Christopher Isherwood and Me at the Gym

 by Stephen J. Gertz

(Written five years ago, the following has the honor of being rejected by every literary journal in California secondary to length (and perhaps certain content). Time to get it out, throw it on the wall, and see if it sticks).


“I’ve started going to the Physical Services gym at Westwood and Santa Monica, and already the exercise makes me feel good. I needed it so badly. That’s a good habit started. I must keep it up.” (Christopher Isherwood,  Diaries, January 12, 1954).

Chris stood at his locker with a towel wrapped around his waist and shower sandals on his feet. He was soaked. He usually set aside a couple of extra towels; they were too small for any one of them to completely dry a body. He seemed lost and said nothing but it was clear what the problem was: a jerk too lazy to walk to the locker room entrance and get his own had walked off with Chris’. His partner, Don Bachardy, wasn’t around; perhaps still in the shower, or not present at all; I don’t recall. I brought Chris (for that is how he asked to be addressed after my initial “Mr. Isherwood”) a few more. It was part of my job: gym instructor, physical therapy aide, towel boy. 

“The smog was so bad yesterday that Bruce Conners [sic] at the gym said one really shouldn’t go out jogging in it; making yourself breathe heavily and inhale all that stuff does you much more harm than the exercise does you good.” (October 3, 1970).

The gym was the Bruce Conner - Al Hinds Health Club, established in 1947 as Bruce Conner’s Physical Services by Bruce Conner (1919-2010), a physical therapist with roots in competitive gymnastics and weightlifting, and the original Muscle Beach. Unlike the franchise model established by his friends, Vic Tanny and Jack Lalanne, Bruce opened what was at the time the only gym in the U.S. for men and women offering physical therapy and massage services. It’s quite possible that every orthopod in the area referred patients to Bruce; because it was operated by a physical therapist and respected athlete it was legit, not strictly for health nuts and ironheads, a nice space (Chris thought the atmosphere at Vic Tanny’s in Santa Monica, “squalid”), and Bruce was quite likable. Word got around. 

It was located on Little Santa Monica Blvd. one block east of Westwood Blvd. on L.A.’s Westside. Because of its proximity to Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Santa Monica and its canyon communities, the gym attracted wealthy celebrity and civilian patients and members, as well as the general, non-wealthy public. In 1964 Bruce trained eleven Olympic medal winners,   and the Russian Olympic weightlifting team once worked out at the gym. It was old-school—a small neighborhood spot with separate facilities for men and women, few machines, and little chrome, mostly for the ladies. I was a member for a few years before I worked there, 1976-78.

“I went to the gym, where [actor] Richard Egan works out in a hooded sweater with a mackintosh pair of pants over it, presumably to make him sweat that much extra”  (November 14, 1961).

It was where I became friendly with many appropriately dressed, overdressed, underdressed, and completely undressed film, television, and music personalities. 

Riccardo “Rick” Montalban didn’t bother with the graceful glide he had adopted to mask his pronounced limp and was thankfully amused when I once described a workout bench as being upholstered in rich Corinthian vinyl because I couldn’t resist. Richard “Dick” Jaeckel, a short, scrawny kid in his acting debut in Guadalcanal Diary (1943), had subsequently morphed into a mighty tree stump with blond hair, eternal tan, and solid chops (see Sometimes a Great Notion). Film director George Sidney, like me, grew up in Queens, NYC, and was a trove of vintage Hollywood lore and legend I could listen to at length and did because George liked to talk about the old days and dump on the new while exercising - or eating donuts he brought in and offered to all. A patient of Bruce and Al, Jan Berry, of Surf City’s Jan and Dean, never fully recovered from brain injuries after totaling his ’Vette ten years earlier near Dead Man’s Curve on Sunset Blvd. in Beverly Hills, two years after Jan and Dean’s Dead Man’s Curve became a top ten hit. Vito Scotti played Nazorine, the baker whose unwed daughter had a bun in the oven and boyfriend without green card in The Godfather. Password game-show host Allen Ludden was a good sport when I once asked for the password as he entered the steam room. 

There were many more, including screenwriter Bill Kerby, who, during pre-production for The Rose, his take on Janis Joplin starring Bette Midler, wrote Van Nuys Boulevard, mercifully unproduced to spare the public from a scene appearing on page 62:


INT. BRUCE CONNER - AL HINDS GYM - MORNING

With a searing CRASH! Man Mountain Wawrzeniak drops loaded dumbbells to the floor and looks at himself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. He nods his head. Next to him, FRED DRYER (Defensive End for the L.A. Rams) and STEVE GERTZ, stand by and openly stare. They are both specimens, themselves, but now they’re in the presence of Greatness and they know it.

                          STEVE GERTZ

                                Good set.

                           MAN MOUNTAIN

                                  Yeah.

                            FRED DRYER

                       You should’ve gone 
                              t’the pros.

                            MAN MOUNTAIN

                               Football’s pussy.

And with that, he turns and walks into the locker room. Gertz and Dryer look at each other.

                             STEVE GERTZ

                               An intellectual…                                             

Yes, Fred was a member, too. “Kate the Great” Schmidt, a close friend who held the American (and soon World) record in women’s javelin, began to workout there, then Jane Frederick, American record holder in women’s heptathlon; Maren Seidler, who had a lock on the American record in women’s shot put; and Italian track star Giulia Montefiore. The Montreal games were on the horizon and the gym again became an unofficial Olympics weight-training site, at least for the Olympians I knew.

“At the gym I feel very strong” (September 12, 1962).

It’s where I reconnected with Lolo, a dear friend from high school who worked the front desk. It’s where I became friends with Levey, an instructor who, like me, was a former NYer, jazz drummer, and competitive boxer with a big, tough father sired by a tougher father, each of whom had been fighters; we shared issues as well as interests. 

It’s where I met “Schitzo Nitz-o,” who, prior to working at the gym, did time for manslaughter after a bar fight went bad; kept a copy of the Physicians Desk Reference at home so he could investigate whatever pharmaceutical he was considering for abuse then take it no matter what the PDR said; was my co-bouncer at a couple of Westside bars; and accompanied me on evictions I handled for a gym member with upscale rental properties but a few downscale tenants who required emphatic assistance to immediately vacate. 

It’s where I caught up with Lisa Lyon, another high school friend, who joined the gym to build strength while studying kendo, became Schitzo’s workout and otherwise partner, and later wound up as the first Women’s World Pro bodybuilding champion, and muse to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and philosopher, neuro-scientist, and psychedelicist John C. Lilly. 

It’s where I met Karl, an elderly, easily irritated and delight-to-incite staff masseur, he of the wandering hands and thankful distaff clientele. He, with fluffy gray-to-white hair on the loss, hard, ice-blue Nordic eyes, and Teutonic accent, we suspected had been Hitler’s personal masseur who fled the bunker after indiscreetly makin’ mit der shiatsu mit Eva, and whose delivery of Schatziputzi, a German term of endearment, remains the most obscenely creepy thing ever heard—just ask Lolo. 

It's where I met Abbye  (strictly ironic “Pudgy”) Stockton, a staff instructor and Muscle Beach alumnus who, during the ’50s health and fitness scene, was “America’s Foremost Bar-Belle." Her husband, Les, another Muscle Beach graduate and staff instructor, was a merry old philandering satyr with a twinkle in his eye and apparently a sparkle in his dick, judging from the effect on the women in the gym he sacked.
 
