by Tamra Lucid.
Mine is a story of fate and chance, of happenstance, and even of romance. A story about how one book changed two lives. This is the story of how I became friends with Manly Palmer Hall.
*
When eighteen year old MPH arrived in Los Angeles, he strolled on wooden sidewalks. The sheep, and the orange trees, far outnumbered the human population of the San Fernando Valley. The golden sunsets were graced by the scent of vast orchards of citrus blossoms. The last dust of the old west settled in the shadows of the canyons.
The grandmother who raised him, whom he always spoke of so lovingly, introduced him to esoterica. He was reading Blavatsky when most kids his age were collecting baseball cards. But when she died, young Manly gave up his job as a clerk on Wall Street to reinvent himself in Los Angeles, where silent movies had built studios overnight. He moved to Santa Monica, California, where his absentee mother had settled, after she spent fifteen years as a chiropractor among the gold miners of Alaska.
Santa Monica, in 1919, was a perennial carnival by the sea. Just south, people frolicked on Venice Beach, under a grove of wooden oil derricks. But in Spring, wildflowers bloomed all the way up to the shoreline of Santa Monica Beach. Signs in front of bungalows advertised readers of palms, crystals, tarot cards, bumps on the head, and the stars. Santa Monica Pier was a new roller coaster attached to an old pier, across the street from vacant lots.
Like an orchid in a hothouse, MPH flourished in the humidity of the lucidity of the potential of this little city. His mission, his idea, his dream, was to create a center for the study of the wisdom of the ages, the Philosophical Research Society. It still stands 56 years later in a cozy corner of Los Feliz, California, with a library of fifty thousand books and manuscripts he collected over his lifetime; but the most rare are now in the care of the Getty Museum.
Tall and handsome, with striking blue eyes, and a Barrymore profile, early in his career Mr. Hall cultivated a creepy elegance; he could have been cast as Dr. Mesmer the Mad Scientist in a noir film starring one of his many celebrity friends.
For a time, Mr. Hall lived in the Ennis House in Los Feliz, a Frank Lloyd Wright extravaganza, described by the architect as Mayan Revival; but to me it looks like a Mayan Mausoleum, and will always be The House on Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price as Manly P. Hall. The foreboding castle overlooks the Los Angeles skyline, conveying authority and elevation. Cracks in the walls, in the shadowy rooms where pseudo Mayan tiles slowly crumbled, provided the perfect backdrop for Hollywood parties, replete with flashy seances, guest fakirs, and dimly lit performances of eerie music.
For a time Mr. Hall was a star. His 1942 lecture The Secret Destiny of America set an attendance record at Carnegie Hall. In seventy years as an active writer and public speaker, he authored over 150 books and pamphlets, and delivered around seven thousand lectures.
MPH’s influence shows up in surprising places: from his tome on display in the windows of the colorfully painted bookshops of Haight Ashbury at the birth of Flower Power, to Ronald Reagan’s brand of American exceptionalism. But Mr. Hall remains a relatively obscure and misunderstood figure. He isn’t as widely known today as are Blavatsky, Crowley, or Krishnamurti, with whom he was friends.
*
I met Manly Hall in the 1980s, when he was in his 80s. President Reagan told us it was morning in America. But in my neighborhood it was a different kind of mourning. The president refused to speak the name of the disease that devastated the gay community; and the world waited with bated breath to see if the new plague would reach them.
MTV drove kids crazy all over America with Hair Metal bands dressed up like circus crossdressers. NWA and Metallica made them look foolish. Crack cocaine and pagers first hit the streets. The decade of the oversexed and proudly greedy smartass ended with the protests in Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall. No search engines. No social media. No smartphones. No pdfs of rare books, as convenient as clicking over to Google and typing a few words.
These days archivists at the Getty discuss how to preserve the Manly P. Hall Collection’s uniquely occult aura. Art historians use it to research the significance of the esoteric tradition in the evolution of modern art. Meanwhile, the Getty is considering changing the name of the collection to honor the mother and daughter benefactors who funded Mr. Hall’s trips overseas to acquire these rare treasures.
At first, MPH relied on these women as his principal patrons. Later, book sales and wise investments helped him prosper on his own. Caroline A. Lloyd and her daughter Alma Estelle were oil heiresses. They held him in such high esteem they gave him a small percentage of their posthumous estates so he could carry on the good work. Their generosity benefited him annually until the last few years of his life.
