I recently learned that Ed Clark passed away of AIDS in '92. If you're just arriving, please scroll down to the first post and read upward. This blog is personal and solely from my point of view. Its purpose is to honor this uniquely creative gentle artist who changed my life.
"Love is just acceptance."
- Ed Clark
That Summer of '71, before Ed moved in, the tenant upstairs Bob used to come downstairs and hang out. He had a black cat named Eldridge (after Cleaver) who had a terrible sense of balance. We'd sit on the veranda talking while Eldridge would try to walk along the railing without falling.
Bob had a one-topic mind: sex. "Come on, Marlan," he'd say, "I can help you lose your virginity." Bob was a nice guy. But that was it. I'd sooner have busted my cherry with Eldridge. But Bob was relentless. One night he launched into a monologue that went:
"I've done it in a bed...in a car...on the floor...in a swing...on a stairs...in a closet...against a wall...in an alley...in a theater...in a rocking chair...in a parade...on a stage...in a helicopter...sitting on a fence..."
Instead of turning me on, it only made sex sound less than exciting. As if the "done it" referred to the tying of shoelaces instead of making love. I tried to imagine fucking Bob in a swing. What was the point again?
I mentioned Ed and Bob's reaction stunned:
"Do I know Ed Clark? He was my roommate sophomore year. I had this girlfriend Melissa who loved to screw. You know that Simon and Garfunkel song Cecilia? Well, I swear to God we were in bed and I got up to go to the bathroom and when I came back...Ed was in there with her getting it on!"
I mentioned Ed and Bob's reaction stunned:
"Do I know Ed Clark? He was my roommate sophomore year. I had this girlfriend Melissa who loved to screw. You know that Simon and Garfunkel song Cecilia? Well, I swear to God we were in bed and I got up to go to the bathroom and when I came back...Ed was in there with her getting it on!"
Was the story true?
Well, Ed and Bob confirmed their ex-roomie status after Ed moved in with me. Then one day while the three of us were in the laundry room, and I was sitting on top of a washing machine, Bob came up and kissed me while Ed was loading the dryer. Then Bob looked at Ed and said:
"Remember Melissa?"
Ed howled.
I had a theater professor who told us bisexual men like to share women (e.g., Look Back in Anger). Was Bob bisexual? I don't know. I don't think he was with us when Ed took me to a party where most of the guests were gay. As the hour grew late, Ed turned to me and said:
"You should go now and I'm going to stay and I'm not coming home tonight."
"Remember Melissa?"
Ed howled.
I had a theater professor who told us bisexual men like to share women (e.g., Look Back in Anger). Was Bob bisexual? I don't know. I don't think he was with us when Ed took me to a party where most of the guests were gay. As the hour grew late, Ed turned to me and said:
"You should go now and I'm going to stay and I'm not coming home tonight."
I was ignorant of the customs of gay men, but Ed's announcement didn't horrify me as it would have when I first came to Tallahassee. Did I feel rejected? It did hurt; but he made it sound like sleeping with a strange guy would not disturb our home life. And it struck me that it was something he had little control over.
Ed spending one night out with a man meant little to me. However, Ed calling me a few weeks later to say he was spending the night with Barbara...that was something else.
By the time I met Barbara, she was a legend in my mind. Ed often quoted her with the same reverence the Pope reserves for the Mother of God. The black and white photograph of her that had hung on his wall had been taken by a fellow art student majoring in Photography named Coleman. When Ed returned to finish his degree in the Fall, Coleman photographed him for an erotic series of nudes.
Ed described one of the erotic shots before I actually saw it:
"I am standing next to a bed with wrinkled sheets. Afternoon light coming in through the window next to me. The penis is still erect but not fully engorged."
Erect but not fully engorged...
I never asked how it got erect in the first place. It could have been any number of ways that didn't require the photographer's help. Maybe Coleman gave his subjects a pile of porn and sent them to the bathroom for a while. I decided not to ask.
After I finally met Barbara, one day we were talking about Coleman whom I had briefly (a diminutive man with an air of ironic dead seriousness, not unlike Andy Warhol). "We were walking along after we first met," Barbara told me, "and I asked him if he was a homosexual and he said yes." I was flabbergasted. Just the thought made me laugh. "You asked him?"
"That's how I am," Barbara said. "I just come right out with it."
I seem to recall Barbara had a New York or Chicago accent, and I think she was a Jewish girl from Miami. Gloria, my second roommate, was a Jewish girl from Ft. Lauderdale. Both shared an ultra-sophistication and a gnawing ambition. But where Gloria had been harsh in her projection of sexuality, Barbara appeared easy and secure in hers.
Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river...I can never think of that line without thinking of Ed Clark's Barbara.
That summer we lived together, Ed eventually decided it was time for me to meet Barbara (and maybe vice versa, I don't know). The first time, Barbara wasn't quite home yet and we waited in front of her sweet little studio apartment that was at below-ground level and attached to a larger house with its own entrance. It had a small bed that Barbara would lounge on and a couple of chairs for visitors.
Unlike Leonard Cohen's Suzanne, Barbara's place was nowhere near water, but she did feed visitors tea and oranges that came all the way from China. She had me at first glance--making an indelible impression--a delicate-boned elfin young woman, carrying a bag of groceries and wearing an unbleached muslin Mexican wedding shirt. As in the photo I'd seen on Ed's wall, her straight light brown hair fell just to her shoulders.
If I had to compare her to a well known film actress, I'd pick Helen Hunt in "Twister."
I wish I had taken pictures of Barbara. It's strange that I didn't, since I even have a photo of a dog swimming across a lake in Tallahassee. Perhaps I was intimidated. She had been photographed by an expert.
Who the fuck was I to think I had the right?
The only photo left that might even hint at her cool, is one of me copying Barbara's look. Taken after I moved to Boston the following year. I'm wearing a Mexican wedding shirt but it looked tighter, shorter and more appealing on Barbara's compact flapper body.
No matter how hard I tried to mimic, I remained more flatterer than imitator.
[Photo by Leonard Warren]
Back to our first meeting. So there we were waiting for the legendary Barbara when she strode up with a bag of groceries and sunny greetings. She took us inside and proceeded to pull out the treasures: Government Issue butter in a huge jar. "Look at all this butter!"
I had no idea butter was so valuable, and this was the first time I'd ever heard of the government "making" butter for distribution. Barbara explained that her boyfriend had cut his hand at work, and his disability qualified him for Welfare food. She showed us other similar goodies and suggested we have a feast.
Barbara declared she would make chicken soup.
"You can make the dessert," she told me. Maybe because I'd brought her some of my famous Betty Crocker banana cake. Or maybe Ed mentioned my fondness for baking (I had learned to bake bread too.)
Ed looked Barbara over and mused, "You ought to weigh a ton, you're so into food. How do you stay so skinny?" She answered: "I've never liked sweets. I like radishes and pickles. Crisp, tart things."
And I was to bring the dessert.
Ed joked that with her stunning cooking skills, she ought to move in with one of the lesbian professors of Art. "You'd be Alice B. Toklas and she'd be Gertrude Stein."
I'd never heard of either. I waited until I moved to Boston and a book review entitled From the Little Old Lady Who Brought You Hashish Brownies (a review of Toklas' cookbook) drove me to finally read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by her genius partner/wife Gertrude Stein.
Barbara put aside the groceries and sat on the bed with her back in the corner of the wall and her legs crossed while we sat perpendicular to the bed. She had a casual but energized way about her that made me feel at home while simultaneously cowed by her.
"Do you like my new gypsy belt?" Barbara asked, thumbs hooked into the leather belt around her narrow hips, twisting it back and forth to show off the lilting etching of a vine that danced across it. (I got one like it a couple years later.)
When we returned for the "feast," Barbara served the chicken soup with a side of Kosher dill pickle. During the meal, she repeatedly urged us to "Eat the soup, now take a bite of the pickle." Because the dill complemented the soup.
It was the first time in my young life that anyone had ever illustrated how two unlikely things might go together.
Barbara didn't dress up for the feast. She wore a denim shirt with metal studs across the pockets and jeans. "I just put these studs on myself," she announced to Ed when we walked in. Ed cracked wise about her having a thing for studs. And then -
"Studs are wrong," Ed said with a sweeping gesture, he added: "I see you in...diamonds."
"No. Studs are better than diamonds," Barbara shot back with a straight serious face. Her voice flat with emphasis. If she absorbed his worship, she gave no indication. Or was Ed the "diamond" they both referred to? Barbara had a boyfriend but she was also on a kind of sexual odyssey, welcoming various willing attractive men into her bed for one-night stands.
In the days before seeking sensual freedom might kill you.
Sensuous is the word I would use to describe Barbara. It was a word bandied about in the 60s. In the dorm, the how-to book The Sensuous Woman by "J" had been passed around, and we girls had giggled over the "whipped cream and cherries" suggestion.
