DEEP STATE Laurel Canyon

[Buick Electra]

(Part 18 - Post 2 of 3)

Within the walls of that singularly odd Hollywood Hills home, which lies about three miles due east of the mouth of Laurel Canyon, Tamar talks of how she “often ‘uncomfortably’ posed nude … for ‘dirty-old-man’ Man Ray and had once wriggled free from a predatory John Huston.” Her own father, not so shockingly, “had committed incest with her. ‘When I was 11, my father taught me to perform oral sex on him.’” Her father also “plied her with erotic books, grooming her for what he touted as their transcendent union,” and freely shared her with his wealthy and influential friends.

“To the girl’s horror, she became pregnant” at the tender age of fourteen – with her father’s child. “To her greater horror, she says, ‘my father wanted me to have his baby.’” A friend, nevertheless, took her to get an abortion. Dr. George was so incensed that, according to Tamar, he “struck her on the head with his pistol,” prompting her step-mother (who also happened to be John Huston’s ex-wife) to assist her in going into hiding.

Dr. George Hodel was arrested and charged with, among other things, offering his young daughter to several friends at an orgy. The sensational 1949 incest trial featured a witness who took the stand to describe being hypnotized by Hodel at a party; she also claimed that she had witnessed him attempt to hypnotize other young women.

Allegations that the rich and powerful were dabbling in incest, hypnotism/mind control, pedophilic orgies, and Luciferian philosophies must surely have been shocking to Angelenos in the 1940s, as they would still be to most Americans today, but to these jaded eyes and ears, it just sounds like business as usual. Also sounding like business as usual is that Tamar was roundly vilified by both the press and the defense team (led by Jerry Giesler), and Dr. George Hodel was acquitted.

Far more shocking even than all of that is the then-unknown fact that, even while Hodel was standing trial on the sensational charges, he was, and still is today, a prime suspect in the Black Dahlia murder case! There have been, of course, numerous suspects identified in the case, including actor/director Orson Welles. But George Hodel does seem to be a much more likely suspect than most of those who have been identified. And his possible guilt, needless to say, does not exclude others from likely complicity as well. The mistake that virtually all investigators of this case have made is assuming that there is only one culprit.

The most likely scenario is that Hodel committed the crime in conjunction with various others in his pedophilic, Luciferian social circle. Man Ray, for example, is a compelling suspect, given that the posing of Ms. Short’s body appears to mimic The Minotaur, one of his better-known photographs. Man Ray, by the way, was something of the Robert Mapplethorpe of his era – the same Robert Mapplethorpe, it should be noted, whom investigative journalist Maury Terry has similarly linked to the Son of Sam case and various other ritualized murders (for more on George Hodel, Man Ray and the Black Dahlia murder, see Black Dahlia Avenger by Steve Hodel [George’s son and a former LAPD homicide detective] and Exquisite Corpse by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss).

How it is that the fourteen-year-old daughter of a lowly probation officer fell into the orbit of the daughter of the wealthy and influential George Hodel (Hodel’s former home is currently valued at $4.2 million) has never been explained, but Tamar, described by Michelle as “the epitome of glamour,” quickly took the youngster under her wing, buying her clothes, enrolling her in modeling school, teaching her to drive, and providing her with a fake ID and a steady stream of prescription drugs – obtained, one would presume, from her father. [BE: Sounds like the pre-cursor to Jeffrey Epstein]

According to Michelle, “Tamar put on perfect airs around my dad and when it became necessary she would sleep with him.” Whatever works, I guess. That perhaps explains why, in early 1961, Gil didn’t have a problem with allowing his underage daughter to move to San Francisco with the daughter of a violent pedophile. Soon enough, Tamar found herself in a relationship with Journeyman Scott McKenzie, and bandmate John Phillips began coming by Tamar and Michelle’s room on a nightly basis.

It wasn’t long before Michelle, still just seventeen, was romantically involved with twenty-six-year-old Phillips, despite the fact that John was still married to Adams, with whom he by then had two children, Laura MacKenzie Phillips having been born on November 10, 1959 in Alexandria. Father Gil, who had himself recently taken a sixteen-year-old bride (one of a string of six wives), still wasn’t concerned. And it’s probably safe to assume that Phillip’s father, who had pursued his bride when she was just fifteen, wouldn’t have been too concerned either.

In October 1962, a year or so after meeting Michelle, John curiously found himself in Jacksonville, Florida (alongside Naval Air Station Jacksonville and Naval Station Mayport) for “two weeks of rest and rehearsal” during the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a guy who “never felt comfortable with political advocacy,” John seems to have had a keen interest in Cuban affairs. Two months later, on New Years Eve 1962, Holly Michelle Gilliam became John Phillip’s second wife. She also joined his reconfigured band, as did Canadian Denny Doherty, who had formerly been with the Mugwumps alongside Cass Elliot. This new lineup was dubbed the New Journeymen.

The newly-formed trio promptly embarked on a curious Caribbean adventure, [BE: Ahhh, 'The Islands!' ] arriving first at St. Johns, where John has claimed that they “snorkeled on acid” for several weeks. They next ferried over to St. Thomas, where they set up camp at a dive beachfront boardinghouse known as Duffy’s. Soon enough, Ellen Naomi Cohen, better known as Cass Elliot, showed up with John’s nephew, who was a childhood friend of hers. Cass had been born in Baltimore but had grown up in Alexandria, where, like Phillips, she had attended George Washington High School.

As the legend goes, Cass waited tables at the dive while the trio performed folk songs. What they were really doing there remains something of a mystery, though in Papa John, Phillips did drop a clue: “The town was crawling with drunken Marines and sailors on their way home from Vietnam.”

Moving on from the boardinghouse, the group next took over an unfinished home on Creeque Alley, where, according to John, they were known as “the island’s open house and everyone was welcome to our commune.” At some point though the governor supposedly ordered them off the island “because he thought his nephew was doing drugs with the crazies at Creeque Alley.” The band had formalized its new lineup of John Phillips, Michelle Phillips, Denny Doherty and Cass Elliot, and they had a whole album’s worth of material written. That first album would feature such enduring classics as California Dreamin’, Monday, Monday, and Go Where You Wanna Go. On none of the bands subsequent albums would they produce anywhere near the level of songwriting that they were allegedly able to achieve on that Caribbean adventure.

Though isolated on that Caribbean island, the songs the group brought back to LA with them just happened to be of the soon-to-emerge folk-rock variety. In Papa John, Phillips quotes Doherty as saying that everyone was “evolving toward the same sound at the same time without really communicating with each other about it.” It was, I suppose, just the way things were fated to be – or it could be that everyone was following the same script, written by unseen others.

Before helping to spearhead the folk-rock movement though, the quartet first had to get off the island, which Phillips presents as a high-risk venture: “We tried to get off the island quietly. We split in groups at the airport to look inconspicuous … We went at night so there wouldn’t be any credit checks done on me.”

Within a month of arriving in LA, the band had a producer/manager (Lou Adler, a Jewish kid who had grown up in a tough, Hispanic section of East LA) and a record deal, and John and Michelle were at home in a comfortable house on Lookout Mountain in Laurel Canyon. They would soon be able to afford to purchase Jeanette McDonald’s former Bel Air mansion at 783 Bel Air Road, which featured “hand-carved wooden gargoyles” and “a walk-in vault beneath the house,” which, as I already mentioned, is a very handy feature. Sitting on five acres, the lavish home, with five Rolls Royces in the driveway, was the site of virtually nonstop partying.

The new lineup, of course, needed a name, and John pushed hard for the occult-based Magic Cyrcle, which the band was briefly known as before ultimately settling on The Mamas and the Papas. There would be other indications as well that Phillips had a keen interest in the occult. He would later, for example, start his own label and call it Warlock Records. And his third wife, Genevieve Waite, was an avid follower of Aleister Crowley.

The Mamas and the Papas proved to be a rather short-lived band, recording and performing just from 1965 to 1968 (with a brief reunion in 1971 to satisfy contractual obligations to their record company). During that time, the band produced five albums and eleven top 40 singles. To date, the lineup has sold nearly 100,000,000 albums.

The first single, released in 1965, was Go Where You Wanna Go, which failed to chart. Their next release, California Dreamin’, shot up to #4. Their freshman album, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears, released in early 1966, rose to the very top of the charts, their only album to do so. Their only #1 single, Monday, Monday, followed the release of the album. It was all downhill from there.

 

[Buick Electra]

(Part 18 - Post 3 of 3)

While recording their second album in June 1966, Michelle was discharged from the band due to the fact that she was having an affair with Denny Doherty, which was causing severe friction in the group. By August, she was back, though that didn’t prevent the group’s second album from performing rather poorly. The third, recorded in 1967 and ironically entitled Deliver, failed to live up to its name. Then in June of that year, The Mamas and the Papas delivered a closing set at the Monterey Pop Festival that almost everyone agrees sucked ass.

