Fritz

by Martin Shepard

  “One day the camera broke. The videotape also needed overhauling. I told Fritz that Marsha had a station wagon and that we’d take it down the coast and stay for a few days. We stayed an extra day and a half in my hometown. When we returned, he was furious. He was incoherent, jealous, and fired me.

  “It was out of nowhere. Fritz had previously talked to me about starting a production company and was I interested. I even began to get some of my own stuff to improve his equipment. I had no idea he was so concerned with Marsha. So I said, ‘Okay. I’ll go up and get my stuff—my microphone and my mixer.’

  “’You’re not going into that house or I’ll call the sheriff.’

  “I was hurt, so I pulled some little-boy stuff. I said to Fritz, ‘You can’t have it. . . . You can’t do that.’

  “’Sue me.’

  “So I did. Afterwards I went off to lead some groups for the Peace Corps. I came by a month later and was sitting in the lodge with Selig, the gardener, and some exceptionally wealthy society ladies. Selig had brought them in and they were all in a twitter.

  “Selig was selling them on the tranquility of our harmonious relationships at Esalen. Out of the back of my eye, I saw Fritz opening his mail. Selig was saying, ‘We have ex-bankers, space engineers, ex-convicts . . .’ and as Fritz opened his mail he turned red and went into a big puffing up of his chest. He had gotten the court summons. I feared an attack. He stalked across the room, walked right up to me, and whonked me with the flat of his hand.

  “This seventy-three-year old man just started hitting me and screaming, and I finally pushed him back. Selig came between us.

  “’I’ll see you in court,’ I said.

  “’Over my dead body.’

  “We reseated ourselves and Selig continued his talk without a broken word as though nothing had happened.

  “The next day, while I was walking toward the lodge, Fritz, in his Fiat, came at me. I jumped away at the last moment and threw a rock at his near window. We were never close again.

  “Several weeks later Fritz did show up in court. I had sued for $100 although he owed me a bit more. He walked into court wearing a grey sharkskin striped suit. His hair was neatly trimmed. This was a very different man—Dr. Perls. No one had ever seen him except in a jumpsuit. And he acted maligned.

  “He went on and on about how he had been ripped off. The judge interrupted: ‘But do you owe him money?’

  “’Maybe. But not $100.’

  “He was gently admonished to be specific. He felt he was training me and the equipment was the price I paid. Not having all my sales slips, I showed receipts totaling $37, and I got part of my money.”

  There are other accounts of Fritz the Opportunist, although much of Fritz’s opportunism came from simple utilizing people that he had little respect for. You, I, or others might not care to accept favors from people who curry favor with us in spite of our open dislike. Fritz would. His attitude might best be described as, “If you choose to be my doormat, I will willingly wipe my feet upon you whenever they are soiled.” He treated Bernie Gunther that way. In some respects, his relationship with Laura might be viewed from a similar perspective, for in spite of his insulting references to her in Garbage Pail, she continued to make her home available to him, and he continued to use it. Yet, for all his brusqueness, there was always the opposite side.

  “Fritz was interesting in that sometimes he could be very sweet and very vulnerable,” added Bernie Gunther. “One day a lady came to Esalen who read palms. Fritz was usually very down on anything metaphysical or mystical, but he consented to have his palm read. And this woman said something which touched him a bit and has always stayed with me. She said: ‘You have all this veneer, all this armor, all of this external defense. And underneath you’re just absolutely soft. Like a crab with a soft body and a hard shell.’”

  Fritz’s half-moon house was built in 1966 upon the highest point of the Esalen property. He was very proud of it. Directly below are the baths, the sulphurous vapors rising straight up to the deck. Off to the right are the living units for the seminarians, and further down the same road is the lodge, which houses the office and the dining room.

  Dick Price lives in Fritz’s house now, enjoying its sunken double-sized bathtub, its stone walls and cedar siding. Blue morning glories climb about cast-iron railings by the door and about the deck, which juts out toward the sea. Scrub trees and brush cover what varies from a straight drop to the ocean to inclines of forty-five degrees.

