Rebels in Paradise (7 page)

Charles Brittin, who documented the artists and musicians of the period, photographed the arrest. An indignant Berman hoped to capitalize on the publicity, but the
Los Angeles Times
had no interest in scruffy artists complaining of censorship. Berman was charged with obscenity, convicted by Judge Holloday, and fined $150. His friend Dean Stockwell, the handsome actor who had been a child star in
The Boy with Green Hair
and been inspired by Berman to make collages of his own, paid the fine.

Slender and bearded, with a pronounced nose and high cheekbones, Berman cultivated the aura of the mystic hipster. Hopps's first impression was awe: “Young, hawk-face intensity, straight ahead stare, super cool.… I knew somehow then that I must come to know him.”
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This was not Berman's first dustup with authorities. Born in Staten Island in 1926, Berman was brought to Los Angeles by his Russian immigrant parents when he was ten. He felt like an outsider even in the supportive Jewish neighborhood of West Hollywood. Fairfax High School alumni from that period include a number of success stories: trumpeter and A&M Records cofounder Herb Alpert, songwriter Jerry Leiber, and Sidney Felsen, cofounder of the lithography studio Gemini GEL. Berman, however, was expelled in his first year for gambling—though he continued to deal drugs at the high school. He took art courses at Chouinard and Jepson art institutes but was arrested in 1944 for possession of marijuana. Offered the choice of jail or the navy, he enlisted. He had a breakdown six months later and was given an honorable discharge.

Hanging out at the Central Avenue jazz clubs, Berman befriended many musicians, including a young Sammy Davis Jr. In 1953, Berman married Shirley Morand, and the couple bought a house on Crater Lane in Beverly Glen that became a haven for Beat poets, musicians, and artists who wanted to smoke pot or crash for an evening.

Berman's devoted friends thought he had a distinctly spiritual charisma, and he lettered much of his work with the mantra “Art is Love is God.” His collages incorporated the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, regarded by Kabbalists as the spiritual root of all other letters. Popularized in the 1950s by the discovery and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Berman painted the Aleph on his motorcycle helmet. With Robert Alexander, who had become a mail-order preacher in order to open his own Temple of Man, Berman published
Semina
, a small loose-leaf magazine of art, poetry, and prose written by and for fellow seekers. Hopps subsidized the rent of a storefront on Sawtelle Boulevard for their publishing venture, Stone Brothers Printing.

Alexander was “involved with drugs and art and poetry and printing, and not necessarily in that order,” observed Kienholz.
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Alexander and Berman hosted readings and jazz gigs at Stone Brothers, something of a precursor to Ferus. One night Dennis Hopper, who had just appeared in
Rebel Without a Cause
, came with his costar and friend James Dean and met Kienholz and Hopps. He returned many times after, calling Hopps “the intellectual godfather of the underworld,” and began making his first assemblages.
4

After his arrest at Ferus, Berman moved with his wife and son to San Francisco, believing, correctly, that he would find a more liberal community in Northern California. Then it was on to Larkspur, where he was followed by a stream of acolytes, including artist George Herms.

*   *   *

Kienholz and Hopps had no finite criteria for selecting Ferus artists apart from attitude. Friends recommended friends. Berman suggested showing Ed Moses, who rented studio space in the back of Stone Brothers. Raised by his mother in Long Beach, where he was born in 1926, Moses spent summers with his father in Hawaii and became an avid surfer, if not an entirely avid student. In 1943, knowing he would be drafted for service in World War II, he enlisted in the navy and got into the medical corps. He was surprised to discover that he enjoyed his work as a surgical assistant, and when he got out of the service, he enrolled in premed at Long Beach City College. “For three years, I got Ds, Fs, and Cs,” he said. No more medical school. As an elective, he took a class with the eccentric abstract painter Pedro Miller. Moses knew nothing about any kind of art and sat in the back of Miller's class utterly perplexed as his classmates painted still lifes. As Miller approached, he quickly slapped a brushstroke of red and another of white on the canvas board. “That wasn't any good, so out of desperation I put my fingers in the paint jars and scratched over the board.… I was doing it as a joke,” he said.
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When Miller got to Moses, he looked carefully, picked up the canvas and put it on a ledge in front of the class. “Now here's a real artist,” he declared. Moses was stunned. “Changed my life right then and there. I became the hero of the class.”
6

