Mickey Cohen

Just finished reading Tere Tereba's Mickey Cohen: The Life and Crimes of L.A.'s Most Notorious Mobster (ECW Press). It filled a gap in my education, which is pretty good on Los Angeles and mob history, but I didn't know much about Cohen, who succeeded his mentor Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel as a central player in the post-war Los Angeles rackets.

Tereba's portrait stresses Cohen's Boyle Heights roots, his shortlived boxing career, his obsession with cleanliness, and most of all his appetite for publicity, which distinguished him from his underworld peers. Cohen absorbed his native city's lust for the limelight, and he paid the price for it. He appeared before the Kefauver Committee and was later subpoenaed for the McClelland hearings. His cagey answers earned him a new enemy, committee counsel Robert Kennedy. In 1961, after Kennedy became U.S. Attorney General, Cohen was convicted of tax evasion and given a 15-year sentence starting at Alcatraz. During his ten-year prison stint, he was brutally attacked and disabled. He was freed in 1972, but the Sunset Strip he had once commanded had turned into a hippy scene that couldn't have been less interested in an old-school mob figure like him. By this time, of course, Nixon was president, and Bobby Kennedy had been killed at the Ambassador Hotel. Divorced, out of the action, and battling stomach cancer, he tried to cash in with a memoir during the Godfather era. He died in his sleep in 1976.

The book's main strength, I think, is the way it uses Cohen's experience to sketch the larger Los Angeles underworld and demimonde of that period. Interesting enough in his own right, Cohen is also a perfect delivery system for this portrait, largely because of his long tenure. His friends, associates, and adversaries included not only Siegel, but also Jack Dragna, Johnny Rosselli, Johnny Stompanato, and Jimmy Utley as well as writer Budd Schulberg, screenwriter Ben Hecht, super lobbyist Artie Samish, actress Lana Turner, Frank Sinatra, and a young Richard Nixon, whose campaign manager tapped the mobsters he had defended in court. Cohen also had connections to racketeers in Cleveland, Chicago, and New York, including Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, Siegel's former partners in Las Vegas. And one of Cohen's crew was Stumpy Zevon, father of musician Warren Zevon.

I turned on L.A. Confidential last night and remembered that James Ellroy used Cohen to get that story going. Cohen may have achieved a kind of iconic status in Los Angeles, but I found relatively little too admire in his character, even by underworld standards. Yet I enjoyed and learned a great deal from Tereba's up-tempo, well-turned biography.

A Long, Orange Trip

Just finished reading Nicholas Schou's Orange Sunshine, which tells the fantastical story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a hippie drug ring centered in Orange County ca. 1970. It's a shaggy one all right: lots of characters, not an especially neat story line, but some riveting episodes.

I first read about this outfit in Peter Conners's White Hand Society, which focuses on Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. (Leary is a key figure in the Brotherhood story.) What I learned from this book is that the Brotherhood's members were street-fighting jerks and petty criminals before they turned on. Then they went cosmic, formed a secret organization, and hatched a plan to sell enough drugs to buy an island in the South Pacific.

That didn't quite work out. Instead of retreating to an island, leader John Griggs purchased a ranch in the desert mountains near Idyllwild, only a couple of hours away from Laguna Beach, the center of their operation. That proved to be a mistake. Instead of eluding law enforcement, the move may have helped police get a bead on the operation. Also, Griggs died there after taking a huge dose of synthetic psilocybin. But the book recounts a fair amount of island time. Several members spent years in Hawaii and helped develop Maui Wowie, the strain of weed that was the rage during my high school years. They also packed a boat full of Mexican pot and sailed it to Hawaii without any navigational instruments. That was another wild ride, well narrated by Schou.

