In Writing There Is No Such Thing As Failure

In 1963, Sam Peckinpah was hired by Columbia Pictures to make Major Dundee, a sprawling cavalry picture set in the Southwest in the closing days of the American Civil War.  Peckinpah and Columbia had high ambitions for the film, which would begin shooting in and around Durango, Mexico in February of 1964.  By the time the movie was released at the end of that year, Peckinpah's career lay in tatters and many in the industry believed the erratic genius would never make another major motion picture.  One of the people who feared this was Peckinpah himself.  He put up a brave front, but when alone with his second wife, Begonia Palacios, Sam broke down, sobbing uncontrollably.

Five years later, Peckinpah came roaring off the barroom floor to make his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, which remains to this day the greatest western ever made.

The truth is, Peckinpah needed to "fail" with Major Dundee before he could make The Wild Bunch.  Dundee made The Wild Bunch possible.  

This is because in writing, directing, and virtually every art form, a creator learns more from their "failures" than they do from their "successes."  You have to fail to succeed.  Often you need to fail many times.

In interviews, Peckinpah often blamed Columbia for the Dundee disaster.  The studio cut the film's $4.5 million budget to $3 million shortly before shooting commenced,.  This meant 15 days would have to be shaved from the 75-day shooting schedule, which ruined many of Peckinpah's meticulous plans for the production.  The producer, Jerry Bresler, and the studio brass failed to support Peckinpah's creative vision.  In post production, the studio took the film away from Sam, barred him from the lot, and ruthlessly recut the movie.  The film that was released to theaters in February of 1965 was a mangled monstrosity.

But Peckinpah shared an equal portion of the blame.  The screenplay that he wrote with Oscar Saul had a terrific beginning, filled with brilliant compelling scenes.  But it began to unravel at the halfway point and became a sloppy meandering mess that failed to pay off the powerful character arcs and themes it had been so painstakingly set up.  Peckinpah was keenly aware of the screenplay's flaws, but feared losing the star, Charlton Heston, if they delayed shooting, and if he lost Heston, the picture might have been scrubbed altogether by Columbia.

So Peckinpah and his crew departed for Mexico with a deeply flawed script.  Sam told Saul he would rewrite the screenplay on location and fix all of the problems.  But this never happened because the production's logistical problems devoured all of Peckinpah's attention and energy.

And it was Peckinpah who created the logistical problems.  Sam had never taken on a production of this magnitude.   He had created the hit TV show The Rifleman (1957), and The Westerner (1959), which was the greatest half-hour western ever produced for television, and had written and directed a low budget feature film that became a sensation, Ride the High Country (1962).

While prepping Major Dundee, Sam laid out a production schedule that would take his company of actors and technicians on a forced march across central Mexico from one far flung primitive location to the next, in a quest to deliver a western with the epic scope of Lawrence of Arabia.  But the frequent company moves across vast distances and working under hideous conditions exhausted the actors, the crew, and Peckinpah himself, which was another factor in the finished film's shortcomings.

Peckinpah got his shot at redemption three years later when the new head of Warner Brothers, Ken Hyman, green-lit The Wild Bunch.  Sam quickly demonstrated that he had learned from his mistakes.  He spent three months rewriting the screenplay until it was tightly crafted with brilliant character arcs that led to a stunning and satisfying climax.

Then he laid out a production schedule with locations that were tightly grouped around the Mexican towns of Parras and Torreon, with roads and infrastructure to support the crew.  There would be no exhausting trek across Mexico this time.  That decision lifted  a tremendous burden off of Peckinpah, his cast, and his crew so they could concentrate on bringing Sam's brilliant script to the screen.

After critics praised The Wild Bunch as one of the masterpieces of the 1960s Peckinpah himself reflected on how the learning experience of Dundee made The Wild Bunch possible.  Peckinpah pointed out that Dundee was not a failure, but an important stepping stone that enabled him to grow as a filmmaker.

Over the course of my 48-years as a professional writer, I have experienced the same dynamic many times.

After having great success with the first play that I wrote and directed, Memoirs of an Awkward Lover, I decided in 1981 to write a second wildly ambitious play about Buster Keaton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a number of other writers marooned in an office at MGM Studios in the 1940s.  Keaton and Fitzgerald were both brought on the payroll at that studio within a week of each other in 1938 -- Keaton as a gag writer, Fitzgerald as a script polisher who could add prestige to some MGM projects.

Both found themselves in kind of limbo, sitting for hours in their office with no concrete writing assignments.  This seemed to me to be the perfect setting for writing a kind of Waiting For Godot in a movie studio.  The play would examine the creative processes of a once great slapstick clown and a literary legend who had fallen on hard times.

I labored very hard on the script and directed it at The Beverly Playhouse in 1982.  It was a much more ambitious production than Memoirs.  I spent a fortune on the sets and rehearsed with the actors for months before it opened.  We had a fantastic premiere.  The audience laughed and cried throughout and applauded wildly at the end.

Unfortunately, there were also a number of critics in the audience and they savaged the play, pronouncing it a pretentious catastrophe.  Ticket sales plummeted and investors -- including my father and older brother -- lost everything.  

I was devastated.  After reading the reviews, I agreed with the critics and never looked at the play again.

Until last week, when I decided to read Under the Nutcracker for the first time since its disastrous run.  What motivated me to look at it 44 years after it belly flopped?  I recently spoke at the International Buster Keaton Society's annual convention in Muskegon, Michigan.  I described the origins of my obsession with Keaton -- how my father had introduced me to his work when I was a boy.  And how a few years later I read the biography Keaton, by Rudi Blesh.  It described Buster's conflicted relationship with his father, which mirrored my relationship with my Dad.

I also discussed Under the Nutcracker.  Afterward, a member of the audience -- Mark Bernstein,  who runs a community theater in the Midwest -- asked if he could read the play.  So I mailed him a copy.  Days later he emailed that he had read it in one sitting and loved it.  He offered a detailed and flattering analysis of the characters and themes and praised the scope of the comedic and tragic elements.

That caught my interest, so I broke open the play and read it last weekend.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Under the Nutcracker is deeply flawed -- the climax doesn't quite work -- but the dialogue is smooth and fluid and funny and psychologically rich, as are the themes about the demons writers struggle with as they try to survive in a mercenary marketplace.  I could see how the play helped me refine a sophisticated stye of dialogue that later enabled me to be extremely successful in television.

So it wasn't a failure at all -- despite its shortcomings.  It was a stepping stone -- as Major Dundee had been for Peckinpah -- that allowed me to ascend to greater achievements.  

I now love the play with all my heart and regret that I allowed critical voices to alienate me from my offspring.

I had a similar experience with my first novel -- Prodigal Son -- which was rejected by publishers who found it to be overwritten and pretentious.  They were right.  

I had been inspired to write it after reading Ken Kesey's masterpiece, Sometimes a Great Notion.  That book blew the top of my head off with its brilliant exploration of the complexities of an American family.  Kesey jumped back and forth in time and switched point of view at lightning speed, sometimes in mid sentence!

I had been having great success as a magazine writer and decided it was time to take on the challenge of a novel.  I wanted to write about my father's Dickensian childhood in the steel mill town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania.  So in 1985 I sold everything I had and moved there for a year and over the course of two years wrote a 2500-page manuscript that I later pared back to 1200 pages.

I tried too hard to copy Kesey's technique instead of developing my own, and I lacked the maturity to bring sufficient complexity to the characters.

Objectively, this project could be deemed a "failure."  Except it was anything but that.

My father didn't want me to go to McKeesport.  He was afraid I would discover he never graduated high school and had been a juvenile delinquent who was forced by a judge to join the Marines to avoid jail time.  Dad threatened to "disown" me if I went to McKeesport.  I broke down crying and said I had to go.  Dad muttered, "Well, I'm sorry I told you anything about my childhood."

But when it came time for me to depart, Dad drove me to the airport and lingered at the gate until I boarded the plane.  A month after I arrived in McKeesport, Dad called to ask if I had found an apartment.  I told him I had.  He asked where it was located.  I told him, "On Union Avenue."  He shouted: "Oh my fucking god, you're on Union Avenue?  I don't believe it!"

A month later he called to say he was coming to McKeesport.  And so the two of us slept in my studio apartment in an old mill worker's house.  He slept on the bed, I slept on the barcalounger.  A shower curtain shielded my window from the street.  Dad kept muttering in wonder all night, "I can't believe I'm back on Union Avenue."

In the days that followed we visited the apartment he grew up in and knocked on the door.  An elderly couple lived there and they remembered Dad's parents.  They invited us in.  We toured the cramped rooms and stood in the bedroom where my father was born.  Later, we visited his father's grave.  Dad's father -- a McKeesport dentist who everybody called Doc Weddle -- had rested in an unmarked grave for more than forty years, until Dad convinced his brother to contribute to the expense of a grave stone.  I watched Dad count the steps and turn at a tree to find the grave -- something he had been doing since his father died when Dad was 12 years old.

In the year that I lived there, I conducted hundreds of interviews with a wide cross section of veterans from McKeesport's halcyon days in the 1930s.  By the end of 1985, I could speak to them with in-depth knowledge, as if I had actually lived in McKeesport during the 30s.

In 1985 the town was dying before my eyes.  U.S. Steel caved into pressure from Wall Street and diversified by investing in oil companies and foreign steel mills.  It refused to modernize the mill in McKeesport because Wall Street insisted it would be more profitable to simply suck money out of the mill as it gradually deteriorated.  While I was there the great blast furnaces were torn down and sold as scrap metal.  The once grand Memorial Movie Theater -- where my father had gone with Doc to see the great silent movie clown Harry Langdon perform -- was also torn down.  As the brick walls tumbled to Earth, a group of old men who had gone there as kids stood on the sidewalk watching and remembering all of the shows they had seen there.

Today rubble is all that remains of McKeesport.  The town that had produced all of the steel pipe used in America when we were an industrial powerhouse is no more.  McKeesport vanished along with America's once robust industrial capacity.  Because Wall Street wanted to make a quick buck.

Looking back, I realize writing that novel was one of the great adventures of my life.  I am so glad I did it.

And, it transformed me into a mature prose writer.  Every day for two years I wrote anywhere from 6,000 to 9,000 words a day.  By the time I finished, I had the creative muscles to attempt a more mature work.

That work became: "If They Move, Kill 'Em!" The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah.  When I began the Peckinpah biography, I decided to make the prose much simpler and reader friendly because I wanted to reach a larger audience.  And yet because of my McKeesport novel, I now had the skill to make the prose sing and to bring scenes vividly to life.

It's ironic that in writing about Peckinpah, I followed a similar creative journey.  

So there is no such thing as a failure in writing.  Because each project is a step in the journey and each step takes you closer to amazing discoveries.

The Road To Ken Kesey

I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest while I was in college and fell madly in love with the novel, which is one of the finest written by an American. In 1982, at age 26, I was a room service waiter at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, writing plays, and wondering if I would ever succeed as a writer. When it was slow, I would read, and I vividly remember devouring Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which chronicled the adventures of Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, who were instrumental in igniting the psychedelic brush fire of the 1960s. My fascination with the Kesey legend was fueled by that book. What happened to this brilliant charismatic author who had once been so influential, but by this time had not published a novel in almost 20 years? I knew only that he was living with his family on a farm in Oregon, and that many in the literary world had written him off as a flame-out who never lived up to his potential -- a ghost story.

It was during this time that my first play, Memoirs of an Awkward Lover, was selected for a staged reading at The New Playwrights Theater in Washington D.C. I was flown to the nation's capital and had a fantastic week there as a director shaped my play for the reading and I was treated by the actors and crew as the thing I burned to be: a professional writer.

My last night there I stayed up drinking with my stage manager and her boyfriend in their wonderful bohemian apartment. The long twisted strands of conversation eventually wound around to Kesey. I spoke of how much I admired Cuckoo's Nest and the stage manager's boyfriend -- whose name I have, alas, forgotten -- popped out of his chair, his eyes aflame. "Cuckoo's Nest is great," he exclaimed, "but the masterpiece is Sometimes a Great Notion. YOU HAVE TO READ IT!" He pulled a first edition paperback off a shelf and pressed it into my hand with the fervor of an evangelist.

