My personal life remained chaotic, so much so that I have a single file that holds the divorce papers from one marriage and the wedding invitation from the next. (I may need to work on my filing system.)
I was good at falling in love but lousy at being in love.
But there were patterns amid the disarray, as women from different parts of the world or with different ethnicities continued to attract me. That sparked my interest in Sumako, who was of Korean descent and as beautiful as her name. She grew up with her mom in America and never met her dad, so I wrote a melancholy song about a young girl who wants to go with her mother to a place called “Sumahama” in search of her father. I really like the ballad, which appeared on our L.A. (Light Album) and included Japanese verses. Sumako and I were briefly engaged but did not marry.
I did, however, marry the next woman I dated seriously. In 1981, I bought a house in Incline Village, Nevada, which is next to Lake Tahoe. There I met Cathy Martinez, who was working at a leather goods store. Even though I was now forty years old, I was still not willing to allow a relationship to grow and develop and was still unwilling to live with a woman with whom I wasn’t married. So Cathy and I did marry, and Wolfman Jack, who was now an ordained minister, officiated the wedding. Cathy and I had a son, Mike Jr., in 1982, but my relationship with Cathy was never strong, and we split up in a couple of years.
The marriages contributed my financial problems in the early 1980s. I had never been good at handling my finances, allowing others to take care of them. That was a mistake, as I never really knew how much money I had coming in or going out, and I would eventually learn that I had a lawyer who was skimming money from me. By the early 1980s, I had taken out significant real estate loans to build out my property in Santa Barbara and to buy the house in Incline Village. I had also borrowed money to buy property in Kauai, Hawaii. The borrowing was excessive under any circumstances, but then I was clobbered when interest rates soared in the late 1970s and early ’80s. I was involved in several new entertainment-related businesses, but execution and follow-up have never been my strengths either, and none of these businesses panned out. I lent $50,000 to a friend and never saw that again. The Beach Boys, meanwhile, were experiencing some of their leanest years, so I didn’t have the income to cover my debts. I was also involved in several costly lawsuits in which the Beach Boys were aligned against my brother Stephen over various real estate deals. (Stephen was fired from the band in 1979 for unrelated reasons.) The lawsuits dragged on for years and severed my relationship with my brother, who in 1988 was convicted of embezzling more than $900,000 from the band.
As for me, I owed the IRS money but was in too deep of a hole. In September of 1983, I filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from my creditors, giving me time to sell some assets, rein in costs, and pay off my loans. It was necessary medicine, but it would take a couple of years before I met the right person who could get my personal life as well as my financial life in order.
In our own ways, all the Beach Boys were trying to put the pieces together. Carl, after the Australia trip, could have been lost for good, but he had never been a chronic drug abuser. He had been surrounded by some bad people in the late 1970s who wanted to take over the management of the band and tried to win Carl’s loyalty by giving him cocaine and other goodies. Those guys were finally run off, and Carl, with the help of a few friends, pulled himself together in remarkably short order.
Carl was inscrutable to most of us. We all knew, however, that he took great pride in the music, and I’m certain that when he saw the video of any of his performances in Australia or New Zealand, he was embarrassed. He was also deeply spiritual, always searching for peace and equilibrium. Though he abandoned TM, he began practicing est (Erhard Seminars Training) in the middle of the 1970s and befriended its founder, Werner Erhard. He then discovered John-Roger, who started a new-age movement that held that the individual soul can be liberated through prayer and meditation. Carl started listening to Insight tapes, derived from John-Roger’s seminars that tried to guide adherents to a path of joy and love, and Carl meditated to these tapes for two hours at a time and attended the seminars as well. He began going to the gym every day, which he hated, but it helped him with his back pain. He lost weight and in time quit smoking. Carl met his second wife, Gina Martin, daughter of Dean Martin, in the late 1970s (they married in 1987), and that too was a stabilizing force.
—
While the band might have been stagnating, I had lost none of my ambition for big performances, and I still believed we could rise to the occasion when the lights were brightest. I had an idea in 1980 for a Fourth of July concert on the Washington Mall, though I wanted to do more than just one show in one city. I envisioned a globe-girdling Independence Day bonanza. Start with a morning gig in Paris; then fly to London for another concert; then take the Concorde to Washington for a show on the mall; then fly next to Southern California; and finish off the day in Hawaii. I wanted to chase the sun across the earth, play in five different time zones, and call it the Endless Summer Celebration.
