Paul Juvenal Osborne III

Paul Juvenal Osborne III

          During the first few weeks that I was in Claremont getting ready for Claremont Graduate School John Ware introduced me to some of the local artsy-hippie-beatnik freak set. I began drinking my beer at the freak set’s preferred dive, the Midway Inn. At about the same time I started hanging out some with a jolly, beer-brewing potter named Bill Meeks, who conducted something of a funky salon at a long table in his front room.

          One afternoon Meeks and I were having a beer at the Midway Inn, and he pointed out to me, standing at the bar, a local artist and character named Paul Osborne, about whom I’d already heard stories. He was about my size, but less burly, with a craggy face, shortish, dishevelled hair, and piercing eyes. He looked as if he’d spent the day laying concrete in the hot August smog.

          Meeks said something like, “Hey, Paul, been gettin’ any work done lately?”

          And Osborne straightened himself to his full height with exaggerated dignity and enunciated in plummy, well-rounded tones, “No. I only look like this because I’m a poseur.” He dragged out the French word lewdly.

          It cracked me up. And Osborne and I started hanging out together excessively.

          He and his family lived at the Stone Houses. I heard various stories of how they’d been built. One was that they’d been a 1930s WPA (google it) project. Another one, the one I preferred, was that “some rich old guy” had retired from some executive calling and had spent the last years of his life piling the stones and mortaring them together. They were, well, whimsical, to say the least. They were on some land in Montclair, just east of Claremont, that had been landscaped imaginatively with drylands trees and shrubbery. There were Eucalypts and Rosemary and fragrant stuff like that. Breezes smelled marvellous. Most of the stone houses were unfinished — floors without walls; walls without floors; a house with stairways leading nowhere; a house with walls and windows and no floors and a basement with no stairs leading to it; rock pedestals with large concrete objects in basic geometric forms (spheres, a triangular pyramid, and so on). There were also one or two two-storied structures with finished flats that looked like illustrations from Mother Goose or Beatrix Potter. A stone swimming pool sat near the back.

          Osborne and entourage had been busy with the property as well. He’d built a pottery studio and a workshop where he and his various assistants created all sorts of fantasy objects made of stained glass sand-cast in concrete. They used their stained glass offcuts to make glass wind chimes that tinkled incessantly from their locations about the grounds, as various stained-glass things cast varied-collared light here and there.

          He also made whimsical junk sculptures of imaginary beings, using one to two-foot lengths of fencepost or utility pole or railroad tie, various items of rusty metal, railroad spikes, and nails. He called them ‘critters’ and sold them to boutiques and galleries in the pricier sections of LA.

          Collecting the right junk for the critters involved taking long walks along the railway line — the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe right-of-way. Osborne enjoyed saying “Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe” in a grand manner. It made him smile. He told me that he’d once been an actor and, “once an actor, always a horse’s ass!”

          He clearly enjoyed saying in his grandest manner that his name was “Paul Juvenal Osborne the Third, raised a High E-piss-apalian.”

          He also told tales of adventures in some town in north-central Mexico, where he said they’d called him ‘Don Paolo’ and he’d had to leave after getting too drunk and riding his horse into the cantina. He was also full of tales of the year or two he and his then-wife Judy spent living in a hogan in a remote part of the Navajo reservation in Arizona.

          A month or two after I showed up he built an apparently somewhat authentic Navajo hogan with whimsical artistic flourishes. The city council was after him to tear it down because it wasn’t up to the building code, but he never did. He claimed it was a children’s playhouse, but his sidekick Tom, his beatnik gentleman’s gentleman (freak’s freak?) usually slept there. The Osborne home itself had been cobbled together under Paul’s leadership from several stone walls held together with some timber walls under a large-beamed roof.

          Osborne told me the story of how once, when he was putting his roof up, Frank Zappa had shown up from Cucamonga with some of the guys he played music with and “some of those funky groupies he always had around him.” They’d watched Osborne rigging up some imaginative technique to hold a major beam in place while firming up a wall it was resting on, and Zappa had asked him what made him think of doing the job like that. Osborne told me that he had answered, “Well, you know, necessity is the mother of invention,” and that he had been able to see the cartoon-symbolic light bulb coming into shape over Zappa’s head.

