1956–1964 Striking Out On My Own
After finishing high school in the summer of 1956, I was ready to strike out on my own and excited by the prospect of leaving my California comfort zone. My mother's stories of her Italian adventures and all those visitors from Europe to Nepenthe made me yearn to explore that old world, where I saw myself one day dancing in the streets in bright costumes and creating wonderful works of art or theater. On my way to that dream, I first studied acting at a performing arts camp in Colorado, then took a trip to explore Paris and Rome for a few months, and finally went to study fine art in Boston and New York. These East Coast cities were as exotic to me as Europe, and I soaked up everything they had to offer. Deciding where to focus my scattered energy and creativity was difficult at first. When I saw Auntie Mame in New York and heard Rosalind Russell say, "Life is a banquet, but most poor sons of bitches are starving to death," I wholeheartedly agreed. I was deliriously tasting every dish that life presented!
1956
Pursuing Acting and Traveling to Europe
My early experiences in theater productions—learning those Shakespeare lines from The Tempest and Henry IV at Happy Valley—made me think I might be a budding actor. During my last year at Monterey High School, I'd seen the Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School do an amazing dance performance to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and longed to be up on the stage and part of that expressive world. A few months after that, Mom arranged for me to take classes at Perry-Mansfield in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, for the summer following my graduation. I took to it as easily as I did to Happy Valley School. There I was among a group of seriously talented young actors and dancers, and it was thrilling to wake each morning looking forward to rehearsals and exercise classes with like-minded students from all over the country. My days at Perry-Mansfield became a powerful part of my education.
The school had a fantastic reputation. The actress Julie Harris had attended Perry-Mansfield some years before, and their new theater was named after her. The teachers were the big draw. The great modern dancer Helen Tamiris, who had choreographed dances for Show Boat and other famous Broadway shows, was teaching and directing a dance production when I was there. She used Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and set the action on the streets of New York. The same age as I was, Dustin Hoffman was studying there at the time as well, bringing his distinctive swagger to the proceedings. I remember all of us thinking, what a pity such a talented guy will never make it. We thought him too short and not handsome enough. Funny how he has gotten more attractive as his immense talent proves itself in film after film.
As I was saying good-bye to Helen at the end of her time teaching us, I said, "I think I'll move up to the intermediate class in dancing next week."
"Don't fool yourself, Kaffe," she said. "I think you should stick to your artwork." I was thunderstruck, but bowed to her insight. We had worked closely together for weeks, and somehow art didn't seem so bad if I was lacking in the dance department, which I could see was a very hard life.
Because I was tall and had a certain look, I was cast as the lead in the play the school produced that summer. I was terrible. I remember Dustin quipping, "Kaffe couldn't act his way out of a wet paper bag."
When I was back in Big Sur that fall, after acting camp, a Hollywood writer friend convinced me to go have a screen test. My lack of success at Perry-Mansfield didn't really deter me. Dad contacted his uncle Stan, who was chairman of the board of directors of Paramount Pictures at that time, so he could arrange everything for me. During the trip down to Hollywood, my writer friend regaled me with horror stories of the hardship involved in an actor's life—beginning with getting up at 4 a.m. every day to go in and be made up. He went on to explain how prescribed your life becomes as you get famous, and how everyone watches every detail of your life to glean juicy slip-ups for gossip columns. It seemed less and less glam. When I got a coach and started learning a script to do my screen test, my nerves set in, and I was quite relieved when Uncle Stan informed me I should start at the bottom and work up. He offered me a job in the mailroom at the studios. "That's it?" I asked myself, my dream of stardom evaporating before my eyes. "I am out of here if that's all my connections afford me."
From L.A. I went to stay with my father's sister, my aunt Katy, in Laguna Beach. To earn my crust, I gave children art lessons and taught them yoga classes on the beach. The months seemed to pass aimlessly. Feeling very adolescent and at a loss, I suddenly decided to join the army. God knows why. I suppose I needed structure and couldn't manage it myself.
When I informed my dad that I had joined the army, he had an unexpected reaction. "I can't bear to think of you in the army," he said. "If you can get out of it, I'll send you to Europe." I couldn't believe it! I skipped off to the army board and begged to be let go. "I have a chance to study in Europe," I lied. Thank God my interview was conducted by two older women who said, "We approve of education and travel. We will see what we can do."
The next month, October 1956, I was off to New York to board a Holland America ocean liner to sail to France. It was my first real trip out of the West, and New York City was a thrilling shock to the system. First of all, there were the tight rows of houses, the crowds of well-dressed people, the shops and museums! Buses, subway trains. Being able to transport myself quickly and cheaply around a dense city was ecstasy!
When I first hit New York, I devoured it with every sense in my country boy being. The Museum of Modern Art was a must on my list. I rushed through it, seeing Picassos, Matisses, and many famous Impressionists. These paintings were so familiar that they were like wallpaper to me, as I'd studied them all in books and magazines in Big Sur. My mother had always cut out artwork from periodicals and put them in scrapbooks for us. However, one large painting stopped me in my tracks and made me halt my art rush. It was about seven feet square and featured a tree that filled the canvas with its gnarled roots and branches. Heads and bodies of children were emerging from the shadows created by the foliage in the tree. As I studied it, I realized the tree was actually a gigantic hand with veins running up the back of the hand and out along the fingers. (It wasn't until I reached Rome that I would find out who painted this intriguing canvas.)
I took in as many tourist stops as I could fit in. I took a boat trip to the Statue of Liberty (in those days you could go climb up into her crown), went up to the top of the Empire State Building, and to many more museums.
Going to the theater was also a treat. A Polish Jew called Louis Golubovsky, whom I met walking in Central Park, liked my enthusiasm and took me to the shows he had seen and loved. We saw all the exciting productions in that 1950s era. The musical Bells Are Ringing with Judy Holliday is the sparkler that remains with me.
I was staying on the West Side with my "aunt," Helen Kelly Rand. We always called her our aunt, but the actual family connection was that her daughter was married to Uncle Stan's son Nixon Griffis, who managed Brentano's bookstore for him. Helen ran a private bar called the Sun-Up Club, which employed high-class ladies to entertain tired-out businessmen after hours. She was a Mae West sort of character—a big Irish woman with blond hair piled up high and a large crimson mouth. She dressed in black lace and a mink stole and often sported a voluptuous purple orchid. Aunt Helen would take me to any film or play I wanted to see, and then sleep through the performance at my side.
