The Unending Tale of Philip K. Dick

[radtimes]

The Unending Tale of Philip K. Dick

http://www.orangecoastmagazine.com/article2.aspx?id=15622
By Patrick J. Kiger
July 18, 2009

Back in the summer of 1981, Catherine Cate recalls, she and the other 
young condo owners at 408 E. Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana had a 
custom of gathering after work at a table in the building's 
courtyard. "We'd pour some glasses of wine, or mix a few margaritas 
or Singapore slushes, and just unwind a little," she says. 
Occasionally, the casual conversation about their working days took 
an offbeat turn, when their third-floor neighbor wandered down to 
join the group.

Phil, as they called him, was pleasant and sociable, but older than 
his fellow condo residents and a refugee from the Bay Area, where 
they suspected he may have experimented with a few illegal 
substances. He had a Berkeley Bohemian dishabille­wrinkled clothes, 
stringy gray hair, dirty fingernails, an apparent indifference to 
shaving. "Grooming was not his priority," Cate recalls. "And his 
color was not good. He had an overall aura of not being in the best 
health." He was pleasant and convivial, albeit somewhat distracted, 
as if his mind were somewhere else.

Phil told them he was a writer, though Cate had never heard of him, 
and mentioned that one of his books was being made into a movie 
called "Blade Runner." It was when Phil started to talk, though, that 
she recalls him morphing from just some aging, eccentric anti-yuppie 
into a visitor from some preternatural, alternative reality. "Flights 
of fantasy, almost nonsensical," Cate explains. "Sort of 'What if …?' 
or 'Have you ever considered this?'"

"At the time, I wasn't a science-fiction fan, so I wasn't familiar 
with Philip K. Dick," Cate says. "Not really knowing about his 
writing career, our knowledge of him was really based upon what we 
saw of him and what we talked about. And he was a very strange person 
from that perspective … it was a little bewildering. You'd listen and 
look at him and think, 'Is this guy on the same planet?' And the 
answer was probably no."

As Cate learned more of her neighbor's literary notoriety, she had to 
wonder why one of the most important American writers of the 20th 
century, a genius that Rolling Stone once proclaimed "the most 
brilliant [science-fiction] mind on any planet," was living in a 
Santa Ana starter condo. "When he finally told us a little about 
himself, he emphasized he was seeking privacy," Cate recalls. "In 
fact, he told us that, should anybody come looking for him, we needed 
to protect him, to neither confirm nor deny that he lived there. He 
tried to stay under the radar."

Today, even as Dick's literary legend grows, his connection to Orange 
County remains obscure. Though he often is thought of as a Northern 
California writer, he lived his final decade in Fullerton and Santa 
Ana and wrote several of his most important books­"A Scanner Darkly," 
"VALIS," and "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer"­during his time 
here. And Orange County was the place where Dick in 1974 experienced 
the transcendental visions that, depending on your degree of 
open-mindedness, either gave him a secret glimpse of a universe with 
multiple realities and the nonlinear impermanence of time, or shoved 
him out on the crumbly precipice of sanity.

Today, nearly three decades after his death in Santa Ana at age 53, 
Dick has a vastly higher profile. Much of his prolific output­he 
published 44 novels and 121 short stories­still is in print. Critics 
hold him in increasingly high esteem, not just as a master of the 
science-fiction genre in the same league as Isaac Asimov or Ray 
Bradbury, but as a philosophical novelist who explored the shifting, 
ambiguous nature of reality and the question of what it means to be 
human. In 2005, Time magazine selected his 1969 novel "Ubik" as one 
of the 100 most important American novels of all time, and 
contemporary writers such as Jonathan Lethem cite him as a major influence.

In Hollywood, Dick has become an industry. Nine of his novels and 
stories have been made into films that collectively grossed more than 
$1 billion worldwide, including the 2002 Tom Cruise-Steven Spielberg 
hit "Minority Report," which generated $132 million in the United 
States alone. Many others are in the works, including projects 
involving big names such as Paul Giamatti and Matt Damon. (See 
related story, Page 88.) A Web search yields an ever-growing number 
of sites devoted to Dick's life and work, such as 
www.philipkdickfans.com and the Total Dick-Head blog 
(http://totaldickhead.blogspot.com).