It’s where I met The Amazing Mary, a middle-aged, formerly miserably married, sexually repressed lady who, according to her liberator, Les, was a subject of study at a sex institute in Santa Monica where she earned the world record for most orgasms within a given brief period of time. It’s a feat I can vouch for, having been treated to a clinical demonstration while sitting in the passenger seat of her VW Beetle in the gym’s parking lot in broad daylight as she, at the behest of Les, digitally drove herself in the driver’s seat. Les and a few men from the gym kept an apartment nearby for entertainment purposes, the purpose being to entertain themselves with Mary, who enjoyed entertaining and being entertained.

The gym was where I met Mambo, the woman who would eventually become my ex-wife due to my instability, with stupidity a close second.

“153 1/2 [lbs.]. We went to the gym” (July 22, 1976).

And it was where I met Christopher Isherwood.

I became aware of him when I was fifteen years old. My mother took my sister and me to see the original Broadway production of Cabaret and I saw his name in the Playbill. I read Berlin Stories a few years later and it sparked an interest in Weimar culture. By the time I began working at the gym I was mindful of his larger literary reputation but hadn’t read any of his other books and was unaware that he had written screenplays. Berlin Stories was sufficient to make a profound impression. When Chris was in the gym I was in the presence of Greatness and I knew it.

But I didn’t do much about it. In fact, I did nothing. I’ve regretted it ever since.

Chris had been a member on and off for twenty-two years before I made his acquaintance, for some time also a member of Lyle Fox’s gym in Pacific Palisades, returning exclusively to Bruce’s when the Fox gym closed. He came in regularly, and stepped on the men’s locker room scale as if punching a time clock. Because I was either busy with a new member, PT patient, laundering towels, in the ladies gym where I spent half my workweek, or preoccupied with my own workouts, I never had many opportunities to talk to him. And Chris and Don kept to themselves, which I respected. But I could have engineered situations. The reality is that I was paralyzed by shyness. As a seasoned Hollywood veteran (I’d worked, after all, as a studio laborer, greensman, and propmaker) I had no trouble kibbitzing with the show biz set. But Chris, he was another matter. I was a precocious reader as a kid and, though I certainly loved movies and TV, accorded book writers with a degree of respect and awe reserved only for heroes. I’d placed him on a pedestal and was completely star-struck. That was not the case with Ray Bradbury, who I’d met a few years earlier while working in a Beverly Hills record shop. Ray was warm, open, and initiated conversation. Chris was not, and did not.

During this time I was also touring the East, reading the Upanishads, Ramayana, and Mahabarata. I was interested in Vedanta. I would have loved to talk to Chris about this stuff, as well as literature. I probably would have been intrusively annoying, or so I sensed otherwise I would not have been so pathetically timid. It’s not that Chris had some sort of force field that he deliberately turned on to keep people away from him, but he projected an element of self-possession and reserve that might be interpreted as aloof, distant, and/or cold which, as I’ve since learned, he was not. I know because, like him, I was (and remain) a Virgo, his birthday falling on the day after mine, though I hope the reaction he got when answering “what’s your sign?” was better than I’ve ever received: “oh,” the “I’m so sorry” tacitly expressed. Maybe Chris and Don, like most people, just wanted to get in, workout, and get out; the likely explanation.

“154 1/2 [lbs.] We saw Stay Hungry (with Jeff Bridges), went to the gym.”  (July 19, 1976).

For an instant in the continuum of human existence I had the most spectacular calves in the cosmos. With a pair of glorious gastrocnemius, solid gold soleus, peroneus longus and brevis to long for, and with each sharply cut and precisely defined, I was “Mr. Universe from the knees down,” a wry homage by former Mr. America, Mr. World, and 4-time Mr. Universe (as well as escort service mogul, organized crimester, and arm-wrestling hustler who often earned over $1,000 a week from that alone) Dennis Tinerino, yet another gym member. 

Support for that sterling epithet presented itself when, as a contestant in the 1977 Jr. Mr. Southern California competition, I was called out as the ideal against which all other contestants’ calves were to be judged, and the enthusiastically vocal audience, now awestruck at the appearance of my dogies, gasped before erupting into wild, unrestrained bravos as Also sprach Zarathustra heralded my ascension into the pantheon, the heavens opened up, a golden shaft of light bathed me in its numinous glow, I experienced ego death, everything was everything, I took my place on the Great Mandala and was at one with All, even the guy in the front row who for a moment looked like a hipster chimp with goatee and shades. On stage, posing before a packed auditorium, with an applied tan, shaved and greased-up from the neck down, and wearing only the suggestion of a Speedo that highlighted my religious heritage, things weren’t surreal enough so I’d dropped a cap of mescaline halfway through the event.

Afterward, I rendezvoused with Spin and Lolo and her sister in the lobby and waited for our chauffeur, Gibson, to bring his limo around. Spin (gym member, natch’), who I’d been with for a few months, dropped her cap. The plan was to go Dada post-contest; I just arrived early. Lolo and Gibby (gym member, of course) had been dating; the limo ride was his idea and it was refined after a committee was formed to consider the possibilities for pagan worship. And so The Golden Calves Revue hit the road.

“Good workout again at the gym today” (February 28, 1961).

Because of work, travel, and various ailments in 1964, Chris wasn’t going to the gym very much. If he’d observed the following he would have surely recorded it.

Photo courtesy of Royal Books.

That year the gym earned a footnote in modern American art history when painter, sculptor, assemblager, filmmaker, and art-provocateur Bruce Conner visited Bruce Conner’s Physical Services and demanded that Bruce remove his name from the building: there was only one, true Bruce Conner and the town wasn’t big enough for the both of ’em. Suffice it to say, Bruce Conner, physical therapist, gave Bruce Conner, artist, the heave-ho and don’t ‘cha come back no mo’. Incensed (mock or otherwise), Bruce Conner, artist, returned with actor-photographer Dennis Hopper, who documented artist Conner and a gaggle of models posed beneath the gym’s painted sign on the outside west wall. (Original prints of Hopper’s photograph now sell for upwards of $20,000). The visual pun was intended - and unintentionally appropriate: the place was Libidoland.  Afterward, Bruce Conner, artist, went inside and distributed buttons to the membership that read, “I am not Bruce Conner,” while sporting his own button, “I am Bruce Conner.” It was a happening, baby! The gym’s signage remained when, in 1971, Bruce retired and turned the business over to Alan Hinds, a physical therapist who had been his assistant. 

“The only achievement for me has been at the gym” (July 28, 1966).

The ladies gym was a garden. If I’d had the temperament for promiscuity I’d have needed a thirteen-month calendar to schedule dates. This is not ego; it was the same story for the other instructors. A member once told me she wanted to see what it was like with a big, built guy. Musicians looking like dental floss with legs may have been the ideal in the outside world during the mid-1970s but inside the gym muscle was exotic and, apparently, tempting, the apple on the tree. I had the astonishing opportunity to meet a lot of women, get to know them, become friends, and then and only then, ask them out if I was interested in something more. This was a first. Prior to that I didn’t meet many women so when one crossed my path discrimination tipped its hat to desperation and took a hike. Though I had a couple of escapades between them, prior to meeting Mambo I had two intense amours fous with women I met at the gym.

