West of Eden

by Jean Stein

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  DR. BEATRIZ FOSTER: One very stormy day, after I’d gotten back from a vacation, Mary Jennifer didn’t come to her hour. And the next thing I knew I had a call from the morgue. Mary Jennifer’s mother was in Dallas because her father was dying in a hospital there. I called Norton and said to him, “There’s a mess here. The people from the morgue called me and told me she’s dead.” And Norton said, “Beatriz, don’t take this personally. You’re talking to somebody who had a son that did the same thing.” I said, “But I take it very personally.” He said, “I don’t want you to do anything with the morgue today. I’m going to take a plane to Texas right now.” So he went to Dallas. He found Jennifer at her hotel. Jennifer’s father was not expected to live long, and when Jennifer saw Norton she said, “Oh, don’t tell me, it’s happened.” He said to her, “Yes, but not what you think. It’s not your father.” At about three or four in the morning, Jennifer called and said, “Oh my god, Beatriz, what you must be going through.” And then we talked for a while. The fact that she would think about me in a situation like that, I’ll never forget that.

  Credit 4.9

  Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1976.

  I remember calling the morgue and asking if could I view the body. The guy said to me, “Lady, wake up. She fell twenty-two stories, how much do you think we have?” It was horrible. I had to go through all her clothes and all her stuff. I took them to my house, where Norton and Jennifer collected everything. I found her diary. Mary Jennifer had very specifically written that diary for me. I told Jennifer that I’d torn it up, and she took it very well.

  I remember how windy it was the day Mary Jennifer died. When I’d seen that her time for the appointment had come and she wasn’t there, I looked out and saw the wind and thought to myself, “There goes Mary Jennifer.” Those California winds, they’ll blow you away.

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  MARIN HOPPER: Soon after Mary Jennifer’s death, at the end of my first school year in Arizona with Michelle, Bob Walker’s daughter, Jennifer called. “You must come stay the summer at our house, because Norton and I are in Malibu.” So we got on a plane back to Los Angeles and it was all very happy. I think I had my fourteenth birthday at that time. Michelle and I stayed in the room that Mary Jennifer had stayed in. It had two twin beds. I would eat breakfast in the kitchen in the mornings with Michelle and Jennifer’s other grandchild, David. It was very seventies Beverly Hills feeling, casual in nature but sort of uptight. They had an eat-in kitchen facing the beach, and we’d all be there and suddenly Bobby would show up. He had kayaked in from Catalina Island, having conversations with the sea lions. Bobby was doing a lot of coke then. He was always very fit and doing lots of things, but he was not really present.

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  DENNIS HOPPER: It might have been a fantasy, but I seem to remember that Bobby Walker had a one-man submarine, and he decided to take it alone from Malibu to Catalina. He was later found three hours past Catalina. I don’t know how they found him. He must have surfaced or something, figured, I must be a little past it. I should have hit that place three hours ago. Anyway, he missed Catalina and was headed toward Hawaii in his one-man submarine. When they found him by helicopter, finally got him and turned him around and got him back to Catalina, he called me and he said, “Dennis, I’m gonna get a two-man submarine, and I want you to go with me.” I said, “Bobby, don’t waste your money. I don’t think I’m really gonna—” “No, no, you’re gonna love it. Listen man, I just had a little miscalculation. That’s all. Don’t worry, we’ll hit it this time. You’ll be with me.” And I said, “Bobby, I don’t really think I’ll be going on this trip.”

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  BRODRICK DUNLAP: Between our house and the Simons’ house was a walkway, and we had an outside bathroom, a beach bathroom, with louvered windows. One day one of their kids opened up the louvered window by taking one of the louvers out and then filled the toilet with buckets of sand brought through the window, just being kids, mischievous, you know. So I open the door and here’s all of this sand filling our toilet, and I go, what? I look down the beach and I see these footprints going back over to the Simons’ house. So I knock on the door and tell Jim, their houseman, “The grandchildren just filled our bathroom with sand.” Mrs. Simon was there, opening some new art, but when she hears me complaining about the grandchildren, she runs in and says, “How dare you say that my grandchildren would do that!” And I say, “I want someone to come and clean it up.” So she rushes into the packing room, or whatever, picks up a claw hammer, and starts coming at me with it. Jim, the houseman, jumps between us and says, “Rick, it’s time for you to go home, you better get out of here.”

