The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  Norman Mini, a protégée of writer Henry Miller, was another employee at University Radio. Norman went to West Point in the thirties and was kicked out for his Russian sympathies and/or because he got drunk at the Yale—West Point football game. He then joined the Communist Party and was the first person in the United States to be convicted and sent to jail under the Criminal Syndicalism Act. Phil went to one Communist Party meeting with Norman and later felt as if he had been marked forever.

  Another character who hung around University Radio was Inez Ghirardelli, a member of the famous and wealthy Ghirardelli family. Once she had been a debutante. Now she was emaciated-looking, wore men’s trousers, suspenders, and shirts, and shaved her hair to a length of three-quarters of an inch. Even in Berkeley, she was considered extremely eccentric. Phil became a good friend of hers. Connie Barbour, a lesbian psychiatrist, was another member of the crowd. She became Kay Linde’s girlfriend after Vince stopped going with Kay. Then there were Alan Rich, who later became a well-known music critic, Kleo Apostolides, and Chuck Bennett.

  Phil, Vince, Norman, and Bill hung around together in the evenings, going to the famous bars of those days, the Steppenwolf and the Blind Lemon, to listen to Odetta and other folksingers.

  Although Phil seemed to get along well with Dorothy at her home, he hid from her when she came looking for him at work, hoping to have lunch with him. People thought that Dorothy was his girlfriend. At that time she had long dark hair, and was thin and Garbo-esque.

  “Phil did the bills at University Radio,” Vince said. “He was an incredibly fast typist and had won contests. He sold radios and TVs. He swept the sidewalk. He sold records.” Phil worked in the stockroom under the store, unpacking records. Phil and Vince used to joke that they wanted clothes the color of packing dust, so that when they had to run upstairs to wait on a customer, they didn’t have to brush all the dust off their clothes.

  Phil had some odd mannerisms and said he was being monitored by Langley Porter because, as a child he had an exceptionally high I.Q. Vince recalled, “He certainly was not a normal preppy type. He worried that he wasn’t normal and surrounded himself with security mechanisms. He had to sit alone every day with his back to the wall on exactly the same stool in the balcony of the True Blue Cafeteria where he could see the door of the men’s room.” Phil told Vince he had a phobia that he wouldn’t get to the men’s room in time. He felt uncomfortable if his friends, at another table, looked at him while he was eating, because he had trouble swallowing.

  It disturbed Vince that when he and Phil would lock up at night, Phil would try the doorknob, leave and come back a minute later, try the door again, shake it, and bang it; then they would get to the street, and Phil would have to go back again and try the doorknob, and shake and bang the door again. Phil’s mood changed from month to month. Sometimes, he would be extremely reclusive. At other times, he would come out of his shell and be the life of the party. One night he danced with Lois Mini all evening, at one point falling over John Gildersleeve’s feet.

  Some days when he came to work, Vince remembered, Phil, with a dark look on his face, would march to the office in the rear where he kept the books, not looking to the right or left, not speaking to or acknowledging anyone. Vince noted that Phil could change his face, either voluntarily or involuntarily, so that he looked like a different person: “Something would trigger him, and his face would actually change.”

  That year, Phil passed the entrance exam at the university and enrolled, but he went for only part of a month. He got claustrophobia so badly that he couldn’t stay in a classroom. He went to ROTC but didn’t like it at all.

  Phil acquired an interest in Gregorian and pre-Baroque music from Vince. Vince also introduced Phil to Gilbert and Sullivan, and Phil became a Gilbert and Sullivan fan. At University Radio, when things were dull, Vince, Phil, and the other clerks would go in a record booth and play records all day long. Vince couldn’t get Phil interested in jazz, though. “Phil had to have frameworks, that’s why he didn’t like jazz.” Phil hated Kukla, Fran and Ollie, but after Vince explained why they were so funny and charming, Phil changed his mind and decided that he loved them.

  Phil had never been taught to drive. He practiced driving in Herb’s University Radio truck with Vince’s help. Phil took the driver’s test seven times. He would always err in some way. He drove erratically.