Chasing the sun . . . how cool would that be? The logistics, however, proved overwhelming, so we settled on one show in one city, on the Washington Mall, and that was challenge enough. We wanted the concert to be free, but a free concert isn’t really free, as it takes tens of thousands of dollars for the staging, security, and cleanup. To help with the costs, we recruited corporate sponsors, which was rare for music performers in the early 1980s but something we helped pioneer. We wanted to include different types of bands to reflect the breadth of American pop music—country-western, rhythm and blues, soul—and we intended to invite Earth, Wind & Fire. But the National Park Service told me no because black bands had caused crowd-control problems in the past. I told the Park Service officials that the Beach Boys had played with all kinds of bands all over the world and had never had an incident, but they wouldn’t change their minds.
Our 1980 concert drew more than 500,000 fans, our largest crowd ever, and we had more than 400,000 the following year at the same locale. We didn’t draw these numbers because we were at the zenith of our popularity or riding a hit single. We had played Fourth of July concerts in the past and never had crowds like that. But there was something about America at this particular time that made the Beach Boys and the nation’s capital a very good fit.
All Americans were jarred in November of 1979, when Iran held hostage our diplomats and citizens, their captors marching triumphantly in the street while calling the United States the Great Satan. It was a daily humiliation, played out on television, with its own despairing, trademark headline: “America Held Hostage.” Oil prices went through the roof, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and the taunts escalated. We seemed to be powerless. Americans, I think, wanted a reason to wave the flag and feel patriotic, and for many, celebrating the Fourth of July with the Beach Boys served that purpose. Writing patriotic songs never crossed our minds, but if we wrote songs that made people feel patriotic, or at least made people feel good about America, so much the better.
The Beach Boys had never endorsed a political candidate and had stayed clear of most political issues, and that remains true to this day. In 1979, however, the presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush contacted us about playing a fund raiser. At first our tour manager, Jerry Schilling, said no, because it was something we had never done. But the campaign contacted Jerry again, and this time Jerry came to us. I remembered that Bush had been America’s de facto ambassador to China as well as the director of the CIA, and that intrigued me.
I wanted to play in a large Communist country. In 1978, we were supposed to go to the Soviet Union with Joan Baez and Santana and perform in Leningrad’s Palace Square. Levi Strauss & Co., working with Bill Graham, had contributed $350,000 for the tour, and CBS was going to film it. We even had a promotional photo taken with Joan Baez and us holding a surfboard, half of it painted as an American flag, half painted as a Soviet flag. But the Soviets, for reasons they never disclosed, canceled the visit.
China fascinated me as well, and one of my best predictions—emboldened by a bit of weed and made to Richard Pryor, of all people—involves that country. Back in the mid-1960s, I used to watch Richard perform brilliantly at a comedy club in West Hollywood. After one show, we were hanging out and somehow got on the subject of China.
“Richard,” I said, “in my opinion, one day the Chinese will be drinking Coca-Cola.”
“No way, Love. That’s the ‘yellow peril,’ man. They ain’t going to be drinking no Coca-Cola in Red China.”
“No,” I said, “I believe they will someday.”
It turned out that carbonation indeed trumps Communism, and the Chinese were drinking Cokes by 1979 (the Russians were drinking Pepsi as well). I lost touch with Richard but saw him backstage at the Academy Awards show in 1983. He was hosting it and had a hundred things to do, but he walked over to me and had something on his mind.
“Love,” he said, “you were right about the Chinese and that Coca-Cola.”
Damn good memory, I thought.
Well, if the Chinese liked Coke, I figured they would also like the Beach Boys—two of America’s finest global brands. But we needed Bush’s help if we were going to be the first American rock band to perform there, so I suggested that we meet with him. Bush was campaigning in Salt Lake City in November of 1979, when we had a concert there, so all of the guys got dressed up—even Dennis wore a sports coat—to meet him for brunch at our hotel.
Bush arrived in his sweat suit, having just gone for a jog. The meeting was supposed to last for a half hour, but he stayed for ninety minutes. He was a nice guy, smart, funny, interested in what we did. We asked him about running for president and traveling all over the country. A television was on, and when John Connally, the former Texas governor who was also running for president, appeared, Bush said, “I don’t like that guy.”
I asked him about China, and Bush thought it was possible. When he asked about our performing at one of his fund raisers, we said we couldn’t do anything officially, but we’d be willing to do an event at a small venue that was not promoted as a political event; and if he showed up, he could come onstage, and we’d donate the proceeds to his campaign.
