Little House in the Hollywood Hills

by Charlotte Stewart

  Josh introduced me and Gardner and we started seeing each other quite a bit. He loved Topanga, especially in the morning when the sun was just cresting the rim of canyon and all you could hear were the sounds of nature.

  He wrote a series of five poems for me called “Topanga,” which he composed in longhand on my deck and later typed up and presented as a gift. Here’s one of them:

  Topanga Sunrise

  The patchwork curtain

  Paisley, tweed and rose

  A luminous stained glass

  Made by you

  A rooster crows

  And a mule off, away

  Cats walking out to see

  And there they are!

  The hills

  The sun between them

  Coming up to me

  A face behind me

  Looking through a screen

  And there you are

  Bringing me my day

  In a cup.

  He was soulful and sweet but could have a temper. One day I drove over to visit Gardner in Beverly Hills and to introduce Doreen. As we walked in here came one of his Jaguars and I bent down and was stroking him and basically showing off. The beast grabbed my neck in its jaws. He wouldn’t let go and Doreen panicked, ran inside, grabbed Gardner, and guess who Gardner was mad at? Me! I had disrespected his cat. I had crossed some kind of human/animal line. I had violated its, I don’t know, cat-ness. He eventually cooled off and I was allowed back on the property, which was good because Gardner had great parties. One Christmas I remember Will Geer was there dressed as Santa and Gardner’s jaguars were silently padding through the house among the guests. I kept my distance.

  Will Geer wasn’t to be the only cast member from The Waltons whom I got know. I ended up being cast in the show’s pilot episode, where I met Ralph Waite, the actor who played John Walton, Sr.

  Like all sets, there was a great deal of downtime between takes and I learned what an unusual background he had for an actor. He had earned a theology degree from Yale and was an ordained Presbyterian minister, who in the early 1960s had been drawn to theater. He’d played on and off Broadway for years and came out to California for The Waltons a little reluctantly I think. He certainly wasn’t the guy you saw on TV. He had a brain like a freight train and lived life to its fullest (decades later he ran against Mary Bono for a congressional seat) and we had a great time together.

  Once when Ralph spent the night at my house in Topanga he realized the next day he’d left his wallet. He called me from the set with this tale of woe so I drove it over to the Warner Brothers and dropped it off — to the amusement of a few people on the show who realized what had happened.

  I did not, I would like to point out, go to bed with every famous or semi-famous guy who came along. An example. One day I got a phone call at home. A very formal older man on the other end asked, “Is this Charlotte Stewart?” and I said that indeed it was. The caller then announced, “This is Mr. Ford.” (It was like Jane Austen was writing this phone call.) By “Mr. Ford” he meant he was the esteemed actor Glenn Ford, with whom I had filmed an episode of Cade County and who was 30 years my senior. Mr. Ford, as he apparently preferred to be called, was inviting me to spend the weekend with him at a vacation home at seaside resort in Mexico. I was so dismayed at the thought that I sort of lurched away from the phone and knocked a painting by Joni Mitchell (a gift) off the wall and watched it tumble down a set of stairs, an accident which this poor work of art bears to this day. I politely declined Mr. Ford’s offer.

  Another time, someone thought I should go out with Don Knotts, the actor who played Andy Griffith’s sidekick. Now, look, who doesn’t love Don Knotts — a terrific comedic performer — but he took me to dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, which was pretty old-school for my tastes. It’d be like going to The Brown Derby, which had been the happening spot in the ‘40s. Don was 20 years older, of a different era, and we just didn’t click. I could barely make it through dinner.

  In another, weirder case, the producer of a TV show I was on came over on some pretext. We had some drinks and were talking about this and that. Then I stepped out to go to the bathroom and when I came back like a minute later there he was completely, 100% naked, sitting on the floor of my kitchen with his back against my cabinets with his big, old, gut sticking out.

  I wondered if this smooth move had worked on anyone else. Ever.

