Yabo Yablonsky

Yabo Yablonsky

          One evening in February or March 1970 I’d been at Jeff Simmons’s place, getting smashed and listening to him make up songs, but he was leaving to go somewhere, and Melody Hastings came across the court and asked me if I’d drive her to a party up in Beechwood Canyon. Melody Hastings was the wife of Doug Hastings, formerly of the Daily Flash and (briefly) the Buffalo Springfield. He was constantly on tour with his new band, Rhinoceros, so I never met him. I was hopelessly in lust with Melody, who was friendly but, as far as I knew, faithful. Anyway, when she asked me to take her to that party my response was — hey, would the Pope like to do a bit of praying?

          So off we went. And it was a good party with plenty of booze and dope, and I was cookin’. In a mood. I remember making up this manic comedy routine as I went along, something about Lithuanian dwarfs. And this sawed-off little bearded guy with a Brooklyn accent was laughing his ass off. My genial host. His maiden name had been Harold Yablonsky, but his dad had always been known as Yabo and he’d grown up as Little Yabo. When he’d gone Hollywood he’d changed his first name legally from Harold to Yabo. His parents had called him Heshie. He was fifteen years older than I was,  the same age as Alfredo. Yabo and I became friends. He sort of adopted me as his common-law nephew.

          Yabo was a working, but not exactly big-time, film director. He was just in the pre-production phase of making a movie off a screenplay he’d written, called B.J. Lang Presents. Terrible name, I thought, but who was I to say? In 1989 I saw a video of it (then called The Manipulator) in a video-hire store in a rural New Zealand town called Otorohanga, but I didn’t have access to a VCR at the time, and by the time I did it was gone. I finally found it online, where it is free to all.

          Anyway, Yabo hired me on as a sort of personal assistant and assistant to the art director, and made sure the producer paid me in non-traceable cash, so as not to jeopardise my still-pending disability claim, which had been pending for about three months at that point.

          The movie starred Mickey Rooney, who was a bizarre character. I mean, here was this white-bearded guy about 50 years old who’d been a movie actor since he’d been a little kid. I got the impression that he had trouble making sense if nobody gave him lines to say. One scene that impressed itself on my mind was Mickey sharing a couple of joints with the crew and going on and on about what a great man J. Edgar Hoover had been. Sheesh!

          The female lead was an underweight actress named Luana Anders, who’d been in Easy Rider. She was a good enough actor. I remember that she was into Namyoho Renge Kyo, a crackpot belief that if you chant the three words in the belief’s name as a mantra, over and over and over and over, all the time, obsessively, not only would all your troubles melt like bubbles, but all your material cravings would end up satisfied. You want a new Mercedes-Benz? Just chant Namyoho, &c. night and day and one will be yours. You want some hanky-panky with your neighbour’s gorgeous wife? Same deal. She called it Buddhism.

          So I busted ass working on that movie and taking care of Yabo, who was responding to the pressures of directing his own script by consuming unwise quantities of Fundador Spanish brandy (Yuck, but different strokes, and all that). Yabo had gone into wild-man mode. He shouted. He purred. He strutted. He roared with laughter and tears and every other kind of emotional display that any occasion could call for. He stomped around declaiming about this and that. It made little difference if he was on the set or off. He came from a generation that took Hemingway and Picasso seriously, more for their flamboyantly macho lives than for their artistic accomplishments. He loved bullfights and all they imply, and hated salads and all they imply. He seemed to radiate a vibration of excitement and macho energy that was almost visible in itself. And although he was not religious at all, ethnoculturally he was very, very Jewish. Only one kind of salami would do, and it wasn’t Danish, as I learnt after running an errand to a delicatessen for him.

          In addition to being Yabo’s errand-boy and nanny, I was seconded to Larry, the art director, and shlepped all over LA scoring props (I borrowed the old-fashioned wheelchair that Mickey kept Luana tied to in the movie from Frank Zappa, who had used it after being thrown from a stage in Europe by a deranged fan, and who usually kept it in the basement studio of his house). I was even able to score some work for a friend of mine who had a VW pickup. I helped to dress the set.

          Somewhere in the middle of all this I remember getting involved with the woman who lived downstairs from my friend Susannah and across the courtyard from Jeff. Next door to Melody. Her name was Patti. She was tall and worked as a nude dancer in some dive out in the San Fernando Valley. My, oh my! After about a month of shooting, Yabo called it a wrap, and that night he had a party on the somewhat surrealistic set we’d built. And the party turned into an orgy. And Patti ended up with Yabo, for a day or two. I did all right at the party myself, but Patti and I were through.

          It was at about this time that I, along with my little dog Naomi, moved out of the little guest house in the Wilshire District where we had been living and into my VW bus. We slept parked in the unused carport assigned to Susannah out behind the court on Fountain. Susannah let me shower at her place. Not wanting to take too much advantage of Susannah, I also took a shower or two at Yabo’s place up in Beechwood Canyon. Then Yabo invited me to live in his spare bedroom.

          In exchange for Naomi and me staying there rent-free, I would continue to function as his PA while he organised post-production for his movie. And the rest of the time I could write. Or, as he put it, the job required that I: “Sweep up the place every day, wash the dishes, run a few errands, and drag me up the hill from the street when I’m too drunk to make it myself.” This was a canyon-side house. Then he added, “And throw away the stuff that gets broken when Sue and I have a fight.” Yabo’s fling with Patti had been both brief and surreptitious, and he was back with his long-time girlfriend, Sue.

          I remember many days when I’d be sweeping the leaves from the back patio, music coming through the sliding doors from inside the house, and taking time to dance with Naomi, who truly did love to dance.