And Dick again is in the news, thanks to a legal struggle that has 
developed over the profits from his literary legacy. In April, the 
author's fifth wife, Tessa Busby Dick, who was with him during his 
time in Orange County, filed suit against an array of plaintiffs that 
includes Electric Shepherd Productions­the film production arm of the 
Dick estate founded by his daughters Isa and Laura­and his literary 
agent Russell Galen. She claims she is being deprived of a share of 
the earnings from two of Dick's works­his 1977 novel "A Scanner 
Darkly," which was made into a movie in 2006, and a screenplay 
version of "Ubik," which she says the author gave her in their 1976 
divorce settlement. Christopher Tricarico, an attorney for the 
estate, declined to comment, but said in an e-mail he will be 
"vigorously defending" against the claim, which may mean even more 
headlines in the months and years ahead.

Dickian devotion has grown to such extremes that a few years ago, a 
robotics researcher built a life-size android version of the author, 
which, according to a New York Times account, "was able to conduct 
rudimentary conversations about Dick's work and ideas." Fans lined up 
at conventions for a chance to meet the ersatz Dick, until the 
android's head was accidentally left in an airline overhead bin, then 
apparently misrouted by luggage handlers.

It may seem incongruous that Dick, who for years fueled his writing 
efforts with amphetamines and described himself as a "religious 
anarchist," would choose to live in what at the time was the nation's 
most deeply conservative hotbed. "He used to joke about living in the 
shadow of Disneyland, and about how everything in Orange County was 
made of plastic," recalls Tim Powers, an award-winning 
science-fiction and fantasy author who became a friend of Dick's 
while a student at Cal State Fullerton. "But he seemed to find it 
convivial. He made some friends here."

And to Dick, who'd become entangled in the darker side of the 
Northern California counterculture, then-staid Orange County may have 
seemed like an appealing refuge. "I think he liked the anonymity," 
Powers says. "Nobody in Santa Ana knew who Philip K. Dick was. He was 
just this guy going to Trader Joe's [to buy] lunch."

As recounted in "Divine Invasions," Lawrence Sutin's 1989 biography, 
Dick was in a rough situation when he began looking to relocate in 
the spring of 1972. At 43, he was coming off four failed marriages, 
bouts of depression and paranoia, a longtime amphetamine habit, 
decades of financial struggle, and the respectable literary world's 
indifference to his work. He hadn't written anything in two years. 
After his house in San Rafael was burglarized­Dick alternately 
theorized it was the FBI or CIA, black militants, religious fanatics, 
or disaffected members of his circle of drug-using acquaintances­he 
fled to Vancouver, where he attempted suicide, and then checked into 
a rehab center to kick drugs and get a respite from the craziness.

Eventually, he turned to Willis McNelly, an English professor at Cal 
State Fullerton who died in 2003. McNelly was one of the first 
academics to look at science fiction as serious literature. "Phil 
wrote to Willis and said, 'I've got nowhere to go,' " recalls Powers, 
who then was a Cal State Fullerton graduate student. "Several of 
Willis' students wrote back to Phil, saying, 'We just lost a 
roommate; you can move in with us.' Such was Phil's desperation that 
he said, 'OK. I'll get on a plane. Meet me at LAX.' He didn't really 
care where he was going."

A welcoming committee included his two potential roommates plus 
Powers and Linda Levy Castellani, another of Mc-Nelly's students, who 
drove to Los Angeles to pick him up. Castellani recalls that Dick 
made a striking, if bizarre, impression on her. "Here was this 
portly, bearded man who looked somewhat like a rabbi," she says. "He 
was in a trench coat and was carrying a Bible and a box wrapped in an 
electrical cord. But the strangest thing was that he never took his 
eyes off me. The attention was so intense, it scared me to death." 
The author, who had a thing for dark-haired women and a tendency to 
fall in love at a moment's notice, already was enamored with her.

The middle-aged writer soon tired of sleeping on the couch and the 
expectation that he spring for the students' groceries, and moved 
into a two-bedroom apartment with a recently divorced male roommate. 
Meanwhile, he continued his pursuit of Castellani, taking her to 
dinner in Los Angeles with sci-fi great Harlan Ellison and suddenly 
shocking her with a marriage proposal. "He and Harlan were having 
this intense conversation and I was just listening, when Phil handed 
me this thick envelope," she recalls. "It was this amazing letter­a 
scary sort of good, page after page about how wonderful I was, and at 
the end, it said, 'P.S. Will you marry me?'" Castellani ultimately 
rejected Dick's romantic advances, but the two remained friends and 
talked on the phone regularly until his death.

