Remembering a Friend

The life of a comet

(Last night I rediscovered this tribute I wrote on my private blog after getting the news that a friend had died 15 years ago. Hardly anyone read it at the time. I’d forgotten how hard the news of his death hit me. We’d been out of touch for a few years. I never got to say goodbye. I’m republishing it in the hope we all remember to say things to each other while we are still here. Otherwise, someday it will be too late.)

***

“Goodbye to my friend, Ken Kelley”

Early this morning, the sad news came that Ken Kelley died last Saturday. When I got off the phone, and got dressed, I went outside to take a long walk. While walking, I composed this tribute:

Ken arrived at the University of Michigan as one of those under-aged child prodigies. He must have been 16 or so. He was the living epitome of the Sixties spirit -- a radical hippie before we even used words like that.

To me, he was a kid with such infectious enthusiasm for everything around him that it almost wore me out to be near him for too long at a time. Ken never did anything in half-measures.

He would eat ravenously and balloon to a huge shape; then diet in macrobiotic mode, and become thin as a rail. His wild curly yellow hair was a white man's Afro. He started an underground newspaper and got in all sorts of trouble by portraying a local political figure in what was deemed, by the standards of the time, obscene.

Ken seemed to know everybody. He was Minister of Information for John Sinclair's White Panther Party. Sinclair also was manager of the band, MC5, and when he was imprisoned for possessing a tiny amount of marijuana, Ken helped draw international attention to his case. Sinclair was released from prison days after John Lennon went to Michigan and held a concert in his behalf. Ken arranged that.

Ken was always this close to getting into serious trouble. He'd shoplift food, try to get away with not paying for gas at gas stations (this was before credit cards), and commit other types of petty crimes that were common among hippies of that time.

When unknown radicals bombed the CIA office in Ann Arbor, Ken said he knew who had done it. Whenever any demonstration or concert or wild event developed, Ken seemed to be at the center of it.

He was relentlessly enthusiastic, a natural promoter of other people's careers, but never really of his own. A typical experience was when he excitedly told us that a wandering theatre troupe called the Living Theater was on campus, and dragged me along for a look.

Sure enough, led by a free-spirited middle-aged couple, this "theater" amounted to a roomful of students (including Ken, of course), getting naked and jumping into the crowd below, who obligingly caught them.

I watched for a while, and couldn't help thinking that the outright glee on Ken's face as he jumped somehow exhibited his identity in a way that I could never achieve for myself. It all seemed rather, you know, unsanitary, to me, but I knew that really I was way too inhibited and simply not cool enough to join in.

The same with drugs, alcohol, sex, and every other outrage of the era. Ken did everything to excess, with an unbounded appetite to live as if there was never going to be any sort of tomorrow.

At that point, I could not really imagine him ever growing old.

***

After our hiatus in the Peace Corps, my wife and I returned to Ann Arbor to figure out what to do with the rest of our lives. Ken was still in town, larger than life, a constant blur of excitement, danger, and the art of the outrageous. He always had the Next Great Idea, and this time, it was to be a magazine called SunDance, to be published in San Francisco.

He urged us to come and be the journalists who could anchor the publication in place. Of course, we said yes, and that's how I arrived in this town, San Francisco, in the fall of 1971, driving our old van across the country, crammed with magazine production gear Ken had somehow procured at the last moment for us to deliver to what was to be our new headquarters office, at 1913 Fillmore Street.

As we drove into town, it was apparent that Ken had relocated to the ground zero of the 60s' revolution. Here was a much bigger stage, with many more famous players, but Ken just treated it as if it was the same place as Ann Arbor.

One day, a well-dressed man appeared at the front door inquiring about obtaining a copy of our new magazine. Ken raced to the front, and held up a copy of our first issue about three inches from the guy's face, and while jumping up and down like a maniac, yelled at the top of his lungs: "Isn't it the greatest magazine ever, huh? huh? the greatest ever? yeah!" The man fell back, mouth agape, but he handed over the few coins necessary to get his copy and rapidly disappeared.

(Later, when I obtained the SunDance FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, it turned out that this man was an undercover informant, since his report of the incident, with his name blacked out, was in the file.)

We never had any money in those days, so eventually SunDance died its inevitable death, punctuated by the unfortunate spectacle of all of us fighting among ourselves over pennies in small claim's court.

Ken and I were on opposite sides in this fight, which ruptured our relationship for a while.