I thought this was a good compromise, and if he became president, he could help us get to China.
On March 9, 1980, we appeared at the Sunrise Theatre in Fort Pierce, Florida. At one point, we told the crowd of about 1,000 people that we had a special guest, George Bush, and he came onstage and sang “Long Tall Texan” with us, and we chipped in our proceeds to his campaign.
George Bush lost, of course, to Ronald Reagan, but he became the vice president, and following the election, Bush contacted us again and invited the Beach Boys to the Inauguration. (We had connections to the Reagans as well, as Dennis had dated their daughter, Patti.) We accepted, played a Concert for Youth attended by 3,000 teens as part of the inaugural festivities, and were listed as honorary chairmen of one of the entertainment committees. All of which was great, but the vice president was unable to open any doors for us to China.
—
By 1980, Carl was easily the most ambitious and creative of my three cousins, which was seen on our Keepin’ the Summer Alive album, released in March. Carl had two songs, written with Randy Bachman, that demonstrated his interest in funky R&B rock. The following year, Carl quit the Beach Boys while also releasing his first solo album, and it’s often assumed that he left the band to pursue a solo career. But that wasn’t the case. Carl wrote and recorded his album, Carl Wilson, while he was still with the Beach Boys, and he could have done the same for future recordings. He quit in part because he was fed up with all the drama and the discord and what he considered to be the band’s lack of commitment to the music. He had also grown weary of his role as the caretaker of Brian’s legacy, and he wanted to break free. As he wrote in the autobiographical song “Right Lane,” which appeared on his solo album:
Always believed I could get what I wanted.
Even if it took a little while.
Always believed I could take care of my brother.
Do my thing with style . . .
I’ve been livin’ in the right lane.
Seeing others cruise me by.
I’ve been tryin’ to do the best thing.
Think I’ll give the passin’ lane a try.
My frustration with the band focused more on the destructive lifestyles, but I never wanted to leave the Beach Boys. I did, however, have the opportunity to branch out. In the late 1970s, seeking to work with performers who preferred meditation to drugs, I formed a band called Celebration. It featured guys who also played for the Beach Boys, including Ron Altbach, who was a superb concert pianist, and Charles Lloyd, the jazz saxophone and flute player.
I once heard him play the most amazing solo in the studio on the song “Feel Flows.”
“Hey, Charles,” I said. “You may not always be with us to play that. Can you write that down?”
“Shit, Love, you can’t write that shit down.”
In 1981, I was approached by Neil Bogart, the founder of Casablanca Records who had signed KISS, Donna Summer, and other artists, and he asked if I wanted to do a solo album for his new label, Boardwalk Records. I gave it a shot, recording ten songs, half of which were covers.
Neil, tragically, was diagnosed with lymphoma while we were recording, and he died in May of 1982, at thirty-nine. Looking Back with Love was released in October of 1981. I liked some of the songs, and the album might have had a chance commercially, but not with the label reeling from Neil’s diagnosis. I also recorded more than a half-dozen songs in the late 1970s, including “Brian’s Back” and “Trisha,” but didn’t release them. To succeed, they would need to have the right producer or to be part of the right soundtrack, and no matter what I recorded, I would always be competing against my former self. Anything I do that is compared to “Good Vibrations” or “California Girls” will appear second-rate—which, of course, is the same bind the Beach Boys have been in for decades.
Regardless of these solo efforts, I prefer playing in a group, because I like the teamwork of a band. My favorite part of Looking Back with Love was that I hired a group of musicians who traveled with me to promote the album. I called the group the Endless Summer Beach Band, and we played cuts from the LP as well as Beach Boy hits.
One of the guys I hired was Jeff Foskett, a twenty-five-year-old singer and guitarist who then joined the Beach Boys when Carl quit. Though we were older, we still played outrageous pranks, and the guys soon pulled one on Jeff. For his birthday, they hired a black prostitute named Chocolate. But the prostitute was a transvestite, which Jeff discovered in due course. The evening came to a quick end, but for some time afterward, the guys asked him, “So, have you heard from Chocolate lately?”
—
Carl returned to the Beach Boys in May of 1982, just a year after he left. It was all about the music, and Carl could not achieve as a solo artist what he could achieve as part of the group. That was true for all of us. What made the Beach Boys special, in my opinion, were our layered harmonies, which could not be replicated by any individual. Carl returned with conditions, however. Assuming full control as band director, he insisted on more rehearsing and more focus while bringing in some new musicians and dismissing a few others. Even though Jeff Foskett was playing Carl’s parts, Jeff stayed in the band because he was so good. Carl also revamped the set list that allowed us to play our favorite songs, including Bruce’s “Disney Girls”; for Al, “Runaway” by Del Shannon; and Carl’s cover of “I Can Hear Music.” The improvement was dramatic.