If the Angel of Death hadn't arrived in the 80s to imbue sexual freedom with anxious horror, such books would still be considered gospel among young girls eager to try their wings. But at that moment, in July of 1971, sexual freedom was synonymous with "freeing your soul."
As an artist, Barbara had a thing for pregnancy. One of Barbara's lithographs depicted a pregnant woman kneeling or sitting on the floor who appeared to be vibrating within concentric circles of energy. The lines of the woman were amber and the rest was white space.
Like Ed's art, Barbara's art evoked spirituality and transcendence. Creation itself was as meaningful to them as the subjects they chose.
One day when we were alone, I examined on Barbara's wall a shadowy black and white photograph of a very pregnant nude woman lounging in a hammock, perpendicular to its lateral lines--her long arms stretched out, holding the hammock's sides. The mound of her stomach visually paralleled the mound of her curly head behind it. While I admired it, Barbara said:
"Can you imagine how relaxed she must have been? In a hammock."
Can you imagine?
Barbara had a way of asking me "Can you imagine...?" As if something had been unimaginable until that moment but now worth contemplating above all else. She once told me about a pair of mind-blowingly beautiful sisters--regal, tall with olive skin and long black hair who had both been the lovers of Leonard Cohen.
They were supposed to be so stunning that you felt like falling to your knees in their presence.
"They did thing with makeup nobody else would dare do, but it made them even more beautiful," she told me. "They gilded their eyelids." As if that were the height of luxury, sensuous delight, and fuck-all nerve. "Can you imagine, Marlan...painting your eyelids gold?"
Barbara took a coffee table book of Klimt paintings off a shelf and introduced me to his vibrant ethereal images. The excess gold in them. How beauty could be achieved and how we could copy it. She pointed to her mink-colored eyes and said, "You have eyes with color. Beautiful green eyes. If I had your eyes, I would paint g-r-e-e-n..."
She said the word green as if my eyes could be imbued with magical powers if I painted this color around them. Barbara wore no makeup, and I sensed she was trying to fix me up. The days of my black-dyed hair and careful mascara were over. I wanted to look as good without makeup as Barbara did.
Despite my heroine worship, I resisted her makeup suggestion. Until I lived in Chicago in the mid-70s where I spent my days pursuing a career in acting, and did try gilding my lids with gold-green eye shadow. But by then Barbara was no longer around to give a thumb up or down.
One day Ed and I found Barbara running around the studio with a script in hand reciting: "Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! It's 6 o'clock and the master's not home yet!" She kept repeating the lines from Skin of Our Teeth over and over. It was for a scene in an acting class. It turned out that she knew some folks from the Theater Department. So we had that connection also.
I was thrilled when she gave me one of her pieces. It was a print of a charcoal life drawing of two nude women. They were faceless and their genitalia non-existent so there was something androgynous in them. And they seemed to be floating in air like matching bookends with space between them as they faced each other.
"We were supposed to only draw the shadows," Barbara explained. It was sexy and I really wanted it. As it happened, Barbara had some prints and she signed one and gave it to me.
For years that drawing hung on my wall from Boston to Canada to Chicago to San Diego--until my 80s L.A. then-husband eventually objected because he thought it depicted two gay men having sex.
Update
A couple days ago, I received a note from Ed's mother thanking me for the photos and letter that I sent her upon news of his passing. I'd asked if she knew where Barbara was and she wrote back that Barbara sends her a Christmas card every year from Washington. "They wanted to get married but I asked them to wait until graduation. Then she married someone else."
Blogger's Note: Memory vs. Truth
After I wrote this post, I purged my files of diaries and letters about my relationship with Ed Clark. Some match my memories, some don't. Others fill in blanks. One thread runs through all the episodes and communications: our inability to say we loved each other at the same time. I said it first and he shrugged. Then he said it years later long-distance and by then--as always--it was too late.
When I decided to quit college and move to Boston, my diary reports:
"Ed called my idea 'crazy.' He said, 'You need a break. Stay in Tallahassee. Work. Go back when you're ready.' He gave me many reasons to stay. Except the one I was waiting for: 'Because I need you and love you.'"
But I'm getting ahead of the story. The next post will simply be my diary from the time covered so far. Please remember it's the breathless writing of a 19-year old in the early 70s.
