by Jean Stein
DAWN WALKER: I had never had a migraine headache until the first time I met Michael. He was such a tortured soul, and it was so apparent. Poor thing, he could overthink everything. Whatever life brings us, Bobby’s attitude was process it and move on, and Michael’s was hang on to it at all cost. I personally can’t imagine spending that amount of energy in misery on purpose. But I did see his brilliance even in the craziness. I thought he was terribly funny, and his costumes never ceased to amaze me. When one was expected to turn up looking somewhat dressed, Michael would want to turn up just the opposite, just for the shock value. We’d be meeting at the Bel-Air Hotel for lunch with Jennifer on Father’s Day or something, and Michael would show up in a baseball cap and his plastic bag from the 99 Cent Store in his hands, and his jeans all torn up, and all sweaty from chasing the bus because he wouldn’t let anybody pick him up. He didn’t want to bother us.
Jennifer described the two brothers as Nickel Pickle and the Joy Boy, because Michael was always a little bit of a sourpuss, and Bobby was just always on to the next thing. Michael idolized Bobby. Bobby was his hero. And when their dad died, Bobby really became his everything. He really loved him. Like, I would never say this to Michael’s daughter, Amy, but the only thing Michael ever loved was Bobby.
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BOB WALKER: All those years in the Valley, Michael really lived the life of a recluse. A good part of Michael’s time was spent in an apartment closed in with his demons. His mind was always racing a million miles a minute, navigating emotional labyrinths with minefields everywhere. It was a horror in a way. I can see how you would feed on that and begin to identify with your pain and your suffering so much that you don’t want it to go away. You want to have these problems, because they are who you are. For instance, long ago Michael shaved his head. He did it to bug Mother, who loved his long hair. And he used to cut his eyelashes. He had long, long eyelashes, and he thought they were girl’s eyelashes. People always commented about how beautiful they were, but he thought they were making fun of him. So he used to cut those, too.
He was most comfortable with street people and people he’d meet at AA meetings and other self-help groups. He was like a professional goer to these self-help groups. And it kept him sober. He was uncomfortable with the educated, I think, even though he’d had an education and he was very smart.
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AMY WALKER WAGNER: My dad had the money to take care of himself. He had insurance. He chose the way he lived, and he chose the way he took care of himself. I mean, he had money to pay for his apartment but he lived very modestly, and he didn’t have a lot of things and didn’t want a lot of things. But he had enough money to pay for his living expenses. And I’ve always felt that if he didn’t have that, he probably would have been homeless. I could see the mental state that he was in, at times, and he couldn’t have taken care of himself. Fortunately he had a lot of financial sense, and he was very good at saving money. It was funny. On his death certificate, Dawn had to fill in something for occupation. Dad never liked to be associated with acting as his occupation. So she put down “finance.”
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BOB WALKER: Eventually his body started breaking down. One day the phone rang and it was Michael calling from the hospital, saying, “They told me I should call somebody in my family because they are going to operate tomorrow.” He had been in the hospital ten days and didn’t call us. He had collapsed in the courtyard of his apartment, and the neighbors had taken him to the hospital. The neighbors told me they wanted to call us, but Michael said, “No, don’t call them, don’t bother them.” Like Mother, he didn’t want to bother anybody. He had been really sick, and he was trying to self-medicate. He thought he just had a cold, but his lungs had collapsed. And he had severe emphysema and severe osteoporosis. He was all bent over towards the end, just terrible.
We brought him home after he left the hospital. But he just wasn’t able to abide by our one rule: be kind to Mom. He was aware that she was descending more and more into dementia, and that might have depressed him. And maybe he felt that now he’d never be able to make his peace with her.
