CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

London Calling, L.A. Answers

In 1966, Irving Blum brought the London art dealer Robert Fraser to the Pop art–laden home of Dennis and Brooke Hopper. Fraser stayed for a couple of weeks and then went with them to Tijuana because Dennis wanted to show him the Mexican folk art that he believed was the equivalent of the African art collected by Picasso and other early modern artists. Fraser and Dennis were snorting cocaine, which had not yet become popular. On the trip, Brooke recalled, Fraser also gave them speed. “We all got crazy, completely raving mad, and were unable to go to sleep for about three days.… The drug scene was beginning but it hadn’t hit the mescaline stage, and certainly hadn’t hit the cocaine stage. Robert had a lot to do with that, in my opinion. He was a very seductive character.”1

Fraser was impressed by the Ferus artists and from January 29 to February 19, 1966, mounted Los Angeles Now at his Mayfair gallery featuring Ruscha, Hopper, Bell, Berman, Foulkes, and Kauffman, along with Bruce Conner and Jess Collins, who lived in San Francisco. It was quite an advanced show for the London of that era.

Ruscha recalled that Fraser had come to his studio and bought a number of drawings that he then sold to John Lennon. “I was just floored that someone from so far away would come and buy my work,” he said.2 Yet, he had few illusions that Fraser was a businessman. “It wasn’t his interest. He wanted the fun and games of it, means to the end, to be in the hoopla.”3

Some of the artists went over for the opening. Hopper, who promptly had an affair with designer Pauline Fordham, was stunned by the atmosphere in London, saying it was “the most exciting time I’d ever seen, or have seen since.”4 After a few days, however, he grew noticeably paranoid, looking out Fordham’s windows for evidence that the FBI was following him.

Hopper, along with Conner, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and actor Sid Caesar, dropped acid with Fraser at his flat while watching their experimental films. Fraser’s drug use escalated. Close to two years later, at Keith Richards’s house, Fraser and Mick Jagger were arrested for possession of heroin, a stunning event given their fame and status. Richard Hamilton turned the newspaper photograph of the pair, handcuffed and trying to hide their faces while in the back of the squad car, into a print called Swingeing London. (It was Hamilton who did the image-free cover of the Beatles’ so-called White Album.)

While in London, Larry Bell became friendly with the artist Peter Blake, who was codesigning, with his wife Jann Haworth, the unforgettable cover for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album. Superficially, it appeared to be a collage but in fact was a wildly elaborate stage set composed of cutout photographs of figures and actual people, plants, and props. Blake took a photograph of Bell wearing black-and-white striped trousers and inserted it into the crowd of people. He added Los Angeles characters Wallace Berman, Lenny Bruce, Simon Rodia, and Aldous Huxley.

Two years later, it was Ken Price’s turn to enjoy the limey limelight when he had a show at Kasmin Gallery. He stayed for six months at a flat owned by Don Factor and experienced European museums for the first time. When he returned to Los Angeles, instead of joining the increasingly frenzied scene, he married a woman who lived up to her name: Happy. Though he maintained a studio in the Mildred Avenue building where Bengston lived, the couple moved to Taos in 1971.

Back in Los Angeles, the Sunset Strip may not have been as wild as London’s Kings Road but there was plenty of action. In 1966 Ruscha documented every seedy and seductive detail in his book of photographs Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Mary Lynch Kienholz was friendly with members of the Byrds through their manager Jim Dickson, who had married Diane Varsi, the actress who had hitchhiked south with her to a new destiny. Though divorced from Ed, Mary retained friendships with the Ferus artists, and many became part of the Byrds’ dedicated fan base. “We danced until we were dripping with sweat,” Mary said. “It was the first time that thing had happened in that everybody was physically involved in music as opposed to jazz clubs where you would sit on a chair with scotch and a cigarette.”5

Ciro’s, as Dennis Hopper recalled, had been the most glamorous of nightclubs for decades, hosting Dean Martin’s wedding in 1949 and featuring other Rat Pack performers before black-tie-and-gown-wearing audiences until it closed in 1959. “There wasn’t a place you could get dinner on the Sunset Strip unless you wore a tie and a jacket in the fifties,” Hopper said, “and then, a few years later, we were all in T-shirts and jeans.”6 After the club was renamed It’s Boss and renovated to support rock acts, it became the center of the Strip in 1965 with the Byrds’ extended gig as their versions of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” soared on the charts.

