The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes

By Tim Lucas

The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes is not just a book about Roger Corman and an outstanding cast of familiar and funny supporting characters. It's a novel about Hollywood when it stood poised between the collapse of the old studio system and the rise of the new independent film movement, a monumental change for which Corman was largely responsible. It's also a romantic story about finding the courage to reshape your own world and—perhaps most importantly—about the risks and challenges artists must sometimes face if they want to advance to the next plateau.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786369611

Book preview

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Roger Corman, Julie Corman and Frances Doel, all of whom were encouraging of this project and generous with their time and reminiscences; Joe Dante and Elizabeth Stanley, for believing in this project since Day One; my fellow screenwriters Charlie Largent, Michael Almereyda, and James Robison, each of whom contributed something special to this story’s humor, tone, and overall make-up; my agent Judy Coppage for her years of advice, diligence, patience and tolerance; Neil Snowdon and Pete & Nicky Crowther for providing this book with such a warm and loving home; and (as ever) Donna Lucas, my wife and most meticulous proofreader, who has walked beside me each and every day of this journey.

As the saying goes, What a long, strange trip it’s been.

T. L.

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For Roger, the real one.

Artist. Problem-solver. And a gentleman.

You are about to be involved in a most unusual reading experience.

This novel deals with the hallucinogenic drug LSD and the man who dared to make the first dramatic motion picture about this controversial subject.

While the principal characters are based with affection on real people, and the story has been informed by published interviews and accounts, what follows is (make no mistake) a novel—a work of fiction.

Therefore, it should at all times be kept in mind by the reader that, while the main points of the story are indeed factual, what binds these points together is largely imaginary.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

—Edgar Allan Poe

You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

—Timothy Leary

CHAPTER 1

NOVEMBER 1966

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SUSAN FONDA, NÉE BREWER, strolled out of the upstairs bathroom into the adjoining bedroom of her Beverly Hills home. Freshly showered, she was garbed in a lightweight paisley caftan as she wrapped a tangerine towel around her long, wet hair, turban-style.

Her husband Peter was—unusually—exactly as she had left him about 20 minutes earlier, exactly as he had been when she first entered their bedroom an hour or so prior. Shirtless and barefoot, he was stretched out on the bed, half-sitting, his back supported by luxuriant pillows, his expression completely absorbed. Not because he had taken mushrooms or any other sort of hallucinogen; there was a spent roach in the bedside ashtray, but hardly any ash.

No, he was deeply engrossed in a film script messengered to their door earlier that day.

Peter was a white-noise kind of guy. He was reading with the radio on—KHJ, Boss Radio. It was just past the top of the hour and a brief news report was in progress: Estimates of Viet Cong deaths run to 2,000 for the week, with new fronts breaking along the Laotian and Cambodian borders where Americans, as has been repeatedly emphasized, are serving in a non-combat and advisory role only.

Click.

Susan thought Peter might object to her turning the radio off, but he was somewhere else entirely. She crept into bed beside him, curled up and watched him read the last few pages in curious silence, waiting to be noticed.

As Peter read the closing words of the script’s last printed page, she saw his lips part, his jaw drop slack in awe and disbelief. He closed the bound manuscript with something like solemnity.

I can’t believe you finished it, she said, mildly impressed. You never finish a script.

To her surprise, a tear formed and spilled helplessly from his eye. Oh, Jesus, he managed, half-gasp, half-chuckle. Jesus H. Christ.

Baby, are you crying?

Peter felt almost paralyzed by the emotions dropped on him, detonating within him from what he’d just read. Everything he thought he knew about the business in which he made his living, everything he thought he knew about the world, particularly the innate limitations available to artistic expression, had suddenly and irrevocably changed. He wiped his cheek dry.

I guess I am, he smiled, a bit self-consciously, embarrassed to be seen.

Peter, what’s wrong?

Nothing. That’s what’s so groovy! It’s like...now everything’s alright. This script...is such a mind-fuck. It’s so...freaking beautiful. You have no idea...

Then tell me, she said, curling up to him. What’s it called?

"The Trip."

Road picture?

No, Susie Bear. It’s about a man who takes acid. Then he held up his hand, as though to call a halt to time itself. "No, it’s really about...It’s really about acid itself."

Susan couldn’t help tensing up a bit. She wasn’t really into the drug scene. When she first heard of lysergic acid diethylamide, it wasn’t considered in the same light as grass or cocaine; it wasn’t seen as recreational. Though perfectly legal, it was a controlled substance accessed by people for use in sessions under the close supervision of doctors of psychiatric medicine. Then it became a kind of recreational drug, which led to its being declared illegal—initially in Nevada and California state.

