The Search for Philip K. Dick (39 page)

In April 1949, Phil fell deeply in love with a popular co-ed, an English literature student who walked into University Radio one day looking for a classical record. Throughout Phil’s later marriage to Kleo Apostolides, he kept telling her that Betty Jo Rivers was the “great lost love of my life.” Kleo said, “Betty Jo would have been perfect for Phil—too bad she had to go off to Paris.”

Betty Jo Rivers, a handsome, confident blonde, was an archaeologist for the University of California at Davis. When I was trying to reach her to interview her for this book, she was off on a dig for several months. Finally, her busy schedule allowed her to drive down from Davis to meet me at a little restaurant in Petaluma. We sat outside under an umbrella and gazed at the Petaluma River, and she told me about her relationship with Phil
.

Phil decided that he was going to wait on Betty Jo before she even came into the store. He saw her through the plate glass window, Betty Jo said:

I sipped my Coke and chewed on my toasted-cheese sandwich, feeling a tiny bit … not jealous, exactly, but aware that this had been a big romance
.

Betty Jo had been dating a fellow graduate student. She told me, “He got shoved out the door,” and she and Phil became a couple. Phil wanted to give Betty Jo his most prized possession, his Magnavox console, but she refused: “Phil’s attraction was all that talent boiling around, getting ready to explode. People of high creativity give off a kind of dynamic, something that is extremely attractive. But he didn’t fit into any of my circles. It was difficult to take him anywhere—he was so extremely shy. We went to see my best girlfriend whose family was visiting. Phil was confused and felt inept. Later, he gave me copy of William James’s
Varieties of Religious Experience
, inscribed ‘To Betty Jo, in exchange for six social errors at once.’”

Phil used to comment on how easy it was for Betty Jo to be with people. He told her that as long as he worked in the store, he could deal with people, although he preferred being down in the basement unpacking records. “I met him in a period of intense ferment. He used to talk a great deal about why he was as neurotic as he was. He had a twin sister who was allergic to milk and died. He always felt it was like the German myth or legend about the person who has to look for his other half, that he was an incomplete person. He blamed the death of the baby on his mother. He talked about fear of crowds and fear of the presence of people around.”

Although Phil wasn’t particularly sympathetic to Betty Jo’s preoccupation with academic studies, he was kind and patient with her because of the pressure of her approaching master’s exam.

When, years later, Phil told me this story about Betty Jo, it became a pitiful story about an abused lover whose girlfriend went to a party, became drunk, went in the bedroom with another man, and then had the lover come to pick her up.

Betty Jo received a fellowship to go to France. “My mind was all set on this scholarship and on going abroad. Phil asked me make a choice between him and going to France. I didn’t have any doubt about what I wanted to do. I asked him, ‘Do you want me to send you pictures of this? Of that?’”

“I don’t want you to go,” he said.

After Betty Jo left, Phil fell under Connie Barbour’s influence. She had made a pass at Betty Jo but had told Phil that Betty Jo had flirted with her. At this period of his life, Phil went to parties and gave parties for his friends, making fancy rum drinks and serving bacon and eggs in his apartment.

I phoned Kleo Apostolides Dick Mini, who now lived in St. Helena, and we made a date to go out to lunch. When I parked in front of her small cottage, loud strains of Italian opera wafted out to greet me. Kleo was in her kitchen, the many bottles of wine she had just made sitting on open shelves. She was professionally interested in writing and encouraged me with my project
.

She had married Phil’s old friend Norman Mini a few years after she and Phil had divorced, and they’d had two children, now grown. A widow now, Kleo enjoyed encouraging young people to read. She knew everything that was going on wine-wise in the Napa Valley, California’s most prolific wine-producing region. She gave me some information about Phil’s life in the early fifties, but she didn’t share her feelings or any personal matters with me. She felt it would have been improper to do so. I thought she was most gracious to receive me and felt somewhat abashed in her presence
.

Kleo Apostolides was eighteen years old, a striking-looking brunette with dark eyebrows accenting her face, when she met Philip Dick. Phil was recovering from his love affair with Betty Jo, but soon he and Kleo were living together. “I met Phil at Art Music in 1949,” Kleo said. Everyone hung out at Art Music then: Alan Rich, Chuck Bennett, and good friends Connie Barbour, Eldon Nicholls, and Norman Mini.

Kleo and Phil went out in the evenings to the True Blue restaurant in Berkeley and sometimes took the train to San Francisco to go to the coffee houses in North Beach. One evening they went with Margaret Wolfson, Phil’s former high school teacher, and her husband, William Wolfson, a young attorney.

“We married in, I think, May or June of 1950. Phil was straight and it was Phil’s idea to get married,” Kleo told me.

Vince Lusby said, “Kleo and Phil’s romance was an all-right relationship based mostly on their common interest in Italian and German opera. They both believed in free love.”

William Wolfson, Margaret Wolfson’s husband, and later Phil’s attorney, saw Kleo as mousy, and thought, “Phil played the role of Pygmalion to her Galatea.”

Alan Rich found me. He had read my letter about Phil in
Horizon
magazine; I hadn’t even known they’d printed it. He remembered coming out to Point Reyes to visit us in the early sixties. Kleo had thought that Alan was still a music critic for the
New York Times,
but in 1983, he was living in Los Angeles, where he had a music service. I phoned him several times, each time enjoying the splendid classical music on his answering machine
.

