I would try to get my mind going in a positive direction and forget about Phil, but then he would call me and say, “Why don’t you come over and see me in Oakland anymore?” He wrote more strange letters, giving me the impression of an almost depraved lifestyle. One time he called and told me that his house had been vandalized and all the literary novels that he had written had been totally destroyed. Another time he called and said in a pitiful tone of voice, “I’m in such bad shape I can’t work on my own any more. The only way I can write is to work with someone else.” He was writing Deus Irae with Roger Zelazny.
In the early summer of 1965, I taught jewelry making to a group of people from the Synanon drug-rehabilitation facility, which was located only a few miles north of where I lived. Six or seven people came down to my house once a week. One of the men in the group, a handsome, tall blond fellow whose family owned ranches in Nevada, became interested in me, and I dated him briefly. I thought perhaps I could make Phil jealous if I told him that someone else was interested in me. Perhaps it would make some change in the situation between us. Well it did all right, but not the way I’d hoped. After I told him, Phil became very cold in his tone of voice and didn’t speak to me for several weeks. It seemed to me that the last thread in our relationship snapped at this time.
Phil’s attorney, William Wolfson, was suing me for half of the house on Phil’s behalf. Under the new no-fault divorce law, he very likely would succeed. I worried: “Where will I raise my girls?” My attorney, Anne Diamond, called a meeting with Phil and Wolfson in her San Rafael offices. She suggested that Phil consider the money he had put into our house as rent. Both he and his attorney were insulted. “Why?” I thought. “It seems so logical.” On Phil’s behalf, Wolfson refused the offers that my attorney had made. Phil sat there without saying anything, but managed to give the impression that he didn’t like what had happened but had no power to do anything about it.
My clever attorney prepared legal papers for me to keep at my house in case Phil came out to Point Reyes again and, on September 29 he did. I asked him to sign the papers that would give the house back to me, and we went to a notary and he did. He seemed happy about this. When we returned to the house, I tried to hug him. He looked at me strangely and rushed out of the house.
The divorce was final on October 21, 1965. I went to court in the morning with my friend Inez Storer as my witness. Anne Diamond suggested that I not pick up the final papers, but I didn’t understand her idea. She saw how much I loved Phil and felt that we might still get back together, that not taking the final step in the divorce action might keep the relationship alive. But I didn’t “get it” and went ahead and finalized the legal action. Almost as soon as I had returned home, Phil called up and wanted me to tell him all about the divorce. He didn’t sound sad or depressed, just cheerfully interested in hearing what went on in court that day.
About a month after the divorce, the girls and I met Phil once again at Jack London Square on the Oakland waterfront. I gave him a beautiful handmade beaded, fringed deerskin Indian jacket that had belonged to Richard. Phil put it on. Years later, a few months before his death in 1982, as we were talking on the phone long distance, he reminded me of that day. He said it was the last time he had seen all of the girls together. He sounded as if he were almost crying.
I didn’t cry, not for eighteen more years, but I obsessively thought about my relationship with Phil sixteen hours a day, trying to understand what had happened. I worked on myself to change or remove traits that Phil had criticized. In the midst of my misery, I started seeing how beautiful ordinary people are. How almost everything we have, the thoughts in our minds, the words in our mouths, even the way we see the landscape, comes as a gift from other human beings. Sometimes a beautiful, numinous light seemed to be behind the hills and the line of eucalyptus trees at the edge of the field.
Lynne, Phil’s stepsister, who had become a psychiatric social worker, told me that Phil had become much more ill and neurotic after he left Point Reyes. She said that there was no way that Phil could have returned.
Six
NANCY
… always agreeable, always willing to look up to him—he was, after all, so much older than she—as an authority. That perpetually pleased him. And it seemed to please her, too.
—Philip K. Dick, Counter-Clock World
I NEVER ENVISIONED having any relationship with Nancy. I hadn’t seen her since she was a nineteen-year-old visitor in my house in the early 1960s, but amazingly, a friendship developed at the time of Phil’s final illness, when I phoned her to give her news from the hospital in Los Angeles. I talked with Kleo at that time, too. Many barriers dropped when Phil was dying.