Moses transferred to UCLA's art department, then to the University of Oregon, then back to UCLA. Then he dropped out to work as a messenger at Twentieth Century Fox. After years of surfing, Moses was tall and muscular, with a puckish appearance, a flirtatious manner, and a mass of brown hair combed back in a ducktail. As he pedaled around the studio lot making deliveries, he caught the eye of a bored Marilyn Monroe. She invited him into her trailer for a diversion. “Her shoes were all run down at the heels, she had hair all over her black sweater but what an ass!” Moses sighed.
7
There followed a
Cannery Row
–inspired stint on a sardine ship in Monterey, where he met a young woman separated from her husband who suggested they move to Las Vegas, where she got him a job as a lifeguard at the Flamingo. Six months later, she went back to her husband and Moses went back to UCLA.

In 1957, he met Hopps and Kauffman. They talked to him about De Kooning and Pollock and validated his intuitive approach to abstract painting. He completed his master's degree at UCLA in 1958. “It took me eight or nine years to get an MA there,” Moses said. “I insulted all the faculty members all the time. One of them said, ‘How would you like not to graduate?' I said, ‘How would you like dealing with me for another year?'”
8
That was the attitude that got him a show at Ferus, exhibiting the gestural abstract paintings that he had completed for his graduate degree. The following year, Moses moved to New York, where he absorbed the remnants of the Abstract Expressionists ethos by drinking at the Cedar Bar and hanging out with Milton Resnick.

*   *   *

Moses once said that Craig Kauffman's face was so angular that he looked like Dick Tracy. Indeed, like Hopps, Kauffman had clean-cut good looks that belied a subversive intelligence. His abstract paintings were structured and considered, influenced by his interest in modern architecture. Kauffman was a shoo-in for Ferus, given his long friendship with Hopps. At his rowdy opening reception, where an inch of cheap wine floated across the gallery floor, Robert Alexander and painter Arthur Richer got drunk and started to fight. Alexander stripped off all of his clothes and was standing in his jockstrap when Richer looked at him and said, “Hey, man, I don't wanna ball you I wanna fight you.”
9
Both men exploded with laughter and went back to drinking. Meanwhile, Kauffman's well-dressed mother, complaining of the mess, was pulling up little pieces of grass that were growing through the broken concrete of the patio. Thanks to his decorous upbringing, Kauffman seemed less overtly defiant than his friends, but he rebelled covertly. One night, after a few drinks, he powered his Jaguar roadster in muddy circles on the well-manicured lawns of the Valley.

An artist who was far from covert in his wild behavior was John Altoon, swarthy and sensual with a hooked nose, full lips, and soulful eyes. His reputation was such that a photograph of him, naked to the waist in his Venice studio with a fetching young woman and a young man lying on the floor, was used as the cover of Lawrence Lipton's account of the Beats,
The Holy Barbarians
. Born in 1925 to Armenian parents living in Los Angeles, he attended Dorsey High School, where his drawing talent became apparent. He joined the navy and served in the Pacific through the end of World War II, then attended L.A. County Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) and Art Center College of Design to study commercial art on the GI Bill. Though making a good living as an illustrator, Altoon yearned to be a serious painter. After taking classes at Chouinard, he moved to New York in 1951 where he was smitten by the abstract painting of fellow Armenian Arshile Gorky.

After four years there followed by a year in Spain and France, Altoon returned to Los Angeles in 1956. A charismatic personality who called his dog “Man” and brought jazz ensembles to play in his classroom at Chouinard, where he then taught in the evening, Altoon attracted the attention of the sultry B-movie star of
The Beat Generation
, Fay Spain. They married in 1959.

