'Are you crazy? That was one of the most God damn bizarre, totally fucking insane things I've ever seen. You need to be institutionalized.'
One afternoon ole Joanie phoned me and asked me to come by. This was before I realized that Joan was still drinking and using. (I'm a slow, but not stupid learner). The sporadically paid house keeper let me in and told me that Joan was in the bedroom.
Just as in a Vegas hotel suite, there was a small, Japanese style, circular copper bath tub adjoining the bedroom. (No, this 'hotel room' didn't have a mirrored ceiling over the bed.) Joan was in the tub as naked as a new born kid, lecturing her daughter, the oldest, and her two teen age boys.
It takes a really fucked up woman, small tits and all, to lecture two teen age boys while being naked, in a bath tub. I went off the wall, after the kids were gone, and went on a screamer starting with, 'Are you crazy?' Dumb question since the answer was apparent. Between the booze and the pills, Joan was really looney.
In walking to see the naked Joan in the tub, I had to walk by her enormous bed. There were 3 very expensive Boggier ski suits and two Bogner après ski outfits laid out on the bed. Since Joan didn't ski, I wondered what the hell that goofy broad was going to do with $6,500 (1975 $) worth of ski clothing. After the kids left and I was finished ranting about a mother lecturing two teen aged boys while naked, I said to Joan 'You don't ski. Why the ski outfits?'
Miss Fashion Plate says, 'I'm going to Tahoe next week and I have to look like a skier.' Her dead husband's very wealthy family owned a place in Tahoe that Joan used from time to time, every winter. At least she didn't buy a set of skis to further impress everyone.
Joan, it turned out, never went clothing shopping. She had a sales person at I Magnin, a very upscale store, who would bring her, periodically, clothes from the store to choose from. To call her well dressed would be an understatement. To call her a profligate spender would be kind. She suffered from a serious disrespect of money.
She was also a hat freak. Joan was small but always wore, huge, great looking, broad brimmed hats. Kinda' looked like they would enable her to fly. In addition to being a hat fashion freak, Joan was also a hot check writer of great consequence. Joan never opened her mail. As with other serious drinkers and users, Joan was afraid of what message was in the mail.
After the Princess unloaded me and I moved into this overpriced Palo Alto dump, I would walk past my mail box for days afraid to open the fucking mail box. My constant feelings of impending doom kept me from even taking the mail out of the mail box, much less opening it. But obviously I did, later rather than sooner.
Joan had a 'keeper' hired by her wealthy relatives to try to keep Joan and her free spending, hot check writing reined in. No hope. So every year end the family would send the 'keeper' a bunch of money to settle up Joanie's hot checks and insane charge accounts. They didn't want their world famous name besmirched.
Fell asleep driving at night on the then new 280. I had spent a day in S.F. with my friend Patti Brown getting my 'colors' done. I think that I'm a 'fall'; no one ever called me 'Sunshine'!
We had dinner at Lorenzo Petroni's North Beach Restaurant. I drank a ton of coffee which didn't keep me awake when needed. On the way back home, on 280, Patti asked if I would mind her taking a nap, which I didn't, not realizing that a few minutes later I would join her.
Wham, Bam, Slam. I came awake, saw that we were hurtling off the road, going a gazillion miles a fucking hour. Having spent four years driving on icy roads in fucked up Iowa, I knew better than fight the steering wheel. We took down some saplings, newly planted trees, ripped a chain link fence up out of the ground, bounced off a horrendous oak tree and finally came to a halt. All of this action while in a Mercedes convertible with its soft top. (The car was totaled; its fate is another cockamamie story.) Miraculously, Patti and I escaped with a few scratches. We did kinda go into shock the following day.
After I had said 'goodbye, good luck, so long' to that sad soul Joan, I kept hearing from Joan's friends about her increasingly bizarre behavior. I decided to go back East and talk with her dead husband's brother and father and see if I could convince them to change their approach. So like a jerk I schlepped my busted ass back East, naturally flying first class, always feeling better to 'go' in flames, rather than sparks.
The following morning I was picked up by a car and driver and driven to a suburb for breakfast with Joan's brother in law at his home. He had just come off his tennis court, showered and was wearing a white terry cloth robe. He thought, I guessed, that he looked debonair. I thought he looked like shit and a real snob as well.
We had breakfast and he asked me lots of questions. The most irritating question came as he was questioning my motives in wanting to see him. I kept telling him my only motive was to try to save Joan's life. Then came the question out if this very bright, fabulously rich, asshole's mouth: 'What are you, some kind of a Christer?' My response was a simple 'Fuck you.'
He finally got dressed and we drove into town to where he and his Father, the Family Patriarch had offices. I told that old man that if they didn't change their method of dealing with Joan that she would surely die. That son of a bitch responded by literally saying, 'It can't happen soon enough for me.' That old prick shocked me into silence and he took off with stories if how Joan was the cause of his obese son's heart attack and death on a tennis court. Yeah, someone held his kid down while some one stuffed enormous quantities of food down his kid's gullet.
Yeah, unreal stories about Joan are many but these days my sympathies are with Joan and her inability to cope with life and resorting to pills and booze. Her husband's family name is now associated with family law suits (over money, naturally) and meaningful charitable and educational gifts. But when the time came for them to stand up and be counted they fell flat in their fucking, selfish, greedy faces. With friends like that Joan didn't need any enemies.
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