  I asked him to leave.

  Eew.

  The guys I had flings with were ones I found sexy, cool, or just fun to hang out with — smart, fascinating, sometimes challenging. For example, on set Chad Everett, who was the star of Medical Center, could at times be a pain — kind of a big shot, told jokes that were usually in really bad taste or annoying, but he could be a lot of fun. Did I want a relationship with the guy? No. Did I want to be Mrs. Chad Everett and wake up beside him for the rest of my life? Shoot me. But he could be entertaining to play with.

  At other times I just developed a mad crush. While shooting that episode of Then Came Bronson in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, I followed the star, Michael Parks, everywhere, totally enamored with his bad-boy-ness. He ignored me as long as possible until I just wouldn’t relent and finally he deigned to speak to me. It was at that point he invited me into his trailer. Magical things happen in trailers. And then my obsession with Michael Parks was done and the world moved on. (It’s funny that he ended up with a role on Twin Peaks years later as Jean Renault, though our paths never crossed on set.)

  The thing I didn’t even think to do was any sort of strategic sleeping-around, which can (I’m told) bolster your career. Think of it as naked networking. In spite of various offers, I didn’t have sex with anyone on “the casting couch” in exchange for a role, perhaps to my IMDb detriment. Sex was never a kind of currency for me. I didn’t obtain things with it. I didn’t try to pin anyone down with it. It wasn’t about control or gain. It was simply recreational, personal, and sometimes hot, sometimes it was just okay. But more often than not, if you were selective with the men you slept with — avoided the psychos, the control freaks, the users, or simply run-of-the-mill assholes — there was a lot to like.

  One time a girlfriend asked me how I could be so promiscuous. Her word choice — promiscuous — not mine. And I said, “Men sleep around like crazy and no one thinks twice. I think I should be able to sleep with whomever I want whenever I want.”

  I believed that if you were both adults and agreed it was for fun, there was no reason not to have a good time together.

  And in a sense I still believe that. However, at the time my sexual decisions were being made within the ecstatic blur of alcohol, weed, and cocaine. Add to this the fact that I was a 20-something who loved adventure, that it was Hollywood in the 70s, that everyone else was doing precisely the same, and it becomes difficult to really sort out whether I was sleeping around in defiance of social norms or if I was just doing what all my dope-smoking free-loving hippie friends were doing while still — yes still — assuaging that gnawing and usually present sense of inadequacy that I had lugged around like a dirty backpack since high school.

  Oh life. So complicated.

  Anyway, the guys raining down on me weren’t just actors. In the summer of 1972 I was living with Robert Greenfield, a contributor and editor with Rolling Stone magazine.

  My roommate, Doreen, had introduced us initially. They’d known each other back in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. What was it with me and East Coast intellectuals? Robert had stopped by the house to say hi to her and we ended up talking and it was pretty clear right off that liking each other was in our immediate future. He was in Topanga on a magazine assignment and asked if I wanted to tag along. He explained he was writing a feature on what at first sounded like a nudist colony, except it wasn’t exactly a nudist colony because not everyone was nude and mostly the reason people were there was for various kinds of hooking up.

  “So it’s a sex club,” I said.

  “Essentially, yes.”

&n
bsp; I hadn’t known until that very moment Topanga had such a place among its many natural wonders.

  I accepted his offer with the understanding that I was not interested in a) taking off my clothes in public or b) making the beast with two backs at this joint simply to give his story a little added color.

  We drove over to this big, bulk of a house that had lots of rooms spreading out all over the place. Once inside it was quite a scene. I ended up perched in a defensive position with my arms around my knees on the shag-carpeted floor of a large but tightly crowded living room. All around me were men and women, some partially dressed, some naked, some fully dressed, mingling, flirting, or in the early-to-late stages of intercourse. It was all being taken pretty seriously. There wasn’t lots of laughter or goofiness, which made it all kind of creepy. So there I am willing myself to be invisible in this alien, porn-like environment, when I felt a bump at my back and I hear a man mutter, “Excuse me.” I turn and there at eye-level and inches away from this gentleman’s startlingly large man parts. He didn’t mean anything by it. He was just making his way through a crowded room to the bar.