  We had a big storm once, and a bunch of debris washed up on the beach. A dead dolphin had washed in, and Norton walked out to see it. And then I got a call from one of his house people, saying, “Will you meet Mr. Simon on the beach? He wants to ask you a question.” So I say okay, whatever, and I walk over and he’s standing there and he says, “Is that a shark or a dolphin? Is that a shark?” I go, “No, it’s a dolphin.” He says, “How do you tell?” And I said, “Because it’s got a long nose, and…well, it’s got a lot of teeth. It’s a dolphin.” A dead animal was on the beach, and he wanted to make sure it was a dolphin, not a shark.

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  MARIN HOPPER: One night Michelle and I were having dinner with Jennifer and I said, “Michelle and I are taking tennis lessons, and we have a crush on this tennis pro.” We were sort of giggling about it at dinner. And Jennifer said, “Well, girls, I have an idea. It’s going to be hard for me to do, because you know I see my therapist Milton Wexler every single day, but I’ve thought a lot about it, I think I’m going to give Michelle and you one session out of my week with him, and in that session, you girls are going to talk to him about sexual education. Milton is going to explain everything to you, sexual, everything, because I’m not going to explain it to you. Everything you want to know, you’re going to talk to Milton about, but not to me, to Milton.” I was so excited. Jennifer said, “Marin, I’m going to call your mother, Brooke, and make sure she knows that I’m going to send you for one session.” I was so excited and thrilled to be taking up an hour of Jennifer’s time with Milton. Jennifer had told me how much Milton meant to her. I’d heard how she had seen him for years and years. I knew that we, Michelle and I, had to get the most out of it. I was deeply curious as to what we were going to talk about. I couldn’t wait to hear his stories.

  Jennifer got up a little earlier that day Michelle and I had the appointment with Milton so she could drive us there. It was a big deal because you normally never saw Jennifer before eight o’clock at night. It was her hour with Milton, which she had never given up to anyone. Michelle and I dressed up. Jennifer was famous for getting to Milton without her hair done. She would go covered in a scarf with dark glasses. The valet would take her car downstairs in the dark parking lot and she’d take the elevator straight up to his office so she didn’t have to be seen. But that day she also got dressed up and waited downstairs in her little Mercedes coupe, the car still running.

  I asked Milton a lot of questions, and he said, “Well, first of all, let me tell you, this is how you get a man. I just want you to know about Pamela Harriman.” He was very up-front. I don’t think you gave names, even in those days. He said, “Jennifer Jones was once in a restaurant with her husband, David Selznick. This was in the 1940s or 1950s. And Pamela walked in with someone very handsome and very promising. Jennifer felt very naïve and said to David, ‘Well, gee, you know she’s always with the most handsome and the most dashing and attractive men, and yet she’s not that beautiful, and she’s not a movie star, she doesn’t have that kind of beauty, David. What is it about that woman that she can get any man she wants?’ And he said, ‘She doesn’t take her eyes off of him the entire time she’s with him. She looks at him the entire time. She orders for them both and takes total care of them, but never takes her eyes off of him.’ ” That was Milton’s big stor
y for me.

  Then I got a little racy and I said to him things like, “Well, what do you do in bed?” And he’s like, “Well, there are three kinds of women. One is a policewoman who tells the man exactly what he should be doing: a little here, a little there. She’s very controlling. And you definitely don’t want to be like that!” I remember I was like, “Okay, don’t be too bossy in bed.” And I said, “Well, tell me about a man’s penis.” Michelle was in a coma. I think she was in such shock that her grandmother had brought her to this man. He said, “Okay,” and he drew us a diagram! He showed us the most sensitive points, where to touch exactly. He was very instructive, very medical about it. And I remember saying, “Tell me exactly where that is.” And he showed us on the diagram. Michelle was so embarrassed. I was asking so many questions, and I said, “Thank you very much. It’s been wonderful talking with you.” And I left with that diagram in my bag. I don’t know if I showed it to Jennifer or not but I think I took it home.

