Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Nearly two decades later, she met Dennis and, with the spark she ignited in his bloodshot eyes, gained entrée into the world of the man she considered to be her father. Dennis always had a weakness for young women—and had in the late 1970s been busted for keeping company with a wayward teenager in a Phoenix hotel room—so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that he would start flirting with his daughter’s friend. Or that he would see his way clear to seducing her and then impregnating her. But was he truly in love with Shawn when he asked her to marry him? Or did he just relish the prospect of seeing the look on Mike’s face when his cousin realized that Dennis was not only his son-in-law but also the father of his first grandchild? In all the drugs, booze, insanity, and long-festering hatreds that had subsumed the band, no one had the energy or focus to confront Dennis about how disturbing the rocky romance with the much younger woman truly was. “There were never any repercussions for things,” Trish Campo says. “I’d get into a car with Dennis, and he’d be going 120 miles an hour down the Pacific Coast Highway, literally bouncing off the walls, and the cops would just shrug and say, ‘It’s Dennis Wilson, leave him alone!’ And it was the same thing with Shawn. He could do anything he wanted, and nothing bad would happen to him.”

  Mike, for his part, had by 1981 been married and divorced six times. That seems a fairly phenomenal track record for a man just approaching his fortieth birthday, but he was soon married again, this time to a woman named Cathy Martinez. The elaborate ceremony was held outdoors on a beautiful afternoon at his sprawling home in Santa Barbara, with Mike dressed in a white top hat and morning coat and his bride in a white silk wedding gown that trailed down nearly to the middle of her thighs. The couple gazed deeply into one another’s eyes while they recited their vows, following the prompts laid down by their chosen officiant, legendary rock ’n’ roll disc jockey Wolfman Jack. Mike’s seventh marriage lasted less than a year, but it wasn’t long before he was married again.

  On another night in early 1982, Brian’s former helpers/handlers Stan Love and Rocky Pamplin found themselves at a Super Bowl party, tossing down a few drinks and kicking around the dismal state their former employer had fallen into. Brian had always had his problems, sure. But the more they talked about how things had turned out for him, the more it all seemed to come back to Dennis. After all, he was the guy who was giving Brian his drugs these days. And the more Stan and Rocky drank, the more unacceptable that seemed. Eventually it struck them both that the time had come to dispense some vigilante justice. “We’d had friction for years and it finally exploded,” Stan says of his cousin. “Dennis was so arrogant and wild; he thought he could fuck around with a professional basketball player, you know? And I wanted to point out to him what happens when you do that.” What happened was this: Stan and his partner burst into Dennis’s house, scaring off the small coterie of friends who were hanging around by pretending to be narcotics officers. When the bystanders scattered, the ex-bodyguards turned their wrath on Dennis, throwing him to the floor and using their fists, feet, and the handset of a nearby telephone to conduct a beating that didn’t end until Dennis’s face was battered and bleeding, his ribs broken, and his voice a nearly incomprehensible cry for mercy.

  But after years of living at full-throttle, steamrolling every physical, professional, legal, and moral boundary he could see, pausing only to point and laugh before roaring off again, Dennis had already burned through the world’s mercy. Certainly, the other Beach Boys and their various managers/helpers could see where he was headed. They even tried to help, in their emotionally distant way, signing him up for detox and even hiring a private jet to take him away in style. But when he wouldn’t go or when he went for two days before making a break back to the streets of Venice and all his usual hook-ups and turn-ons, they just sighed and shook their heads. “I don’t think he ever thought seriously about cleaning up. He was gonna do what he was gonna do,” says Trish Campo, who finally resigned her position as Dennis’s personal manager in the spring of 1983, even though she could never stop being his friend. “He basically wanted to challenge life at every moment: How fast could you go, how crazy could you be, how far could he get away with something? The drugs and alcohol did something for him.”

  The drugs and alcohol were doing something for Brian, too. By the end of 1982, his weight had reached 340 and was still climbing, along with his seemingly unquenchable appetites for food, booze, and other, even more dangerous, substances. At the rate Brian was going, it was clear that he would be, as one insider put it to another, “the next headline in Billboard.” So now they were at a crux in the road. Either they could let Brian continue on his path to self-extinction or else they could force him to confront his problems once and for all. But what could work? As much as they hated to admit it, there was only one doctor who had ever really worked his way beneath Brian’s skin. His name was Eugene Landy and, as luck would have it, he was willing to take Brian on again. But only with certain restrictions: This time, Landy declared, there could be no interference from the Beach Boys or anyone else. The program he described to them conformed exactly with the description he’d contributed to the Handbook of Innovative Psychotherapies, published in 1981: “The success of twenty-four-hour therapy rests on the extent to which the therapeutic team can exert control over every aspect of the patient’s life.” Thus, Landy would set up a house for Brian to live in, along with a full staff of helpers, bodyguards, and attendants. The goal, he’d written, was to “totally disrupt the privacy of [the] patient’s [life], gaining complete control over every aspect of their physical, personal, social, and sexual environments.”

  Landy, in other words, would be Brian’s ultimate authority. A father figure, if you will.