  So that was my first date with Robert.

  Later I traveled with him to Mexico where we hung around with the film director Alejandro Jodorowsky during the filming of The Holy Mountain. Jodorowsky was a mesmerizing presence, tailor-made for the experimental spirit of an era in which everything — mystical, spiritual, and pharmaceutical — seemed worth exploring. He was as revered an artist as he was controversial. His film El Topo was an art house hit but he was also rumored to have raped an actress on film.

  The magazine had paid my way on the trip since Robert told them I was his photographer. Much preferring the role of photographer to hanger-on girlfriend — though I knew next to nothing about photography — I borrowed a professional-grade camera from an artist friend, Tony Hudson (whose cute little boy Slash would grow up to be a member of the band Guns-N-Roses). On the plane I read the camera’s owner’s manual as well as the instructions that came on the boxes of Kodak film.

  Once in Mexico Robert and I spent a lot of time on the set and in the house where Jodorowsky was living at the time. I occupied myself chiefly by fiddling with Tony’s camera to see if I could coax a few good images out of it.

  For some reason Jodorowsky ended up taking a liking to me and invited me to sit next to him taking my pictures while he was shooting his movie. And once we got back to L.A., after all the high jinx of stumbling through Photography 101 on the fly, Robert and his editors liked my photos, some of which ended up running with the Rolling Stone feature.

  A month or two later Robert and I flew north to San Francisco. He was now working on a book about the Rolling Stones, his second, which would be called Stones Touring Party: Journey Through America with the “Rolling Stones.”

  Just after we arrived I got a call from my sister, Barbara Jean. She said mom had done something a strange — had driven herself nearly three hours from Yuba City to San Francisco General Hospital.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Barbara Jean said she wasn’t sure. Mom had always been very tight-lipped about any difficulties she might be having. Talking about her health was part of a long list of things she didn’t discuss.

  It was a few hours before the Rolling Stones concert. I’d been excited about seeing the group for weeks but now all that anticipation was replaced with dread, sensing that something much bigger than Mick Jagger might be coming at me.

  After taxiing to the hospital I met my brother and sister where we had a chance to confer with a doctor involved with mom’s case. He didn’t soft-petal it; she had pancreatic cancer and had six months to live. If that.

  It was like a hammer blow to the chest. The bigness of it made thinking in a straight line nearly impossible. It took a while to really grasp what we’d just heard. I remembered how Tim had gone through a mental and physical collapse at the end of our relationship and I hoped desperately not to replicate that right now in front of my family. I wanted to keep myself together but wasn’t sure how.

  When we went into her room, Mom was Mom. Her skin and eyes were yellow from jaundice and yet her attitude was like nothing special was going on. She refused to speak about the diagnosis and had no time for our tears. Nothing was going to change as far as she was concerned.

  Barbara Jean turned to me and said, “You should go to that concert.”

  I shook my head. How could I?

  “There’s nothing for you to do here,” she whispered. “If we just sit around staring at her, it’s just going to make her mad.”

  It went against every impulse — after Honey had died alone following the same kind of assurances, the last thing I wanted to do was leave her side.

  But I knew the situations weren’t the same. The cancer wasn’t going to end her life in the next few hours. Barbara Jean was right; we’d just piss her off by hanging around. I gave my dear mom a kiss.

  As I was leaving she called after me, asking if I’d do her a favor and buy her a nightgown.

  “Nothing in yellow,” she added, offering the only hint that she was aware that she was presently the color of margarine.

