Susannah Campbell & Leda

Susannah Campbell

          The woman who lived with Jon Keliehor in the court on Fountain went by the name of Susannah Campbell. She turned out to be one of the best friends I had during the time I lived in LA.

          Susannah Campbell wasn’t her birth name. She was the black sheep of some old New England family with old New England money. Horses. Polished hardwood yachts, and all that. She was short and blonde and round-faced and very femme and a few years older than I was. Her home decor always seemed to have a beatnik Beatrix Potter thing about it. Lots of frills and arty knick-knacks. She always seemed to thrive on being busy with cosy little domestic stuff. The architectural style of the court on Fountain suited her fine.

          She’d been something of a groupie in the early sixties. She told me groupie anecdotes about Chick Corea and some other high-profile jazzbo, and a trip to Greece with the Donovan entourage. She’d had a series of doomed affairs with other creative types, who usually treated her badly. She wrote songs and sang fifties-style jazz in a light, airy voice. The overall impact was that of a Yankee Billie Holiday, right down to the affinity she had for heroin. She had a fine critical taste for music and art and people.

          After Keliehor went away she had a rock & roll photographer named Danny Seymour staying there with her for a short time. I only met him once, briefly, but she was devastated when he did her wrong. Later he was to feature in a legendary but unreleased documentary about the Rolling Stones’ 1972 North American tour called Cocksucker Blues, and still later I heard that he had been mysteriously murdered on a yacht off Mexico. After he left Susannah I comforted her and we kissed. It was a nice kiss, but we never became a couple. Over the years we got to bed maybe twice, but both times when one or both of us were too drunk to be satisfied or satisfying.

          Once in mid-1970 I got her a job singing in a sleazy nightclub down on Olympic Blvd, but my career as her manager never really got off the ground. A few weeks later, when I moved out of my granny flat in the Wilshire District, my little dog Naomi and I slept in my VW bus in Susannah’s assigned carport space behind the court on Fountain Ave. She didn’t have a car and wasn’t using it.

          Some months later she moved to a place near Elysian Fields, east of Echo Park, where she was badly burglarised of her wonderful record collection. Then the blues got to be too much for her and I remember visiting her at some heroin rehab place where she was doing crafts.

          When I returned to LA in January 1972, I slept for a month or so on the couch in the front room of Susannah’s place-at-the-time, a little hillside house on Glendale Boulevard near Alvarado Street in northern Echo Park, almost to southern Glendale, not far from the old Mack Sennett studios. It was right beneath the transmission tower of one of the big top-40 radio stations, and odd things in the house would pick up the signal. Susannah complained to the radio station when she plugged in her iron and it started talking to her, an event that apparently did ill to her nerves.

          A week or two after I began staying there I scored some weed and, feeling it was proper to contribute to the household, I dumped it into the pot stash she kept in a shoebox. I was mortified when she came home and thrashed me with an emotional scolding for diluting the sacred top-grade Acapulco Gold that Michael Bloomfield, the guitarist, had given her. But she forgave me.

          I don’t recall ever having a clear idea of what Susannah did to make a living when she wasn’t being a housewife. I seem to remember her having a shit job once as a waitress, but it didn’t last long. I gave her some money toward the rent when I was staying at her place on the hillside, but I recall things there being tight. Once when I was living there she went out on a date that had been set up by a girlfriend. She came home with some money, but she was miserable. When I made tolerant noises, she told me that she felt as if her soul had been damaged.

          Not long afterwards I moved into a ratty basement apartment under the big house on Bonnie Brae where Karen Clark and Psyche had lived toward the end of Richard’s confinement. I knew the basement flat was coming vacant because I’d known the guy who was moving out of it, a motorcycle racer named Don, for years. Susannah moved into the same address shortly afterwards, but into a much bigger and nicer place than mine, up on the ground floor.

          It was there, in Susannah’s apartment upstairs from mine, that she threw a big birthday party for me, celebrating “26 years of failure”. It was also there that she tried to set me up with a nelly-gay friend of hers who was crashing there for a few days. He gave me deep, penetrating looks and told me that he had a rare form of throat cancer that required fresh semen for treatment. Susannah expressed amazement that I turned him down. Sorry, not my type.

          That summer she got back into heroin. Once again I was a disappointment to her: my aversion to even the sight of a syringe meant that I was unable to assist her either with tourniquet or works when she was giving herself a fix. Then she got a new boyfriend some years younger than she was, who was also into smack. His name was Gray. She told me how much better heroin is when she was all strung out than when she’d just been joy popping; it became just one long mellow cruise. She also told me how she and Gray kept infecting each other with the same gonorrhoea, as they couldn’t get it together to get to the clap clinic at the same time.