Although the title stresses the Brotherhood's signature brand of mind-melting LSD, their hashish business was the most interesting part of the book. Members trekked to Kandahar when that was an even more remote location than it is now. The first trip took several weeks and was full of twists and turns; in fact, the original destination was Turkey, but some fellow travelers convinced them that Afghanistan had the best stuff. Once there, they scored primo hash from Afghans who would have been at home in the Hebrew Bible. The Brotherhood smuggled it back to the states, often in hollowed out surfboards. The LSD, it turns out, was practically given away, all in an effort to enlighten the world, Leary style. When Leary was sent to prison, the Brotherhood paid the Weathermen to bust him out.

Yeah. Pretty wild.

Organized crime is one of my favorite genres, and there's plenty of that here. But what comes through most vividly to me is the utopian impulse behind the operation. Mostly these guys wanted to surf, drop acid, smoke hash, meditate, and get back to the land. The drugs were in many ways more sacramental than recreational. There was plenty of sex, but Griggs tried to emphasize family life, hippie style, especially on the ranch. (At first, the ranch community excluded unmarried members of the Brotherhood.)

On the edge of the operation was Mike Hynson, best known for his role in Endless Summer, which is nothing if not utopian. For you youngsters, Endless Summer was the 1966 film about two youthful surfers traveling the world in search of the perfect wave.

The Brotherhood's operation came crashing down in 1972, when law enforcement rounded up members in a multi-state raid. But several remained at large for years, and some went on to lead interesting post-Brotherhood lives.

Hats off to Nick Schou for his research on this amazing story.

On the Ground

Last week I heard from Sean Stewart, the editor of a new book on the sixties underground press called On the Ground. It joins John McMillian's recent Smoking Typewriters and its precursor, Abe Peck's Uncovering the Sixties, in reviewing the rise and fall of the underground press.

On the Ground complements those books superbly and succeeds on its own as well. Unlike them, it's studded with clips, ads, photographs, and spreads from the Berkeley Barb, San Francisco Oracle, The Black Panther, the San Francisco Express Times, and many other publications. (I've picked the California-based ones, but Sean's focus is national.)

The text features direct testimony from those who founded, contributed to, read, and otherwise helped keep these newspapers alive. We hear from John Sinclair (White Panthers), Paul Krassner (The Realist), Art Kunkin (LA Free Press), Abe Peck, Judy Gumbo Stewart (Berkeley Barb), Bill Ayers, Emory Douglas (The Black Panther), and many others.

The artists include R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gilbert Shelton (Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers), and Bruce Conner, who produced a cover for the San Francisco Oracle. As part of my Grateful Dead research, I'm learning more about both Conner and the Oracle, but I didn't know they were connected.

Sean gives us a minimal structure: ten chapters that a) describe how the work got done and b) track the fortunes of the genre. The headline version is that they got a lot of free stuff from sympathizers, sold a lot of sex ads, used photo-offset printing, worked with the goodfellas who ran (still run?) newsstand distribution, coped with various forms of internal and external strife, got a little carried away toward the end, and finally moved on to other forms of activism and professional life. (Sean concludes with a helpful "where are they now?" section.)

Between the art and the first-person accounts, On the Ground is above all immediate. It allows you to sample the publications, read the insiders' anecdotes, and make up your own mind about these publications.

If you've had your snout in Ramparts for the last few years, you'll see many familiar names. Paul Krassner, of course, was that magazine's "society editor." Jeffrey Blankfort's photographs accompanied its coverage of the Democratic National Convention in 1968, and several of his photos appear in my book. Judy Albert got her nickname from Eldridge Cleaver when he was on the Ramparts masthead. Ron Turner of Last Gasp will publish Warren Hinckle's forthcoming book on Hunter Thompson.

(Of course, fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I don't regard Ramparts as an underground publication. The whole point was that it invited comparison with Time, Esquire, Playboy, etc. Let's call this the Garner Thesis--named after the New York Times critic who thought I scanted the underground press in A Bomb in Every Issue.)

I came upon other familiar names, too. One of Norman Solomon's co-authors, Harvey Wasserman, describes how the FBI's infiltration of his underground newspaper indirectly led his collective to begin the anti-nuclear movement in Massachusetts. Jeffrey Blankfort recounts meeting David Fenton, the youngest photographer to place a photo in Life. (He was 17.) Fenton went on to work for Rolling Stone and then founded Fenton Communications, one of the big rainmakers in political communications today.