I took that creased and dog-earred paperback with me to California and the Sunset Marquis Hotel and read it every night on the graveyard shift and afternoons between serving omeletts at the pool. It was a staggering work. It told the story of a logging family, the Stampers, and two brothers who were bitterly divided in childhood by their stepmother. The novel leaped backward and forward in time to span three generations of this family, and from one stream-of-consciouness point of view to the next, often changing perspective in mid-sentence. At first this ever shifting mosaic of a family was disorienting, but as I became acclimated to it, it became intoxicating and revelatory. Kesey had penetrated the inner life of his characters with a depth and insight that surpassed the achievements of even James Joyce and William Faulkner. When I reached the last sentence at 3:30 one morning, the power of the ending knocked the wind out of me. I broke out in a sweat and could not catch my breath and realized I was on the verge of an anxiety attack. No book since Of Mice and Men had had such a seismic effect on me. I told the cook I was going to walk the hotel hallways to collect used food trays and wandered for hours as my thoughts raced and my pulse hammered. I felt as if I had not read the book, but it had read me, looked straight into the very core of me and forced me to confront my deepest demons. I knew then that I HAD TO MEET THE MAN WHO WROTE IT!

And so Ken Kesey became my white whale, and I pursued him with the mad intensity of Ahab. About this time I had begun selling my first articles as a jounalist and had just written a cover story for L.A Weekly about street gangs called "This Fighting Life." I remember arriving at the L.A. Weekly offices in East Hollywood on Hyperion Avenue at dawn to watch the trucks load up my issue and ship 300,000 copies across the city.

I had finally made it. I was a professional writer. This was in December, 1984. In January I wrote a letter to Kesey through his publisher, Viking Press. I explained that I was a journalist for L.A. Weekly and wanted to interview him for the paper. Of course, I had no assignment and was not really interested in writing an article. I used this as a pretext to meet him. I included a self-addressed stamped envelope to increase the odds that I would get an answer.

A couple of weeks later, my envelope came back with a postmark from Springfield, Oregon. I ripped it open to find a piece of stationary embossed with the image of the Merry Pranksters' legendary psychedellic school bus, "Further." On it, Kesey had scrawled a reply: "Dear David: Naw, I don't think so. Publicity is no damn good unless you've got something to publicize." I was disappointed, but far from defeated.

Two years later I walked into a bookstore -- they still existed in those days -- to discover a new novel -- Demon Box by Ken Kesey -- prominently displayed. I read it in one sitting. Though it was uneven and not on the level of Notion or even Cuckoo's Nest, it was a sporadically great novel that grappled with the failures of the 1960s counterculture -- of which Kesey had been a prime architect -- and Kesey's own personal failures and despair.

I wrote another letter -- this time to his home address in Springfield because he had included it on the reply he sent me two years earlier. I wrote: "Dear Ken: It appears you now have something to publicize." And I again asked to interview him for L.A. Weekly. I included no self-addressed stamped envelope this time and received no reply.

So I called information in Springfield and they gave me Kesey's telephone number. I called three or four times and the phone on the other end of the line rang and rang and rang, but no one ever picked up. Finally, one night Kesey's wife, Faye, answered. Fighting to control the shiver in my voice, I stammered out my name and who I was and why I was calling. "Oh, yes, David," Faye said. "Ken's right here. Let me ask him." I heard mumbling on the other end of the line, quaking with the realization that Kesey knew who I was and was one of the several voices I heard speaking in the background. At last, Faye came back on the line. "Ken says he's doing a reading from the book at the San Francisco Opera House on December 18th. If you come, stand up at the end of the reading and shout out your name. And he will give you the interview." Okay -- I replied -- I'll be there!

A couple of weeks later I drove to San Francisco and attended the reading. It was surreal to finally find myself sitting twenty feet from Kesey -- the curly once red hair around his ears now gray, his powerful wrestler's torso thickened by the decades, but still formidable. He closed the show by reading a chapter entitled, "The Day After Superman Died." It was about the death of the beat hero, Neal Cassady, who had been the driver of the Merry Pranksters' school bus. While reading about Cassady's death, Kesey struggled maintain his composure.

The reading ended. The audience applauded. But before I could stand and shout out my name, the velvet curtains closed and Kesey vanished back stage. Fuck! What do I do now? The only thing I could do. I bounded onto the stage, ducked through the curtain, and walked right up to Kesey, who was removing his costume and sweating profusely.

I introduced myself and Ken said, "Oh, so you're David." He shook my hand and walked away from me to talk to Hugh Romney -- aka Wavy Gravy, an associate of the Pranksters and the official clown at Woodstock. The two talked about the reading, the emotions it dredged up, and about Cassady. Suddenly, Kesey drew Romney into a fierce hug and broke down weeping uncontrollably.

When he had pulled himself together, he moved on to chat with other members of his crew. I approached him again and tentatively asked when we could do the interview. He shrugged with annoyance. "Right now. I thought you'd have a tape recorder or something." Then he walked away from me again.

I was crushed, felt silly, felt like running out of this theater and forgetting this entire stupid quest. But I didn't. Instead, I watched Kesey and his crew, which included his son Zane and daughter Sunshine, load the props from his reading into a truck behind the opera house. Once everything was loaded, Kesey and his friends loitered in the small side street behind the facility and Kesey knelt to talk to a young girl, maybe four or five years old, named Bethany. He pointed to the full moon shining silver-blue just above a bell tower in city's skyline. "Look at that moon, Bethany. It came right out of that bell tower." Suddenly, I heard myself interjecting. "That's where they keep it." To my astonishment, Kesey laughed heartily, looked directly at me for the first time with his electric blue eyes, and said: "You may have a future as a writer. My friend Larry McMurtry says the job of a writer is to make stuff up."

In an instant, he warmed to me. Kesey's crew was going to a party thrown by the opera house management and he invited me to come along.

At the party, a moment presented itself when Kesey was alone at a table. I asked him a question about Neal Cassady and Ken gestured for me to sit beside him. He gave me his exclusive attention for the next half-hour, answering any question I came up with. I wanted to understand why he felt Cassady was such a creative genius. Ken told one story after another that illustrated Cassady's intuitive brilliance. But I remained unconvinced. I had read all of Cassady's writing and listened to audio recordings of his famous raps, and I found him to be a prodigious but undisciplined intellect. As he told yet another tale that illustrated Cassady's alleged cosmic wisdom, I got the feeling Ken was trying to come to terms with Cassady's squalid death from an overdose of downers and booze. Being a man of imagination, Kesey could not accept the desolate reality of Cassady's squandered potential, so he wove a heroic myth about Cassady that held many parallels the myth the Chief and other inmates of the mental hospital wove around Randall Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

At one point Kesey took the cap off a beer bottle, placed it between his thumb and index finger, and folded it in half as if it were made of cardboard instead of metal. "I can do that with any one of my fingers," he bragged. I believed him -- his fingers were huge and wrapped tight with muscle and calloused flesh. But I found it odd that he would make such a boast. I can do it with a pair of pliers -- I countered.

As the party broke up, Kesey and his friends made plans to meet at the Exploratorium in Golden Gate Park at noon the next day. He looked right at me and said, "Got that?" I said: I'll be there.

The next day I showed up at the exploratorium at noon. Kesey and the Pranksters were nowhere to be seen. I knew from reading profiles about him that promptness and adhering to a schedule were not his strong suits. So I hung about at the Exploratorium for the next two hours, taking in all of the brain teasing exhibits, which revolved around the theme of the limits of our perceptions.

Finally, at around two, Kesey and the Pranksters showed up in the parking lot. I joined them. Kesey gave me a perfunctory hello then went on talking to his friends. Suddenly, it was announced that they were heading back to Oregon. Kesey strode toward his truck without a glance in my direction. I fell in beside him and blabbered some semi-coherent mush about how much I admired Notion and what a profound effect it had on me. Kesey nodded rapidly, embarrassed, and threw a huge thick arm around me. "That's great, man. If you have any other questions you want to ask me, you can call me at home."

A week later I did just that. I conducted two telephone interviews with him in which I mostly asked him about Cassady, the Pranksters, and the Grateful Dead, because I sensed these were topics he was much more eager to talk about than writing. At the end of our second interview, he said. "If you happen to be up this way this summer, stop by. We'll go for a ride down the river."

And so that summer I "just happened" to be up that way. By this time I knew him well enough to understand that trying to make an appointment or set a date to visit would prove fruitless and frustrating. So I simply drove up to Oregon and when I was about ten miles from Kesey's farm I telephoned. Faye answered. I told her I was in the area and would like to stop by the farm the next day. She said that would be fine and gave me directions.

Kesey and his family had left Haight-Ashbury and returned to Oregon in 1967, after he had served time on a prison work farm for marijuana possession, and after the promise of the Summer of Love had faded into the cold unforgiving Fall of Heroin Addiction and Street Crime. Ken moved his family into a huge red barn on property his father had owned and converted it into a house. He raised cattle, llamas, peacocks, miniature goats, hay, and a wide variety of lush vegetables.

I eased my Honda Accord into to the barn's front yard to find Kesey in the open garage. He glanced at me then slipped into a side door that led into the barn. Great -- I thought -- feeling comfortable now!

I got out of the car and ventured to the barn's open front door. Through it I could see a kitchen and adjoining living room with a huge gleaming Zodiac symbol painted on the floor. Blues music blasted from speakers, but no one stirred inside the huge space. I called out a couple of times, but got no answer. Oh swell. What do I do now? Slink back to my Honda and drive away?

As I stepped off the front porch, I glanced to the left spotted the ancient Merry Prankster school bus, Further, slumped in a field like a psychedelic compost heap, and decided to walk over and check it out. I passed a small log cabin that I would later learn was called The Pump House because it housed pump equipment to circulate water from the back yard pond. Tables and shelves in the Pump House were packed with reels of 16 mm film and audio tape. Then I passed a tool shed in which every rake, pick, shovel, hammer, and screw driver was covered with rainbow swirls of Day-Glow paint. Okay -- I thought -- you're not in Kansas anymore. You've landed on a strange and wondrous planet.

Finally, I arrived at the barbed wire fence that bordered the field where the bus rested. I stared at it for a long time -- the cracked glass of the accordian door, the pitted windshield -- and thought to myself: Cassady actually sat behind that wheel. It wasn't just a story in a book, it actually happened.

Finally, I turned around and discovered Kesey now sitting in the doorway of the Pump House, staring at me with his electric blue eyes. It was just as Tom Wolfe described in Acid Test -- you never saw Kesey enter a room, all of a sudden he was just there.

I made the long walk over to him. He stared at me all the way. I extended my hand and reintroduced myself. He nodded. "Of course, I remember you." Then turned his attention to a bucket before him where he was stirring up a batch of wet cement. "Joe's going to sign his name in cement today," he reported, offering no further explanation until he poured the cement into an octagon frame and called his black lab, Joe, over to dip his paw in the damp concrete.

Two long-haired teenagers who had been doing some work on the property showed up and the conversation somehow moved to the subject of weapons. "I found out in prison that people who were into knives had knife wounds." Kesey observed. "Those who were into guns had gun wounds. You get involved with weapons and the karma will blow back on you. Better not to touch weapons at all. I've given all my guns away."

Having finished Joe's memorial slab of concrete, Kesey announced that he and the two young men were going into town for lunch. "You're welcome to join us, if you want to follow us there in your car." I eagerly agreed, though once behind the wheel I realized this would be an easy way for Kesey to get rid of me. So be it -- I was determined to squeeze whatever time I could out of him.

We met at a steak house directly across the street from the Eugene Symphony's hall. Kesey ordered a big bottle of red wine, which we consumed while discussing the politics of the day. This was 1987 -- the Iran hostage crisis, in which Islamist activists held the staff of US Embassy hostage in Tehran, had been resolved only a few years before. Kesey said he understood the outrage on the part of many Americans, but pointed out that hostage taking was a long established tradition among enemy nations -- the practice stretched all the way back to the dawn of civilization -- so when his countrymen reacted as if this was an unprescedented act, Ken thought they were being naive.

I was trembling with anxiety, but I would not give into my shyness; I forced myself partake in the discussions as they moved from topic to topic. When the bill came, I reached for it saying, "I've got it."

Ken said, "No, that's not necessary, David." The waiter hesitated, uncertain about who he should hand it to. I said forcefully, "I'll take the check."