We went through a lot with her dementia, but we were able to handle it all, because we all felt a lot of love for her. And even though we wanted to have Michael at our home, he wasn’t able to be kind to her. If she would say, “Hey, Michael, how are you?” he would ignore her completely. He just would almost freeze in place and not react. And while Mom wasn’t aware of Michael’s illness, she was aware that he was being rude to her. At one point she said, “Don’t talk to your mother like that.” So I finally told him that this kind of behavior was not acceptable. He was sick, in really bad shape, but when I said that, he marched out of the house. He must have felt like he was a kid again, back fifty years, being controlled and judged by Mom, under her scrutiny, or maybe even not being loved as much as I was. I followed him out and said, “I appreciate your problems, and I’ll talk to you as much as you wanna talk about it. But we have to be kind to one another and acknowledge one another as being part of this experiment here.” But he kept on walking and somehow got a bus to take him back to his apartment. This was a man on his last legs. He lived probably another year afterwards in that hovel.
I don’t think he ever had a moment’s peace, even after he moved to the assisted living home. The angst and the worry and the anxiety and the fears were all there. And memories. The last time I saw him he was lying on his back, looked near death even then, although I was in denial. His arms were literally thinner than a banana. And every day he seemed to get weaker and weaker. He was eating properly at last, but for years he had been malnourished. I remember him sitting at the table on Thanksgiving a year earlier and what teeth he had starting to crumble in his mouth. He sat there with his teeth in his hands and a look on his face like “What’s happening to me?” He had smoked three, four packs of cigarettes a day, and at the end he started popping cough drops instead of smoking cigarettes. And he lost weight every day. It finally got to the point where he didn’t even have the strength to lift a spoon to feed himself.
We got a call at three in the morning. He must have felt a heart attack coming and reached for the cord to call someone and tumbled out of bed. He must have gone right away. It suddenly hit him. He just got so weak that he just couldn’t go on anymore. I think he had a serious infection. He’d had all his teeth pulled three weeks earlier, all twenty-three of his teeth, because he hadn’t seen a dentist in forty years. And then he just seemed slowly to go down, down, down, down, down. I was with him two days before he died. One of the last things he said to me, tongue in cheek, was, “This has got to be my punishment for being a lapsed Catholic.”
But now he’s free. After he died, we scattered his ashes on a hill at Point Dume overlooking the ocean. It’s so peaceful. And he is there with the lizards and the wind and the breezes and the rain and the crows calling.
One of my best memories of Michael is from when we were traveling up to Utah. I was coming down off of I don’t know what, I was getting sober again, one of my Robert Downey episodes. I went up there to rehab myself. I don’t know what Michael was doing. He was probably sober. But I remember there was this wonderful hot spring on the Virgin River up in Utah in a town called Hurricane. Pah Tempe Hot Springs. The water was just the right temperature. We painted ourselves with mud there, me and Michael, and this was the most natural, the most real, probably one of the best times of his whole life, I think. He went out painted with mud and walked in the hills with a stick.
Credit 4.10
Michael Walker.
Then he came running down the hill like something out of one million B.C. It was almost like you expected dinosaurs to crest the ridge behind him. Like he was running from the cave bears. He came down like such a wonderful savage.
Two years after Michael’s death, Mother was near the end of her life. It was costing five hundred dollars a month to get her Porthault sheets ironed and pressed. We finally set up a table in the garage, where D
awn ironed sheets. But eventually even the last remaining sheets didn’t get ironed. Mom was way beyond that.
For three days just before she passed, she lay there with her eyes closed. She’d seen enough in her ninety, almost ninety-one years. She’d taken enough in and she was finished. She was even finished with eating, she just didn’t want to eat anymore. So she just breathed and listened to the kirtan music and to us. About fifteen minutes before she left, her breathing got more gentle. She’d been breathing rapidly for about three days, but then it slowed, and then her eyes opened finally. I had my hand underneath her hand. I was right by her head and she just passed in this gentle beauty. We’ll always carry that with us. Her breath just slowed to a gentle, soft whisper, and then no more breath, no more breathing, and that flutter in her wrist like a butterfly.
Colleen, her nurse, and Dawn dressed her in white and put little white flower petals in her hair, just gorgeous. Bud Cort had given her a rosary, which she was wearing, and some water from Lourdes and a silly ten-inch plastic Jesus that changed colors.
