Rebels in Paradise (30 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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CHAPTER NINETEEN

Love-ins and Outs

By 1968, Rudi Gernreich was considered such a notable figure that he was included in a photograph staged by Los Angeles County bureaucrats of the city's cultural elite. On the steps leading to the entrance of the L.A. County Museum of Art, he posed with artists, designers, critics, and curators. Altoon, Bengston, Kienholz, Ruscha, and Kauffman posed with Tuchman, Coplans, and others.

Gernreich had brought his alternative model, the leggy beauty Léon Bing, who had replaced Peggy Moffitt after she and William Claxton moved to London. Bing was wearing the same plastic tunic that she had worn on the cover of
Time
, with a clear plastic panel running down the front from collar to hem. Some of the artists were standing next to their paintings, and Bing recognized the big canvas with the word “Spam” and the chiseled, intense artist holding it. She insisted Gernreich introduce her to Ruscha. After that, as she put it, “It was on.”
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Ruscha, who had just completed his now-famous screen print of the Hollywood sign in a searing orange sunset, could not resist the advances of the long-legged cover girl. Their torrid affair continued for the next four years. Bing said she was surprised that such a cool character could be “such an ardent and inventive lover.”
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They made love about four times a week in his studio on Western Avenue in Hollywood. She introduced him to her friends in the music and film scene, bringing him to the home of her good friend Mama Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas, where joint papers were imprinted with the Louis Vuitton logo, and had sex with him in the swimming pool. She brought him to producer Harry Cohn Jr.'s ranch in Joshua Tree, a place of remote beauty about one hundred miles east of Los Angeles, where the artist later built a house and bought extensive acreage. She gave him engraved business cards: Ed-werd Rew-shay, Young Artist. He gave her a gunpowder drawing of the word “Slap,” a reference to the professional's term for a model's heavy makeup. He introduced her to his artist friends and asked her to pose for his photographic novella of Mason Williams's story “Crackers,” which he later made into the 16 mm film
Premium
.

In both, Bing is the date of a nattily dressed Larry Bell riding in Mason Williams's own 1933 Pierce Arrow, driven by Tommy Smothers wearing a chauffeur's uniform. Gernreich makes an appearance as a hotel bellhop. Bell escorts Bing to a seedy, cheap hotel room where she undresses and gets into a bed covered entirely with lettuce. To her surprise, Bell douses her with salad dressing and announces that he must leave to get crackers. Premium Saltines, of course. He then goes to an exquisite, expensive hotel room and enjoys his crackers while alone in bed. This whole adventure could have been considered a warning. When Bing's affair with Ruscha came to an end, he gave her a painting of words in ketchup red on a yellow background: “Listen, I'd Like to Help Out, But—.” Ruscha and Danna Knego divorced then later remarried.

Mason Williams was not married and was ever more popular. With his hazel eyes, dimpled chin, an income of $500,000, and ultrahip friends, he recalled having about forty girlfriends between 1969 and 1970 and thinking, “Man, that is out there.”

“The joke I have is that people say, ‘You have had about 10,000 girlfriends.' I say, ‘That's ridiculous. It couldn't be more than 6,500.'”
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The Hoppers' marriage, however, couldn't take the strain of the late sixties. After six years, as Dennis's drug use and infidelity took their toll, Brooke left him. He had taken to terrifying the children—her two sons from a previous marriage as well as their daughter—by chasing them around the house with a six-shooter in each hand. Brooke had to drive them to her friend Jill Schary's house to stay until Dennis passed out. The separation was bitter. Most of their sizable art collection was sold or kept by Brooke so Dennis was left with few assets, apart from a barely coherent script that he had written with Peter Fonda called
Easy Rider
. Brooke did not bother asking for any percentage of that project, she was so certain that it would be a flop. (Costing $340,000 to make, it grossed $30 million in the United States alone.)

The availability of the birth control pill, approved for use in 1960, a growing awareness of the erotic desires of women, and widespread experimentation with drugs accelerated rampant sexual freedom. In the spring of 1967, Griffith Park was the site of several love-ins. The Doors played the February love-in and some six thousand flower children congregated for the Easter event.

By then, the so-called studs of Ferus were minor celebrities who attracted groupies just like rock stars. Kauffman, who would marry seven times and have countless girlfriends, attended the Easter love-in and fell under their spell. Vivian Kauffman recalled, “It was a boys' club and I think it was pretty difficult to live with those people. They had to be so concentrated, they led very selfish lives, and all the women were left in the wake.”
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Vivian divorced Kauffman in 1967 and went to work for Blum. (She remained friends with Kauffman, however, and often invited him to dinners that she made for visiting artists, such as Carl Andre and Frank Stella, while working for Blum. She later married PAM trustee and collector Robert Rowan.) Robert Irwin and Nancy Oberg divorced for the second time. Ed and Avilda Moses divorced. Larry and Gloria Bell divorced in 1971.