It wasn’t hard though for the band to score that coveted closing slot, given that Phillips had played a key role in organizing the event. Monterey proved to be, according to Barney Hoskyns, the “moment when the underground went mainstream.” As Rolling Stone noted in its Fortieth Anniversary Edition, “The plan for a new kind of festival was spearheaded by John Phillips, the leader of the Mamas and the Papas, and Lou Adler, an influential producer and the band’s manager.” Also noted was that the “road to Monterey began with Alan Pariser, a young heir to a paper-manufacturing fortune,” just as the road to Woodstock began with John Roberts, a young heir to a pharmaceutical manufacturing fortune, but that’s another story entirely.

Two months after Monterey, the band made their final television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Two months after that, the quartet headed off to Europe while recording their fourth album, The Papas and the Mamas. That album’s first single was the Laurel Canyon-inspired 12:30 (Young Girls are Coming to the Canyon). Shortly thereafter, the band broke up. John tried his hand at a solo career with the wildly unsuccessful result being the release of The Wolf King of LA. To satisfy record label demands, the group briefly reformed for their fourth album, People Like Us.

Following that unsuccessful venture, the band once again dissolved.

to be continued …

 

[SmithJ]

CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

The whole 60’s California drug culture was orchestrated by the CIA to destroy America

 

[Buick Electra]

Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation: Part XIX

(Part 19 – Post 1 of 3)

PART XIX

BY DAVE MCGOWAN | AUG 14, 2011​

“This is going to break your heart, but much of the music you heard in the ‘60s and early ‘70s wasn’t recorded by the people you saw on the album covers. It was done by me and the musicians you see on these walls … Many of these kids didn’t have the chops and were little more than garage bands … At concerts, people hear with their eyes. Teens cut groups slack in concert, but not when they bought their records.”

-Hal Blaine, longtime drummer for the Wrecking Crew, quoted in the Wall Street Journal on March 23, 2011

Before moving ahead with the John Phillips saga, I first need to pose an extremely important question to all my readers: is anyone out there in the market for a slightly used, covert film studio? If so, then all you need do is pull about $6.2 million out of your penny jar (though in today’s housing market, you might be able to cut a better deal) and Lookout Mountain Laboratory can be yours! And if you act fast, you might be able to get a package deal on the lab and the Hodel house! (the photos in this post are of the lab as it looks today as a converted residential dwelling).

Another item worth noting: as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on January 28, 2011, “Ron Patterson, the flamboyant, free-spirited creator of the Renaissance and Dickens fairs, died Jan. 15 at a friend’s house in Sausalito after an illness. He was 80.” As staff writer Carolyn Jones noted, Patterson’s creation “was sort of a medieval precursor to Burning Man.” And Burning Man is, of course, a rather explicitly occult ritual first performed on the Summer Solstice of 1986 and now performed every summer in Nevada’s Black Rock Desertbefore an audience of 50,000+.

What does any of that though have to do with Laurel Canyon? As we have seen so many times before, all roads on the Conspiracy Superhighway seem to lead to Laurel Canyon: “In the beginning, the Renaissance Faire was an experiment in Mr. Patterson’s backyard. In the early 1960s, Mr. Patterson and his wife, Phyllis, who were both interested in theater and art, began hosting children’s improvisational theater workshops at their Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles County) home.”

One naturally wonders whether aspiring thespian and golden child Godo Paulekas (originally cast, it will be recalled, to play Satan in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising) was involved in those workshops. In any event, there is certainly nothing creepy about children’s workshops being hosted in a small, tight-knit community that was home to more than its fair share of pedophiles, so let’s just move along.

One last item of note, this one from, of all places, the pages of Sports Illustrated circa June 29, 1981. The following excerpt is from a short piece written by publisher Philip Howlett to introduce readers to writer Bjarne Rostaing: “Born in Lincoln, N.Y., Rostaing grew up in various places in Connecticut, where he attended what he recalls as an even dozen schools. ‘I got my B.A. and master’s in English from the University of Connecticut,’ he says. ‘Then I did part of a Ph.D. at the University of Washington before going into the Army Intelligence Corps in 1959. We had Paul Rothchild, who later became producer for The Doors and Janis Joplin, to give you some idea of what the unit was like.’”

I’m guessing that it was like countless other intelligence units designed to churn out shapers of public opinion, whether actors, novelists, newsmen, or, in this case, sportswriters and producers of popular music. It is quite shocking, of course, to learn that the handler of two of Laurel Canyon’s most influential and groundbreaking bands (Love and the Doors) had an intel background. Apparently the search is still on for anyone of any prominence in the Laurel Canyon scene who didn’t have direct connections to the intelligence community.

Anyway … during the heyday of the Mamas and the Papas, John and Michelle Phillips knew, and regularly played host to, virtually everyone of importance in the canyons. In addition to all the singers and musicians living in Laurel Canyon, the power couple’s circle of friends included Warren Beatty, Peter and Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Terry Melcher and girlfriend Candace Bergen, Marlon Brando, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski, soon-to-be-dead gossip columnist Steve Brandt, Larry Hagman, presidential brother-in-law Peter Lawford (fresh from his probable involvement in the murder of Marilyn Monroe), Dennis Hopper, Ryan O’Neal, Mia “Rosemary’s Baby” Farrow, ethereal Freemason Peter Sellers, and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

And a short, scraggly singer/songwriter by the name of Charlie Manson.

There were, to be sure, numerous ties between John Phillips, the ‘Wolf King of LA,’ and Charles Manson. And ties as well between bandmate Cass Elliott and Manson. And between Philips and Cass and the Cielo Drive victims. John Phillips, for example, had invested $10,000 in Jay Sebring’s business venture, Sebring International (rumored to have been a front for various illegal activities, including drug trafficking). Michelle Phillips had a brief affair with Roman Polanski in London while Polanski was married to the soon-to-be-dead Sharon Tate (during that same sojourn to London, Tate was reportedly initiated into the practice of witchcraft).

Mama Cass, as previously noted, lived across the street from the house occupied by Folger and Frykowski at 2774 Woodstock Road. Both homes were frequently visited by known drug dealers. Regulars at Cass’s home included Pic Dawson (also a regular at the Frykowski/Folger home and at the Tate/Polanski home), the son of a US State Department official who, according to John Phillips, was suspected by authorities “of using diplomatic pouches to move drugs between countries,” and Billy Doyle, a local dealer who was infamously filmed while being flogged at the Tate/Polanski house just three days before the murders (according to Dennis Hopper). Another regular was Bill Mentzer, later convicted of the brutal murder of Cotton Club producer Roy Radin and labeled ‘Manson II’ by journalist Maury Terry. The LAPD once described Mentzer as a member of “some kind of hit squad.”

So dark was the scene at the home of the ‘Lady of the Canyon’ that, according to Terry, four of the LAPD’s initial prime suspects in the Tate killings were drug dealers associated with Elliott. And yet, curiously enough, all of the canyon’s peace-and-love spewing musicians were regulars at Mama Cass’s home as well. As Rolling Stone noted in its Fortieth Anniversary Edition, “’Mama’ Cass Elliott’s cozy canyon house functioned as a sort of rock salon.” In a similar vein, Barney Hoskyns wrote in Hotel California that “Cass kept permanent open house.”

Also noted in Hoskyn’s tome was that the Laurel Canyon scene “all spun around him and Cass,” with the “him” in this case being David Van Cortlandt Crosby, who, like Cass, had an insatiable appetite (by his own account) for potent pain killers like Demerol, Dilaudid and Percodan. Crosby was one of many Canyonites who regularly dropped by Cass’s place to hang out and engage in impromptu jam sessions, and to mingle with some seriously disreputable characters.

Also a regular at Cass’s place, by some reports, was Charlie Manson himself. According to Ed Sanders, it was at Cass’s home that Charlie first met her neighbor, coffee heiress Abigail Folger (who helped finance Kenneth Anger’s films, like the one that was supposed to star Godo Paulekas but instead starred Mansonite Bobby Beausoleil). According to Terry, the rather notorious group known as The Process: Church of the Final Judgment – which evidence suggests had deep ties to the Manson, Son of Sam, and Cotton Club murders – actively sought to recruit Mama Cass, as well as John Phillips and Terry Melcher.

A few further bits of Mansonalia: Terry has written that the Family’s iconic bus was seen parked at the home of John and Michelle Phillips in the fall of 1968. Reports also hold that Manson attended a New Year’s Eve party at the couple’s home on December 31, 1968, just months before the murders. So close were the ties between the Mamas and the Papas and the Manson clan that both John Phillips and Mama Cass were slated to appear as witnesses for the defense at the Family’s trial, though not surprisingly, neither was ever called.

For a band that sang about being “safe and warm, if I was in LA,” the members of the Mamas and the Papas kept some pretty dangerous company in the city of angels … which reminds me that, not long after the band hit the charts, Tamar Hodel received a postcard from Michelle Phillips asking her to watch their scheduled performance on the Ed Sullivan Show and then meet the group at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel before a scheduled concert. Tamar showed up with father George at her side, the two apparently still maintaining a close relationship, and Tamar, George, John, Michelle, Denny and Cass embarked on a drug-fueled pre-show odyssey.

