Tonight I'm thinking about 2 movies that strangely intersected my life in 1969: Robert Wise's "The Haunting" and Michael Wadleigh's "Woodstock". There are few dates such
as that 1969 summer weekend beginning Friday, August 8 that changed the cultural landscape
of our haunted world so profoundly that it still resounds today. Before that day the
doors to my neighbors’ homes were always unlocked and we neighborhood kids
would freely enter each other’s homes unannounced as long as it was thru the
kitchen door. On hot summer nights our house was completely open as my entire family slept on a redwood deck in our backyard. That summer Sharon Tate was living the Beach Party dream starring in the comedy "Don't Make Waves" with Tony Curtis.
On that summer night the dry and hot Santa Ana winds were blowing through the canyons so fierce that my family debated whether to sleep outside in our hilltop backyard like we did on
so many hot summer nights. But the wind was not strong and blustery like other summers, but lazy and eerie. In my bedroom a movie poster of “Don’t Make Waves” hung on the wall.
My father, an ex-World War II army air corps officer on Iwo Jima then was a pathologist with a specialty in hematology and worked for Thomas Naguchi’s famous L.A. Coroner’s office. He hardly spoke at all, and especially never talked about his war experiences on Iwo Jima or his coroner work.
But in our kitchen fridge where the eggs should have been were mysterious tissue samples of who knows what at the ready for my father’s late night work he would do in his home
office which was like an enveloping fetid cave den. Inside, because of his blood work his co-workers at the L.A. County Hospital gave him all sorts of Dracula bauble head figurines and pictures which hung on the walls where stuffed bookcases weren’t. He used to bring home expired frozen blood from the county blood bank and we would spread it across our yard as fertilizer. A publicity pig Supervisor Baxter Ward heard about this and chastised my Dad on local TV for stealing government property. My Dad would not talk to the press again until he was Director of the Red Cross and he spoke about the AIDS crisis in the mid 1980s.
That night of August 9 the air stopped moving through L.A. around midnight, and weird sounds from miles away would carry through the thin dry air to our canyon ranch home. Every Saturday morning my father and I would go out and have breakfast and meet up with his hardware store buddies in Garvanza, a sleepy lagoon village just north of Highland Park in L.A. I brought along our L.A. Times to look at the movie ads and I saw the full page ad for the opening of the Haunted Mansion. Our family would make their annual second week of August trip to Disneyland in a few days and I was excited beyond belief. Dad’s first cousin Floyd’s aerospace company had supplied Disneyland a few years back some of the space age equiptment for the audio animatronic birds of the Tiki Room and we had known for a few years earlier that his company supplied some of the hydraulic equiptment for a room that would stretch. Around 1964 the year the Haunted Mansion was supposed to open outside posted at its gates was a ghost wanted sign that I made my dad read to me aloud:
In those days there were no cel phones but there were routines, which my dad’s was so regular his office knew where he was almost all the time. At our last stop, Eagle Rock Lumber, my dad was paged over the loudspeaker. I had seen dead bodies before at the County Morgue. I had watched Dad do surgery and autopsies. Seeing was always easier to digest than smelling the overwhelming chokingly acrid fumes of formaldyhyde that permeated the Coroner’s examining rooms. I had even been to a few crime scenes after the deceased had been removed and blood samples needed to be taken. He was not being summoned immediately but told to stand by and that he would be needed shortly at a multiple homicide crime scene up in Benedict Canyon above Beverly Hills.
He was told to be prepared to take many blood samples from multiple areas both inside and outside the house. Dad drove me home. I watched as he lit a cigar in his little Ford Falcon and drove away to work. He returned after dark and spoke to my mom in quiet tones. On Sunday morning August 10 all hell broke loose. There was another multiple murder, this time in Los Feliz. The TV news was awash with the sex and drug murder orgy that was supposed to be the Tate Murders. News was filtering out about the second murder scene.
Meantime there were also news spots about the Haunted Mansion opening on Saturday, August 9 and the large crowds that were swelling Disneyland. Dad returned home late that Sunday night. The dry Santa Anas blew a sense of dread across L.A. as fear hung over the city like a grim reaper. Our doors were now locked, windows were now secured. Neighbors did the same. The eden in our surburbia had ended with a new harsh reality that there were evil men out there who wanted to kill you, even if they didn't know you. As the wind cast weird dancing shadows around Sharon Tate on my movie poster staring at me on my bedroom wall, I had to get up in the middle of the night and take it down.
By the end of the week we went to Disneyland and I rode the Haunted Mansion twice that day: once in the morning and again at night. I was given a "Ghost Haunting License" signed by Pluto that night. I loved the styling, the macabre art and gallows humor of Marc Davis, the Disney legend who I would meet six years later at Cal Arts. The day after we went to Disneyland it had so many people trying to get in (a record 82,516) they had to close the main gate and turn people away.