The greatest shock in the art world, however, was the divorce of Walter and Shirley Hopps.

After three years as director, Hopps was spending as little time at the Pasadena Art Museum as he had at Ferus. Curator James Demetrion noticed that in the last six months of 1966, he would be at the museum just two or three days a month. “It was a problem in terms of morale for staff—very loyal people who felt let down, you might say.”
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As one wag put it, he was a presence but he wasn't present.
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Neither was Hopps at home since he was often with other women. Kauffman recalled, “Walter cheated on Shirley. She caught him a couple of times. I think Shirley found him in bed with a girl and Walter jumped up and said, ‘This girl is very mixed up and I was counseling her.'”
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Shirley was dismayed. “I heard him say we had an open marriage and I didn't know what he was talking about,” she said.
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“He disappeared all the time. Many a time I would not know where he was for two or three days. He was really involved in drugs—uppers and downers—and that is how he managed. He was always behind so he'd work twenty-four or thirty-six hours straight through on uppers and downers, none of which I knew. I never suspected because he was such a different species of person and able by his own will to do such things, you could believe he could stay up those hours.”
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She added, “Walter had limits. There is only so long you can do it. He's too erratic and needs someone to take care of him. I loved him but didn't want to have anything to do with him.”
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Shirley left him in 1966. Despite her rise as an art historian at UC Riverside, having received her doctorate in 1964, she had remained involved in Ferus and been in regular contact with the perennially charming and well-mannered Blum, who was all sympathy for her frustrations. “You could say there was a very strong attraction to Irving. It was a question of being together all the time and Walter being away all the time.”
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Shirley preferred the library to the social whirl of the art scene, and Blum provided a nice balance. “Irving was so outgoing, it was a part of the attraction. He was comfortable with people so I didn't have to deal with it too much.”
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Hopps, in considerable denial about his own condition, was stunned when Shirley moved out. “I think Walter really never got over it,” she said.
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Irving and Shirley eventually married at the Maple Drive home of Don and Lynn Factor in what Irving described as “a hippie wedding” with everyone wearing beads and flowing robes. They moved into an apartment on San Vicente Boulevard in West Hollywood decorated with the Warhol Campbell's soup-can paintings. In 1969, they had a son, Jason Ferus Blum.

Larry Bell observed one singularly odd outcome of their marriage, since his wife, Gloria, was Shirley's sister: “I've had the dubious distinction of having both Walter Hopps and Irving Blum as my brothers-in-law.”
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During his years at the Pasadena Art Museum, from the 1963 Duchamp retrospective to the 1967 Joseph Cornell retrospective, Hopps had brought a considerable amount of attention to the museum despite his eccentric behavior. Artists adored him and accepted all his irregularities. It was due to his friendship with Jasper Johns that the tiny PAM became one of the museums to host his coveted 1965 show organized by Alan Solomon for the Jewish Museum in New York. A few days before the Johns opening, Hopps told everyone to be at the museum at nine at night to install the show coming from the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Demetrion recalled, “He strolled in after midnight, and we were there all night. Still, the show looked great.”
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Though the Johns show came with a catalog, Hopps wanted to produce his own and told Demetrion to compile a chronology. Knowing that Hopps found writing to be extremely taxing, Demetrion inquired about the progress of the essay. Hopps reassured him that the essay was on track right up to the night of the opening reception when Demetrion arrived and was horrified to see a stack of cards featuring a reproduction of Johns's
White Flag
with a note on the back stating that a definitive catalog written by Demetrion would soon be available. “I blew my top quietly,” Demetrion recalled. “I told him ‘What was behind all that, ruining my reputation?' I explained to Johns, but it bothered me. I'm still not sure I'm over it. Yet, Walter was so easy to forgive, even against your will sometimes. He had a certain charisma.”
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Hopps's true gift was his acumen in targeting talent and selecting the best work by certain artists. His cachet with artists also helped secure work for a few Los Angeles collectors at a time when there was increasing competition for the best pieces. He acted as an adviser to Pasadena real estate mogul Robert Rowan, chairman of the board of trustees at PAM, who built a noteworthy collection of color-field painters and Ferus artists. Yet Hopps had zero administrative skills. Demetrion recalled, “Walter was not able to control the financial situation, so Rowan became the main support of the museum, putting up about $50,000 a year, which was a ton of money in sixties.”
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When Don Factor joined the PAM board, he was distressed to find that Hopps “was supposed to be out doing the things museum directors do and he'd be sitting around with his artist friends. The board got fed up.… He … should never have been made director.”
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