Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

by Robert Stone

  These calls came from friends of mine, who enjoyed in the frisson of hearing their old pal apparently ensconced in moguldom, on the other side of a secretary who sounded like Irene Dunne. The project went on location into the New Orleans kind of heat where it was too hot to think. This was just as well for me. For many reasons—principally an utterly unsuccessful attempt to graft one or two (at least two) incompatible elements—the thing in progress slid between incoherency and the nearest equivalent cliché. The novel aspired to a certain poetry and was made of words. The movie WUSA came out looking like such a novel rendered as a very indif- ferent episode of Matlock. There are almost enough unintentional laughs in WUSA, the movie to which I myself allegedly reduced A Hall of Mirrors, to make its history seem funny even to me. Almost but not quite, con- sidering it provided me with enough regrets to fuel one lifetime’s worth of insomnia. Not to mention aggregate hours of boredom and disappointment inflicted as punishment on an innocent audi- ence. All I can say by way of apology is that I suffered too. I should also say that the responsibility for the general badness of it was not the fault of the actors, who worked very hard for a cause we all be- lieved in. To people who were moved by the book and felt betrayed by the film, I offer my very real regret and my apologies. I felt badly about it, still do. And I suffer with that audience as its numbers grow in tiny increments, year after year, in spongy-carpeted motels in the middle of the night, as relentlessly (but not nearly relentlessly enough for anybody’s profit and certainly not enough for mine) the film is shown on television. When I see it go on, I and others like me, who know what happens next, can simply turn it off. With this in mind, let me take a minute to warn some of the prime green: remembering the sixties 197

  writers who may later be in the same situation. Remember that as gray dawn finds the last paperback edition of your lovely book, its covers gone, its endpapers (with all the nice quotes from reviews) shredding, the embarrassing movie with which you provided the world (and which all your readers think of as a cop-out) will still be opening for the daily farm report on every functioning television screen at the Parsi-run Motel 6 in Weed, later that afternoon to be watched with increasing incomprehension by the Panamanian maid. A Hollywood joke of what might be called the “Manson period”: You’re in Hollywood, you’re walking the streets, you’ve eaten noth- ing but bananas (what else?) for four days. As you droop at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, a long black limousine pulls up beside you. The door opens: a fat man with short arms emerges. He’s wearing a beret and jodhpurs and there’s a cigarette holder between his lips. He’s definitely in the movies. He’s holding a sandwich and he says, “Hey, kid.” Your attention is arrested. The sandwich is a very tasty-looking California sandwich, full of good things, like avocado and water- cress. And you know somehow that it’s not just nourishment, but maybe...a career! “You want this?” asks the Hollywood man. “It’s yours!” You’re so hungry. It’s been days. You couldn’t face another banana even if you had one. You reach out. You reach out joyfully. Just at the moment when you’re about to take it, you notice that, so incon- spicuously, on one corner, there’s a virtually infinitesimal but unar- guably present teeny dab of shit. Naturally you hesitate. You stay your hand, you consider. Then, greedily, you seize the thing. You’re thinking: “I’ll eat around it.” 198 robert stone

  One day everything changed. One afternoon Janice and I were smoking dope with a couple of actors, a married couple, around our age. They were friends of John Wayne’s and often appeared in his westerns, and they observed that he would not have approved of their smoking gage. The wife had been to the beach, where she said she had seen two animals fighting. “What kind of animals?” I asked her, picturing, I suppose, Ko- diak bears or elephant seals. “I think...I think,” ventured the stoned lovely, “I think they were winkles.” Everyone watched in leaden-eyed tolerance while I rolled around the fuzzy rug, convulsed. It was the funniest line I had ever heard in my life. Forty minutes later, when I had suppressed my last yak, we went outside to look over Benedict Canyon. It was the kind of Los Angeles summer day that Nathanael West could de- scribe with such exquisitely turned admiration and loathing. Sumptuous, sensual, euphorbia-scented. Hummingbirds sipped nectar. “That’s the house,” the young woman who had seen the animals said. The four of us stood and looked down at an attractive greenswarded property on Cielo Drive in Bel-Air. I had stopped laughing. For quite a while we stood and looked at it. Everyone had to have a look. I was walking into the coffee shop of the Beverly Hills Hotel the next day, and a couple of women who worked in the gift shop were in close converse. One listened openmouthed and pale. The other, the speaker, said her husband was a deputy and had been to the house. He had seen awful things there and had been unable not to tell her. “He said it looked like a fag murder,” the deputy’s wife said. prime green: remembering the sixties 199