But Dick wasn't without female companionship for long. A few months 
later, at a party in Santa Ana, he met an 18-year-old soon-to-be 
college student from Anaheim who aspired to be a writer and had sold 
a few pieces to small magazines. "I didn't know who he was," says 
Tessa Busby Dick, who became the author's fifth wife. "But I just 
knew that he was a remarkable man. And as I read more of his work, I 
appreciated his genius." Dick wasn't just attracted to Tessa's 
looks­the dark-hair thing again­but also to her intelligence and 
empathy. On a visit to Disneyland with friend Powers, he proposed to 
her, though the romantic ambience was disrupted when he began arguing 
with Powers over a pickle that he had snatched from Dick's plate.

Tessa recalls the years she spent  with Dick in Fullerton as "the 
most wonderful time of my life." In 1970s Orange County, Fullerton 
was a bohemian oasis, a college town with war protesters, cappuccino, 
even an organic grocery. Dick and his new wife lived near the Cal 
State campus, where he could be around the students and intellectuals 
whose company he found stimulating. In July 1973, Tessa gave birth to 
son Christopher, Dick's third child after his daughters from previous 
marriages. (Though Christopher, along with his half-sisters, owns and 
manages their father's literary properties, his mother did not name 
him as a defendant in her recent lawsuit.)

A few months later, in September 1973, according to biographer Sutin, 
United Artists picked up an option on Dick's 1968 novel "Do Androids 
Dream of Electric Sheep?," putting a much-needed $2,000 in his 
pocket. He even started to write again, completing the novel "Flow My 
Tears, the Policeman Said," which he had set aside back in Northern 
California. He conceived a new novel, "A Scanner Darkly," set in a 
seedy dystopian version of Orange County, in which a narcotics agent 
pursuing the source of a new, personality-fragmenting designer drug 
goes so far undercover that he begins to investigate himself. As Dick 
admitted in a 1975 Rolling Stone interview, it was the first time 
he'd written a novel without the help of amphetamines.

But beneath the fragile normality, Dick was in turmoil. "His method 
was to think about a book for a long time, and then write the entire 
thing in 10 or 11 days, hardly eating or sleeping as he pounded it 
out at high speed on a manual typewriter," Powers says. "That was the 
way he'd done it in the 1960s, when he was doing a heap of 
amphetamines to fuel his production. But even after he quit the 
drugs, that was the only way he knew how to write, in one sustained 
burst. … Particularly in the last 10 years that I knew him, the 
writing of his books began to take a real physical toll on him."

In February 1974, after being given anesthesia for dental work, Dick 
returned home and began experiencing bizarre visions­a rectangle of 
pink light on his bedroom wall containing writing in a strange 
language he could not read, along with mathematical equations. He 
heard voices, and was visited by strange beings who "looked almost 
human, but they had large heads, small noses, small chins and mere 
slits for mouths," as Tessa later recalled in a self-published 
memoir, "The Dim Reflection of Philip K. Dick." Instead of abducting 
him, the alien visitors used holograms to turn Dick's apartment into 
a classroom, where they taught him a secret theory of existence. Dick 
only explained parts of it to Tessa: The past wasn't immutable; to 
the contrary, someone was in the process of changing history. And 
neither was it linear; somehow, Dick simultaneously existed in the 
present and in ancient Rome. Neither was the physical world solid and 
stable; even something as basic as a light switch on a wall might 
mysteriously vanish when you reached for it.

Dick would ponder his "2-3-74" experience, as he came to call it, for 
the rest of his life, and it eventually would help inspire his 1981 
novel "VALIS," a mind-bending synthesis of science fiction and the 
mysteries of Gnosticism and Christian theology, in which mystical 
revelations are beamed by laser from an orbiting satellite.