Kauffman recalled, “They were there for like a month and it was a party night every night. They were nice guys, very friendly. They were pretty good so we’d dance. It was like our own club.”7 The artists engaged with young, hip Hollywood—the Hoppers, Peter and Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Dean Stockwell, and Toni Basil.

The first wave of groupies started to show up. Pamela Des Barres hitchhiked from her home in the Valley over Laurel Canyon Boulevard to the home of the best-looking Byrd, Chris Hillman. Hillman drove a Ferrari he had purchased with the first of the big money from record royalties. David Crosby was driving through the canyon on a Triumph motorcycle given him by Peter Fonda. They hung out with Bob Dylan at Fred C. Dobbs—converted from the old-guard Chez Paulette—partaking of celery stuffed with peanut butter. It was there that Eve Babitz first met Stephen Stills and Ann Marshall. She brought Hopps there as they pursued their irregular love affair, both of them increasingly strung out on amphetamines. “I knew he was married but what could I do? Speed makes me able to walk through anything and not be hurt by it,” she said later.8 Young and in thrall to the fiction of Colette, Babitz avoided heartbreak by keeping a number of lovers around at the same time.

Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, had opened an eponymous clothing boutique on the Strip known among rock’s new elite for its custom fashions, which is how Mirandi came to measure the inseam of a beautiful young man with pouty lips named Jim Morrison. Eve seduced him at first sight after seeing the Doors play a small club on the Strip called London Fog. “Being in bed with Jim was like being in bed with Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes. His skin was so white, his muscles were so pure, he was so innocent,” she later wrote in Esquire magazine.9 A pudgy kid who had lost thirty pounds after discovering drugs in the summer of 1965, he had grown out his curly hair and channeled his UCLA studies in film and poetry into lyrics for his fellow band members to follow with their jazz and classical music training. The darkness of the music was counter to the romantic, folk-derived sounds of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, signaling an end to the communal optimism of hippies hanging on the Strip.

The Crescendo, an old jazz joint where movie stars had congregated, followed the trend on the Strip and was converted into a rock club, the Trip—its sign hung upside down—owned by Elmer Valentine and raspy-voiced Barry McGwire, known for his hit “Eve of Destruction.” It was the site, on May 3, 1966, of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, complete with films, a light show, Nico, and the Velvet Underground. The Mothers of Invention opened and were cheered as local heroes. The Velvets’ under-rehearsed and chaotic music was greeted with boos. Lou Reed responded by calling Frank Zappa a “two-bit pretentious academic.” John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, a couple of the Byrds, Ryan O’Neal, and Jim Morrison were in the audience. Sonny liked it but Cher left, saying of the Velvets’ raw music, “It will replace nothing, except maybe suicide,” a remark the group found so hilarious they added it to future posters.10 The following night, the Velvets were even less popular. There were only five people in the audience: the Grinsteins, the Felsens, and UCLA art historian Kurt von Meier.

Though the band was booked through May 18, on the third night, the sheriff’s office shut the club down for disturbing the peace. A sign on the door directed patrons to go see Johnny Rivers at the Whisky a Go Go, which shared the same owner. To get paid, according to union regulations, the Velvets had to remain in town so they stayed at the Castle, an imitation medieval stone lodge in the hills owned by actor Jack Simmons that was popular with rock bands. Bob Dylan had just stayed there with Edie Sedgwick.

Warhol himself fared better by filling Ferus with helium-filled silver Mylar balloons that floated like clouds against his yellow wallpaper screened with the pattern of a Day-Glo pink cow’s head. It was similar to the show he had mounted at Castelli and was inspired by Ivan Karp, who said to the artist, “The only thing that no one deals with now these days is pastorals. My favorite subject is cows.” Warhol grasped the notion and said, “New Cows! Fresh Cows!”11

In November 1966, the Doors performed in New York for the first time. Warhol and Gerard Malanga went to see them at the popular disco Ondine. “When we walked in, Gerard took one look at Jim Morrison in leather pants just like his and he flipped. ‘He stole my look!’ he screamed, outraged. It was true enough—Jim had, I guess, picked it up from seeing Gerard at the Trip,” Warhol recalled.12 The Doors played Ondine on a few more occasions. Morrison would stand at the bar drinking screwdrivers and taking downers. “He’d be totally oblivious—and the girls would go over and jerk him off while he was standing there,” Warhol said.13 While in New York, Morrison agreed to star in Warhol’s first “blue movie”—to have sex with a girl in front of the camera—but when the time came, he never showed up.