You could fit Spin in a tea cup and still have room for a tea bag and two lumps of sugar but she had big ideas. Most of them involved sex, many of which I enjoyed, others not so much. She held my testicles hostage to being “open-minded” and so I always said yes when my head was often screaming no. On one occasion she’d contrived I felt like a crash-test dummy at an orgy. She lived a few blocks away from the gym with her long-term boyfriend in an open relationship well on its way to closing up shop. She scared the hell out of me when she once lost consciousness after an orgasm and I thought I’d killed her, but she finally came to and wanted more. But I made excuses, afraid anxiety might kill me. During an evening shift, we once trysted in the gym’s ultrasound/hydrotherapy room, from within which on enchanted nights it was not unusual to hear ultra-sounds having nothing to do with standard therapeutic modalities. I was volunteered to pose for the boyfriend, a professional photographer with a scheme to broaden his portrait business with “fine art” erotic photography catering to sophisticated couples. His shot of me, however, looked like a porn bar mitzvah commemorative: naket boychick in full profile, head bowed and turned away in reverence with shadows for the sacred and solemn but head not turned and shadowed enough to mask the bar mitzvah boy’s punim. It was not a photograph I was keen on anybody ever seeing but people did when the weasel set up a display in The Pleasure Chest in West Hollywood without my consent. I had to pay him a social call to request all prints and negative, a visit I hope his recollection of stimulates the panic I witnessed when he opened the door and saw me looking nothing like happy. Macho has its appropriate moments.

Rima was smart, exotic, and pensive, with a face like a bright full moon with a dark cloud hovering over its surface. She was a successful business machine saleswoman six years my senior whose twisted on and off relationship with her demon shrink she hoped I’d be the cure for. She told me she loved me and I believed her but couldn’t say it back because I didn’t want to believe it even though I felt it; doomed if I do, damned if I don’t. A hothouse flower, she wore Jungle Gardenia, a scent so overpowering that I often swooned when we embraced, so I asked her to tone it down. She did, confining it to down below. She asked me to hurt her during sex but that was new to me and I was too scared; I couldn’t meet that need and felt that I had failed her in a fundamental way. She wanted me to run away with her, somewhere, anywhere but I didn’t have the guts or maybe it was just good sense because I felt something wrong inside her, like a dog can smell cancer. I raced to see her at 2AM when she called, drunk and in tears two months after she once again fell under Freudenstein’s spell, and begged me to come over and hold her and I did, rocking her in my arms on her couch for as long as she needed because you don’t leave a wounded and defenseless animal in the middle of the road, you just don’t. But I abandoned her without a note after carrying her to bed and tucking her in when she finally passed out, a careless act not meant to be so that has haunted me ever since.

“Today I did my first full day’s work at Fox. I have what seems to be a dream secretary, Eleanor Breese” (September 24, 1956).

I was anxious to move on from the gym; I was serious with Mambo and needed to demonstrate that I had a future. Lisa was a story analyst at American-International Pictures, and the knowledge that there was a job informally  called “reader” was a welcome revelation. Sometime later I was talking to Bill Kerby about this employment manna and he said that a friend of his might need some help. He arranged a meeting. I put together a few writing samples, met his friend and for the next four years worked as assistant to and reader for a dream employer, Eleanor Breese, executive story editor at Lorimar Productions, at the time the number one television production company. During that period Eleanor talked about working in the Scribner’s steno pool for Maxwell Perkins and assignments he sent her on, e.g. working at the kitchen table in Thomas Wolfe’s Brooklyn apartment, typing up manuscript pages as he threw them over his shoulder while using the refrigerator as a standing desk. She mentioned working at Fox, but Chris never came up, which is odd because as I’ve subsequently learned the two became friends and socialized outside of work. If she had talked about him I’d have remembered.

I asked Lolo what she remembers about Chris. Not much of anything, it turns out. Chris was gentle, Levey recalls. “He’d say ‘hi,’ when he came in. He fidgeted around; he didn’t sweat buckets.” Lisa, who was a friend of Don, doesn’t recall seeing Chris at the gym at all. Apparently, he possessed the power of invisibility when he wanted to move through the world unobserved.

I’d have asked Schitzo but restlessness consumed him and he went AWOL. For three years if my phone rang in the middle of the night—as it did around once a month; it was his metaphysical menses—I knew who was calling and what to expect: in the midst of an existential crisis and heavily drugged he would channel The Beach Boys. And I’d respond in kind to keep him on the line and away from the ledge. I’d pick-up the phone and without greeting he’d begin.

“I’m gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same old strip. I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip.”

“Don’t worry, Bobby, everything will turn out alright.”

“Now it’s dark and I’m alone, in my room. What good is the dawn that grows into day? The sunset at night, or livin’ this way?”
 
“At least you’ve got the warmth of the sun.”

“Yeah, but will I look back and say that I wish I hadn't done what I did?”

He already wished that. Time to distract.

“Perhaps, but here’s a little peninsula, and over here’s a viaduct leading over to the mainland.”

“Why a duck?”

And we’d run that Marx Bros. scene.

Schitzo scrammed to Australia and worked in a health club in Sydney. When he got kicked out of kangaroo-land for lack of a work permit he wound up in Hong Kong, working in another health club. At one point in the mid-‘80s a mutual friend called to tell me that Schitzo was in town and wanted to get together. So I went over. I met his recent bride, a young Chinese girl who spoke no English. Schitzo didn’t speak Chinese. That can only have improved the marriage’s prospects for success. I would have asked him about it but he wasn’t around. Just before I arrived he announced to our friend that he was going out for a few minutes. I waited a few hours. He never showed.

“154 1/2 [lbs.]. Don in Santa Barbara. By myself at the gym today, old Dobbin puttering about. I don’t do very much but it makes me feel as if I am really trying, and I am in my old Dobbin way. I am so lazy and exercising is so boring but I must do it. I fear that I will be too consumed by sloth to attend my own funeral. (I must stop thinking about death. Courage. Onward!). After showering, I went to my locker and found that someone had walked off with my towels. But Stan, one of the instructors, was kind to get some more. The young man is nice, and seems to always be on the verge of asking me a question but never does. I sometimes find myself  staring at him, an Adonis from the knees down.”

I wish he’d written that entry, even if he got my name wrong. Most fans of anyone feel that they know the person. This is particularly true with authors, who foster one on one relationships, the writer and reader engaged in a pas de deux, a rendezvous of minds with a strong tactile element: the feel of a book in the hands, the touch of a page. There is a certain intimacy. People curl up with a book; no one curls up with a movie. Yet whatever the medium fans would like to be acknowledged and set apart from the crowd. It would have been very satisfying to have gained Chris’ attention in a diary aside however trivial, silly, or critical. I regularly saw the guy, I (sort of) knew the guy. I was someone special! It is a vanity I confess to, an egoism I accept, just as Chris accepted his own vanity and egotism. I struggle to find connections, however tenuous, between us, forcing synchronicity where it doesn’t exist. Perhaps Chris’ guru, Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, could have made more of coincidence than I can. One of the few things I get out of it is the gnawing sense that crossing paths with him was an augury that I ignored; that a life with books was my fate but I wasn’t paying attention until decades later when I finally awoke from an unsettling sleep.

Taps has blown for the golden calves, and time hasn’t done me any favors from the knees up. The armor has fallen away and I feel lighter inside, though terribly vulnerable. Yet the world doesn’t hurt as much as it once did. As my body rides off into the sunset I watch from my homestead porch with amused irony. I have reverted to the tall, thin bookworm I began as, the intervening years as if a 45-year aberration, a strenuous journey essential to finding a place within my family, myself, and the world.

For three years the gym was the center of my life and a formative experience that influenced all that followed. It was to me what Weimar Berlin was to Christopher Isherwood: a way station and safe place to explore young manhood, pursue adventures in masculinity, and observe and experience a fascinating, decadent milieu, albeit from a different orientation, and certainly without Nazis in the background, unless you count Karl. I wasn’t a camera but my Kundalini was taking notes.

“Even now I can’t altogether believe that any of this happened” (Goodbye to Berlin).


Nor can I. Memories are viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, so far away yet a nanometer nearby, trapped, stretched, and distorted between perspectives. The appearance of a golden age of youth is no more than that. When I woke up in the morning the days were dark and I’d hope they’d get light. The anger, confusion, and depression so well disguised that I fooled even myself remained veiled, their origins evaded until they could no longer be avoided. The past lies in wait, and it is patient. If you don’t deal with it, the past will deal with you. 