By 1970, John and Michelle had divorced. Many years later, Michelle would reveal that their time together had included at least one episode of domestic violence, one that she was still reluctant to discuss: “It was serious. I ended up in the hospital. That’s all I’ll say about it.” The union had yielded John a second daughter, Gilliam Chynna Phillips, born February 12, 1968 in Los Angeles.

 

[Buick Electra]

(Part 19 – Post 2 of 3)

On January 31, 1972, John Phillips married for the third time, to actress and Crowley aficionado Genevieve Waite; on the wedding guest list were soon-to-be-governor Jerry Brown and soon-to-be-lieutenant-governor Mike Curb. The couple’s time together would be marked by wildly out-of-control drug consumption and the birth of two more offspring: Tamerlane, whose name is presumably in part an homage to Tamar Hodel, and Bijou Lilly, who was taken away and placed in foster care in Bolton Landing, New York after her drug-addled parents were deemed unfit to raise her.

In June 1972, shortly after marrying Waite, Phillips moved into a canyon home at 414 St. Pierre Road that had been built by William Randolph Hearst. The Rolling Stones had just vacated the property, and their trusty sidekick, Gram Parsons, would grow very close to John Phillips. Parsons, of course, would soon turn up dead, while John would head off to London, where he reportedly planned to record a solo album with assistance from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. That project never got off the ground, however, as Phillip’s addictions rendered him impossible to work with, even for a world-class drug abuser like Richards.

Cass Elliott turned up in London the very next year, but unlike her former bandmate, her trip abroad was to be one-way; on July 29, 1974, she was found dead in occasional Canyonite Harry Nilsson’s London flat. Ms Elliott, it seems safe to say, knew a little too much about the dark side of Laurel Canyon.

Following the dissolution of the Mamas and the Papas, Cass had gone on to a successful solo career and had become a familiar face on American television screens. In addition to hosting two prime-time network specials, she had guest-hosted the Tonight Show and had appeared on such popular early-1970s shows as The Red Skelton Show and Love, American Style.

She had been married twice, first in 1963 to vocalist Jim Hendricks in what was reportedly a platonic arrangement aimed at getting Hendricks a draft deferment. During that first marriage, which was annulled in 1968, Cass had given birth to a daughter, Owen Vanessa Elliott, born on April 26, 1967. Hendricks, however, was reportedly not the father and Cass steadfastly refused to reveal who Owen’s true father was. In 1971, following the breakup of the band, Cass married again, this time to Baron Donald von Weidenman, a wealthy Bavarian heir. That marriage collapsed after just a few months though and Cass was single when she died just a few years later. Owen, already fatherless, was just seven.

Denny Doherty, meanwhile, went on to host a popular variety show in Canada, as well as performing in various formations of the New Mamas and the Papas. He passed away on January 19, 2007, reportedly due to kidney failure.

Michelle Phillips released an unsuccessful solo album, but then switched gears and went on to a successful acting career, gracing the small screen in such hit shows as Knot’s Landing, Hotel, and Beverly Hills, 90210. She continued to have numerous flings and has married several more times. At sixty-seven, she is the only living member of the original Mamas and the Papas.

Returning now to John Phillips, in 1975 he sobered up enough to put together the soundtrack for the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, a surreal venture featuring the talents of fledgling actor David Bowie and director Nicholas Roeg, who had previously collaborated with Crowleyite Donald Cammell on the heavily occult-influenced Performance. Roeg’s film, curiously enough, includes a cameo appearance by Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell. At that same time, Phillips was working on completing a horrifically bad, Andy Warhol-produced musical entitled Man on the Moon, which closed just two days after opening.

As a side note, Phillips at one time had Don “Miami Vice” Johnson in mind to play the lead in his space opera. Like the rest of the Hollywood notables in this story, Johnson was a canyon dweller at the time. His next-door neighbor was a guy by the name of Chuck Wein, an avid occultist and buddy of Warhol who, in addition to managing bizarre nightclub acts, directed the 1972 new age documentary Rainbow Bridge, filmed less than two months before star Jimi Hendrix turned up dead. Wein shared a curious nickname with fellow Canyonite Charlie Manson: ‘The Wizard.’ But I may have drifted a little off-topic here …

Some of you may have noticed, by the way, that I am all but cured of my former addiction to the word ‘digress,’ thanks to a twelve-step program I’ve been working my way through. I can now veer off on wild tangents having little to do with the main topic of discussion – like filling you in, for example, on nonexistent twelve-step programs – and not feel the slightest compulsion to point out the temporary loss of focus.

Anyway … for the remainder of his career, Phillips’ musical output consisted primarily of occasionally writing songs for and with others, his most well known contribution being his co-writing duties on the wretchedly awful Kokomo, recorded by the Beach Boys.

In 1981, Phillips found himself facing charges of trafficking large volumes of narcotics. By his own account, he had an arrangement with a pharmacy that allowed him to obtain large amounts of narcotics without prescriptions (daughter Bijou would later say that he had actually purchased the pharmacy, guaranteeing virtually unlimited access). The charges were quite serious; in Phillip’s own words, he “was looking at forty-five years and got thirty days.” He began serving his sentence, appropriately enough, on April 20, and he was released just three-and-a-half weeks later.

He should have gotten at least ninety days just for Kokomo. It never hurts to have friends in high places.

Phillip’s circle of friends, in the post-Mamas and Papas years, included J. Paul Getty, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and Princess Margaret. Getty and Kennedy, both plagued by demons of their own, were likely being supplied by Phillips. Another name in Phillips’ rolodex was Colin Tennant, the wealthy heir of a massive petrochemical conglomerate in the UK. Tennant owned a private island in the British West Indies where wealthy friends like John Phillips and Mick and Bianca Jagger could engage in unknown activities in complete seclusion.

Upon being released from his preposterously short period of confinement, Phillips put together a version of the Mamas and the Papas that included daughter Mackenzie Phillips and original lead vocalist Denny Doherty. Scott McKenzie, who had summoned all the runaways across the country to come to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, later replaced Doherty. Laurie Beebe subsequently replaced Mackenzie Phillips, after which Doherty returned one again to replace John Phillips. The band finally called it quits in 1994.

Phillips had divorced Waite in 1985. In 1992, he received a liver transplant and a new lease on life. Just months later, he was photographed drinking in a bar in Palm Springs. In 1998, Phillips and the other surviving members of the Mamas and the Papas were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Three years later, on March 18, 2001, Phillips died of heart failure. The saga wasn’t quite over, however; Phillips’ daughters would carry on with the family tradition – while spilling some dark family secrets along the way.

Oldest daughter Mackenzie began her acting career at the tender age of twelve when she landed a role in what was to be George Lucas’ breakthrough film, American Graffiti. Just a few years before, it will be recalled, Lucas had been an unknown cameraman at the Rolling Stones’ notorious Altamont concert. During filming of Graffiti in 1972, John Phillips, who I’m sure had lots of important business to attend to and therefore little time to look after his daughter, signed over legal guardianship of Mackenzie to producer Gary Kurtz.

A few years later, in 1975, Mackenzie landed a role on what would quickly become a hit television series, One Day at a Time. During the third season, however, Mackenzie was arrested for public drunkenness and cocaine possession, after which her substance abuse problems continued to spiral out of control, causing frequent problems and considerable tension on the set of her hit show. Providing a template for Charlie Sheen to later follow, she was fired from the production in 1980.

After two nearly fatal overdoses, she was invited back by producers in 1981. The following year though she collapsed on the set and was once again fired. What had once seemed a very promising acting career was over as quickly as it had begun.

From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, she performed intermittently with the reformed Mamas and Papas. In 1992, she reportedly entered a long-term rehab program that she didn’t emerge from for nine months. Following that, she kept a low profile for many years. In August 2008, however, she was arrested at LAX for heroin and cocaine possession and on Halloween day 2008, she entered a guilty plea and was once again sent to rehab.

 

[Buick Electra]

(Part 19 – Post 3 of 3)

A year later, in September 2009, Mackenzie released her tell-all memoir, High on Arrival, which painted a dark and disturbing picture of her late father. In addition to introducing her to drugs at the age of eleven by injecting her with cocaine, Mackenzie claimed that Papa John had raped her on the eve of her first marriage, and had engaged in an incestuous affair with her that spanned a decade and ended only when she became pregnant and did not know who the father was – a scenario, it should be noted, with remarkable parallels to the ordeal endured by Michelle’s surrogate mother, Tamar Hodel.

John Phillips’ memoir covering the time period in question makes no mention of the illicit relationship with his daughter. He does claim that Mackenzie was once raped at knifepoint by an unknown assailant. He also notes, shockingly enough, that Mackenzie’s “house in Laurel Canyon was destroyed by fire.” That, as we all know, hardly ever happens.

The year after dropping her bombshells, Mackenzie appeared on what is arguably the most appalling ‘reality’ show to ever hit the airwaves, Celebrity Rehab, in a role far removed from her glory days on a hit primetime show. That same year, sister Chynna Phillips entered rehab as well, though she was seeking relief from, uhmm, ‘anxiety.’

