The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  Tessa was serious about remarrying Phil, but Phil told his friend Tim that the prospect of remarrying Tessa terrified him more than anything in the world. He started going with Mary Wilson and invited her to go to the next Metz meeting with him. He told me over the phone, “She’s a kind of super-secretary, not a girlfriend.”

  Mary said, “We had a relationship on so many levels, it was hard to describe. We were going to sign partnership papers. Phil was going to back my acting career. He liked to have me around to gauge people’s reactions.”

  Phil was also dating a woman architect in her early thirties who lived by the beach and drove a turbo Porsche. It annoyed Phil when she talked about her great car.

  Old friend and fellow sci-fi writer Ray Nelson came down from Berkeley and visited Phil in December. Phil was expecting one of his current girlfriends to visit and told Ray, “She’ll be here any minute, and I’ll introduce you to the girl I’m going to marry.” Then he got an odd look on his face and said, “But I can’t remember her name.” He got out his address book, looked up the woman’s name, and wrote it on the inside of his hand. “Now I won’t have any problem,” he told Ray, happily.

  Ray wrote me in 1988:

  I visited Phil in L.A. shortly before his death, and found him pleased with his newfound wealth and delighted with the movie version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? even though a series of screenwriters had made major changes in it. We talked about his various wives and girlfriends and he went out of his way to indicate to me that he didn’t care about any of them, that he couldn’t even remember their names.

  Most of the time he put on a great show of happiness, yet whenever we left the world of literature and entered the world of personal relations, a great void of sadness seemed to open up behind his eyes.

  Only once did he seem to be speaking to me as a real person and not a mask. We’d been talking about old friends when suddenly, seriously, he said, “How’s Anne?”

  Phil’s days were busy and productive. He was active in the management of his condominium complex. The Perezes, his next-door neighbors who lived in Doris’s old apartment, were extremely fond of him and invited him over for dinner two nights a week.

  The last time I talked to Phil on the phone, three weeks before he died, he was carrying on about Mary Wilson, and I thought to myself, “There he goes again.”

  Phil had a stroke on February 18, on a Thursday. He called his doctor in the morning and described pre-stroke symptoms. His doctor urged him to go to the hospital, but evidently he either didn’t go or couldn’t. The Perezes found him on the floor of his apartment late that afternoon. Tim Powers rushed over to be with him while he was being taken to the intensive care unit of nearby Western Hospital.

  Laura, back in Michigan, Phil’s only adult relative, was notified and phoned me. The next morning I called the hospital, and the head nurse on the floor told me that Phil had had a mild stroke and there was every reason to believe that he would have a full recovery. But on Saturday morning, when I phoned again, he had had a much worse stroke. The nurse told me he had been resuscitated and was now in intensive care. Laura flew out from Michigan on the advice of the hospital staff. Phil recovered consciousness Saturday evening when Laura arrived and was extremely glad to see her. I was on the phone half the day with Laura, the hospital, and other relatives. My telephone bill was $1,000 that month, a great deal of money at that time.

  I debated with myself about whether it was the right thing to do to go down to see Phil one last time, but Laura told me that I wouldn’t have been admitted.

  Many friends were trying to get in to see Phil, and science fiction fans were hanging around in the corridors—one even managed to get into the intensive care section. Reporters from Newsweek and Time magazines were phoning. Ex-wives and old girlfriends were coming out of the woodwork. There was a lot of intrigue. Finally, the hospital withdrew visitation privileges from everyone except the family: Laura, the only adult family member.