  Standing outside, the eye is inundated with greens and blues. Cats walk about—one of which is pure white, like Mitzie, Fritz’s cat, who he claimed was his guru. Bees are sampling the nectar of some brilliant red flowers. Daisies are in bloom by the stone steps that lead to the door.

  Dick Price, red-faced, slim, with grey hair, blue intense eyes, and a hurried and energetic voice, ushers me inside to speak about Fritz.

  The interior of the house consists of one large room, rounded and wood-paneled in back, with an expanse of glass in front that faces upon deck, sky, and sea. This is where Fritz lived, conducted his workshops, and listened to recordings of Mahler, Mozart, and Brahms at dusk. Two small bedrooms are tucked into each side of the moon’s crescents. Dick speaks: “The way we operated back in 1964, we didn’t have any resident staff. I think Bernie had just come in residence, but the place was open to outside leaders and open to programs whether or not I liked them. Esalen was operated to allow a number of independent scenes to go on. Mike and I would go along with them as long as they were within reasonable grounds. So, at first, when Fritz said ‘I want to live here,’ I said ‘Okay.’ He has a draw. I didn’t know him that well. His name might be good for business. I didn’t have that strong an opinion of him at first. I grew to dislike him during that first year and a half that he was here. And then at the end we grew very close and loving.

  “When he first came here he was drawing four or five people to his workshops. Almost two years later, he was still only drawing thirteen or fourteen. And then his curve went up so quickly that at the end, if you let it go in sixty-nine, Fritz would have drawn two hundred or three hundred people.

  “But as I said, at first I didn’t trust him. I saw him putting people down and having very little patience. If someone was obviously disturbed and came to see him and Fritz wasn’t interested, I’d see him just turn away. It was almost brutal. But in the context of the group, I saw him as loving and patient and sensitive. It was just like a coin turned around. All the things I thought he was utterly without, in the course of a group he had with a richer degree than anyone I had ever witnessed.

  “My background was one of Buddhist studies, so what I also saw, almost immediately, was the parallel between Fritz’s awareness training and The Heart of Buddhist Meditation—a text that claims to be based upon the discourse of Buddha twenty-five centuries ago. Here was a book, apart from the lack of interpersonal possibilities, but in terms of awareness exercises, that could be used as a textbook in Gestalt. So naturally I went on to train with Fritz.

  “I had learned that Fritz was not easy to deal with in a business way and yet this was my responsibility. We paid leaders on the basis of how many people came to a workshop. Fritz would come back and say ‘I don’t trust your count.’ Finally I would tell him that ‘I will not pay out until you come back with your secretary and we go over it person by person by person. And you will not get paid until we have a mutual agreement.’ I can’t think of any other leader we had to do this with.

  “With Fritz you learned that you had to establish this immediately. Because he’d say, ‘You paid me for sixteen people and I had seventeen people.’ I used to feel, ‘Well, he doesn’t have a group this week. I’ll handle my business with him now,’ for our business would not be more than an hour a month. But I quickly learned that No! The time to get him was when he was doing a group and feeling good and involved. Without a group, Fritz
became very, very bitchy. Not so when time went on, but certainly in the years, say 1964 and ‘65.”

  To fully appreciate Fritz, one needs to appreciate paradox, for paradox abounded during Fritz’s initial phase at Esalen. In regard to his work, Fritz wrote the following:

  “My function as a therapist is to help you to the awareness of the Here and Now, and to frustrate you in any attempt to break out of this. This is my existence as a therapist, in the therapy role. I haven’t managed it yet for many segments of my life. You see, like every other psychologist or psychiatrist, I solve my problems to quite an extent outside. The fact that I’m so happy in integration means that my own integration is incomplete.”

  Fritz not only taught out of his own familiarity with conflicts, but also as a way of alleviating them. Leading groups, for Fritz, was more than an occupation. It was also a form of self-therapy, one of the ways he solved his problems “outside.”