          Yabo and I, however, did not have such a congruent taste for music. He, of course, liked his sounds flamboyant and, to me, a bit overdone. At the time his favourite was Finlandia by Sibelius, which he played over and over again. I was into the music of the people I knew and what they liked. Yabo liked his pop music a bit schmaltzy, such as The Mamas & the Papas. He hated anything that sounded at all country-ish, or even by singers with even a trace of a Southern or country accent. He even hated The Band. It had something to do with him having been to boot camp in Mississippi during the Korean War. Later that year, after I moved out, when we went together to see Zappa and the Mothers perform Zappa’s music with the LA Philharmonic at Pauley Pavilion, he didn’t think much of that either.

          When in his cups, Yabo often enjoyed telling tales of his early days in the tough Jewish street gangs of the Brownsville district in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Yabo was a physically active and highly dramatic story-teller, even more so with a snoot full of Fundador.

          My favourite Yabo story, though, was one he told of an event in the early 50s. He was back from Korea and was living with his immigrant parents from Brownsville, getting into the intellectual-artist-beatnik thing, and reading all the right books. One of those books was The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley. So Yabo found out how to send off somewhere for psilocybin mushrooms, did it, and had a wee munch. He spent a night without sleep floating about Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, revelling in the splendour and wonder and beauty of it all.

          Shortly after dawn he came home, looking as if he’d been doing what he’d been doing. He parents were concerned. So he said, “Mom. Dad. I love you very much. I feel the greatest love for you both. I’ve eaten some mushrooms I read about.” Here he ran to his room and brought out The Doors of Perception to show them. “See, it’s in this book by Aldous Huxley, the famous philosopher. So it’s all right. It’s nothing to worry about, and I want you to know that I love you both very much ...”

          And his mother and father looked at each other silently for a moment. Then his mother said, “Heshie, dot’s nice. But next time, no more mushrooms.”

          Yabo’s relationship with his girlfriend Sue complicated my tenancy agreement somewhat. Yabo told me, “Look, Richard — when Sue comes by you’re gonna have to stay somewhere else. We’ll be, like, fucking in the fireplace and fucking on the kitchen counter and stuff like that, y’know?” Cleaning up the day after Sue’s stays at Yabo’s house usually took me at least an hour. Especially if they’d had a fight. I remember one time in particular when she’d broken his riding crop and poured all his Fundador — several bottles of it — and a half-gallon bottle of Jim Beam down the kitchen sink.

          The somewhere else I stayed was with a cheerful young red-haired woman with no visible means of support named Donna, who lived three or four houses down the hill from Yabo’s place. I don’t know what to write about Donna without seeming pornographic.

          Eventually I moved completely out of Beechwood Canyon, but I still hung with Yabo from time to time. His agent found me a cruddy job as a delivery boy for a Jewish deli on Beverly Boulevard when my unemployment compensation ran out.

          Later, when I signed up briefly with a talent agency, I got an interview with a guy who was a friend of Yabo’s, but he ended up telling me to write a screen treatment with a story line like that of a movie called The Grasshopper that was just out and which I hadn’t seen. Thanks.

          B.J. Lang got finished and went nowhere. The people who’d put up the money either didn’t know what to do with it (Yabo’s theory) or just didn’t think there was anything they could do with it. Yabo moved out of Beechwood Canyon to some place in a semi-rural fringe of LA. I went out to see him there once, early in 1972. He was writing away at various speculative projects. People were talking about the My Lai massacre.

          I managed to keep in touch with Yabo after I left LA. He did the screenplay for another movie, a 007-esque opus called Jaguar Lives! in 1978-79. I never saw it, but he sent me his novelisation of the screenplay.

          In the early part of 1981 I had a bit of money, and for some reason I still had plenty of credit on my MasterCard, so I decided to make a sentimental journey out to LA from San Antonio. I went in March. It’d been more than eight-and-a-half years since I’d left. My next-door neighbours were glad to mind Naomi for a few days while I was gone.

          I rented a car at the LA airport and drove directly to Echo Park, where I got a couple of burritos from the Burrito King and a half-quart of beer from the deli next door, all of which I consumed there in the little parking lot. Eventually I drove up to the Hollywood Hills to see Yabo.

           Yabo now owned a place of his own on a high and leafy hillside looking down on the Hollywood Freeway going through Cahuenga Pass. I’d arranged in advance to stay with him, but when I got there he wasn’t home. I hung around for a while — went for a walk around the neighbourhood, and so on — until he got there. We smoked some pot and yakked. Yabo had just finished having a script of his shot into a feature with Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, Max von Sydow, and Pele — a WWII/soccer epic called Victory. A very Yabo-ish title. He gave me his novelisation of it, and I saw it much later on video.

          We went into Hollywood for dinner with an agent at some flashy Asian restaurant. They talked real Hollywood stuff, mostly about business, but the other guy went on a bit about famous actresses he knew who were lesbians. There went all my illusions. I paid more attention to the food than they seemed to.

          The next evening, after I’d spent the day hanging out with John Ware, Yabo and his girlfriend, a former nun from Belgium, took me to a Hollywood Party. It was a good party. Lots of Hollywood People were there. I wasn’t one of them. I was a cab driver and an artists’ model and a small-time food and featurette writer from San Antonio.

          I flew home the next day.

          We kept in touch loosely over the years until recently.

          In his early seventies he finished writing a new play, called Jews without Money, about the tough gangs he hung out with in the 40s. It received mixed reviews in the States, but was apparently well-received in Britain.

          Yabo died of cancer on February 10, 2005, the same day as Arthur Miller. Yabo would have been thrilled to have been married to Marilyn Monroe, himself, I’m sure. He was 73.