Unraveling Anne
An ignominious end can befall anyone—even a mother who twinkled among the bright lights of L.A.’s hippie heyday by LAUREL SAVILLE
“Murdered?”
The word always gets repeated—sometimes the whole sentence. “Your mother was murdered?”
As if I could get something like that wrong.
My mother, Anne Ford, was murdered.
It was November 3, 1983. I was a college student in New York. She was a mentally unstable alcoholic living in a classic California bungalow not far from the corner of Sunset and Vine. The house had once been gracious and charming but, under her intermittent care, had fallen into disrepair.
The back wall had been burned. Street people slept on the porch. A family of ducks lived in a tiny pond in the scrap of yard. The local police, who knew my mother as Crazy Annie, found her in a bedroom, stabbed and strangled, her sundress askew, her panties caught around an ankle and her squat-legged, one-eyed dog standing over her body, growling at the uniformed intruders.
Some of these details I learned at the time of her death; others I learned 10 years later, when the police had reopened the case and, on a lucky break, found her killer. I came from my home in New York to the Hollywood homicide bureau, where I sat on a hard metal chair in a narrow space, flipping through a four-inch-thick black binder, somewhat nervously overseen by an enormous man with a gun on his hip.
At one point, he interrupted me. “Wait,” he said, pulling the book away and skipping to the section that held photos in plastic sleeves. “It’s not that I want to keep anything from you—”
“It’s just that there are some things I do not need to see,” I interjected understandingly. He nodded, his face grave, grateful. In between the blank spaces where he had removed photos of the “victim” were images of rooms once notable for their elaborate woodwork but now marked by the black haze of smoke damage. A hall badge from my grammar school days peeked out from a pile of torn clothing, costume jewelry, garbage. Pieces of furniture I had napped on as a child were lopsided as if stone drunk.
There was one picture of her, an 8-by-10, full-color glossy. The detective told me it was taken some months before her death, when she had come into the police station to report having been beaten and raped. In the photo, my mother’s face was scrubbed clean, and her black hair was marked by scattered strands of gray. She was staring straight into the camera lens, her blue eyes faded but her expression proud—defiant, really.
When the picture was taken, my mother had been living on and off the streets for about six years. She had been drinking large quantities of cheap red wine and smoking packs of unfiltered cigarettes for more than 20 years. She hadn’t had regular meals, health care or showers for more than five. Her mind was deeply deteriorated from all the ways her life had exacerbated its inherent flaws.
Still, before all this, my mother had been Miss Redondo Beach, a Fiesta Queen, model, fashion designer, artist and glamorous girl-about-town who had dated Marlon Brando. She knew how to take a good picture. And in this picture, she’s posing. In this picture, the purples, blacks, blues and reds that in another part of her life might have been makeup came instead from a bruise spilling over her right eye and cheek. And in spite of everything, it showed a handsome woman who looked a decade younger than her 53 years.
I thought, The most striking thing about my mother is not that she was murdered but that she survived her own life for as long as she did.
It is also striking that my older brothers and I survived our childhoods with her. My mother positioned herself in the epicenter of 1960s Los Angeles, and like most parents of that milieu, she thought nothing of bringing her three young children along for the ride.
I thought, The most striking thing about my mother is not that she was murdered but that she survived her own life for as long as she did.
My earliest memories are of the gatherings that so defined that era. Sometimes we would set out to join a horde collecting for a “love-in.” Twisting my body like a cat that didn’t want to be held, I would squirm as my mother’s boyfriend, Henry, carried me to the car, begging to be left behind, while my mother exhorted me to stop being such a “drag.”
I didn’t want to get flowers and rainbows painted on my face or beads and ribbons plaited into my hair. I didn’t want to watch glassy-eyed people twirling in tie-dye skirts and peasant blouses—or without shirts at all, their thin, bare chests and small, drooping breasts open to the air and sunshine as they tangled together on a blanket or in the mud, their mouths and limbs slack against one another.
If it was the Fourth of July, the party would be on Santa Monica or Malibu beach, and people would set up dozens of multicolored tents on the white sand. Every night, campfires and sparklers lit up the beach, and rockets and fireworks filled the sky. Henry organized a ring of campfire stones outside the flapping door of our army-surplus tent, while I spun sparklers and then collected the spent metal spikes so no one would step on them later.
