by Penny Suess

Michael was a sweet guy. The kind that women really like, because he seemed to genuinely like women. And he was funny – another thing women like. So when he sometimes said maddeningly sexist shit, he did it with a grin, and you couldn’t hold it against him.

I first met Michael (he was never Mike to me) in January 1979. Dana Gurnee invited me to come to dinner on a Saturday night at the house he, Michael, and Larry Menshek were renting on Troy Drive. It would have been called a bachelor pad in the 1950s, and it still had a bit of that vibe, though Michael had jazzed it up with some colorful and creative furnishings you never would have seen then. Like the shelving unit made from a concrete pillar form, with holes cut into it. This cylinder about 18 inches in diameter and maybe six feet tall moved around the house over the years, but I think it was in the corner of the living room that night. In all its red-painted glory. There were also low, squishy foam sofas, one blue and one covered in orange knit fabric. Later, when the orange one developed a long tear, I mended it with black thread, for kind of a Frankenstein look. Michael was not amused, but he left it that way.

Dana and I had been working together at Computer Typesetting Service in Glendale the previous fall, but he’d moved on to another job after a couple of months. In those days, before everybody had a desktop computer with publishing software (not to mention Web sites), we could hop from type shop to type shop with ease. There were dozens of ad agencies and designers who needed to buy actual type, words on photographic paper, for god’s sake! And we were the peons who produced them.

If I remember, I was sleeping my Saturday away when Dana called. I was working night shift, the “lobster” shift, then. Ten p.m. to 6:30 a.m. or so. I used to get home to my Los Feliz apartment about 7 and crash till midafternoon, then have my real life till it was time to leave for work again, around 9:30. Pretty much opposite to everyone else I knew. [Why do these remembrances end up being at least as much about the rememberer as the gone guy?] This was going to be our first “date,” first time seeing each other outside of work.

Also at the house when I arrived were Larry and Barbara and Michael. Dinner was spaghetti, green salad, and bread. Instead of butter, there was lecithin spread – courtesy of Barb, I’m sure! Clowning around at the table, Michael grabbed some of the lecithin and smeared it on his head with the comment that maybe it would stimulate some hair to grow! He was always sensitive about being a little bald. Thus the hats, I guess. He had a lot of them.

So we all had a nice time around the Nevamar table, scene of so many card games later, then went our separate ways. Dana and I spent a couple of hours sitting on that orange sofa (or was it the blue one?) and talking.

Over the next three years, I spent many weekends at the Troy Drive house. Larry moved out to be with Barb, and a succession of new roomies passed through. For a while, it was Australian women from the Consulate, who filled the kitchen with Pavlovas and other treats. Bill Shepherd passed through for a summer, working for the Census. Dana always refers to his girlfriend as the smoking ballerina. Then there was Mark Yablonski/Younger, who aspired to be a Country DJ and listened to tapes of his own radio gigs in the bathtub – right next to Dana’s room.

There would be games on TV. I know nothing about either football or basketball, but I would sit and let the spectacle wash over me while the guys watched. I don’t know how many times I argued with Michael over how to pronounce “penalize.” I said “peenalize,” as is traditional, but he and the announcers invariably said “pen (like the writing instrument) -alize.” I used the word penal (penal colony) as my example of correctness; Michael said, “but what about penalty?” Nobody ever “won” that argument, and I just decided he was squeamish about the long e sound – too close to pee, or penis.

There were lots of ladies for Michael in those 70s into 80s times. Computer matches that resulted in a date or two. I would meet them in passing. All were lovely. Few were around for long. I don’t have any insight into this; it wasn’t like discussed or anything. It seemed a shame, to me. Michael was a nice guy and fun and smart and generous. What do women want, anyway? One of the age-old questions. But I guess he was pretty picky, too.

Finally, in 1982 Dana and I left for our year-long trip around the country in our camper, and when we returned, we got a place in Santa Monica together. Though of course we often saw Michael in the following years, we just weren’t “family” anymore, in that casual way.