Kesey's voice bristled, "Oh, you'll take the check?" I looked at him and simply smiled; something in my expression softened his anger and he let me pay for the meal.

Afterwards, we walked out to our cars. "What are you plans now, David?" Kesey asked. I revealed I didn't have any. He said, "I've got some business to attend to in town, but why don't you meet me out at the house later for supper?" I said I would love to do that and drove off to kill time in a dusty little park in Eugene, riding a tidal wave of adrenaline as I absorbed the wonder of it: Ken Kesey just invited me to dinner!

I drove back out to the house at around 6 p.m. and found Faye there alone, with her house cats and a Macaw Parrott named Taco. Faye took me shopping at the local market, where she bought a huge salmon. By the time we returned to the barn Ken had showed up and soon more people followed: Ken's brother, Chuck, and his wife; his son, Zane; his daughter, Shannon; and movie producer Rob Miller, son of playwright Arthur Miller, along with his wife and kids.

It was a wonderful night filled with laughter and thoughtful discussions about books, movies, and politics. After dinner, Kesey led the kids into the backyard to play hide-and-seek with his dog, Joe. Joe would actually sit and wait while Ken and the kids fled into the shadows of the vast back yard, then at Ken's command the dog would run out to find the kids, one at a time.

After hide-and-seek, Kesey lit a bunch of candles and handed them to each of the children. "Come on, kids, let's take these candles out to the back yard!" And like a psychedelic Pied Piper, he led the children into the inky depths of the yard -- their candle flames bobbed and weaved in the dimness like a string of iridescent pearls, until they came upon an abstract metal sculpture, which I suddenly realized was the marker for the grave of his son, Jed. Jed, who had been a wrestler like his father, had died a few years earlier when the University of Oregon's wrestling team van careened off an icy mountain road. The death had been devastating for Ken and Faye, yet here he was now playing with this group of children, as he must have played with Jed when he was young, and honoring his son's memory by placing these candles on the marker. It felt profoundly healthy, and magical. Jed was still there, a part of Ken's life. To learn more about Jed's death, click on the following link: Jed's death. (http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/09/what-world.html)

Late that night, I found myself alone with Kesey in his living room. "I know what you should see!" he suddenly exclaimed. Ken moved off to a side room stacked high with video tapes. He surfaced with a copy of the movie The Horse's Mouth, adapted from the Joyce Carey novel. In it, Alec Guinness plays a once famous now forgotten artist, Gulley Jimsom, and in the very first scene he is pursued by a young aspiring painter, who wants Jimsom to teach him to be a great artist. Kesey patted me on the knee and said, "You go ahead and watch this, and I'll see you in the morning."

He didn't mean it as a put down. In fact, he loved the movie and believed it had a lot to say about art: principally, if you want to be great, you have to be fanatically committed to your craft. Jimson manipulates and uses everyone around him to get the materials he needs to paint his next work. An early scene featured Guinness taking over and destroying a rich patron's home while he and his wife are out of town. The sequence played as high slapstick, and Kesey doubled over with laughter, but it also carried a profound message. "When we first saw this movie, it came as a revelation to us," Kesey said. "We didn't know anyone could exist that way. Living solely for their art. I don't know anyone doing that today."

I spent the night in the back yard, lying on a mattress Kesey had laid out there, under a spectacular array of stars. The next day, we went on a hike to the top of a nearby mountain peak. And the next morning, I announced I was heading home. Kesey was a little surprised, as if he expected I would stay a lot longer. But I did not want to wear out my welcome. Shortly before we parted, he mentioned that he intended to teach a course at the University of Oregon English Department in the fall in which he would have a class of graduate students write a group novel that he then intended to publish. Kesey saw the exercise as an antidote to the overly precious writers' workshop stories that most colleges were producing those days.

I made a note of this. And two years later when the book was finished and about to be published, I pitched the project to Rolling Stone and they contracted me to write a feature article about it. It was my first article in a national publication, a publication famous in American letters, and one that had featured many stories about and by Kesey over the years. I traveled back to the farm to interview Kesey and his students, and here is the article that I published:

[caption id="attachment_116" align="alignleft" width="175"] [IMAGE: http://davidoweddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Ken-Kesey-Page-1-Thumbnail.jpg] (http://davidoweddle.com/?page_id=119) Click on this image to read my Rolling Stone article![/caption]

After the article hit news stands, I was terrified to call Kesey to find out what he thought of it. But, as I am sure will not shock the reader at this point, I could not restrain myself. Trembling with anxiety, I dialed the number. Ken got on the phone and said to me: "It was a wonderful article. My family all enjoyed it, including my mother. They appreciated all of the hard work and detail that went into it." My eyes teared up because I knew that his family meant everything to him, and by invoking it, Kesey was paying me his highest compliment. One of the themes I had stitched into the article was the fact that Kesey used the class as a way of re-energizing his own writing and I had mentioned his long awaited, unpublished novel set in Alaska, Sailor Song. Before hanging up, Ken said to me, without prompting. "And I am going to finish the Alaska book."

When I visited the farm to interview him about the writing class, Kesey invited his friend, songwriter Mason Williams -- who composed the 1960s hit Classical Gas -- to dinner. Williams and Kesey had been touring the northwest doing benefit concerts to raise money for the restoration of rivers that had been degraded by dam projects, habitat destruction, or pollution. At the concerts, Williams and his band would play a series of American songs about rivers, and Kesey would punctuate the musical numbers with comic bits. I had the treat of watching Kesey improvise a couple of routines that were later incorporated into the concerts. The man was a born entertainer and could have been a first rate comedian. (In college, before deciding to become a writer, he had briefly pursued acting.) At one point Kesey told me he would be performing with Mason in Sacramento, where my sister lived, and invited me to come see the show.

I told my sister, Tracey, about it and she said she wanted to come, too. Then my older sister, Jeanne, decided she wanted to come also and then my father called to say he had spoken to Tracey and decided he wanted to attend. My blood ran cold as ice water. My father was an ex-Marine who had fought in some of the worst battles of the South Pacific. In fact, I would later write a cover story about how those experiences permanently scarred him. To read that story, click on the following link: Secrets at the Bottom of the Drawer (http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jul/22/magazine/tm-25106).

My father was a right wing, Orange County Republican who hated liberals with a rabid passion. Inviting him to this concert featuring one of the iconic figures of the 60s counter culture was a recipe for disaster. I telephoned my sister and said, "What were you thinking?" Tracey calmly replied, "He wanted to go. What was I supposed to do, tell him no?"

Dad knew how much I admired Kesey's work, but did not really know the man's history. And I made no effort to educate him when he came with me to Sacramento. I just hoped the concert would not be too political and that I could get through it without my father causing a major scene with all the ancillary trauma.

A strange thing happened. My father sat through the entire concert, laughing and enjoying it, even when Kesey made left wing cracks about Ronald Reagan's Contra Aid program and his war against drugs. At one point my sister gave me an anxious look. Dad could not have missed the political jokes, but because he knew how important Kesey was to me, he seemed to make a conscious decision to ignore them.

Afterwards, my entire family attended the VIP back stage party. I did not approach Kesey right away. Dad kept nudging me and saying: "When are you going to introduce me?" I gave vague, evasive answers, because the truth was I did not want to introduce Dad. I was terrified he would make a spectacle of himself and embarrass me, or worse fill me with shame.

Finally, I approached Kesey and congratulated him on a hilarious performance. He threw an affectionate arm around me then took me over to meet Ed McClanahan, a writer friend of his from Stanford, and an author I much admired. While I was talking to McClanahan, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father walk up to Kesey and stick out his hand. My blood pressure shot through the top of my head -- oh fuck, what is Dad going to say?

Later, I found out he said: "I want to thank you for being such a fine influence on my son. He thinks the world of you." And Dad went on to explain to Ken that my two sisters were here. Kesey's eyes lit up. "David's family is here? I want to meet them!"

After finishing talking to McClanahan, I joined Kesey, who was with my entire family. Ken threw his arm around me again and told them: "Yeah, we're not even sure how it happened, but David's become part of our life." After Ken left, Tracey said, "Wow, does he like you!" And she described how he had spoken highly of several magazine stories I had written, including the one about him.

I next saw Kesey about two years later at the American Bookseller's Association Convention in Las Vegas. I had just signed a contract with Grove Press to write my first book, a biography of Sam Peckinpah, and was there to meet with my editor, Anne Godoff. Kesey was there to promote a new book -- he was now publishing books almost every other year -- and I had the opportunity to hang out with him and the Pranksters, including the legendary Caroline Adams (AKA Mountain Girl) and Ken Babbs. Kesey had restored another old school bus into a psychedellic replica of the original "Further" and the Pranksters had driven it from Oregon to Vegas for the convention. As they were preparing to depart, I climbed aboard the bus, shook Kesey's hand, and said, "You know, I'm very proud of how my father acted at that Mason Williams concert." I explained my father's background as a Marine and his politics and advanced my theory that he made an effort to set his politics aside that night. "Well, you know," Kesey said, "those World War II guys are caught up in a whole whirlpool of stuff. And no matter how hard they thrash, they can't fight their way free of that whirlpool. But underneath all that, when you get down to the core human beings, they are very solid individuals." We shook hands and parted ways again.

Over the next few years, I saw him when he came down to L.A. to do readings from his various new books. Once, he did a reading at the Anson Ford Theater in the Hollywood Hills. Dennis Hopper introduced him by saying: "I've been asked to introduce Ken Kesey. Wow. How do you do that? It's like being asked to introduce a cloud."

After the reading, Kesey took questions from the audience. Someone asked if he felt he'd done too much LSD and if he thought it had damaged his mind. "No," Kesey said, "I don't think so. On the other hand, I've had too many gin martinies. You see, I know what's done me harm. You are never going to have a major problem with hallucingenics in this country. Heroin, yes, amphetimines, cocain -- yes. But you're never going to have a major peyote problem. There are a lot of people asking for less peyote, but not more."

I think that was a very accurate assessment of his weaknesses, as I observed them. In the years I knew him, Kesey did not do LSD on a daily, or even regular basis. But he did drink excessively, and from what other people who spent more time with him have told me, I believe he was an alcoholic. He also smoked pot every day, usually starting at around noon. These habits definitely had a negative impact on his writing. As was evident when he published Sailor Song, which was a pale shadow of his great novels written 30 years earlier. It has a number of strong passages, but unraveled into a disorganized mess in the latter half of the book. The reviews were mostly scathing, and I felt guilty about being one of those who goosed Kesey into finishing it.

The last time I saw him was shortly after he had turned sixty, in 1996, when he came to L.A. to promote The Last Round-Up, the second to last of his books to be published. Kesey's Jail diaries were published a few years after his death. Round Up was considerably less ambitious than Sailor Song, and a better book. I wrote a detailed account of the time I spent with Kesey for the Los Angeles Village View. Here is a link to the article:

I never saw him again after that. It's fitting that our last conversation was about mortality, a major theme in his work and in his life. After he died in 2001, at age 66, I wrote a tribute to him in Orange County

And so it came to pass, more than 35 years after I first wrote Ken asking to interview him for an L.A. Weekly article, that I finally wrote the piece for that publication. I kept my word, and it felt good.

Mom and Me

Every morning I walk my Labradoodle -- Kesey -- along the cliff here in Paradise Cove. We always pass my mother's bench.  The one she sat on every day after she contracted  a malignant brain tumor and was forced to come live with me.   She would gaze out at the great expanse of blue water and say breathlessly, "It gives me such peace."  You could feel the ocean loosening the kinks in her body and psyche as she breathed in the salt air.  

I look out at the water today and think of her ashes swirling among the waves down there.  Sometimes I talk to her.  Especially on Christmas Day.   She and my father shared a deep love of that holiday.  Writing about it now I smell her scrambled eggs and sausages and coffee cake warming the kitchen on Christmas morning. 

In home movies taken when my parents visited Hawaii and other tropical locales, my mother is frequently positioned at a window gazing out at the ocean in an almost trance-like state.  My father -- taking the movies -- would always have to call out to her multiple times before she turned to face the camera with a slightly dazed expression.

The ocean triggered a spiritual experience for her that could not be translated into words.