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  BOB WALKER: Marin Hopper and Michelle were early teenagers when Mom sent them to see Milton to have a talk about sex. So Milton said to Mother, “I’ll see them on condition you don’t ask me any questions afterwards.” And of course, she couldn’t help it. She started digging. She was bursting at the seams to know what they were told. “What did they talk about?” But Milton said, “They knew more about this subject than I ever will know.”

  I think Mom needed Milton. And she loved him. At some point, Frank Gehry, Julie Andrews, Blake Edwards, Sally Kellerman, Bud Cort, and Mom, among others, were all in group therapy with Milton. Mother used to say to him, “Milton, I’m your only patient that never graduated.”

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  MILTON WEXLER: People in the film world gravitated to me one way or another. I don’t have a clue as to how it mounted, but gradually I started meeting directors and actors and some of them joined my group. A lot of them, you know, were fairly well known. So the whole thing started to spread. And then they began to put stuff in the newspaper that was irritating to me. “Analyst to the stars” and crap like that. I wasn’t an analyst to the stars. There were a couple people that were star quality, I guess, but you know, it wasn’t as if the stars in Hollywood were flocking to me.

  I found the group sessions quite extraordinary. I knew nothing about it all when I organized my first group with painters and sculptors and people like that. I had successfully treated John Altoon for schizophrenia because of my research on that sickness at Menninger’s, so I suddenly had a reputation in the art world. The trouble was artists don’t pay their bills, and I was becoming bankrupt. So I said, “Fellas, I can’t do this anymore. We’ve got to do something different. We’ve got to form a group.” I created my own process, my own techniques, my own everything. I was quite flabbergasted by the results. The artists were such fun. Even though everybody loved everybody, they were scathingly critical of each other. There was something about their warring that seemed to produce some kind of creativity. At one point I said to them, “The competition is so keen that you’re all paranoid killers.” The dynamic was extraordinary. I would allow anything in group—yes, I would allow anything. But then of course in that kind of group, no matter whether an attack was justified or cruel, the attacker would be immediately attacked back. And I would make sure to call on somebody who would take up the cudgel to say this kind of cruelty was not acceptable. I did not have to become a participant. It was a wonderful laboratory to observe human behavior and the human interactions.

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  BOB WALKER: I remember at one of those sessions at Milton’s office on Roxbury Drive, a man came in with a gun. Half of Hollywood, old Hollywood, is sitting there. The man didn’t bother Mom, didn’t ask for her rings or anything, but he robbed the other folks. She remembered that she tried not to stare at him. She never made eye contact. She became invisible and extremely cool. She said she’d remembered something that I had said: “I’m in the ocean, in my kayak, but I’m not worried about the sharks ’cause I can neutralize them.” Somehow she got that into her head, and so she was just in there thinking, What would Bobby do in this situation? He would neutralize the shark. So she became extremely calm and got through it fine. But that’s not what I meant. Neutralizing the shark is about coming to terms with the fear that’s within you. That’s actually the shark you want to neutralize, the shark of fear. And the way to do that is to embrace it. I’m sure Milton was a picture of calm and reason. He was that kind of person.

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  SALLY KELLERMAN: There were twelve or so of us, and we’d meet for about two hours at around seven at night on Thursdays. I remember I had on a pink off-the-shoulder sundress because when I walked into group, and everybody said, “Oh, you look so beautiful tonight. Oh my gosh, Sally, you really look great.”