_______
_______
 

How WET Can You Get?

by Alastair Johnston 

Leonard Koren, Making WET: the magazine of Gourmet Bathing, Point Reyes, Ca: Imperfect Publishing, 2012

 WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing (1976–81), was a pioneering example of a California “lifestyle” magazine that was as much about the design and packaging as about the content. There were ads that looked like editorial content and vice versa. Ostensibly about bathing, it ran from 1976 until 1981, when the editor, Leonard Koren, left Venice, California, moved to San Francisco and then to Japan.

  The influence of Japanese culture increased steadily in the US, particularly the West Coast states, after the Second World War. Zen Buddhism was an important element, but so were the graphic arts. And there is the Japanese tea ceremony. “The Japanese tea room – despite its very appealing form and philosophy – was too culturally specific for the vague purposes I had in mind,” said Koren, who was a former architecture student looking for a direction.

   Koren wanted to create some kind of visual expression that was not in the mainstream. He had been thinking about bathrooms as important but overlooked places that were private and cleansing: they had illumination, heat and water. They involved nakedness and contemplation. He had used images of bathers in a series of artworks, and came up with the idea of a magazine about bathing. His magazine was to be about enthusiasms, and since California is about extremes, he though he would create a parody of enthusiasts.

   His inspiration was threefold, first there was Vogue which he saw as dogmatic, full of bombastic bluster and grand pronouncements about fashion, such as “BROWN is the new BLACK!” Then there was Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, which was a compendium of beautifully presented drivel by self-important minor celebrities; and thirdly, there was Gourmet, a foodie magazine which featured pretentious articles about meals. Koren liked the idea of a tongue-in-cheek combination of all three, a “Magazine of Gourmet Bathing,” that was and was not about bathing: mud baths and soaps can only hold your attention for so long, but pretty much anything could work in the context. He started working on WET and delivered the magazine to friends in Venice Beach and Santa Monica, networking to sell ads or find contributors.

WET June/July 1977, photo by Raul Vega; design by Tom Ingalls & April Greiman

   In April 1977 he met the designer Tom Ingalls who had design world connections to photographers and graphic artists, that would improve the look of the magazine from a funky typewritten fanzine into something with more polish. At the time Ingalls was going through a break-up with his girlfriend April Greiman, and Koren hoped they could get along long enough to get the April/June issue of the magazine done. Greiman was on the verge of becoming one of the key figures in the LA design world. Her background was in textiles and she had gone to Basel, Switzerland, to study at the Art School there, but the faculty had plugged her into a series of courses in typography that were to transform her interests. She took the Swiss style she had been schooled in, and elements of Russian Constructivism she had picked up in Europe, and deconstructed them, leading to a postmodern style in American design in the 1980s (popularized, for example, on record album covers from Los Angeles-based labels).

  Cultural historian Frances Butler referred to it as “The LA Slash-and-Spritz style” because of the pieces of film, rubylith and artificial blotches added to the clean layouts that were appearing with the introduction of computerized design. No longer were jobs typeset in metal, repro-ed and pasted up, now there were photo-compositors, and most of the pre-press work was done on the light table. This led to a certain sterility in graphics that Greiman saw at once, and countered with stray bits of Zip-a-tone screen, registration marks and other tools which were normally invisible – a “baring the device” technique that had become popular in literature and film long before. In 1981, Butler wrote, “Sometimes the connection between visual incidents is not made explicit and the reader must try to trap these incidents into a syntax. Much contemporary graphic design has essentially a reader-sequencing structure. This is true of many Japanese posters, especially the early work of Tadanori Yokoo, and now the poster work of the Los Angeles slash-and-spritz school.”

WET September/October 1979, the "Religion" issue: Ricky Martin photographed by Guy Webster; designed by April Greiman & Jayme Odgers

  WET quickly evolved from a funky typewritten news-letter to a slick glossy publication and this attracted attention and advertisers. And while the content is more or less immaterial to advertisers, the nudity aspect didn’t hurt. As Koren said, “There is an appetite for nakedness – not the stagey, self-conscious nakedness of skin magazines, but the nakedness that lets the body pass by itself through the awakening and regenerating extremes of hot and cold, light and dark, wet and dry, that the natural environment is so kind to provide.”

  The magazine took off (events at bath houses created a buzz in the press, followed by television interviews in hot tubs, and Mademoiselle editors coming to mud bath parties) and attracted a lot of talented Angeleno artists: designers John Van Hamersveld, Taki Ono and Rip Georges, cartoonists Matt Groening, Futzie Nutzle and Gary Panter, photographers Herb Ritts, Raul Vega and Jayme Odgers. Some at the start of their careers, lent their talents cheaply and helped push the boundaries of art and design that WET would become known for.

  Koren said, “Scattered throughout California there are certain latter-day saints – a dangerous number of whom seem to be artists, photographers, or writers – who get the joke of gourmet bathing without having it explained. Which is fortunate because the concept is so evanescent and mercurial that to attempt explanation is to risk over-kill.” He did explain that it is not a system, a therapy or a philosophy, it is “at most a point of view having some--thing to do with sensuality, humor, humility, and taking such pleasure in small things that they stop being small.”

WET September/October 1980, design by John Van Hamersveld

  
   The magazine continually reinvented itself. For one thing the designers used it as a calling card to move on to other better-paying or higher profile gigs, but through new approaches to graphics and editorial content, it evolved. John Van Hamersveld, who had already achieved design fame with covers for the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street (1972: a collage of Robert Frank photos with scrawled hand-lettering and visible tape and cut marks), Hotter than Hell by Kiss (1974: showing the influence of Tadanori Yokoo), and Eat to the Beat by Blondie (1979: hand-lettering, angled type and a grid), continued with an illustration career; Jayme Odgers’ trade-mark image of a hand holding a Polaroid was featured on Fleetwood Mac and other best-selling album covers; Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” cartoon made its first appearance in WET in 1978: it grew to a weekly syndication of 250 papers and launched Groening’s TV show “The Simpsons.”

   Koren found the thematic approach (e.g., “Religion”) was a good solution to pulling an issue together. He persuaded poet Lewis MacAdams to move south from Bolinas and assume the role of editor, which he fulfilled excellently, bringing in another range of literary connections, including William Burroughs’ essay “Is language a virus?” An article on necrophilia created a furor – and sold copies. Koren was well-networked. He dropped in on Noel Young in Santa Barbara and got a copy of Henry Miller’s essay “On Turning Eighty,” which ran in the magazine, as did an article on Henry Miller’s bathroom (Sept/Oct 1981). Fashion and music joined the regular contents. Kristine McKenna brought interviews with musicians that had uncensored language and ideas, making them unfit for more mainstream media. WET caught the Zeitgeist and was light and ephemeral, not predictable or ponderous. The ads blended into the editorial content and vice versa, creating a unified style, which is always desirable in a magazine.

WET September/October 1981, design by "King Terry" Teruhiko Yumura

 
    Koren refers to wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of finding beauty in imperfection, and seeing profundity in nature, as one of his guiding principles. D. T. Suzuki described wabi-sabi as “an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty.” In graphics there is a style known as hata-uma or good/bad art (literally “clumsy-tasty,” referring to the occasional appeal of the badly drawn), which extends wabi-sabi to illustration. Koren hired Tokyo-based Teruhiko Yumura as art director in 1981. Yumura (known in WET as King Terry) brought this fresh style to LA design and it influenced Gary Panter and others. Again confusing editorial and advertising matter, there is a full-page ad for Terry’s Hit Parade, a “full-color action art book from Japan’s number one illustrator,” available exclusively as a “terrible WET book.”