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DAWN WALKER: I made arrangements at a little place called Conejo Mountain Funeral Home in Camarillo. They sent a van to pick up Jennifer, and they took care of all the paperwork that goes along with cremation. They called me when things were ready, and Colleen and I went there. While they were getting everything ready, we waited in a little room next door. We made a little altar on which we put roses, chocolates, photographs of Michael and Bobby and Jennifer’s parents, one of Bobby’s purple handkerchiefs, the water from Lourdes, and candles. Before they sent her into the oven, we wrapped her in beautiful red cashmere blankets and we put a Virgin of Guadalupe pillow next to her. We took the water from Lourdes, two bottles, and we poured it on her, along with rose and lavender water. We kissed her, told her we loved her, and we sent her in. While we waited, we had a little kirtan music going in the background on an iPhone, and we talked about all of the events of the last six years. They brought us her ashes in a bag. I had brought the box that had held Michael’s ashes. It had his name on one end of the box and hers on the other.
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BRODRICK DUNLAP: Norton’s first house is owned now by Arnon Milchan, a big wheel in financing in Hollywood. Haim Saban is next door, in the Garland house. He turned it into a fortress. Malibu today is no longer the town that I grew up in. In the old Malibu, we had a hardware store, we had a lumberyard, we knew the doctor, everyone in town knew each other. If I walked down the street and my car broke down, someone would pull over and pick me up. I’d go to the shopping center for lunch, and I’d know everybody there. They’d know my kids and everyone would say hello. We all rode our motorcycles up and down the beach, and no one cared. The beach was so very different back then.
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WALTER HOPPS: I would be remiss if I didn’t recount the surreal twist of fate having to do with the last day of Bobby Kennedy’s life, which he spent in Malibu. A few years before the Frankenheimers sold their beach house to Norton Simon, they volunteered it to Bobby Kennedy toward the end of his campaign. That afternoon, one of the Kennedy children got caught in the surf—it was rough out there—and Bobby went in to save him and scraped his forehead a little bit. So Mr. Frankenheimer got some of his wife’s makeup and fixed it so it wouldn’t show when he gave his speech later that evening.
As the story goes, after the Kennedy boy was pulled from the surf, Grace Garland invited the children to swim in her pool next door. Before leaving for the Ambassador Hotel, Bobby and Ethel Kennedy went over to thank Grace, and she, knowing that they had a menagerie of pets at their house in Virginia, gave them a monkey, a spider monkey named Mr. Magoo. The monkey had belonged to Jane Garland. It was an impossible, miserable critter to give to anyone, and Grace gave it to the Kennedys.
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BRODRICK DUNLAP: The Kennedys went off to the speech and never came back. Everyone was gone. They left behind a little spider monkey with a rope stretched between two trees so it could go back and forth. I remember seeing the monkey in the tree for a couple of days. And then one day the monkey was gone.
V
THE STEINS
1330 Angelo Drive, Beverly Hills
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The entrance to Misty Mountain.
JEAN STEIN: I still remember listening at night to the cries of coyotes around our family house, which was known as Misty Mountain. It was built by Wallace Neff during Prohibition for Fred Niblo, the director of the first Ben-Hur. Its site high up in Beverly Hills led me to imagine as a child that we were far removed from town. Even then I had the sense that my world was make-believe. I recall my mother boasting that Orson Welles had come to the house with Dolores del Rio and praised it by saying, “This place reminds me of Berchtesgaden.” In the mid-thirties when Katharine Hepburn lived there, she had to fend off snakes in the living room—or so I was told.
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FIONA SHAW: Up there, you couldn’t believe you were in Los Angeles; you were in Connecticut, or wherever you wanted to be. But of course as soon as you came out on the patio behind the house and looked down at the city, you thought you were in heaven, looking down at earth. Because it certainly had nothing to do with whatever was happening down there. And it was weirdly human scale. It was kind of a villa more than a castle. And there were a few castles around. You looked out the windows, there was a castle over here and a castle over there. And if you looked down from the house, it was two minutes as the crow flies to where the Sharon Tate house was. That’s a dubious bit of history: “Sharon Tate was murdered just over there.” Then the neighbors were worried about their dogs because they’d be eaten by mountain lions. So it was like, “Mountain lion over here, Sharon Tate over there.”
