West of Eden

by Jean Stein

  My grandmother was very moved that I went to Ferriday. She was very surprised, I think. I’d asked her where she was from and she said that when she was growing up her father had a movie theater. I asked around in the town, “Is there an old movie theater?” People told me there was only one, so I took pictures of it. It is an old town. There is nothing…the Mississippi River just on the other side of the wall. I’m not sure it was the right theater. That is the thing, I am not certain. And I am not certain either that she told me the truth. That was the problem always with her—that you were not certain, sometimes you felt that she was saying the truth, and sometimes you didn’t know.

  Once she let me bring my friends over to the house. Usually she would say, “No, not today. I am sick.” I was there in a motel in Santa Monica with my ex-boyfriend, James, and my two French friends, and I called her and said, “Can I come up?” and she said, “Come on up.” I thought, This is amazing. So we all drove up there. Of course, she didn’t see them. They all stayed downstairs. We went all over the house. She had us brought down a bottle of really good French wine with cookies and stuff. I don’t know why. It was really funny. She even gave me some money, a hundred dollars, for us to go and have dinner. Isn’t that something? I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t believe it. I think she thought I was going to get married to the man because I told her that I was with my boyfriend. I remember she said, “Which one is it?” She had probably been looking down. When I went back outside, my friends had jumped into the pool, which I would have never dared to do myself. That pool. The woman who worked there came down with robes. She was actually so happy that someone was swimming there. My friends were so excited. They were actors and they took pictures of the Oscars. Then they were in the swimming pool shouting, “Hey, Lauren! Hey, Humphrey!” It was real fun.

  I didn’t go in my grandmother’s bathroom when she was alive. She had a closet in there, and the shoes were all stored by era. There were some high-heeled shoes, some shoes with low heels, then the later shoes were all slippers. I don’t know how many there were, like sixty pairs of shoes. Too bad, if I hadn’t lived so far away I should have taken them.

  —

  GORE VIDAL: Doris Stein’s story about her last glimpse of Ann Warner, though, is wonderful. Doris was driving her land yacht down from the heights and came down by Ann’s house as she had a couple times. Doris said, “The gates were always shut. Just nothing was going on and no way of getting in touch with her.” But this day the gates were open. And Doris said, “I just stopped and I went in.”

  And there was Ann big as a house watching. She was on a golf cart. That was it. Some kind of golf cart that she was getting herself around in. “And as she whisked past me, she said, ‘Hello, Doris.’ I said, ‘Hello, Ann.’ ” She kept going and Doris said, “I turned around and I left.” Just whizzing by.

  —

  PATRICK FOULK: I was up at the house a few times before Jack went to the hospital. By that time, he wasn’t the same jackass he’d been when he was in power. He hated dying. So we became a little closer. Then, after Jack died, Ann had a big house and a squad of people, but she was very alone. I kept going up there, and she suggested that I come there to live. So I lived at her house for the next twelve years.

  Once Cary Grant called and said, “Annie, let’s get the hell out of this goddamn town. Let’s go somewhere where you can just be yourself and have some fun.” That was about a year before he died. But Ann was very aware of her role as Mrs. Warner. She was a person who would stay up all night and then sleep in the day. There would be days when I wouldn’t see her, but I was always talking to her on the phone. Sometimes I’d sleep upstairs in a room of Jack’s, just to be close. There might be an earthquake or it’d be raining, and we’d talk and that would make her feel good, and me, too.

  She was incredibly brave, but she liked to feel a kind of security. Over the last year or two, when she was diabetic, the nurses were there around the clock, giving her insulin. But it wasn’t like a sickroom: everyone was very cheerful and so was Ann.

  —

  JAN IVAL: I worked as a butler and a chauffeur for Mrs. Warner for twelve years. I had a little house in the back, whose windows faced the hill, and you could see deer and coyotes. I come from a very distinguished Spanish family in Chile, much better than the Warners. Mrs. Warner loved that. She would tell stories about her youth on a Southern plantation, but I personally think she made them up. She acted her life like a scene from Gone with the Wind. She had an explosive character.

  We’d go out to dinner almost every night. Once we were driving to a little joint she had read about in the newspaper: it was a long way out of town, and she wanted to stop and ask for directions. I said, “We’re not lost, and I’m not going to stop.” So she opened the door of the car and tried to jump out. I had to grab her by one arm and pull her back in.

  In the beginning, she was afraid to have people see what she looked like. Then she saw that no one recognized her, so she didn’t care. Sometimes if it was a fancy restaurant or somewhere she didn’t want to give her name, I would make the reservation, and she would pass me money under the table to pay.