  When working, Fritz was excited, happy, integrated, and in contact with the world. When idle, his thoughts left the Here and Now and wandered to what could have been, real or imagined injustices he suffered at the hands of others, what might yet be, and his shortcomings as a father, husband, guru, and friend. As Dick Price noted, the time to discuss business with Fritz was while he was working, for when he was unoccupied he was usually unapproachable, nasty, or highly suspicious.

  “Fritz,” said Dick, “used his groups for personal awareness exercises. He was very, very sharp and present and I could just see him become vitalized in doing his work. He wasn’t bitching that the house wasn’t complete or that ‘Esalen isn’t all that I would want it to be.’ He would become utterly present. And in becoming utterly present he energized himself, using excitement and interest and all the things he talked about.”

  Fritz’s tendency toward paranoia is a perfect example of not living in the moment. When one becomes paranoid, one is trying to figure out what the moment means. The same holds true of his hunger for new experiences. As Jim Simkin has said, “He would want more than what was there. And he would imagine that there was more”—the Divine Discontent that Julian Beck referred to.

  By making his therapeutic focus the awareness of the Here and Now, Fritz disciplined himself to be cognizant of the present moment so as to reflect it back to those he worked with. When he focused his own awareness this way, his fantasies, preoccupations, suspicions, and painful memories all fell by the wayside. Little wonder, then, that Fritz needed to teach for his own peace of mind as much as others needed him for their greater contentment.

  To imply, however, that Fritz’s therapy served little more than his own needs denies the benefits that countless people derived from it. It seems to me that Fritz’s brand of Gestalt served the needs of therapist and patient alike. To argue over whose needs had primacy is as pointless as pondering the question, “Did the chicken precede the egg?”

  Much of Fritz’s inner struggle was between what he called his Topdog and Underdog (what Freud referred to as Superego versus Id, or Eric Berne labeled Parent and Child). The Topdog was the moralist, the perfectionist, the internalized parent. The Underdog represented the impulsive, self-seeking, instinctual attitudes that are often frowned upon by parents or society.

  One patient who worked with Fritz complained of feeling nervous, and tight in her arm. He asked her to tighten his arm. As she squeezed, she relaxed markedly.

  “Aha,” said Fritz. “Because you did to me what you usually do to yourself. This is the golden rule in Gestalt Therapy: ‘Do unto others what you do unto yourself.’”

  This is exactly what Fritz did with his Topdog/Underdog conflict. He externalized it and played both roles toward others. Among the professional community and the world at large, he was Underdog: wild, woolly, impetuous, creative, rebellious. And with many of his patients, he became Topdog: authoritarian, unsympathetic to certain feelings, and critical. With patients, his natural tendency was to frustrate (Topdog). In his personal life, he wanted the Underdog’s support.

  Instead of berating himself for still having dependent feelings, he would turn his scorn upon dependent men who occupied his hot seat. Rather than torture himself for his manipulative tendencies, he would twit this quality in others.

  Why not forgive and forget all these shortcomings both in himself and others? Because he was a perfectionist. That’s why he cautioned against being one. And he was still, as a therapist, more aware of liabilities than assets.

  Such is the nature of paradox. The more you try to explain it, the more absurd it becomes.

  It was during this first year and a half that his health steadily improved. Being out of the Los Angeles smog, eating decent meals, sleeping and rising on a regular basis, and spending much time in the medicinal baths all contributed to his increasing sense of well-being, as did the slow but steady build-up of both his work schedule and acclaim. Credit is also due to the work that Ida Rolf did with him.

  Ida, a contemporary of Fritz’s, practiced “Structural Integration.” He knew of her from his own interest in body/movement/posture. What she did might be compared to deep-muscle massage coupled with chiropractice, in that she would “tear away” the fascia that unnaturally bound down certain muscles, enabling a new and more natural alignment and posture to emerge. She came to Esalen in 1965, primarily to work with Fritz on his stooped posture and sunken chest. Her work (along with the supportive Esalen ambience) was so effective that his heart no longer pained him.

