Coffee House Positano: A Bohemian Oasis in Malibu, 1957–1962

By Jay Ruby

This unique auto-ethnographic study of life at the Coffee House Positano—a Bohemian coffee house in Malibu, California—during the late 1950s and early 1960s is a combination of historical reconstruction and personal memoir. An ebook consisting of a collection of memories expressed through multiple formats—text, image, audio, and video—it describes in illuminating detail the great range of people who frequented Positano and the activities that took place there over its short but influential existence.

As an ethnographer analyzing his own culture, author Jay Ruby uses a unique ethnographic method known as “studying sideways.” He combines the exploration of self and others with the theoretical framework of anthropology to provide deep insight into the counterculture of late 1950s and early 1960s America. He shares his connection to Positano, where he lived and worked from 1957 to 1959 and again in 1963, and reflects on Positano in the context of US counterculture and the greater role of countercultures in society.

This intimate and significant work will be of interest to anthropologists as well as scholars and the general reader interested in California history, Beat culture, and countercultural movements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Feb 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781607322726

Book preview

Coffee House Positano

A Bohemian Oasis in Malibu, 1957–1962

Jay Ruby

The sign that hung at the entrance to the coffee house by the patio.

University Press of Colorado

Boulder

Dedication

Mike Dutton (left) seldom waited tables, but this exception makes for a good publicity shot.

Lorees Dutton’s (right) ambition was to be a writer. Between being a mother of two and co-owner of Positano, she seldom got the chance.

To Mike and Lorees Dutton, co-owners of Coffee House Positano. They changed my life and made this whole thing possible.

Table of Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

About Methods

Preface

Introduction

A Brief History of the Ownership of the Property

Mike and Lorees Dutton

Coffee House Positano

Positano’s Menu

Activities

Who Came to Positano?

Memories of Positano

Positano and Other Coffee Houses a—Comparison

Some Theoretical Musings and Non-Conclusions

One Thing Ends and Another Begins

Published References

About the Author

Appendix: Bulletins

References

Copyright

Acknowledgments

It was with the assistance and encouragement of Michael and Winston Dutton, the sons of Mike and Lorees, that I started this work. They provided photographs, documents, leads to other people, and their memories. Many, many other people were open and giving of their time and memories. I have already thanked them in person. I now give them collective thanks.

I wish to thank the many people who purchased items from me through Ebay and Amazon. While they had no idea what they were doing, they financed my research when the various funding agencies I applied to did not.

I do not know the names of most of the photographers whose work I used here, even though I made a good-faith effort to find them. Should anyone recognize an image of theirs, please let me know and I will do my best to correct this oversight. Finally, I especially thank Darrin Pratt, director of the University Press of Colorado, for having the vision and courage to take a chance.

Todd Shirk Computer Specialty designed the revised website.

Back to home

About Methods

Doing Yard Work and Studying Sideways

This work is a bit unusual in that few anthropologists study educated, comfortably upper-middle-class people in the Western world who are involved in the arts and humanities. There is a tradition of social science studies of the middle class, beginning with C. Wright Mills’s White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), but I find this literature not relevant to a study of the kinds of people who frequented Positano and have therefore decided not to discuss these works. Hortence Powdermaker’s

Hollywood: The Dream Factory (1950) is a groundbreaking study of the Hollywood studios. While some of the people Powdermaker studied were somewhat similar to those who frequented Positano, again I found little in her work that was useful to my study. More recently, Sheri Ortner, UCLA, and Rachel Heiman, the New School, have pioneered anthropological studies of the upper middle class. However, Heiman’s Rugged Entitlement: Driving after Class in an American Suburb is still in press, and Ortner’s study of Hollywood is a work in progress. Sadly, I found nothing useful with which to compare the culture of Positano.

In her seminal essay Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained from Studying Up, Laura Nader admonishes anthropologists to explore US society, in particular the middle and upper classes, in terms of increasing our knowledge of the processes whereby power and responsibility are exercised in the United States (1972, 284). Her emphasis is clearly on what George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1999) called anthropology as cultural critique. In passing, Nader uses the term studying sideways without elaborating on what she means. I have chosen to employ the phrase in a less political way to describe my research here. By studying sideways, I mean research in which the researcher is culturally similar to those being researched.