When it was time to board the ship to Europe, I could hardly contain myself. If New York was amazing, think what Europe would be! Could my pulsating heart take the strain? During the days it took to cross the Atlantic, I got to know several fellow passengers quite well. One of them was a sensitive writer with whom I had many philosophical talks on the breezy decks or over a brandy before retiring. Then I caught the eye of a dashing Frenchman—tall, handsome, with bedroom eyes. We ended up in his room, and he asked why I was always seen talking to the writer. "He is very interesting," I explained.
"He should have been made into a lampshade," my Frenchman murmured under his breath. It was my first encounter with anti-Semitism, and I couldn't understand what he meant. When I told the writer later, he explained with a pained expression, "There are people in this world who feel we Jews should not be allowed to live." I was in a state of shock and avoided the anti-Semite for the duration of the trip.
After the boat landed, my first stop was Paris. When I got there, I was thrilled but very nervous, being so new to this world. I had the name of a good inexpensive hotel, which I went to and settled into a room. What a miserable night that was! My na?ve fear of being robbed in my sleep made me put my camera, passport, and wallet under my pillow, leading to a very restless, lumpy night.
When I ventured into the Paris streets, the smells and sights got right under my skin. What struck me most was the relaxed humanness of it all. I felt as if I were in Big Sur, yet this was a big, important city in Europe. The feeling was so strong that the many times I've returned to Paris, I get the same frisson, and powerful sense memories of those first impressions return.
I found a small hotel on Rue des Saints-Pères called Rive Gauche and moved there. It was surrounded by workingmen's cafés, where all the artists ate, among them American and English expats. Meals were delicious, jolly, and lingered over with stimulating conversations. The red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, loaves of chewy bread, carafes of good inexpensive wine, and warmhearted but no-nonsense waitresses bustling about made each meal memorable.
Before I left Paris, I went to see a museum exhibition of the work of the mystic artist Odilon Redon. It introduced me to one of my first huge color influences. This painter, whom I'd never heard of, had an electric effect on my senses that has stayed with me all my life. I think it's to do with the rich, tinted mists he creates around his studies of figures, shells, and, best of all, richly colored flowers that pierce my imagination so deeply. Every time I study Redon's work, even in bad repros, I'm moved to a vibrant world where color is tangible. I heard that Redon painted almost-dead flowers so their color would be more intense.
The next stop on my European tour was Italy. Our family friend ZEV was in Rome, and I was to meet him and his wife, Gertrude, there. What a relief to have them to show me around. The train ride from cold winter Paris to the sunny south was wonderful. When we crossed the border into Italy, people started singing as they felt the sun.
ZEV and Gertrude were staying in artist and stage designer Eugene Berman's flat off the Piazza Navona, and I joined them there. On my second night, they gave a dinner party for me, and Gertrude told me a very famous Russian painter was coming to the dinner. "He has work in the Museum of Modern Art," she said.
"Oh, damn!" I said. "I'm afraid I rushed through that place and can only recall one work. It was a big hand that looked like a tree with baby faces in it."
She smiled and replied, "Tell our guest that. It will interest him." When I was introduced to Pavel Tchelitchew that night, I told him the only work I'd been stopped by was this tree painting. He, too, smiled—it was his 1942 painting called Hide and Seek.
ZEV's delicious, zany humor was a tonic. He turned out to be a fantastic guide, knowing weird and wonderful little shops, the great museums, and lesser-known ones. We took side trips to Pompeii and other places. ZEV also knew good, inexpensive restaurants and made up hilarious stories about the statues and paintings we'd see on our tours. I began to feel so at home there, especially when I met loads of people I wanted to get to know better. Not wanting to leave, I wrote to Dad, asking for more money so I could stay on in Rome. His blunt refusal was a shock. That was a good lesson to learn early on—make your own money so you can do as you please, not be controlled by someone in charge of the purse.
Passing through New York on my way home to Big Sur, I went to a fabulous Christmas party given by Leo Lerman, the famous magazine editor who worked for Condé Nast, among others. Leo was one of the most delightful characters I met in a city crammed with colorful people. He had an unpompous self-confidence and a very original eye for the exotic. The Christmas tree he decorated for the party made such a vivid impression on me that it was foremost in my mind when I was asked to decorate the tree at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London fifty years later. All over his tree, Leo had placed lacy cut-paper fans in many sizes, ranging from about fourteen inches across up to very tiny at the top of the tree; they were virginal white with touches of bright color—a veritable wedding cake!
Leo's legendary parties were always full of creative types—artists, writers, musicians—so the company was stimulating. At one of them, a jolly black man caught my eye and said, "Hello, I'm Louis Armstrong." A few nights later, I was walking near Radio City Music Hall when I heard a pure trumpet solo coming from a dressing room window. As I stopped to listen, an African American man on the street looked up and murmured, "That's Satchmo!" As I basked in the golden sound, I thought New York was a magical city.
1957–1960
Starting life as a young artist on the East Coast
After my second brief stay in New York, I went back to Big Sur. I was nineteen and pretty much determined to continue my artwork and give up my misplaced acting ambitions. I soon met poet and playwright Lyon Phelps, who was then in his mid-thirties. He was in California visiting his parents on Partington Ridge. Lyon's father had been a missionary and scholar in China for thirty years, so Lyon spoke Chinese and was very well read. We talked books, and about Europe and the East Coast, where he spent most of his time.
Although Lyon was a bit of a dreamer, he had practical advice for me—he convinced me to move East and go to art college. We went to New York together and found an apartment there. I look back on it as a very exciting time. Lyon introduced me to painters like Larry Rivers, and poets and writers such as Frank O'Hara and his lover, Joe LeSueur. It was an education for me being around bright, ambitious artists and writers. I was growing up culturally and socially. At one stage, Lyon took me to a one-night-only performance of his play The Gospel Witch, which was on in a prominent New York theater. I had a martini before the play, ensuring I slept soundly through it. Another lesson: Don't drink before the theater.
Because Lyon had gone to Harvard, he was always interested in what was happening in Boston and Cambridge and knew what the area had to offer. He encouraged me to apply for a scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which I did, and I received a generous one. We moved to a little house near the school.