She had never taken LSD, as people were now calling it. She knew that Peter had some experience of it; he had, in fact, taken it several times—initially in 1965, and more recently as a means of coping with the loss of his best friend, Stormy—Eugene Stormy McDonald III, that is—the heir to the Zenith Radio fortune, who had taken his own life with a shotgun almost two years earlier in 1965. Stormy’s death, and the violence of it, had reopened ripples in time, linking it to the 1960 overdose of his beloved Bridget Hayward (for whom they had named their daughter) and his mother’s own suicide when he was only 10 years old. All this explained why, when Peter met The Beatles and took acid with them, he told John Lennon I know what it’s like to be dead. John hadn’t been ready to know that, and used Beatle clout to have him shown the door.

Susan hadn’t felt any need to use the drug to explore herself, but she had seen at close hand how it had helped Peter. It had made him a less neurotic, more self-accepting man. He had become less armored at home among his loved ones, more confident and assured in business, someone who was substantially more than just Henry’s son. He didn’t always see this because, when he looked at his dad, he saw something of himself and also something of Americana.

I dig my father. I wish he could open his eyes and dig me.

Susan intuited that the best thing she could do was to be available to Peter, to inhabit this moment with him. So she pressed him once again, gently: Tell me more.

It’s incredible. There’s one scene that contains something like 500 individual shots. He describes every one, and they’re all right, all lucid, all...kinda inevitable, you know? Here, let me find it.

Peter rifled eagerly through the Xeroxed pages, near-crazed with gratification.

The pages aren’t even numbered; it’s all so stream of consciousness. Wait, here it is. Now dig this...

As Susan listened attentively, Peter rattled off an incoherent sequence of images: funeral man in white makeup, bouncing acorns, a blue spinning pinwheel, birds feeding, horses galloping along the beach, Buddha, a buffalo head nickel, bouquet of flowers, three monsters, spilling jewels.

Guess you had to be there, thought Susan...

Then, alerted by an emotion she seldom heard in his voice, maybe only that first time he held their child, she looked up from the printed page to her husband’s face and saw another tear forming, pulsing over the curvature of his eye. She watched as it bulged, glittered, and broke over his lashes to glide through the stubble on his cheek.

Sounds like you might want to do this one, she said.

He looked at her like she’d just made the understatement of the century.

"Want to do it? Susie Bear, I have to do it. This isn’t some bullshit part like Tammy and the Schmuckface. This is going to be the most important film ever made in North America. Maybe anywhere."

Just like that, she was convinced. She knew he wasn’t joking.

He continued: I can’t believe that I—of all people—could be fortunate enough to be asked to star in this movie.

Who wrote it? she asked.

Jesus. For half a second, Susan almost mistook his exclamation for his answer—but then Peter added, I didn’t even look!

Peter turned the script over and looked at the cover page. It was stamped Property of The Corman Company.

Fuck me, he thought. How they had ever lucked into this brilliance, he had no idea.

Then he saw the byline.

Jack Nicholson.

Jack Nicholson? she exclaimed.

Peter frowned. The name rang a dim bell.

Oh, you remember! We’ve met him, Susan said brightly.

Where?

I don’t remember, some opening or party. He’s an actor. I didn’t know he was a writer.

If he’s an actor, why can’t I place him?

Maybe he hasn’t made anything notable. Just Corman stuff, right?

"Susie Bear, I’m doing Corman stuff."

Yeah, but I think he’s been doing it for 10 years. If he hasn’t made it yet...

He was made for nobler things, Peter said. He slapped the face of the screenplay in his lap. He needs to know.

With that pronouncement, he scooted to the foot of the bed and started putting on his socks and boots.

Where are you going!?

I’ve got to tell him.

You mean right now?

You don’t understand, Susie Bear. A mind this sensitive...He could be despairing. I’ve got to find him and tell him.

Do you know where to find him?

Peter halted in his tracks. No.

Susan slipped off the bed. Let me make a few calls. I hear he’s quite the ladies’ man.

It only took one. Susan returned fairly quickly with the information Peter needed: I called Luana. It seems they’re old pals. He’s going through a divorce, crashing over at Harry Dean Stanton’s place.

She saw her husband standing before her, all 6' 2" of him fully outfitted and primed for night flight, looking much like the character he’d just played in Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels—leather jacket, tinted aviator glasses, skinny black leather trousers with racing stripes, Cuban heels.

Peter Fonda. The rock star who needed no guitar.

Love you, Susie Bear, he grinned, kissing her cheek. Now if I can only find my keys.

Downstairs, a three-year-old girl sat cross-legged in front of a television console, watching an old black-and-white movie. Peter ambled down the flight of stairs behind her, the heels of his boots making a familiar tattoo on its cascade of Spanish tiles.

Hey, Bridge? You seen Daddy’s chopper keys?

The child barely reacted.

Did you check your pockets? Susan called down from upstairs.

Sure enough: there they were. As he was about to head out the front door, Peter took notice of the movie his daughter was watching: John Ford’s My Darling Clementine. He walked over and scrunched down next to her.

Know who that is? he asked, pointing at a man on the screen.

You?

Peter smiled philosophically, as though his daughter had seen through his face to a wish cherished somewhere deep behind it.

Naw, he confessed. That’s Henry. That’s Gramps.