Sean avoids big conclusions, though the preface by Paul Buhle tries out a few. For example, he calls the underground press "one of the great wonders of modern cultural politics" (ix). Whatever you make of this wonder, Buhle is certainly right that this volume's unique contribution is its combination of oral history and evocative images, a combination that can be absorbed and enjoyed in a single day or savored slowly.

Dugald Stermer RIP

Dugald Stermer, path-breaking art director of Ramparts magazine, died yesterday after a long illness. He was 74.

I got the call last night from Bob Scheer, who heard about it from John Burton. Sad news indeed. I came to know Dugald while I was working on the Ramparts book. He was hugely gifted, highly respected, even beloved. He deserved all the credit he received--and more--for his work at the magazine, and he was also revered for his teaching and art.

He started at Ramparts in 1964, when it was a two-year-old Catholic literary quarterly that resembled “the poetry annual of a midwestern girls school.” But as Ramparts began running more controversial content, Dugald transformed its look and earned the respect of Warren Hinckle and Bob. Between 1966 and 1968, the trio produced a magazine that, according to the New York Times, restored the lapsed institution of muckraking, put showmanship back into journalism, and gave radicalism a commercial megaphone.

Dugald’s art direction was a critical part of that achievement. Ramparts became the first “radical slick” by combining blockbuster investigative stories with high production values, including color, photographs, and glossy paper. That combination supercharged the magazine’s circulation and heightened its impact. When Dr. Martin Luther King came upon a 1967 Ramparts photo-essay called “The Children of Vietnam,” which documented the effects of U.S. bombing on Vietnamese civilians, he immediately decided to come out against the war. King wasn’t the only one affected by that piece; Dugald told me that laying it out was “just about the nastiest job I’ve ever had.”

Dugald left Ramparts in 1970, and the magazine folded for good in 1975, but his influence in the magazine world lives on—most obviously at Rolling Stone, which was founded by Ramparts alumni Jann Wenner and Ralph Gleason in 1967. With Dugald’s blessing, Jann lifted design elements from Ramparts, and some still appear prominently on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Born in 1936, Dugald grew up in Los Angeles. “I was a beach boy, your basic forties and fifties kid,” he later said. “I liked playing cowboys and drawing pictures.” In his youth, he was something of a hood. “My image was surly, leather-jacketed, the white t-shirt with rolled up sleeves, the Levi’s hanging low. A nasty little teenager. Who worked in a gas station, so I was greasy on top of all this.” But a high school teacher noticed his talent as a cartoonist and encouraged him to attend college. He studied art at UCLA and worked for two years in a Los Angeles design shop before joining a Houston firm.

In Texas, Dugald met San Francisco advertising guru Howard Gossage, who was helping Hinckle juice up Ramparts. Dugald had no magazine experience, but Gossage arranged for an interview. Dugald learned that founding publisher Edward Keating had enough credit for two more issues. But Dugald didn’t want to design corporate reports forever, so he packed his young family into his Volkswagen bus and headed for the Bay Area. He soon became a key player at the magazine. “I was pretty intransigent about what I did, a ‘my way or the highway’ sort of thing,” he recalled. “I learned early that the person who gets there earliest and leaves latest makes all the decisions. Any territory you could defend was yours.” His easygoing manner and workhorse habits tempered Warren’s extravagance and short attention span. Like Warren, Dugald was a rebel, not a radical, and that quality helped keep the magazine from descending into the doctrinaire.

For Dugald, the fact that Ramparts was located in California was crucial. Because the magazine wasn’t based in New York, it was never expected to succeed. For this reason, Gossage said later, the Ramparts staff was like a troupe of dancing bears; their technique was less important than the fact that they could dance at all. But those low expectations allowed Dugald to innovate, and he made the most of his liberty.

