it, there is my girl,” he said as he snapped the shutter. “Now take off your bottoms. Only you will see how beautiful you are.”
At that point, I know I was caught up in the moment and the excitement of thinking that someone, even an overweight sweaty photographer, saw me as beautiful. The hippie women were not shy about their bodies, so I decided to do what he asked. I took off my bottoms and let him photograph me. I felt beautiful. I imagined myself to be the most desirable girl in the world, thinking that all the boys at the beach would want me. This would be my secret that they could see only if I let them. When we finished, I dressed and we got back into the car. When we began to drive, I realized I had no idea where we were going.
“I thought my house was back there,” I pointed. It felt like we were going in the wrong direction.
“Don’t worry, we are going to my studio. It isn’t very far from here. I have a few more photo ideas I would like to shoot.”
We got to this little cabin, which was far away from any other houses. He had a key, so I figured it must be okay. It smelled musty when we entered it, like it had not been used for a while, but it was clearly a place where he had been before. He told me to lie on the bed and give him a smile. He shot some photographs.
Then he went into the bathroom and started the bathwater. “I would like to get some shots of you in the bathtub with some bubbles,” he shouted from the other room.
I sat there for a moment, looking at the fading light in the cabin. All at once I came to the realization that none of this was okay. I was alone in a cabin in a place I would never recognize again, and no one had any idea I was there. My stomach tensed up.
“That’s all right,” I said hesitantly. “I have to go home now.”
I heard him turn off the faucet. He came back into the bedroom, where I was now sitting up straight.
“You don’t have to do a shot in the bath if you don’t want to.” He started to stroke my hair, and I felt my heart race. He noticed me tense up and began rubbing my shoulders. I became aware that part of the musky smell permeating the air when we entered the cabin was coming from him.
“I really need to go home now,” I said, standing up.
“What is your hurry?”
I started to cry. I wasn’t a wood nymph or a hippie girl. I was a dumb girl who was alone in the woods with someone I didn’t know who was trying to get me to have sex with him. That much I figured out. I only hoped it wasn’t too late.
He sat with me for a minute and said, “I thought you wanted to do this.”
My chest began to heave. I couldn’t speak.
“Get dressed,” he said. “I will give you all the photographs and we will forget this ever happened.” We got back into the car and he drove me back to the house. He said he would call when the pictures were ready and would give them all to me if I promised not to tell anyone about it. I nodded and wiped my eyes on my sleeve.
Surprisingly true to his word, he showed up a few weeks later with over two hundred and fifty photos of me, mostly in the nude. I really liked one in which I was smiling and in my orange bikini. I took that one out and put the rest of them back in the brown envelope they came in and hid them under the bed.
Young as I was, I still understood how lucky I’d been to return home safely, and that there was something very wrong with what had happened. The photographer was disturbing, of course, but the fact that I’d met him because of people living in my house was equally troubling. Though I hadn’t considered it before, the people my parents were involved with were relative strangers to us, and we took most of them at their word about their pasts. These were people my parents had invited into our home, a place that was supposed to be safe, but now it turned out I couldn’t trust them.
Beyond these uncomfortable questions of the modeling shoot, there was also a larger, more problematic reality for me. No longer a child, like Danny and Kathy, but not an adult either, I was in a precarious position, and no one—not my parents and not me—seemed willing to acknowledge it or to recognize just how vulnerable I was. My father was plunging our family headfirst into the ethos of the moment, opening us up to a communal existence without fully understanding the risks that this posed for me specifically. Or perhaps as I would like to believe, he too was simply naive about some of the very real dangers hidden in the idealism of the moment. Acting as hastily and impulsively as he always had, he didn’t stop to consider that as a parent of a teenage girl he had different responsibilities. It was a miscalculation that would prove dangerous.
Los angeles during that summer of 1967 was a crazy scene. There were happenings every weekend, and it was easy to get caught up in the wave of change. This was a revolution led by the young, and more of them were arriving every day, flooding into Los Angeles and into San Francisco to find the tribes of hippies they’d heard about. California was at the epicenter of the counterculture, and eventually it just came to blend in with the sunshine and the palm trees.
While it was becoming increasingly clear that this way of life was taking over, I still had my own reservations. I had enough maturity to know that school and a stable living environment had been good for me. I had ambitions and goals for myself. But it also became more difficult to resist the forces around me, especially since my parents’ blind enthusiasm clouded their judgment. They were thinking and acting like the teenagers streaming into L.A., as though they didn’t have responsibilities or kids of their own; after all, it’s a lot easier to live in the moment when you don’t have three mouths to feed. They were adults, but apparently they were rejecting that role. And though I had plenty of misgivings about their approach, at a certain point that summer I decided to simply give up the fight—if living in the now was my future, so be it.
In mid-July, my parents let me go to the Fantasy Faire & Magic Music Festival at Devonshire Downs with Jan and Joan. It was a two-day festival in Northridge, which wasn’t too far from us. The radio ads described it as a “magic meadow where people would partake of a spectacular gathering, an adventure in light and sound with twenty groups including the Doors, the Iron Butterfly, Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, in forests and meadows filled with a thousand wonders.” There was no way we were going to miss it.
The bands were as spectacular as advertised, but there was something else that caught my eye as we wandered throughout the sea of hippies. The promoter of the event was a tall, handsome, curly-headed man in his late twenties named Kim Fowley. My eyes followed him as he walked the grounds greeting people he knew. Jan and Joan teased me because it was obvious that I was hot for the guy. He was just my type and he was in charge—that was very appealing. Eventually, he started to notice me, and toward the end of the day, he approached me and asked how I liked the show.
I don’t know why, but I felt like a different person as I flirted with Kim. It was like I was intoxicated, but not on drugs, on him. I didn’t want to come across as a dumb little kid, so I acted as poised as I could. While we spoke, I made up my mind: If he made any kind of move, I wouldn’t turn him down. There was sex everywhere, but more than that, the expectation of sex was everywhere; if I was expected to do it, I at least wanted it to be with someone I found exciting and sexy. Not some leering perv with sweat stains or a longhair who happened to be living under my parents’ roof.
Kim got the message, asking my name and giving me little things to do as he made sure the show ended without any difficulties. Jan and Joan decided to leave, and when they came up to tell me they wanted to go, Kim offered to give me a lift home. With the cleanup under way, he talked and I listened, and a few times he took me by the hand. My