It was my mother who took my hand when I was two years old and led me to the ocean for the first time.  I was frightened but captivated.  She gently explained there was nothing to fear as small waves broke over my smooth pale feet.  

Then she sat me down and helped me dig for sand crabs.  When she pulled one up from the subterranean depths and placed it writhing in my palm, I too was captivated by the mystery of this border region between land and sea.

When I was seven we moved to the then small beachside town of Corona del Mar, California.  Mom drove us to the beach every Saturday of the summer in our hatchback 1966 racing green Mustang, which had a special button under the dash that made the car whinny like a wild stallion.  My sister and I  cavorted in the waves and caught crabs and starfish and small tide pool creatures, which we deposited in our tin pails.  When it came time to go home, Mom gently convinced us to return the sea creatures to their natural habitat.

I moved to Paradise Cove when I was 32.  Thirty-eight years later I live here still.  Because of my mother.  I consider it one of the great achievements of my life that I carved out a place for myself here in Malibu.

But my relationship with my mother was as plagued with ambivalence as the one I had with my father.  It took a subtler form, but it was just as fraught.

All the time I was growing up and well into adulthood, my mother delighted in telling a story about giving birth to me.  The nurse said, "Congratulations, you have a beautiful red-headed boy."

Mom's eyes popped with with disbelief.  "A red head?  No!  That can't be.  You've made a mistake.  Not my son!"

She laughed with delight when telling this charming little anecdote.  Never once did she concern herself with how I felt about being told I was a repulsive freak.

Then there were the episodes where my father's post traumatic stress from World War Two got the better of him and he would explode with rage.  One time he hit me until I peed on his leg, then hit me for peeing on his leg.  During all of the beatings Mom would stand there, bleating weakly, "Jim, that's enough.  Stop Jim."  She never placed herself between me and my father, never tried to pull me to safety.

After these episodes she would come to my room to explain the reasons for my father's outbursts.  "He didn't mean it.  Sometimes the stresses he's dealing with at work get the upper hand and he's not himself.  He loves you very much.  Always remember that."  Then she would tell me about my father's Dickensian childhood.  His father, whom he loved dearly, died when he was 12 and was buried in an unmarked grave.  Dad was left in the custody of his mother who was so prone to violence she once opened a cut on his forehead with a mop handle. Dad had to go to a doctor to get it stitched up.

Mom's apology for my father's abuse would inevitably be followed by an apology from Dad himself.  I'd hear him coming down the hall and would get ready for it, because this was a beloved ritual.  He's come in and sit beside me on my bed and say how sorry he was for losing his temper.  He explained that sometimes bad moods overwhelmed him so that he couldn't think straight.  "It wasn't about you.  It was me.  You know that I love you, right?"

I wouldn't look at him at first.  I kept my eyes averted and made him beg for it.  "You understand, don't you?  I love you and your sister and mother more than anyone else in the world.  I'd be lost without you."

Finally, at last, I would look up at him and say yes, I understood.  He would pull me tight and kiss me.  I can still feel his beard stubble on my cheek, smell the cigarettes on his breath, and the Old Spice cologne on his skin.  To this day, those rituals of forgiveness remain the most ecstatic moments of my life.

But it didn't make everything okay.  It took years of therapy to come to terms with my anger at both my parents.  At first the focus was my father, for he was the obvious monster.  But over time therapists turned my focus to my mother (the good parent) and helped me realize I was also angry with her.  Because she was the sane one.  She knew better.  And yet she failed to protect me.  

It was not safe in my house to express anger directly to my father.  Or my mother -- because Dad kept drilling it into my head that I must always respect her and if I didn't I would have to face him.

So I found more unique and creative ways to express my resentments.  By stealing mail.  Taking rocks and smashing the glass dials on all of the water meters in the neighborhood.  Ruining two swimming pools in one day by pouring paint in one and filling another with dirt clods.  Oh yeah, and I started multiple fires with matches.

It got so bad that one day when a house in our subdivision caught fire, Mom called me at the friend's house where I was playing and demanded to know if I had anything to do with it.

And yet Mom did most of the heavy lifting when it came to raising my sister and me.  When I formed a burning desire to become a ventriloquist at age 10, it was Mom who ordered one from our beloved Sears Catalogue, along with an LP by TV ventriloquist Jimmy Nelson that taught me to throw my voice.  I studied it for countless hours and became the hit of my Fifth Grade talent show, feeding my burgeoning love of show business.  

I was a terrible student.  I didn't see what school had to do with me or my world and the things I loved in it.  Our playground was fenced in.  I remember clinging to the chain link, gazing enviously at the adults strolling or driving by, free to go anywhere they wanted and do what they wanted.  

I hated everything about school.  Reading intimidated me.  I was desperately shy.  When asked to read aloud I choked.  So they put him in the slow reading group.  

Flash card exercises seemed to be specifically designed to humiliate me.  Again, I choked.

My third grad teacher wrote on my report card: "David does not have a command of the English language.  This is going to be a big problem for him in the years to come."  

Mom never let me forget that assessment.  She brought it up many times over the years.

I think she worried from very early on about what would become of me.  I don't believe she had high expectations.

She pinned her hopes on my sister in those early years.  Tracey was a straight A student and in a mentally gifted program.  She was a swimmer and a gymnast who brought home medals.  I was uncoordinated and displayed no interest in sports.  I only excelled at destroying public property.  Flushing an M-80 down a toilet and blowing it off a wall in a public park bathroom was another of my great achievements during this period.

On the other hand, Mom did not give up on me.  She tried engage my interest in academics.  In Fourth Grade they gave us writing assignments.  Two page essays on United States or California history.  To me, filling up those two pages seemed like being asked to write War and Peace.  An insurmountable task.  I would stall, until Mom brought down the hammer and forced me to sit with her and write the entire essay.  So she was my first co-writer.  My first editor.

She bought me a set of World Book Encyclopedias that came with a Learning Center board game that enabled you absorb trivia in a variety of fields.  And she walked me through its intricacies.  Afterward I played with it on my own, but probably not to the extent that she had hoped.  I also broke open those World Books to read about the Roman Empire, World War Two, silent movies, and a wide variety of other topics.

Mom noticed my growing interest in World War Two -- nurtured by Dad's war stories -- and bought me a set of Time Magazine books that tracked the history of the entire war.  For the first time I developed a sense of the war's scope and how it unfolded.  I quickly became obsessed and read those books over and over.

None of this had an impact on my school work.  Yet.

The real turning point came when I saw a production of Of Mice and Men on TV.  A few days ago I posted an account of how I came to watch that program and its lasting effect on me.  But in case you didn't read that post, I will give you a quick recap.  I identified with the character of Lenny, the dimwitted child-man who is bullied by other ranch hands (as I was bullied by my father and by the big kids in school).  But Lenny has superhuman strength and is able to crush the fist of one of his tormentors.  Oh how I wished I had his power!  More importantly, I was deeply moved by the friendship between George and Lenny and the loneliness George feels after he is forced to shoot his friend to save him from rapidly approaching vigilantes who intend to brutally murder Lenny.  I was lonely too, and I felt George's isolation on a visceral level.

Somehow I found out there was a book that the TV show had been based on.  So I went to the library and got it.  From that day forward I was never without a book.  Within a few weeks I wrote my first short story -- a blatant ripoff of Rudyard Kipling's Rikki Tikki Tavi.  I brought the story home from school at read it to my mother and my sister Tracey at our pinewood kitchen table.  My mother expressed great enthusiasm.  I'm sure she felt a sweeping sense of relief that her son was at last starting to master the English language.  But she would not have been relieved if she knew what it would lead to.

Because I wrote from that day forward.  Every day.  Reading and writing became my religion and 60 years later I am practicing it right now as I write this.

At first the effects of my new faith seemed positive to Mom.  Within a year I was getting A's in many classes -- history, English, social studies, and biology, to name a few.  I was not as consistent as my sister.  If I was uninterested in a subject -- math, Spanish, French, art -- I barely managed to pass.  But still, I was making great strides.

It wasn't until I announced that I intended to be a writer and to make movies that my mother's alarm bells went off.  She thought this was an appalling development and tried everything she could to talk me out of it.  She suggested I get a real estate license, or go to work for my father at his packaging plant, or sell insurance, like my half-brother, who was fantastically successful.

Unfortunately, she was no match for my father, who read every short story I wrote and watched every movie I made and offered much praise and detailed critiques.  Dad would say, "You're going to make it!  You have talent.  You're going to ring the bell, the nose knows!"

Mom resented Dad's encouragement.  She felt he was filling my head with pipe dreams and that it would only lead to failure and disillusionment.  She wanted me to be happy, to get married, buy a home, and live a conventional life.  After college when I was waiting on tables and polishing airplane hangar floors and emptying semi-trucks full of fiberglass insulation to earn a subsistence level living while writing plays that no one wanted to see, she believed my father had done me a tremendous disservice.

I recently ran across a batch of Christmas cards from that time.  Dad's card was filled with encouragement.  "This will be the year when you finally ring the bell.  I can feel it!  All of your hard work is about to pay off!"  On her card, Mom wrote, "Well, hopefully this year will be better than last year."

In 1985 I decided to write a mammoth Thomas-Wolfe-sized novel about my father's Dickensian childhood in the rusted out steel mill town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, just up the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh.  Mom thought I was delusional to do this, even though she was the one who originally told me the tale of my father's youth and got me fascinated at an early age.

Ironically, my father didn't want me to go either.  He was afraid I would discover that he did not graduate from high school and that he had been forced to join the Marines because he was a juvenile delinquent.  But when he found out I was living on the street he was born on he put his misgivings aside and flew out to stay with me in my one bedroom apartment in a weathered mill worker's house.  Dad slept on my bed.  I slept on a Lazy Boy chair.  A shower curtain shielded the window from the street.

Mom never came.  Never commented on what I was doing.

But when I finished the 2500-page manuscript, a strange reversal happened.  For the first time, Dad refused to read something I wrote.  I think because it cut too close to the bone.  The heart of the novel was his relationship with the father he idolized and lost at age 12.  The wound inflicted by his Dad's death plagued my father his entire life.  On his death bed he would still be talking about his long lost father.  But Mom -- to my astonishment -- read all 2,500 pages.  She was one of the few people to do so, because the book was an overwritten failure.  I will have more to say about this in a later post.

But Mom persevered through Kevlar-dense prose to the very last page.  Sometime shortly after that Mom and Dad and I went to dinner at the Five Crowns, the upscale steak house in Corona del Mar where we had all of our important family dinners.  During the meal Dad held forth on how much he loved and admired my mother's father -- Nick Byrne, an Irish farmer who came to America to work as a gardener on the enormous Gilded Age estates on the Hudson River in Irvington, New York.

Dad often talked in glowing terms about Mom's father at family dinners.  In part, I believe it was his way of trying to make up for hurting my mother so many times over the years.  But he really did idolize Nick, I think because Nick had an inner calm and integrity that eluded my father.  

On every previous occasion my mother would listen to the litany of praise with a tight stoic mouth and expressionless eyes.  But this time -- after recently finishing my mammoth novel -- she fixed me with a piercing gaze and broke into uncontrollable tears.  "I feel so guilty because I was ashamed of my father.  Because he was just a poor gardener, pulling weeds on a rich man's estate."

It was a stunning moment because my mother was a enigma to me.  In contrast to Dad, she revealed very little about her inner emotional life.  Consequently, I felt remote from her.  When I came home from college for a visit I would hug her and she would manically pat my back, as if I were too hot to hold.  

The day after that dinner, she also said to me with a puckered mouth:  "You are never to write about me the way you've written about your father.  Do you understand?"

I just looked at her without responding, so I am not breaking a promise by writing about her now.  I know it would displease her, but if she were alive to read every page of my four volume memoir about our family I think her feelings would change.

After my father died, Mom finally opened up to me as I had so longed for her to do.  But when she opened up it was not to shed sentimental tears and utter facile bromides about love and loss.  It was to spew forth for more than an hour about all the ways my father betrayed her.  Chief among his crimes was fucking just about every woman he could get his hands on.  Once at a party at a suburban home, Mom had to drag him out of some bushes in the front yard where he was fucking another one of the guests.