But somehow we got back together and resumed our friendship. Ken was the major driver in the effort that exposed Timothy Leary as a government witness in grand jury witch hunts by the Nixon administration. As always, Ken introduced me to excitement and opportunity and danger I never would have generated on my own.

So another memory. When Ken was driving me in a Porsche to the mountains at high speed, so we could convince Leary's friend Allen Ginsberg to join in the anti-Leary cause. Allen whispered his terms to Ken and the two of them went off in the bushes for a while; Ginsberg returned smiling with satisfaction; Ken winking to me as if to say, "Whatever, mission accomplished!"

During these chaotic years, Ken started and abandoned more creative projects than most of us will see our entire lifetime — books, movies, concerts, publications, conspiracies. He somehow emerged as a brilliant interviewer of the famous, who were starting to be known as "celebrities" in the magazine business, i.e., a tool for selling issues.

One of Ken's most memorable interviews was with the homophobe movie star Anita Bryant, a sweet married Southern Christian girl who didn't even know the meaning of "69" until Ken drew a picture for her. Not yet "out" himself publicly, Ken traveled with Bryant all over the country as she crusaded against the evils of homosexuality.

One might have expected him to write a cruel expose of Anita, but, typical of Ken, his heart got the best of him. "I love her, " he explained to me. "I don't want to hurt her." The climax to this story came in the Midwest when a gay protester threw a pie in Bryant's face.

There, in the news photos, was Ken, shielding her with his jacket, in order to ensure that the embarrassing photos of her would not reach the front pages, but they did anyway.

In the end, Ken always did the wrong thing and the right thing at the same time. That was his charm.

Case in point. I was an organizer of a group called the Bergman-Ramirez Defense Fund in the '80s, which sought to draw support for two reporters who were being sued for libel by the San Francisco Police Department.

Ken had somehow wrangled a job as a columnist at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner at the time, and was "covering" the trial.

But then, during a short break, as a prank, Ken darted up to the judge's seat and placed one of those sanitary toilet seat covers on it. Just as he started running back, the judge and the cops re-emerged from their break, their faces red with blistering fury at this unacceptable insult. "I didn't do it! I didn't do it!" Ken was screaming as he raced from the scene, but it was obvious to all that he was indeed the guilty party.

He was arrested, thrown in jail, and fired by the Examiner.

There were many other such episodes, too many for me to recount here and now, for I am weary. But the one last anecdote I must recount occurred after Howard Kohn and I had published our Patty Hearst stories in Rolling Stone, which caused a national media uproar in 1975.

We, the reporters in this case, were the subject of much media scrutiny because the aforementioned Hearst newspaper empire, fearing our article would damage heiress Patty Hearst's legal case, chose to print unsubstantiated allegations that we had unethically gotten our story by posing as "legal investigators." One of our sources, Jack Scott, joined in with a similar line of attack, conveniently omitting the fact that we'd been working on a book with him about the case.

Two famous left-wing lawyers called us at Rolling Stone and vowed we would "never publish again." The local head of the FBI told Howard he would "cut us off at the knees" if we dared to publish any more stories embarrassing the Bureau.

Left-wing "friends" all over the Bay Area denounced us in harsh terms. One of the girls I knew from SunDance days, had since gotten romantically involved with the domestic terror group that had kidnapped and converted Patty Hearst; she got through to me on the phone and told me that I would be shot and killed.

It seemed like virtually everyone I knew was abandoning me but not Ken Kelley. "We've got work to do," he explained. "Let's get going."

And he proceeded to devise a brilliant counter attack against our enemies in the battle for public opinion. Damaging information about Jack Scott, the Hearst empire, and the FBI started appearing in Herb Caen's daily column. Pieces sounding at least faint praise for our reporting methods started finding outlets. A few supporters on the left (very few) spoke out somewhat on our behalf.

Gradually we won the war of public opinion. Over the subsequent months, I started developing thicker skin, and more importantly, a more critical eye at the concept that I needed anyone else's approval to do what I thought was right.

It was my dear and most loyal of friends, Ken Kelley, who helped me get myself back from that terrible feeling of being only another of society's outcasts. The irony in this, of course, is that Ken was himself always the consummate outcast; yet, as my loyal friend, he knew that this was not the right place for me to end up.

When somebody passes away, I know that you are supposed to say, "May his soul rest in peace." But somehow that doesn't feel right in Ken's case. So I'll just close with this: "I loved you, my friend. May your soul be dancing happily out there, wherever you've gone to, laughing your loudest laugh, flying skyward at the speed of light."

Because there never was a place that could contain my friend Ken

Good-bye, Ken.

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