Chynna first captured the spotlight in 1990 as 1/3 of the vocal group Wilson Phillips, alongside of Carnie and Wendy Wilson, offspring of the reclusive Brian Wilson (the only Beach Boy, by the way, to not be involved with the aforementioned Kokomo, and arguably the only really talented Beach Boy). That group though proved to be very short-lived, as did Chynna’s musical career.

In 1995, Chynna married actor William Baldwin. In 2003, she became what Vanity Faire described as a “fervent born-again Christian. She was baptized in brother-in-law Stephen Baldwin’s bathtub.” The magazine also quoted Chynna as saying that “being a mom is challenging for me – my perspective is warped.”

Like her older sisters, Bijou Lilly Phillips – born April 1, 1980, just a year before her father was harshly punished for running a major narcotics trafficking operation – merged into the fast lane at a very young age. Her mother was addicted to heroin while carrying her and Bijou has candidly described herself as a “crack baby.” Raised partially in a foster home, she was reunited with her father by the courts when in the third grade. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

Described by Index magazine as “a wild child who, through fate and circumstance, was somehow allowed to partake of New York’s nebulous nightlife at an age traditionally more suited to playing with dolls,” she was a cover model from a very young age. She was also, perhaps not surprisingly, the fourteen-year-old star of a Calvin Klein ad campaign that many people (as well as the US Justice Department) considered to be bordering on child pornography, and that Bijou herself has referred to as “the kiddy porn ads.”

Bijou told her interviewer from Index that lurking behind the scenes of that notorious Calvin Klein photo shoot – I’m guessing as a technical adviser – “was this porn guy.” The interviewer identified that “porn guy” as Ron Jeremy, probably the world’s most famous, and arguably the world’s most inexplicable, porn star.

 

[Buick Electra]

Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation: Part XX

(Part 20 – Post 1 of 2 )

PART XX

BY DAVE MCGOWAN | MAR 13, 2012​

“What struck both of us was that there were huge gaps in Houdini’s life story and some puzzling inconsistencies. So we embarked on a journey to discover the real man. Early on, we discovered an important connection that most biographers seemed to miss.”

From the Introduction to The Secret Life of Houdini, by William Kalush and Larry Sloman, 2006

As noted earlier in this series, there is considerable debate over the question of whether Harry Houdini ever lived in the Laurel Canyon home known locally as the “Houdini House” (the History Channel’s Brad Meltzer’s Decoded recently aired an episode on Houdini that included a segment filmed at the site, which was unreservedly identified as the former Houdini estate; the series, however, doesn’t appear to be overly concerned with accuracy).

Even if Houdini did live in the home that now lies in ruins, his story would seem to have little relevance here. After all, Harry Houdini, widely considered to be the consummate entertainer of his era, reached the peak of his career long before there was a Laurel Canyon – before there was even that magical place known as Hollywood. What then is there to gain through an examination of the life of Harry Houdini? Quite a bit, as it turns out.

What are generally claimed to be the basic details of Harry Houdini’s life can be found in countless published biographies and web posts. Born Erik Weisz in Budapest, Hungary on March 24, 1874, he was the fourth of seven children born to Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weisz and the former Cecelia Steiner. The family later changed the spelling of their names and Houdini became Ehrich Weiss, known by friends and family as “Ehrie,” which ultimately became “Harry.” His stage surname was an homage to famed French magician Robert Houdin.

In mid-1878, Rabbi Meyer, with his five sons and pregnant wife in tow, set sail for America, arriving on July 3, 1878. The family first put down roots in Appleton, Wisconsin before later moving, in 1887, to New York City. Four years later, Houdini launched his career as a magician, at first performing basic card tricks. He had little success and at times would make ends meet by performing in circus freak shows.

In 1893, he met singer/dancer Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, known as “Bess,” who would become both his wife and lifetime stage assistant. The pair though, performing as “The Houdinis,” continued to find success an elusive goal.

To say that Houdini’s fortunes changed in 1899 would be a bit of an understatement. As recounted by Kalush and Sloman, “Within months, he had gone from cheap beer halls and dime museums to the big-time – vaudeville. In one year’s time, he had gone from literally eating rabbits for survival to making what today would equal $45,000 a week.” After finally hitting it big, however, Houdini then did something rather inexplicable – he abruptly sailed off to England to begin a lengthy European tour.

Kalush and Sloman pose the obvious question: “Why would someone who had finally made it big risk everything and leave behind lucrative contracts to go to England with no real prospects in sight?” Why indeed? Such a move in those days would normally be an act of career suicide, but things worked out a little differently for Houdini; everywhere he went – first in England and then in Scotland, Holland, Germany, France and Russia – he was lauded by the press and quickly catapulted into the national limelight.

After a four-year absence, Houdini returned to the U.S. in 1904 and resumed his lucrative career. For many years, he was the highest-paid performer on the vaudeville circuit and he would frequently perform publicly to huge crowds in stunts that were sometimes arranged with corporate sponsors to promote their businesses. In 1912, he introduced what would become his most famed escape act, the Chinese Water Torture Cell.

In 1918, Houdini decided to try his luck with the fledgling new entertainment medium known as motion pictures, starring first in a multi-part serial and then in The Grim Game (1919) and Terror Island (1920). It was during this time that he is said to have taken up residence in Laurel Canyon, at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Avenue. Following that, he moved to New York and started up his own production company, the Houdini Picture Corporation, which released The Man From Beyond (1921) and Haldane of the Secret Service (1923), after which Houdini gave up his less-than-successful film career.

For the last few years leading up to his death on October 31, 1926, Houdini primarily focused on debunking psychics and mediums, leading some to speculate that the spiritualist movement may have been behind his untimely demise. To this day, séances are regularly held around the world in attempts to contact the famed magician and escape artist.

And that, in a nutshell, is the Harry Houdini story as it is usually told. But telling stories as they are usually told is a rather boring pursuit, so we are, shockingly enough, going to take a slightly different approach to see if maybe there isn’t an entirely different story hidden in the obscure details of Houdini’s life, beginning with his sudden rise to fame after wallowing in obscurity for years.

As noted by Kalush and Sloman, “The young Houdini … couldn’t make enough money to succeed at magic. Hungry and crestfallen, he was ready to give up his dream, until he walked into a Chicago police station and met a detective who would change his life. Immediately after this fateful encounter, his picture graced the front page of a Chicago newspaper. That picture catapulted him to renown.” Within months, Houdini was arguably the most famed entertainer in the country.

That detective was John Wilkie, a major player in the formation of the International Association of Police Chiefs (founded in Chicago in 1893, at the outset of what has been dubbed the Decade of Regicide, which set the stage for World War I) and the ominously titled National Bureau of Identification, and ultimately the chief of the U.S. Secret Service, America’s premier intelligence operation during that era. It should probably be noted here that one of Houdini’s nephews, Louis Kraus, worked for the Treasury Department, overseer of Wilkie’s Secret Service.

Authors Kalush and Sloman are of the opinion that, “It was forward-thinking for the chief of America’s only intelligence operation to be using entertainers for covert activities in 1898.” Maybe so, but the authors duly note that such actions were not unprecedented; nearly four decades earlier, Abraham Lincoln had recruited an eighteen-year-old magician named Horatio G. Cooke to serve as a Civil War spy. Lincoln and Cooke were close enough that he was reportedly present at the president’s deathbed. Later, near the end of his life, Cooke became a close friend of Harry Houdini.

It could also be noted that an entertainer of a different variety, stage actor John Wilkes Booth, also appears to have served as an intelligence operative during the Civil War, so the practice of utilizing entertainers for covert operations clearly didn’t begin with Wilkie, who was himself a magician and a disciple of escape artist R. G. Herrmann. In addition to Houdini, Wilkie recruited other magicians as well, including Herrmann, Louis Leon, and heavyweight prizefighter/magician Bob Fitzsimmons.

Another of Houdini’s covert backers was Senator Chauncey Depew, an uncle of magician Ganson Depew and a former mentor to then-Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt (who would soon be catapulted into the presidency by the assassination of William McKinley, one of the final victims of the Decade of Regicide). Houdini would soon gain another hidden backer – William Melville, head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and the most visible law enforcement official in the UK. Melville would ultimately become the first chief of Britain’s MI-5.

As Kalush and Sloman discovered, “Within days of arriving in England, Houdini met with a prominent Scotland Yard inspector and once again, his career took off.” That inspector, of course, was Melville, whom Houdini secretly met with on June 14, 1900, five days after arriving on England’s shores. He had left the U.S. on May 30 using a passport issued just two days earlier – a passport that contained more than its fair share of anomalies.

The document listed his birthday as April 6, though his actual birthday is said to be March 24. It claimed that he was born in 1873, making him one year older than he actually was. Most curiously of all, the document indicated that Houdini was a native born citizen, though he most assuredly was not. He had been allowed to surrender his previous passport, issued to a naturalized citizen, in exchange for the officially-issued but clearly fraudulent passport that he used to tour Europe.

Given his background as both a magician and a Mason (by his own account), it goes without saying that secrecy, deception, and illusion were second-nature to Houdini. He also, as Sloman and Kalush noted, had the unusual “ability to interact with a country’s police officials and do demonstrations inside their jails,” and he was known to be rather proficient at the art of breaking-and-entering. Needless to say, these abilities would have served Houdini well in the world of espionage.