  Phil sank rapidly on Sunday. On Monday, strongly against the wishes of Phil’s current girlfriend, Laura brought in an Episcopal priest, who “laid on hands” and prayed for healing for Phil. But by Tuesday, Phil had sunk further, and the priest, who had come again, told Laura that they must read the last rites. Phil was anointed with unction, and, standing by his bed, Laura read the responses: “Have mercy upon him … have mercy upon him … grant him your peace.” Laura thought that Phil squeezed her hand faintly at the end of this ritual. He fell into a deeper and deeper coma and suffered extreme tachychardia and many heart failures. Toward the end of the week, the nurses and doctors told Laura to go up to stay with Jayne and me in Point Reyes Station. She was emotionally exhausted, and there was nothing more she could do. Phil was gone. There was only a body being kept artificially alive. Doris Sauter was allowed to sit by Phil’s bed and read the Episcopal litanies. There had been no brain activity for five days when on March 2, the head of the hospital’s neurological division called Laura. We had all been sitting around the kitchen table at Jayne’s house talking and waiting. The neurologist told Laura that if there were no objections from the family, he would order the life-support system turned off. He stated that it was cruel to keep it going. Laura hesitated. Perhaps some of her concern was that some of the women in Phil’s life were in a state of denial and were sure he would somehow recover and, also, she was only twenty-two years old. Without thinking I said firmly, “I’ll take the responsibility.”

  A memorial service was held in Santa Ana. I worked out a plan with Phil’s father, who arranged for Phil’s ashes to be flown back to Fort Morgan, Colorado, and buried beside his twin sister, Jane. Later, at Paul Williams’s suggestion, I arranged another service in St. Columba’s Church in Inverness for Phil’s northern California friends and relatives.

  Phil finally got into Time magazine. It printed a short obituary.

  There was great shock and grief among Phil’s friends and in the science fiction community when Phil died. One friend said, “He was one of those special people whose like will not be seen again….”

  PART III: 1928-58

  As I learned about Phil’s life after Point Reyes, it seemed to me that the luminous spirit of the man I had known had been obscured. It was still there—but like a dim reflection in an old scratched mirror. I had wanted to understand what had happened between Phil and me, but what I found still didn’t make an understandable pattern. I decided to learn everything I could about Phil’s past—and there was my Phil again!

  Twelve

  EARLY YEARS

  Phil was a Sunday’s Child, high spirited, yelling, full of life from the minute he was born.

  —Edgar Dick, 1983 interview

  When her labor pains began more than a month early, on December 16, 1928, Dorothy Kindred Dick had no idea she was going to have twins. She and her husband, Edgar, were at home in their Chicago apartment, and the woman doctor whom Dorothy, an early feminist, had chosen had not yet arrived, much to Edgar’s disgust. He didn’t think his wife should have chosen a woman doctor. A tiny blond boy was born at 8 a.m. Over fifty years later, his father, long estranged from the family, still spoke of that child fondly and tenderly. Edgar wiped the mucus from the newborn baby’s face. “I knew how because I had delivered a lot of calves,” he told me at his home in Menlo Park when I interviewed him in 1983.

  Much to the couple’s and the doctor’s surprise, labor pains started again. A tiny, quiet, dark-haired girl was born. Dorothy and Edgar named her Jane Charlotte.

  Dorothy, always thin and frail, had no milk, and Edgar wanted the babies to be sent to the hospital, but the doctor disagreed. There were great discussions about what the babies should be fed. Edgar said that Dorothy “even consulted the janitor,” who suggested goat’s milk.

  Dorothy’s mother, Meemaw, was sent for, but Edgar said, “She didn’t remember much about raising babies.” She arrived in Chicago two weeks later, but very soon it was clear that the situation was too much for her
. When the babies were three weeks old, two visiting nurses came to the house to check the children for an insurance policy Edgar had taken out on them. The nurses saw that the babies were dying and insisted on taking them immediately to the hospital. Meemaw grabbed Phil and ran into the bathroom and hid. She was afraid he would never come back. But the nurses prevailed and both children were taken to the hospital.

  The two babies were diagnosed as being severely dehydrated. Jane died soon after. Phil was put in an incubator and improved enough in two weeks to be brought back home. A wet nurse was found, a big Polish woman, and baby Phil smiled his first smile at her.