   The successful marketing of the Californian lifestyle, particularly in the context of water, was a trend that continued with Beach Culture (late 80s) and Ray Gun (Santa Monica, 1992–2000) magazines, designed by David Carson, that were also essentially pointless, but graphically far less interesting.
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Serendipity Books Is For Sale

by Stephen J. Gertz

Serendipity Books, the Berkeley, California landmark and legendary rare book shop owned and operated by the late and equally legendary Berkeley landmark, Peter B. Howard, is now publicly on the block.

The entire shop may be purchased. Alternatively, the inventory and fixtures are being offered separately, as is an option to purchase or continue the lease on the building.

A separate page with details of the sale is now on Serendipity's website.

The Howard family is also talking to auction houses.

A private deal to sell the shop fell through earlier this year after negotiations broke down.

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Renting Los Angeles

by Stephen J. Gertz

The following originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, January 7, 2007. I've been jammed-up the last few days and readers will, hopefully, forgive the reprint of a story that has nothing to do with rare books beyond the author's full-time entry into the trade at its end.

I recently moved out of a place I temporarily rented. It was just a rest stop, a place to recover from a reality OD: lost marriage, lost career, lost home, lost balance, lost confidence, lost spirit. I lived there for seventeen years.

In Los Angeles, where the lost seek to find or be found, frequent moving is a survival sport--the average tenancy for renters is five years, so staying in one spot for a 17-year stretch must be some kind of record. At least it is for me. In chronological order, it beats the 15 years in the brick row house I grew up in in New York City; the two years in the 3BR lower duplex on Eastborne in Westwood that my mother, my sister and I moved into when we migrated to L.A. in 1967; a year in the small 2BR 4-plex on Pandora Avenue near Beverly Glen after my sister moved away, where screenwriter Robert Towne rented the bachelor as an office and Warren Beatty would occasionally drop by, from a distance offering a tentative wave and hello as if, just in case, he knew me (the guy's blind as a bat even with glasses); the one-room dump above a small store on Washington Boulevard near La Cienega after I left home, where the landlord "re-porcelained" the bathtub with a coat of white paint that would peel off in the water and leave chips all over my body when I emerged; the flop joint I shared with two friends on Purdue in West L.A., site of my only LSD trip but no amount could hallucinate the place into a palace; the two-bedroom I shared on Clark up the street from the Whisky on the Sunset Strip, where the call girl in the apartment next door, alas, thought I was sweet and hands-off adopted me; the two-bedroom lower duplex on Holt Avenue south of Pico I shared, after passing the landlady's qualifying quiz, "Milkhik or fleyshik?," understanding kosher even if I didn't practice it; the big two-story 2BR Spanish Revival on Orange Street near Wilshire that my then-GF and I rented but she sayonara'ed the day before the move so I lived there myself, hemorrhaging the rent; the small, dark one-bedroom on Beverly Glen between Olympic and Pico owned by Fritz Feld, the character actor from '30s-'40s Hollywood who made a career playing eccentrics who punctuated sentences with a succinct slap of hand to mouth that created a pop! exclamation point and who was married to Virginia Christine, Mrs. Olson of the Folger's Coffee commercials; the dilapidated 1BR bantam bungalow on Bay Street in Santa Monica that the landlord had subdivided to rent the cubbyhole bedroom separately but that, fortunately, no one was fool enough to move into; the upper duplex on the 23rd Street strand in Venice that I shared with a female friend who owned nine cats that hated me and the feeling was mutual; the 10 years in the place in Mar Vista that my wife and I lived in, one in a cluster of seven cozy, rustic cottages atop the highest hill in the neighborhood, with a view from our second-story bedroom of the ocean to the west and to the east the Hollywood sign; the six months in a one-bedroom in lower Beachwood Canyon in the immediate aftermath of our split.

I was evicted from that last apartment. I desperately challenged the landlord in court, and what fun it was to take the witness stand and be compelled to admit that, although a grown man of 38, I was destitute with no prospects, anguished words undiluted by tears that I could not hold in despite a herculean effort to maintain my composure. My whole, failed life congealed in that very public, naked moment. Nineteen eighty-eight was not a good year.

And so, feeling flat out of potential with my future behind me, I found a garage apartment in back of a house near Palms and Sawtelle, returning to Mar Vista just a few blocks from where my ex and I had lived but a light year distant from when the marriage was working, work was working and I was content.

The place was tiny. Yes, you could swing a cat in it but only a kitten, the runt of the litter. Small kitchen and bathroom, and a 9-by-12 knotty-pine paneled bedroom/living room that by the time I shelved books floor to ceiling on all walls and planted a desk, bed and television had three feet of floor space and no room for company, not that I was doing any entertaining. It was a comforting, monastic cell, a wood-frame compression bandage with a roof. If I needed to breathe, there was a petite patio with a fiberglass awning outside my door that opened onto a well-tended garden with flowerbeds and fruit trees that I shared with the landlord.

Jose "Lupe" Hernandez was the owner of the place, a quiet, gentle, humble man, a mason who had worked hard to buy the property and worked harder to maintain and improve it, crafting the elaborate and extensive brick paths, steps, porches and cinderblock perimeter walls with his own hands. A widower in his early 60s when we met, he seemed to understand my need for privacy without discussion. I had been a bit apprehensive about having the landlord so close and potentially underfoot; not a problem. And I was not a problem. Because I didn't want him coming inside the apartment and disturbing my hiding place, I rarely asked him to fix things; there were never major repairs to be taken care of and I dealt with the small stuff myself. I was quiet in the hole I'd dug for myself, hunkered in for the duration of my convalescence.

After the one-year lease was up, it was never renewed; we just continued under month-to-month terms. He seldom raised the rent and when he did, he awkwardly apologized for the necessity.

We saw each other when he was working in the garden or on one of his improvement projects, rarely exchanging more than a few words but always pleasant, sometimes philosophical. I met his son and grandkids. On holidays he'd have his family over for barbecues in the shared yard, always inviting me but I'd politely decline. I could hear their laughter and conversation as I sat on my bed reading or watching TV. It sharpened my sense of isolation and made me withdraw further into myself; people make the lonely feel lonelier.

Work was intermittent, and I spent an enormous amount of time alone. I often wondered what Mr. Hernandez thought of me--we were always Mr. Hernandez and Mr. Gertz to one another--but he was never intrusive, he never inquired. He saw me through a minor heart attack, attentive as I was stretchered out that morning early in 1990, quietly solicitous when I returned 10 days later. A few times a year he would visit his family in Guadalajara, asking me beforehand to keep an eye on things, take the garbage cans to the curb and return them. He retired a couple of years after I moved in, his shoulders worn out from a life of manual labor, and was around all the time then, certainly aware that I was almost always inside. At one point during the mid-'90s, he returned from Mexico with a bride. She didn't speak English and my Spanish was negligible. We exchanged simple holas as I was leaving or returning, and I wondered what she thought of the guy living in the back, always there but rarely seen.

Five years into my tenancy, I met a woman and began a five-year contest of wills, a relationship doomed from the start but a life preserver, the two of us shipwrecked on the shore of a desert isle. She told me I was the best man she'd ever been with--which didn't speak well for her prior choices--and she, well, she'd have me, which was all I needed to know, my prospects otherwise nonexistent. With a career, material standards and a need to stretch from time to time, she didn't like being in my apartment, and though I was not comfortable doing so, I began to spend all my time at her townhouse in West Hollywood, returning to my place every other day or so to check in on things.