  I filed the line away, never to use it, but her story sort of spoiled my day. I went back to the Chateau to do a joint with Janice. “Where did you get the dope?” she asked. “Did you buy some?” It was Jay Sebring’s dope, and he had given it to me at a party. Jay Sebring, who had named himself after the Florida seaside raceway, was now dead, a victim of the Mansonites. He had been a hairdresser from New Jersey, had reinvented himself in the Hollywood style, a nice man. He was a friend of Abigail Folger, a woman I knew a lit- tle. Abigail was born to ride in pursuit of those boars up in the Carmel Valley, as beautiful a flower of California as grew. Her wealth came from coffee. She was intelligent and kind and as classy as could be. She spent a lot of time volunteering with children in Watts. Many people say they will never forget what she was like, what her smile was like, until the young nonconformists eviscerated her to write misunderstood Beatles lyrics in blood on the wall of the house on Cielo Drive. It was saturnalia time in Hollywood, a very grim feast of the meaningless. The youngsters disappeared from the boulevard as though the bad father of the feast had eaten them. For some time Manson went uncaught and the police put out false leads. Before his capture, the most extraordinary speculations as to motive and perpe- trator went around. The most unsettling involved the number of people who suspected one another of having a hand in the murders. This included famous people who used not to do such things. Then the Manson Family went down, and the theorizing and the interpretation exfoliated. Nixon had done it. Why? To embarrass the antiwar movement. A well-known person offered a theory that naval intelligence had killed the victims, which I personally re- sented. A droll speculation, that one, because it involved the CNO, 200 robert stone

  old Mormon Admiral Moorer, reviving the Phineas Priesthood and sending forth the assassins, all in the name of victory in Vietnam. Fear appeared in a handful of dust. When the bearded trolls and their consorts were run out of town, fear remained. People hired bodyguards. At one house (I swear) the protection would follow a swimmer doing laps up and down the length of the swimming pool, admittedly a very long one. One movie person claimed she had fired her security when the man asked if he could come inside and play the piano. “I’d just as soon... you know.” Indeed. Something over five years after the John F. Kennedy assassination, and the event had something of the same resounding emptiness. Hollywood is a self-referential place and then as now it was full of rise and fall and blighted hopes, anger, disappointment, dope, and toadying and jealousy. Everything except maybe good sex. Suddenly something happens that makes everything even less sensible and significant than before, the total nothingness at the heart of thing- ness explodes in front of you. Not everyone’s a philosopher. Never did the lights go on so fast and the glitz come off the columns and the glass balls shatter as in the wake of a couple of murders. Things could not be made to be the same. There was an earth- quake, really—a small one, but we felt it at Oblath’s. A number of people who were friends or acquaintances of Kesey passed through town. Kesey’s credo was that nothing human was alien to him, and most folks were close enough. Ken’s friends, a wandering band known as the Hog Farm, had coalesced
around a cultural figure who called himself Wavy Gravy. Wavy had once been a café poet in New York and had followed the sixties trail to Califor- nia, where some transcendent experience had provided him with a prime green: remembering the sixties 201