          Osborne was about ten or twelve years older than I was, which meant that he was a clear product of beatnikism more than hippiedom. He had Miles Davis and Lenny Bruce albums, and so on. Judy had once been a high-fashion model and the roommate of a girl who’d been married or otherwise involved with Bob Denver, who’d played the pseudo-beatnik Maynard G. Krebs on the Dobie Gillis TV show, and later became Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island (he was, according to her stories, a real asshole, but that — I was to discover — is fairly common in Hollywood). Paul and Judy had two little girls, India and Jody, growing up there in the stone houses.

          Osborne also had a previous family, living in L.A.

          The parties at the Stone Houses, of course, were fabulous, with carloads of artsy freaks coming out from LA and plenty of music and food and drink and controlled substances and people wandering around the grounds until dawn.

          Sometime after New Year’s, the Osbornes decided to open up “a little shoppe for ladies” (as Paul always said in his daintiest voice), at the bottom of one of the stone houses out near the road, right by the open-air pottery studio. They had a line on a large supply of fabric that they got from the Navajo Reservation called Navajo plush. It was heavy, shiny, velvet-like stuff that had originally been designed for use as furniture upholstery fabric. The Navajos liked it, they told me, because it was both colourful and warm to wear during the cold desert nights. Judy was a steady and imaginative artist at the sewing machine, and had turned out a whole bunch of good-looking, but stiff and heavy, garments with it. I had her custom-make a Rasputin-style shirt for me out of black plush. It never fit right in the arms. Anyway, the shoppe was called ‘The Navajo Plush’, had a Southwestern decor, and sold the produce of the various workshops and studios at the stone houses. I don’t think it ever made much money.

          With all the artistic endeavour going on at the Stone Houses — the stained glass, the sculptures, the potter’s wheel, the sewing — the place was a magnet for people attracted to that sort of thing, as I was. Osborne allowed various people who showed to be exploited working on his various projects. One of these was a troubled teen-age girl named Shelly. Shelly started coming to the stone houses to throw pots (and to smoke pot) instead of going to school, and running away from her ultra-straight home environment to sleep out in an unfinished stone house. Her parents, who really didn’t want the hassle, decided that it would be a good idea to get rid of her and arranged to give the Osbornes custody as foster parents.

          I saw her father when he came by to inspect the premises. Short hair, creased trousers, shiny shoes, and a red-and-blue patterned sport shirt, he was the very model of an accountant visiting an artist’s studio. Osborne told me after he left that he’d bet dollars to doughnuts that that shirt was the only thing her dad owned that had any colour in it at all.

          Things got dicey later when Shelly got busted for pot and, with her one phone call, called the stone houses and, in a tearful panic, told Judy to hide all their weed. Judy was royally pissed off, as she knew the cops were probably listening in on the call and this foster parenthood business had become more trouble than she, for one, wanted to deal with. Shelly didn’t stay with them much longer after that.

          One night at about this time Osborne cut his hand badly when he was chopping firewood while intoxicated. Judy wasn’t pleased. She needed him to finish work on some critters that needed to be sold to pay some bills, and accurately blamed him for his injury. He dealt with the problem by buying some Old Bushmill’s Irish Whisky — not the cheapest of drops — for the pain in his hand and in his artist’s soul. He frequently referred to himself as an ‘arteest’. 

          His life was like that. Straight out of the beatnik’s handbook: drugs and alcohol, creativity and charm, aesthetic beauty and stressed relationships.

          I used to drive out to the stone houses often after I moved into LA. Things began to fall apart in 1969 when the landlady, with whom Osborne thought he had an ironclad lease, sold off the corner lot of the property, which was a big chunk of the stone houses, to a developer who bulldozed it flat for a gas station that didn’t get built right away. The scene dissolved rapidly. Osborne went to New Mexico, but Judy and the kids went to San Francisco.

          About a year later Osborne phoned me in L.A. He was in town for a couple of days. He showed up with an artist friend from Santa Fe named Wolf. Wolf got very drunk. When we were at our friend Alfredo’s house Wolf made some really nasty racist comments to Alfredo’s sons. Then we went to visit Osborne’s first wife and her family. Wolf ate one of her wine glasses — crunch, crunch. A thin trickle of blood came out of his mouth and ran down his chin.

          In mid-1971 I was driving from LA to visit family in Delaware, and I stopped off in Santa Fe to look Osborne up. It took me a long time to find the house from the directions I had. It was on an unpaved street without house numbers. Osborne had moved out. The woman who lived there knew him, but had no idea where he was. I spent the night there with her. I should have stayed much longer. I completely lost all contact with him after that.