In a desperate attempt to demonstrate that I was worth sticking with, I went back to school and studied occupational therapy, which I was good at but hated in clinical practice; skilled nursing facilities and hospitals not pleasant in the extreme, I scrammed. I helped Mr. Hernandez with his shoulder problems, and though it cost me $20K in student loans I was quite gratified to be able to do for him.

I'd grown to intensely dislike staying at my girlfriend's all the time--I never felt at home--and when the lease on love expired I was glad to return to my micro-villa.

Many years into my tenancy, I asked Mr. Hernandez to call me Steve. He invited me to call him Lupe. But it was too weird, and we continued to address each other formally. By now, I'd begun to see myself as a protector for Mrs. Hernandez when she was by herself; I know Mr. Hernandez felt that way and I was proud that he did. We had mutual respect for one another, concern and trust, and I saw him more than I saw anybody else. He was, though I never thought of him as such, my best friend.

Los Angeles is an easy place to love but a hard place to like. The view from Bel-Air at 3 o'clock in the morning in June, when the city is blanketed in fog and you're above it all, a full moon illuminating a surreal ocean of clouds, the highest points in the city appearing as a heavenly archipelago; seagulls flying across a pink, lavender and vermilion spring dusk striated with gray clouds and entering a zone of fading sunlight that transforms them into a flock of brilliant, gently undulating stars in V-formation flight; the cast of the moon on the Pacific producing a hypnotic phosphorescence seen through a copse of tall, thin cypress; the apocalyptic beauty of a giant red sun within an ashen sky the morning after a Malibu fire--such scenes provoke deep, primal adoration but act as an intermittent reward schedule, just enough to condition you to endure the daily traffic grind, the housing costs that bleed you weak and the stress of an accelerated, demanding world that has laid waste to the laid-back lifestyle. L.A. is the lover you stay with for the occasional great sex despite emotional distance and loss of intimacy, for what once was but is no longer, and you stick it out, like life, because it beats the alternative.

In early 2000, I began to emerge from the wilderness. I found steady work that was satisfying if not remunerative. A little less than two years ago, I began a cross-country Internet romance, introduced by my '90s ex-GF who had returned to Tampa and become close friends with this woman. Thus pre-screened, Hank and I enjoyed what began as an attraction of interests and intellect and blossomed into a full-blown passion. Hank sold her house and moved out here so she could breathe stimulating, alligator-free culture and we could be together.

I gave notice to Mr. Hernandez and hunted down a place for us. Our rent budget, of course, was blown. (Need I add that what Hank took away from the sale of her home wouldn't qualify as a down payment on an L.A. birdhouse?) Worse, though, was that the landlord's agent--an agent, not the landlord himself--had an exasperating habit of responding to inquiries about things that needed to be fixed before move-in with a dippy smile and a palms-up get-real gesture that accompanied his mantra: "But it's only a rental!" (It's a phrase I've since heard so often that I'd like to tattoo it on his forehead.)

I wanted to meet the landlord; I needed a relationship. I finally did. Without eye contact, he limply shook my hand, squirmed out a few words and turned to talk to his sycophant. I blinked and he was gone, no goodby, no nothing--tenants, apparently, aliens never to be dealt with face to face. Mr. Hernandez had spoiled me rotten.

Moving day. I'd been seeing Mr. Hernandez on and off over the last 30 days, briefly discussing Hank, whom he'd met and liked. During a weekend visit of hers we'd made quite a bit of after-hours mambo music, and we ran into him as we emerged in the morning. When I returned from taking her to the airport, he was in the garden. He rose and with a shy grin expressed a simple, genuine "congratulations." It was a pregnant felicitation, an amen to all the years alone and the struggle to right myself, a blessing to the future and happiness, and yes--are we not men?--a thumb's up on getting laid. Now I'd packed the last few boxes into my car and was ready to turn in the keys. In the movie version, our mutual reticence dissolved at that moment, we gently hugged, I said, "Goodby, Lupe," he said, "Goodby, Steve," resolution achieved, credits roll, fade to black.

No such thing occurred. Instead, I simply gave him the keys. I wanted to say, "Goodbye, Lupe," but I couldn't. Mr. Hernandez he was, and so he remained as I remained Mr. Gertz in our farewell. And 17 temporary years were over, a snap of the fingers--like that! I met him when I was 38; I'm now 55, he's 75. I drove away, never to return.

The rent is driving Hank nuts, L.A. isn't holding her in thrall, and forget about the freeways. As I write this, our lease is almost up. She wants to look around. Maybe we'll find another, cheaper place with as much space. Fat chance, I'm thinking, but we'll give it a shot. She wonders about Seattle. I wonder too. I've lived in L.A. close to 40 years, and while I stopped feeling like a New Yorker decades ago, I'm only now feeling like an Angeleno, and the commitment is weak. I sure as hell don't want to invest a single extra dollar of our money to improve our landlord's property. He sure doesn't--after all, it's only a rental. Then again, maybe we'll stay right where we are, in L.A. Forever: permanent, if only temporary.

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The Most Significant Books of California History, Part 2

by Stephen J. Gertz

Zamorano Select, a companion volume to the essential The Zamorano 80 (1945), has just been published by the Zamorano Club. It is an instant must-have for collectors of Californiana, specifically rare books about California history, and key reference. 

This collection of bibliographical essays, limited to only 350 copies, covers 120 significant books in California history, ranging in date from On the Ambitious Projects of Russia in Regard to North West America (1830) to The California Gold Rush (1997). The contributing writers are Larry E. Burgess, William G. Donohoo, Alan Jutzi, and Gordon J. Van De Water.  Gary Kurutz provides an Introduction. Ordering details below.

The Zamorano Club is Southern California’s oldest organization of bibliophiles and manuscript collectors. Founded in 1928, it sponsors lectures and publications on bookish topics. Most noteworthy among the latter is the Zamorano 80 (1945), a member-selected and -written catalogue of the most significant books in California history. The Club was named in honor of Agustín V. Zamorano (1798-1842), a provisional governor of Alta California and the state’s first printer.

Launch Party for a Reference Book? Yowsa!

Here's a paragraph I never thought I'd write:

If you live in or plan to visit Southern California, on Saturday, March 26 at 5 p.m. a party to celebrate the publication of Zamarano Select will be held at The Book Shop, 134 N Citrus Ave., in Covina. The event is open to the public and refreshments will be served. 

A special display of some of the books featured in  Zamorano Select has been arranged. In addition, contributors to the Select will talk about some 
of the books chosen and will be on hand to sign copies.

The concept of a book party and signing for a limited edition of a somewhat esoteric volume screams parallel universe - check to make sure the sun rose in the east when you woke up this morning. And yet...

That a public party in honor of this book has been organized will come as no surprise to those who know Brad Johnson, proprietor of The Book Shop along with his wife Jennifer. Brad began his career in the trade as a neonate, selling used books on how to influence parents to the formerly fetus in the infant ward. He began working at The Book Shop as a teenager. Now in his early thirties, he has been an (official) bookman for half his life. One day we're all going to be working for or buying from this guy.

For more information regarding the launch party please email Jen Johnson or call (626) 967-1888.

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BURGESS, Larry E. William G. Donohoo, Alan Jutzi, and Gordon J. Van De Water. Zamarano Select. With an introduction is by Gary Kurutz. Los Angeles: Zamarano Club, 2011. 176 pp, 26 illustrations including eight tipped-in color plates. Octavo. 9-1/4 x 6-1/8 inches, decorated cloth. offset printed. Designed and produced by Peter Rutledge Koch with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken.

Limited to 350 copies, of which 66 are reserved for subscribers.