  renewed identity and new name. One of the stories current about him was that he had been cashiered from the comedy troupe the Committee for appearing for a show in a tweed jacket with salami arm patches. The Hog Farmers were fine young people for all I ever knew, but it was bruited about that they spent some time out at the Spahn Movie Ranch with the Mansonites. Me, I was a friend of Ke- sey’s, too, a friend of a friend of Richard Baba Ram Dass Alpert, who had bum-tripped me back when. Alpert was the ex-colleague of Timothy Leary, who knew everyone and had connections with the Brotherhood of Eternal Life, who were considered heavy. And con- nections proliferated. Leary’s “archivist” was my NYU and Paris pal Michael, the man who would go on to become the father of a beauti- ful movie star, although this was naturally unknown at the time. We were smoking Jay Sebring’s dope, and so on and so on. As the summer of 1969 lengthened, there was a whole lot of shav- ing going on in Los Angeles. Good-humored tolerance of the neo- bohemian scene was suspended, and whatever it was was not funny. Fear inhibited. We decided to go back to England. Life was sane, sort of, and rela- tively predictable. Before setting out for London we went to what might be called a farewell party. Nitrous oxide was currently big on the scene. In the nineteenth century, many will know, it played a role in American scientific and intellectual history. At Harvard, the very place Ram Dass and Leary were experimenting with LSD and turning students on to William James, the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience and brother of Henry, the brother of the master novelist had conducted his own experiment with nitrous oxide, some eighty-odd years earlier. Nitrous oxide was used early as an 202 robert stone

  anesthetic in dentistry, and Harvard students had taken to frolicking with the stuff. So joyous were the cries of delighted insight that Pro- fessor James heard echoing through the Yard that the liberal- minded and adventurous scholar thought he might try some. One evening the savant set a tank by his bed, connected to a pipe. As the chimes sounded across the gables, Professor James passed into a profound reverie. Suddenly he came to consciousness, his intellec- tion ablaze with discovery. He had happened, with the aid of this wonderful elixir, on the very meaning—but the very meaning!—of life. Pen and ink were at hand. No sooner had he time to write than a second drowsy numbness passed over him. In the morning he awakened to the merry bells. Leaping from his stern scholar’s bed, he seized the sheet of paper upon which he had inscribed life’s meaning. This is what he had written: Hoggamous Higgamous, Man is Polygamous Higgamous Hoggamous, Woman is Monogamous. How true! And even the obvious must be reexperienced down the generations. That this wisdom not perish but be found by each age in its time may have been the reason for the sudden very-late-sixties popularity of nitrous oxide. Another joke of the era: “Man, can you fix me with a doctor that writes?” “No, man. But I can put you with a hip dentist.” Anyway, nitrous oxide and its discontents. The party we were at- tending was indeed a farewell party, since we were bound back to England, now home. But it was, further, a farewell party for the late owner of the nitrous oxide, a graduate student who had delighted in taking his gas while relaxing in a hot bath. While asoak, the luckless prime green: remembering the sixties 203

  man passed out. While he was out, his head slipped beneath the wa- ter to rise... never. Farewell, as Poe observes, the very word is like a bell, and Poe and this graduate student I’m certain would have liked each other. There was a lot of gas left over, which was good because there were a lot of us there. Here I steel myself for confession. Few readers will fail to experience outrage at what I now feel bound to disclose. But if there is a God in heaven—William James would have known it. All right, our kids were with us. Everybody’s kids were with them. So we were doing gas with balloons, and you know how kids are with balloons. I mean you had to be there. It was a beautiful day. The kids were having such fun! There was so much gas. And it was hardly as though the late owner of the gas were lying there drowned in a bath- tub; he had passed on, and he certainly didn’t require any more gas. And the kids so liked the balloons, and of course they liked the gas too, taking the gas from the balloons. How this happened, what happened next, nobody is sure because everybody was ripped and fighting greedily over the gas, and the children were fighting greed- ily over the gas too. So to square it, even-steven it, we declared, we the adult authority, come on, kids, just one balloon’s worth to a kid. When, would you believe, this one little tyke made this snarky face right at me and said ha ha or hee hee or some shit, “These aren’t balloons! They’re condoms!” And by the spirit of William James, they were condoms. We’d been getting loaded watching small inno- cent children sucking gas from condoms. So if the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had fi- nally caught up with me there, would not the cry have been: Exter- minate the brutes! So we left for London. 204 robert stone