Altoon also suffered from a severe bipolar disorder that led him to commit himself on more than one occasion to Camarillo State Hospital. He was both soothed and tormented by the process of painting.

John Altoon

Photograph by Joe Goode, courtesy of Joe Goode

He heard about Ferus. “He walked in and announced that he was there. He liked us; we liked him,” Kienholz said. “We all went up to Barney's [Beanery] and, you know, drank for a month or so, and he was part of the gallery. It was sort of casually informal.”
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*   *   *

Likewise, Billy Al Bengston did not require an introduction. He strolled in and proclaimed, “I'm going to be the world's greatest artist.… I'll take you all to lunch.” Hopps and Kienholz thought that was a reasonable proposition. As they all walked out of the gallery, Bengston jumped out in front of a car on La Cienega, flung out his arms, and cried, “Halt!” Kienholz recalled, “The car screeches to a halt … and we thought that was neat, you know, that was okay. He said he was going to be the world's greatest artist, and he wasn't afraid to jump in front of a car, and that qualified him somehow.”
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*   *   *

In addition to this handful of Los Angeles artists, Ferus initially showed the San Francisco painters who had been in Hopps's Action shows: Jay DeFeo, Sonia Gechtoff, Frank Lobdell, Arthur Richer, and Julius Wasserstein. Many also showed work in San Francisco at the Dilexi Gallery, run by Hopps's old friend James Newman. “We were switching shows back and forth,” Kienholz recalled, “running stuff by canvas-covered trailer up the coast and installing it for Jim and bringing stuff down and all that.”
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*   *   *

In short, the approach to showing art at the first incarnation of Ferus was anarchic. “It wasn't intended to be a fuck you,” Kienholz said. “It was … an alternative route. And it wasn't cooperative.… It was Walter's and mine. It was a place where other things could be tried.… The community response, with the exception of a very few special people, was either ridicule or laughter or the classic ‘My kid could do that.'”
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Ferus did not prove to be a magnet for art collectors, but the actor Vincent Price bought one of Kienholz's paintings for $100. Kienholz took the check to Barney, proprietor of the nearby bar Barney's Beanery, who hesitated, unsure whether the check would clear. Price didn't buy anything else from Ferus until 1964, when, as a spokesperson for Sears, Roebuck and Co.'s department of fine art, he bought about twenty folksy paintings by Streeter Blair.

The Tail-o-the-Pup, a La Cienega hot dog stand constructed in the shape of a hot dog, was a regular lunch stop for Kienholz and Hopps. One afternoon in 1956, they had drawn up their contract on a paper wrapper: “We will be partners in art for five years.” After the first year, Kienholz wanted out.

“I very quickly realized that I couldn't do a gallery thing because I can't remember faces and names. People would come in and they'd say, ‘Hi.' I'd say, ‘Hi.' They'd say, ‘How are you?' I'd say, ‘Fine.' They'd say, ‘What's the matter?' I'd say, ‘Nothing.' They'd say, ‘Well, do you know who we are?' I'd say, ‘No.' They'd say, ‘We bought the “something-something” yesterday.' I'd say, ‘Oh shit, yeah, I'm sorry.'”

Kienholz added, “But that just turns people off like hell.”
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According to Kienholz, he sold his share of Ferus to Hopps for $1,500, then lugged all manner of cast-offs and supplies up the seventy-two steps to his house. He built a studio in his overgrown backyard to concentrate on his own art, which had grown in complexity and scale to include parts of mannequins and bits of furniture. Mary quit her job to take care of their two toddlers, Noah and Jenney.

It soon became apparent that Hopps was incapable of sitting in an art gallery day in and day out. His strength was talking to artists in their studios and spotting talent. Shirley contributed her free time and some of her paycheck from the University of California–Riverside, where she was then teaching art history, but it was clear that he needed a new partner.