Rebels in Paradise (12 page)

After the Factors bought a Spanish Colonial Revival home in Santa Monica that had belonged to drama critic Kenneth Tynan, the piece went on view in their living room with other works by Kienholz. (In 2008, the L.A. County Museum of Art purchased it from the Factor Collection for reportedly $1 million.) The Factors owned an eponymous men's clothing store in Beverly Hills designed by Alvin Lustig and regularly traded clothing to the artists in exchange for works of art. Monte Factor paid Ed Ruscha to design his logo. Factor said, “The artists gave us more than we could ever give them.”
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CHAPTER FIVE

Okies: Ed Ruscha, Mason Williams, Joe Goode, and Jerry McMillan

On a sweltering summer day in 1956, Ed Ruscha and his best friend, Mason Williams, waited impatiently to set out for Los Angeles. The two had grown up in the same Oklahoma City neighborhood, had attended the same classes, had double-dated to the high school prom, and had even collaborated on an episodic painted mural about the Oklahoma Land Run. Ruscha looked to be on the cusp of manhood, his face defined by high cheekbones, brown hair, and almond-shaped eyes. Williams, squarely built with dark hair, an upturned nose, and a dimpled chin, retained a boyish appearance. Both were blessed with charming Oklahoma accents, a honeyed meld of southern and western tones. Fittingly, they headed off to college together. Ruscha, nineteen, packed his black 1950 Ford with trunks of clothes, school supplies, and sandwiches made by his mother. The car tended to burn oil so Ruscha had a case on hand and, indeed, the car went through thirteen quarts making the 1,250-mile journey west along Route 66. For them, the fact that they were going to college paled in importance beside the fact that they were getting out of Oklahoma City.

Ed Ruscha

Photograph by Dennis Hopper, © The Dennis Hopper Trust, courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

Edward Joseph Ruscha IV was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937 and was five years old when his parents moved to Oklahoma City. His father was transferred to Oklahoma to work as an auditor for the Hartford Insurance Company, and he remained for the next twenty-five years. A survivor of the Depression, Ruscha's father had a singular piece of advice for his son: “Always pay cash.”
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He had paid $7,000 cash for their 1920 brick house on Northwest Seventeenth Street in 1942.

Ruscha's father remained a devout Catholic despite having been excommunicated in 1922 after divorcing his first wife. For many years, Ruscha and his siblings were not told that they had a step-sister, the daughter of that first marriage. “It weighed heavily upon him,” Ruscha recalled. Ruscha's repentant father attended mass daily, taking his eldest son with him on Sundays, despite the fact that he was prohibited from taking communion or kneeling during the service. Ruscha's mother, also Catholic, attended church only on occasional Sundays or holidays, and instead of kneeling, she sat with her husband as a show of loyalty. While Ruscha studied catechism, he could not be an altar boy like his neighbor Joe Goode.

While his father traveled for business, Ruscha grew close to his mother, who was gifted with both a sense of humor and of propriety. Her two sons and daughter sent thank-you notes promptly and addressed their elders as “sir” or “ma'am.” A dedicated reader and correspondent, she kept an open dictionary in the dining room and encouraged her children to look up word definitions.

According to Ruscha, his mother's literary sympathies extended to the creative efforts of Williams, who called her “a godsend.”
2
Williams had spent his earliest years in Rule, Texas, where his family had lived a hardscrabble existence in a shotgun house with no indoor plumbing. “We were like a Walker Evans photograph,” he said later.
3
Williams's father, a tile setter, made a better living after bringing the family to Oklahoma City, but young Williams spent most of his free time at Ruscha's house. “[My mother] hit it off with Mason, who was always spouting poetry and silly stuff,” Ruscha said. “She encouraged him, almost like a second mother. He'd come over and play guitar, folk songs, or country and western.”
4

The Ruschas were the last on their street to get a television; such an indulgence was thought to be a bit “show-offy” so the family listened to radio drama, and Ruscha came to value not just the meanings but the sounds of words.

As teenagers, he and Williams discovered a store in town that carried 45 rpm records by rhythm and blues musicians, what Oklahomans called “race music.” Ruscha's first purchase was the Clovers single “One Mint Julep” with “Lovey Dovey” on the B side. The slow, rocking rhythm and suggestive lyrics promised darkened rooms, close dancing, romance, and mystery. He bought recordings of Stan Kenton, Count Basie, and Billy Eckstine and missed few concerts at the Municipal Auditorium. In 1949, Spike Jones and the City Slickers found Ruscha hanging around the back of the auditorium trying to sneak in. They gave him some money and told him to go buy some eggs. Thrilled by this brush with celebrity, Ruscha did what he was told. When he returned, they invited him backstage where he watched these grown men throw eggs at one another in front of a live audience. The wild array of instruments they played, the jokes, the nutty clothing—Ruscha knew he was witness to denizens of an exotic netherworld. “Music played such an important role in my development as a kid.” he said. “Enough to visualize how big the world was.”
5

Ruscha became friends with Jerry McMillan and Joe Goode when all three joined a Classen High School fraternity that held events with a sorority. Dating was fine, but Ruscha was wary of marriage. “In those years people were trying to emulate their parents. Marrying and settling down was an issue to be approached. It all crashed when the book
On the Road
came out and we started reading beatnik poetry and took an about-face to that old order of thinking.”
6

Ruscha, McMillan, and Goode ruled in the art classes, whether drawing still lifes or designing record album covers. Ruscha found a book about Marcel Duchamp in the library, and art and absurdity became entwined in his thinking. He thought about the Dadaists as Goode and McMillan “were cutting up … making these stupid sculptures and lighting them on fire,” Ruscha said. “It all linked with the idea of having madcap fun.”
7

By his own account, Ruscha was a mediocre student, receiving Cs in most classes, and occasionally Ds. “I got a B in history class and I was stunned,” he said.
8
In art, however, he got all As. “I was aimless. I didn't know what I wanted to do until the eleventh grade.”
9
Just before graduating from high school in 1956, he was awarded first prize in graphic design from the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce. At that point, he decided to go to art school.