  Robert and I had incredible seats of course for the concert, in a box to the left overlooking the stage. There was the most famous band in the world just feet away and yet I was detached. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards put on a hell of a show and they were at their pinnacle in the early 1970s. But in that moment the music and the noise of the audience were not much more than white noise.

  After the concert Robert grabbed my hand and led me backstage, where he consulted with one of the band’s managers about getting together for dinner. That led to elaborate instructions that I didn’t pay attention to. Robert however led me through a maze of backstage hallways and out of the theater where a mob of fans and paparazzi were waiting. There followed a bewildering James Bond-like swapping of taxis and subterfuge to outwit photographers and Rolling Stones devotees to get to a super-secret, super-stoned-out dinner at a restaurant with the band and select groupies.

  None of it mattered.

  My mom was dying. And I needed to get her a nightgown.

  A couple of days later Mom drove herself home and ignored the fact that she was dying, running at her usual pace of life: gardening, keeping the house clean, getting together with her friends for their weekly Bridge games.

  At the time I was at a loss to understand this kind of reaction to learning you only have a short time to live, thinking that if it were me, I’d mark lots of things off my bucket list like seeing the sunset on Fiji, taking the Queen Mary to England, or seeing friends I hadn’t connected with since childhood. But what I’ve realized is that the modest rhythms and routines of life are what made my mom happy and so she was spending her final days doing the things she loved. I’d like to think that she lived her bucket list every day, though I suspect that’s oversimplifying who she was and underestimating her dreams. Since my dad’s death she had in fact done some traveling including the trip of a lifetime to Africa.

  Later I would learn that Mom had finally gone to an attorney and worked through a list of important things related to the house, finances, her will, and so on.

  I had little idea what was really happening until I got a call from her doctor in Yuba City who said, “Your mom has no idea that she has two weeks to live.” Well, she did. She just wasn’t going to waste her breath about it with him.

  This was my cue. Whether she was going to like it or not, I flew to Sacramento and got a ride to Yuba City. Mom had grown small and frail and I could see the end was not far off. She asked me to tell her friends what was happening to her. I borrowed her car and ran this sad and distressing errand, knocking on doors and delivering the news. One of her friends had already guessed the truth, another took it okay, and a third really fell to pieces.

  On one of her last nights at home, Mom and I relaxed and watched TV. As it happened I was on two shows on CBS that night — Medical Center at 9 p
m and Cannon at 10 pm. Back then, if you were in a guest role the wardrobe department would often ask you to bring an assortment of your own clothes to wear. In one show I was a prisoner on a bus and in the other I was a blind heiress. I had filmed the shows a few months apart and without realizing it, I ended up wearing the same green houndstooth jacket. Mom thought that was hysterically funny and we had a great laugh.

  She was proud of what I’d become professionally — her little girl who’d displayed so few natural abilities had done all right, which is what I believe I heard in her laugher that night.

  A day or so later, I finally cajoled her into calling my brother and sister — she hadn’t wanted to bother them. But Mom was ready to go to the hospital. They both came right away and the next day my brother, Lewis, carried her tiny frame to the car and he and Barbara Jean took her. I had decided, with a touch of drama, that I didn’t want to go and then after they’d disappeared down the road I was so overwhelmed and disconsolate I thought, “Why am I being so stupid? Of course I want to go.”

  I hopped in Mom’s car and lit a joint to try to keep myself together.

  On the way I started thinking of my best memories of Mom…like riding in the front seat of our car on our way to somewhere falling asleep up against her. Soft and warm…so comfortable and safe. For a small woman she had large breasts. Not sexy, just a mom.

  She always wore a housedress with stockings rolled at the knee with a quarter, to get the measurement just right. The only time she wore trousers was when she and Honey traveled in their camper. She had a permanently freckled right arm from hanging it out the passenger window.

  She had the same hairdresser for years named Bunny and a perm every two months. She didn’t really like the style but didn’t want to hurt Bunny’s feelings. I had cried when she cut off her long red hair. She wore it braided over the top of her head.