In all my writings, there's not a word about Woodstock, Jane Fonda, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, or any of those iconic stylemakers who rocked the worlds of my fellow students. That Ed Clark was pursuing philosophy and Eastern mysticism while listening to Bartok and Beethovan means he was pursuing what seekers pursued during that time. He was more Alan Watts than Abbie Hoffman. More Timothy Leary than Tom Hayden. More Allen Ginsberg than Bob Dylan.
By the time I met Barbara, she was a legend in my mind. Ed often quoted her with the same reverence the Pope reserves for the Mother of God. The black and white photograph of her that had hung on his wall had been taken by a fellow art student majoring in Photography named Coleman. When Ed returned to finish his degree in the Fall, Coleman photographed him for an erotic series of nudes.
Ed described one of the erotic shots before I actually saw it:
"I am standing next to a bed with wrinkled sheets. Afternoon light coming in through the window next to me. The penis is still erect but not fully engorged."
Erect but not fully engorged...
I never asked how it got erect in the first place. It could have been any number of ways that didn't require the photographer's help. Maybe Coleman gave his subjects a pile of porn and sent them to the bathroom for a while. I decided not to ask.
After I finally met Barbara, one day we were talking about Coleman whom I had briefly (a diminutive man with an air of ironic dead seriousness, not unlike Andy Warhol). "We were walking along after we first met," Barbara told me, "and I asked him if he was a homosexual and he said yes." I was flabbergasted. Just the thought made me laugh. "You asked him?"
"That's how I am," Barbara said. "I just come right out with it."
I seem to recall Barbara had a New York or Chicago accent, and I think she was a Jewish girl from Miami. Gloria, my second roommate, was a Jewish girl from Ft. Lauderdale. Both shared an ultra-sophistication and a gnawing ambition. But where Gloria had been harsh in her projection of sexuality, Barbara appeared easy and secure in hers.
Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river...I can never think of that line without thinking of Ed Clark's Barbara.
That summer we lived together, Ed eventually decided it was time for me to meet Barbara (and maybe vice versa, I don't know). The first time, Barbara wasn't quite home yet and we waited in front of her sweet little studio apartment that was at below-ground level and attached to a larger house with its own entrance. It had a small bed that Barbara would lounge on and a couple of chairs for visitors.
Unlike Leonard Cohen's Suzanne, Barbara's place was nowhere near water, but she did feed visitors tea and oranges that came all the way from China. She had me at first glance--making an indelible impression--a delicate-boned elfin young woman, carrying a bag of groceries and wearing an unbleached muslin Mexican wedding shirt. As in the photo I'd seen on Ed's wall, her straight light brown hair fell just to her shoulders.
If I had to compare her to a well known film actress, I'd pick Helen Hunt in "Twister."
I wish I had taken pictures of Barbara. It's strange that I didn't, since I even have a photo of a dog swimming across a lake in Tallahassee. Perhaps I was intimidated. She had been photographed by an expert.
Who the fuck was I to think I had the right?
The only photo left that might even hint at her cool, is one of me copying Barbara's look. Taken after I moved to Boston the following year. I'm wearing a Mexican wedding shirt but it looked tighter, shorter and more appealing on Barbara's compact flapper body.
No matter how hard I tried to mimic, I remained more flatterer than imitator.
[Photo by Leonard Warren]
Back to our first meeting. So there we were waiting for the legendary Barbara when she strode up with a bag of groceries and sunny greetings. She took us inside and proceeded to pull out the treasures: Government Issue butter in a huge jar. "Look at all this butter!"
I had no idea butter was so valuable, and this was the first time I'd ever heard of the government "making" butter for distribution. Barbara explained that her boyfriend had cut his hand at work, and his disability qualified him for Welfare food. She showed us other similar goodies and suggested we have a feast.
Barbara declared she would make chicken soup.
"You can make the dessert," she told me. Maybe because I'd brought her some of my famous Betty Crocker banana cake. Or maybe Ed mentioned my fondness for baking (I had learned to bake bread too.)
Ed looked Barbara over and mused, "You ought to weigh a ton, you're so into food. How do you stay so skinny?" She answered: "I've never liked sweets. I like radishes and pickles. Crisp, tart things."
And I was to bring the dessert.
Ed joked that with her stunning cooking skills, she ought to move in with one of the lesbian professors of Art. "You'd be Alice B. Toklas and she'd be Gertrude Stein."
I'd never heard of either. I waited until I moved to Boston and a book review entitled From the Little Old Lady Who Brought You Hashish Brownies (a review of Toklas' cookbook) drove me to finally read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by her genius partner/wife Gertrude Stein.