  SIXTEEN Years before, circa 1960, while George Rhoads and I were painting apartments on Central Park West, we would play sta- tion WBAI so that George could bend his mind’s ear over some postmodernist music. Neither of us, frankly, was a great fan of Schoenberg or Berg. George liked mid-twentieth-century mu- sic for what he genially called its “creepiness.” The music we painted to was accompaniment to the station’s news and commentary. Much of this both George and I, who considered ourselves among the well informed, found abstruse. It amounted to denunciations of American policy in the former

  French colonies in Southeast Asia. I was not persuaded. Considering how fond I was of my own opinions at that young age, I ought to have paid more attention. The subject, it turned out, would persist. And the war. It would be the issue, politically, that dominated a lot of my life. I saw myself as a writer whose work reflected politics, so of course there was liter- ally no escaping it. Too bad you can’t pick your history. The degree to which the Vietnam War consumed the vital energy of the nation, degraded the honor of its stand against the hateful ideologies of the twentieth century, and used up the lives of its youth was tragic. Tragic seems a paltry word, but what can one say? The ruin and death we inevitably brought down on Vietnam will always be held against us. It will be recalled as one of the crimes of history. In fact it was worse than a crime; as a coldly wise Frenchman said in an- other connection, it was a blunder. However, no one now requires more moralizing on that topic. Yet maybe I just can’t stop. Let me say that my tendency to run on is not the outrage of a Vietnam veteran, which I certainly was not. Nor is it that of a committed journalist in the line, because I was not that, either, as was, for example, Michael Herr, who survived Khe Sanh. My role was somewhere between that of a tourist and a writer in residence. It was the spring of 1971; the war was lost. I had just taught my kids, in London, to ride their two-wheel bicycles. I didn’t want to be there, in Vietnam; I didn’t want to stay. I didn’t want to leave, ei- ther, because it seemed betrayal. Maybe many of those who participated conspicuously in the “de- bate” are proud of their contributions to it. In my opinion most of them ought not to be. In the time between my discharge from the Navy and the time I went to Nam I remember how the war side- 206 robert stone

  lined so many other concerns that were vital to the country. I re- member the crowds of which we were sometimes a part, Janice and I. The Berkeley-Oakland city line, where the Oakland cops let the Hell’s Angels attack the demonstrators. The space before the Penta- gon, in Washington, D.C. Fifth Avenue and the United Nations, in New York. And Grosvenor Square, in front of the American embassy in London, and Haverstock Hill, site of many antiwar demonstra- tions. The brandishing of right-mindedness and chauvinism, the surfacing in both America and Europe of hatreds that had little to do, finally, with war in Asia. In London, I remember my beloveds giving blood for the Na- tional Liberation Front. I had a dream once of the blood, huge gouts of it in aluminum containers, being
poured into a sewer drain some- where. Maybe it wasn’t a dream, just an inappropriate notion, like that of piety settling like a dirty-smelling film on the furniture. But this is mellow retrospect. We felt involved. Eventually, the incessant talk, the examinations of consciousness, the doubts about where truth lay became more than I could bear as a distant witness. When I found that I had arrived, somewhat to my own astonish- ment and horror, at Ton Son Nhut airport in the spring of 1971, my only experience of war had come as a U.S. Navy sailor in 1956 at Suez, when we had watched the French naval air wing attack the de- fenses at the harbor at Ismailia, Mystère jets coming in at the top of our radio rig. That had been enough for me. Or so I thought. But in 1971 I was in London with no second book written and a pretty poor excuse for a movie headed for late-night TV with my name on it. It seemed to me that if I was going to continue doing my job, I had to go over to the country and the struggle that was the center of so much of life’s passion. Ed Victor, who had been an editor at Jonathan Cape, together with some associates, was putting to- prime green: remembering the sixties 207