  Although he was still a virgin, not so unusual in those days when the sexual revolution was barely beginning, even in Berkeley, Phil told Vince that he believed that he was a homosexual. Vince said that back in 1947, the theory about homosexuality was much different. He said, “If you were a sensitive and creative man, chances were a hundred to one you were a homosexual who hadn’t been ‘brought out.’ In time, I disabused Phil of this idea. He thought because he was a person who liked artistic things, loved music, and had creative impulses, he was gay. One of my arguments was, ‘Go look at their records and books, Phil. They all have the same records and books.’“ And Vince and Phil both felt Vince had saved Phil from being homosexual.

  The next problem Vince addressed himself to was that Phil wasn’t heterosexual either, because he’d never been with a woman: “University Radio was a sort of dating bureau. If the record clerks found someone they thought attractive, they’d give her a record to play in one of the booths. Then they’d find another record, similar to the one she’d asked for, and take it back to the booth and tell her, ‘Play this; it’s much like the first one.’ She might end up listening to two or three albums, although she might end up not buying anything. That wasn’t part of the scenario anyway.”

  One day, Phil met his first wife, Jeannette Marlin, when she came into the store to buy a record. Vince didn’t find her to be “particularly artistic or musical. She couldn’t pronounce the word ‘Debussy,’ but Phil evidently got some sort of vibrations. She asked for a record; Phil gave it to her and showed her a booth. He did the inevitable thing and took another record back and another, and subsequently—there was a large listening room in the basement next to the radio repair shop, and beyond, another room that was a storage area. You’ll be familiar with both these rooms from reading Dr. Bloodmoney. Phil and his future wife cohabited in the basement of University Radio one night and he established his masculinity. They married shortly afterwards.”

  In those days, you very likely would marry the first man or woman you slept with. Phil was nineteen at the time, and Jeannette was twenty-six. Phil had to get his mother’s signature in order to be allowed to marry. Dorothy didn’t think that the marriage would work but she signed anyway, thinking that Phil would learn something from the experience.

  Gerry Ackerman remembered visiting Phil and Jeannette in their new apartment. He came with composer Dick Maxfield. He wrote:

  Phil and Jeannette lived in an old near-tenement apartment on the corner of Addison Way behind Walt’s Drug Store…. [A]ll the rooms were joined together like railway cars, one behind the other. All was dark, messy, disorderly; the usual painting of the new apartment had not taken place, nor did there seem to be any furniture or charm…. Although they had been there some time, the place was full of unpacked boxes. Everyone else I knew rented a house, cottage, or part of a house with a garden or a tree or two. Apartment houses seemed alien to Berkeley life; no one that I knew lived in such a place…. I could only remember her as either an unfriendly or frightened presence, standing behind a stuffed chair with her hands resting on the back as if it were a shield…. Phil was seated in the rocking chair when we came in and … he greeted us and said good-bye to us without getting up. No coffee was served—almost unthinkable in the unwritten etiquette of Berkeley.

  Six months later, Jeannette and Phil decided to divorce, and Vince appeared as a witness. Jeannette’s complaint was that Phil kept playing three records that she couldn’t stand, the three records that he had played for her in the booth the first time they met. Phil told Vince that he was glad it had all happened because he had been saved
from homosexuality. Phil roomed with Vince for a while, until Vince married his fourth wife, Monica. Years later, Phil based a character in one of his literary novels named Nikki on Monica, and Vince and Monica’s autistic child became Manfred in Martian Time-Slip. Phil found his own place on Bancroft, an apartment that he immediately painted. He moved in his large record collection, his Magnavox console, and stacks and stacks of science fiction magazines. Friends remember that he told them he was learning to write science fiction stories. The divorce with Jeannette must have been an amicable one because he had a photograph of her on the mantel. He said that he had liked Jeannette, because she had left him alone. At this time, Phil was caught up with German Romanticism and heavily into Wagner, and Germanic myths and legends. He played Wagner at full volume into the early hours of the morning until the neighbors banged on the walls.