  The death of Jane had a profound affect on Phil’s entire life. The separation from that incredible closeness that twins experience in the womb, the separation from his mother, the physical deprivation the tiny baby experienced—all left their mark. Dorothy talked mournfully about Jane’s death throughout Phil’s childhood. “I heard about Jane a lot,” he said years later, “and it wasn’t good for me. I felt guilty—somehow I got all the milk.” As a child he imagined a playmate whom he called “Becky.” He thought of her as his lost sister.

  Jane’s body was sent back to Colorado. Edgar’s family held a graveside ceremony in a blinding snowstorm at the Fort Morgan cemetery. When Dorothy told about this terrible time, she repeatedly stated that Edgar had stayed at his club. He wasn’t there to help her when things were really rough. Edgar’s account made him sound like a good guy and portrayed Dorothy as having bad judgment and bad instincts.

  When Phil was born, Edgar and Dorothy had already been married eight years. They had met in their home state of Colorado, when Edgar came back in 1918 from serving with the Fifth Marines in France, the most highly decorated infantry battalion in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps.

  Edgar was second oldest of a farming family of ten boys and four girls. Dorothy told me that the family ate in two shifts. The dining room table wasn’t big enough for them to all eat together. Edgar had been born in Johnstone, Pennsylvania, at the turn of the century. In a memoir that he wrote about his natal family, Edgar referred to his mother, Bessie Mack, as Irish, but another time he said she was Scotch-Irish, as was his father. Phil, as an adult, put great emphasis on the one-quarter German blood he claimed to inherit, but actually his mother was of English descent and his father’s family was Scotch-Irish. Phil had no German blood in him at all—but he never mentioned any Irish ancestry.

  Edgar adored his mother, and saw her as “protecting her children’s lives and a wonderful cook.” He spoke of his father as an excessively severe, although intelligent, man: “I can remember my father whipping us for trying to mimic him gargling.” Edgar’s father was frugal, organized, and hardworking and taught his son to be this way.

  In the teens of the twentieth century, Edgar thought his father made a terrible mistake when he moved his family from the Pennsylvania farm to a desolate, water-deprived area near Cedarwood, Colorado. The family starved physically and mentally for more than three years on a homestead that was “ruled by dry, hot wind, tumbleweeds, jack rabbits, coyotes, rattlesnakes, and prairie dogs.” Later they moved to Fort Morgan in northeastern Colorado and went into sugar beet farming. Brothers of Edgar’s still own land and farm in this area.

  In 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany, Edgar “wanted to go to defeat the Kaiser.” Although he was only seventeen, he was six feet tall and a big, husky young man. He persuaded his father and mother to go with him, and one night they went by lantern light to the tiny post office in Fort Morgan and signed his enlistment papers for the Marines. “When I left Colorado on the train, I told my mother I’d wave to her as I went by the house. I remember her standing there on the front steps waving good-bye to me. I’ll never forget. I can still see her standing there.”

  After training for six months in Pennsylvania, Edgar went to France. He was, he said, “a corporal, like Napoleon and Hitler,” and became a runner taking messages from one company to another at the front, because he could spot German machine-gunners in the trees when no one else could. The Fifth Marines were shock troops that were brought to the front lines of battle in difficult military situations. Edgar fought in the battles of Belleau Wood, the Argonne, and Chateau Thierry. He loved the adventure of being a soldier and told me he was sad when the war was over and he had to go back home.

  He met Dorothy Kindred from the Rocky Mountain town of Greeley, and they married September 29, 1920. In 1923, the young couple moved to Washington, D.C., to take advantage of a federal scholarship at Georgetown University that was granted to ex-servicemen. Pursuing agricultural studies, Edgar graduated in 1927 and became a scientific aide at an experimental livestock farm near the capital.

  Dorothy Grant Kindred, Phil’s mother, was the middle child of three. Her father, Earl Grant Kindred, “a big handsome, brilliant man,” as Edgar described him, was a self-taught lawyer, something that was still possible when he was a young man. Earl Kindred had married Edna Matilda Archer in 1892 in Iowa. When Dorothy was born, the family lived on a ranch they owned near Greeley. According to Edgar, Earl made and lost fortunes. He had bad luck. After he went bankrupt and sold the family ranch, potash was found there and made the next owner a millionaire. Earl couldn’t support his family most of the time. Dorothy told me that on two occasions her father, seeing bad times coming, shot all the children’s pets because he felt there wouldn’t be enough money to buy feed for them. This was traumatic for Dorothy, an animal lover. She had dearly loved her horse Brownie, which she owned as a young girl, and her love of cats was enormous. Phil used the story of Earl’s killing the family’s pets in Confessions of a Crap Artist.