As one Fonda grabbed his saddle and swung onto his horse, outside—under the stars, amid the sounds of tree frogs and distant traffic—another Fonda swung onto his Harley, jammed in its key, engaged the engine, and raised heavy metal thunder. Then he rolled down the driveway to claim the open road as his own.

CHAPTER 2

JUNE 1966

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SUNSET BOULEVARD IS A SNAKE of winding asphalt that spans an impressive 21.75 miles, from Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles to Pacific Coast Highway in the Palisades. The Sunset Strip (as its mile-and-a-half stretch through West Hollywood is popularly known) has always been synonymous with where the action is and—perhaps more importantly—where it’s going to be. The word street seems unworthy of such a phenomenological magnet but, taking its myriad stories into account, it is a street—one where many futures have been made. Where else can teenage hitchhikers stand, with their thumb out, get picked up, and sign major studio contracts before they set foot on the sidewalk again?

It is also where the action has always been, the home turf to all the great Hollywood supper clubs—Ciro’s, the Mocambo, Dino’s Lounge, the Trocadero and Moulin Rouge—not the mention that notorious pied-à-terre of Hollywood royalty, the Chateau Marmont Hotel.

In the 1940s and ’50s, as the Brylcreemed and bouffanted habitués of all those swank martini clubs began to be lured across the desert by the greener felt of the gaming tables in freshly built Las Vegas, the Strip entered a period of decline. This made it available to change—extreme change—a premonition, if you will, of what was about to take hold of the motion picture business that built this city on the dust of fool’s gold. It was around this time that the city’s Baby Boomers first stepped up to the plate, demanding their inheritance. The local scene began to metamorphose in curious response to their desires.

In the early 1960s, as KRLA blasted the happy sounds of The Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, their lyrics name-checking all the local landmarks from Colorado Boulevard to Doheny Drive, the Strip embarked on its own advent into modern mythology. It became the epicenter of endless summer; a place for cruising, for flexing the wings that were the birthright of the native Angeleno, for driving with the top down and feeling as one with all the sun and flesh and fame that Los Angeles, California had to offer. It became the city’s great equalizer, its demilitarized zone, its Via Veneto.

New worlds of diversion appeared—the Whisky a Go Go, where the best local and out-of-town bands played and sometimes recorded live; The Body Shop, where you could see bosomy Russ Meyer starlets twirl their tassels up close and in person; Jay Ward Productions, with its Bullwinkle Moose statue on permanent outdoor display; and Tower Records, where you could shop for new music alongside the same people who were recording it. As tartar began to build up on the Hollywood smile of this new decade, it was no longer just the Strip. It became a scene—a fluorescent, bubbling Petrie dish of advertising for sights, sounds and styles, stacked wall-to-wall with neon signs and billboards trumpeting all that which had yet to come; the new movies and albums, the clothes and TV shows that the rest of the country (indeed, the rest of the world) would be talking about in the months ahead, for the year to come. Contrary to its name, Sunset was actually where the sun rose—on the American dream.

Depending on where you lived and how long you had lived there, the Sunset Strip might seem akin to the trenches that are sometimes dug and filled with gasoline by property owners to discourage the influx of fire ants, because the Strip also divided the most important section of the city. Below the Strip were the hotels and the cheaper properties, those without views, the refashioned flop houses where tourists stayed and wannabes paid too much rent for the privilege of an address they didn’t mind leaving with casting agents as their own. Above the Strip were the Hollywood hills, much too steep to be walked on foot, where were piled the lavish homes of most everyone who divided their time between fantasy and reality in the worlds of film and television.

Come the Summer of 1966, a similar dividing line began to arise between the Hollywood old guard and its burgeoning avant-garde: the young, the long-haired, the colorfully and flowerfully-dressed. Such folk were hooked on the siren songs being sent out into the night air from Whisky a Go Go, the Troubadour, Pandora’s Box, the Galaxy, the Kaleidoscope, Sneaky Pete’s, and all the rest. It wasn’t just the new establishments, either. Even Ciro’s—struggling to stay open with their diminishing clientele—reluctantly kissed their old dress code goodbye and booked The Byrds.

The old guard may have taken to spending their weekends in Vegas but this didn’t mean they had no objection to the unwashed kids moving in and taking over their old stomping grounds. It was still their Strip, after all. It wasn’t the same as it had been, back in the day when Gazzari’s had been Sherry’s Restaurant, the joint where gangster Mickey Cohen got whacked in 1948, so the police were asked to start taking an interest in the vagrant element. Hippies started getting hassled, a few dozen took beatings regardless of gender. Ten o’clock curfews were introduced to discourage the 24-hour costume parties that had started taking place up and down the main drag.

The city may have been in flux but one beautiful thing about it remained constant: the billboards decorating its twists and turns with advertisements for the latest bumper crop of homegrown product. To Roger Corman’s eyes, they were a glimpse into the future; they were science fiction. After all, it was this product and this product only that prepared not only Los Angeles