  In April 1949, Phil fell deeply in love with a popular co-ed, an English literature student who walked into University Radio one day looking for a classical record. Throughout Phil’s later marriage to Kleo Apostolides, he kept telling her that Betty Jo Rivers was the “great lost love of my life.” Kleo said, “Betty Jo would have been perfect for Phil—too bad she had to go off to Paris.”

  Betty Jo Rivers, a handsome, confident blonde, was an archaeologist for the University of California at Davis. When I was trying to reach her to interview her for this book, she was off on a dig for several months. Finally, her busy schedule allowed her to drive down from Davis to meet me at a little restaurant in Petaluma. We sat outside under an umbrella and gazed at the Petaluma River, and she told me about her relationship with Phil.

  Phil decided that he was going to wait on Betty Jo before she even came into the store. He saw her through the plate glass window, Betty Jo said:

  … with my new short haircut that looked to him like the helmet a Valkyrie would wear. He told me that he fell madly in love with me at that moment—he had a strong urge to jump right through the plate glass window. As soon as I walked in the store, he grabbed me by the arm before I even asked for a record. When I asked for something by Buxtehude, he immediately assumed that I knew music. Soon I was closed in a small listening room with stacks and stacks of records. He told me, “If you like this record, then you’ll like this one and this one.” Later when I put my coat on to get ready to leave, he asked if he could walk me home. As we walked, we talked and talked about music, Berkeley, “life.” When we got to my place, a fair piece away on Hearst and Ninth, I hadn’t had any supper and I asked him if he would like a sandwich. He turned absolutely green and said, “Eat with another person in the room?” and left. Later, he got so he could sit over a sandwich with me, but at that time he was afraid of crowds and messed up about public eating.

  I sipped my Coke and chewed on my toasted-cheese sandwich, feeling a tiny bit … not jealous, exactly, but aware that this had been a big romance.

  Betty Jo had been dating a fellow graduate student. She told me, “He got shoved out the door,” and she and Phil became a couple. Phil wanted to give Betty Jo his most prized possession, his Magnavox console, but she refused: “Phil’s attraction was all that talent boiling around, getting ready to explode. People of high creativity give off a kind of dynamic, something that is extremely attractive. But he didn’t fit into any of my circles. It was difficult to take him anywhere—he was so extremely shy. We went to see my best girlfriend whose family was visiting. Phil was confused and felt inept. Later, he gave me copy of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, inscribed ‘To Betty Jo, in exchange for six social errors at once.’”

  Phil used to comment on how easy it was for Betty Jo to be with people. He told her that as long as he worked in the store, he could deal with people, although he preferred being down in the basement unpacking records. “I met him in a period of intense ferment. He used to talk a great deal about why he was as neurotic as he was. He had a twin sister who was allergic to milk and died. He always felt it was like the German myth or legend about the person who has to look for his other half, that he was an incomplete person. He blamed the death of the baby on his mother. He talked about fear of crowds and fear of the presence of people around.”

  Although Phil wasn’t particularly sympathetic to Betty Jo’s preoccupation with academic studies, he was kind and patient with her because of the pressure of her approaching master’s exam.

  I used to study at his place. Getting ready for the master’s was an ordeal. At that time, everything depended on the orals. Afterwards, a kind man gave a party for the tired, sleepless group that had just taken them. He handed everyone a martini in a water glass as they came in the door. I’d never had a martini. I drink little, and I have no tolerance for alcohol. “Here, this will relax you,” he said. “And,” I thought, “this is a party and I’m grown up, have my master’s, and now this is what I’m supposed to do.” Well, as I went into a daze and knew I was passing out, I looked around and noticed it wasn’t just me. There were people falling on the rug. I had the sense to get to the phone and call Phil and say “Get me home.” I have a hazy memory of him appearing at the door. He told me later he had to look through all those prone bodies before he found mine. He threw me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and deposited me in a cab, muttering in my ear about “irresponsibility and drinking.” The next day, I woke up with a classic hangover, and Phil made me some coffee and scolded me solidly. I later noted that there was a Betty Jo in one of his novels who was a drunken linguist.