So too would many of the devices he boasted of inventing. According to Kalush and Sloman, “[Houdini] told the New York Herald that he invented rubber heels and cameras that work only once. The Boston Transcript reported that he invented ‘an envelope which cannot be unsealed by steam without bringing to light the word ‘opened’ and a wash which will remove printer’s ink from paper’ … In his own Conjurer’s Monthly, he touted the use of chloride of cobalt for sending invisible messages.”

 

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(Part 20 – Post 2 of 2 )

A friend of Houdini’s, fellow magician Billy Robinson, was also well-versed in the tradecraft of the intelligence community. In his book Spirit Slate Writing and Kindred Phenomena, Robinson “detailed thirty-seven methods for secret writing [which] would play an important part in spy communication during World War I.” He also “detailed how to read other people’s letters without opening the envelopes by using alcohol to render them temporarily transparent,” and offered readers “subtle methods to share information while being closely scrutinized.”

Kalush and Sloman share what became of Robinson not long after penning the book: “Then, virtually overnight, he changed his name and appearance, left the country, and broke many of his connections. Years later, his only brother wouldn’t even be able to find him.” Robinson died in 1918 while performing a bullet catch trick that he had performed many times before. Houdini would write that “it seems as if there were something peculkar [sic] about the whole affair.”

In addition to possessing skills and knowledge that were ideally suited to the spook trade, Houdini also ran what could best be described as his own personal spy ring. In addition to an unknown number of fulltime confederates (mostly young women, including one of his nieces), “Houdini employed female operatives on an ad hoc basis when he came to town.” Probably the most important of these operatives was a young fellow magician named Amedeo Vacca, whose relationship with Houdini was unknown to virtually everyone throughout the escape artist’s life. So secret was the close relationship between the two that even Harry’s wife and brother, magician/confederate Hardeen, were unaware of it.

Houdini was a man for whom secrecy seems to have been something of an obsession. His home was said to be laced with secret passageways and hidden rooms, and his desk contained hidden compartments. There are indications that, while on the road, he would frequently maintain, for unknown purposes, a second hotel room in a different hotel. A man named Edward Saint (aka Charles David Myers), who was close to Bess, once claimed that Houdini “had safes and vaults in his home, and vaults in banks that his lawyers had access to; but one secret, now made public for the first time, is the fact that Houdini had one safety deposit vault in a bank or trust company in the East under some familiar name other than Houdini, and of which the secret location rested only in Houdini’s brain. In this vault was kept highly secret papers.” As far as is known, no one – not even Geraldo Rivera – has located that secret vault.

With his espionage tradecraft and dubious passport in tow, Houdini traveled to Germany in September 1900 after taking the British Isles by storm. As was the case in England and Scotland, the press immediately showered the visiting entertainer with accolades. There was one key difference in the press coverage though: “The newspaper accounts of Houdini’s demonstrations at German police stations portray him as a police consultant rather than a mere entertainer … For a vaudeville performer, Houdini seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time and have unprecedented access at the Berlin police station.”

As he had in the US and the British Isles, Houdini established some unusual connections for a stage performer. One associate of his in Germany was a chemist named Hans Goldschmidt, who a few years earlier had patented a incendiary compound known as thermite. “Houdini noted that he was in Berlin when Goldschmidt performed his first test on a safe. He didn’t explain why a stage escape artist would be at such a demonstration.” For the record, Houdini does not appear to have been in the vicinity of the thermite demonstration given in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001.

After performing to much acclaim in Germany, Houdini continued his pre-World War I tour by visiting France and Russia (the countries that Houdini visited on this unusual tour – Russia, Germany, France and Britain – had the curious distinction of being the major players in the soon-to-unfold Great War, but I’m sure that’s just a bizarre coincidence).

In Czarist Russia, “the magician had official permission to appear in any city in Russia, an extraordinary set of circumstances that bespeaks the close relationship between Superintendent Melville and the Okhrana, the imperial Russian secret police.” Houdini’s Russian tour was booked by a guy named Harry Day, “a mysterious expatriate American who changed his name and met Houdini in London around the same time as Houdini’s first meeting with Melville … [Day] eventually became a member of Parliament and did overseas espionage for the British government.” For many years thereafter, the shadowy Day would handle Houdini’s European bookings.

Following the lengthy tour of pre-war Europe, Houdini returned to America with much press fanfare. One of his most high-profile stunts upon his return was escaping from the heavily fortified Cell #2 at the United States Jail in Washington, DC. The cell had famously housed Charles Julius Guiteau, convicted assassin of President James Garfield, prior to Guiteau’s hanging at the facility on June 30, 1882. Guiteau, who, like his father, was closely affiliated with a religious cult known as the Oneida Community, shot Garfield on July 2, 1881, after having learned how to use a handgun just a few weeks earlier. He claimed to be acting on orders from God.

The gunshot wounds inflicted by Guiteau were not fatal. Garfield died nearly three months later, on September 19, 1881, from infections resulting from (probably deliberately) poor medical care. According to Wikipedia, “Of the four presidential assassins, Guiteau lived longer than any after his victim’s death (nine months).” Given that Lee Harvey Oswald survived JFK by just two days and Leon Czolgosz survived William McKinley by just fifty-three days, this would be a true statement were it not for the fact that there is compelling evidence suggesting that John Wilkes Booth lived for several decades after the death of Abraham Lincoln. And then, of course, there is the question of whether these four men – Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz and Oswald – were the actual presidential assassins.

But here, I suppose, I have digressed (yes, I am officially bringing that word back out of retirement).

Houdini, needless to say, succeeded in escaping from Guiteau’s former cell – and also rearranged all the prisoners residing on the jail’s fabled ‘murderer’s row.’ To do so, of course, he would have needed a master key, which someone clearly provided to him. But why? Such were the perks provided an entertainer who appeared to be “working as an agent for U.S. government agencies, international police associations, and a special branch of Scotland Yard.”

A couple years after his escape from the US Jail, there was a curious incident at the Houdini household. On October 25, 1907, an intruder made a concerted effort to kill the performer, slashing at the sleeping figure more than 100 times with a razor. Harry Houdini, however, was not home at the time. The victim of the attack was his brother Leopold, who closely resembled Harry. Household servant Frank Thomas was arrested and charged with the attack, though there was scant evidence linking him to the crime and no known motive. Indeed, Thomas had arrived the next morning for work seemingly unaware the attack had taken place.

Had Houdini been home at the time, there might have been a different outcome, given that some reports contend that the escape artist carried a handgun at all times. Remarkably, Houdini was able to keep his name out of all press accounts of the crime and trial despite the fact that the attack occurred at his home, he appears to have been the intended victim, and the alleged assailant was his own servant.

On November 26, 1909, Houdini became the first man to successfully fly a powered craft on the Australian continent. He cheerfully dispatched publicity photos featuring him in a plane surrounded by German soldiers – a move he would soon regret when those German soldiers found themselves on the opposite side of the battlefields of World War I. Following America’s entry into the war, Houdini would attempt to destroy all photographs documenting his training of German pilots.

The magician’s first flight, and all his subsequent Australian flights, were arranged by Lieutenant George Taylor of the Australian Intelligence Corps. Curiously, despite Houdini’s avid early interest in aviation, he did not, as far as is know, ever fly again after leaving Australia.

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In other news, it appears that, while Lookout Mountain Laboratory has been out of business for many years, the spirit of the clandestine film studio is still very much alive and well, as evidenced by the ‘Kony 2012’ video.

 

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Calling it a night. Last 2 segments will be posted tomorrow.

 

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My radio/alarm clock is set to a Christian station and when it went off this morning - playing some song I asked myself, "How much of this is Alpha-Agency MANUFACTURED where neither God's nor Jesus' name is mentioned that seem to have the same beat as many other Christian songs?"

 

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I spent a year in Hollywood, about a half mile from Laurel Canyon Blvd. and didn't have a clue.

If I'd known about all this, I'd have probably been arrested for trespassing....just drinking in all that history.

I wasn't allowed to really go to concerts in high school. I went to my first one in junior year. It was Bread. Very CALM concert, which is probably why I was allowed to attend. Didn't like my parents "over-protective-ness" at all at the time. REALLY APPRECIATE IT NOW!

 

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Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation: Part XXI

(Part 21 – Post 1 of 3)

PART XXI

BY DAVE MCGOWAN | MAR 19, 2012​

“Why people even said Dr. Crandon committed illegal operations on little children and murdered them.”

-Mina/Margery Crandon

On April 29, 1911, Houdini debuted his famed Chinese Water Torture Cell escape in Southampton, England, though he had perfected and copyrighted the act well over a year earlier. The inherently dangerous stunt caused quite a sensation: “Just the sight of the apparatus was enough to give you shivers and make you believe, as one critic noted, that you were about to witness a ritual sacrifice.”

Around that same time, Houdini was, for reasons unknown, busily buying mothballed electric chairs at auctions across the country.