Returning from a vacation in the United Kingdom, Caroline, her husband Warren, and Estelle, befriended Mrs. Chandler and her son Raymond, who had no money and no prospects. The Lloyds let the Chandlers stay with them at their mansion in Los Feliz. Warren worked as a lawyer for the Los Angeles Creamery. He got Raymond a bookkeeping job there. Raymond made it to vice president before getting fired for drinking on the job one too many times. He became a famous writer instead. Warren liked to end his parties with a session at the Ouija board. In their house, Mr. Hall gave one of his first lectures.
In the PRS library I saw a bronze sculpted by Mr. Hall when he was younger. I imagine Caroline inspired him, since she had studied in Paris with Robert Wlérick, a studio assistant to Rodin. Estelle had an apartment there. She hobnobbed with Hemingway and Man Ray. After Caroline died, Estelle donated two bronze figures by her mother to the Exposition Park Rose Garden in Los Angeles. One of the statues, named Poise, was cut off at the ankles and stolen. The feet are there to this day, still poised.
*
As for me, there’s not much to tell about my early life. My father was a former Marine. During the war he performed his service by doing celebrity interviews in San Diego where he was stationed. His claim to fame, while enlisted, was dancing with a Hollywood actress to Xavier Cugat’s band. He claimed that he’d built transport crates for nuclear bomb parts in his garage workshop. He was a highly skilled carpenter, but how in the hell did he get a job making boxes for nukes? Even if I’d asked he would have made up some elaborate cock and bull story. He let no opportunity to tell a tall tale go by.
Recently, after I stumbled upon a book by Thomas Sawyer Spivey published in 1904, I realized telling tall tales is a Spivey tradition. The book is called Lavius Egyptus or The Unveiling of the Pythagorean Senate. With chapter titles such as “Herodotus Seeks the Rosy-Cross,” it’s clear Spivey-like liberties are taken with history. So I am not at all sure what to make of Tom’s insistence that he knew Mark Twain.
You see, Tom Sawyer Spivey was not named after the famous fictional character. Tom claimed he inspired not only the name but the personality of America’s most famous juvenile delinquent. Tom’s wife said that her husband would often travel to New York to enjoy the company of his old friend Samuel Clemens. In a book, Tom’s grandnephew wrote that his uncle died a multi-millionaire with over a hundred patented inventions. Sure he did.
Being raised by Spiveys, in my case, however, produced a result most disturbing to my family. Not only did I have no aptitude for telling tall tales, when some white lie became necessary in the course of events, I couldn’t hide my perplexed Year of the Dog eyes. Even my awkward silence betrayed me. “What the hell is wrong with you?” the angry sibling or parent would demand, “can’t you lie like a normal human being?”
My mother loved waitressing. The daughter of a farmer in Indiana she spent thirty years in a coffee shop in the middle of Hollywood, directly across from the Cinerama Dome, next to the RCA building. She loved feeding celebrities. All the busboys called her mamacita. When her boss tried to retire her she sued him for age discrimination and won. But she always looked at me like I was born fully armored from my father’s forehead. Dealing with me did not check any box on her card. When I was fifteen she gave up on me being a waitress, even though she thought I could get good tips, if I only changed my attitude, but she knew that was a lost cause. If she had only known about astrology she would have said: “Oh Lord have mercy, my daughter was born with Saturn conjunct the sun,” but all she knew was what was looking back at her made her feel uncomfortable.
My life wasn’t different from that of most other girls. Absent father. Negligent mother. Alcoholic brother, quick to hit. Bullied and gaslit at school. Always known by your last name. Abducted and nearly murdered. Nothing out of the ordinary.
In my late teens, I worked in the shipping department of a warehouse, as a teller at a bank, a title messenger, a member of a three person cleaning crew for vacant apartments, and I even apprenticed with an Academy Award winning makeup artist. Why did I have so many jobs? Abusive customers, inappropriate advances, but most of all I could never get over the nagging feeling that I was supposed to be somewhere else. I quit the bank, for example, so I could take LSD in Yosemite. But that’s a story for another book.
*
Rainy April 1, 2 AM. Parking lot of the inexplicably legendary Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset Boulevard, haunt of rock stars and groupies, but also where Vincent Minnelli proposed to Judy Garland, back when it was known as the Villa Nova. In 1972 the new owners named it the Rainbow, as a tribute to Judy, who had died in 1969.
