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.