Listening to all of this, I became very upset.  Mom had taught me to make excuses for my father, to rationalize his behavior, and now she pulled the rug out from under me.  Mom said, "Well, you kept pressuring me to open up and express my real feelings."  She went on to explain that she had never told me about any of this because she knew I loved my father and she did not want me to turn against him.  She wanted to keep the family together and so she swallowed her feelings of betrayal for the sake of me and my sister.

It has become a cliche to portray women who make such choices as pathetic and weak.  When it's discussed at all these days, the impulses that drove my mother's decisions are ridiculed.  People say things like, "Your mother was too weak to face the world on her own."  "She let your father treat her as a doormat."

There is truth in such conclusions.  But Mom did keep the family together and there is no question in my mind or my sister's that this was good for us.  The family economy was maintained, enabling us both to graduate from college -- something Mom and Dad never had the opportunity to do.  It was good for my father, too.  Because he would have spiraled into the ground if Mom divorced him, and never would have lived into his 70s.  Mom knew this.  And through it all she saw the tragic arc of his life, from his brutal childhood to the dehumanizing war and all of the inner demons he fought as a consequence.  And she knew the reality: he needed her much more than she needed him.  And when he was up, there was no person more fun to be around than my Dad.  And Mom loved it when he was up.  She used to say all the time, with a great deal of affection, "He's a Gemini.  No question about it.  He's two different people.  But when he's in a good mood, there's no one else like him!"  He was hilarious and unpredictable and she loved that about him.  I think she looked around at the alternatives -- all those white bread Orange County Republican men in their flat-top hair cuts, Lacoste shirts, khaki trousers, and top sider shoes -- and she was... bored.  Mom was addicted to the excitement of being around my father.  We all were.  The three of us went on many family vacations in our high school and college years and even afterward, and on them in we laughed and joked and had an all around ecstatic time.

It took courage to stay in the marriage.  But she didn't see it that way.  In her heart of hearts she wondered if she was simply a coward who was too afraid of ending up alone to make a clean break with my father.  She was keenly aware of how the world -- including her friends -- viewed her for making such a choice and she bore a great deal of shame about it.

But in the decades since her death I have come to believe my mother had an abundance of courage.  Not the blustering testosterone-fueled courage of my father.  But a quiet courage that was not recognized by even her closest friends.

I saw that courage when she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in 1994.  My father had been dead for more than a year when she flew to New York City to watch me introduce a screening of Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece, The Wild Bunch.  I had recently published the authoritative biography -- "If They Move... Kill 'Em!"  The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah -- which received rave reviews.  When I stepped to the podium I received a standing ovation.

Afterward, my mother came down from her seat, her eyes aflame as she said, "I can't believe all of those people were applauding for my son!"

The triumph was short-lived because that night she became incoherent in her hotel room and the next day she was diagnosed with a Stage Four Glioblastoma, for which there is no cure.

When I broke the news of the diagnosis to her in the hospital room her eyes widened.  "You mean I have a tumor growing out of my brain?"  When I affirmed it, her mouth tightened bitterly.  "Well, that's just great."

And yet, when I had to put her into an assisted living facility a couple of months later she adjusted with amazing resiliency.  She never said, "Why me?"  She never complained that she would not live to see her grandson born or see me get married to my then girlfriend, Risa Parness.

When Risa and I picked her up once a week to take her dinner I would find her in the lobby, all dressed up, in full makeup.  She would burst into a smile and approach me with open arms.  "Oh, my son is here!"  The receptionist would tell me she had been waiting there for a couple of hours.

She loved going to dinner and was full of laughter, even though she was speaking word salad.  She grew to love Risa and her daughter because we had her over to Risa's house every Sunday night to watch 60 Minutes.

For more than 20 years she had been a receptionist in an architect's office.  So now she spent her days at the assisted living facility's front desk, helping the receptionist answer the phones.  She would coo to a caller in a melodic professional voice, "The hamburger is very American."  And would continue to speak word salad until the receptionist eased the phone out of her hand.

Other afternoons she would ride around in the van that took residents to various medical appointments.  Mom displayed a keen interest in the action on the streets and chattered happy nonsense that kept the other passengers entertained.

Even after I brought her back to my house to die, she remained profoundly positive.

Her rich white Orange County friends had abandoned her.  Not one of them came to see her or even telephoned.  So instead she formed an intense attachment with her home health aid, Antoinette -- a middle-aged African-American woman who did not own a car and had to take the bus to get to my house every day.   Antoinette was a born-again and she read passages from the Bible to my mother over the last few days of her life.  Mom had always been an ardent believer.  She took Tracey and I to church every Sunday until we reached middle school, then she gave up the practice, but kept her faith.  By the time I reached college I had become a committed atheist.  There was no role for me to play in Antoinette's Bible readings, so I went to my office to work on a magazine article.

Mom and I had often argued about religion.   Despite her bitterness about my father's betrayals, she kept pictures of him all around her bedroom and later in the rooms of the facilities she inhabited.  She was constantly seeing signs that my father's spirit was trying to contact her -- though old phone messages on the answering machine, songs that came onto the radio, butterflies that landed on her window pane, pumping their wings slowly as if signalling her.

"You don't believe in those things," she would say.  "But I do!  Oh, I certainly do!"

Three days before she died I came into my bedroom to find my mother staring deep into Antoinette's eyes.  Antoinette said, "She's getting ready to cross over to the other side.  She's afraid, but she's beginning to let go of that fear.  She will cross over.  But she's got to finish some business here first.  She's been looking at that picture all morning."

Antoinette gestured to a picture on my bedroom wall, taken off the coast of Guadalcanal when my father returned there in 1986.  My mother paid for the trip and on that island my father finally shared with her some harrowing memories that he'd been holding back for more than 40 years.  Mom held him while he wept.  Afterward, back aboard their cruise ship, a photographer snapped a picture of the two of them.  In it, my parents glowed like a pair of newlyweds.  

Antoinette was right.  My mother was staring at that very picture.

Antoinette said, "She and I have the same pain, deep in our hearts."  I said, "What pain is that, Antoinette?"  She said, "We both fell in love with a man who ran around on us." There was no way my mother could have conveyed to Antoinette the history of her marriage to my father.  She wasn't coherent enough to do this.  So how could Antoinette know it?

Antoinette gazed deep into my mother's eyes and said, "It's okay, Gloria.  You no longer need to feel ashamed for loving him.  You were the one.  You were the one for him, Gloria.  He was just weak in that part of his life, that's all.  So you need to let go of your anger toward him and accept him for what he was and forgive yourself for loving him."

My mother's eyes filled with tears and she nodded.  It was a transcendent experience.  I didn't convert to Christianity.  But I now accept there are moments of magic in life and I feel no need to understand or codify them with scripture.  

As Ken Kesey said, "The answer is never the answer.  What's really interesting is the mystery.  If you seek mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking."

My mother helped me understand what Kesey meant.  It was her last lesson to me, given 35 years after she put that first sand crab in my hand.

Later that day, while holding her, I broke down, crying uncontrollably.  Suddenly, my mother's eyes snapped into focus.  She asked what was wrong.  I said I didn't want to lose her.  She said, "Oh, honey, you're going to be okay.  You'll see."

Then the clouds closed in again and she never said another coherent word to me.  

She was right.  I was going to be okay.  She saw to that. 

The Lasting Impact of Our Work

 Those of us laboring in television often feel our “product” is disposable.  It airs, and if we’re lucky, reruns a few times, and then vanishes into the ether, perhaps resurfacing in the back pages of video catalogues amid box sets of other long forgotten television programs.  We try to be philosophical about it, consoling ourselves with the fact that we were well paid, managed to keep current on our mortgages and health insurance, and bulked up our pensions so we will not face homelessness in our old age.  But did we make an indelible mark on our culture, and influence the hearts and minds of millions the way the best stage plays, novels, or movies do?   We don’t dare to hope for that.  The most we have managed to do – as Arthur Miller would say – is inscribe our name on a cake of ice on a hot July day… Or so it too often seems.

But whenever I am haunted by such doubts, I remind myself of one particular television program that profoundly altered the trajectory of my life.

The year was 1968.  I was twelve and living in Louisville, Kentucky, which had only three television stations at the time -- one of them a UHF channel that focused exclusively on agricultural news.

I had always been a terrible student, earning mostly D’s and C’s, and even a number of F’s on my report cards.  I got in terrible trouble in third grade when my teacher found all of my homework for the year stuffed inside my desk.  I never brought it home because I didn’t want my parents to see my dismal marks.  I vividly remember the parent/teacher conference following this archeological discovery.  It was the only one my father ever attended, but he made up for his many absences by bringing a special intensity to this one.  “You know why you’re not getting good grades?” he said, shoving his huge craggy face within an inch of mine, spraying me with minute droplets of spit.  “Because you’re daydreaming all the time!  Looking out the windows at the birds in the trees instead of concentrating on your work.”

He was right.  I could not see how school was in any way relevant to my life and found it nearly impossible to concentrate my mind on the tedious exercises my teachers scrawled upon the dusty blackboards.  The same third grade teacher who discovered my cache of homework wrote on my report card that year:  “David does not have an adequate mastery of the English language.  This will be a severe hindrance to his academic development.”  She was also right.  I was in the slow reading group in her class and remained in the slow reading group all the way up to the seventh grade.  Books -- reeking of dust, dried ink, and decaying paper -- held no allure to me.  Reading assignments loomed before me like prison sentences.

No teacher, no matter how sympathetic or charismatic, could break through to me.  I’m sure if I were growing up today I would be labeled with ADD, or some other learning impaired classification, and would be fed an officially sanctioned narcotic to help me overcome my disabilities.  Fortunately, they had no such classifications in the 1960s and I was left to flounder on my own.  Until one fall night in Louisville when I tuned our GE Porta-Color Television into a special live production entitled, Of Mice and Men.  If I had grown up in this age of hundreds of cable channels I never would have watched it.  But there were only three channels, so it was a choice between hog reports, a hillbilly hoedown, or this adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, written by John Hopkins, directed by Ted Kotcheff, and starring George Segal as George, and Nicol Williamson as Lenny.

From the opening moments, the production grabbed me by the throat.  I identified immediately with the child-man, Lenny, trapped in a cruel world that he couldn’t fathom.  The horrifying scene in which Curly picks on Lenny re-enacted my encounters with bullies in the halls, locker rooms, and gyms of my junior high school.  And Lenny’s sudden burst of rage mirrored my own fits of anger, with the added fantasy fulfillment of watching this huge child-man crush the bully’s fist and reduce him to tears.

But it was the ending that catalyzed me, and changed my life forever.  The friendship between George and Lenny spoke to something I knew innately even at 12:  that friends and loved ones provide our only insulation from a cold, savage world.  I had never seen an ending so dark and yet strangely uplifting.  As a future mentor of mine, Ken Kesey, was fond of saying:  Art is a work of imagination that can take you to the very darkest corners of human experience and yet leave you feeling somehow ennobled.  The climactic moment when George shoots Lenny so that he will not have to be tortured by a sadistic lynch mob cut me to the core.  Even at 12, I understood that George did this out of love and tenderness, and yet this act of mercy would leave an indelible scar that he would carry with him for the remainder of his days.  Before shooting Lenny, he distracts him by asking him to gaze across the pond while he describes the little farm they dreamed of living on one day.  Just before the bullet splits his skull, Lenny cries out ecstatically that he can see the farm.  This chilling moment helped me grasp the redemptive power of imagination, it’s ability to heal our deepest wounds, and even alleviate the stark horror of death itself.

When the program ended I sat in the dark of our living room, bathed in the glow of the TV, trying to understand what had just happened to me.  It felt like a spear had been driven through my heart, and yet I felt strangely exhilarated.   It was as if I hadn’t watched this show, but it had watched me, bearing witness to my deepest fears, resentments, and yearnings.

The next week I went to the library and checked out Steinbeck’s novel.  I devoured it, experiencing all of the same emotions the television show had provoked, but on an even more profound level.  In the months that followed I became a voracious reader, consuming novels on the bus rides to and from school, in the precious minutes before the class bell rang, on the playground, in my room at night – in every spare moment of every day.  Soon I was writing short stories and making my own movies with my father’s Super Eight Camera -- eager to create for myself the same experience that Of Mice and Men had given me.