  Ira Barmak, a producer, was there that night, just back from Mexico. He was talking about his moon ring, which had something to do with some guy that he was seeing. And he also had a loaner watch, because his watch was being repaired and there was some problem. So there was a lot of discussion about all this. And suddenly there’s a knock at the door. Milton says just, “I’ll be right back,” and he goes out to this little anteroom outside. He’s gone for several minutes, and we’re all laughing, making comments about why he was taking so long. And somebody says, “Maybe it’s a robbery.” And then Milton comes back into the room with a brand-new briefcase. He puts it on a table in the middle of the room, and he says very calmly, “Put all of your money and your wallets in there.” I’m thinking to myself, What are you up to now, Milton? What are we gonna learn from this now? And suddenly a guy whirls around the open door with a gun that looked huge. In my mind, I see him wearing a three-colored hat, like a beanie, from the Middle East. He was black and dressed all in black. And he says, “Put every dollar and penny you have in that bag. If I find one penny on you, you’re dead.” I dug through the bottom of my purse, ripping out the lining and taking every penny. And I never looked up, because I thought I was looking so beautiful that night that if I looked up, that he would kill me. One person took off their ring and sat on it. Somebody else took a hundred dollars out of their wallet and did something similar. In those situations, you don’t really think you’re going to be the one to be shot. I was sure that I was going to lose some friends that night. It was really scary. After I had thrown everything in, I just sat there.

  Ira Barmak, the guy with the moon ring, decided to stare him down. So the mugger says, “You. Get up here. Give me that ring and that watch.” Now remember, we had Donna O’Neill there, whose husband owned all of Orange County. We had Jennifer Selznick Simon. And people actually risked their lives to sit on a hundred-dollar bill or a ring. I was just amazed. We’re all sitting there sure that someone’s going be shot. And then the mugger says, “Okay, I’m gonna go now. And you don’t move out of this room or I’ll kill you.” And Milton says, very calmly, “Well, how long should we wait?” The guy whirls the gun around to Milton, and he says, “Are you fucking kidding? You want me to shoot you or something?” And Milton goes, “No, I just—” “Well, you better shut up.” I was sure he was going to kill Milton. And he left the room. It was so scary. But that evening sure cured us. Nothing bothered us anymore. The moon ring, the watch—all those seemingly important issues weren’t so important anymore. We sat there for the longest time, chagrined at the shallowness with which we’d been dealing that night with our lives.

  The next night, all of us met at a hotel to talk about everything. Everybody had something different they were feeling and saying. Milton was intrigued by people’s reactions. What I remember most was Jennifer saying, teary eyed, that she had nothing to give the robber. She had no jewels and no money in her purse. She had nothing to give the robber. And that worried her.

  We all had to give our reports to the police. I reported seeing a three-colored hat, but other people didn’t see a hat at all. They never found the guy, but it did get in the press. And here’s what it said: “Ninet
y-eight dollars’ worth of jewelry was taken.” I think if the guy ever found out who was really there, he would have shot himself to think of what he could have walked away with.

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  BUD CORT: Milton was like a myth in Hollywood. I don’t know how Jennifer met up with him, but she covered the waterfront and it wouldn’t have taken her long to figure out who was the guru of whatever she was investigating. The first time I met her was at one of Milton’s various benefits for his Hereditary Disease Foundation. The Song of Bernadette had been a seminal movie for me. And then the more I watched Jennifer’s work, the more I realized that she had a divine madness. You could see what a tender, vulnerable creature she was onscreen. Being her friend was like being friends with a unicorn. And to be in the movie business, it’s completely schizophrenic. Every second you’re on the set, you’re touched, you’re mauled. It’s like a molestation. We ended up in Milton’s group together. Milton was a doll. He filled a gaping hole in my being. I’m an actor. You know what I mean?

  I didn’t know Norton that well at all. But I remember sitting down next to him at a dinner one night at his home in Malibu. He said, “What are you doing sitting next to me? This is supposed to be boy-girl, boy-girl.” And I said, “You’re just being a fuddy-duddy.” I’d never had a father, so I wasn’t too great with guys. Bob Altman heard our exchange and said to me, “Don’t you know there’s a secret to getting along with everybody? You just make believe that they’re all on acid. Then it’s easy not to take anything too personally.” Norton and I ended up talking, and I thought he was great.