  Carl and the rest of the group accepted Landy’s proposal that fall. But because they didn’t have the authority to commit Brian to treatment, first they had to maneuver the ever-resistant musician into a position where he could not say no. To do this, they settled on a ruse, sending a letter to Brian in early November to notify him that he had been “fired” by the Beach Boys. What’s more, they lied to him and Carolyn Williams, his live-in companion, claiming that his profligate spending had drained all of his savings accounts. Brian had no money to pay his rent or grocery bills, they said, and soon he’d be out on the street unless, of course, he and Carolyn agreed to meet with Dr. Landy and at least talk about rejoining his program. Seeing no other option, Brian acquiesced. Landy didn’t actually attend the December 1 meeting but sent in his colleague, Arnold Dahlke, who secretly taped the goings-on until Carolyn noticed the recorder and snatched the tape away. “No one told me we were being taped. Things sure are strange around here these days,” Brian observed.

  They got even stranger when Carolyn, in a heated moment, told Dahlke that Landy could “go to hell.” Somehow, this random curse became a large point of contention, as the still-absent Landy had Dahlke and his financial administrator Sally Steinberg tell Carolyn that nothing could proceed until she let him come back from hell. “We can’t go ahead until this is resolved,” Dahlke said. “Landy is very stubborn and he has to sit down and discuss Brian with you, but right now he’s in hell and no one can bring him back but you.” Eventually Carolyn sent the psychologist a hand-drawn “Get out of hell free” card, and later that evening another staffer showed up with a note from Landy saying he’d been awarded a prize “…for outstanding temper-control-of-the-year,” which he wanted to share. What he’d taped to the card was a half-smoked joint.

  Like the Wizard of Oz, Landy continued to remain in the shadows, fluttering just beyond the fringe of the meetings until mid-December, when he put in a three-minute appearance at a conference between his assistants and Brian and Carolyn. Just after New Year’s, Brian agreed to check into Cedars-Sinai for a weeklong battery of physical tests. Both he and Carolyn were expecting that he’d be returning to their Pacific Palisades home, but by the time she came to pick him up, Landy and company had already taken him off to Hawaii, leaving o
nly a legalistic letter Brian had signed instructing her to move out of his house immediately.

  Holed up in a remote beach near Kona, Hawaii, the psychologist rolled up his sleeves and set on the task of rebuilding Brian Wilson’s fragile psyche in a whole new way. Soon Brian would lose weight, steer clear of drugs and alcohol, and regain the kind of self-discipline he hadn’t displayed in nearly twenty years. His eyes would seem clear and focused, and he’d speak again of writing songs and making records. And no matter where he went, Eugene Landy or his representatives would be there, watching his actions, recording his statements, noting who he was with, what they did, and what he said he wanted to do next. And just in case he slipped out of sight for a moment or two, he wore a beeper so Landy could summon him to the nearest telephone. “I influence all of his thinking,” Landy told California magazine in 1984. “I’m practically a member of the band.”

  And though no one knew it at the time, the band was about to feel the influence of a few very unlikely fans in Washington, D.C. It started in the spring of 1983 in the office of the Secretary of the Interior, then occupied by James Watt, whose market-friendly approach to guarding the nation’s public spaces had already made him anathema to environmentalists of every political stripe. What’s more, Watt was a fundamentalist Christian and fierce social conservative who could not abide the thought of promiscuous drug use or worse taking place on the very National Parks property he was charged with overseeing. And after catching a whiff—literally—of the massive free rock concerts staged near the Washington Memorial on Washington’s Mall starring the Beach Boys in 1981 and the Grass Roots in 1982, he figured he’d smelled enough. The free concert would continue in 1983, Watt announced. But this time around it would feature the US Army’s Blues Band and the Las Vegas showroom singer Wayne Newton. “Patriotic, family-based entertainment,” according to Watt, and not the bands that attracted what he called “the wrong element” to the celebration. “We’re not going to encourage drug abuse and alcoholism as was done in the past,” he decreed.

  Granted, Watt’s statement included neither the word beach nor the word boys. But the Beach Boys had loomed so large across Washington’s Fourth of July in the last few years that it was fairly obvious whom he was talking about. And though Watt had provided an unwittingly accurate portrait of the Beach Boys’ more private indulgences and problems, he had failed to note the group’s connections to both the president and the vice president. These became clear the next day, when Bush stood up to defend his one-time supporters. “They’re my friends and I like their music.” Reagan made no official comment at first, but his chief of staff, Michael Deaver, declared that his entire family and in fact most of his neighbors had ventured to the Mall for the last Beach Boys concert there and had “a wonderful time.” Finally sensing the dimensions of the political disaster looming ahead, Watt’s office backpedaled frantically, terming the group “solid, middle-class family people.” Which of course was far less accurate than the secretary’s earlier implication about drugs and alcohol.