He told me, “Kleo was a music nut, a vocal nut. Phil and Kleo married because of their common musical interests, principally Italian opera. I saw no strong emotional base between them.”

John Gildersleeve thought, “Kleo and Phil were friendlier than most married couples. They were really good friends. Phil was definitely the dominant figure. I wondered if Phil thought I was coming around to see Kleo, instead of him. He acted rather odd when I came around. I had quite a reputation as a ladies’ man in those days.”

Phil and Kleo started looking for another place to live. “At one point,” Kleo told me, “Phil and I moved to Sausalito for one day to an apartment on the bay. Phil looked out the window and became extremely disturbed by being so close to the water. We moved back to Berkeley the same day.”

Phil had told me that he and Kleo bought a very old small house at 1126 Francisco Street for $2,000. He said it was financed by Dr. Apostolides, Kleo’s father. But Kleo said, “This is not true. My father never gave us any money for the Francisco Street house…. When Phil and I first got together, he had already put the down payment on the house; it was
his
house, and that is why all I asked for and got in the divorce was the ‘55 Chevy; we paid it off together, and no one ever helped us in paying it off.”

Lynne Hudner remembered the house well: “It was a somber, musty-smelling house in the bad part of town with two bedrooms upstairs, a kitchen, and a front room too small to be called a living room. Phil and Kleo had nothing, only a few chairs that didn’t match. But there were lots of books and records in bookcases made of apple crates and pictures on the walls. Phil, sitting in his dark, huge, filthy old easy chair, was an omnivorous reader and read Styron, Sigrid de Lima, Malamud, James Joyce, Beckett, and the other literary writers … writing in the late forties and early fifties…. Kleo had no interest in domestic arts or clothes. Both Phil and Kleo wore dirty jeans all the time. There were a whole mess of cats, one named Magnifa.”

Vince told me, “Phil and Kleo argued about everything—how to make coffee—they fought all the time.” Phil describes the house in his 1980 story for
Playboy
magazine, “Frozen Journey,” and in his last novel, published thirty years after his Berkeley days,
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
. Kleo remembered that Phil became apprehensive about things going wrong with the house.

Phil told me a story about his life there: “One day, a fly buzzed and buzzed, circling around in the living room. I watched it for a while and then I began to hear a tiny voice talking.” He didn’t tell me what it said, and I was so amazed at his experience I didn’t ask.

Phil used to sit on his porch railing and watch the kids play at the school across the street until he realized that some older women who lived next door watched him every time he sat there. He became afraid that they would think he was some kind of a sex fiend, so he didn’t watch the children anymore.

In 1951, Herb Hollis fired the whole bunch that worked at University Radio, including Phil. Vince Lusby said, “It was Norman Mini that got Phil fired. There was some sort of intrigue going on at University Radio. On top of this, Norman told an obscene joke to a customer. Herb, a prude, fired him and later fired Phil for talking to Norman when he came in the store. At that point Phil listed his vocation as a writer, because the unemployment benefits were better. If the Unemployment Bureau couldn’t find you a job in your line, they had to pay you benefits. At that time you could list yourself as anything. Although Phil had written some things earlier, he really became a writer at this time.”

Phil stayed home full-time to work on his writing. Agoraphobia seemed to be a determining factor for his writing career. An early story, “The King of the Elves,” describes the beginnings of this lifestyle.

“Phil’s output, even at the beginning, was so voluminous,” Kleo said, “that when I went out to get the mail one day there were seventeen returned manuscripts lying on the porch. Phil was writing literary fantasies and science fiction, all mixed. I read the manuscripts and criticized.”

Phil was a protégé of Anthony Boucher, the editor of
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
. Phil went a few times to his private class, but he was so uncomfortable in a group situation that he had to send in his manuscripts in to be criticized. Phil sold “Roog,” his first story, to
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
. He papered the walls of the small center room of his house with rejection notices. Later, he sold some of the stories that had been rejected to the same magazines that had spurned them.

Alan Rich remembered, “Phil’s first writing consisted of impressionistic portraits, thinly disguised, of people he knew. I was a character named Max who always read the
New York Times
. I was uncomfortable with this portrait.”

Kleo paid a large share of the couple’s household expenses, working full-time, while Phil was beginning to write and publish: “We had a simple lifestyle—Phil was making a little money from his writing and I was working—we had little to spend.”

Phil had told me that one of his treats was boiling canned milk to make Depression pudding. He made this dessert for me once in Point Reyes, and it was surprisingly tasty. Kleo told me, “I don’t even know what Depression pudding is…. We ate meals of ten-cent chicken-giblet gravy on potatoes once a week. But,” she said with mock indignation, “we did not have ground horse meat; we got whole steaks from the pet-food store and broiled them.”

Phil frequently described his early poverty as being characterized by eating hamburger bought from the Lucky Dog Pet Store. When I lived with him, he liked to talk about how poor he’d been and how ingenious at getting by on almost no money. He told how he’d gone from store to store buying loss leaders, and how he and Kleo had eaten for only $10 a month. One of their entrees was a popular noodle dish prepared with gravy that only cost a dime.