In 1913, Houdini’s beloved mother passed away, which apparently resulted in Harry learning some deep family secret. Following her death, Houdini sent the following cryptic note to one of his brothers: “Time heals all wounds, but a long time will have to pass before it will heal the terrible blow which Mother tried to save me from knowing.” The meaning of this rather provocative note remains a mystery. Houdini, by the way, was in Denmark when his mother died, and he requested a delay of her funeral to allow himself time to return to the States. Despite strict prohibitions in Jewish law, the entertainer’s request was, of course, granted.

In December 1914, just a few months after the staged provocation that allegedly triggered World War I, Houdini was summoned to the nation’s capitol for a private audience with then-President Woodrow Wilson. It is anyone’s guess what business the two men discussed, but it probably had little to do with stage tricks.

A year-and-a-half later, on that most notorious of dates, April 20, an estimated 100,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C. to watch Houdini perform a straightjacket escape. Other than for a presidential inauguration, it was said to be the largest crowd ever assembled in downtown Washington. One year later, in April 1917, the US declared war on Germany.

For the duration of the United States’ involvement in the war, Houdini spent a considerable amount of time aiding the war effort, both through fundraising and by frequently visiting the front lines, where he ostensibly went from camp to camp providing entertainment for the troops.

Houdini’s Hollywood career also began just as the US was entering the war. It has often been said that one of his first credits was as a special-effects consultant on the Mysteries of Myra cliffhanger serial, though others have claimed that Houdini had no involvement in the production. Curiously, the real consultant for the project is said to have been occultist/intelligence asset Aleister Crowley.

Houdini’s first feature-length film, The Grim Game, opened to rave reviews. Ensconced in Hollywood, Houdini quickly made friends with mega-stars Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, both of whom would soon be caught up in scandals – a career-ending one in Arbuckle’s case. The fledgling actor next began work on Terror Island, filmed largely on Catalina Island. Unlike his feature debut, Island opened to poor reviews, leading a discouraged Houdini to launch his own production company to create his own starring vehicles.

Just after completing Terror Island, in December 1919, Houdini was involved in yet another curious incident. Having injured his ankle performing the water torture escape, he paid a visit to a doctor who examined the performer and pronounced him in imminent “danger of death.” Houdini nevertheless lived on for several more years; the doctor, meanwhile, turned up dead within two weeks.

By the end of 1921, the Houdini Picture Corporation had two feature-length films in the can – The Man From Beyond and Haldane of the Secret Service. The first, co-written by Houdini himself and released on April 2, 1922, involved a bizarre plot revolving around a man found frozen in arctic ice and brought back to life, a case of mistaken identity, confinement in a mental institution, escape from that same institution, and an abduction. Haldane, released the following year, was Houdini’s first attempt at directing himself. It featured the magician as his real-life alter ego, but its performance at the box office signaled the end of Houdini’s film career.

For the rest of his years, Houdini devoted a considerable amount of time to investigating and debunking the spiritualist movement, which flourished in the post-World War I years as legions of fake ‘mediums’ preyed upon the grief of those who had lost loved one in the war, promising to reconnect them with those in the ‘spirit’ world. By design or otherwise, Houdini’s crusade served primarily to publicize the movement. Houdini’s interest in the movement was said to have been spawned by the death of his beloved mother.

Houdini had a number of friends in the spiritualist movement, most notably and prominently Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and possible perpetrator of the infamous Piltdown Hoax of 1912. Both Doyle and Houdini were also had connections to Le Roi and Margery Crandon, and that is where this story takes a decidedly dark turn.

Margery, born Mina Stinson in Canada in 1888, had moved with her family to Boston, Massachusetts at a young age. As a teenager, she is said to have been a musical prodigy and to have played various musical instruments in local orchestras, and to later have worked as an actress, secretary and ambulance driver. In 1917, the then-married Mina was hospitalized and operated on by Dr. Le Roi Goddard Crandon, a man who occupied a prestigious position in Boston society.

Crandon was a direct descendent of one of the original twenty-three Mayflower passengers and a member of the Boston Yacht Club. He had graduated from Harvard Medical School and had also obtained a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from Harvard, where he also served as an instructor. Just before meeting Mina, he had served as a Naval officer and as head of the surgical staff at a US Naval hospital during WWI.

Shortly after meeting the doctor, Mina divorced her first husband and, in 1918, became the much older Le Roi Crandon’s third wife. The two seemed hopelessly mismatched, she being young, vivacious and, by all accounts, very attractive, while he was said to be rather arrogant, unpleasant and antisocial. Nevertheless, the pair quickly became the talk of Boston’s high society, particularly after the summer of 1923, when they began holding regular ‘séances’ in their home.

One regular member of the couple’s inner circle was a fellow by the name of Joseph DeWyckoff, a wealthy steel tycoon who had been born in Poland and educated in England and Czarist Russia before settling in America to practice law. He was ultimately jailed in Boston on embezzlement charges, then later fled to Chicago after embezzling yet more money. He soon turned up in, of all places, Havana, Cuba, where, according to Kalush and Sloman, “in 1898 he was recruited by John Wilkie, the Secret Service chief, as a co-optee and was involved in spying for the United States during the Spanish-American War.”

That would be, needless to say, the very same John Wilkie who had kick-started Harry Houdini’s career that very same year. As a reward for his service, DeWyckoff, who “had a history of violence,” “was given the contract to salvage the Battleship Maine in the Havana Harbor.” The Maine had been sunk in what appears to have been a false-flag operation carried out by US intelligence operatives to justify launching a bloody colonial war.

Although fragmentary, there is clear evidence that Le Roi and Mina Crandon, in conjunction with various others (including DeWyckoff), began to ‘adopt,’ sometime soon after getting married, an untold number of children who subsequently went missing. A number of letters that Dr. Crandon penned on the subject and dispatched to his buddy Doyle appear to have gone missing as well. As Kalush and Sloman note, “Strangely, many of the letters regarding the investigation into the boys have been expunged from Crandon’s files.” As faithful readers know, there is nothing strange about that at all; it is pretty much par for the course.

In one surviving letter, sent on August 4, 1925, Crandon notes that “about December first I had Mr. DeWyckoff bring over a boy from a London home for possible adoption … In April 1925, our Secret Service Department at Washington received a letter saying that I had first and last sixteen boys in my house for ostensible adoption, and that they had all disappeared.” Four years earlier, a Boston newspaper had reported that two boys had been rescued from a raft. One, eight-year-old John Crandon, was Margery/Mina’s son from her previous marriage. The other was a ten-year-old English ‘adoptee’ who was reportedly so unhappy at the Crandon home that he was frantically attempting an escape, with the younger boy in tow (not unlike the Steven Staynerstory). “Two years later, when Margery began her mediumship, there was no trace of that boy in the household.”

Perhaps he was the ‘homeless’ boy whose dead body was reportedly found on the outskirts of Joseph DeWyckoff’s large estate in Ramsey, New Jersey during that time period.

 

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(Part 21 – Post 2 of 3)

By 1924, Dr. Crandon was openly asking his many friends in the British spiritualist movement to “be on the lookout for suitable boys to adopt.” Around that same time, as another associate noted in a letter, Crandon was “being sued for $40,000 for operating on a woman for cancer, when she was simply pregnant, and destroying the foetus … A highly incredible story which persists is that a boy who was in his family some weeks mysteriously disappeared. He claims that the boy is now in his home in England, but still official letters of inquiry and demand are received from that country. This is no mere rumor, for I was shown some of the original letters … The matter has been going on for more than a year. It is very mysterious.”

In response to questions raised about the disappearance of one particular boy, Margery/Mina complained that “people wrote asking his whereabouts, and the prime minister of England cabled to ask where he was and demanded a cable reply. Why people even said Dr. Crandon committed illegal operations on little children and murdered them.” According to Margery, “the poor little fellow had adenoids and had to be circumcised,” so Crandon opted to perform the surgery at home. It was widely rumored that the good doctor had performed another procedure at home as well – surgically altering his wife’s vaginal opening to allow her to ‘magically’ produce various items at séances.

On one occasion, Margery opened a closet in her home and showed an associate a collection of photos of well over a hundred children, “most of them really lovely.” Margery told the woman that, “Those are Dr. Crandon’s caesareans—aren’t they sweet? All caesareans.” Given that Crandon wasn’t known for delivering babies at all, the notion that he had delivered over a hundred of them via caesarean was an absurdity. Who then were all these children and what became of them?

Such is the fragmentary evidence trail indicating that an untold number of young boys fell into the nefarious hands of a cabal of wealthy individuals with connections to the intelligence community. Nearly a full century ago. Not to worry though – the disappearances were investigated by John Wilkie’s Secret Service and a British MP by the name of, uhmm, Harry Day. And I’m sure they got to the bottom of the sordid affair, just as Louis Freeh is undoubtedly now getting to the truth of the Sandusky case.

Not long before his death, Houdini, who had an extensive library of literature on the occult, began working with horror writer and racist occultist H.P. Lovecraft on various magazine articles. In 1926, he hired Lovecraft (who could, by the way, trace his lineage to the Massachusetts Bay Colony) and Clifford Eddy, Jr. (another occultist and horror writer and one of Houdini’s covert operatives), to co-write a book debunking superstition (despite the fact that wife Bess was known to harbor numerous superstitions, some of them apparently quite bizarre).