After the weekend was over and the other tents were taken down, ours would still stand, alone on the beach, littered with dried-up seaweed, empty shells and cans of beer, a lone sandal, a plastic bucket with a broken handle, damp clothes jammed into corners. Our faces would be glazed, our hair tangled with sea spray, our tans invisible under the salt encrusting our skin.
Days later, when the food and booze had finally run out, Henry would drag everything out of the tent, pile it on a blanket and tie the corners together, while my mother sat in the detritus, crying that she didn’t want to go back to the dirty dishes, the bills, the bastards downtown.
Other times the party was in the hills above Malibu, at a friend’s glass-walled house where nudity was the norm. Sometimes it was at Barney’s Beanery, where I wove myself around the barstools, asking again and again when we were going home, my leaden voice drowned out by the din of what my mother called witty repartee.
Sometimes the party started down on La Cienega, in an art gallery called Ferus, where adults stood, elbows cupped in hand, discussing things like “white space” and “irony,” and I wandered through the scattered forest of adult legs clad in fishnet stockings or white go-go boots, slick pants with flared-out legs or simply skin that disappeared into the faraway hem of a miniskirt.
But most often, the party took place at our own house, a sprawling, stuccoed behemoth at the corner of Fairfax and Sunset, where people arrived with brown bags of Coors, Gallo burgundy and Pall Mall Reds, as well as instruments, sketchpads and stories. They sat around and played and talked and smoked and drank and drew one another playing and talking and smoking and drinking.
An accretion of glasses with rings of dried wine, ad hoc ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, felt-tip pens with snub-nosed tips, jugs of graywater, tin cans filled with brushes and palettes cluttered with smudges of paint grew on whatever surface was nearby. Hands and arms were in constant motion, filling a glass, wrapping a shoulder, dragging a child into a lap, strumming a guitar, rolling a joint, shaking a cigarette up out of a pack, jogging across a pad of paper.
To me, my mother’s friends were just drunks in paint-spattered jeans. But she filled our home with their work, arranging dozens of paintings and drawings against the dark blue walls of our living room, their mere presence a promise that all this was going to amount to something someday.
According to Joan Didion, the era ended with the Manson murders in August 1969. But for my mother, the party never ended. Darkness began to surround us—war, gas crisis, stock-market crash, recession. She became more combative and paranoid. Parties were no longer attended by the up and coming but by a motley group of wannabes and has-beens.
And yet a newspaper reporter who visited her more or less perpetual garage sale in 1970 wrote, “The whole scene is obviously real and not a trip. Anne sparkles...in the July heat.”
My mother embodied all the reckless, selfish innocence of the time and place in which she first flourished. It’s no wonder she refused to let it go.
In 1981, an official investigating her habit of starting campfires in a vacant lot and relieving herself on neighbors’ property, said: “She was going to turn this into a little Shangri-la...It was the typical thing of the free spirit versus city hall.” Up to her last days, she was filling smoke-stained sketchbooks with dress designs and plans for a renovation on her fire-damaged home that counted on “flower children coming down from the Hollywood Hills to restore Queen Anne to her throne” in a house with a glass roof, “so I’ll never feel closed in again.”
My mother embodied all the reckless, selfish innocence of the time and place in which she first flourished. It’s no wonder she refused to let it go. It’s no wonder it was the death of her.
After my mother was killed, there was little left behind other than paintings. Picking through them in a dark garage on a gray day a few weeks later, still encased in the fog of shock, the stories she had told me about each piece drifted back. A painting of surfers rendered in flat blocks of chalky color was by John Altoon, her “first great love,” unsigned because she had taken it out of the garbage, where he threw so much of his work.
A plaster-of-Paris piece of wedding cake was a party favor created by someone named Claes Oldenburg. A small square with an apple green heart surrounded by bands of blue was by her friend Billy Al Bengston. An accordion book of Sunset Strip photos was made by someone named Ed Ruscha.
As a child, those stories had meant little. But even before her death, I had begun to see these same names elsewhere, printed on little cards stuck on the walls of great museums. The Ferus Gallery is now the stuff of documentaries and coffee-table books. Altoon’s drawings go for tens of thousands, and Ruscha’s book, which I never tired of stretching out to its full length across our wine-stained and cigarette-burned living-room rug, is now a collector’s item.
I had begun to wonder why these men made it and she didn’t. My childhood had been filled with a chorus of voices telling me how talented my mother was. Clearly, talent was not enough.