In 1982, when I met with her, Nancy was a fragile, feminine woman, evoking strong protective and compassionate feelings from those who came to know her. Although she said she didn’t remember much about the past, she agreed to meet me for several interviews. We met for lunch at the Marin Mental Health Clinic, where she managed the medical-records system at the hospital she had gone to at one time for treatment. I also visited her in her pleasant Novato apartment where she lived with her two daughters, Isa and Tina. Isa was there one time I visited, and I remember she and Nancy laughed and giggled a lot. Both were beautiful women, delightful to be around. Nancy had a humble, almost childlike, manner, but she was direct and intelligent in her speech, although there seemed to be a note of mournfulness in the tone of her voice. She said frankly, “I made a mess of my early life.” She was pleased that she had now lived in one place for ten years, maintained relationships that went back ten years, and created a life for herself and her children. She didn’t want me to tape the interview, so I took notes by hand.
Nancy is a very religious person and after she left Phil she almost joined Jim Jones’s community in northern California—before Jones moved it to Guyana. She shudders at her narrow escape. I keep in touch with Nancy every few years. My daughter and her daughter Isa have become close friends and manage the PKD estate together.
Nancy was the third child of three in an upper-middle-class family. She attended public schools until high school and was brought up in the Episcopal Church. She told me that her family had a strain of hereditary mental illness in it. Her adolescence was difficult. Her mother went into a coma caused by a brain tumor when Nancy was twelve and died when Nancy was eighteen. As is common in families where there is a lack of parenting, the brother and two sisters drew close together. After her father’s second marriage broke up she went to boarding school, after persuading her grandmother to finance this. Maren Hackett was Nancy’s second mother-in-law and gave Nancy the mothering that she had missed. The two became close.
Nancy was sent to a psychoanalyst for a full Freudian analysis when she was only a teenager. In retrospect, she thought this was very odd. She had an illness that was characterized by a period of overactivity and sleeplessness, followed by a long period of depression. These attacks were so terrible that Nancy told me that she had “looked forward to dying.” In her adolescence this illness was believed to be psychogenic. This medical view put an impossible burden on her to “get well.” Recently this illness, now called bipolar illness, is known to be due to a chemical imbalance in the brain and, like diabetes, can be controlled by medication. After years of suffering, Nancy found that she could enjoy life and work and function well.
After Phil evicted Jack from his house, he invited both Nancy and her sister, Anne, to live in his new cottage. He told Kirsten Nelson that he was in love with Anne. But Anne didn’t return his interest. When Phil kept talking about the cat box being bugged, it frightened her. She was afraid that he really did think this. Phil switched his affections to Nancy, drawn to her by her fragility. Phil told Kirsten, “I am in the Christ sweepstakes. If I don’t save Nancy, no one else will.” Kirsten thought that Phil wanted to play doctor and take care of Nancy but didn’t think Phil and Nancy were good for each other. “Neither of them was stable at that time,” she
told me.
Nancy had just returned from Spain, where she had been briefly hospitalized. She was depressed and taking strong medication. Philip took her to her appointments with her psychiatrist.
Phil wrote Maren Hackett on December 20, 1964:
I wanted to add a couple of things I didn’t get a chance to say to you tonight…. First: it may seem to you that my attitude toward Nancy is irresponsible. If so, then what would be a responsible attitude toward her? Loving her surely isn’t irresponsible…. [Y]ou yourself have made your own agreement on this matter—at least in the abstract—clear in past times. Treating her like an adult; that is, assuming that she is capable enough to know what she is doing? Well, here we have the “first stone” problem; none of us are utterly capable; none of us are totally without some sense…. Let’s spell it out. I fell in love with Nancy…. I’m thirty-six years old, or some such absurdly huge figure…. I’ve seen a number of sorrows come and pass in my life…. I trust that having passed through that, and survived, I can probably deal with rather difficult and even brutally heartbreaking human relationships; I can take a hell of a lot and still grin and get by—without retaliating, or becoming bitter, or wanting to hurt someone back. Is Nancy’s life none of my business? Idiotic; of course it’s my business…. I’m glad to declare my aims as regards Nancy…. I have nothing to be ashamed of; what’s your story? I love her and I want to be with her—all the time, if possible. Is this destroying her? Lord. Oh ye of little faith, Maren. Were I to want that of you, would you decline it as an act of destruction toward you? I rather doubt it.