  One day we were driving down Third Street, and Mrs. Warner saw a man with a cook’s hat on. She said, “Look! There must be a restaurant somewhere.” So we drove back, and there was a little restaurant on the side street. It was kind of shabby and dark but very clean. Every table was taken, and there was a counter at the end with a display case full of chicken wings and mashed potatoes. Mrs. Warner told the man behind the counter that she wanted the chicken wings. He said, “You have to pay first.” So I went down to the register, and the woman said, “Let me see your Social Security card.” It was a welfare restaurant. So I went back to Mrs. Warner and dragged her out. She said, “But the food looked good, and the people looked so happy eating it.” And I told her, “Mrs. Warner, this is a welfare place where you have to leave your Social Security number, and I don’t think it would look right to have Mrs. Jack Warner eating here.” She said, “I want my wings.” So I took her to the car, went back in, passed over my Social Security card, paid a dollar, and took the wings out to her.

  When I was driving her to the hospital for the last time, we passed a little coffee shop and she said, “Let’s go in.” She ordered chili beans and they were very hot. There was a jug of cream for the coffee, and she poured it onto the beans. Then she said to me, “Maybe this is my last dinner.” She had humor, even though she knew that she wasn’t going to live very long.

  —

  LOUIS ROSNER: Mrs. Warner was at Cedars-Sinai in the intensive-care unit with a rare lung disease, and there was a point where the question was, “Is the case salvageable now?” and I wanted to keep fighting for her. But her daughter Barbara had signed a do-not-resuscitate order. So I talked to the doctor in charge, Dr. Mills, and protested it. But he felt that to put tubes in her throat and all of these things in her veins and to keep her respirator going would be torture.

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  JACK WARNER, JR.: When Ann died, in March 1990, there was an obituary in the Los Angeles Times. It was written by someone who had never known her, and they used a picture of some strange lady: I don’t know who the hell it was. So I phoned the obituary editor and asked, “Who’s that lady you had on Ann Warner’s obituary?” She said, “I don’t know.” “You’d better check, because it’s not her.” All she said was “Oh, my god.”

  —

  BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: A couple of months later, I went to visit Mother’s grave to see how everything looked. As I was driving out of the Jewish cemetery, I saw a chapel with a huge Nazi flag on it. I thought I was dreaming, and suddenly I felt a little scared, because the cemetery was completely deserted. So I drove around this chapel, and on the other side there were picnic tables and a film crew. They were shooting a movie, and they had just rented the building. I went back to the main office, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my life. I said, “I don’t care how much
money they’re giving you, you don’t let them desecrate a Jewish cemetery by hanging a Nazi flag!” At the same time, it was hilarious. It was better than a Mel Brooks movie.

  III

  JANE GARLAND

  22368 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu

  ED MOSES: In 1957, I was a graduate student at UCLA and I needed a gig to pick up some living money, so I went over to the job office for students. They had these little card files you’d pick through. I always looked in the medical section, in the crazy section, trying to find something intriguing. I was interested in anything that was more esoteric.

  There was one job that looked interesting. You had to report to the neuropsychiatric ward at UCLA and talk to a Dr. Judd Marmor, tell him your credentials and capabilities. I didn’t really know anything about him. I arranged to meet this guy and he explained the situation. There was a woman who had been in and out of mental institutions, but it was not a crisis situation and it was time for her to get out of the neuropsychiatric ward. Her history was described in very couched language. Dr. Marmor was giving me as little information as possible. I would be paid two dollars an hour or something like that, which was a good sum compared to any other job you could get at the time. He said, “This girl is very disturbed. Do you think you can handle taking her out to restaurants and staying at the family’s place in Malibu at night and on the weekends?” At that time they were experimenting with schizophrenics in England—instead of putting them into a lockup cell, they just let them out so they could socialize, go dancing, interact with the so-called real world. The theory was that if they were introduced to a “normal” or natural family structure by people who were paid to serve in that role, and who didn’t make a big deal about it and just did what the patients wanted to do, little by little they would hook up and move back into our reality.

  When I was in the navy during World War II, I was trained as a surgical technician at the San Diego naval hospital, and as part of the training I had to go through various medical areas—psychiatric, urology, general surgery, cranial surgery. I worked on four or five intercranial operations with the Gigli-saw drill and would drill holes in the head. I thought I was hot shit. I could scrub in with any of these guys and know what they were doing before they knew it themselves. I worked in the spinal meningitis ward for a while, and in every manner of ward. I had some slight experience with the psychiatric wards. I thought I knew a lot about everybody—who could better take care of the crazies and the weirdos that everybody else was scared of but me? So that’s where I came in. And my cohort, Walter Hopps, too. Sometimes he went by Chico. Only crazies like us could deal with the genuine crazies. I said, “Oh, sure, this is right up my alley.” Judd Marmor knew a sucker when he saw one.