Forty years later I was working as a writer/supervising producer on a critically acclaimed television series called Battlestar Galactica.  The show had a legion of passionate fans who showed up at public screenings or corresponded with me.  One of them was Kim Kennedy, an assistant director working on Law & Order SVU.  (Kim currently works on the Emmy Award winning series, Homeland.)  Kim was sharp, articulate, and wildly enthusiastic about Battlestar, and soon became a close friend.  In the course of our many conversations, Kim mentioned she worked with a director/producer on SVU named Ted Kotcheff, who was now in his late 70s.  My eyes popped out of their sockets.  I told her the story about seeing Of Mice and Men, and about how it had changed my life, and begged Kim to arrange a telephone call with Kotcheff.

A soft, courtly voice purred over the receiver.  “Mr. Weddle, I’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica.  It’s a terrific show.  I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to tell you so.”

“We’ve met before, Mr. Kotcheff.”

“We have?”

“Yes, in my living room in Louisville, Kentucky when I was twelve.”

I proceeded to describe the experience watching Of Mice and Men, and how it had affected me.  Kotcheff graciously thanked me and admitted he had not seen the show since it aired in 1968.  I told him he could view it at the Paley Center For Media in Beverly Hills.  He said he would make an effort to see it again and circled back to the subject of Battlestar Galactica.  “I’ve watched a number of your episodes and I must commend you.  It’s outstanding work.’

“Well, I never would have done any of it if it wasn’t for you,” I answered.  “Your show set me on the path to become a writer.”

Kotcheff’s voice choked with emotion as he murmured some words of gratitude and we bid each other farewell.  For hours afterward I glowed with the satisfaction a debt repaid.

All of this is a long way of saying our work in television is not ephemeral.  The best of it has the ability to alter attitudes on big social and political issues.  But beyond the reviews, the ratings, and medial hoopla, we should never lose sight of millions of people out there sitting in the dark of their living rooms and bedrooms absorbing what we have created.  We will never know how many lives we’ve changed, how many minds we’ve expanded, or how many individuals feel just a little less lonely because of a show we have written, directed or produced.

My Granddaughter Abigail

Last Sunday, my wife and I went to a talent show at a theater in Topanga Canyon to watch my granddaughter, Abigail Crouse, belt out three songs with the vocal range and panache of Broadway headliner.

Abby is madly in love with show business.  She is currently in rehearsals for three plays with three different theater companies in Topanga.  All of her friends are theater kids -- passionately obsessed with acting, singing, and dancing.  Abigail and her crew love to sing songs from Epic -- a musical adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey.  She knows all of the characters from that ancient Greek text and can tell you their backstories and why she likes or dislikes them.

She also loves to draw and make miniature three dimensional sets out of construction paper that look strikingly similar to the ones produced by art departments on the television shows I have produced.  

She loves to write essays and short stories.  Her English teacher says Abby is writing two grade levels above her current 6th grade class.  

Of course her preoccupation with drama could be a passing phase.  And that's okay with me.  I don't know what career Abigail will end up pursuing, but I am reasonably sure it will be a creative one.  I take a great deal of pride in that because it is something I have been working on with her ever since she could walk and talk.  I have said to my daughter and son-in-law many times: "If she has a creative mind, she will thrive in any field she pursues, from astrophysics to business to biotech."

I cannot take credit for all of Abigail's creative achievements in the 11 years she has been on Planet Earth.  The lion's share of the credit belongs to Abby herself, but I think I made a contribution.

Our creative journey began with a gnarly piece of drift wood that sits in our backyard.  When Abby was two I told her this was a Troll House and that many trolls lived there and deposited their treasures within.  Then I would hide little shiny presents for her there -- figurines, Christmas ornaments, wrapped candy, etc.  And I would tell her these were presents the trolls left for her.  Soon, every time Abby came over she would say, "Grandpa, we go to the Troll House now?"  Her eyes would bulge like a pair of golf balls every time she found a new hidden gem.

Then came our hikes down a fire road in Paradise Cove in which Abigail assumed the identity of her alter ego, Jungle Girl.  I was her loyal attendant as she sat upon a tree stump throne and waved a pine branch scepter, dispensing proclamations to the squirrels and bunny rabbits that scurried past us.

There is a tennis court on that fire road with flowers planted around the chain link fence that encloses it.  One day I said, "Let's go to The Grandpa Garden to see if any new Grandpas are blooming."  Abigail gave me a quizzical look.  I explained that this was where grandpas were grown by the loyal gardeners of Paradise Cove.  In fact, I myself was grown there and ripened and was picked just before Abby was born.  Her eyes widened as she scanned the flower beds for signs of a freshly blossoming Grandpa.

After that, on every hike Abby would say, "Let's go see if any new Grandpas are growing!"

One day a man in his 60s was playing another old man on the fence-enclosed tennis court.  I cried excitedly: "There are two freshly picked grandpas!"  I explained that after Grandpas are picked they are wild at first and must be kept in a cage until they are tamed.  I myself had been kept in that cage for weeks just before Abby was born.  Abby stared in utter fascination at the freshly picked Grandpas until the men grew self conscious and began missing shots.

We also rode in a golf cart all around Paradise Cove.  One street runs beside a deep ravine filled with trees and bushes.  I stopped the cart.  "Look Abigail, it's Gremlin Gulch."  Abby immediately wanted to go down and hunt for Gremlins.  Once down there, as she peered apprehensively through the undergrowth,  I said, "There's one!  See his eyes in that bush, staring back at us!"  She shrieked and ran back up the hill at record speed.  But on a subsequent day when we drove past she urged me to stop and said excitedly, "Grandpa, can we go down into Gremlin Gulch?"  And so we would repeat the whole psychodrama again and again and again.

I believe in puns.  When I was growing up my father and I would engage in long pun riffs, each of us feeding off the other as we slung puns fast and furious.  I did the same with Abby because I believe puns help you develop a sophisticated use of language.  We would drive by a pair of deer statues on someone's lawn.  I would ask, "Hey Abby, why do you think the sculptor created that deer with the antlers?"  

She would say: "Because he wanted to make a buck."  

"And why did he carve the female deer?"  

"To make some doe."

Our golf cart also sped past a large concrete structure that's part of the septic system in Paradise Cove.  I told Abby it was Pandora's Box, the one from which Pandora released all of the deadly sins that infected humankind.  After doing this a few times I could say to her, "Abby, what's that structure?"  She would answer that it was Pandora's Box and recite the entire myth to me.  I like to think that her current passion for The Odyssey and Greek Mythology had its origins in those exchanges.

I also taught her another myth on those golf cart rides.  Not a Greek or Roman or Egyptian myth, but a very specific myth that had been passed along through three generations of my family. 

My father's father, William "Doc" Weddle, had been a dentist in McKeesport, Pennsylvania in the early 20th Century.  I never met him because Doc died when my father was 12 and lay in an unmarked grave for 40 years until my father put a headstone on it.   

Before Doc died, my Dad used to ride around the greater Pittsburgh area with him on the streetcars.  Those streetcar rides were much like my golf cart rides with Abby.  Doc passed along all kinds of folk lore and tall tales to his youngest son, Jimmy, and my dad lapped it up, his imagination blossoming with wonder.  One of the tales Doc Weddle told his son was about The Birds That Fly Backwards.  "Look up in the sky, Jimmy, keep your eyes peeled, and you will see whole flocks of them flying backwards, heading North in the winter.  Do you know why they fly backwards, Jimmy?  Because in order to know where they're going, they need to see where they've been."

This simple yet profound metaphor for how the past affects our trajectory into the future was then passed down to me by my father.

And years later I passed it on to Abigail.  Every time I heard the squawks from the flock of green parrots that thrive here in Malibu I would point to them and tell Abby they were The Birds That Fly Backwards.  And then I would explain why they fly backwards.  Soon she could recite the myth herself.

When I wrote the memoir about my family, I asked Abby if she would draw a picture of The Birds That Fly Backwards for the last page of the book.  It took her almost a month because she agonized on how best to portray them didn't want to let me down.  She did not.  Her picture is luminous and magical and triumphant.  She drew it 100 years after my grandfather, Doc Weddle, first told the story to my father, who later told it to me.

That is the power of story telling.  And a testament to its value.

Since the time she could talk, I have been showing Abigail classic films -- the silent masterpieces by Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, and clips from early sound movies by the Marx Brothers and dancers and singers like Cyd Charisse, Ginger Rogers, and Eleanor Powell.  

One time when I was at work I got a message on my cell phone from Abby: "Grandpa, I'm here at your house.  I was going to watch Buster Keaton with you, but you're not here."

I showed her Groucho Marx singing, "Whatever it is, I'm against  it," in Horsefeathers.  And I showed her Donald O'Connor singing, "Make 'Em Laugh!" in Singing in the Rain.  She watched silently but attentively.  I was not sure if these musical numbers had any impact on her.

Until that Thanksgiving when Abby and her best friend, Sheila, announced they wanted to perform songs for all of us.  To my astonishment, they sang "Whatever it is, I'm Against it!"  and "Make 'Em Laugh!" without so much as fumbling one line of the lyrics.

Last year I was able to take Abby and her friends to see Singing In the Rain at the Aero theater.  They came out of the screening singing the songs and proclaiming that Donald O'Connor's character -- Cosmo -- was their favorite.  "Cosmo rules!"  They yelled to passing cars.

I brought Abby to Sony Studios to visit the inner workings of my Apple television series, For All Mankind.  She toured the wardrobe department, hair and makeup, but it was the production design department with its miniature scale models of the sets made out of construction paper that most fascinated her because they were so similar to the miniature doll houses Abby built at home out of the same materials.

We took her on set while scenes were being shot and the crew was generous enough to allow Abby to climb onto a camera dolly to feel what it would be like to be a camera operator.

I also created a scene for Abby in the very first episode of For All Mankind that my partner, Bradley Thompson, and I wrote.  In it, Molly Cobb becomes the first woman astronaut to fly to the moon.  Molly is unprepared for how much this will mean to young women and is startled and moved when thousands of letters pour into the Johnson Space Center from girls who now see her as a role model.  One of the letters is from a fictional character named Abigail Crouse.  I wrote Abby's letter and Molly's response to it.  There is a message buried in it for the real Abby: she can do anything she is bold enough to dream of in this life.  Then I framed those script pages and hung them on the wall of Abby's bedroom.

She read the pages once and probably has not looked at them since.  But they hang over her head as she lies in bed fantasizing about all of the things she wants to be when she grows up.  

I think Abigail Crouse is an incredible young woman with a creative mind that seethes with ideas and plans and aspirations.  She and others like her are the hope for our future. 

My Half-Sister Jeanne

I met my half-sister Jeanne when I was ten years old.  Before that I did not know she existed.  My father's first marriage and the two children it produced were kept secret from me and my sister, Tracey, until the day in 1966 when my brother Jim rode his Triumph motorcycle out to California from the East Coast, walked into my father's office, and said, "So, where you been?"

A couple of days later my 24-year-old sister Jeanne blew into my life like a fresh breeze through a stale corridor.  

Like all of us Weddles, she was an incredible story teller, capable of transforming any event -- no matter how mundane or traumatic or sad -- into an outrageous slapstick comedy that would have you falling out of your chair with laughter.

When I knew she was coming over to visit I percolated with excitement for days.  Jeanne's coming!  Oh man, it's going to be so great!

She loved to laugh and had a passion for the absurd.  Thus she was the perfect audience for the silent comedies I was buying from Blackhawk Films with my paper route money.  Jeanne got every gag in a Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy movie and guffawed over the subtlest gestures or details.

So it was only natural when I began making my own silent comedies -- first with my parents' Sears Super Eight Camera, then with a Yashica Super 800 -- that I would cast Jeanne in the movies.  If she had lived in the 1920s I'm convinced she would have been a great comedienne, a rival to Mabel Normand.  She mugged hilariously, threw her whole body into absurd contortions, and was a hit with audiences every time.

Jeanne's theater of the absurd traveled with her wherever she went.  When my brother Jim and Jeanne and my father all went to Vegas in 1971 to see a stage production of Cabaretstarring our actress friend, the great Jane Johnston, Jeanne, Jim and my father went bar hopping.

The evening got crazier and crazier, until finally Jeanne led the group into the Palomino Club, which was the premiere strip joint in Vegas in those days.  She introduced herself to the manager as Diamond Lil, a headliner on the East Coast Burlesque Circuit.  My father then assumed the persona of her manager and proceeded to negotiate for Diamond Lil to headline at the Palomino.