Counter-Clock World came from this period. There’s a nice portrait of Nancy in it as Lotta. Phil’s old Berkeley friend, Maury Guy, came back from Canada where he’d been living. He stopped by to see Phil’s parents, Dorothy and Joe Hudner. He was looking for a place to stay for a few days and called Phil from the Hudners’ place. Phil was cordial. Maury said, “It was just like old times, Phil was so glad to hear my voice.” Phil invited Maury and his new wife to stay with him in Oakland, but Maury began feeling uneasy. He said, “The drug ambience was so strong—I had been into amphetamines myself. I wasn’t going to go near that scene. Phil told me he was going to marry this young girl whom he had just repatriated from a Spanish mental hospital. It was too much for me.”
Maury expressed a concern for what was happening in Phil’s life to Dorothy, and she replied sadly, “Phil has become a hopeless amphetamine addict.”
Phil was the conservative one in the relationship with Nancy. The summer of love was approaching and drugs were “in.” Nancy and Phil came out to West Marin to see his old friends and to look for a house in the area. After he visited various people they stopped speaking to me; he was still telling “monster” tales about me, and convincingly, too—but he wanted to move back near me and the children. The rents in West Marin were too much for Phil and Nancy’s budget and instead they rented an apartment in San Rafael. Then they found a rental house in Santa Venetia, a lower-priced but attractive section of San Rafael near the Frank Lloyd Wright Civic Center, a quarter mile from an arm of San Francisco bay.
Alys Graveson remembered, “The house was charming, near the water, but it was too small for a writer, especially after the baby was born. There was no place for Phil to write.”
“Baby paraphernalia was everywhere,” Nancy said. “When Philip was married to me, he never wrote except when he needed money. Then he would write a novel in six days by using amphetamines.”
In mid-June of 1966, my friend Sue Baty phoned me to warn me that Phil had called her husband, Judge David Baty, and had made an appointment to be married to Nancy in a civil ceremony at the Batys’ house, which was where the judge performed marriages. Sue was disturbed by this and told me she didn’t plan to be home.
The marriage was July 6. That same afternoon my daughter Tandy and I were singing in the chorus of the Inverness Music Festival’s production of Haydn’s The Creation.
Sue told me that Phil, Nancy, her sister and brother, Anne and Michael, Maren Hackett, and a gentleman dressed in a gray suit and a strange purplish-red shirt, whom no one introduced to the judge, made up the wedding party. After the civil ceremony, this gentleman stepped forward and blessed the marriage, Phil’s fourth. This mysterious person turned out to be Bishop James A. Pike, the controversial Episcopal bishop of northern California and Maren Hackett’s current paramour.
It was strange that Pike would bless this marriage, since the laws of the Episcopal Church at that time were similar to Roman Catholic laws, and Phil’s marriage to me had not been annulled even though there had been a legal divorce. But then Pike never did play by the rules of the church that had entrusted him with the office of bishop. In fact, he used his power in the church to promote his own idiosyncratic brand of “theology.”
When Father Read at St. Columba’s Church heard about this wedding, he wrote in the church records that Phil had excommunicated himself. Fr. Read, a student of church law, disliked Pike intensely, and felt this was the thing to do, but I am not sure his action was legal, either, since a subsequent vicar told me that the current bishop would have had to approve this action, and Pike never would have. What a day. At the same time in the afternoon, the beautiful white borzoi, Ollie, that I loved so, dropped dead at the veterinarian’s. The office was located a block from the Baty house. The dog hadn’t been sick.