Not improving, however, was Brian, who after his release from Brotman in 1979 moved into a house in Santa Monica Canyon and received daily assistance from several nurses. He performed with us on occasion, but he was probably at his nadir, often chain-smoking at the keyboard (he went through four packs a day), singing off-key, and mumbling through the lyrics. A couple of times he even gave the crowd the finger. At 310 pounds, he was now morbidly obese, but even that didn’t reflect how dire things had become. In March of 1982, Brian was rushed to St. John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, where he was seen by Dr. Lee Baumel, a psychiatrist who had treated Brian before. In his report (which was part of a future legal proceeding), Dr. Baumel said that Brian had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, and organic brain syndrome. In recent months, however, Brian had suffered from “increasing decompensation marked by massive abuse of Cocaine, marked weight increase, affective lability, threatening harm to others, breaking objects and windows in his home and a man who could be dangerous to himself or others . . . [Brian has] obtained over $20,000 within the past 4 to 6 weeks for purchase of Cocaine. The patient has become threatening and abusive when money is not readily turned over to him for this purpose . . . The patient is not overtly suicidal. However, he dictated a letter to his attorney implying early death.”
Brian was released after a few weeks.
Earlier in the year, when we were performing at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, Brian received an unexpected visitor—Dr. Eugene Landy. They spoke for a while, and then in the summer, Landy called Jerry Schilling with an interesting message.
“I want to finish my painting,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Jerry asked.
Landy explained that he wanted to work with Brian again. He met with Jerry and Carl and proposed that he revive his around-the-clock program for Brian—it would last twelve to eighteen months and cost $900,000.
Everyone knew it was a risk. Even though Brian and Marilyn were divorced, Marilyn had worked most closely with Landy the last time, so Jerry and Carl asked her opinion. “I guess he could help Brian again,” she said, “if he doesn’t get outrageous.” They asked my opinion, and while I knew that Landy was unorthodox, egocentric, and a little bit dangerous, I said that he had previously had success with Brian in getting him active and making him more responsible in his dress and social activities.
We believed we had a choice to make: pay Landy the money to take over Brian’s life or watch Brian die.
We hired Landy. Brian resisted, so on November 5, 1982, Carl, Al, and I met with Brian, and I handed him a letter and asked him to read it.
It said that the Beach Boys had fired him and that he couldn’t be part of the band until he entered treatment with Landy.
Brian was stunned as well as hurt.
“What the fuck? What in the fuck am I going to do for money if you kick me out of the group?”
“Look,” I said, “you got to lose weight or you’re going to die. You’re smoking cigarettes, and you weigh over three hundred pounds.”
We argued for a while, but Brian eventually conceded. He knew we weren’t changing our minds, and I believe he also recognized that this was the only move left. He was soon off to Hawaii to begin his recovery.
If Landy succeeded with Brian, we discussed possibly hiring him for Dennis, whose condition was of equal concern.
I don’t know that Dennis ever recovered fully from the sale of Brother Studio, which he had to sell when Carl liquidated his stake. It not only complicated Dennis’s recording efforts but marked a point at which the two brothers began to diverge. Dennis’s public blowouts had also become more conspicuous. In June of 1979, he went on a drinking binge during a week of concerts at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. During one show, I was trying to get him to focus on his drums, and he stood on the riser, glared at me, kicked the set over, and jumped me. The brawl didn’t last long, as security personnel, roadies, and other band members dragged us offstage and separated us. It would have been embarrassing under any circumstance, but all the more so because Aunt Audree was in the audience. An intermission followed, after which we all returned to the stage, though I stayed as far away from Dennis as possible. Afterward, we told him that he couldn’t perform with us anymore until he dried out, and he was gone for the better part of a year. He made few contributions to our next album, Keepin’ Summer Alive (March 1980).
After his second divorce with Karen Lamm, Dennis moved in with Christine McVie, the keyboard player and singer with Fleetwood Mac. Just a few years after the release of Rumours, she was one of the world’s most successful recording artists, and she later said of Dennis: “Half of him was like a little boy, and the other half was insane.” McVie was also part of a musical group, when it came to drugs, that “made the Rolling Stones look like a Salvation Army band,” according to the Daily Mail in London. McVie later said she gave up drugs in 1984, but at the time, she and Dennis shared the same zeal for the good life.