We still play his Christmas Goop CD mixes around the holidays. All eleven of them.

 

by Dana Gurnee

When thinking of more to say about the Life of Mike, I keep returning to 1967. Still the chronological approach, but it’s something. And I write it to put it out of my mind.

I first met Michael in 1962, in biology class at Wilson High School in Long Beach. He and I, along with a girl named Lenore, were the only sophomores allowed to take this “difficult, seniors-only” course. We had to pass a tough test to qualify, and the teacher of the class made a big deal about us and the A’s we always got on papers and exams, hoping to shame the seniors into doing better. Just a tiny morsel of evidence that Michael was a bright, shiny object back then. (As for Lenore and me, someone else will have to make that call.)

Michael and I never “touched” outside of class. He was tall and handsome and debonair and classy and witty, while I was just witty. Maybe. He played trombone in the band and marched in a Rose Parade. He was a cross-country runner who consistently placed second or third, behind a boy who was near Olympian in his speed. Michael always had a job, such as the paper route that John Harding mentions. When Michael could drive, he went all the way to Los Angeles on dates and spent more than $5. He got good grades, back when good grades still meant excellence. And he and his brother handled most of the household chores, while his parents worked full time and enjoyed cocktails. He could do it all. He was the hippest man alive. Hard-working, too.

After high school, Michael attended Long Beach City College for two years, and then transferred to UCLA in 1967. During his LBCC years, he was a pal of Larry Menshek, who put Michael and me together when Michael was looking for a roommate to share the expenses of an apartment.

I was about to begin my third year in a UCLA dorm, but wanted something more grown-up and adventurous — something more conducive to certain forms of recreation and consumption, you might say. And I needed a hip guy to help me get going.

So Michael and I became roommates at 1519 Colby Avenue, in West L.A., about five miles from campus, just around the corner from Shari’s, a wonderful 24-hour coffee shop where hamburgers were 85 cents and coffee had just gone up to 15 cents.

Soon after starting at Colby, Michael had three part-time jobs so that he could pay his way and still go to classes. In the wee hours of the morning, he delivered L.A. Times newspapers to the UCLA dorms, using his motorcycle with sidecar to carry the dozens of thick papers. In the early hours of the evening, he worked in the paste-up department of the UCLA Daily Bruin, with his fast skills doing far more than his fair share of the work. And on weekend nights he worked at UCLA Medical Center doing odd jobs that occasionally included taking bodies to the morgue, using a special code to bypass all the floors. He got in trouble once for miskeying the code, causing the door to open in the lobby while he had a stiff.

Through all this, Michael attended classes and did quite well in them, I think because excelling in them was based not on learning, but on raw artistic talent. His major was graphic arts, continuing an interest he had when he was a baby. He finished all the tough academic stuff at LBCC, so his UCLA grades were based on producing objects of art, and that he did, using his superb skills as a designer, illustrator, typographer, and letterer. He was like the young Bob Dylan writing songs: The output was beautiful and magical, and seemed effortless.

Meanwhile, I was working part-time jobs, too — paste-up at the Daily Bruin and doorman at a theater — spending too little time studying at home, often missing the large classes with hundreds of people in them. In upper division, exams were essay questions, and getting A’s or B’s required little more than legible handwriting, decent syntax, and liberal bias. (I might have had higher grades had my name not been a girl’s name.)

All this was against the backdrop of Vietnam and protest, LBJ and Nixon, acid and pot, the new music, and all the rest. Michael went along with the social movements with great glee and appetite, but he did not haunt political gatherings or carry signs or organize levitations of the Federal Building. But he was a “leftie” on the way to hippiedom.

In those days, I felt — Michael, too, I’m sure — that we were fighting to survive, i.e., to stay out of the war and to stay in the U.S.A. The alternative to our draft deferments seemed like death. We believed that old men with limp dicks were jealous of our perpetual erections, and wanted us out of the way so that they could get the girls. In retrospect, these views are profoundly unfair and naive, but so it goes.