According to Kalush and Sloman, “Shortly after meeting with Eddy and Lovecraft, Bess was stricken with a nonspecific form of poisoning.” Indeed, there is evidence suggesting that both Harry and Bess Houdini suffered from some form of poisoning prior to Harry’s death. In addition, Houdini is said to have suffered from severe mood swings and to have had some “aggressive confrontations” in the weeks leading up to his death, both of which were out of character for the illusionist (though Bess is widely reported to have suffered from extreme mood swings throughout her life).

As the story goes, Houdini, who prided himself on being able to take a punch from pretty much anyone, was sucker-punched in his dressing room by a McGill University student, which caused his appendix to burst and ultimately led to his death on October 31, 1926. Houdini’s physicians dutifully swore out affidavits certifying the cause of death to be “traumatic appendicitis,” though the medical community now acknowledges that such a medical condition has never existed. No autopsy was performed.

As previously noted, the house in Laurel Canyon universally known as the ‘Houdini House’ burned to the ground exactly thirty-three years later, on October 31, 1959. Precisely fifty-two years (the magician’s age at the time of his death) after that, the Magic Castle in the Hollywood Hills exploded into flames on October 31, 2011. Built as a Victorian mansion in 1908, the converted structure opened in 1963 as the Magic Castle, a rather creepy members-only club featuring hidden rooms and secret passageways. According to reports, the only room in the building left unscathed by the fire was the Houdini Room.

The mid-1920s were not a good time for the Houdini/Weiss brothers. Brother Gottfried Weiss, born two years before Harry, died in 1925. Harry followed suit the next year. Brother Nathan Weiss, born four years before Harry, died soon after, in 1927. Shit happens, I guess.

On June 22, 1927, Houdini’s European booking agent, Harry Day, reported that his apartment had been ransacked. That day would have also been the Houdini’s wedding anniversary – assuming, that is, that Harry was actually legally married to Bess, which may not have been the case. Two months after the break-in at Day’s apartment, Theodore ‘Hardeen,’ who had inherited all of brother Harry’s props, effects and papers, reported that his home had also been broken into while he had been on the road.

Joscelyn Gordon Whitehead, the guy credited with gut-punching Houdini, was a rather curious gent. Though a college student at the time of the incident, he was already in his thirties. His father was a British diplomat serving in the Orient. After Houdini’s death, Whitehead is said to have become a recluse living something of a hermetic existence. He did have at least one close associate though – Lady Beatrice Isabel Marler, a wealthy heiress and the wife of Sir Herbert Meredith Marler, a prominent Canadian politician and diplomat who once served as Canada’s ambassador to the US.

After Houdini’s death, it was widely rumored that Bess – who in addition to suffering from wild mood swings was also an alcoholic and a drug addict who was occasionally suicidal – ran an illegal speakeasy/brothel in conjunction with a woman named Daisy White, who was said to have been Harry’s mistress. Nothing weird about that. White was not, by the way, the only woman who claimed or was rumored to have had an affair with the performer.

In mid-1945, Theodore “Hardeen,” one of Houdini’s two surviving brothers and the one who had inherited all of his effects, checked into Doctor’s Hospital for a scheduled operation. On June 12, 1945, Hardeen left the hospital in a box. It was reported at the time that Hardeen had been planning to pen a book on his brother and had begun work on the project before checking into the hospital.

Nearly two decades later, on October 6, 1962, Leopold Weiss – Harry’s last living sibling and the one who had been brutally attacked in his brother’s home – is said to have jumped off a ledge and fallen six stories to his death. The last of Houdini’s secrets went to the grave with him.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It has often been noted that Houdini took far longer to perform many of his stage escapes than was actually necessary, and that he was frequently out of view of the audience during such times. This has generally been assumed to have been for dramatic effect. Authors Kalush and Sloman though offer a far more compelling possibility: “One explanation is that such challenges gave Houdini both the opportunity and an alibi to conduct a mission while he was performing.”

It was, in other words, the perfect cover, for how could a man be responsible for something that occurred elsewhere when he was performing on stage for a captive audience at the time? There are, it should be noted, clear parallels here to the story told by Chuck Barris, who has claimed that he was similarly slipping off to conduct covert missions while performing his duties as a chaperone for the Dating Game.

Of course, no one took Barris seriously because we all know that such things don’t really happen in the real world – or at least not in the world that the media present to us as the real world.

It should also be noted here that Houdini possessed, as do most magicians, seemingly superhuman abilities, such as the ability to dislocate his shoulders at will to slip out of straightjackets. He could also regulate his heart rate, respiration rate and other metabolic functions such that he could survive for extended periods of time with little available oxygen, thus facilitating his escapes.

Such abilities are rather commonplace in the world of magic. One magician was found to be able to identify what card a person was holding by virtue of the fact that he had such extraordinary visual acuity that he could see the reflection of the card in the subject’s pupils. Many magicians are able to pick up a stack of cards and know by feel exactly how many cards they are holding, and are able to distinguish individual cards by subtle thickness variations indistinguishable to people with normal abilities.

How do people gain such incredible physical abilities? Probably the best way of understanding such phenomena is as a function of trauma-based, early childhood training.

It appears then that, at the end of the day, the actors populating the Harry Houdini story are the usual cast of characters: intel operatives, Masons, pedophiles, mind-rapists, occultists, and, of course, entertainers. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

[Buick Electra]

(Part 21 – Post 3 of 3)

I, for one, am pleasantly surprised to see that the hack filmmaker who subjected the world to “Kony 2012” is now appearing in some of the most entertaining videos ever to hit the web.

I should, I suppose, qualify that last statement: Ron Jeremy’s fame is inexplicable in the sense that it is hard to imagine that anyone, male or female, really wants to see Ron Jeremy naked. He is not, however, just any ol’ porn star. To the contrary, he is a porn star whose mother was an asset of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, and whose physicist father had probable intel connections as well. And he is a porn star who attended high school with none other than future CIA director George Tenet, and a porn star whose uncle had ties to notorious gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.

He is, in other words, an extremely well hung connected porn star.

Bijou has alluded to the fact that Mackenzie was not the only Phillips daughter to receive unwanted attention from Papa John. In her music can be found lyrics such as “he touched me wrong.” Asked directly about such references, she told an interviewer that she had “made this decision not to talk to the press about anything that’s gone on in my life, but just to write music about it. They can interpret it themselves,” though she then quickly added, “It’s blatantly obvious.”

The youngest of the Phillips clan also acknowledged that she has a “Daddy” tattoo on her rear. “That was [done] during a time,” she said, “when I was a pretty sick puppy.”

Bijou made her film debut in 1999 and has had a number of low-profile film and television roles since then. Most recently, she had a recurring role on the freshman season of Raising Hope as, of all things, a serial killer. She is currently an avid Scientologist. Many of the problems she has faced, she ultimately realized, stem from the fact that she’d “never been shown respect by [her] parents. [She’d] always been treated like an object, not like a human.”

 

[Buick Electra]

THE LAST AND FINAL INSTALLMENT of LAUREL CANYON SERIES

Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation: Part XXII

(Part 22 – Post 1 of 1)

PART XXII

BY DAVE MCGOWAN | APR 1, 2014​

No, this isn’t actually a new installment of the Laurel Canyon series. It is, instead, an explanation of why there haven’t been any new chapters posted in quite some time now. There are, I can assure you, a number of new chapters that have been written – one on Frank Zappa and a couple of his more colorful discoveries (Captain Beefheart and Larry “Wild Man” Fischer), one on Arthur Lee and his band Love, one on John Kay and his band Steppenwolf, and one on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. There are also a number of new additions to the Laurel Canyon Death List. And some supplemental material concerning the death of young Godo Paulekas.

There is also a new chapter that takes a look at the punk and new wave scene that, in the late 1970s, began replacing the sounds of Laurel Canyon on the radio dial. And a new epilogue that reveals that Charlie Manson wasn’t the only serial killer/mass murderer with curious ties to the Laurel Canyon scene. And a new preface that aims to accomplish two things: explain to readers how and why I came to pen this saga, and preemptively respond to potential critics. Also added is a forward written by my esteemed colleague, Nick Bryant, author of The Franklin Scandal.

None of that, however, will be making an appearance on this website, or on any other website. Instead, it will be incorporated into – drum roll, please – a Laurel Canyon book! I have been, you see, quietly working for some time now with a publisher in the UK. And what we have put together is, I honestly believe, a vastly improved telling of the Laurel Canyon saga. In addition to all the new material that will be exclusive to the book, much of the previously posted material has been reorganized and extensively edited to improve the flow of this rather dark journey through what was supposed to be a hippie utopia. And both an index and a bibliography have been added to make this work a more valuable research tool.

The published version carries a different title: Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream. In the Table of Contents below, all chapters/sections that appear in red consist of all new, previously unposted material; those in orange have been supplemented with varying amounts of new material. Since late September, Weird Scenes has had its very own Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/WeirdScenesInsideTheCanyon, with additional information. If you stop by, please be sure to hit the ‘like’ button.

