California Dreamin'

In 1966, I was a fourteen year old living in Boldo, a rural Alabama crossroads.  My mother had just married my stepfather for the second time and he had moved the family from Birmingham to manage the Goodyear dealership in the Northwest Alabama town of Jasper.  There was no available housing in Jasper so we rented a ranch with ten acres of land and a small lake in tiny Boldo.

I was miserable and missed my friends and family in the city.  The locals didn't exactly throw open their arms to strangers and I was stranger than most.  Let's just say that farming wasn't my forte and I had little to offer that most honorable endeavor.  I wanted to hurry up and get grown and be an actor in Hollywood.
 
 

The Boldo Elementary and Jr. High School looked like an old white barn on cement blocks. My general demeanor seemed to infuriate my rougher male schoolmates and I was harassed and made to fight or flee on a daily basis.  I desperately tried charm and humor to avoid getting beat up before school, after school and during the dreaded "recess."  Doubtlessly entertaining to some, my attempts at fitting in were met with snarled, angry taunts and pummelings.  The older brothers of these boys were already fighting and dying in Viet Nam.  There was more than a little fear and apprehension lying just beneath the surface in these tough young country boys in 1966.  I found them all terribly attractive and that didn't help matters.  This unsettling truth was my deepest and most well guarded secret.

I deduced that my best prospects for reaching draft age alive (and presumably being sent off to die in Southeast Asia) was to keep my own company as much as possible.  I practiced walking and talking like the other boys so as to improve my blending capabilities.  In the afternoons I would tumble off the rusty yellow school bus and my performed stiff and manly gait would dissolve into my own as the bus rolled out of sight.  I would take my transistor radio on long walks in the woods by the lake listening to my two favorite Birmingham radio stations, WSGN and WVOK.  Late at night I would listen through a thousand miles of static to get the latest pop music news from WLS in Chicago.  Pop music was a safe harbor for me.

I bought my first LP in the June of 1966.  To earn the money to buy "If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears" by The Mamas and The Papas I swept the front sidewalks and stacked tires out back at the Goodyear store for a week.  It cost $3.25 and I still have it.  I hit puberty that summer and I am convinced I was struck with it at precisely the moment I played track four of that album.  The song was a Lennon /McCartney tune called "I Call Your Name" that Cass Elliot, Denny Doherty and John and Michelle Phillips took to new heights.  Cass Elliot became a star the moment I heard this song.  The honky tonk piano intro still gives me chills.  I instantly knew obsession for the first time.  I began to buy, read and save everything written about the group. I started a scrapbook and used my allowance to purchase every fan magazine and trade paper available.  I was as good as any clipping service and I amassed an incredible collection of Mamas and Papas articles and just about every photograph ever published of the group as a whole or it's members individually.  My self imposed social isolation left me with plenty of  time to kill in metropolitan Boldo.  I was so in love with this group that I spoke of little else.  My parents became somewhat alarmed and consulted with my Aunt Lo.  Dear Aunt Lo was attracted to conspiracy theories and almost convinced my mother that I had fallen victim to a clever communist plot to destroy American youth.  This cemented my bond with these four singers forever.  I was holding on to their reality in order to survive my own.

I had a battery operated portable turntable and I would take it and my one and only LP with me into the woods and play this record at top volume for myself and the birds and deer and squirrels and wild rabbits of Boldo.  The birds seemed particularly to enjoy "Monday Monday" and it's possible I may have reminded these birds that the single had gone "double gold" and had sold over two million 45's.  There did come a time when I ran short of family members willing to listen to my delighted recitations of the statistics surrounding the Mamas and the Papas record sales. Even the birds sometimes took to wing when I started proclaiming the latest chart successes. I  certainly never tired of listening to the songs on that album. "Go Where You Wanna Go" became a kind of anthem for me.

In that dreary year I spent roaming around Boldo avoiding fist fights I began to day dream that The Mamas and The Papas and I were the best of friends.  I would someday move to California and go to all of their concerts for free and I would give them all tickets to my movies.  This fantasy sustained me and held at bay a deep loneliness.  I just knew I would get along famously with Mama Cass and Mama Michelle and I longed to meet Papa Denny the heartthrob tenor and Papa John the brilliant songwriter and musician.  One look at them all sitting in that bath tub on the cover of their album and I was convinced that I was truly one of them.

The Mamas and The Papas were together for only two years. They broke up in 1968.  The relationships between the members of the group constituted a soap opera of love requited and unrequited and loyalties forged and betrayed.  They sang their story in the  songs written for their four albums of original material.  John and Michelle divorced in 1971.  Cass Elliot died in London in August of 1974.  Denny went back to his home in Nova Scotia.  John continued to write and occasionally record but his drug and alcohol addiction took a heavy toll and he has never again reached the creative achievements he enjoyed while partnered with Michelle in the 1960's.  Michelle forged a successful career as an actress in film and television and is enjoying herself and her second career to the very fullest.

I carried my scrapbook and my records with me when I left Boldo, Alabama and the South in 1976.  I moved to New York City and then to Los Angeles where I began my career as an actor in films.  Los Angeles immediately seemed to me an old friend and I have been at home here since I arrived in the Summer of 1977.

I met Michelle on my birthday (April 15th) in 1983 at The Palomino Nightclub in North Hollywood.  Over the years we would see one another at parties and premieres  and I finally asked her out to lunch in 1999.  We met at Pane Vino in Hollywood and I brought with me a gift copy of the scrapbook I had started more than  three decades before and finally confessed to my childhood obsession.  We spent that beautiful late June afternoon in Pane Vinos' patio sharing our memories of days gone by and we became friends.  Later that same summer we sat together in my dining room and sang along with a CD of "If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears" and I made sure the windows were open so the birds outside could hear it too.