Most anthropologists study downward; that is, they study people who are in some way disadvantaged economically, politically, and socially. In general, most social scientists study people who in some way suffer from these problems. To study sideways is to study people who are similar to the researcher economically and who do not suffer from any of these problems. The subjects of this work are as educated and culturally sophisticated as the researcher and remain understudied by social scientists.

The people who came to Positano as customers or staff to whom I was able to talk were able to take an active part in the gathering of information and even in its analysis. They understood what an ethnography is and could focus their memories on things socially relevant.

The initial reason for doing this research was to explore the profound effects living in this place had on my development. For starters, I married the barista. After the coffee house closed, I returned with my family and lived there one additional year with Lorees Yerby Dutton, the co-owner, and her children. I do not believe it is possible to separate the personal from the professional. Like many others, I am using this ethnographic study to also explore myself and my life. I cannot honestly separate Jay Ruby’s life at Positano from an ethnographic analysis of Coffee House Positano. I came to Positano a relatively naive, unworldly young midwestern WASP. During the time I was there, a world of good wine, gourmet food, hip literature, jazz, avant-garde theater, poetry, and art first appeared to me. I got to drive Mike’s MG-TC sports car instead of the Detroit clunkers I was used to. I grew up sexually and began a journey into experimentation with mind-altering substances.

It is with this knowledge that I started the study. I interrogated myself first; as I spoke to others who knew the place, I continued to recall more and more as my memory was challenged by their memories. I established a baseline of knowledge and proceeded from there. I did this as an anthropologist so my exploration of self and others was infused with the theoretical framework of my profession.

The Duttons who ran Positano had two children, Michael and Winston. When we all lived at the coffee house, I often babysat them as I got up early to clean the place. Their parents could not mind them, since they had to close the coffee house in the wee hours of the morning. I contacted Michael and Winston, now adults, and explained my plans. They were wonderfully supportive and helpful. They shared photographs, menus, bulletins, and other invaluable materials and memories. They put me in touch with others and, most important, they explained what happened to Positano when it closed. It was at this point that I learned that Jerry Ziegman, a scriptwriter from Peyton Place, became the manager of the property after Positano closed and turned it into an arts community that lasted until everything burned down in 1993. The research was then expanded into something much larger than I could have imagined. This work concentrates exclusively on Positano; when completed and published, a second part of the study will be devoted to the arts community. It is titled The Property: Malibu’s Other Colony

.

Because of Michael and Winston, I was able to interview a number of people who either worked at Positano or were customers. I missed talking to important people like Mary Madden, Lorees’s cousin, or the painter Ed Pagac. For them, the past is the past, and they do not wish to revisit it. As frustrating as this was since they had knowledge I lacked, I had no choice but to respect their privacy.

Because Positano ceased to exist a half century ago, the normal methods of participant-observation could not be employed. In some ways, this study resembles the early work done by anthropologists trying to understand Native American culture. Pioneers like Robert Lowie and Alfred Kroeber found the oldest living members of a group and asked them to reconstruct what life was like when the culture was vibrant and alive. While it would be accurate to call this work a kind of memory culture study or salvage ethnography, it differs significantly from these earlier works because the natives in this study spoke the same language and shared the same culture as the researcher. So the difficult task of understanding the cultural differences between subjects and researcher did not exist in this case.

An anthropological study in the digital age of affluent, well-educated people means that some of the interactions between researcher and subject were conducted electronically. When I was just beginning and had sufficient material, I developed a website that was neither complete nor well designed but that served its purpose—to let people know of my research and invite them to contact me. I also created a Facebook page. Perhaps a dozen or so people responded to this information. In that way, I obtained more interviews and more contacts. Email was an essential way to stay in touch. I asked new questions when they arose and could request photographs of other materials that could be sent via the Internet. In a real sense, email has erased the line between the field and home.

I found that a number of people who went to Positano later became part of the arts community. They form an essential link between the coffee house and their community. For example, Bill Wallace was one of the last of the Positano waiters, and he became close friends with Mike Dutton. When Mike and Lorees divorced and Mike moved into one of the cottages on the property, Bill moved his school bus home near the cottage to be some comfort to Mike. In addition, Bill and his brother, Peter, also a Positano regular, were responsible for one family, the Farrows, moving to the property. There are other examples of the way Positano melded into the next phase of this property.

As the world changes, anthropological field methods must also. Websites, email communication, Facebook pages, and other yet-to-be-invented electronic devices are becoming commonplace for ethnographers. The romantic fantasy of the researcher trekking through the jungle to some remote village where all communication is face to face and limited by vast linguistic barriers is over.