Dugald didn’t read magazines or the alternative press, so he had no preconceived notion of what Ramparts should look like. Mostly he was guided by his UCLA professor’s dictum that the best design is never noticed. To emphasize the magazine’s message rather than its look, Dugald set every line of type—the captions as well as the text—in Times Roman. Drawing on local styles, especially those developed by San Francisco printers Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, he produced an elegant design that grounded the magazine’s explosive stories and irreverent tone. “It was a conscious choice to just use one typeface, and make the design very simple,” he told an interviewer in 2009. “It had nothing to do with budgets, although we never had any money … I wanted the magazine, page-to-page, issue-to-issue, to feel like chapters of a book, and, considering our content, to look credible.”

At its peak, Ramparts received the prestigious George Polk Award for excellence in magazine reporting. More established magazines began to emulate Dugald’s approach, and Esquire tried to hire him. But he declined the offer, which would have matched his salary but diminished his artistic control.

Dugald left Ramparts when its new editors, David Horowitz and Peter Collier, engineered Bob Scheer’s ouster. (Warren had already left to found Scanlan’s magazine, where he first matched Hunter S. Thompson with illustrator Ralph Steadman.) Dugald pursued a freelance career, first as a magazine designer and then as an illustrator. He drew a wildlife series for the Los Angeles Times; worked on campaigns for Levi’s, the Iams Company, the San Diego Zoo, Jaguar Cars, BMW, and Nike; and created editorial illustrations for Time, Esquire, the New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, and Rolling Stone. He designed the Olympic medals for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, and the State Department commissioned him to design the 2009 Earth Day poster. In 1986, he was the subject of a solo exhibition and retrospective at the California Academy of Sciences, and he gave the keynote addresses at the International Conference of Natural Science Illustrators in 2000 and the International Conference of Medical Illustrators in 2001.

Dugald taught illustration for many years at the California College of the Arts, where he was a Distinguished Professor and chaired his department. He was appointed to the San Francisco Arts Commission in 1997 and served on the Delancey Street Board of Advisors for over 30 years. (The foundation is a residential self-help organization for former substance abusers, ex-convicts, and the homeless.) He is the author of four books: The Art of Revolution (1970) with Susan Sontag, Vanishing Creatures (1981), Vanishing Flora (1995), and Birds & Bees (1995).

In a 2010 interview, Dugald was asked about his career. “As Howard Gossage used to say, ‘The only fit work for an adult is to change the world.’ He said it straight-faced, and while other people might laugh, I always have that in the back of my mind. I don’t walk around with my heart on my sleeve, but I do feel that using our abilities to make things better is a pretty good way of spending a life.”

Update: Stephanie Lee's obituary ran in the San Francisco Chronicle today. She corrected Dugald's age, included family information, specified the cause of death, and got a quote from Bob Scheer. See also Leah Garchik's item in the Chronicle; she knew him for 40 years.

Update redux: Steven Heller's obituary appeared in the New York Times on December 7. Very fitting. Mr. Heller interviewed Dugald for Imprint. (That's the 2010 interview link above.)

One more time: I attended Dugald's memorial at Delancey Street yesterday. Mimi Silbert hosted, there were touching tributes from family members and friends, and John Burton added some earthy humor. Tim Luddy, creative director at Mother Jones, offered this homage. The Los Angeles Times added this obituary and article on Dugald and his work.

Trampling Out the Vintage

I attended an event at Heyday Books on Sunday and was treated to an unusually interesting couple of hours. About fifty of us squeezed into Malcolm Margolin's parlor to hear Frank Bardacke talk about his new book, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (Verso).

I know a little bit about the UFW from Randy Shaw's book, several documentary films, and my research on Carey McWilliams. But Frank's presentation offered a different and valuable take on the organization and its history. Most of it assorted well with what I thought I knew, but Frank grounded that story differently--and very convincingly. I was impressed with his ability to move from big picture stuff to illustrative detail and back again. And he made it look easy, which is even tougher.