Nothing ever came of it, of course, and the group moved on to other adventures.  That kind of thing happened with Jeanne all the time.

I became an avid sky diver in my early 20s.  When Jeanne found out I was doing this, she said, "I want to come watch!"  Which is how she ended up in a Cessna prop plane that had no door on its right side.  We ascended to 13,000 feet then each of the parachutists dove out of the open side of the plane.  The pilot forgot Jeanne -- an observer -- was still in the compartment and went into a steep spiraling dive to get back to the airstrip to pick up the next group of sky divers.  By the time he landed, Jeanne looked like a Warner Brothers cartoon character desperately gripping the sides of the compartment, her eyes the size of golf balls.  

Instead of complaining to management about the incident, Jeanne quickly wove it into another hilarious tale that she told over and over again, to great effect.

Then there was the time she was employed at a company in Orange County.  One day her boss, Mr. Gibbons, said he would be working at home and asked Jeanne to bring him some important files from the office.  Jeanne arrived at his house to find the front door open.  She stuck her head into the foyer, and called out, "Mr. Gibbons?"  No answer.  But the stereo was playing easy listening music so she ventured into the house, calling out, "Mr. Gibbons?  Mr. Gibbons?"  

She found him sprawled out on the living room couch, stark naked, feigning that he had fallen asleep.  Jeanne left at once.  When she saw Mr. Gibbons on Monday morning she acted as if nothing had happened and he -- massively uncomfortable -- did the same.

Jeanne did not contact HR because there was no such thing in those days.  She did not cry and go to therapy to process her trauma.  Because there was no trauma.  It was just too juicy an anecdote!  Jeanne quickly transformed it with each telling into a hilarious slapstick romp, always pausing to note that "poor Gibbie" had the tiniest little peepee.  Many times over the years that followed my sister Tracey and I would beg Jeanne to tell "The Mr. Gibbons story" and she always rose to the occasion, adding new comic embellishments each time.

When I wrote Battlestar Galactica, one of the characters, Gaius Baltar, became the leader of a religious sex cult.  I named one of the his primary disciples Jeanne.  When she saw the episode, Jeanne cackled with glee.

In 2015 I wrote an episode of The Strain that recreated the day my brother walked into our father's office to ask, "So, where you been?"  My whole family came to a screening of the episode, including Jeanne.  I sat behind her as it was shown. I had thrown the name of my father's best friend, Ken Shaw, into the scene and when the father character said it, Jeanne laughed and murmured softly, "Ken Shaw."  That's what I miss so keenly -- Jeanne's ability to pick up on the subtlest of personal references in my work.

We didn't know it at the time but that screening was the last time all of the members of our family would be together.  Not long after that Jeanne was stricken by a massive stroke that left her bed ridden and blind.  I visited her a number of times and on the last occasion said, "Jeanne, tell me the Mr. Gibbons story again."  She laughed softly, "Oh poor, Gibbie," she murmured "he had a such a tiny little peepee."

I miss my big sister terribly.  For her memorial I put together video woven from our home movies.  I have attached it here.  Check it out and see for yourself the force of nature that was Jeanne Weddle.

Speaking at the Buster Keaton convention

On Friday night, October 2nd, the International Buster Keaton Society was generous enough to invite me to speak before their convention.

My topic was my memoir, The Birds That Fly Backwards.  While the book is not about Buster Keaton, he looms large in the narrative.  I told the Damfinos (the name we Keaton heads have chosen to call ourselves) how my father introduced me to Keaton, and how that galvanized my imagination and led to me becoming a writer and filmmaker.  

I described my father -- an ex-Marine who had fought in the bloodiest killing fields of the South Pacific.  Dad lived in the fierce grip of post traumatic stress and he inflicted that stress upon his family.  He was moody, explosive, and too often violent.

But he was also incredibly charismatic.  Because he had almost died in combat a number of times and seen friends die, Dad believed in living each moment to the hilt.  His favorite saying when daring someone to step out of their comfort zone in the wild parties he threw was: "You may never pass this way again!"

He terrified me.  But he also fascinated me and I was desperate to connect with him.

Because he was my Dad.

One time I told him I hated school because I had bright red hair and the other kids taunted me by calling me "Red."  Dad said: "Don't you know that one of the greatest comedians alive today is a man named Red Skelton?  He's a great pantomimist, revered the world over.  So the next time those kids call you 'Red,' you say to them, 'Thank you.  It's an honor to be named after a great artist like Red Skelton.'"

Soon I was watching The Red Skelton Hour every week then performing his pantomimes at my father's parties.  People roared with laughter.  And no one roared louder than Dad.  He had a laugh that was a force of nature -- a great wind of hilarity that shook the entire house and was impossible to resist.

Once when I took a particularly spectacular pratfall Dad was there to give me a hand up.  He said, "That was worthy of Buster Keaton himself."

I said: "Who's Buster Keaton?"

In the days that followed Dad recounted the basic facts of Keaton's career and explained why he revered him.  Soon his obsession became mine.  I used my paper route money to buy Keaton movies from the Blackhawk Films mail order catalogue and studied them carefully.

When I was 14 I bought a biography -- Keaton by Rudi Blesh, which remains the best bio on Buster to this day.

In it, Blesh described the development of The Three Keatons vaudeville act.  Buster was trained by his father in the complex art of slapstick clowning.  The two became so close that they could read each other's minds on stage.

But as Joe Keaton pushed 50 he became a severe alcoholic.  He began hitting Buster for real on stage because he resented how his son had stole the limelight, and Buster would have to beat his father off with a broom, while still keeping it funny.  And all the while the audiences screamed with laughter.

Blesh taught me that comedy is tragedy from a distance.  And to be great, a comedian has to draw upon deep and often painful emotional truths and twist the pain to make it comedic.  All great clowns -- from Charlie Chaplin, to Woody Allen, to Richard Pryor, Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Sid Caesar, Jerry Lewis, Lucille Ball, Lily Tomlin, and Carol Burnett -- understood this.

The book also struck deep because the relationship between Joe Keaton and his son so closely paralleled my relationship to my father.  And like Buster, when I came of age I usurped my father, which was painful for both of us, but something that absolutely had to happen as it does with most fathers and sons.

All of this is described in The Birds That Fly Backwards and I explained it in detail to the Damfinos.  I was floored when I got a huge ovation at the the end, and when people kept coming up to me over the next day and half to say how they were deeply moved by my presentation.

I think this is because most of the presentations at the convention over the past 30 years have focused on historic descriptions of how Keaton's movies were made.

No one had ever spoken about why Keaton's work had such a deep effect on them and why they were drawn to it.  I realized everyone in that theater could have told a story of their own that would differ in specifics but would have much in common with mine. 

We all came to Buster Keaton because he could express our pain and get us to laugh at it.  He made it bearable.  And in a convention all of the people moved by his work can form a new family.  One filled with love and fellowship and passion.

It was one of the greatest weekends of my life.  Thank you Damfinos everywhere! 

Happy Birthday Buster Keaton

Happy Birthday Buster Keaton!  He was born 130 years ago today.

For the past two days, I have been attending the Annual Convention of the International Buster Keaton Society in Muskegon, Michigan.  It has been an incredible experience.

Two days ago, a group of us took a tour of the Bluffton neighborhood on the shores of Lake Muskegon.  This is where Buster Keaton spent every summer of his boyhood from 1905 until 1917, when his family's vaudeville act broke up.  Here he could leave the pressures of performing and constant travel from one city to another behind and for two or three months play baseball, pilot his motor boat around the lake, fish, devise elaborate practical jokes, chase girls, and spend time with his family -- his father Joe, mother Myra, sister Louise, and brother Harry.

The Keatons bought property in Bluffton on a hill overlooking the lake in the summer of 1905.  America was still a half wild nation.  The frontier had just recently been settled.  Millions upon millions of acres of open land stretched in great expanses across the heaving continent, much of it still incredibly cheap.  A decade earlier, Buster's father had participated in the land rush at Oklahoma's Cherokee Strip to stake a homestead claim.  And a decade before that the United States Cavalry had been fighting Native American tribes on the Great Plains.

By 1905 Joe Keaton no longer needed to homestead.  He was a headliner in vaudeville -- then the dominant form of popular entertainment -- and had entered the ranks of the middle class.  After buying the lakeshore property in Bluffton, he became a real estate promoter for the area.

Within a few years hundreds of vaudevillians had settled here.  Why Bluffton?  Respectable white Protestants regarded actors as undesirables.  Most fine hotels refused to rent them rooms.  Instead, actors and performers had to accept being segregated in theatrical boarding houses.  Just as the Irish had settled in Boston and the Jews in Brooklyn, and the Polish and Germans in Pittsburgh, the actors now settled on this undeveloped beachfront to build a community of their own.

The modest wood bungalows that lined the unpaved streets housed magicians, comedians, singers, animal trainers, and acrobats.  Since they were not welcome in the Wasp yacht clubs of Muskegon, the actors opened their own yacht club in Bluffton, and their own nightclub, and their own baseball field.  They had their own taxi service, which consisted of an elephant owned by one of the animal trainers.  The pachyderm gave drunken revelers rides home from the saloon, or the ball field, or the beach.

The Keatons and other actors had their own boat docks and their own vessels, which ranged from small ten-foot skiffs to huge yachts.

Today, a surprising number of those houses still stand.  Bluffton remains a bucolic vacation town, quiet and filled with friendly people.  Many of them threw their doors open for us and proudly told us about the history of their homes and their neighborhoods.

The Keaton house was torn down decades ago, but a new house with an almost identical footprint sits on the same lot, along with the original retaining wall that still has the names of Buster's parents carved into its aging cement.  They were engraved there in 1914.

As a teenager, Buster invented all kinds of elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions.  When a neighbor who lived just up the hill complained about tourists using his outhouse without his permission -- indoor plumbing was decades in the future -- Buster rigged a trip wire that caused the walls of the outhouse to collapse and expose the interloper for all the neighborhood to see.  I had read about this many times, but it was something to actually stand on the hill and look at the spot where the trick outhouse once stood.

There were many other outlandish inventions.  A trick fishing pole that was connected to pulley underneath a dock to fool a tourist into thinking he'd hooked a massive underwater creature while Buster and his friends urged him to keep reeling in the monster.  Elaborate alarm clocks that went through fantastic mechanical chain reactions before snatching the covers off of snoozing neighbors, and so on, and so on.

But two stories I heard the other day affected me more than the comedic ones.  Like one of my other heroes, Sam Peckinpah, Buster Keaton populated his movies with layers of references from his private life.  This was more than an inside joke.  It was a way of personalizing his films, which gave them an aura of truth that made his comedies both funnier and more more poignant.

We heard two such anecdotes the other day.  One of Buster's neighbors in Bluffton was a vaudevillian named Big Joe Roberts.  Roberts had a yacht that tied up to his personal dock.  It was called "Damfino."  Keaton gave that name to his doomed ocean-going vessel in his classic short comedy The Boat.  It conveyed Keaton's stoic attitude toward the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  At the end of The Boat, Buster and his family end up marooned on a desert island in the pitch of night, surrounded by a void of inky black darkness.  When Keaton's wife asks him where they have landed, he shrugs and mouths the words, "Damned if I know."  Or Damfino, which was also the name of the doomed vessel that brought them to this limbo.

It summed up a fatalistic attitude that Keaton maintained in his personal life and as the stoned-faced character he played in his movies.

The other story we were told was about a boating accident that occurred in the waters right below the Keatons' house.  It happened after Buster left there for good to go to New York to break into the movies.  Kids racing a speedboat lost control of it and two people were thrown out of the boat and drowned.  Keaton knew the victims and was filled with remorse when he heard the news.  He told friends he wished he had been there because he felt he could have saved the victims.

Years later, Buster staged an almost identical boating accident in the thrilling climax to his film The Cameraman (1928).  But in the movie -- shot in Newport Harbor, south of Los Angeles -- Buster saves a young woman.

The tragedy he failed to stop in life was averted in the fictional world of film.  This is what Keaton taught me: using art as a vehicle for healing your personal wounds.  And when you do that, it's a sure bet you are addressing the wounds of your readers or audience.  Art helps us come to terms with the emotional conflicts we fail to solve in life. 

