Just to continue with this thought about Los Olivos, because the reader might not go to the trouble of looking up who any of these characters I mention are, and so remain ignorant really of how things are wound together in my personal history, I will point out that Ray Stark was once a powerful force in New York and Hollywood and continues to be an influence to this very day. I liked the fact he would take time from his busy schedule in Hollywood to come see his son Peter perform in the Shakespeare Festival, which was a small town hokey event for a prestigious intellectual bank like the Claremont colleges (the Shakespearean acrobats and clowns assembled to entertain the audiences on their way to the plays were drawn from the boys gym class at the local high school, and they'd installed a trampoline for their physical antics).
Ray Stark
My pal Peter Stark
What they do now
(I read through that long list, the only thing I can be directly and immediately connected with is Les Blank and his documentary about the Garlic Festival, because I developed a recipe for garlic ice cream, which I have boasted about several times in print. That the influence of this recipe spread farther afield I cannot deny. I never went to the Garlic Festival and I never went to the Nucleus Nuance, a hip restaurant now defunct on Melrose where the famous of the day gathered that used my recipe for a dessert. All that exists now is the recipe, and my name in a book or a newspaper article online).
I did like the fact when I heard of this back a decade or so ago that Ray and his wife Frances started a residential home for old actors, as that could have been my grandmother living in there had she lived to be 113 years old or so, presuming she'd had the money to pay for such rents (which she wouldn't have, just living off a deceased husband's meager social security stacked up after years on the assembly line in a Detroit auto factory), and her contributions to Theatre lofty enough to be mentioned and recognized on the rental application. Although my grandmother, when she was close to 75 years old, could still kick high, and reach the top of a door jam, which by all later reports she would still do on occasion when encouraged at a Thanksgiving family gathering. One time, she had a little too much wine and fell down flat on the floor, but just laughed and got up and tried it again and succeeded.
In thinking about it, when I knew Peter, I can't recall that he mentioned his mom to me, his Dad was the one typically who Peter, a young college man just trying to start out and gain a footing in life was the parent he was most concerned with, and I guess this was a reflection of Peter's personal issues of the time. I am the one making this psychological assessment based on our conversations that I recall from the time.
Though he was not completely self-absorbed. Peter and I would also mention and talk a bit about the settlements in Claremont for the retired missionaries ,,, we'd think about the future sometimes, in the shallow way that youth are known to do (his family would likely never have to worry, while life was a stretch for my grandmother after retiring from vaudeville, and how all things must pass, where either of us might be going and how we might end up.) Once in awhile, he genuinely sparkled. We went so see a movie at a Pomona drive-in, Saturday night at the movies like all the other young folks in the Valley, a film which though he knew someone attached to the film in some indefinable way neither of us liked, so we left and drove into the hills one evening and spread out a sleeping bag (which he carried he said because he was a member of the Sierra Club), and all we did was look at the stars in the clear sky, each in our own thoughts which we did not share with one another.
Ray by all reports really didn't like living the bucolic life in Santa Ynez, though he raised horses. His neighbor on Camino Cielo Road, a famous actor turned politician, owned 8 cows, by all reports, and took a huge cattleman's tax writeoff on his property. And they spray painted the grass green with fertilizing compounds when he went to visit a local state mental hospital before he reduced funding to throw everyone out on to the streets when the world at large was unprepared for them. You can't help seeing a conspiracy sometimes, myself included. When I was quite young, I was carried by adults on an outing of some kind, I visited this family home at the Redi Kilowatt house, but I don't recall too much of what went on there and I don't recall meeting anyone in particular, as I preferred to stay out in the garden.
Later, though, Lily Tomlin and I would talk once in a very great while about our mutual memories of relatives working in automotive factories. Noisy awful work, a hell of a way to make a living, is what we agreed upon. That shared commonality, a temporary geographic propinquity, and a mutual friend is about all we had in common at that time, aside from a skewed view of the world. You might see some of the things we talked about in her skits, though, so you'll have to be a detective and figure out what those might be, the spread of creative influence while tracing the intellectual history of the United States and all. I know what they are, but you can feel free to guess and if you guess correctly, you might say this is just too coincidental and so must be a fabrication or an embellishment or just a big fish story on my part. Whatever, history belongs to the victors, the biggest voice in media, and all those other platitudes you'd care to quote here.
None of this has too much to do with Williams College, except I was visiting and living there during this period and these people were in my recent memory then (except for the garlic, that came about a decade later, so I've fallen off a strict chronology here) and so they were part of my cosmos, as we used to say back then.
As for me, currently, I am consumed with bringing in references to Los Olivos so that you might better understand the nature of the people who Dr John W Hopkins allowed to live on the estate, although he did not know the facts nor the aura surrounding any of the famous people I knew in that past, nor even their names, he knew nothing of my personal history. But he allowed me to live there, and he was satisfied he was drawing people to him in some weird occult or metaphysical way to continue on in the genuine spirit of the Institute of Creative Development (overlaid with newer stricta and interpretations as developed by the leadership of the Understanding movement).
