We Can't Always Sing and Dance:
In Memory of A Good Friend
http://www.tothecenter.com/index.php?readmore=12037
By LIONEL ROLFE
December 21 2009
My friend Karen Kaye, executive director of Connections for Children
in Santa Monica, a non-profit provider of babysitting and other
services for single working mothers, is dead.
She died just before Christmas.
It seemed she went quite quickly. I know she had undergone surgery
and chemotherapy for cancer, but that was supposed to have cured her.
I didn't see her for a few weeks, and then realized she hadn't called
me about Thanksgiving. For the last several years, she has invited me
to her Thanksgiving dinners, where old friends and family members met
to consider how the year had gone.
I called her. She sounded a bit weak, which concerned me, but she
said in a cheerful voice, yes, we're getting together. Samantha, her
niece, would be making a great dinner.
Samantha indeed made a great dinner, but Karen was in the bed. Weak.
She said she had just had surgery. She wasn't too specific about what
it was. She didn't look good. She was in a lot of pain and Samantha
was in charge of giving her the palliatives.
That was shocking because usually Karen was full of energy. She was
the same age as me, 67, but had always exercised and eaten carefully.
She had plans to read and travel.
The last few years, Karen had become a high-powered executive in the
non-profit field. I better remember her as just about my oldest
friend on the planet. I've known her for half a century or so.
I was either 16 or 18 when I first met her. It probably was the
latter, but I'm still a little confused about the details. I know I
met her in a German or philosophy class at Los Angeles City College.
It was either 1958 or 1960. I always thought 1958, she said it was 1960.
Karen, like me, hung out at some of the coffeehouses around City
College, such as the old Ve, Pogo's Swamp and Xanadu. In the last few
years, I actually saw Karen only every few weeks, although we talked
by phone more regularly.
One of the most regulars was Levi Kingston, who had founded Pogo's Swamp.
Levi founded Pogo's Swamp on Melrose Avenue, across the street from
the Lithuanian Cultural Center. The Xanadu opened up shortly after,
right next door to the Lithuanian Cultural Center.
The Xanadu became an important coffeehouse, for it is where a lot of
Los Angeles Times journalists would come to gripe about how awful
their paper was and how much Los Angeles needed a new newspaper.
Several famed characters came out of the Xanadu. One was Art Kunkin,
an old Trotskyist, a machinist and printer. He's the one who actually
got the first issue of the Los Angeles Free Press, or the "Freep,"
out. The Freep was the nation's first underground newspaper. As a
result of the "Freep," a whole string of underground newspapers
popped up across the nation, helping to organize the '60s counter
culture that had as its first goal ending the war in Vietnam.
Kunkin is still around and kicking, an alchemist and mystic who lives
in the desert. He says he will never die.
Karen was never as radical as most of us were in those days. Rather
than being sympathetic to communism, for example, she was a
socialist, sort of a right-wing social democrat, even then.
I was 16 or 18, as I said, so I of course wanted a romantic
relationship with her. She was a very beautiful woman, at least in my
memories, but we never had a romantic relationship, sad to say.
Still, I was a regular at her home in "lower Beverly Hills"負hat
section of Beverly Hills which is just south of Olympic Boulevard. I
loved to go there in part because I loved Karen's father, who was a
wonderful raconteur and old Yiddish theater actor who of course had
grown up around the Left.
Everything was so political in those days I adopted the habit of
calling Karen Kerensky, the old Menshevik, I think he was, or some
such thing during the Russian Revolution. We used to talk intensely
about things like that耑olsheviks and Mensheviks and Trotskyists and
Stalinists. We also argued about music and literature, of course.
We would sit around in Karen's living room, talking with her father,
who had been a small time character actor in b-movies from the 30s in
Hollywood, but had come out of New York Yiddish Theater.