Dennis rejoined the Beach Boys for a summer tour in Europe in 1980, and to celebrate the Beach Boys’ twentieth anniversary, we were going to have a New Year’s concert in Los Angeles. As part of the promotion, the five of us appeared on Good Morning America from ABC’s studio in Los Angeles. With the camera running, Dennis, either hungover or stoned, slumped over on the couch, and when Joan Lunden asked him the opening question, he buried his head in his arms and almost fell to the ground. After Carl spoke, and with Dennis lying on his side, Lunden asked, “Dennis, how are you doing? Are we keeping you awake?” And Dennis, after reaching for Carl’s mic, mumbled, “Is this ABC?”
Live television with the Beach Boys.
My own skirmishes with Dennis were relatively minor compared to those he had with my brothers, particularly Stan. When Stan was Brian’s bodyguard, he was constantly fighting Dennis’s effort to give Brian drugs. One day in an elevator, Stan turned to Dennis and said, “Look it, if you keep trying to give Brian cocaine, I’m going to kick your ass.”
Dennis put his finger in Stan’s face and said, “I swear to God on your mother’s grave, I didn’t give him cocaine.”
Stan was very close to our mom, who had just died, and took exception to the reference. Moreover, Stan’s love for Brian is unconditional, and he decided that the next time Dennis gave Brian drugs, he would exact his revenge.
The opportunity came after Dennis had parted ways with McVie in 1981 and was renting a house on Wavecrest Avenue in Venice Beach.
Stan had heard that Dennis had gotten Brian a huge stash of cocaine. Though he was no longer Brian’s bodyguard, he thought it was time to teach Dennis a terrible lesson, and who better to join him than Brian’s other former bodyguard, Rocky? The two of them went to Dennis’s house in Venice and knocked on his front door. When Dennis didn’t let them in, they returned, and at about one A.M., knocked the door down. From there, they pursued Dennis through three rooms of the house, dragged him by the hair, pushed him through a glass window, kicked him and punched him in the forehead, and crashed his head into the wooden footboard of the bed. Stan also picked up the telephone and whacked Dennis in the face. All these years later, Stan says of the incident, “Rocky had to pull me off after a while because he didn’t want me to kill him by accident.”
Dennis suffered a broken nose, numerous lacerations, and a suspected concussion. He pressed charges against both men, and they were given fines and placed on six months’ probation.
Nothing Dennis did deserved such a brutal beatdown; but Stan was convinced that Dennis was trying to destroy Brian, and this was Stan’s bare-knuckle message to stop.
The setbacks for Dennis continued. His most prized possession was a sixty-two-foot sailboat that he had bought in 1975. He rebuilt the vessel, which had a golden pelican on the bow, and docked it at Marina del Rey. He called it Harmony. Dennis marveled at how the teakwood’s true beauty emerged only when it was wet: you could see the grain, but the boat had to be in action to fully appreciate the texture. Dennis could relate. Harmony was his escape from his troubles onshore and also a place where he lived for stretches of time. For someone who cared nothing about material possessions, it was the one thing that he truly loved. And then he lost it, in 1981, when he could no longer afford the payments, and a bank auctioned it off for a fraction of its worth.
Over the years, we went to great lengths to try to find Brian proper medical treatment. Dennis’s needs may have been even greater. But while Brian was at times a reluctant patient, he was willing to go to the hospital, consult with psychiatrists, and at least make an effort at rehabilitation. Dennis either rejected outreach attempts or, once he did go to a hospital or detox center, never made a serious commitment. Dennis once came to visit his mom, and when he was there he called Jerry Schilling and said he needed to go to the hospital. Jerry picked him up in his Jaguar, and as they were heading to Century City Hospital, Dennis lowered the glove compartment mirror and began snorting heroin.
“I have to do this,” Dennis said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Whatever it takes to get you to the hospital,” Jerry said.
The benefit of the hospitalization was short-lived.
I once got a call that Dennis was wasted on the streets of Venice. I drove down and found him and brought him to his house. I don’t recall much about the conversation, but I know that he made promises about getting help, and before I left, he said, “Let’s meditate.”
For all of my battles with Dennis, he made the single most important call in my life—from Paris, to tell me that Maharishi wanted to meet us. I was always grateful for that and could only regret that our lives had diverged so dramatically.