$100 ($65 to members) plus applicable tax and shipping. Trade terms available.

To order, or for further details, please email the Club Secretary, Stephen Tabor or phone (626) 405-2179.

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A selected list of the publications of the Zamorano Club is available here.
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Art Center To Fill Acres of Books Site

A rendering of the proposed Art Exchange project.
(Photo credit: Rodolfo_M)

When Acres of Books, the legendary used and rare book shop that for seventy-four years provided Southern California book lovers and literati with a place to get joyously lost in and, ultimately, became a designated cultural landmark, closed in 2008 the grief was profound.

Acres of Books in Long Beach, CA, at the time of its closing in 2008.

Now, the Long Beach Redevelopment Agency Board has approved the final environmental impact report allowing Art Exchange, an art-driven facility where visitors can watch local artists create, buy art and attend classes, to be built.

Acres of Books in its heyday.
Though not a wide shop, it was deeeeep.

If a book shop has to close, I can’t think of a better way to fill the space that Acres of Books sat upon than by opening a local art center.

A partial view of the front section of Acres of Books.

And what a space it was. With an inventory of one million - yes, one million - volumes Acres of Books, established by respected rare book man Bertram Smith in 1934, was a vast Elysium of everything between two covers. Art Exchange will incorporate the front 5,000 square feet of the original, Art Deco facade of Acres of Books. That front section was reasonably easy to find your way around. When I began in the trade as a scout twenty-five years ago, I would stop into Acres of Books twice a month and stay the entire day. Why? It was the back 5,000 square feet that often yielded the best finds. Not a book shop with standard amenities - like bright lighting and air-conditioning - the back room, more of a humongous warehouse than annex, was filled with books in only the most basic order. You never knew what you’d find, and if you had to spend four hours going through only a small part of the thousands of dusty books with a flashlight to find a gem, so be it. It was worth it.

Bert Smith established Acres of Books
in Cincinnati, OH before moving to California.

It was worth my fingertips getting so dried-out from handling the books and dust that they would crust, split, and bleed. It got to the point where I began to wear surgical gloves while going through the books.

The rear annex of Acres of Books.
The photographer has used a strobe to light this shot.
Reality check: The florescent lights above were not
sufficient to illuminate anything must less a book's spine.
All treasures were buried in darkness.
Note the length of this aisle: Plenty of distance for
a small plane to take off and land.

At the time, I was specializing in erotica, sexology and curiosa and would always ask Jackie, Bert's granddaughter-in-law, if she had anything more than what was on the shelves. After a few months of visits and inquiries that she gracefully answered, I finally won her trust. The next time I showed up, she took me into one of the back rooms to a small, padlocked shed within. She unlocked it, opened the door, and switched on the single overhead bulb.

“The scat room,” she said. And she left me alone.

Inside were wall-to-wall, floor to ceiling shelves of rare, vintage smut and classic sex studies. Best part? The books were priced as they were originally before the shed door was sealed to the public. Four books I knew were worth $150-$200 each. Price? Fifteen dollars apiece. I suspect Acres of Books paid no more than a couple of dollars each for them, if that much. I walked out with six boxes of books, sold two books right away and covered my investment. I felt like a bandit. I suspect the Smiths were quite satisfied with their return. Oh yeah, the hours spent there were worth it.

Ray Bradbury adored Acres of Books. At the time of its
closing he said, "I love this place. I love the smell of it.
When it used to rain...I'd come to Long Beach, I'd
come here to the Acres of Books and I'd go in the back."

It was that experience that reinforced the notion that it might be possible to earn a living selling used and rare books.

The new Art Exchange will stand on hallowed ground. If they called the project Acres of Art, I don’t think anyone would object. Acres of Books put Long Beach, California on the map of international book attractions. With 10,500 square feet of space, perhaps Art Exchange, part of a larger arts development, will become a similar mecca.
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Photo of Ray Bradbury courtesy L.A. Observed, which has a fine memorial to Acres of Books featuring Bradbury.

Governor Schwarzennegger and I Compare Calves

LOS ANGELES. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger officially opened the 43d California International Antiquarian Book Fair on Friday night, February 12, 2010, along with First Lady, Maria Shriver, during a small ceremony intensely covered by the media. Excusing himself immediately afterward, he promised “We’ll be back” to check out the rare books.

Oh, how I wanted to write that lead. A loose-cannon member the Southern California chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), the book fair’s sponsoring organization, had, unilaterally and without consulting his colleagues, formally invited the governor to open the Fair to draw press and public attention. The Governor’s scheduling office sent their regrets but with the his wish for a successful event.

The Governor and First Lady returned to the Fair after a quick dinner at Schatzi, the Governor’s restaurant on Main Street in Santa Monica that closed in 2007. They met with an old and dear friend, a member of the local ABAA chapter, who walked them around the Fair and helped the Governor’s security people shoo flies away. It was, reportedly, a delightful reunion; the Governor and his rare book-selling friend had not seen each other for thirty-five years.

I met Arnold in 1975, before he became SCHWARZENEGGER! and was known merely as The Austrian Oak, the most successful bodybuilder in the sport's history, and on the cusp of fame with the general public; Pumping Iron, the acclaimed documentary based upon Charles Gaines' and George Butler's book of the same name, would soon be released (1977) and introduce the world at large to the large world’s superstar in all his glory.

Andy Meisler, a friend and free-lance journalist, was in L.A. on assignment for Sports Illustrated to write a profile of Arnold, who was training for the Mr. Olympia contest, bodybuilding’s top crown. It would become Arnold’s sixth, of seven, wins.

Andy, Kate "The Great" Schmidt - the 2-time Olympic bronze medalist in women’s javelin and world record holder whose American record still stands thirty-three years after she speared it - and I, an amateur boxer with Olympian fantasies, met Arnold at Gold’s Gym - the original, and one and only, on Pacific Avenue in Venice.

The Governor and his friend were, at one point, observed in heated discussion. Though it was unclear exactly what was said and who said it, the words “girly calves” were overheard.

Arnold was in the midst of his workout, cranking out seated lat-rows with the entire weight stack as resistance. He was focused, subdued, and intense. He perspired charisma. Warm introductions were exchanged, and he returned to work, finishing up his morning routine (he worked in split sessions, morning and afternoon). The four of us then walked down to The Brown Bagger, a small restaurant on Washington Street near the beach in Venice, now long gone.

While Arnold ate the entire menu (or so it seemed) we talked and kibbitzed. Arnold, just a few years older than us, was relaxed, centered, low-key, and completely at ease. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not a loud, boastful individual; he doesn't need to be. He asked each of us about ourselves and what we were doing. Kate’s Olympian experience and bronze from 1972 (the bronze in ‘76 on the horizon) and my sport of choice piqued his interest and respect. As I recall, he and I got along very well; Arnold did not have to assume the role of pysche-out king as he customarily did with friends and acquaintances who were also competitors. He had an easy smile and laugh, and was very sharp. He answered Andy’s questions thoughtfully and without cliche. He was supremely confident but not obnoxious; he handled himself well and was charming. It was impossible to not like him.

What was most impressive? He was, if not intellectual, clearly very intelligent. At this early stage of his life, before he was earning serious money as an actor, he, through bodybuilding product endorsements, had earned enough and was frugal enough to buy property in Santa Monica before its redevelopment and renaissance along Main Street. He was destined, through hard work and well-developed business smarts, to become wealthy no matter what he later did.

He never knew during our meeting that surrounding my tibias were the greatest set of gastrocnemius, soleus and peroneus muscles to ever grace a man’s lower legs, calves strictly Grade-A, prime milk-fed veal. In an otherwise flawless bodybuilding physique, calves were always Arnold’s weak point and his posing angles tended to mask or downplay the deficit south of patellas, north of tarsals.