I adored Boston. With the cobbled streets on historic Beacon Hill, it felt older than New York. It also moved at a slower pace, and had shops and coffeehouses everywhere. People seemed to live relaxed lives. Houses full of paintings, books, and colorful old carpets stimulated my greedy eyes. At one dinner party hosted by a very posh friend of Lyon's, I got talking to a handsome woman about fifty. When I told her I was interested in portrait painting, she asked, "How do you get a likeness?" I held forth for the whole evening about my experiences painting my family and friends. When she left, I asked my hostess, "Who was that very nice lady who listened so attentively?"
"Oh, she is the best portrait painter in Boston!" Mental note: must ask questions before pontificating next time!
Lyon became the theater and film critic for the Boston Globe, and we attended many previews of films and plays. I loved the small poetry readings and student productions, as well as the glamorous first nights of big pre-Broadway shows.
Meanwhile, my classes at the Museum School progressed. In the beginning, I learned as much from fellow students as from the instructors. But after about three months there, when we started seriously studying the color wheel, I rebelled. Color is instinctive, I told myself. I didn't want to dissect it in a scientific way, so I decided to withdraw and teach myself. The school was very disappointed at my giving up, as I was a scholarship student they had high hopes for. My father's reaction was not unexpected. He told me, "If you don't finish college, you'll be a dishwasher the rest of your life."
Nonetheless, I was determined to make progress as an artist. I drew every day and painted as much as I could on my own. Needing more room in my little rented house, I took a hammer to a dividing wall between the living room and a tiny side bedroom. That gave me more room and extra light from the bedroom window. The poor landlord nearly dropped dead when he came to check the flat, screaming, "Where is my wall?" I handed him a sack full of plaster dust and sticks. How do we get so brazen and insensitive in our ignorant youth? I blanch to think of scenes like this now. I don't know why we weren't kicked out onto the street immediately.
One day during the beginning of our time in Boston, Lyon got word that a great friend, the folk singer Odetta, was coming to town to give a concert. I was amazed when I heard Lyon had offered her a place to stay while she was in Boston. Our abode consisted of a tiny kitchen, three cramped rooms, and no proper bathroom. We just washed at the kitchen sink.
Lyon was reviewing a film, so I was sent to attend Odetta's concert and bring her back to our place afterward. I will never forget her powerful performance. It was totally engrossing. Her face was full of pathos, her voice as deep as Paul Robeson's as she sang spirituals to her gutsy guitar. The audience went wild. Odetta's expressive voice had captivated them. It's no wonder that she soon became known as the queen of American folk music, inspiring Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin.
After the concert, I went backstage to find Odetta surrounded by fans five or six layers deep. "How will I compete with all this to get to her to come home with me?" I wondered. As I stood behind her at the edge of the enthusiastic crowd, a long black arm appeared through the throng and grabbed my hand. She remembered meeting me the year before with Lyon.
My abiding image of Odetta's stay was seeing her in a little nightdress, washing at our humble kitchen sink. Although she was much younger than my mother, she was like her in many ways—large, shy, talented, and full of love and passion. I remember Odetta's laugh when Lyon played her a recording of Edith Sitwell reading her poem series Fa?ade, and it came to the part about Negresses. When she showed us pictures of her new brawny boyfriend, she said, "Can you imagine me with this handsome guy? Sure wasn't looking for someone that handsome. I always thought, who needs it?"
A couple I got to know very well during my Boston years were the Cohens. They lived in Cambridge in a huge Victorian family house with a massive garden. Bobbie was a photographer and Freddy an architect. They had three young children who were growing up fast, and Bobbie longed for a new baby to cuddle. She was thin and hyper with a nervous laugh. Wanting a mural to entertain her kids in the living room, which they used as a big playroom, Bobbie commissioned me.
I devised a highly detailed fantasy of clown figures roaming a strange land and worked laboriously on my vision with small brushes. It was my first proper mural, and I loved doing it. Not knowing how to price my work, I charged far too little. It's hard to think about the mural now, because after I worked months and months to complete the piece, a psychiatrist friend commented to Bobbie that she thought it would give the kids nightmares. The next time I visited the Cohens, the walls were painted white. All trace of my work was gone! I should have charged more than five dollars per eight-foot square panel, I told myself, then she might have valued it. Unfortunately, there are no photos of the mural. It was the late 1950s, and we were less camera-happy in those days.
While I was still working on the mural, Lyon and I were looking for a house in a run-down (therefore cheap) part of Boston. I found an area of the city called Roxbury that really appealed to me. In the late 1950s, Roxbury was full of wonderful rows of old multicolored Victorians in various states of disrepair. One particular stone house with a rather Swiss-type green roof caught my eye. I asked a little boy in the street if anyone lived there. "Just a minute, I'll see," he said. And picking up a rock, he threw it through the window. "Nope. No one's there," he said.
I learned that the house had been foreclosed by the bank, which was willing to sell it for $3,000. It had four stories and eleven garages that could be rented out, so was a steal. I called Dad, begging for finance to purchase this bargain. "Don't touch it—it's a bad deal," said my adventurous father. So I raised the money from a friend and we moved in.
Making the house habitable was a struggle, to be sure. Fortunately for us, however, a large part of nearby Boston was being torn down to make space for a whole new spate of modern development. We were somehow given carte blanche to wander about the demolition sites, helping ourselves to whatever we could salvage. Sinks, wiring, doors, windows, pipes—all covered in the dust of ages—made it possible to start patching up Daimon's Lair, our name for our new house. Lyon was very well versed in the classics, so I'm sure he called our house Daimon's Lair thinking of the guardian angel or guiding spirit of the Greeks. (Bobbie, on the other hand, called it Cold Comfort Farm after Stella Gibbons's hilarious comic novel of the 1930s.)
Once settled in our Roxbury house, I finally had generous space for a studio, so I started working like mad on a series of still lifes of large bowls, platters, and cups. One of them was hanging in our living room when my father flew in for a visit and to view the "bad investment." He stood back in shock when he saw the canvas. "That's the sort of painting people would put on their walls!" he gasped in amazement. The poor man had been raised with all of us kids producing little artworks that everyone cooed over, but he never really got it—that any of us would ever take art up seriously was beyond his reckoning. As for the house, he was glad I was settled but didn't rate the neighborhood.
