Bobby Darin

As I was showering, searching for a line of authenticity for NaNoWriMo, an idea came to me: how many kids could claim playing If "I Were A Carpenter" on a cheap palomino pony guitar to the guy who actually wrote the song?

OK, so Bobby Darin was NOT impressed with my playing or singing skills...when I began to play, he said No, no, it goes like this. He took the guitar from me roughly and showed me the right bar chord. Not Em. Winced, when he realized how hard it was to play those steel strings. He handed it back.

I stood, with bare foot on the coffee table, biting my lip, as I slid that chord progression up the neck. Blood on the strings.

He lounged back on our hand-me-down sectional couch, a long tall cool drink of a man in tight jeans and cowboy boots, greased back hair and the longest sideburns I'd ever seen.

My mom purring beside him saying he was a cool cat—dismissing his vague Las Vegas Daze. They had that high daze in common, and both were graduate cum laude of the Timothy Leary School of high education: Turn on, tune in and drop out.

As the song goes: Let me take you higher....

My Mother was a Bohemian

My glamorous mother was a real bohemian gypsy artist, traipsing all over the West Coast, following the jobs to Reno, Las Vegas and Hollywood but she always came back to her home base in San Francisco, where she was born, usually broke and more often, broken down. She'd mend for a spell and then she'd be off again seeking her fortune and fame on the road.

She'd talk of the places she'd been, the people she'd met. How nice Frank Sinatra was, how he bought her a drink at the Cal Neva. At one point, she did costumes for the show girls in Tahoe and Las Vegas, a connection which led to her working for costume designer Ruben Panis in Hollywood but that's a convoluted story of the 60s and '70s I'm not quite ready to excavate.

She brought home strangers she'd met, some of whom, paradoxically, I'd run into decades later as a poet: Beat poets Eugene Ruggles, Bobby Kaufman, in the late '60s and early '70s, even the singer Bobby Darin—who was holed up near Esalen. He was tall and thin and pale, leaned back on the couch in jeans and cowboy boots, hair pulled back in a ponytail, with the longest sideburns I'd ever seen. Enigmatic. I remember trying to fret the chords to "If I Were a Carpenter," on my cheap steel string guitar until my fingers bled.

I don't think he was impressed with my talent. I didn't get my Maritn until my 16th birthday, the winter of '68-69 in a pawn shop in San Francisco. The ending of Kevin Spacey's Beyond the Sea had a huge unexpected memory payload for me. I remember a very hippie Bobby sitting back on the sectional couch... But the corroborating details of those stories are lost.

When I was young, I wasn't interested, then she got too crazy with the drugs, I was distainful, now it's too late to recover the facts and now here I am, in my fifth decade, weaving the thin threads of the past into a tapestry of stories.


© 2007 Maureen Hurley

My mother & Tom Green

NOTES:

My mother Kellé hooked up with actor/playwright Tom Green in the early 1960s...I truly hated him. Not enough words in the English language to cover all his vagaries.

And the drug thing was Tom's doing. I suspect why I kept such a distance from the theatre was because I saw what my mother turned into under the the influence of Tom Green. He latched onto her and wouldn't let go. Took her down with him as far as I'm concerned. He was forever writing that half-assed Fellini rip-off screenplay, 4 and a quarter, that never materialized... But I did inherit his old compact baby blue enameled Olivetti, my first real writing machine.

Tom Green stayed in her life one way or another until he died of TB. Or something like that. By the end, even he—human leach that he was—was too much for her and she no longer lived with him, ca. the end of the 1980s.

Anyway, we saw a lot of Mom during the 70s and I must say that hanging out in the early 70s with her was a blast, I remember concerts in Golden Gate Park—especially the Human Be-in... I remember hanging out in the Haight in a cafe, a big booth.... We were always dropping in on folks and things were so loose in those days.

Some names emerge from the memory blank (stet): Lynn Deutra—a Digger who ran the Forest Knolls Freestore. Vampyre Mike, Pasha (I met her later at Whitman's memorial), Whitman McGowan—you can see a glimpse of my mother in his DVD "White Folks Was Once Wild Too." Eugene Ruggles, Bobby Kaufman.

I've one memory of wandering with a girlfriend into Grace Slick's place on Fulton? during a drug deal. Grace was in a black ecru lined babydoll, heavy raccoon eyes, and was generally rather cross that we were hanging out in her living room.

But by the 80s, my mom was spending more time in The City, I suspect she was becoming increasingly marginalized. Or strung out. I think speed was her drug of choice. She was painting a lot at Project Artaud. For a while she lived in a beer vat at the old Hamm's Brewery and was den mother to fledgling punk rockers.

sfchronicle_vault June 24, 1954: The Hamm’s Brewery sign🍺 was always able to toast itself, high above the Central Freeway, a neon chalice that filled and emptied endlessly in the San Francisco night sky. It seems like a dream now. There is no known video, and The Chronicle only has black-and-white photos. But for more than two decades, the 13-foot-tall glass of luminescent beer was the most prominent landmark in the center of the city. 📷: Bob Campbell

I've not yet written about the Venice memories, I stayed a couple of summers with her and my brother Guy stayed on the full year when she moved to the canals—I don't even know the names of the streets. Was she on the canal or on the beach?

Or what it was like for my brother living with her. He never talked about it. Her friend Pat was the one who kidnapped the baby boy, Billy, and then gave him up to the state. Kellé pretty much went off the deep end after that.

I would love to find someone who remembers anything of the gigs she got in Las Vegas costuming—how that came about? What went wrong? It seems she could've made it bigtime and derailed.

My grannie said she wasn't sleeping, up sewing 60 hours straight. There was some story about a missed deadline, falling asleep at the wheel, waking in the desert, beads breaking on one of the costumes (probably something I threaded), showgirls falling on the beads onstage—all scattered snippets of lost stories.

But I remember what she wore as she sewed. White capris and a B&W Marseilles sailor striped shirt. She showed me how to dance the cha-cha-cha. She showed me the place where she had drinks with Frank Sinatra at Cal Neva. So I know it happened. But how to shape it into a story?