I began to wonder less about the toll the ’60s had taken on her and more about what she might have been a part of. I began to want to see her life as more than a headlong tumble toward a tragic death and my own life as something more than an antidote to hers. I began to realize there were three women I wanted to know better: my mother as I knew her, my mother as she was before I knew her, and myself. To go forward, I first needed to go back.
Laurel Saville, author of several books, numerous articles and short stories, is a corporate communications consultant with an MFA from Bennington College. She lives and works in New York, in a 100-year-old brick building on the banks of the Mohawk River, overlooking the Erie Canal.
Adapted from Unraveling Anne: A Memoir of My Mother’s Reckless Life and Tragic Death. Copyright Amazon-Encore. Used with permission, all rights reserved.
Categories: L.A. History / Personal Space / Photos / Pictorials
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The time your mother grew up was a turbulent time with intense peer pressure- especially to use drugs.
During this time- being a parent first- and putting your needs and dreams aside was not popular. We now know this is what good parents do.
A person would have to have had very strong, open minded, supportive and boundary oriented parents to surpass this time with children, being an "artist" to survive. It seems she was loving enough to produce talented and stable children- that is something indeed.
Many people died during this time- often tragically.
Posted by: Paula | 11/04/2011 at 04:19 PM
Certainly there is a lot of bitterness palpable to the reader the writer felt in the recounting of her hideous upbringing. But the unattractive tone is one of superficial superiority, which is, as it should be known by the writer, as overrated as Bennington College.
~ Craig Hill, a native Angeleno and ex-resident of a few 100+ yr-old brick buildings in New England and the lower-class squalor that is Bennington Vt.
Posted by: craig hill | 11/05/2011 at 03:01 PM
Is this a book promotion? Because the headline made it look like it was a complete story with a beginning and a resolution in one article. I feel fooled that this was presented as a full story only to find out it was merely a taste of a story, and if I want to read the ending, I have to buy the book. It may be haute and artsy and post-modern to present a magazine "article" this way, but it is still a smoke-and mirrors trick in the end.
Posted by: enn | 11/06/2011 at 08:40 AM
-A good piece -probably very hard to write though- as you can smell the former California/Hollywood decadence that precipitated the world of today. I wish this woman the continuance of luck in this life and California just the luck to survive once again to be some former free spirited land. God be with...
Posted by: J | 11/06/2011 at 11:01 AM
Sad that the woman was alcoholic and had likely mental problems. The children obviously had fathers and relatives to take them to safety. Not all kids are so lucky. The drinking drunks really come out of the woodwork to critisize and try and make good their own illness affects on their kids in the comments; i bet half the posts here are drunks on ssi.
chris coonen
Posted by: chris coonen | 11/07/2011 at 03:41 AM
Alcohol really is the devil in a bottle.
Be strong,
Debra...
Posted by: Debra J.M. Smith | 11/10/2011 at 09:58 PM
Did this woman ever have a psych evaluation ?? It well could be that she had damage to or a split in her Corpus callosum. It is sad that everyone just accepted the situation as "crazy Annie" and that children were involved in a situation that well could of have a physiological basis. Typical of our society,all around,including those that could have helped, just perpetrated the demise of someone "different".
Posted by: patricia elden | 11/13/2011 at 08:23 AM
I found it a compelling read. It makes me think about the other Anne's are out there tonight-- without the benefit of that little bungalow.
Alcoholism plus mental illness will continue to be the chicken-and-the-egg quandary of human existence. Life being what it is, there is never just one casualty in that combination. Good for the writer being able to tell the story.
Posted by: M A Cherry | 11/15/2011 at 07:18 PM
Laurel Saville
I wrote this for you but I have no burning desire to see it in print; you can do with it what you wish.
I had a step sister murdered but I didn’t know her very well. I didn’t know your mom at all but I knew her type and the neighborhood you lived in and the kind of people she hung with, I was there in every sense of the word and saw your type and your brothers; I can’t tell you how much it would piss me off, to see these children (your mom) having children (you) that had none to care for them. Yep knew the area well, Barney’s Beanery, Sunset Strip, Hollywood Hills and of course Hollywood.
As a child of the sixties I was a Vietnam vet, gang member, abused by priest, school dropout, drug addict, college student and sometimes homeless (well in truth that was when I was 17 and before Nam). So you seem to be asking, what happened to your mom?
While I can’t answer for your mom yet I can answer with my experience and perhaps you can get some insight from that.