When the Byrds were playing the Trip in 1966 with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Babitz became obsessed with the talented English bluesman. She dressed up and danced close to the stage at the Trip and at the Whisky but to no avail. She finally drove down to Huntington Beach to hear them but had to accept that her big-busted beauty was not Butterfield’s type. That evening, Buffalo Springfield was playing in the club down the street and, after finishing their set, had come to hear Butterfield’s band. Stephen Stills was loving it, but the rest of his band wanted to start the hour-long drive back to Los Angeles. Babitz offered, “I’ll drive you home but you have to let me do your album cover.”14

Stills became her lover and, sure enough, Babitz created the cover of their second and most successful album: a collage inspired by Joseph Cornell, whose work Hopps had introduced to her. “Walter’s house was full of Cornells,” she recalled.15 Hopps also told her to see the Cornell show in New York, where she took acid, got lost in his intricate collages, and decided to make a composition of an angel, flowers, and a view of water for the album cover. “It was the best thing I ever did,” she said.16 When the mind-blowing result of this decision landed on the desk of Nesuhi Ertegun, brother of Ahmet Ertegun, who had signed Buffalo Springfield to Atlantic Records, he called Babitz for an explanation. At the mere mention of Cornell, he grew very excited. Apparently, he had been collecting the work of Cornell for years.

Stills wrote many of the Buffalo Springfield songs, including the 1967 hit, “For What It’s Worth.” Dressed in military jackets, with Stills sporting a cowboy hat, the band performed it on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Tommy Smothers mugged with a pistol as Stills sang, “There’s a man with a gun over there.” The Buffalo Springfield appearance was just one example of the Smothers Brothers’ determined attempt to bring the counterculture into commercial television, and this was in no small part due to the input of Mason Williams.

In 1964, after his three-year marriage to Sheila Massey ended in divorce, Williams moved back to Los Angeles and lived with Ed Ruscha in the Vestal Avenue house for a year until he was able to rent a nearby apartment in Echo Park. He was playing guitar and singing his offbeat songs at the Troubadour. Artists such as Glenn Yarbrough and the Kingston Trio were singing and recording his folk songs. As the folk scene gave way to electric rock, Williams began writing comedy for Roger Miller and the Smothers Brothers.

While in the navy, Williams had watched his childhood friend Ruscha become a significant player in the contemporary art scene as well as a family man. Ed and Danna Knego were married in 1967 at a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. This commitment did not dampen Ruscha’s sense of humor. A month before the wedding, he placed a full-page ad in Artforum with a black and white photograph of him sleeping in an ornate bed between two pretty young women. The caption read, “Ed Ruscha says goodbye to college joys.”

Mason Williams and Ed Ruscha in front of Ruscha’s Oklahoma City home

Photograph courtesy of Mason Williams

Within the year Edward Joseph Ruscha V was born. He was nicknamed “Frenchy” by Larry Bell, who said Ruscha “is such a Frenchy sounding name.” When Danna told Ed that she was pregnant, they were visiting his brother Paul in New York City. He was smoking a cigarette, and at the news he put it out and never smoked again—except for the night that Frenchy was born, when he celebrated with friends at the Classic Cat, a burlesque bar with topless waitresses on the Sunset Strip. At age twelve, the son rejected “Frenchy” in favor of “Eddie.”

Williams enjoyed his own triumph that year when his guitar instrumental, “Classical Gas,” became an improbable hit record. The wacky humor that he shared with Ruscha was perfect for the combination of variety acts and comedy on CBS’s The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. From 1967 to 1969, he earned $50,000 a year as the head of a group of writers that included Rob Reiner, Leigh French, and Steve Martin, a comic that Williams respected so much that he initially paid him out of his own pocket.