Dad would have been more impressed by the manor house my friend Eduardo took me to visit while I lived in Boston. I had met garden and interior designer Eduardo Tirella in California a few years earlier. For a while, he had shared a house with dress designer Edmund Kara in Laurel Canyon near Hollywood, then they both moved to Big Sur when Dad decided to rent them a property near the restaurant, which he had just acquired for its water rights.
Eduardo used to drop by Daimon's Lair from time to time when he was in the area for jobs. For the last few years, he had been working for tobacco heiress Doris Duke. Doris was then one of the wealthiest women in the world, spoke nine languages, and devoted her time to the arts, philanthropy, and improving her many grand houses and gardens. Eduardo collaborated with her on decorating several of her homes and was, among other things, designing the gardens of the world for her family estate, Duke Gardens, in New Jersey.
At one point, Doris sent her private plane to fetch me and take me to meet them at her other family estate on the ocean in Newport, Rhode Island, called Rough Point. It was a stormy night, but my flight got through. Eduardo and Doris were held up in New York and would come in the next day. I wandered around alone in the huge eighty-five-room mansion—it was vast with large, high-ceilinged rooms. Later, I ate dinner on a long antique table, waited on by her staff—very lonely and strange. I tried to imagine what it would be like to own this and her other houses in Hawaii and L.A.
When Doris and Eduardo arrived, the house came alive—dogs, music, conversation. Eduardo told me that as soon as Doris had inherited the house from her mother, she immediately had the dark wood-paneled walls painted white—shades of Miss Havisham when Pip pulled the heavy curtain down. Eduardo lit a chandelier at one end of the house, and as we walked through the many rooms to the other end, he turned out lights so we could look back through a dozen rooms and see the light shining like a candle in the far cavelike distance.
Eduardo adored the gardens he was working on there and showed me through the ones done and in construction. We wandered from there out onto a little beach near the house, and I smoked my first pot, seeing with heightened vision the little plants on colored stony cliffs as Eduardo impressed on me his love for the natural world.
Doris allowed me free run of the house to paint anything I wanted, so I set up my easel in a corner of the enormous kitchen and did a study of brown and white dishes and fruit. She quipped to Eduardo, "He has a pick of all the fabulous European antiques I have collected, and he chooses the kitchen bowls!" I also painted a huge bouquet of flowers Eduardo had gathered from Doris's garden.
In the evenings, Doris would practice her singing. Her dream was to be a big jazz singer. She had a very high voice that was barely audible, but felt hard done that no one in the industry would give her a chance to perform. She was convinced she wasn't getting that break because they thought she didn't need the work.
Eduardo told me he grew up in New Jersey, and his family would occasionally drive past the great walls of the Duke house and vast gardens nearby. He used to wonder wistfully what it would be like to be in there and longed to have a look. And that little boy Eduardo found himself years later on the other side of the wall becoming an indispensable part of Doris Duke's life.
This reminds me of my friend Gayle Ortiz, whom I met years later in California. She used to pass a house she loved in her neighborhood and would often put her hands on the gates and say, "One day you will be mine!" When it came on the market unexpectedly years later, she was first in line and bought it. So those youthful dreams and yearning can materialize. Gail now has a great bakery near Monterey in Capitola and has filled her house with her brilliant mosaics. After one of the area's earthquakes, she circulated the neighborhood asking, "Any breakages?" I learned mosaic techniques from her and now often find myself on the scrounge, just like her.
1: My painting of Doris Duke's Rough Point kitchen, done in the late 1950s. "He has the pick of all my fabulous antiques, and he paints the kitchen bowls," she commented. 2: The sprawling Duke mansion, Rough Point, in Newport, Rhode Island, which I visited with Duke's garden designer Eduardo Tirella. 3: A pen drawing I did of Eduardo sitting under one of his sumptuous flower arrangements at Doris Duke's home. 4: A young Doris Duke in a fetching fur outfit. 5, 6, 7, 8: My fabric designs echo the magical palette of French artist Pierre Bonnard's shimmering painting. 9: Bonnard's Le Déjeuner, 1932. This incandescent Bonnard convinced me that color was the way to go in my own work.
Because Lyon was a critic for the Boston Globe, my life in Boston was peppered with many invitations to interesting cultural events—music, plays, exhibitions. One of the most exciting concerts I was lucky enough to happen upon was the first Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island, in July 1959. It was when I first heard Joan Baez. Folk singer Bob Gibson was scheduled to do a fifteen-minute performance, and he gave up half his time to introduce a new talent he had come across. Out stepped a barefoot eighteen-year-old girl with long black hair in a homespun dress, a virtual unknown to most of the audience. She opened her throat and made history.
In 1960, after a few years in the Roxbury house, I realized my heart wasn't in the reconstruction side of things, and that Lyon and I would never really finish it to any comfortable standard. Lyon wanted to write, and I wanted to paint, so we never quite focused on the task at hand. After I decided to leave Boston and move to the more artistically vibrant New York, Lyon stayed on in Daimon's Lair for a while. But eventually we sold the place for $8,000, which made our poor artist buyer happy, and we were glad to move on. My father was probably right that it wasn't a particularly wise long-term investment. When I went back to Boston some years after selling the house and told a taxi driver I wanted to go see it, he said, "Hope you aren't planning to stay there on your own. It's not safe." Unfortunately, by the late 1960s, Roxbury had become famous for its race riots.
Just before I left Daimon's Lair to live in New York in 1960, I decided to take mescaline with Lyon. It wasn't quite the swinging sixties, but drug taking was starting to enter the bohemian world. We had all read The Doors of Perception written by Aldous Huxley in 1954. Lyon and I were very curious to enter that inner world, yet very nervous because of all the horror stories we had heard of people becoming addicted to heavier drugs or hitting terrible depths of depression or even dying.
We cleared our calendar, and on a warm summer morning, with a friend to sit with us for the day, we dropped our pills. What followed is difficult to put into words, but the main impression left in me was that everything in life is deeply significant and beautiful if we experience it with an open enough perception. It's a tall order with our constantly chattering minds full of conditioned reflexes and attitudes. I remember seeing two street boys talking to each other on a corner. I didn't hear their conversation, but just watched their bodies as they talked. The total affection and connection was clear to see, yet I'm sure they were ordinary heterosexual guys. At one point, I was leaning out the window watching the light on the leaves of the tree next to our house when I felt our sitter grab me back into the room. He was sure I'd let myself sail down through those leaves, and I felt no sense of danger, so I am glad he rescued me. Later, I thought a lot about that experience and decided it was worth taking time to let the significant beauty in the world around me surface, as I knew it would if I gave it that time. Drugs never interested me again after just a couple of experiments like this.