Doing Yard Work and Ethnographic Friends

For most of its existence, anthropology has concentrated its attention on the exotic other while sociologists have examined the oppressed, pathological, and other problematic aspects of Western culture. Only a few social scientists have followed Laura Nader’s admonition to study sideways (1979)—that is, to do ethnographies of US cultures—and even fewer have looked at the educated middle class. When they do, it is almost always a study of some sort of malfunction like heroin addiction among suburban teenagers. It seems to be assumed that attempting to study people who closely resemble the researcher presents insurmountable problems of subjectivity. I long ago rejected the validity of the objective-subjective continuum and other outmoded remnants of Positivism and have argued for an openly engaged, reflexive approach to doing ethnography.

Since the late 1990s, I have been conducting research that combines the autobiographical with the ethnographic. While I dislike the term autoethnography, for reasons explained elsewhere, it best describes this work. I prefer reflexive

instead, as I have been an advocate and practitioner of this idea for decades (Ruby 1980

). I make no attempt to separate explorations of self with investigations of the social world. I am convinced that if I wish to gain an understanding of US cultures, I will have to do so through my own life and experiences. In some sense this work is a logical extension of my study of my hometown, Oak Park, Illinois—see "Oak Park Stories

". I lived and worked at Positano. I continued a social relationship with some of the people from Positano long after it closed.

In the late 1990s I conducted ethnographic studies of Oak Park, Illinois. As Karl Heider once said, I was doing yard work instead of the fieldwork most anthropologists do. I started looking at the community at first because I wanted to gain some understanding of who I had become by looking back at my childhood—that is the auto part of the ethnography. In this process, I discovered something quite extraordinary. The place I knew growing up as a conservative, wealthy, homogeneous if not racist, very straight if not homophobic, Republican suburb had transformed itself into one of the most successfully integrated places in the United States. I was amazed and dumbfounded. Oak Park actually planned its integration. Today it is a successful community with a population that is about 30 percent African American. They have distributed themselves throughout the community rather than creating a segregated neighborhood like those found in Evanston, Illinois, or Shaker Heights, Ohio. In addition, a politically active gay community has emerged.

Among the advantages of studying an educated community is residents’ ability to provide critical and recurring feedback. I created a website/blog (http://astro.temple.edu/~ruby/opp/

) in which I placed periodic updates on my research and maintained an email listserv. I received regular comments, criticisms, and suggestions while I was doing the yard work that continued when I returned home. I was able to interact with the residents more as colleagues than as subjects.

One further consequence of doing this kind of work is that one frequently develops friendships with people from the community that last beyond the study. As a consequence of my research, I produced three CD-ROM multimedia family portraits. One was of a WASP family who lived in the village for four generations. I went to high school with the matriarch’s daughter, and she and her husband became social friends. We went to museums and restaurants, had each other over for dinners and holidays. Her husband, Bob, and I became close friends. While it has been over a decade since the study was completed, we remain close—speaking on the phone weekly and visiting each other. The relationship is incredibly complex. We share a lot of common interests, as all friends do, but he is also a window into the place I studied and, of course, to my hometown. I will continue to remain interested and informed about the place for the rest of my life.

My current research continues my exploration of both self and US culture. As I discuss elsewhere, I moved to Positano in 1957 and lived there until 1959. I worked as the dishwasher and then the janitor and discovered a way of life I had dreamed about but never participated in. During those two years, I developed into the person I am today in terms of my interests in counterculture, exotic food, alternative literature, music, art, and similar topics. I also met and married my wife.

A few years ago, I started writing autobiographical vignettes. I intended to write a few hundred words about my time at Positano. To my amazement, I could find almost nothing when I Googled the name. An article on the revival of coffeehouses in Los Angeles called Positano mysterious (Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1990). The place, people, and memories were about to disappear. So I decided to expand my original intent and undertake another autobiographical ethnography. While I did not develop any close friendships this time, I did renew old relationships with people who were patrons, waiters, and waitresses. I located Michael and Winston Dutton, the now middle-aged children of the owners of Positano.

Michael Dutton informed me that after Positano closed in 1962, Jerry Ziegman convinced the New York investment company that owned the property where the coffee house had been located to allow him to be the property manager and to rent out spaces in the various buildings to people involved in the arts. For more than thirty years, Ziegman created an unparalleled arts community in which over fifty people lived—some for several decades. It