Everybody seemed very impressed to be there, but I didn’t get it. What I did get was that I was on a collision course with yet another very unwelcome experience. Five lowlifes had me cornered. I had nowhere to turn. Who do you think I decided would be my knight in shining armor? Yeah, that guy over there all in black, with a glare that could cut glass, standing in the rain, smoking a Black Russian cigarette. I watched as he disdainfully gazed upon the parade of humanity passing before him, like a dashing anime villain. “How noble,” I thought.
The look he threw at me as I approached him was more than a little cynical. I had been warned earlier that night by Mario Maglieri, the proprietor of said establishment. He saw me looking at Ronnie and intervened. ”Listen to me,’ he said earnestly, “you’re a nice girl. Stay away from that guy. He’s bad news.” I didn’t know Mario, or why he thought I was a nice girl, especially since I was too young to legally be in his club, but I knew Mario was wrong. Ronnie wouldn’t let anyone hurt me, and he didn’t. Within two weeks Ronnie and I were sharing his tiny bachelor apartment a couple blocks up the street from the Whisky a Go Go.
Now in case you wonder if I went to the Rainbow that night thinking about meeting the love of my life, no, I was badgered into going by the acquaintance that happened to cause the bad situation I was trying to avoid. I had recently written in my journal: “there is no such thing as true love.”
Ronnie also reluctantly came to the Rainbow that night, with his former drummer, looking for their former guitarist. They were going to get the old band back together. Not a band really, more of an invitation to a second Altamont. Ronnie had given up on love, too, and had more of a sex for food and liquor operation going, with different girlfriends for different days of the week. That ended abruptly. I brought cats, ferns, spider plants, mismatched plates and cutlery. I also knew the mysterious art of laundry, and how to cook fresh artichokes on a hot plate.
Eventually, I learned that Ronnie had grown up under the scrutiny of a family of Holocaust survivors, living like a refugee in the country he was born in. His parents were control freaks to a degree that only children who had survived Nazi authority figures could achieve. Their decision to have an only child late in life worked out for me, but not so well for him, or them.
His best friends were his parent’s silver Standard Schnauzer, books, and the occasional feral cats that dropped in wherever they could find him. Even rattlesnakes in empty lots who shook their rattles at any intruder allowed Ronnie to pass. Coyotes found his presence acceptable. There’s a rapport between creatures of the wild in the middle of the city. They know their own. He had read Sartre at twelve years old. Monkeywrencher at thirteen. A budding petty criminal at fourteen. The first goth I ever met. Happiness? For the weak. Ronnie had a plan. To die before age thirty, because, you know, ew thirty. He was a missionary nihilist, with a creepy rock band, daring something terrible to happen.
And yet even in this vortex there were signs. As a boy Ronnie once wandered into a bookshop in West L.A. where he saw on the display table Atlantis, Mother of Empires. That book haunted him. At first, he yearned for a copy, but the book was too expensive, and much too bulky to shoplift. It took its place in his psyche as the symbol for when he first encountered the occult. Only later did he realize the book had foreshadowed his friendship with Manly Hall. The author was Robert B. Stacy-Judd, the architect of the buildings that house the Philosophical Research Society.
Here’s a glimpse of Ronnie just before we met, as written by the boy himself: “As an eighteen year old I fronted a band for sold out audiences of over a thousand in Los Angeles. Our guest list ended with this ominous line: anyone wearing colors of Satan’s Slaves and Devil’s Henchmen. The club hired off duty cops to double their security at our shows, for all the good it did them. They booked us anyway, because they made so much money on the bar, and our manager was bribing the right people with sex and drugs. I added violence to my repertoire of vices. Mayhem, too. I intentionally crashed my car into another car. I’m grateful I was never able to get a gun, and that no one including myself ever got seriously injured by my antics. Eagerly reading books on mind control, black magic, and naturally, Hitler, I was intent on creating a movement for the forgotten, their revenge on our party hardy peers. At live shows, big redneck guys with their arms folded, took up position on either side of the stage to protect me. Girls who touched me, pulled back their hands in slow motion making a hissing sound as if burned. When I passed a liquor bottle around, it caused a communion of thrown fists. I was well on my way to being at the wrong end of a very bad scene. Fortunately, I fell in love.”
I had found the place I was supposed to be, but as you can see I had my work cut out for me.
An Excerpt from Cassandra by Tamra Lucid.