Lyon had reviewed a series of Shakespeare plays during his time with the Boston Globe, one of which starred Alvin Epstein. Alvin was a stage actor in his early thirties, already well known for playing the part of Lucky in Beckett's Waiting for Godot on Broadway opposite Bert Lahr's Gogo in 1956, and the Fool in Orson Welles's King Lear in the same year. When I met him backstage in the late 1950s, he had a warm twinkle in his eye, and we got along famously. He invited me to visit him in New York the next time I was down, and I stayed with him there a few times while I was still in Boston. When I moved to New York, Alvin generously told me I was welcome to share his West 14th Street apartment.
Once established in New York, I continued with my artwork, painting Alvin, his friends in the theater, and still lifes. I also made papier-maché angels after seeing some German carved wooden ones on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Christmas tree.
One of my favorite still lifes that I did in New York was heavily influenced by Pierre Bonnard. I'd discovered him a year before, while flipping through a book of the French painter's work. The glowing colors astounded me. I think that was when my fierce love of color really started to rear its head. I was particularly struck by Bonnard's use of orange and cool lavender. To prepare for the still life, I first spread an orange oilcloth over our dining-room table, which had an overhead lamp that bathed the area in a pool of light. The subjects I placed on the table included marmalade jars, soft blue-gray cups, and plates of fruit. The reflected light from the orange cloth onto the blue-gray pottery and the grapefruits enchanted me. I can't remember where we ate as I labored for a week or so on the painting. "Don't touch the still life," was a refrain often heard in my kitchen studio. Poor Alvin—with me taking over his life like that—but he never complained (and we're still friends).
There are two stories of Alvin's that always remind me what America was like in the late 1950s and early 1960s when I was in New York. In 1962, he had a part in a play starring the tall, elegant, and talented actress and singer Diahann Carroll. It was a musical by Richard Rodgers called No Strings about an African American woman and a white man—played by Diahann, and Richard Kiley—who meet up in Paris as lovers. This was a very progressive theme in that era. The delicious episode Diahann told Alvin sums up the racial attitudes of the time. A year before, she was booked to sing in a hotel in Florida. She got there, settled into her room, and called down to book a table for a preshow dinner. "Where would you like that, Miss Carroll, in your room or in the kitchen?" she was asked. Without batting an eyelid, she replied, "I'll have it wherever you would like the show, in the kitchen or in my room, it's all the same to me."
At that time, there was also a deathly fear in the United States of Russia and its people. They were supposedly our entrenched enemy, who would do us in if we ever let our guard down. Alvin's father, a well-established doctor in New York, had as a patient William Z. Foster, the chairman of the Communist Party of America. Foster needed a big operation that he couldn't afford to have done in the United States, so he went to receive treatment in Russia, and Alvin's father accompanied him there. We had just lived through the McCarthy era, when so many creative people in theater and film had been blacklisted and lost their careers and reputations for having supposedly communist leanings. When Alvin's father returned from Russia, he was aglow with impressions of life in the Soviet Union. Learning and books were freely available, he said, people happy and warmhearted. He'd been to such great theater and ballet, and on and on. How could this be? We heard everyone was crushed under the heel of that oppressive regime, and no happiness or freedom was to be found.
I began to understand how the truth could be twisted. Later, I realized how repressed some Russians were and also how they were brainwashed into believing we Americans were the oppressed and miserable masses—our poor begging in the streets, medical treatment for only the rich, and no culture. Both sides used propaganda.
In 1960, when Alvin had time off, which was rare, we traveled across America in a Volkswagen bus and loved it. We were both greedy for the sights of the vast landscapes and the fascinating towns in the "flyover states" that you never hear much about. Alvin loved Big Sur when we reached the West Coast, and I introduced him to my parents and the stunning views of the wild coast from our family restaurant.
When we visited Deetjen's Big Sur Inn a short distance down Highway 1 from Nepenthe, they were playing Joan Baez's first album. It was a perfect combination: Joan's English and Scottish ballads soaring out of an old Norwegian inn among the towering redwoods in Big Sur. The combination of a rich, heart-stopping voice and a cool self-contained persona makes Joan one of the deepest fascinations in my life. Her vibrant voice has popped up in California and London throughout my years, always enchanting. How lucky I felt to have seen her historic début at the Newport Folk Festival!
Back in New York, I met many creative, famous, and working theater people through Alvin. He had received a Ford Foundation grant to start his own theater group, and with it, for rehearsals, he rented a huge loft in the Meatpacking District near our 14th Street apartment. This area is now very desirable, but it was a real backwater then.
We gave several amazing parties in that loft to break it in. At one I recall meeting Siobhan McKenna, whom I had seen some years earlier starring in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. She left me totally smitten with her rich Irish voice. Celebrities like the comic duo Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and actor Eli Wallach also added sensational dash to the event. But the most memorable meeting that night was with legendary composer Leonard Bernstein. I had seen and adored West Side Story on Broadway and was fascinated to actually meet the creator of its musical score. Imagine my emotions as he pressed my hand, looked longingly at me, and said, "How does it feel to be the most handsome man in the world?" I'm sure he was a bit drunk and said that line to many people, as I've learned he was a passionate soul who ate alive the world he encountered. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed my moment with him.
When Alvin got in his stride developing the first production for his theater group to showcase for producers, I suggested he hire Dustin Hoffman, who was living in New York and who I'd heard was looking for work. They rehearsed the play The Bacchae, and Alvin was quite pleased with Dustin till the night of their presentation—Dustin never showed. When Alvin met him a couple of years later and asked why he hadn't bothered to come, Dustin quipped, "Because I really want to make it." Which as we all know, he certainly did to great acclaim when he appeared in the film The Graduate in 1967.