From September 1967 to June 1968, we watched with awe as things got worse and worse, yet also more exciting. Nine months then would equal 10 years today. Maybe 20.

When RFK was assassinated, I was working at McCarthy headquarters in Westwood, answering incoming calls. My first knowledge of what was happening came when a caller accused us at the headquarters of pulling the trigger. Michael came to the place to watch TV with the McCarthyites. A couple of hours later, Michael took me back to Colby in the sidecar. We walked the 200 feet to Shari’s for hamburgers and pints of coffee. Michael said he had extra time to drink coffee because the Times would have to redo its front page, meaning there was no reason to arrive at the usual time to load up the sidecar.

In its way, this was a life’s highlight, aided greatly by Tareyton cigarettes, which, of course, we could smoke anywhere we felt like.



 

by John W. Harding

Since many of Ian Michael Hamilton’s friends arrived late and have little idea of how he came to be who he was, let me share some of what I know of his formative years.

First of all, his birth name was Michael. Michael Hall. We met as freshmen and fellow French-class victims at Long Beach City College. While he chose to change his name a few times over the years, he was always unpretentious, frank, searching, and a joy to talk to — in English, at least.

I learned he played trombone in the school band and I must have gone to see him at a pep rally because one of my first memories is seeing him sitting with his instrument, puffing and blowing like crazy into the mouthpiece. As soon as there came a musical rest, he lowered his trombone, reached down and stuffed a large piece of banana in his mouth.

I did not know what to think of this at the time, but looking back it seems like the perfect Zen demonstration of aloof dedication. Michael would always resist the expectations of leaders. Even in a band he could not lose himself in the part he was playing.

It was the fall of 1965, and Michael was still living with his mother and working at his old high school paper route. He hated the deadening routine of getting up before dawn every day, folding stacks of papers and loading them into bags on his bicycle. But he was on a mission to save enough money to buy his own motorcycle.

 

 

This was typical Michael Hall back then: I brought him to my home in Lakewood and as we passed through the kitchen my mother pulled a sheet of cookies from the oven. “Take one,” she offered. “I’ll take two,” replied Michael. There’s nothing like being oneself to put folks at ease.

 

Later I learned he was an avid student of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy. He wanted to surround himself with beautiful women, cool music and fancy technology. New inventions and innovative concepts always made him giggle like a girl.

He seemed to spend endless hours poring over every detail of the magazines and illustrations he enjoyed, training his eye to see what was there and how it was achieved, starting himself on a path toward graphic design.

I was part of a community drama troupe known as the Virginia Country Theatre due to its location in a wooded neighborhood behind north Long Beach’s Virginia County Club. Michael started coming out with me, helping the group on a design project or two. He wasn’t a big theater fan, but he loved the social mix and the stimulation of being around talented people. Still, he was edgier and more open to new experiences than any polished country club teen.

That made sense if you knew Michael’s background. He had entered grade school in West Virginia coal country. Even after his family moved west to an apartment in Long Beach, California, it had to struggle to stay above the poverty line.

Michael tried hard to fit in with the crewcut hootenanny vibe of the early 1960s, and was a Goldwater volunteer. But along came the rock’n’roll culture and it clicked with his inner-rebel. Soon he was signing his name as M. Higgins Hall and he no longer wanted any part of backward-looking, narrow-minded thinking.

Finally cutting loose his paperboy route he took a minimum wage job in a hospital. He often talked about wheeling newly admitted patients up to their rooms on a gurney one day, then having to go up and take their bodies to the morgue the next. It was more than depressing to him, but he stuck with it long enough to buy his first motorcycle and begin thinking seriously about a four-year college.

Luckily, UCLA was still affordable to California residents in 1967. Everyone would be far more sophisticated at a major university, he said, and he convinced me to apply there with him. Perhaps he believed it was the secret portal to the Good Life as proposed by Hef. In anticipation, he had a sidecar welded to his motorcycle — a placeholder for that special someone who might want to make the journey with him.