The book’s official release date is April 4. I have begun taking pre-orders for signed copies here, for both paperback and hardcover editions. From that same page, you can also order signed copies of my previous book, Programmed to Kill.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword by Nick Bryant

Preface

1 Village of the Damned By Way of an Introduction

2 Power to the People Call this a Counterculture?

3 Dig! The Laurel Canyon Death List

4 Related Lives and Relative Deaths

5 Desirable People The Canyon’s Peculiar Past

6 Vito and his Freakers The Sinister Roots of Hippie Culture

7 The Death of Godo Paulekas Anger’s Infant Lucifer

8 All the Young Turks Hollywood Tripping

9 Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon

10 Helter Skelter in a Summer Swelter The Return of the Death List

11 Detours Rustic Canyon & Greystone Park

12 Riders on the Storm The Doors

13 Eight Miles High and Falling Fast The Byrds

14 The Great Serendipity Buffalo Springfield

15 Beyond Buffalo Springfield (and the Monkees, too)

16 Altamont Pie Gram Parsons

17 The Lost Expedition of Gene Clark

18 The Wolf King of LA ”Papa” John Phillips

19 Hungry Freaks, Daddy Frank Zappa

20 Born To Be Wild John Kay

21 A Whiter Shade of Pale Arthur Lee and Love

22 Endless Vibrations The Beach Boys

23 The Grim Game Houdini

24 Won’t Get Fooled Again Punk and New Wave Arrive

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Selected Bibliography & Filmography

Index

 

[Rabbit]

catching up reading.

-sigh-

California, obviously, is now a cursed place---and has been, ever since at least the turn of the 20th century.

Makes me wonder if there ever 'was' a time that this place of abundant verdant vegetation, mild climate, plentiful arable land, and lovely vistas--was ever pristine and pure?

How far back in time, I wonder, would one have to go?

No offense to any TB2K members living there, but if, after reading this, any of you DO live there (if the politics and earthquakes haven't already chased you away)--- I'd be getting OUT of there.

Satan has obviously claimed a stronghold in the "City of (fallen) Angels" and the rest of (at least) Southern California, so I wouldn't even visit that demon-infested place, much less LIVE there.

And God's judgment--though delayed--does not sleep.

Almost like it is an open portal to Hell.

 

[mzkitty]

Lots on Gene Clark in Youtube. Hmmm, this whole thing has been just too spooky. I am so glad I wasn't in CA or around those people back then at that exact time. I'd probably be dead. It was insane enough as it was.

But thanks, BE. I truly appreciate it.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HXa3wfzWKQ

 

[Terriannie]

In the spring of 1967, I started High School and graduated 1970 in Torrance, CA on the outskirts of LA County. Back then, I sure didn't know all these deep, dark details, but I sure felt the vibes! How could I not with all the drug deaths and failed, "flower power love-fests"? We had the Compton riots, Manson murders, Art Linkletter's daughter's suicide, etc., etc. (Although, her suicide was actually a positive in my mind because I made a vow to NEVER drop acid or any other kind of chemical!) (I was strictly the rare, pot/hashish/cheap, Thunderbird wine drinker but was found more likely to be in groups that drank Coke and coffee. I quit that short, pot scene LONG before I left CA in 1975.)

Coming from lower middle class, my friends and I entertained ourselves on the cheap. Sometimes we would explore Hollywood by following the sky beams. Gas was cheap and you could fit a lot of girls in a 64 Corvair. I didn't know Laurel Canyon was a hot spot but I do remember thinking that was actually more of a draw to live at other than Beverly Hills. Got bummed out cruising Hollywood Blvd though, when once we got there, we came upon a protest. Cool!! (we thought) Turned out it was an early gay parade and we were treated to a whole bunch of cute gay guys skipping and tripping down the Blvd., holding hands. "What a waste" said a bunch of teen girls looking to flirt with cute boys.

Yeah, I'm not going to lie. The hippy movement was a draw for me but that lasted only a super-short time, especially after the California Dream of "Gidget" and the TV show "Goovy" was not a come-as-you-are to the beach to dance. They were actors/actresses. Thank God even though I was a naive teen, I had a loving mother, "fairly" straight friends and a good Guardian Angel, so I only skated on the edge. I escaped.

This story has brought back so many memories both good and bad but most importantly, it has strengthened my resolve to stand my ground as watcher on the wall, trusting only God.

 

[Thunderdragon]

In the spring of 1967, I started High School and graduated 1970 in Torrance, CA on the outskirts of LA County. Back then, I sure didn't know all these deep, dark details, but I sure felt the vibes! How could I not with all the drug deaths and failed, "flower power love-fests"? We had the Compton riots, Manson murders, Art Linkletter's daughter's suicide, etc., etc. (Although, her suicide was actually a positive in my mind because I made a vow to NEVER drop acid or any other kind of chemical!) (I was strictly the rare, pot/hashish/cheap, Thunderbird wine drinker but was found more likely to be in groups that drank Coke and coffee. I quit that short, pot scene LONG before I left CA in 1975.)

Coming from lower middle class, my friends and I entertained ourselves on the cheap. Sometimes we would explore Hollywood by following the sky beams. Gas was cheap and you could fit a lot of girls in a 64 Corvair. I didn't know Laurel Canyon was a hot spot but I do remember thinking that was actually more of a draw to live at other than Beverly Hills. Got bummed out cruising Hollywood Blvd though, when once we got there, we came upon a protest. Cool!! (we thought) Turned out it was an early gay parade and we were treated to a whole bunch of cute gay guys skipping and tripping down the Blvd., holding hands. "What a waste" said a bunch of teen girls looking to flirt with cute boys.

Yeah, I'm not going to lie. The hippy movement was a draw for me but that lasted only a super-short time, especially after the California Dream of "Gidget" and the TV show "Goovy" was not a come-as-you-are to the beach to dance. They were actors/actresses. Thank God even though I was a naive teen, I had a loving mother, "fairly" straight friends and a good Guardian Angel, so I only skated on the edge. I escaped.

This story has brought back so many memories both good and bad but most importantly, it has strengthened my resolve to stand my ground as watcher on the wall, trusting only God.

I lived there for 5 years. Early 1990s. I lucked into a rent controlled apartment in Santa Monica and ran 5 miles or so daily mostly to Venice beach. I kind of moved there after grad school as I was a runner. Did not actually witness anymore debauchery than I witnessed at a large big 12 university . I mostly stuck to beach towns for night life. But I did notice no one was getting married and having kids…so I left to live somewhere I could afford a house with a shorter commute. My girlfriend followed and we married. She is from la. But we never go visit.

 

[homecanner1]

BE want to thank you for reposting it in total. It was my 3rd time to read it and boy howdy am I able to connect more dots than before!

A word to everybody that was in that orbit back then, rumors keep swirling that once Trump is restored there will be "declas". Basically that he dissolves Quantico/Langley over corruption in order to rehire/retrain.

And in the wake of that reset will be something created called The CIA Reading Room. Sort of like Julian
Assange Wikileaks but on steroids. Once its all declassified we will be able to log on and scroll the index and read for ourselves the real truth. Based on Jefferson's Library of Congress but a researchable Library of USA Sin Inc.

So all the groupies, the go go dancers in the cages, the biker wars over the formaldehyde/rat poisoned dope, who supplied the gas credit money for the Manson Family bus to roll and maps of all the tunnels, all will be public record. Not just relegated to night owl conspiracy theorists listening to paranormal radio guests

And I am totally cool with that, flag to Midler & Scorcese, lol. " No mercy "

 

[Buick Electra]

BE want to thank you for reposting it in total. It was my 3rd time to read it and boy howdy am I able to connect more dots than before!

A word to everybody that was in that orbit back then, rumors keep swirling that once Trump is restored there will be "declas". Basically that he dissolves Quantico/Langley over corruption in order to rehire/retrain.

And in the wake of that reset will be something created called The CIA Reading Room. Sort of like Julian
Assange Wikileaks but on steroids. Once its all declassified we will be able to log on and scroll the index and read for ourselves the real truth. Based on Jefferson's Library of Congress but a researchable Library of USA Sin Inc.

So all the groupies, the go go dancers in the cages, the biker wars over the rat poisoned dope, who supplied the gas credit money for the Manson Family bus to roll and maps of all the tunnels, all will be public record. Not just relegated to night owl conspiracy theorists listening to paranormal radio guests

And I am totally cool with that, flag to Midler & Scorcese, lol. No mercy

HC, thank YOU for all the valuable information you bring over to, at least the threads I've seen you on! That Mackenzie Phillips you brought over, earlier on this thread, was a huge red pill in her own words.

And now this CIA Reading room!

So please, accept my thanks for all you do!

 

[Johnny Twoguns]

Interesting little ditty: Demise of Laurel Canyon

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZsL4UfSlSQ

 

[Buick Electra]

Interesting little ditty: Demise of Laurel Canyon

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZsL4UfSlSQ

That was good. Thank you JTG. I enjoyed all the pics they had of these 'entertainers.' This would be good to watch before one gets into the nitty gritty of McGowan's work.