          Soon after I left LA at the end of August I got a letter from her telling me that she and Gray had gotten married. Then I got married. Then she wrote me that she’d had a daughter. We exchanged a few more letters before my wife destroyed my address book and all my letters. About thirty years later a mutual friend, who’d reconnected with me via facebook, told me that somewhere along the line Susannah had “made the transition. Drugs.”

Leda

          In the autumn of 1970 I moved out of Yabo’s place in Beechwood Canyon into the spare bedroom of the apartment of a young guy Yabo knew named Jim Coblentz. Jim aspired to be a film editor. The place was on — I loved this — Normal Avenue, across the street from LA City College.

          At the time I was also hanging out a bit with an Italian-American guy from New York named Nicky Lampe who was also a friend of Yabo’s. He did a bunch of the carpentry work on the set of Yabo’s movie. He said he’d learnt the trade from his father and his grandfather. He was also a dab hand at the 12-string and sang in the style of Jesse Colin Young and post-Belmonts, post-heroin Dion. He had ambitions as a singer, but was about to go inside for a while — something to do with dope.

          Anyway, Nicky introduced me into a social circle that hung out at a smallish mansion in central Hollywood. It had one wall that was a giant aquarium. I did a yard-work job there. And of course there was this girl. Her name was Michelle. She had good-looking boobs and talked about her mother a lot, but I didn’t get the drift of what she was getting at. Anyway, she gave me her phone number. And I called her. She was staying at, of all places, the Bel Air Hotel. She told me to pick up her mother and come out to Bel Air to get her. Once again I proved useful as a chauffeur.

          Her mother was a woman named Leda. She wasn’t her biological mother. She was her spiritual mother. Leda looked like she was in her thirties, but that was probably deceiving. She turned out to be an acquaintance of an ex-girlfriend of mine who had been more than twice my age, but who hadn’t looked her age, either.

          Leda was a notorious Hollywood character and publicity-seeker. She went around in astrology gowns talking all sorts of spiritual-esque rubbish in the medieval-to-pagan vein. She popped up from time to time as spiritual adviser to various phonies with sort-of-familiar names. I remembered seeing her picture, with a good-sized caption, in a copy of Esquire. It’d been in a Manson-inspired article about Hollywood heaviosity-sleaze. The picture had been of her simulating (I would perhaps incorrectly assume that she was simulating, that is) having sex with a live swan. Hi, Mom. The cover blurb said that Lee Marvin was afraid of her.

          She lived in a biggish house downhill and on the other side of Beechwood Canyon from Yabo’s place. I picked her up some time in the middle of the day and drove her out to Bel Air. As I drove, she filled me in a little bit on what was going on. She wasn’t easy to follow.

          On the one hand she was obsessing about another of her daughters, who had been attached to John Phillips, formerly of the Mamas and the Papas, in what sounded to me like a groupie relationship. Anyway, this daughter had been reduced to dancing in a nude go-go bar in Long Beach. And this other guy named John, the one who’d bankrolled Metamorphosis in Echo Park, where Richard Clark’s headshop had been, was involved in what to Leda was some nefarious way as well, but Leda failed to make clear exactly how. What Michelle was doing at the Bel Air Hotel, and why she was running up a big tab that she had no way in hell of paying, was also left vague. It seemed to have something to do with making someone Leda had a grudge against do the paying. We smoked a joint or two on the way out, and I was a bit high when we got there.

          Michelle was staying in a large one-and-a-half story bungalow that reeked of luxurious expensiveness. I got the impression that she’d been staying there for several days. She produced some large, white capsules that she swore were organic mescaline, and we each popped one. I was keen to escape Leda and go for the brass ring with Michelle, but they decided to go have a late lunch — on the tab — out by the pool. And who was I to tell someone she shouldn’t have lunch with her mother?

          I was aware by this time that Michelle was ripping somebody off — either the hotel or someone else — bigger’n Dallas. And I was a bit hesitant to participate directly in the scam. I was the chauffeur, and I was probably going to be the getaway driver (my fantasies of mescaline-enhanced dealings with Michelle’s boobs and better guaranteed that), but I felt a block against stealing anything directly. Not that that would’ve counted for much if it became a matter for the criminal justice system, but there it was. And I had my little dog Naomi with me. Naomi probably wouldn’t have been welcome at the poolside restaurant.

          So Naomi and I hung out for a while at the bungalow and then we went for a stroll around the landscaped grounds. But I got thirsty, so I went back to the bungalow, put Naomi in the VW bus, and went to the pool area to look for Michelle and Leda. I sat down to join them and ordered a beer, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather than putting it on Michelle’s tab. They were drinking champagne. And we sat and chatted. Mostly about that ghastly business with John Phillips and John the eminence gris and the wayward daughter. I guess it would have been more accurate to say that Leda and Michelle continued their chat while I looked around at the social milieu poolside at the Bel Air Hotel. It wasn’t a society in which I ordinarily mixed.