Years later, I asked Nancy why she and Phil had come out to Point Reyes to my friend’s house to get married. Innocently, she replied, “That was the only place where Phil could go. He was in such a nervous state he couldn’t go to a stranger’s.”
Kirsten Nelson’s relationship with Phil changed after he married Nancy. She said, “Phil stopped writing to me—in some ways, he was a proper and conventional person and he would’ve thought it was the wrong thing to continue his intimate relationship with me via mail. He had to go by the book.”
In all the time he was married to Nancy, Phil never came to Point Reyes Station to see me or the girls; he continued to phone, although at longer and longer intervals.
For the next few years, the girls and I were very poor. We lived on about half the income we’d had. It was our “vegetable soup period.” We made vats of soup with nine-cents-a-pound lamb shanks and ate it with powerful wholewheat bread made from an Adelle Davis recipe. I lost my fear of being poor; we were poor and it turned out that it was fun to meet the challenge. We even entertained frequently, serving the excellent soup and bread. Even though I continued to feel depressed at times I kept active in various community activities. My youngest daughters, Tandy and Laura, and I sang in the chorus of a number of operas produced by the Inverness Music Festival. I became a member of the board. Tandy and I scraped up a down payment, bought two nice horses on the installment plan, and did some trail riding. Luckily, the horses could live on the grass growing in our field. At that time I slipped into the demanding sport of dressage and spent the rest of my riding life trying to do it right. Meanwhile, my friends, concerned for our little family, got together and redecorated my house. I had managed to turn the jewelry business into a means of support with no business experience and no capital. The girls did all the housework, laundry, cooking, and shopping, and babysat to earn the money for their clothes in order for me to have the time to make and sell handcrafted jewelry. My next-door neighbor, Henryetta Russell, came over to help me, became a dear friend, and remained with Anne Dick Jewelry for the next forty years. As we worked together in my tiny studio, she sympathetically listened to my tales of woe. She was there polishing jewelry that last time Phil came home.
Periodically, Phil would call up and say he was coming to visit, and the girls would look forward eagerly to his arrival, but then he would call again, halfway to our house, and say, “The dog got sick in the car, so I have to go back,” or, “I had a flat tire; I can’t make it.” This happened six or seven times. Santa Venetia was only twenty miles away from Point Reyes Station, but it might as well have been a million lig
ht-years. Next, Phil started calling to say he was on his way to visit us but never came and didn’t even phone to give an excuse. He did this four or five times and the girls finally gave up on him. But I wasn’t able to turn my back on Phil or the relationship that we’d had. How can you turn your back on love? I couldn’t understand the present situation, it didn’t make sense. I decided that I had to leave the door to my (ex?) relationship with Phil open a crack but get on with my life. I became terrified of running into Phil and wouldn’t even drive anywhere near Santa Venetia.
On March 17, 1967, a baby girl was born to Phil and Nancy. Phil sent me a photograph of the new baby. He named her Isolde but he and Nancy called her Isa. She grew into a lovely young woman whom I am very fond of. Back then it was another turning point. I still remained emotionally attached to Phil—but less so.
Nancy and Phil frequently visited Bishop James Pike and Maren Hackett, Nancy’s stepmother, at the older couple’s San Francisco apartment. Then Pike’s older son committed suicide and Pike turned to spiritual mediums in his grief. Because Pike was an Episcopal bishop, this made headlines all over the country. Nancy and Phil took part in some of these séances. Many years later, Phil wrote about these events in his last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
After James Pike was forced to resign as bishop under the threat of a heresy trial, he took an appointment at the Institute for Democratic Studies, a think tank at Santa Barbara. In June 1967, Phil and Nancy went to visit Pike and Maren Hackett. Nancy recalled that Philip and Pike joked about Pike’s near ex-communication. Pike openly and frankly denied the doctrines of the virgin birth, the trinity, and the deity of Christ and told Philip and Nancy that he had a lot of support for his positions from various organizations both in and out of the church.
The Search for Philip K. Dick Page 15