My mom was married six times and naturally had gone through WWll and I vaguely started to become aware of the world in the 50’s but it was the 60’s when I left my family (can’t say home). I would run away from the house but the police would drag me back to hell. My mom was never around and the dad’s didn’t stick around very long; plus, I had an older brother that outweighed me by 100 pounds and got a particular delight in beating and stomping me whenever he had the whim.
I guess I was one of the first street kids in Hollywood, lurking and looking for some kind of action; funny thing is I was safer on the streets of Hollywood at 3 AM than I was at home. Guess I was about 15 at that time but it wouldn’t be until I came back from Nam that I got familiar with your mom’s type of group and play area.
There have always been dysfunctional families that have produced weird kids that became weird people, which would describe me I guess but what I found even weirder were the kids that came from whole caring families that stepped off the deep end, never got that. If I were pressed I would have to say their emotional needs outweighed their intellect and they succumbed to their quest for adventure over the good sense of being compatible with society. Maybe some felt society had failed them, it damn sure did me.
Now to get to the time frame of your era, which for me would have been when I got back from the war to a completely different world that I frankly didn’t recognize; drugs were a major part of everyone life and they scared the hell out of me. But since everyone (literally everyone I knew) was taking them I decided I should too, oops.
Since you saw how drugs directly impacted your mom and your family life I will not comment more about them except to say they are brutal and savage as the murder of your mom shows.
At the beginning though it was magical, fun, exciting and with LSD I heard how it was a mind expanding experience and that was why I took it, it was like living in a fairy tale. The trouble with most fairy tales is many end with horrible consequences and this fairy tale was no different with its effects, lasting unto death.
There is of course more but I think you were looking for the highlights. The bottom line is society norms changed after WWll giving Americans a great economy with more prosperity than we had ever enjoyed. This led for many seeking a more hedonistic lifestyle with more involvement in self so it was rather like Americans had turned into Peter Pans looking for the good time, which was more important than anything else that life had to offer.
In the sixties with Vietnam plus schools having anarchists as teachers that vilified American society and history the perception of America changed for many of us. If you can see an old Disney series called Swamp Fox with Leslie Nielsen and then compare it with Full Metal Jacket and it might help you achieve and appreciate the mind shift of that time.
I hope this helps you as for me I stay at home and am a trader in Westlake Village.
Patrick
Posted by: Patrick | 11/16/2011 at 10:52 AM
Love this piece. Beautiful.
Posted by: Amber | 11/16/2011 at 02:14 PM
My mother Elsie was one of Anne's "normal" friends. She did not drink alcohol. She was a dress designer with whom your mother worked with and respected. She truly cared and worried about her, however there wasn't anything she felt she could do to help her.
My brother & I did spend some time with you and your brother. And yes it was a very "hippyish" environment. We wondered what happened to her, but as time went by with no word from her we busied ourselves with our respective lives. We were a small part of her life, however she did have a place in our hearts.
I hope you have found piece in some of what she DID accomplish.
Peace to you & your brothers, Marilyn & Tito
PS If you would like to contact us, please do so.
Posted by: Marilyn | 11/18/2011 at 11:14 PM
It's amazing if u actually experience this...being a young socialite in LA with some really bad habits...I hope I get at least a movie!
Posted by: Idgaf .com | 11/20/2011 at 10:21 PM
Beautiful writing. I loved reading this.
Posted by: Sophia | 11/27/2011 at 07:56 PM
Such a sad story, but sadder still that the mother was so much invested in her own pleasure seeking that she pretty much neglected her daughter. Please don't ask why this happened to her. It happened because she put herself in the position. That is the ugly truth.
Posted by: observer | 01/23/2012 at 02:46 PM
It was her life, and she lived it in a way as she was determined to do, and this account of that life reveals it from the eyes of a child, now grown. An amazing sober account, with one glaring ommision, who was/is Laurels father?
Posted by: stewart | 01/24/2012 at 04:37 AM
It's very frustrating to read article after article after article about the devastation wrought by alcohol, while at the same time the marijuana prohibitionists refuse to even discuss their beef against the alternative cannabis. It's quite pathetic (and pure fascist league) that no one will even try to explain how alcohol supremacism over cannabis is a rational and just policy. Get real, cannabis haters, there's a killer drug on the loose and it ain't cannabis.
Posted by: saynotohypocrisy | 02/22/2012 at 02:15 PM