  But by then Reagan—still skating through his Teflon era—had compelled his Secretary of the Interior to appear at a sort of public humiliation ritual, dragging him into the White House for a good talking-to and sending him away with a larger-than-life statue of a bullet-pierced foot meant to represent his own gaffescarred extremity. Meanwhile, Mike had already leaped to take advantage of what he had already figured for a uniquely double-sided publicity opportunity. On the one hand, he could play the renegade, shaking his head at Watt and all the clueless straights who thought they could knock the rock. “I thank all you undesirable elements for coming!” he’d yell at concert crowds that spring, always earning a massive ovation. But he also accepted Nancy Reagan’s apology when she called to make amends, and even now he revels in the small talk they shared that afternoon. “I said, ‘Well, that’s okay, Mrs. Reagan, it’s not the last time James Watt is going to say something silly,’” he recalls cracking. She invited the group to visit the White House the next time they were in Washington, and two months later they took her up on the offer, performing on the South Lawn at a party for the Special Olympics. And it was all so chummy and sweet (Reagan: “We were looking forward to seeing them on the Fourth of July. I’m glad they got here early!” Mike: “For undesirable elements, I think we have a lot of desirable elements here.”) that no one seemed to mind or even notice that Mike’s hat advertised Chevrolet, the company that had started sponsoring some Beach Boys concerts. Or that Dennis seemed pretty obviously drunk. Instead, they all sang along to “California Girls” (dedicated by Mike to Mrs. Reagan, of course), and later that night the group played a private birthday party at the vice president’s residence, where they helped the VP celebrate his fifty-ninth birthday with an hour of greatest hits that climaxed when the birthday boy leaped up onstage to help sing “Barbara Ann,” specially dedicated to his own favorite Barbara, the white-haired woman who was beaming regally from her seat just beyond the edge of the stage.

  America’s Band, indeed. And yet this public anointment by the highest offices in the nation’s power structure did nothing to inform or deepen the Beach Boys’ artistic vision or the sense of possibility they brought to their music. Once it was over, they just packed up their gear, as they had done so many thousands of other times, and moved on to the next venue, where they could parcel out the usual portion of surf/car/girl hits, tart it up with a few jokes and generic exhortations, and then collect a rather large check and get back to their hotel.

  They performed in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that Fourth of July, all of the original Beach Boys plus Bruce, performing on a ten-foot stage built on the sand, halfway between the rumbling ocean and rattling, chiming slot machines in the casinos on the boardwalk. The crowd was enormous, a galaxy of boats moored just beyond the breakers, all of them bathed easily in music so loud it drowned out the sound of the planes buzzing overhead. The Playboy casino twinkled just over the horizon. Was this Dennis Wilson’s vision of heaven? Perhaps. But Dennis was a wreck that night, sweaty and shirtless, his booze-swollen gut rippling as he flailed unsteadily at the rhythm he could no longer nail down for his own. And when he got to his traditional spotlight number, “You Are So Beautiful,” his voice was so wrecked by the years of booze, cocaine, and cigarettes that he could only launch into a meandering rap about how it felt to stand up there on the stage, looking out at all the faces that were looking back up at them. “If you only knew,” he wheezed. “If you only knew how it felt to be up here singing and playing…the joy it brings to us…” The audience screamed its approval, as they always did, and Dennis stood silent for a moment, letting the cheers wash around him, waiting for the love to drizzle into that part of him that was too empty to ever be satisfied, no matter how much music, love, sex, drugs, booze, or applause he poured inside.

  “Happy birthday, America!” Carl screamed, and then they were off again, ripping through another “Surfin’ USA,” another “Fun, Fun, Fun,” another “Barbara Ann.” This was the music Dennis had inspired, echoes of the world he had first glimpsed during those stolen teenaged hours on the beach and then brought home to deposit into his big brother’s unbounded imagination. Now, nearly a quarter century later, it still had the power to enrapture people, still had them dancing and screaming on this beach 3,000 miles away. If you only knew, if you only knew.

  The people kept cheering for the Beach Boys, but they didn’t know anything. Five months later, on a sunny but chilly December afternoon just a few days after his thirty-ninth birthday, Dennis was drinking with some friends on a boat moored in Marina Del Rey, near the slip where he had once moored the Harmony, his beloved teak sloop, since repossessed for lack of regular payments. Restless as ever, Dennis had strapped on a diving mask and jumped into the ocean, swimming down to sift through the sand in search of relics from his earlier life. He came up with a silver picture frame he had once hurled off his boat, laughing in triumph as he tossed it up toward his friends. Then he went down again
, slipping out of the sunshine and back down into the greenish depths where it had all started for him. Dennis had always been a strong swimmer, which is what puzzled some people later. But he was a different person now. “That last year it was like he was alive, but he wasn’t there,” Trish Campo says. Barbara Wilson, who last saw the father of her sons at a party celebrating his youngest son’s first birthday in the summer of 1983, had reached the same conclusion. “Dennis was so far gone, it was as if he had already died.”

  So there he was in the chilly water, using all of his remaining strength to push himself even deeper, searching for something just beyond the tips of his fingers. Did he realize how cold the late December water had grown? Did he struggle against the end, or did it simply ease him away, off into a light that would, finally, ease that terrible emptiness?