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  CRAIG KAUFFMAN: I knew Ed Moses in college, and a bunch of other artists. You know, Walter and Billy Al Bengston and John Altoon and Bob Irwin, and—and so forth. John Mason and all those people. And then later, Ken Price. We were the guys who went to college—the art school kids. Maybe you know Walter made photographic collages. We would kind of go to the crummy areas, and he would take some photographs. There must have been fifty bars on Fifth Street back then. Bars and prostitutes in the bars and stuff. And in those days, there were sort of soft porn movies shown down on Main Street. We went to some of those. The girls really didn’t take their clothes off all the way. Maybe you saw their breasts. And Walter took some photographs in the theaters of these girls. And they were in some of his collages.

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  ED MOSES: I met Walter through Craig Kauffman, who was a painting student at UCLA at the same time I was. This was in the early fifties. Craig took me over to Syndell Studio, this little gallery that Walter and Jim Newman had opened with another guy named Ben Bartosh. There was this real pretty girl who worked there. Years later, she jumped off the edge mentally. She committed suicide and it was real tough on all of us. Craig and I both dated her; we all passed everybody around back then—we were very generous—but Jane Garland was never passed around. She was too spooky.

  Credit 3.1

  Ed Moses.

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  JIM NEWMAN: I knew Walter as Chico. We lived in the same dorm freshman year at Stanford. Walter was lean, maybe six feet tall, and wore dark-rimmed glasses. He stood straight and moved slowly but fluidly. He spoke with very carefully chosen words and phrases—actually, he spoke prose that wouldn’t have needed editing. He made you feel you were the most important person around.

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  WALTER HOPPS: I once knew a girl named Dominique. Dominique designed very trendy knitwear for Jax of Beverly Hills—do you remember that place?—and subsequently for customers such as Mrs. Lennie Hayton and Eva Marie Saint, on whom they were quite fetching. Dominique was a super knitter among other things, and she invented the whole style of little knitwear tops. During the Beat period some women wore sleeveless men’s undershirts with no bra or anything underneath, which was quite charming for those of us around. You got a pretty good free show, you know what I mean. Dominique was a high-spirited girl in my life in those years. She was dating a guy named Bob Jones who was a good amateur chess player and one day he would counsel me in my games with Marcel Duchamp.

  Anyway, Bob Jones also was a graduate student in psychology at UCLA, which I paid little attention to—he was Dominique’s boyfriend, always away, always busy with chess or with his graduate studies, and how all this got rolling was that I’d hear reports from Dominique from time to time that Bob had some kind of strange job that was keeping him away even more than usual. It also happened that an artist friend of mine, Ed Moses, who was around the university at the same time, began to speak to me about this amazing job he had. I was to learn it was the same job.

  Somehow Ed Moses was the connection to recruit young people who would serve as special psychiatric attendants to a very strange patient under highly unusual circumstances. Ed and Bob were restrained from talking about the patient in any great detail; they just referred to it as “the case.” Nevertheless, I learned enough from them to be very interested.

  For students in those years, the pay was terrific. Well, terrific was I suppose two or three dollars an hour. Ed said that I should meet the psychiatrist who was the head doctor on the case. He said there was a need for young men, not necessarily with any psychiatric attendant training or orderly background. I would be screened by a doctor in the UCLA psychiatric unit to see if I measured up, then I would learn more from there. The psychiatrist turned out to be Judd Marmor. I heard all sorts of things about him later on. It turned out that he was considered the most brilliant psychiatrist of his generation, and one of his major causes was to take homosexuality off the list of pathologies.

  Walter Hopps.

  I called Dr. Marmor, made an appointment, and early one evening I showed up at his house in Bel Air. A young man, his son, let me in. Dr. Marmor appeared and apologized for having been on the phone. We conducted our interview, and he explained the circumstances of the case and what might be expected. Then he also had me talk some about myself. Having known psychiatrists professionally and personally before this, I knew that I was being given a very sensitive screening indeed.

  My mother and father were both doctors. And for a period of time when I was a child, my mother was also very sick. My father told me she was going to die, and he took me in to see her in their bedroom. I remember her being unconscious or asleep in bed and the whiteness of it all. The terrible lesson of that for me was that my father had this kind of life-or-death control over all of us. And that seemed to give him powers beyond those that came with being a father, with being older and larger—all those things that are normal to any child. Doctors can fix your hurts and make you well, but I got a very vivid picture early on as to how he was, or seemed to be, in charge of the dying.