"He was his own skeptic, always ready to dismiss and deride his 
theories when he saw flaws in them," Powers says. "One day he'd think 
it had been God talking to him. The next day, he'd say it was just 
acid flashbacks. The day after that, he'd decide it was psychosis, or 
some sort of secret Soviet telepathy experiment. But he kept coming 
back to the idea that it was God." He pauses. "I'd put money on it 
that it was God who spoke to him, crazy as it seems. His sort of 
ongoing, contentious dialogue with God does have the tone of Teresa 
of Avila [a 16th century Catholic mystic]. Or maybe it's just a 
better story that way."

By 1975, Dick's marriage to Tessa was falling apart, and he had 
become involved with another woman, Doris Elaine Sauter­a 
relationship that became even closer when Sauter, in her mid-20s, was 
diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. According to biographer Sutin, Dick 
again attempted suicide­gulping a combination of pills, slitting his 
wrist, and sitting in his garage with the engine of his car running, 
before having second thoughts and calling for help. "When I went to 
see him in the hospital, he said, 'See, I tried to kill myself. You 
have to move in with me now,' " Sauter recalls. "I read him the riot 
act about that."

Dick moved from Fullerton to downtown Santa Ana, where he rented a 
two-bedroom apartment that he later bought when the building went 
condo. As a bohemian hipster whose work depicted future people 
oppressed by life in their monstrously huge, regimented, soulless 
"conapt" complexes, Dick couldn't escape the irony that he lived in a 
condo. In a 1980 Slash magazine interview, he denounced the condo 
association's resident meetings as creepily intrusive.

In truth, Dick's new residence was in some ways ideally suited to 
him. His building had an elaborate security system, which assuaged 
his latent paranoia. For the agoraphobic author, the apartment was 
within walking distance of the post office and a Trader Joe's, where 
he could pick up roast beef sandwiches and frozen dinners.

Sauter did her best to get Dick out of his Santa Ana comfort zone, 
but it was tough work: "It was more anticipation anxiety. Prying him 
out of the house was hard, though if you could get him to go, he'd be 
glad that he did. I could never get him to go to the Santa Ana Public 
Library, for example. But when Ray Bradbury would speak in O.C. and 
take a room at the Disneyland Hotel, I'd get Phil to go out and have 
a drink with him. He always liked that."

For all his psychological maladies and quirks, though, Dick remained 
a focused, professional writer. "He would get up at 10, have some 
coffee, write until 3 in the morning, sleep for five hours, and then 
get up and do the same thing the next day," Sauter recalls. "He'd 
switched to using an IBM Selectric typewriter, and he was a 
lightning-fast typist. I don't recall him doing a lot of rewriting. 
The first draft was always very readable.

"After he passed away, people would always ask me, 'How sane was 
Philip K. Dick?' Anybody who could wake up at 5 a.m. like he did and 
play hardball on the phone with his agent in New York­I mean, how 
crazy could he be? There's been a tendency to picture him as a 
psychological mess, because of the suicide attempts and so on. But 
Phil had the ability to put aside whatever he was feeling or thinking 
to do business."

Over the last few years of Dick's life in Santa Ana, Sutin reports, 
he finally managed to earn a high five-figure income from larger 
advances, royalties, resales of his early books, and payments from 
the producers of "Blade Runner." But to him, relative affluence 
wasn't entirely a positive development. "People always say it's too 
bad that he died before he made serious money, but he would have been 
uncomfortable with it," says Powers. "Remember, he grew up in 
Berkeley in the 1950s, when rich guys were not OK. As it was, he 
always was finding excuses to give it away feverishly­charities, 
UNICEF. One time he even had a bank teller who'd seen his account 
balance call him up and ask for a loan of a couple of thousand bucks. 
It was an unbelievably inappropriate thing for the guy to do, but 
Phil just said, 'OK.' "

In February 1982­a few months  before the release of "Blade Runner," 
the Harrison Ford movie that would introduce Dick to mainstream 
audiences­he suffered a major stroke at his condo, dying on March 2 
at age 53. The facts of his demise have not been universally 
accepted­perhaps fitting for someone who believed in multiple 
realities. Someone once assured Powers that Dick had committed 
suicide, just as musician Kurt Cobain had, though Powers quickly 
corrected them. Six weeks after Dick died, Sauter was startled to 
read a claim in an article that he was still alive. She once made 
arrangements to see the android version of the author. "It really 
felt like it was going to be a big emotional shakeup, like seeing a 
dead family member," she says. "Then we finally decide to do it, 
[but] the head disappears … Phil, who had this great droll sense of 
humor, would have thought that was hysterically funny."