To avoid being drafted for service in the Korean War, Ruscha joined the navy. After boot camp at the Great Lakes Recruit Training Command near Chicago, he had to commit to two weeks a year on a destroyer, but at least he would be able to attend art school and get out of Oklahoma City. “I knew I couldn't hack the Bible Belt.… And the East, that was just too old world for me,” he said with a shrug.
10

An earlier family vacation to Los Angeles had made a great impact. “The patterns of vegetation, the feeling of acceleration, the corner of Sunset and Vine”—all were potent memories. “Another attraction was the hot rods, the custom cars. I knew I wanted to go to California. That was the only place.”
11
Ruscha's father tried in vain to direct him toward a more dependable profession. “He thought [art] was too ivory tower,” Ruscha said.
12
So they compromised: Ruscha would study commercial art in order to pursue a career in advertising.

Ruscha had not contacted any schools before making the trip to Los Angeles. He had heard about Art Center in Pasadena, which had a successful commercial art program. When he went there to apply and found that the classes were full, he heaved a sigh of relief. “They had a dress code!” he said indignantly. “No facial hair. No affectations of Bohemianism, no berets, no sandals, no short pants. You couldn't be a beatnik.”
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So, Ruscha enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute near Lafayette Park on the eastern end of Wilshire Boulevard where “you didn't have to have a professional appearance.”
14

Nonetheless, Chouinard was a professional commercial art school. Founded by artist Nelbert Murphy Chouinard in 1921 in a modest building on Eighth Street, the school was considered a serious environment for art, even though it was not accredited. “The attitude was that a diploma did not matter. You were judged by the product you came up with,” Ruscha said.
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Walt Disney had asked Chouinard to train artists in the skills required to animate the films he was making. At the time, he could not afford to pay her tuition. She believed in what he was doing and told him to pay her when he was able. Animators were produced, films were made, and Disney later paid her the overdue tuition for every student. (In 1970, Disney facilitated the merger of the school with the L.A. Conservatory of Music to become what is now California Institute of the Arts in the suburb of Valencia.)

Ruscha and Williams rented a room in a nearby boardinghouse on Sunset Place. The August smog was so intense that they went to a drugstore for a salve for their burning eyes. “We'd never experienced air pollution before,” Ruscha recalled.
16

Their Chouinard instructors Bengston, Altoon, and Irwin were committed to careers as practicing artists despite the dearth of professional opportunities. Bengston once had his students stretch paper around the classroom and draw and paint on it collectively. At the end of the day, he told them, “Tear it down and throw it away.” Ruscha said, “It was the idea of, ‘Just get in and do the work.'”
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Williams had enrolled at L.A. Community College with the idea of majoring in accounting but spent most of his time in jazz clubs and concerts. Deciding to pursue a career in music, he returned to Oklahoma City and took a crash course in piano with a teacher who told him that he would never become a great musician. With the burden of greatness lifted, Williams decided to have fun. In 1958, he bought his first guitar, an old Stella, for thirteen dollars. He began playing and singing with groups in coffeehouses and clubs and eventually got his songs recorded. He remained in touch with Ruscha from a distance until 1961 when, having joined the naval reserves, he was called to serve on the USS
Paul Revere
with the U.S. Navy in San Diego. Sailor by day, folksinger by night, he performed at clubs in San Diego with weekend stints at the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard.

After just a few classes, Ruscha abandoned his pursuit of commercial art, drawn by what he called the “bohemian” fine-arts department. Like his teachers, Ruscha was painting in a gestural abstract style until he saw the cover of a 1958
ARTNews
featuring Jasper Johns's
Target with Four Faces
. He also saw a photograph of Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 combine
Odalisk.

“That just sent me,” Ruscha said. “I knew from then on that I was going to be a fine artist. It was a voice from nowhere; it was the voice I needed I guess; I needed to hear this and see this work. And it came to me, oddly enough, through the medium of reproduction, and so it was a printed page I was responding to, and not the work itself. But the kind of odd vocabulary they used inspired me—it was like music that you've never heard before, so mysterious and sweet, and I just dreamed about it at night.… These new voices I was hearing transplanted the temporary excitement I had from Abstract Expressionism, which was the only thing at the time.… The work of Johns and Rauschenberg marked a departure in the sense that their work was premeditated, and Abstract Expressionism was not. So I began to move toward things that had more of a premeditation … having a notion of the end and not the means to the end.… It's the end product that I'm after.”
18

Ruscha started incorporating words into his paintings, an effect not appreciated by the Chouinard professors. One teacher was notorious for expressing his disapproval by taking out a cigarette lighter and setting fire to students' work. Ruscha was out of town when this happened to his collage so his indignant friends stormed the dean's office to protest the vandalism. When Ruscha heard about it, he thought he must be onto something if it so upset the faculty.

During the summer recess, Ruscha returned reluctantly to Oklahoma City. The trip home reinforced his decision to leave. “[I was] so glad that I had gotten away from the Bible Belt and all those people. Because there was just no room for poetry.… An artist would starve to death there.”
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His ceaseless praise of L.A. weather, women, and cars—not to mention art school—convinced Jerry McMillan to follow him west. The following year, they convinced Joe Goode.