I've known about Frank for a while now. He's featured in a film I always show in my California Culture class called Berkeley in the Sixties. (In fact, I showed it last night.) But I also interviewed him on the telephone for my Ramparts book. This was the first time we've met in person, and I was impressed with him and his presentation, which was personable and forthright. (In his introduction, Jeff Lustig noted that Frank is probably the only person to be kicked out of both Harvard and the UFW.)

As it turned out, I also met Saul Landau at the event. I interviewed him for the Ramparts book but had never met him in person. Saul is another guy with an amazing story, which I'll save for another post. Anne Weills, Bob Scheer's ex and another important figure in the Ramparts story, was also in the house.

Congratulations to Frank and thanks to Malcolm for hosting the event.

The Grateful Dead: Captains of Industry

I had the pleasure of meeting Barry Barnes at the American Culture Association meeting in San Antonio this year. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I attended a dozen or so academic panels devoted to the Grateful Dead, and Barry was one of the speakers. He's a business professor, and he has a new book out: Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead. Check out the Boston Globe article here.

This book wasn't an easy road for Barry. After he presented his book idea at a previous meeting, two marketing guys rushed out a similar title, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. That book received some attention at the Atlantic and elsewhere. But Barry's good standing in the Deadhead community helped him land a deal at Grand Central Publishing, a very respectable division of the Hachette Book Group that's helping him get the word out. Kudos to Barry!

7 Walkers and Friends: Well, That Was Fun

I got a little lucky last night. I knew I wanted to see 7 Walkers, Bill Kreutzmann's band featuring Papa Mali, at the Great American Music Hall. And I heard there might be special guests from Kreutzmann's old band.

So I was delighted to see Mickey Hart come out for the first set along with talking drum virtuoso Sikiru Adepoju. As far as I'm concerned, watching Kreutzmann and Hart drum together is proof positive that I've wasted my life. Utterly. Getting into that groove and staying there for 50 years sounds (and looks) pretty good to me. And guest bassist Reed Mathis from Tea Leaf Green looked like he was having fun, too.

But there was also the extra microphone in the middle of the stage. Could that be for another special guest? The answer came when Bob Weir shambled out a few numbers into the first set. And then Maria Muldaur. It was the first time since 2009 that the three former Dead members appeared together. The first set included "Mister Charlie," "New Speedway Boogie," "Big Railroad Blues," "Bird Song," "Wang Dang Doodle," "Deal," "Sugaree," and a cover of "Fever."

It was an embarrassment of riches for the average fan, who could stroll up to the window, plunk down $25, and amble up to the front of the stage.

I really dug Papa Mali, by the way. No need or desire to compare him to Garcia, but his gator-bait sound crosses very well with the Dead songbook.

My back was killing me, the lingering result of an auto collision two months ago, so I had to decamp after the first set, but I'm looking forward to hearing about the second.

Patrick Atwater: California Dreaming

Patrick Atwater's A New California Dream: Reconciling the Paradoxes of America's Golden State feels custom-made for my Humanities 450 course at San Francisco State University. (Catalog description: "California Culture. Dynamics of California society and culture in recent times; world oasis, flawed paradise, lifestyle crucible, and creative milieu; function in American culture and Pacific relations.")

In this wide-ranging book, Atwater recounts the state's unique record of hatching economic opportunity and innovation. He's alert to the state's remarkable physical geography and what Carey McWilliams called the authority of the land. And although Atwater's identification with California is strong--there's a boosterish quality to his portrait--he also considers the less uplifting aspects of the state's history and its present governance crisis.

Like all dreams, the California one resists precise definition. Perhaps necessarily, it remains a little beneath or beyond consciousness. In some ways, though, the personal history of Arnold Schwarzenegger captures its key points: the immigrant who makes it big through bodybuilding at the beach (cf. McWilliams's "cult of the body"), then Hollywood movies, and then electoral politics. We even know Arnold's modes of transportation--the Hummer and the Harley--which no doubt reflect the state's obsession with mobility. When it comes to self-fashioning, California style, Schwarzenegger is a parade example.