My Fathers Four Kids

Out of my father's four kids, my half-sister Jeanne had the roughest, most conflicted relationship with him.

Jeanne was Dad's first child, born while my father was in the South Pacific, fighting the Japanese.  Dad often told the story of how he found out he was a father.  He was coming down a muddy road in the jungle, returning from a "push" (Marine-speak for a military offensive) when his unit came upon a group of Marines headed the other way, going into the fight my father was just leaving.

One of the Marines in the opposite column was a friend and he shouted to my father, "Hey, Slim Jim!  You're a father!  I just heard it over the Mosquito Network!  Your wife had a little girl!"  The Mosquito Network was set up by the armed services to give soldiers in the field a feeling of connection with America.  Big band performances were recorded, and so were personal announcements and messages to the soldiers from loved ones back home.  The LP records were shipped to the South Pacific and played over short wave radio.  That's how it came to be announced that Slim Jim now had a daughter named Jeanne.

My father returned from the war filled with the violence and aggression that the Marines and the enemy had instilled in him.  Things did not go well with his young daughter.  Now four years old, Jeanne had been raised by her mother and grandmother -- a household of women.  Her father arrived as an invading alien presence and she was not happy about it.

On the first night, Jeanne walked right into her mother's bedroom, as she often did, hoping to sleep with Mommy.  To her abject horror, this alien creature called "Dad" had taken her place.  Her eyes widened as she realized neither of them had any clothes on.   Dad yelled at her to get out. 

There was another story about those early years that Jeanne and my father liked to tell at family gatherings.  They would trade off in mid-story, each one handing portions of the narrative to the other.  And they both laughed as if it were hilarious.  

But it wasn't.  It was a horror story that we were all being encouraged to view as funny to help the two of them deny the stark underlying reality.

Here it is:

Dad was sitting in front of the radio, listening to a ball game as he spread red hot horse raddish over crackers and devoured them.  Jeanne appeared before him and said she wanted some.  Dad said she couldn't have any because the horse radish was too hot.  Jeanne insisted.  Dad denied her.  Finally, Jeanne went ballistic.  As Dad liked to tell it, Jeanne had been spoiled by living in a house full of women.  Any time she was refused something, she threw a shrill tantrum and got her way.  Dad decided it was time to teach Jeanne a lesson.

Jeanne would lean close to Dad as he told this story, her eyes shining with amusement.  Except if you looked closely it was not joyful.  It was amusement that fought desperately to hide her darker feelings.  "And you taught me, all right, didn't you Dad?"

She would bray laughter and Dad would return a knowing chuckle until someone would plead, "So tell us what happened!"  Jeanne would nudge my father and say, "Tell 'em, Dad."

And so Dad told of how he watched Jeanne pitch a fit.  "It was incredible.  She was bouncing off the walls and ceiling, screaming because that always worked before, she always got her way.  So finally I said, 'Fuck it!  You want some?  Okay, here ya go.'"  Dad shoveled a heaping pile of mouth blistering horse radish onto a cracker and shoved it into Jeanne's hollering mouth.  

Jeanne's eyes popped wide with astonishment and then she shrieked -- not a tantrum scream this time, a scream of pure agony as she rushed to the bathroom to throw up.

We did our best to laugh, and Jeanne encouraged us, leaning against my father and saying affectionately, "Oh, Dad..."

All of us kids were abused to varying degrees by our father, but Jeanne got the worst of it by far.  When we all reunited in California, my half-brother Jim was much more adept at handling Dad.  This was in part because Dad walked out of his first marriage when Jimmy was very young, so he did not have the traumatic memories that Jeanne had.

When she became an adult, Jeanne and my father had long periods of sustained closeness that would inevitably be disrupted by a fight or fit of rage from Dad.  Jeanne's method of dealing with Dad was to withdraw.  Completely.  She would not come see him or return his calls for months at a time.  Once they did not talk for more than a year.

This was a passive-aggressive move, not the best one for resolving conflicts, but it inflicted considerable anxiety on my father.  He would talk incessantly about Jeanne, wonder why she had cut him off, because in Dad's mind he was always the injured party, never the aggressor.  It was fascinating to watch Dad rewrite events as he described them -- even when I had been there to witness them.  He recast himself as an innocent, a cool-headed loving father who thirsted for tranquility.  In truth, he desperately wanted to be that kind of father, but constantly fell short, and he knew it.

One time when they had not talked for months, my father pulled his car next to Jeanne's at an intersection.  He frantically waved at her, rolled down the window, and called out to her, but Jeanne just stared straight ahead and drove off when the light turned green.  Dad was devastated.  Years later I asked Jeanne about the incident.  "Of course I saw him," she said.  "I ignored him because I knew it would drive him crazy."

And yet they loved each other.  In the good times, there was nobody more fun to be around than Jeanne and Dad.  

In my teenage years I collected silent movies -- by Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and Charlie Chaplin.  There was no better audience than Dad and Jeanne.  They howled to the heavens with laughter.  Then I asked Jeanne to be in the Super Eight silent comedies that I was making with my Yashica Super 8 Camera.  Jeanne was hilarious!  A born actress!  Any time she came to our house I stuck her in one of my movies.  Sometimes she wasn't in the mood and I would pout, refusing to talk to her.  

The zenith of our cinematic experiments was Return of the Tramp, a silent movie starring my sister Tracey in Charlie Chaplin makeup.  Tracey was fantastic -- the spitting image of Chaplin.  My father was in it, too.  For years he had begged me to put him in a movie.  I finally granted his wish by casting him as a bartender in a scene with Jeanne, who played "Lil -- The Dance Hall Queen."  Jeanne wore an outrageous curly wig and gyrated so hilariously my father kept cracking up while the camera was rolling.  "Dad, you gotta stop laughing!" I admonished.  "I can't help it," he kept bleating.  "She's so damn funny!"

When I was 13, my father, Jeanne, Jimmy, and his best friend Gary all went on a trip to Juarez, Mexico.  They came back with an assortment of outlandish souvenirs and an even more outlandish set of stories about their experiences.  They had been drinking in a restaurant off the town square when someone started a contest about who could find the craziest souvenir.  One by one, they disappeared into the teeming stalls of vendors and came back with their trophies:  a bamboo and wire bird cage, a velvet Elvis painting, a bullfighter's cap, a gold painted plaster replica of Michelangelo's David.  Then, when properly lubricated, they all went to the cock fights.  Gary was a little too lubricated because halfway through a match he suddenly disappeared from the top row bleacher they were seated on.  "There he is!"  Jeanne cried, point to the ground some ten feet below where Gary lay flat on his back, out cold. 

As I listened to these tales at age 14 they seemed like the most exciting adventures one could possibly imagine.  So I began agitating.  "I want to go to Mexico with you guys!"  Jeanne became my ally, "We have to take David," she said with a wicked laugh.

And so, a year later we went to another Mexican border town, Nogales.  My mother did not go and neither did my sister, Tracey.  But Dad's first wife, Jean -- mother to both Jeanne and Jim -- came.  My father had not seen his first wife in more than 25 years.  At one point as we walked the streets of Nogales, Dad and Jean fell behind us and talked for a long time about their two kids and how proud they were of both of them.  Later I heard Jimmy and Jeanne whispering about how wonderful it was to see their parents reunited, if only for a weekend.  It's the irrational heartfelt dream of many kids from broken homes: to see their divorced parents reconciled.

In the early morning hours we ended up in a Mexican nightclub.  An emcee with a hideous comb-over introduced a series of singers wearing ill-fitting wigs.  Jeanne loved them all.  I can still hear her laugh, reverberating across the club, filled with her lust for the absurd.  That crazy nonsensical chaotic night was one of the greatest in my entire life. 

On our way back to the hotel in Phoenix, we stopped at a gas station.  They still had gas station attendants in those days and one came out to greet us.  He had a red baseball cap and about half his teeth tucked behind his unshaven cheeks.  As he focused his bloodshot eyes upon us, Dad called out, "Ahoy, Bucko!  We're in need of some high test!"  I remember Jeanne doubling over with laughter and saying, "He does look like a Bucko!"

She doubled over again the night my father died.  Not with laughter, but with grief.  Dad was already in a coma when she came through the door and the sight of him in the living room in a hospital bed caused her to break into violent sobs.  "Oh, Dad..." she said with such stricken sadness.  She remained at his side all night, until he drew his last breath at 3:30 in the morning.  Even after he died, she stayed with him, gently stroking the curly black hair on Dad's icy forearm and talking to him in gentle tones about all of their unfinished business.  

Jeanne taught me that relationships are complicated.  People are not made up of one emotional color, but many colors.  Their worst behavior is not the sum of who they are.  Neither is their best behavior.  All of her life, Jeanne yearned for the father who had at times been so cruel to her.  Yearned to be with him, to be close, until she could not stand it anymore and had to go away for a time.  But she always came back.

Just as she always come back to me in the night as I lie in my bed, unstuck in time, traveling through all of the moments of my life.  So often Jeanne is there, with her grand laugh, her love of the absurd, and her love of me and her brother and my sister, Tracey. 

My Mother

I first began writing it as a story about my mother being struck by a brain tumor and the how she dealt with the impact of this tragedy.  But as I was writing the first episode I began to realize the memoir could be much more than that.  I could use the last year of my mother's life as a narrative spine from which a series of flashbacks would sprout to tell a more expansive story of my family.  

The climax of the saga would be the last week of my mother's life, which she spent in my bedroom before dying with my sister and me at her side. 

I hit upon this approach four years ago, while visiting my mother's home town in Ireland.  It was Easter in Blessington, a small farming community just south of Dublin.  On Sunday I climbed the bell tower of our family church, pulled the rope, and rang the bell for my Mom.  It was a profoundly moving experience.

My mother is the hero of The Birds That Fly Backwards.  She was the one who held the family together.  She endured my father's emotional abuse and shielded her children from the many nasty ways in which he betrayed her.  My mother forced my father to strike a bargain to save their marriage.  For the sake of the children.  That phrase has become a cliche.  But reducing it to a cliche denies the painful emotions associated with such a pact.  

My sister and I benefited enormously from this arrangement.  My father also benefited.  He had a domineering personality.  If you walked into our home in the 1960s you would think my father ran the entire show and needed nothing from anybody.  But in fact he desperately needed the emotional equilibrium my mother provided.  If they had divorced, Dad would have fallen apart.  He knew that, which is one reason why he kept rebelling and trying to prove he did not need Mom.

When my father turned 65, my mother revealed she had saved a bunch of money while working as a secretary in an architect's office.  She offered to take Dad on a trip anywhere in the world.  My father said he wanted to go to Guadalcanal, where he had fought as a Marine during World War Two.  And so they went, in 1986.  Once there, Dad broke down and confessed he had lost his identity and emotional equilibrium in the war.  Mom held him and promised to help him regain his stability.  No other woman would have had the tenacity and empathy to do that for someone who had often been so cruel to her.

That was my mother's most important gift to me.  Empathy.  She always tried to see the good in other people.  She never judged them.  She approached everyone with an open heart.  As a writer that has been one of my fundamental principals: to approach every character I write about with empathy, an open heart, and to try to understand them rather than pass judgment on them.  My mother taught me that.

She took me by the hand when I was two and led me along the beach so I could set foot in the ocean for the first time.  She loved the ocean.  In family photos and home movies if a body of water appears in the frame, you will find my mother turned toward it.  "It brings me such peace," she used to say.  She would inhale the sea breeze and you could feel the visceral effect as it filled her with quiet ecstasy.

Every morning and night I walk along the cliff in Malibu and pass the bench she used to sit on during her last year on this planet.  I look out at the ocean where her ashes now swirl and I think of her.  Sometimes I talk to her, expressing gratitude for all she did for me and my sister.  

Her family came from Ireland to start a new life in America.  She couldn't afford to go to college, so she became an American Airline stewardess instead because it was one of the few jobs in the 1950s that gave women a measure of independence and financial freedom.  My father had not even graduated from high school.  But together Gloria and James Weddle grabbed hold of the opportunities of the post World War Two boom and managed to put both of their children through college to provide them with opportunities Gloria and Jim never had.

Whatever their shortcomings, that remains a stunning achievement.