To continue my art studies in New York in 1960, I started attending the Art Students League on West 57th Street. It was, and still is, an atelier school where students can take studio classes taught by international artists. Painting and drawing there was hugely stimulating. However, in my still life class, the subjects were mostly pedestrian bowls of fruit with draped cloths. Hardly inspiring. I asked if I could set up the next arrangement for us to paint, then went down to the Lower East Side, where I found vacant lots with piles of rubbish. Gathering up the rusty buckets and tools, old broken window frames, and corrugated metal I collected there, I arranged a landscape of dereliction. It was the start of my love affair with the rich tones of rust.
When we weren't painting still lifes, we worked from live models. One day, a middle-aged, plumpish woman took the stand. As we painted away, our instructor, Mr. Dickenson, stuck his head through our door and commented, "There is not one muddy shadow on her body, students. They are all silver." Later, when our model had donned her robe and left the room, Mr. Dickenson informed us that she had modeled for the fountain in front of New York's Plaza Hotel (which has since been converted to fancy apartments). I think of her every time I pass that corner on my New York visits.
1961–1964
Working as an artist on the West Coast
In my early twenties and forever restless, I packed my bags sometime in 1961 and moved back to Big Sur, eager for new experiences. California looked suddenly fresh and new after my four-year absence.
I was lucky enough to rent the old mess hall at Anderson Creek where Henry Miller had lived in the 1940s. My sister Holly and her husband, Tony Gafill, lived in a cottage below me. Tony was a beautiful, bright, barefoot boy, with huge, dreamy eyes and a tall, lanky body. He used to wear a scarlet nightshirt all the time, and I remember seeing his naked legs sticking out from under his car, which seemed to need endless repairs. When Holly had her first child, they found a Victorian book called something like Caring for Baby. This baby's care was a steep learning curve for Holly. As Holly said of those days, "Babies don't come with instructions." Tony had wanderlust and soon drifted away after their second baby, Erin, was born. Like many children deprived of a father's attention, she developed a deep imaginary picture of Tony and longed to meet him as she was growing up.
I painted a lot of still lifes and family portraits in my new big studio. There was no heat except for an oil drum cut to accommodate logs. It actually threw off quite a good heat if there wasn't too hard a gale blowing. Wild cream narcissus, orange calendulas, and the delightful round leaves and flowers of nasturtiums surrounded the mess hall. The salty scent of the pounding sea below us mingled with the perfume of the flowers. Sunrises and sunsets were glorious, and it was mostly an intensely happy time.
Sometimes, however, I did feel isolated. Not wanting the expense of running a car, I didn't drive, so I had to hitchhike thirty miles into town to shop, and often had a long wait getting back unless I could corral a friend into giving me a lift. What saved me from drowning in loneliness for several months was an intense relationship I was having with a man my age from back East who had a strange sense of humor. Eventually, we split up over some misunderstanding, and I felt glad to be on my own in my big studio house at Anderson.
Some weeks after the breakup, I was woken up in the middle of the night by voices in my kitchen. It was my ex-friend saying to a stranger, "Oh, you can sleep anywhere here. Kaffe won't mind." As I ran into the kitchen I flew into a rage at the presumption of it. "How dare you come barging in here acting like you own the place?" I shouted. Then I turned to the poor stranger, a quiet man with a black mustache who was cringing in embarrassment. "I'm not angry with you," I said. "Please do stay!" My embarrassed guest turned out to be Steve Lovi, an artist from Chicago living in San Francisco at the time. During breakfast the next morning, his gentle intelligence impressed me—yet I had no inkling what a huge role he would play in my life some years down the road.
I continued painting away in my studio, entertaining the occasional visitor and trying to keep myself motivated. One day not many months after my return to the West Coast, I heard a big four-wheel-drive car pull up outside. I looked down my long studio room and through the open door at the other end. A tall man in white silk pajamas sprang out of the car. The only colors on him were paint smudges around his crotch. I knew that syndrome—nervously grabbing yourself as the excitement of painting took hold. He announced in his proud voice, "You don't know me. I'm Alba Heywood. I live up the hill, and you are coming to paint with me." Something about his assertive manner made me collect my paints and join him—the beginning of my two-year study with this established artist.
1: One of my first Fair Isle knits from the 1970s. 2: A painting I did of the prisoner's mess hall that became my studio in Anderson Creek, CA, in 1961, when I returned from the East Coast. 3: The wild Fassett tribe in the sixties with a new generation of nieces and nephews. 4: Such a romantic; a cow's pelvis on my head and wearing Ethiopian beads. 5, 6: Portraits I did while at Anderson Creek: local character Margeret Lial sitting in a field of mustard flowers, and Mom in her green velour bathrobe.
Alba had the look of a hero in the Napoleonic war paintings. Tall, thick brown hair parted in the middle, piercing eyes, and eagle-sharp features. Born into a prominent oil family in Louisiana, he was in his early thirties when I met him. He shared his Big Sur home with his Dutch lover Loet Vanderveen, whom he had met in New York. They both had had successful careers that they threw over in 1960 to move to Big Sur and live the dream. Loet became a ceramicist and sculptor, and Alba concentrated on his painting. Alba taught me many things in the next months, often sweeping me off to go to exhibitions in Monterey or San Francisco when not painting day after day in his studio.
Being a southerner, Alba was full of stories and drama. One day in San Francisco, we were walking down a street when he suddenly lit up, grabbed a passing young woman by the face, and said in a breathless voice, "Kaffe, look at these eyes. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?" The poor creature went from terror to melting under his appreciative eye. One thing Alba taught me that really took hold was: "Paint as well as you can. Don't worry about your style. It will arise from the weakness you can't correct."
While I was working away at Anderson Creek, Eduardo Tirella used to drop by occasionally. It was through Eduardo that I also came into contact with movie star Kim Novak and singer Peggy Lee. He was good friends with both. (His friend Edmund Kara used to make dresses for Peggy Lee in the early 1950s.)
At some point, Eduardo took me to Peggy's house in Hollywood Hills and talked her into sitting for me to paint a portrait. "But I don't have my paints with me," I protested.
"I'll buy you a new set," said Eduardo, and off we went to get paints, turpentine, brushes, and a canvas. It all added up to the price I'd charge for a painting. Another of life's lessons—one's materials can be replaced, and it's money well spent. I painted Peggy's portrait sitting in her garden in three hours and gave it to her. Recently, I met her daughter, who says she inherited the painting.