Karen's father never made much of a living胛aren's mom did most of
that. Karen's mom was a classic Jewish mother, in the sense that her
son Stan was the great genius, and her daughter was just her
daughter. Stan was perhaps a great genius, but the problem was he
knew it, and was sometimes insufferable. Still, he was an important
avant garde filmmakers in the early '60s, and later helped create
Quarterdeck, which invented one of the first "windows" programs for
personal computers. Stan is bright, no doubt. Recently he turned up
on the front of Los Angeles Magazine, which raved on and on about one
of his his latest invention.
Stan was a regular at these Thanksgiving dinners, as was his mother
and Levi Kingston and a number of other people as well. Karen's
mother wouldn't be coming to this year's Thanksgiving. But don't feel
too sorry for her, she lived well into her 90s, vigorous both
physically and mentally almost to the end.
Karen's mother had made a pretty good living as an executive
secretary to Justin Dart, the owner of Rexall Drugstore and founder
of Ronald Reagan's kitchen cabinet of rich Republicans, who first
made Reagan California governor and then president.
She made a fairly good living, although not an extravagant one. Her
husband was in charge of the arts, films, politics, and good conversation.
Although the Kayes lived in the poor part of Beverly Hills, and their
house was rather modest, Tony Curtis lived right down the street--I
think he lived on Clark Street. I don't know if the old house is
still there. It's probably been replaced by a mini-mansion or a giant
apartment complex.
Karen and I never became lovers, but we did drive across country. We
got stuck for a week in Vincennes, Indiana, where my car broke down.
We were tantalizing close to Chicago, a real big city. But Karen
found even Vincennes fascinating, and we spent most of that week
prowling it's charming streets and talking to its rustic denizens.
It was still much more interesting when we finally limped into
Chicago. Then we took the turnpike to New York, where I proudly
introduced Karen to my mother, the pianist Yaltah Menuhin. My mom
fell in love with Karen too.
Not too many years later, I was married--working at my first official
newspaper job at the Pismo Beach Times. It was the early '60s. By
that time, Karen was living in Berkeley, where she eventually got a
masters degree in anthropology. My then wife and I went to Berkeley
to visit her and our Fiat broke down. It remained in Berkeley and
Karen lent us her VW to drive back to my first newspaper job at the
Pismo Beach Times. We returned the VW the following weekend to pick
up the Fiat and return her VW.
Karen went on to cheat death during her many travels. On a later
occasion when she drove across country, this time with someone else,
she was in a terrible car accident in Oklahoma and in the hospital for months.
That's why I sometimes lost contact with Karen over the years. She
went to India for five years or so, living with her boyfriend Gene,
who worked for the Ford Foundation.
Later she returned to New York, where she married her one and only
husband. He was at that time a leader of the student rebellions at
Columbia University. He eventually became a doctor and Karen moved
back to San Francisco where he took a job with Kaiser Permanente. He
was becoming increasingly conservative, and Karen chaffed under his
demands that she become a "doctor's wife."
When they split, the only thing Karen wanted to take with her was the
piano. That Steinway stayed with her until the end. She never played
that well, but she would noodle, and at her parties, there was always
a friend who could play it better than her.
She kept traveling苟very year she was going to Africa or Armenia,
Bangladesh or Latin America. When we went to bookstores together, she
would always first go to the travel section. She loved reading travel books.
For a few years, I lost contact with Karen. It was only when she
moved back to Los Angeles that changed.
While I had fallen for London, she returned to Los Angeles and
developed an unusual love of her own hometown. Unusual, because she
had seen the world, and still found Los Angeles interesting and
fascinating. Her training as an anthropologist was a good one for her.
She found me after reading something about me in a newspaper, a book
signing or some such I was doing. It was a very pleasant surprise
seeing her again. She looked great.
In her later years, Karen made up for the fact that she never had
children by running Connections for Children. She also "adopted"
neighborhood children, who were often around her house, determined to
help them avoid gangs and to get educations.
I think it is very telling that as Karen's mother, then in her 90s,
was dying, Karen learned she had cancer. She did not tell her mother,
not wanting her mother to worry about her daughter dying before she
did. That was how Karen was.
--
Lionel Rolfe is the author of "Literary L.A." and several other books
that can be seen on the website, www.boryanabooks.com.
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