But many of the state's most intractable problems can be framed as conflicts between two or more aspects of the dream. Consider, for example, land-use showdowns. On the one hand, we believe in economic opportunity, and nothing has provided more of that than real estate development. But we've also inherited John Muir's preservationist ethic, which reveres wilderness. Or food: the organic, slow food culture of the North Bay (for example) exists cheek-by-jowl with the latest Frankenfood advances coming out of UC Davis, about 30 minutes east. Paradoxical, indeed.

Atwater gets this as well as anybody. A fourth-generation Californian, he blends his personal experiences and observations with an armchair survey of the state's history and key themes. Along the way, he cites some of California's shrewdest observers, including Carey McWilliams, Kevin Starr, Mike Davis, Richard Walker, Luis Valdez, Joan Didion, Wallace Stegner, Josiah Royce, Jeff Lustig, Henry George, John Muir, James Houston, and Richard Rodriguez.

Atwater never actually delivers on his promise to reconcile paradoxes and dream anew. And despite the book's reading line, this isn't a blueprint. It's a smart, deeply felt, and frankly hortatory essay, but it feels more like a warm-up for a still inchoate project that will make the most of his passion and erudition. May this first effort lead to many more.

Lunch Bucket Paradise

The good folks at Heyday Books sent along Fred Setterberg's Lunch Bucket Paradise, which I finished reading today. As the title implies, this "true-life novel" and coming-of-age story depicts a particular kind of hog heaven: the East Bay suburbs between World War II and Vietnam.

Some of this ground has been covered (though quite differently) by San Lorenzo native Curtis White in his first novel The Idea of Home. Here our first-person narrator is the son of a Scandinavian mechanic at the Alameda Naval Air Station and an Italian (and very Catholic) housewife. The boy's rites of passage are queued up and handled in order: friends (and their scraps), catechism, yard work, Boy Scouts, gigs, girls, warehouse work, more girls, and finally the prospect of conscription.

I'm a little belated--maybe ten years younger than Setterberg's hero--and raised a few miles north in El Cerrito, but I found the world of this novel familiar territory. If you remember Juan Marichal, Doughboy swimming pools, Archie comic books, Brylcreem, Rice-a-Roni, Rainier ale, and the pleasures of discovering James Brown (for me it was also Tower of Power), you'll probably relate to this fictive world, too.

The novel isn't tightly plotted--several chapters were published in serial form, and it reads more like s series of connected but self-contained sketches. Its pleasures are hitched to the coming-of-age theme, first in the shadow of World War II and then in dread of Vietnam. There's also the specific and unmistakable sense of place. Finally, there's the post-war, California version of unterrified Jeffersonianism, perhaps best embodied by the boy's father, a self-educated, free-thinking family man who wants better for his son. It's not exactly the myth of the happy yeoman, but it's pretty close, and for me it has the ring of truth.

Theodore Roszak RIP

We lost another important California writer this week: Theodore Roszak, author of The Making of a Counter Culture. He was 77.

As his obituary notes, that book began as a series of articles for The Nation. It doesn't mention his editor, Carey McWilliams, who helped him develop the work. Professor Roszak, who met McWilliams only once in 1964, told me that he considered McWilliams a gentle, friendly, avuncular, and remarkably generous older man who listened carefully and astutely assessed his strengths and weaknesses.

Like many Nation contributors, Professor Roszak was grateful for McWilliams's hands-off editorial style. "He didn't intervene, interfere, or climb all over the work," Roszak recalled. Instead, McWilliams supported him and let him develop his thesis in a four-part series. "It was exactly what I needed at the time," Roszak told me. The series formed the core of his 1969 landmark book, which coined the term counterculture.

I'm sorry to say I never met Professor Roszak in person, even though he lived in Berkeley and taught at Cal State East Bay. But I was grateful for his time when I interviewed him on the telephone for the McWilliams biography. And I'm even more grateful for his important contribution to our understanding of the Bay Area in the 1960s.