  When, years later, Phil told me this story about Betty Jo, it became a pitiful story about an abused lover whose girlfriend went to a party, became drunk, went in the bedroom with another man, and then had the lover come to pick her up.

  Betty Jo received a fellowship to go to France. “My mind was all set on this scholarship and on going abroad. Phil asked me make a choice between him and going to France. I didn’t have any doubt about what I wanted to do. I asked him, ‘Do you want me to send you pictures of this? Of that?’”

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said.

  After Betty Jo left, Phil fell under Connie Barbour’s influence. She had made a pass at Betty Jo but had told Phil that Betty Jo had flirted with her. At this period of his life, Phil went to parties and gave parties for his friends, making fancy rum drinks and serving bacon and eggs in his apartment.

  I phoned Kleo Apostolides Dick Mini, who now lived in St. Helena, and we made a date to go out to lunch. When I parked in front of her small cottage, loud strains of Italian opera wafted out to greet me. Kleo was in her kitchen, the many bottles of wine she had just made sitting on open shelves. She was professionally interested in writing and encouraged me with my project.

  She had married Phil’s old friend Norman Mini a few years after she and Phil had divorced, and they’d had two children, now grown. A widow now, Kleo enjoyed encouraging young people to read. She knew everything that was going on wine-wise in the Napa Valley, California’s most prolific wine-producing region. She gave me some information about Phil’s life in the early fifties, but she didn’t share her feelings or any personal matters with me. She felt it would have been improper to do so. I thought she was most gracious to receive me and felt somewhat abashed in her presence.

  Kleo Apostolides was eighteen years old, a striking-looking brunette with dark eyebrows accenting her face, when she met Philip Dick. Phil was recovering from his love affair with Betty Jo, but soon he and Kleo were living together. “I met Phil at Art Music in 1949,” Kleo said. Everyone hung out at Art Music then: Alan Rich, Chuck Bennett, and good friends Connie Barbour, Eldon Nicholls, and Norman Mini.

  Kleo and Phil went out in the evenings to the True Blue restaurant in Berkeley and sometimes took the train to San Francisco to go to the coffee houses in North Beach. One evening they went with Margaret Wolfson, Phil’s former high school teacher, and her husband, William Wolfson, a young attorney.

  “We married in, I think, May or June of 1950. Phil was straight and it was Phil’s idea to
get married,” Kleo told me.

  Vince Lusby said, “Kleo and Phil’s romance was an all-right relationship based mostly on their common interest in Italian and German opera. They both believed in free love.”

  William Wolfson, Margaret Wolfson’s husband, and later Phil’s attorney, saw Kleo as mousy, and thought, “Phil played the role of Pygmalion to her Galatea.”

  Alan Rich found me. He had read my letter about Phil in Horizon magazine; I hadn’t even known they’d printed it. He remembered coming out to Point Reyes to visit us in the early sixties. Kleo had thought that Alan was still a music critic for the New York Times, but in 1983, he was living in Los Angeles, where he had a music service. I phoned him several times, each time enjoying the splendid classical music on his answering machine.

  He told me, “Kleo was a music nut, a vocal nut. Phil and Kleo married because of their common musical interests, principally Italian opera. I saw no strong emotional base between them.”

  John Gildersleeve thought, “Kleo and Phil were friendlier than most married couples. They were really good friends. Phil was definitely the dominant figure. I wondered if Phil thought I was coming around to see Kleo, instead of him. He acted rather odd when I came around. I had quite a reputation as a ladies’ man in those days.”

  Phil and Kleo started looking for another place to live. “At one point,” Kleo told me, “Phil and I moved to Sausalito for one day to an apartment on the bay. Phil looked out the window and became extremely disturbed by being so close to the water. We moved back to Berkeley the same day.”