothing store called Themis, owned by Pamela Courson, who was Jim Morrison’s girlfriend. Probably “official girlfriend” is the term I should use as he was usually seeing several women at once. I rarely saw Pamela except for the time she drove her car through the front window of her store.
Little House in the Hollywood Hills Page 8