It was a Spanish crescent house. Semicircular. And it looked deceptively low-rise. There was a floor underground, and as I understand, after dinner the guests would go downstairs, where there was a screening room and a bar. Much of the entertaining went on down there. And then outside, it had hedged square gardens, which is my idea of complete heaven. I want to die in a walled garden.
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The view from Misty Mountain.
And then beyond the gardens there was a tennis court, surrounded only by canyons. You know, you could sort of feel Katharine Hepburn wearing some marvelous flannels, going ping with her racket.
I saw photographs of Jean’s parents, and—you know, Bette Davis, whoever was at the parties on certain evenings. There were more photographs of all of them downstairs in the bar adjoining the playroom looking absolutely gorgeous, these women wearing tiny threaded fabrics with very scooped fretwork on their evening dresses, so that you realize when they said, “Come to a party and hang out,” that they were having these incredibly stylish parties on a Friday or Saturday night.
Very exciting that the level of evening dress was early nineteenth century right into the twentieth century. It wasn’t just people in flannels doing a lot of hands in pockets. People were really stylishly dressed. Of course, they all had martinis coming out of their ears. And then beyond the bar, there was a door that led to an exit for a fast escape in case of a raid.
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Bette Davis and newsman Harry Crocker in the living room.
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From left to right: Frances Goldwyn (Mrs. Sam Goldwyn), Mary Lee Fairbanks (Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks), Jules Stein, and Kitty Miller (Mrs. Gilbert Miller) in the screening room downstairs in the 1940s.
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JEAN STEIN: During the Second World War, my parents set up the secret room behind the bar as a kind of bunker, a bomb shelter, in case the Nazis…
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FIONA SHAW: Came and got them. You’d grab a bottle of whiskey and just go behind your door, and you’d be gone. The bar had this high, high red leather back, sort of like being in a railroad station bar of the 1930s. And it was a tiny bar, and you know, it was a place where you’d just sit and you’d drink. Obviously top secret, or whatever you wanted to be.
&n
bsp; —
DAVID “PREACHER” EWING: You remember before the house was sold you asked if I’d take pictures in the abandoned pavilion? By then it was in ruins, with vines growing in through the broken windows. This place, just ten feet away from the manicured lawn, was all withered so it was like the lost childhood. I had the feeling, like, did some horrible event take place there that everyone wanted to forget about? I mean, did somebody catch somebody having an affair there? Like, we don’t talk about this, we don’t think about this; we don’t tear it down because it doesn’t exist.
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JEAN STEIN: I preferred it as a ruin. One of Preacher’s photographs showed a rusty Electrolux vacuum cleaner laid to rest behind the soda fountain.
I asked Father one day why he didn’t keep up the pavilion. It was just the two of us sitting on the patio. He looked far off into the distance, and he said, “Well, the children grew up and went away.”
After my parents died, my half brother had the pavilion torn down one day when I was away, because he thought its condition would hurt the real estate value of the property.
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BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: I remember walking up to the lawn that led to the pool with the carousel horses. I used to adore the ice cream parlor. I loved the pavilion. I remember meeting Elizabeth Taylor there once as a little girl. We were sitting on the lawn. And she’d just done National Velvet.
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WILLIAM EGGLESTON: I was wandering around the gardens. Didn’t know where I was either. I didn’t know the place—you led me around, you were my guide. I remember one beautiful night. I stayed late at the house, ’cause I think I’d had a couple of drinks. And I was probably waiting on Barney, the houseman, to take me back to the Chateau Marmont. It is a beautiful memory. You wanted to take a dip. So, next thing I knew I was in a lounge chair out there looking over the pool, you know? And you appeared wet in this—you were really good looking in this bathing suit. I don’t know where we ended up that night. It might have been the night when I was going with you to Joan Didion’s.