I was always fascinated by stories of the film actress Kim Novak. She was cool and beautiful with a passion and wildness sizzling just under her elegant serenity. I loved hearing that all her dressing rooms had to be painted lavender, as it was one of my favorite colors at the time. At one of Nepenthe's big Halloween parties, I spotted Kim sitting quietly, surveying the crowd of costumed characters. I grabbed a grapefruit from behind the counter and strode up to her table. "I'd like to present you with a prize for looking the most like Kim Novak," I said, bowing deeply. She laughed and asked me to join her. I'd seen a film she'd starred in about actress Jeanne Eagels, which I enjoyed a lot. She said she loved that part better than any other she had done, but the film was not a success and the studio was not proud of it. Because she had a house up the coast near Carmel, she was a frequent visitor to our family restaurant. It didn't really surprise me when she retired early from the dazzling limelight to raise horses.
One day when Eduardo was visiting my Anderson Creek studio, I began complaining, saying I would love a little garden in front of my house but hadn't the time or energy to do anything about it. Eduardo was a passionate designer who felt anything was possible if you set your mind to it. "Are you free this weekend?" he asked with a determined look. "Yes," I said. "Well, let's make that garden!" He bundled me off to the beach, where we found driftwood logs and large stones, which we brought to the house. We then spent a day digging up a plot, planting succulents and other shrubs, and positioning wood and rocks. Presto, a garden in two days! It was a great illustration of "never say never" and what a burst of enthusiasm and confidence can achieve. Remember, this is forty years before the spate of instant garden makeover programs on TV. Eduardo would often stop in wonder at the beautiful mushrooms, ferns, and river stones as we hiked in Big Sur canyons, saying that no garden designer could make anything better. He made me value even more what was so familiar to me. When Alba met Eduardo, he said, "Oh, I expected you to be wrapped in cellophane!" I guess I'd gone on about him too much.
Although my life in my converted mess hall studio seemed natural to me, one event put into perspective how unconventional and bohemian it seemed to others. I had a visit from Michael Murphy, the cofounder of Esalen, a center for the study of human psychology that had just opened at our beloved sulphur springs down the road. He brought with him a group of ardent young students who were on a weekend course at the institute. They had come to study how a bohemian artist lives free of the restraints of society's conventions. There I sat in my big drafty studio, my oil-drum fire burning, and tried to answer questions about my bizarre (to them) life. Their well-ironed beige chinos, button-down collars, and neat haircuts were quite a contrast to my sandals and colorful shirt.
Many unconventional people were still being drawn to the unique life and setting of Big Sur in the early 1960s. One such was a boy named Archie, who was a street gypsy from San Francisco. Very bright and attractive, he appealed to men and women. My sister Kim rose to the challenge when he said he knew little about women. She would instruct him, she thought, and instantly became pregnant with her first son.
Archie and I got on well. My friend Lyon, by now back on the West Coast, liked him because he was intellectually curious and read what was recommended to him. One evening Archie, Lyon, Alba, and I were having a drink at Nepenthe when Alba suggested we continue drinks up at his house on the ridge. With Archie in the driver's seat, we began our long, winding journey up to Alba's place, 1,600 feet above sea level. Once we left the highway and started up the hill through Alba's canyon, Archie stopped the car for a pee. I stayed in the car, and Alba and Lyon jumped out and started walking on ahead. When Archie caught up with Alba and Lyon, he slowed the car down so they could jump up onto the front bumpers. As we neared the top of the ridge, Alba, feeling frisky, shouted, "Let's go! Hit the gas!" Obediently, Archie speeded up. Suddenly the car hit a deep rut and careered sideways off the road and over the cliff. Alba and Lyon jumped clear just in time. The car rolled over about eight times till it came to rest on a bush at the edge of a steep drop to the rocks below. As Archie and I had tumbled around in the car, I had felt nothing but exhilaration. I'd always wondered what a car accident would feel like, and here it was—whoopee!
When the car came to a stop on its side, I asked Archie if he was okay. Luckily, he had only one scratch on his head, and I wasn't injured at all. We quickly climbed out of the car and looked up the hill. Far above us we saw Alba and Lyon in tears, convinced we were done for. Once we were back up on the road we realized it was Alba who had been hurt jumping from the careering car. He had broken his wrist, which was now giving him pain as he emerged from shock. We drove into town to take him to the hospital. His frustration at not being as mobile the next month was very difficult for him.
Like all of us, Alba was lucky to escape the accident alive, but seven years later his luck ran out. In March 1969, he fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand. Having taken sleeping pills, he didn't awaken, and smoke inhalation sent him to a tragic early death—he was barely forty. As I was writing the first draft of this story, an old friend of mine showed up with a painting of Big Sur he felt sure I had painted. At first glance, I thought it was one of the many studies of the coastline I produced in the early 1960s. But there was something about the way it was seen through a framework of planks that gave it a strong style I recognized as my old teacher's. Indeed, it was signed "Alba." I'm so grateful to have this tangible memento of a towering influence in my life.
Once again restless to explore more of the world, I moved up to San Francisco in early 1963, and Lyon gladly claimed my Anderson Creek studio. I took to the big city like a duck to water—I was never meant to remain a country boy. The rugged Big Sur coast is very seductive with its fresh, wild life in all senses of the word. But to be able to wander down streets of Victorian houses and climb hills looking at front gardens with all the variety man puts into his dwellings was irresistible to me. On top of that, there were the shops, museums, and chance meetings with people from all over the globe—stimulating in the extreme.
When I was first in San Francisco, I was lent a beautiful hilltop apartment on Nob Hill by Judy McBean, a socialite art lover who was going to Europe for a month or so. After settling in, I wandered down to the nearby North Beach area of the city, and the first person I met who appealed to me was an artist from a Danish American family—Charles Heim. We got talking, and I could see at once he was really into painting and knew about all the artists in the area. I brought him to my digs to show him my paintings and drawings. He responded in a very positive way to my work, wanting to show it to all of his rich collector friends.
Charles invited me to his house and studio on Potrero Hill. I was thrilled to be meeting another young artist who was bright, attractive, and really encouraging, finding me many contacts. He had an elfin quality, laughed easily when pleased, and was serious most of the time. His house was full of things I loved—oriental carpets, interesting furniture, paintings, and drawings.