In the comments section, Judy Cromwell and Dana Gurnee both evoke Michael’s UCLA years in good detail. I can tell you how he threw himself into campus life and took over the editorial reins of the student humor magazine. He spent so much after-school time working on it that he tagged himself “The Phantom of Kerckhoff Hall.” Everyone in his life was brought aboard to write stories, brainstorm features and suggest headlines.

We renamed our first issue De-Press, on the theory that any publication in those years using humor to highlight basic truths would be at least in part a downer. The issue had a caustic political edge and even a nude centerfold — Michael himself posing for a cutout party game called “Pin the Penis on the People.”

For almost a week the issue sold like hotcakes on and off campus, but then the administration got complaints and it ordered all remaining copies recalled. Michael was summoned before the board of advisors to answer for his crimes, and he went absolutely ballistic, storming out of their office after calling them every coal-country name in the book.

When it came to big issues or large emotions, Michael did not believe in half gestures. While smitten with one lovely co-ed, he took a photo of her naked body and blew it up into a ceiling-to-floor hanging mural for his apartment living room.

 

In his final year at UCLA, Michael declared it was time for us to pool our resources and start a hippie commune. He found a suitable multi-roomed Hollywood mansion from the 1920s, and seven of us signed a lease with its owner, a retired singer named Adrianna Mitchell.

In the late 1930s under her own name as Adrianna Caselotti, she had done the singing for Disney’s “Snow White.” So we dubbed ourselves Snow White’s newest seven dwarfs.

 

 

The mansion was on Alta Loma Terrace in the hills behind the Hollywood Bowl. To reach it you used a temperamental outdoor elevator off Hightower Drive.

When the elevator refused to work, you had to hike up a hundred steps and along a shaded, sloping concrete footpath around private gardens, bougainvillea bushes and banana-leaf trees.

A period of epic parties straight out of “Animal House” ensued, passing in a blur. I remember everyone covering the fireplace in day-glo art. There was glitz and glamour and even a few movie stars, though I doubt Hef ever attended our parties. The communal kitchen was mainly used to store piles of dirty dishes.

When the fog lifted, I was working on a German freighter bound for Europe and Michael was moving to San Francisco to be closer to his new idol, Jimi Hendrix. We reconnected some time later when Michael resettled in a stilt-home in the Los Angeles hills behind Universal Studios. He had gone beyond male-pattern baldness by then, and renamed himself Ian. He went on to a complete makeover, re-inventing himself as a full time graphic artist and recording engineer.

Michael mastered the art of designing Web pages with his lifelong friend Larry Menshek. He still had plenty of time for month-long motorcycle getaways. Meanwhile, he delighted in keeping up with all the latest gizmos that technology could throw at us.

When I finished my first novel, Michael was there to design its book jacket and to help me sift through a whole thicket of publication obstacles. He patiently performed a similar service for many a client over the years, and most of them hung onto him as friends.

Like Scaramouche, Michael Hall was “born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad.” As with many people with a sense of life’s absurdity, Michael liked to laugh at the predicaments his humanity got him into. But while his humor began with himself it also ended there. He never looked down on others for where they came from, nor for their weaknesses or failings. He knew that everyone has a journey to complete, and none of us can predict where it will lead.

Rest yourself now, Michael. Your friends will somehow carry on, warmed by the memories you left us.

by Dana Gurnee

Well, I’ve been overwhelmed with images and memories, as if given a dangerous mind-bending drug. I first was tempted to wait a few weeks, and to put those memories all together in a long, coherent, sequential narrative. But now I think I will poke in random fashion, starting not with 1967, when Michael and I became roommates at UCLA, but starting with something that intrudes more insistently: the UCLA humor magazine that Michael led in 1968.

Michael somehow heard that the humor magazine’s editorship was legally up for grabs every year. For decades, the editorship had been held by one fraternity or another. The existing humor magazine, Satyr, prided itself on its comic-strip character Captain F-Q, who drooled over amply endowed cartoon co-eds. It wasn’t a bad publication, and its “ownership” seemed entrenched and pleasing to the powers that were.