“Yes,” I told him, “let’s meditate.”
—
For a while, Dennis was living with his teenage daughter from his first marriage, Jennifer, and one day she brought home a friend. Her name was Shawn.
Shawn Love.
She told Dennis that I was her father.
In the 1960s, after my divorce from Frannie, I had a brief affair with a young secretary from the Ukraine. Some months after the affair ended, she named me in a paternity suit, even though she was living with a fireman at the time. It occurred to me that I had more income than the fireman, and I was skeptical of the paternity claim. This was before DNA could establish such things, so we went to court and took blood tests and lie-detector exams. The judge ruled that the “plaintiff has not established by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant is the father of the minor plaintiff.” The mother agreed not to appeal in exchange for $9,500, which I paid as a lesson learned, and I assumed that chapter was closed.
But it wasn’t. The child used my surname, so she grew up as Shawn Marie Love. I knew nothing of her whereabouts until someone told me that she had moved in with Dennis. Shawn was now seventeen, and Dennis was thirty-six. Their son, Gage, was born in October of 1982, and Shawn and Dennis were married the following July.
While Dennis was always reckless, the damage was usually to himself. This was different. Broke and broken, he was in no position to care for himself or a teenage bride, let alone a newborn. Some believe he slept with Shawn as revenge against me, a final act of sexual conquest with a tinge of incest for good measure. Perhaps Dennis saw it as a defiant stroke against all three Love brothers. Or maybe it was just Dennis being Dennis: he met an attractive teenage girl, and he couldn’t help himself.
Shawn and Dennis separated a couple months after they married. I never spoke to Dennis or Shawn about why they got together, nor did I take it personally. We all knew the relationship was doomed, and the one who would pay the steepest price was baby Gage.*
Dennis continued to make occasional appearances with us, including at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa, California, on August 3, 1983. By then, the scruffy, chiseled rock magnet was gone. Dennis had shaved his beard and cut his hair. He was thicker around the middle, his face puffy. He had had two throat surgeries to repair his vocal cords, and his singing voice, which once had a pleasing roughness, was hoarse. But when he stepped from behind the drums, he still loved the moment as he spoke to 15,000 fans.
“Folks,” he said, “if you knew what it felt like to be up here singing and playing, you know, in front of you. The joy it brings to us. Thank you so much.” He sang “You Are So Beautiful,” sweating at the end, and above the cheers, he waved to the crowd and said, “God bless you, the Beach Boys.”
In a final effort to get him straightened out, Carl, Al, and I told Dennis that he was cut off from all touring revenue until he entered a treatment program. In September, when Brother Records inadvertently sent him a check, our lawyer asked him to return it.
On December 28, just after he turned thirty-nine, Dennis was visiting friends on a boat at Marina del Rey, where the Harmony had once docked. Despite his heavy drinking of vodka the night before and that morning, Dennis dove into the fifty-eight-degree waters in search of trinkets or keepsakes. He found a silver frame that once held a wedding photo of him and Karen Lamm, which he had tossed off the Harmony after they divorced. On his final dive, he came to within two feet of the surface and then sank back down. His friends, uncertain if Dennis was playing a joke, waited a while longer. When they were about to dive down themselves, they spotted the Harbor Patrol, which searched the waters for about thirty minutes before finding the body. Dennis was pronounced dead three minutes later. The coroner’s report said that Dennis was legally drunk, with an alcohol level of .26, and he had traces of Valium and cocaine in his tissues.
When I heard the news, I felt sadness, particularly for his mom, but not surprise. I always thought Dennis had a death wish. Maybe it was frustrated ambition or guilt over Charles Manson or the addictions that he could never shake. Maybe our destinies are set at an early age. In the Wilson household, Brian was the genius, Carl the angel, and Dennis the rebel. And Dennis could never break that mold. Aunt Audree used to say that even as a boy, all “Denny” ever wanted was Murry’s attention. Dennis did improve his ties with his father in the last few years of Murry’s life, talking with him more on the phone, reliving the old days, and forging some kind of connection.
Gage was Dennis’s fifth child, so perhaps there was closure to Dennis’s relationship with Murry Gage Wilson.
Dennis’s family received permission from President Reagan to bury him at sea, and his short life came full circle. When we were kids and someone was driving us to the beach, Dennis would push his upper body through the window, strain his neck as far as it would go, shade his eyes, and peer westward. He wanted to be first to glimpse the ocean.
Sail on, sailor.