In the next months, Charles and I spent a lot of time together. He was a great cook and made good meals for us. Music was a big part of our relationship, as Charles's ex-lover Jesse was training to be a concert pianist and shared the house. We talked nonstop about Europe, paintings, theater, and books. We ate in interesting restaurants. We went to every museum and quirky antique shop we could discover. We walked the city; planned murals, paintings, and exhibitions; and painted and drew together with gorgeous romantic music filling the studio. Charles told me of his European travels and instilled me with longing to return there.
This was the most stimulating period of my artistic life up to that point. Charles constantly brought me interested collectors who commissioned work and heaped encouragement on me. I began to feel like a proper artist under his enthusiastic eye. Charles himself worked for a printing firm and so could only paint seriously in the evening or on weekends. I swore, if I had to starve I wouldn't go that route. When I asked him why he didn't do art full time, he said, "I have to have a car. I couldn't afford to run it on an artist's earnings." I vowed then never to have a car till I could afford one on my creative pay. So I never properly learned to drive—one of the few citizens of California not to drive, I'm sure.
In San Francisco, I hung out mainly in a huge warehouse of a restaurant, called The Old Spaghetti Factory Café and Excelsior Coffee House, in North Beach. Freddy Kuh, a world traveler and confidently funny man, had built the restaurant up from scratch from the burned-out shell of a turn-of-the-century pasta factory. He lived above the business. The place consisted of three vast floors filled with Freddy's auction-house finds. Masses of couches, overstuffed chairs, and dressers filled with china vied for space with paintings, sculptures, rugs, and all manner of objects. When you had tea with Freddy, you could pick the room set you fancied. There were at least a dozen completely furnished areas of chairs, settees, cabinets, and tables cheek by jowl to wander through. It was like an overcrowded vintage showroom.
After The Old Spaghetti Factory opened in 1957, it quickly became a haven for artists, theater folk, and Beat poets, as well as lotus-eaters of the burgeoning hippie movement. The restaurant served modestly priced food and wine and was imbued with atmosphere. Eccentrically decorated, colorful wooden chairs hung upside down from the ceilings; moose heads and other kitsch lined the walls.
Freddy liked my work and even bought a few of my still lifes and drawings. Eventually he asked me to do a large mural in the restaurant, depicting all the characters that frequented the place. It was eight feet square and done on Masonite. I loved my weeks of working on the painting, right on the wall where it would hang as you entered the main room. Freddy gathered the cast for the painting day by day: the little flower seller Millie; the great artist's model Flo Allen, who sat for me with bare brown breasts; and one of Freddy's best friends, the artist Joseph St. Amand. Even visiting poets like Thom Gunn were included.
When I was hesitant about what to charge for my mural, Freddy said, "I'll give you lifetime free eating and drinking at the Spaghetti Factory for it." What an offer, since I spent most of my food budget in that place. The trouble is I moved to England a month later, only having the occasional meal there on visits home. Years after Freddy died and the Spaghetti Factory changed hands, the painting showed up in an antique store in San Francisco. It was bought by a filmmaker who made a documentary about it for TV. He invited me and all the people in the painting (those still living) to be interviewed for his film.
During my life in San Francisco, I had some precarious times, trying to support myself as an artist and getting very near the end of my funds. I had had one-man drawing shows at the Pantechnicon Gallery and the Legion of Honor museum, but I was still struggling. Luckily, as close as I came to destitution, those angels never really let me down. Looking at my bank account at one point, I realized with real fear that I had only about five dollars left. I took out three dollars and bought bread, cheese, and eggs from a day-old shop that had real bargains for struggling artists like me. Then I called a drama critic friend who had expressed interest in my work. After inviting him to dinner in my studio room in the Fillmore District, I hung every painting I'd done three or four high on the walls.
We ate my simple meal (thank God for the bottle of wine he brought) and gossiped about San Francisco life. He never once seemed to look at my work, so as the meal ended and he was donning his coat to leave, I said to myself, "I guess I'll have to go back to live with my family in Big Sur!" Just as he reached the door, he turned and asked, "How much is that painting on the far right?" My heart leapt, and I knew that no matter how close I got, I'd always survive.
Another life-saving commission I got was from a very wealthy family friend, Hugh Chisholm. He called one day and invited me to draw his huge house in Hillsborough, just south of San Francisco. The area was very upmarket (the local yarn shop was called the Status Thimble). I sat drawing his grand house for a few days, and during that time was introduced to a visiting couple from England. Jeremy Fry was an inventor, successful engineer, and philanthropist, and Frances Chadwick (the wife of a famous sculptor) was having a fling with him. They were both tall, elegant, beautiful, and easygoing. Our lunch together was full of laughter and flirtation. The next day as I sat drawing, Hugh said, "You liked those people, didn't you? Well, I think you should go to England. You have many good qualities, but you could use some finishing touches, and England can do just that for you."
Suddenly, that did sound like a good idea. At a dinner party some weeks before, I had met English novelist Christopher Isherwood. He must have been about sixty-one then, but was so full of vim and vigor I didn't even think of his age. He was a small figure with dancing eyes blinking with intelligent wit. We got so engrossed in conversation, the whole party seemed to fade away. We talked about books—I'd just read W. Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up, a literary memoir written in 1938. Christopher thought Maugham hadn't been honest enough about his gayness. We also discussed art and perception, and about the coincidences that keep cropping up in regular patterns. Christopher was without a doubt one of the most stimulating and engaging souls I'd ever met. The next day, I bought as many of his books as I could find and devoured them. They were about England as well as the rest of the world, including Berlin and L.A., seen through his English eyes.
I was well stoked to take up Hugh's suggestion about going to England, and I found a cheap ticket on Icelandic Airlines—a propeller flight that took twenty-four hours if you were lucky.
In October of 1964, the night before I was to fly, I went to The Old Spaghetti Factory to have a farewell dinner. As I sat there before my huge multi-portrait—excited about the new world before me but sad to leave all this—the door burst open and in walked Jeremy Fry. He was on his way to the Far East to check on some of the remote-control valves that had made his fortune. "Guess where I'm going tomorrow?" I cried. When he heard I was flying to England, he was thrilled. "Do you have a place to stay?" When I said I hadn't arranged anything, he pulled a huge iron key out of his briefcase and handed it to me along with the address of his business flat in London. "I'll be there in a week's time," he said. "Once I arrive, we can go together to my home in Bath."