Here's another one involving Ray Stark, the producer. I was friends with his son Peter in Claremont when he was going to CMC and I was a senior trying to accelerate my departure from Claremont High School. My family had brushed elbows with the Starks early on in life (I'm not sure how, but I was invited to a fancy Beverly Hills birthday party and once rode on the merry-go-round in Beverly Hills while the adults waited by the brass ring pole, and later on during a shopping trip in Westwood as I was admiring some red queen anne pumps in a shoe store, we would encounter Peter who would follow us to a gypsy tea room. Peter was eventually admitted to the Claremont Colleges, Ray would come to the Shakespeare Festival, where Peter had a part onstage. I would talk with Ray and Peter in the dressing room as Peter applied his make-up and make crass jokes to impress his father.
Remember how everyone in the press of the time gave a vague geography to Ray's ranch, to afford him some semblance of privacy, saying his rancho was located "somewhere in Santa Ynez Valley" ... when he was at his Elba, exiled it would seem from the new "Hollywood"? Everyone who knew, knew. His place was in Los Olivos.
A famous episode in the old Zorro television program was introduced by this plot summary outline:
“A mystery develops when a teenage girl arrives in the
pueblo and asks for
directions to a ranch no one has ever heard of.”
There's only a slight correlation here. I'm just trying to make it exciting for you all to thrill or wonder more at the game of coinkydink and this recent business about more Los Olivos connections. You know, I stopped at the edge of his long driveway one time, several decades ago, as I didn't want to intrude on his life, we were hippie-looking types in a '49 Chevy pickup truck typically in use to deliver organic produce, and I just waved hello to the house, and hoped he caught the friendly well-wishing vibe.
Dr. John W. Hopkins and his ability to draw talented people to him to continue on with Williams College in the genuine spirit of Cora Williams Institute for Creative Development, and his acceptance of strange coincidence that just blossomed all around him, was beginning to rub off on me a bit, in so far as I thought I could recognize the lines of connectivity by taking each person and event back and forth in a logical manner, and then viewing the assembly or result of their combination. Shaky ground for a theorist or historian, skating on thin ice for a person in a human science like sociology (both history and sociology being discilplines which any trained in real science would dismiss as mere "pseudo science"), but for a creative individual, a heck of a lot of fun sometimes, and sometimes more than interesting if not actually fun.
I remember Peter Stark telling me, among other things, his parents named him Peter and his sister Wendy from the book by J.M. Berrie, Peter and Wendy. Poor troubled Peter, he would sneer in disbelief because his life even in rich privileged Beverly Hills where the world could be his oyster was so unlike that of Neverland, and then because other times it weirdly was. He was troublesome, lonely, confused, and a handful as a child, in psychotherapy as a child, and he told me his folks had talked about taking him in for electroshock treatments when he was a kid in the hopes it might help him in some way! Poor, poor Peter, I thought at the time I heard that story from him. He was difficult as a young man, too, even for me, and I tended to make a lot of allowances for people who were my friends. He had pushed and recommended that his dad make a "new movie" that the "new intellectuals" would want to see ("Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mom's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad"), but somehow he ended up acting in a version that another person put out, and the film was not well received. Peter though raised in show business with all those connections and all the money to back nearly anything he did could likely never compete successfully with his dad, or feel he received his father's real approval for any of his artistic adventures. I was very sad when I learned of his suicide in New York (where apparently he spent a lot of time at Fire Island).
So I just waved hello to Ray Stark's house, way down a long driveway behind a gate, and hoped he got the friendly well wishing vibe.
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