  “You know, Dick,” he said to Price, “I was able to walk up and down to the baths today with hardly a beat dropped.”

  “He was like a kid when he was pleased by something,” Dick reminisced, “and he claimed that Ida gave him the last six years of his life.”

  Fritz, by his remarkable response, gave Ida and her therapy—better known as “Rolfing”—their claim to fame.

  In addition to the mellowing that came with regained physical health, his growing acceptance by the Esalen community, and the opportunity to work more regularly, Fritz was also vitalized by his reinvolvement with artists—most notably Ann Halprin, the founder and director of The San Francisco Dancers Workshop. His developing closeness to her gave him an opportunity to do group work with her dancers in terms of using movement to have them integrate emotionally unfinished business—work that satisfied him greatly because of his special delight in creative theater and because of the unique wedding of aesthetics and Gestalt Therapy that he might preside over.

  Fritz’s being in residence did not, in any way, hamper his outside travels, and he frequently journeyed and worked in both Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was during one of his visits to the Bay Area that he met Ann. A slim, graceful woman with short sandy-colored hair, open, curious eyes, and an expressive mouth that radiates, at rest, a warm, soft smile, she was in her mid-forties at the time. She speaks of Fritz lovingly, clearly missing the presence of a cherished friend: “In my own way I had deviated totally from traditional theater, from traditional dance, and was searching for all sorts of new resources to work with what I called a humanistic approach to theater. Someone told me, ‘You would be interested in Fritz.’ So that’s how I happened to go to him while he was coming up from Esalen to give workshops here.

  “The first meeting I had with Fritz came when I was very heavily involved with the theater. I was giving a performance at the time. Many of the things that we were doing were so far ahead of ourselves that we were only being appreciated by a very small group of people. We never got the support that we needed to maintain the continuity of our work. It was as if we were too far out all the time.

  “I remember the day I came. I was really hurt. Because I felt I knew what we were doing, and I couldn’t understand why the critics didn’t understand and why we weren’t getting more support. I was feeling pretty upset and brazen and sort of furious with the world. And this man, who I have since learned to love and appreciate, John Enright, was in one of t
hese first groups. He arrived at this group in a black suit and a white shirt and a tie and black shiny shoes and black silk stockings. And he was sitting sort of upright in his chair.

  “We were all waiting for Fritz to come, and I was sitting next to him. Something about the look of that man sitting there like that, wearing those kind of clothes, just freaked me. All my resentments about not being understood, about ‘Who’s crazy? Is he crazy or am I crazy?’ just triggered me off. So I stood up in front of this man and I started to rip my clothes off. I was just glaring at him in the eye as I pulled this off and that off, until I stood in front of him stark naked. I stood there very brazenly, and then I sat down.

  “And he started to cry. Tears started streaming from his eyes. I didn’t know what to do when he started to cry. I didn’t expect that. It’s like whipping a dog that goes limp on you. I was so irritated that he didn’t yell at me ‘Stop that’—or something. Instead, I got this terrible reaction from him that just took the wind out of my sails.

  “Fritz was standing in the door. He had been on the way in and saw the whole thing. I sat down and crossed my legs as if to say, ‘Humph.’ And Fritz came in, having seen everything, and said, ‘So why are your legs crossed?’

  “I thought I was so flipped out. He implied, ‘You think you’re so far out? Man, you’re just as uptight as he is.’ So that was my first dance with Fritz at a workshop he gave in San Francisco.

  “Our next interaction occurred in another group session. I was sitting next to a fire and I was terribly turned off by some person who was working on their craziness. I just made a circle around myself on this thick carpet and I kept looking at the fire. I was very unconscious about what I was doing.

  “Fritz came over to me. I didn’t even notice that he had left his chair. But he came around the room, sat behind me, opened up his legs to kind of embrace me with them, put his hand on my hair, and said, ‘And I am your Guardian Angel.’