          It was late October, and the sun went down fairly early. We went back to the bungalow and Leda helped Michelle pack in preparation for doing a runner. As I recall, Leda helped herself to a number of items that clearly were hotel property — ornaments, bed linens, and the like. They packed Michelle’s and the other stuff into the back of the bus and got ready to take off. At the last minute, though, Leda disappeared. I thought it’d be a good time to make a move on Michelle, but it wasn’t.

          A few minutes later Leda emerged from the darkness with something large stuffed into one of the hotel’s pillowcases, jumped into the back seat, and told me to take off. She’d stolen a swan from the hotel garden’s pond. Why I was surprised, I don’t know. This was a woman with a large and warped ego, zinging on mescaline and champagne and who knows what else, who led a clearly delusionary life even under ordinary circumstances. I moved Naomi closer to me on the bench-style front seat, shifted the bus into first, and my mind into neutral.

          The swan was, obviously, distressed, but Leda did her best to calm it down by cooing soothing words at it. She gave me on-the-fly directions (“Turn left here; now turn right here,” etc.) to a mansion in Benedict Canyon. It was Papa John Phillips’s house. While I drove her over there she was busy writing and drawing shit all over the swan’s pillowcase in lipstick. Occult warnings of some sort, I would imagine. I was hoping I wasn’t getting involved in some Manson-esque ugliness. I stayed, mentally, in neutral, but I was nerving myself to come down on the side of goodness and animal welfare if Leda got violent. But she didn’t. Not really.

          Anyway, what happened was that I parked in sort of a courtyard in front of the Hollywood Olde Englishe house. Lots of probably fake half-timbering. Leda and Michelle gathered up the pillowcased swan and headed for the front door. I turned the bus about so it was facing the way out. Way out, indeed! Then Leda and Michelle came running noisily back from the house, giggling like adolescents, climbed into the bus — Michelle in the front passenger seat and Leda in the back seat — and told me to take off. Now, a ’66 VW bus was not a vehicle for flashy displays of torque, but I did my best as they laughed and loudly remembered the looks on Phillips’s and his friends’ faces when she’d released the swan into his front room.

          And, goddamn it, Leda had kidnapped Phillips’s dog, a big old placid thing — some kind of a retriever, I think. She was ecstatic. The dog had a tag with Phillips’s phone number on it. She’d phone and tell him that she’d found his dog. At the hotel. Then maybe he’d do right by her daughter! I saw in the rear-view mirror that the dog looked bewildered and scared. I headed for Hollywood.

          I pulled Naomi closer to me and said something like, “You’re not going to hurt that dog, are you?” in my cold, calm, in-neutral voice.

          Leda answered me in a normal tone of voice, with nothing of the phoney goddess about it. She assured me that she had no intention of doing harm to any innocent creature. Then she started cooing to the dog, as she had the swan in the pillowcase.

          Michelle, if I remember correctly, was dozing off, her cheek against the window. I didn’t know how many days she’d been awake.

          Leda and I had something resembling a sane conversation for a while there as I drove along, about people and values and things like that. When we got to Leda’s house, I carried Michelle’s bags inside. Leda took the dog into the kitchen to phone John Phillips. It wasn’t that late — maybe nine or ten o’clock.

          Michelle went upstairs. I was wondering whether to go up after her or to wait for her to come down when there was a knock on the door. Some rich Hollywood *faggola was there. It was somebody I knew slightly. He had a date with Michelle for a party at somebody’s house. Michelle came breezing down the stairs and headed with him to his sports car. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t fucking believe it.

          I must have been standing there with my jaw hanging down to my belly when Leda came out and bad-mouthed the dude and Michelle for me (“He’s nothing but a party-boy — and I do mean boy — nothing at all like a man like you”), but that didn’t help much. Leda then told me that she’d called Phillips, and that he was coming for the dog, and that she had to prepare the room — throne, candles, incense, music, and so on — to be properly imperious and intimidating for his arrival.

          Not a scene into which I would fit, obviously, so I drove back to Normal Avenue with Naomi. I must say that it did take me a while to get to sleep. I never saw Michelle again. I ran into Leda from time to time, but I never asked her what happened after I left. At least the cops never came looking for me.

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*faggola was I term I devised to describe a certain Hollywood type: relentlessly heterosexual decorative males who prettified themselves in the extreme and behaved in a flutteringly camp and traditionally feminine manner in order to attract decorative Hollywood females.

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.