It's all part of an Internet-age version of the ancient Greek mystery 
cult that has sprouted during the last two decades, with Dick as its 
deity-oracle-role model. "Phil's work, with its hints of insights 
into God and the universe, lends itself to that sort of obsessive 
interest," Powers says. "A lot of people respond to that. But I think 
Phil would have been a bit bewildered, just as he was in the '70s 
when Marxist critics in Europe adopted him as a hero. He never had to 
deal with the kind of prominence he has now."

If he had lived, Powers wonders if Dick might have followed the same 
course as Hawthorne Abendsen, the fictional writer in Dick's "The Man 
in the High Castle," who writes a novel revealing an alternative 
reality­and then goes into hiding to avoid the consequences of his revelation.
--

Patrick J. Kiger is an Orange Coast contributing writer.
--

The Philip K. Dick Filmography

Dick's novels and short stories are among the hottest commodities in 
Hollywood nearly three decades after his death. In 2007, the Philip 
K. Dick Trust and Electric Shepherd Productions struck a deal with 
the Halcyon Co., owner of the "Terminator" franchise, which gives 
Halcyon first-look rights at all of Dick's literary properties, as 
well as the opportunity to develop video games based on them. In 
addition to the films below, projects currently in the works include 
a Disney animated version of "The King of the Elves"; a $62 million 
adaptation of "Adjustment Team," starring Matt Damon; "The Owl in 
Daylight," a biopic starring Paul Giamatti; and "Flow My Tears, the 
Policeman Said," announced in May by Halcyon at the Cannes Film 
Festival. An adaptation of "Radio Free Albemuth," starring singer 
Alanis Morissette, is awaiting release.

Blade Runner (1982) Director Ridley Scott'sadaption of the 1968 
novel  "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," set in a monstrously 
decayed Los Angeles, initially struggled at the box office, but the 
Harrison Ford flick has become a cult classic.

Total Recall (1990) This Paul Verhoeven directorial effort bears 
little resemblance to Dick's 1966 story "We Can Remember It for You 
Wholesale." But audiences loved Arnold Schwarzenegger as an ex-secret 
agent. A remake is underway, scheduled for a possible 2011 release.

ConfeSsions d'un Barjo (1992) A French adaptation of Dick's 1975 
non-sci-fi novel "Confessions of a Crap Artist," about an eccentric 
ne'er-do-well obsessed with preposterous theories. An Amazon.com 
reviewer called it a "very strange movie, at turns comic, harsh, and 
fantastic."

Screamers (1995) Peter Weller starred in this flop, based on the 1953 
story "Second Variety." Miners fighting their former employer on a 
distant planet create autonomous killing machines, which then turn on 
them. Critic Roger Ebert said the film depicts a future so grim "it 
makes our current mess look like Utopia."

Imposter (2002) TV stars Gary Sinise, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Tony 
Shalhoub were cast in this unsuccessful adaptation of a 1953 story of 
the same name, about a man accused of being an alien double of 
himself. Variety called it "a penny-pinched 'Blade Runner.'"

Minority Report (2002) Directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom 
Cruise, this adaptation of Dick's 1956 story "The Minority Report," 
about a future police officer arrested for a crime he has not yet 
committed, was a huge success critically and at the box office.

Paycheck (2003) John Woo directed this Ben Affleck-Uma Thurman 
vehicle, faintly inspired by a 1953 story with the same title about 
an engineer who plants clues to thwart his employer's erasing of his 
memory of a secret project. Mixed reviews and mediocre box office.

A Scanner Darkly (2006) Director Richard Linklater'sadaptation of 
Dick's 1977 novel about a future undercover narc, played by Keanu 
Reeves, and a personality-fragmenting drug. Critics declared it 
brilliant, but it opened the same week as "Pirates of the Caribbean: 
Dead Man's Chest."

Next (2007) Bears almost no resemblance to Dick's 1954 story "The 
Golden Man," upon which it was loosely based. In lieu of Dick's 
golden-skinned mutant protagonist, it stars Nicolas Cage as a Vegas 
magician who can see two minutes into the future. Panned by critics, 
it did well at the box office.    	­P.J.K.

.

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