The Mansion had many scenes inspired from Robert Wise's chilling "The Haunting". The exterior of the Haunted Mansion was inspired by a famous house in Baltimore, not unlike the strong yet forboding Hill House in Jackson's novel. Inside both houses the completely neatly furnished Victorian style decor has the feel that humans had just fled in terror right before you've entered. And in both nary a specter or a real live ghost make an appearance until over half way through the journey. Gloomy mood and creepy sounds effectively rely the haunted world to the mortal visitor.
Fresh from directing and winning 2 Oscars for "West Side Story", Bob Wise choose next the psychologically terrifying novel of 4 psychic sensitive people inside a haunted house where no one had spent the night in 50 years. The film made a star of Broadway's Julie Harris, featured Russ Tamblyn in his first role since "West Side Story", and the beautiful Claire Bloom. With only one physical visual effect (which was copied in the Haunted Mansion corridors of doors), it is one of the scariest films of all time. Bob Wise told me once that the secret to directing a film like this is to focus on the foreground and the what the characters are feeling. For him, the close-up was everything.
Based on Shirley Jackson's novel, who is one of my favorite writers, her work explores the inner demons that rattle our bruised and battered psyches and the soul's lonely journey to find a safe place in the world. In Jackson's novel that's usually in the haunted world of the afterlife or some other imagined dimension foreign to us that symbolizes a dark and moody heaven where the damaged soul can rest and reinvigorate itself. Jackson's protagonists are the perfect metaphor for a group of innocent victims, like those at the Tate house that gruesome night, subjected to the terror from a malevolent world (like a Charles Manson), who then must psychologically muster the strength to triumph, even in death over what is sometimes beyond their comprehension.
Early Sunday August 10 The LaBianca murders happened within a mile of Marc and Alice Davis’ house in Los Feliz. I asked Alice if she felt any sense of fear at the time and surprisingly she said no. While the murders were random , she said she and Marc put it out of their minds. The LaBianca’s daughter, who discovered the murders of her parents was then a waitress at the nearby Tam O’Shanter Inn, which was Walt Disney favorite restaurant (and written about here in previous posts). My dad had to visit both crime scenes to collect blood and I rode with him to the Tate House which had so much blood splattered all over the living room walls it looked faked. For some reason I found the LaBianca murders far more creepier and closer to my psyche that I refused to go near the house for over 35 years (It was rumored to have been owned at one time by Walt's brother Roy).
Dad would work on murder cases as an expert witness and doing lab analysis of the blood. I was permitted to go into his office and use the microscope on his desk for my own investigations.
One day I found two black notebooks labeled “Tate LaBianca Case”. Inside were the explicit crime scene photos as well as lab and autopsy photos of the victims. It's strange when you see pictures of the victim's faces after an autopsy, because surprisingly their faces look peaceful. For the years my dad worked on the case I would sneak in the neighborhood kids and charge them 50. cents to see a real crime scene photo from the Tate-La Bianca murders. As the murder trial began weird things happened around our house. The phone would ring and weird breathing and music could be heard. Someone one night used the hose in our front yard and left it on. In those days I slept in a corner bed set with my brother underneath a large picture window that overlooked the giant pine trees of our backyard. One night I laid awake and heard footsteps approaching our room. A dark jacketed male figure with a wide brim hat stopped at our window and stared directly at me wide awake. He reminded me of one of
the hitchhiking ghosts in the Haunted Mansion. I thought it was our teenage neighbor and found out the next day he was away at camp. My brother and I never discussed the incident until last year. He remembered seeing the guy too and also thought it was our neighbor.
As a supposed counterpoint of the dark night the swinging sixties ended, that same weekend the peace and love festival called "Woodstock" took place in the catskills mountains of New York. The press heralded the peaceful gathering of 400 thousand hippies as ushering a new era of peace and love. Mike Wadleigh filmed and the now legendary concert, and a young Thelma Schoolmaker edited a virtuoso documentary about the festival. It was one of the first films to use split screen and pop art effects with stereophonic sound. Mirred in lawsuits from staging the festival, the organizers, desperate for some cash, sold the worldwide rights to the film for under 2 million to Warner Brothers, who went on to make a bonanza off the film and the 2 album soundtrack. The producers ended up making nothing.
But the dark seeds that would destroy the peace and love hippie movement heralded that weekend from New York were already planted in L.A. And my eden would never be again. The fun and lazy world of beach parties, eating at googie drive ins, enjoying backyard tiki luaus while dreaming of an endless summer, and the sense that you could go anywhere anytime and always be safe was over. By December another rock documentary, the much darker and scary "Gimme Shelter" filmed the Rolling Stones disastrous concert at the Altamont Motor Speedway near San Francisco where Hells Angels "security guards" murdered on film a harmless hippie. But this haunted world of blood and demons would plant another seed that would bloom into a twenty year journey of art and film and lead me to the many spirits who lurked centerstage that weekend and then later entered my life as real specters: Robert Wise, Marc Davis, and oddly, Thomas Naguchi.