Williams experienced the heady and speedy success possible in Hollywood. From Echo Park, he had moved to Tommy Smothers’s guesthouse at the top of Kings Road. Then he rented Paulette Goddard’s former Beverly Hills residence, where he lived with Nancy Ames, a Washington debutante-turned-folk-singer who cowrote the Smothers Brothers theme song with him. Their collaboration on “Cinderella-Rockefella” sold six million copies in 1968. Then he bought a house off of Mulholland Drive that had once belonged to Howard Hughes. He hired Ruscha, still renting the house in Echo Park, to help with storyboards for the show.

Williams and Ruscha would prowl the clubs on the Sunset Strip and the art cinemas on Western Avenue and Melrose that showed foreign films such as Fellini’s 8½ and Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Tommy Smothers called Williams “the great gleaner” because he could translate that material into sketches or ideas for musicians or actors to book on the show.

With the extra cash from his Hollywood-sized paycheck, Williams started to execute a few art projects of his own, including a life-size paper reproduction of a Greyhound bus from a black-and-white Max Yavno photograph. It stood behind him as a backdrop while he played the Grammy-winning “Classical Gas” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour yet survived as a work of art. In an edition of 2,200, it sold for thirty-five dollars folded up in its own box and was included in the Word and Image exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. When shown at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967, a special thirty-seven-foot room was designed to contain it. “As you walked in the door, the bus started and wrapped around and ended exactly at the doorway,” said Williams.17

Williams committed a $5,000 work of Conceptual art a few months later when he hired V. E. Noble, the famed skywriting pilot, to fly above the Mojave Desert at dawn tracing puffy white lines in the shape of a stem and leaves with the sun itself as the glowing blossom of a sunflower. It measured two miles by three miles, certainly making it one of the largest works of art and the shortest in duration: forty seconds. “The idea wasn’t to see it, really,” said Williams. “The idea was for people to hear about it and say, ‘Yes.’”18

Mason Williams, Sunflower, 1967

Photograph courtesy of Mason Williams

Williams and Ruscha, who had spent their childhoods listening to records or the radio together, mutually appreciated the slippery relationship between words and meaning, puns, palindromes, and double entendres. Ruscha considered words for their appearance, sound, and significance while Williams approached language with the poetic fervor of a songwriter. They frequently provided pictures or ideas for each other but their strangest collaboration had to be the day that Williams drove a 1963 Buick at ninety miles per hour as Ruscha threw his friend’s typewriter out the window. Former roommate Patrick Blackwell took photographs of the machine as it flew through the air, hit the tarmac, bounced, and crumbled. To Williams’s dismay, his housekeeper consigned the shards of metal and ribbon to the trash but the photographs survived as a Ruscha, Blackwell, and Williams book called Royal Road Test. The act qualified as performance art but Williams never had such aspirations. “I was living the life of an artist but did not think of myself as an artist,” he said. “It was a time when art was lived as a lifestyle.”19

These forays led him to suggest that CBS executives incorporate art ideas into The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. He added his “Classical Gas” sound track to a three-minute film of three thousand works of art, from cave painting to Picasso, compiled by UCLA film student Dan McLaughlin. It concluded with the statement: “You have just had all the Great Art of the World indelibly etched in your brain. You are now cultured.”

Williams recalled, “I think I took influences from Ed’s world of art, and I was the primary troublemaker on the show.”20 He engineered comedian Pat Paulsen’s pseudo-presidential campaign by hiring former governor Edmund Brown’s consultant and demanding debates. In keeping with the late sixties, the show’s writers grew more eccentric and political, satirizing mainstream America and criticizing the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War. At that point, Williams and the Smothers Brothers ran afoul of CBS executives. As CBS attempted to dictate appropriate fare for prime-time entertainment, the Smothers Brothers tried to push the boundaries of acceptable speech on the medium. On April 4, 1969, one week before the end of the season, CBS threw the show off the air. The Smothers pitched a fit, accusing CBS of infringing on their First Amendment rights. They would not appear on CBS again for twenty years, though they continued to perform live and Williams continued to work for them. They often appeared at events protesting censorship in the media, but Williams retreated from celebrity in the 1970s. “I wanted to be more like God. In the beginning, God had a creative life. Along came religion and he had a career.”21