  Earl Kindred left the family home in Colorado on many occasions “seeking his fortune” and then, later, came back. While he was gone, the job of supporting the family fell on Dorothy’s shoulders. Although only a teenager, she went to work to support Meemaw and her younger sister, Marion. Older brother Harold left home permanently when he was twelve. The family legend was that he was very angry, but Edgar didn’t know what he was angry about.

  Dorothy was furious when her father would come back from his wandering and Meemaw would take him in again. Perhaps the stress of this period contributed to her contracting typhoid fever at seventeen and then Bright’s disease. The doctors gave her only a few years to live. She never recovered her health completely and was ill with kidney problems all her life.

  Much of the information about Dorothy’s early years with her natal family came from Lynne Hudner, Dorothy’s stepdaughter. Lynne came down from Santa Rosa for an interview and spent the night at my house. We talked all afternoon and evening. It was the first time we’d had an opportunity to visit since those pleasant times in 1973 when Lynne and Dorothy lived in Inverness.

  Lynne said that Dorothy, although sickly and frail all her life, as sickly people sometimes are, “went on to become a gifted and brilliant woman, intellectual, articulate, powerful—a person with definite ideas—but there was another side of Dorothy that came out of that difficult childhood and adolescence, a fearful and reclusive side, and guilt-ridden.” She was ill with an unending series of kidney infections and other physical problems “and like some chronically ill persons she was hypochondriacal. She was overly concerned with Phil’s health, and years later in her second family, with the health of [Lynne] and [her] twin brother, Neil. Illness was a way of life for Dorothy, and she used her illnesses to manipulate and control her family.”

  Lynne thought that Dorothy “had insight into her tendency to be reclusive. Paradoxically, she also liked people and fought her inclination to guard her psychological territory. But she had a view of life as intrinsically not good, a view of herself as not a good person, and a real worry that the world would be destroyed. She believed the parent was responsible for making the child into a good person. As a mother she was loving and intelligent but guilt provoking.” Phil, earlier, and Lynne, in Dorothy’s later family, both felt they’d be cut off from Dorothy�
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  Dorothy and Phil, when he was growing up, weren’t part of any large family group and didn’t belong to any community groups or church. Lynne thought Phil never learned to adjust to certain aspects of life.

  Lynne, a psychiatric social worker looking back on her childhood, wondered if the ambivalent feelings of love and hate that both she and Phil had for Dorothy were due, in part, to a misunderstanding on the children’s part of an undercurrent of suffering and limitation that created an atmosphere of heaviness and somberness in Dorothy’s household. “Dorothy was a restrained person, relating outwardly mainly on an intellectual level, not given to expressions of affection—not open with her feelings.” Lynne thought that Dorothy must have been “overpowering to Phil as a small child.” Lynne herself had a father and a brother to insulate her.

  “Dorothy, a pacifist, dedicated to nonviolence, would not allow any expression of anger—but she herself could show disapproval by a withering glance. Her household wasn’t one of emotional self-expression; there was no give and take, and no yelling, ever. If Phil did something wrong, he wouldn’t quite know what it was. Yet there was a tremendous, deep closeness between Phil and Dorothy. It mattered a great deal to Phil what Dorothy thought. But also he wanted to fight, to get away.” Lynne felt that a part of herself, a part of Phil, and a part of her twin brother, Neil, always remained a child around Dorothy. Phil’s hurt and his deep love for his mother were by far the most intense. Lynne said that Phil adopted a lot of Dorothy’s patterns. He was frugal and orderly like his mother and became a writer because of his mother’s admiration for this profession.