But Michael decided to try to take it over, along with me and a group of pals, mostly from his graphic-arts classes. Those were terrible, tumultuous times, with Vietnam, the assassinations, the Chicago convention, the Nixon election, yadda yadda. Somehow Michael was able to persuade a UCLA decision committee that it was time for the humor magazine to better reflect the times — to have a less-conservative feel, to have a modern design, and to have “girls” play a role, too, as actual staff members. Outrageous!

We were stunned when Michael pulled it off. And it stunned the Old Guard, who laughed off Michael’s challenge, and perhaps did not make a strong play to renew their sinecure.

However it came down, Michael got the job.

The poor overseers had NO IDEA what Michael and his staff would produce. The magazine had full-frontal nudity (female, of course) on the inside cover, pubic hair and all. (But the photo was tastefully grainy.) This was two years before Playboy did the same.

The center spread was a nude picture of Michael, sans dick, with a whole bunch of phallic symbols on a separate page, which could be cut out to create a “Pin the Penis on the Person” poster. Thoughtful man that he was, Michael had the reverse side of this page blank, so that cutting out items would not destroy content.

The magazine’s cover had the words PEN and IS, slightly touching, but leaning strongly in opposite directions. To the casual observer, the magazine’s title was PENIS. But the careful observer would see the 5-point Helvetica Light type on each side of PEN and IS, and then see the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Jejune now, but dangerous then. (Honest!)

The pages were full of political protest and social commentary and drug references. One page was a drawing of Hubert Humphrey with a Hitler mustache. The words on it: “Mein Humpf.” This was from a sign that Michael carried at a violent demonstration that took place at the Century Plaza Hotel in the summer of 1968, when LBJ was spending the night. I think Michael was beaten by the cops that night. But maybe that was someone else. It’s funny what one is unsure about after 48 years.

The back cover was a U.S. flag with about 400 stars on it. Every square inch of the magazine was something shocking and new for 1968, with typography, design and graphics that were new to behold. Even the size — square and large — was new.

In the telling, it seems sadly naive and staid. It’s like trying to explain why we once thought that Bob Hope was funny. It’s all about context. And back then, this magazine was a disappointment for the UCLA administration. There was an article in the L.A. Times about its disturbing departure from the tradition of campus humor magazines everywhere.

Even during the magazine’s production, there were problems. The typesetters refused to type in certain words, or to type entire pieces. But Michael was able to break in to the typesetters’ room, and he then figured out how to use the computers and the programs to produce the type we needed to paste up the magazine. He knew how to it all! After that, he and I worked on the type machines between 2:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. for several nights, and somehow the magazines were made, though with many horrible typos that made it to print.

We sold the magazines for 75 cents each — if my memory serves, 25 cents more than the price of the old humor magazine. We sold them by standing on the various campus walkways, sometimes suffering taunts and threats, but mostly enjoying warm support.

It all ended when Michael was fired. This happened because I turned over 200 copies of the magazine to some campus official, who told me that he wanted to place them in an off-campus bookstore to make more money. I thought this was pretty neat. But a few days later, another campus official came in to do an audit of the money we had collected. Guess what? We were $150 short. I did not get a receipt for the 200 copies that were taken, and the other official denied taking them from me. The evidence was irrefutable: We were crooks.

So Michael was accused of embezzling and was fired, with the “deal” being that if he agreed to leave the magazine peaceably, he wouldn’t be expelled from school. Michael and I knew what we were up against, so we slunk away.

The magazine, by the way, was called De Press. The experience revealed what would be (and already were) trademarks of Michael’s character: his energy, his talent, his ability to quickly figure out almost anything, his being always on the leading edge, and his uppitiness (to get control of the magazine even for a couple of months).

The next issue of the humor magazine returned to the Old Guard. Today, I see the previous editor’s name often listed as a writer on a popular cable show. Google indicates that the magazine is still called Satyr. I can find nothing about De Press.