No, he never knew that not one but two two former Mr. America and Mr. Universe title-holders, Dennis Tinerino and Reg Lewis had, independently of each other, declared that I was an awe-inspiring Mr. Universe - from the knees down.

The Governor and his friend, near blows, were parted by the First Lady who suggested that they retire to the nearest mens room to settle the argument. She did not wish to see the man she loved and the man she recently spurned resort to physical conflict.

Last year, while cataloging a small archive of Dr. Doolittle author, Hugh Lofting, I came across a few letters written in 1938 to the novelist and his publisher by the president of Yale University’s Dr. Doolittle Club, Sargent Shriver. Thinking that she might enjoy learning of the existence of these letters I wrote a note to the First Lady detailing my find and enclosing copies of them. I received a very warm reply thanking me, my soft sales pitch, apparently, so soft, subtle and nuanced it was completely missed.

The two men entered the men’s room on the California level of the Century Plaza hotel, where the Book Fair was in progress. With armed security posted at the door, the men’s privacy was assured. Fortunately, however, a member of Book Patrol’s intelligence unit had previously installed bugs in the bathroom in the hope of collecting rare book gossip.

A year later, my Olympics and otherwise boxing dreams down for the count, I was at loose ends, working in a health club and had begun to seriously lift weights. So, WTF, I decided to do some competitive bodybuilding. In the 1976 Jr. Mr. Southern California contest, held at the Glendale Civic Auditorium, I did not win, place or show in this entry-level affair; compared to everyone else (the Weider brothers had thrown in a few ringers to qualify for the upcoming Mr. America competition), I looked like dental floss with legs. But oh, my calves! During the legs pose-down amongst the finishers, I was called out to pose as the standard by which their lower legs would be judged. It was a magic moment, my calves swollen with pride. The rest of me just felt silly.

Around six months later, I ran into a guy who’d competed in a few bodybuilding contests and was totally into it. I told him my monster, highly defined and cut-up calves story. Turns out, he had attended the contest.

“Jeez,” he said. “You’re the one, the guy with the Martian calves. A few of us talked about 'em afterward for a couple of days. Boggling. From another world."

“For months and months I heard the stories but I had no idea that it was you everybody was talking about. I thought: urban legend! What did you do, model for Grey when he was writing his Anatomy? Mein Gott, such long insertions and bulk! And cut like diamonds, the definition of definition! How did you do it?”

“Arnold, Arnold, Arnold. Still competitive after all these years. Relax, we’re both long past our prime.”

“But I have to know, I have to know!”

“Okay. One, my DNA was generous in that department. Two, as you well know, you have to hit the calves hard to get them to respond, super-high reps. It was the boxing, all the running, fast, up on my toes, and rope-skipping, again, up on my toes. That’s the secret. But if, like you, there’s not much to work with, all the running and rope-skipping in world won’t turn your calves into blue-ribbon Holsteins.”

“I’m crushed.”

“Deal with it, buddy. Hopefully, better than with the California legislature.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Hasta la vista, baby. Say goodbye to Maria for me; you're the luckiest man on the planet.”

“Tell me.”

If you go down the list of Sports Illustrated’s Top 100 Sports Books of All Time you will see books by Norman Mailer, Paul Gallico, Philip Roth, Budd Schulberg, Jimmy Breslin, Grantland Rice, Thomas Hauser, and Joe McGinnis, amongst other great American writers on sports or otherwise.

Their books are ranked below Arnold’s Education of a Bodybuilder (Simon and Schuster, 1977), a textbook on mental discipline and toughness, deep focus, concentration, goal-setting and achievement. It is only nominally about bodybuilding. Fine copies of the first edition, first printing in hardcover in like dust jacket are not easy to find. There are a few signed copies of the trade paperback and hardcover but they are either later printings or have condition issues.

Pumping Iron by Charles Gaines and George Butler (Simon and Schuster, 1974) was the book that brought bodybuilding out of the shadows and Arnold into the limelight. The most desirable copy to collect would be, presuming it exists, Arnold’s personal copy inscribed by Gaines and Butler. Copies formerly owned by strangers but signed by the authors are fetching up to $500. The movie (1977) based upon the book brought Arnold to wide public notice.


Many moviegoers are likely unaware that after the embarrassing Hercules in New York (aka Hercules Goes Bananas, 1970) and before he became an action- movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared in a truly excellent film directed by the great Bob Rafelson, Stay Hungry (1976), based upon Charles Gaines' novel (1972). Though not the star of the film, it pivots on him. It is a quiet, gently confident and assured performance. While he may have later left his acting chops in the dressing-room trailer, in Stay Hungry Arnold acts, and does so with graceful ease. It remains his best performance.


The most desirable copy of Pumping Iron currently being offered is a very good copy of the trade paperback edition signed by the authors, Arnold, and every single member of the cast, including Jeff Bridges and Sally Field. The asking price is $695.

“One last thing, Steve.”

“Anything, Arnold.”

“Please don’t tell anyone about this. I have a reputation to maintain.”

“Your secret’s safe with me. Your puny calves shall remain hidden beneath your pants.”

But hey, my closest friend in the world who I only met once for a few of hours thirty-five years ago, gave me the bum's rush when I invited him to open the 43d California International Antiquarian Book Fair. Is that any way to treat an old, dear friend?

The knee socks are off.

Eat your heart out, Governor Schwarzenegger. From 1975 - c. 1976 3/4 I was Mr. Universe - from the knees down. And you? Girly calves!

Observe short gastrocnemius muscles (r),
and calves too small in proportion to thighs and torso (l).

It should be noted that while I was massive below the knees I was, by bodybuilding standards, missing above them, three pumped and plumped toothpicks providing the only evidence of my arms' and torso's existence.

Sic transit gloria muscle. Et tu, Guv?

Last Chance For Planned Parenthood + 40 Tons of Books

The 35th annual Planned Parenthood Book Sale is currently in progress at the Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara, California. Beginning on September 16, 2009, it will continue through this Sunday, September 27th.

The Planned Parenthood Book Sale has now become a major happy hunting ground for book collectors and dealers. Opening day found a dozen book lovers lined up at 8AM; by the time the doors opened at 5PM collectors had reproduced into the hundreds and descended upon the collectible books display tables like starving neonates in search of mother’s milk. Think a Macy’s ladies undergarment sale with frenzied shoppers going through the merchandise as if in a battle royal, life and death, free-for-all.

“These are the compulsive bibliophiles and dealers,” sale chair Peggy Nicholson said of the opening night crowd. “When you get to check out at 9 o’clock you practically have to grab them by the neck and move them out.”

Nicholson said the sale, a fundraiser for local chapters of Planned Parenthood, grows, by book volume, every year. Last year, she said the sale grossed $123,908, the exact same amount to the dollar that it made in 2007. On opening night, the sale typically brings in around $23,000.

Volunteers start cataloguing and pricing the books in early January. Nicholson said so many books are donated at the organization’s warehouse, 721 E. Gutierrez St., that volunteers consistently work two days a week through September preparing for the sale.

Moving the 40 tons of books to Warren Hall this year required three moving trucks, and Nicholson said volunteers spent two days unpacking.

Collectors and dealers come from all over California to sift through the selection of books which, in a stroke merchandising genius, are replenished daily with fresh material, thereby keeping serious book stalkers busy for the entire length of the fair and not just on opening night to cherry-pick the ripest fruit.

This is not a laid back book fair. It’s a ten-day bustle n’ hustle for books and tranquility takes a holiday until buyers get home, sit back and bathe in the warmth of new acquisitions.

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