Barbara put aside the groceries and sat on the bed with her back in the corner of the wall and her legs crossed while we sat perpendicular to the bed. She had a casual but energized way about her that made me feel at home while simultaneously cowed by her.
"Do you like my new gypsy belt?" Barbara asked, thumbs hooked into the leather belt around her narrow hips, twisting it back and forth to show off the lilting etching of a vine that danced across it. (I got one like it a couple years later.)
When we returned for the "feast," Barbara served the chicken soup with a side of Kosher dill pickle. During the meal, she repeatedly urged us to "Eat the soup, now take a bite of the pickle." Because the dill complemented the soup.
It was the first time in my young life that anyone had ever illustrated how two unlikely things might go together.
Barbara didn't dress up for the feast. She wore a denim shirt with metal studs across the pockets and jeans. "I just put these studs on myself," she announced to Ed when we walked in. Ed cracked wise about her having a thing for studs. And then -
"Studs are wrong," Ed said with a sweeping gesture, he added: "I see you in...diamonds."
"No. Studs are better than diamonds," Barbara shot back with a straight serious face. Her voice flat with emphasis. If she absorbed his worship, she gave no indication. Or was Ed the "diamond" they both referred to? Barbara had a boyfriend but she was also on a kind of sexual odyssey, welcoming various willing attractive men into her bed for one-night stands.
In the days before seeking sensual freedom might kill you.
Sensuous is the word I would use to describe Barbara. It was a word bandied about in the 60s. In the dorm, the how-to book The Sensuous Woman by "J" had been passed around, and we girls had giggled over the "whipped cream and cherries" suggestion.
If the Angel of Death hadn't arrived in the 80s to imbue sexual freedom with anxious horror, such books would still be considered gospel among young girls eager to try their wings. But at that moment, in July of 1971, sexual freedom was synonymous with "freeing your soul."
As an artist, Barbara had a thing for pregnancy. One of Barbara's lithographs depicted a pregnant woman kneeling or sitting on the floor who appeared to be vibrating within concentric circles of energy. The lines of the woman were amber and the rest was white space.
Like Ed's art, Barbara's art evoked spirituality and transcendence. Creation itself was as meaningful to them as the subjects they chose.
One day when we were alone, I examined on Barbara's wall a shadowy black and white photograph of a very pregnant nude woman lounging in a hammock, perpendicular to its lateral lines--her long arms stretched out, holding the hammock's sides. The mound of her stomach visually paralleled the mound of her curly head behind it. While I admired it, Barbara said:
"Can you imagine how relaxed she must have been? In a hammock."
Can you imagine?
Barbara had a way of asking me "Can you imagine...?" As if something had been unimaginable until that moment but now worth contemplating above all else. She once told me about a pair of mind-blowingly beautiful sisters--regal, tall with olive skin and long black hair who had both been the lovers of Leonard Cohen.
They were supposed to be so stunning that you felt like falling to your knees in their presence.
"They did thing with makeup nobody else would dare do, but it made them even more beautiful," she told me. "They gilded their eyelids." As if that were the height of luxury, sensuous delight, and fuck-all nerve. "Can you imagine, Marlan...painting your eyelids gold?"
Barbara took a coffee table book of Klimt paintings off a shelf and introduced me to his vibrant ethereal images. The excess gold in them. How beauty could be achieved and how we could copy it. She pointed to her mink-colored eyes and said, "You have eyes with color. Beautiful green eyes. If I had your eyes, I would paint g-r-e-e-n..."
She said the word green as if my eyes could be imbued with magical powers if I painted this color around them. Barbara wore no makeup, and I sensed she was trying to fix me up. The days of my black-dyed hair and careful mascara were over. I wanted to look as good without makeup as Barbara did.
Despite my heroine worship, I resisted her makeup suggestion. Until I lived in Chicago in the mid-70s where I spent my days pursuing a career in acting, and did try gilding my lids with gold-green eye shadow. But by then Barbara was no longer around to give a thumb up or down.
One day Ed and I found Barbara running around the studio with a script in hand reciting: "Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! It's 6 o'clock and the master's not home yet!" She kept repeating the lines from Skin of Our Teeth over and over. It was for a scene in an acting class. It turned out that she knew some folks from the Theater Department. So we had that connection also.
I was thrilled when she gave me one of her pieces. It was a print of a charcoal life drawing of two nude women. They were faceless and their genitalia non-existent so there was something androgynous in them. And they seemed to be floating in air like matching bookends with space between them as they faced each other.
"We were supposed to only draw the shadows," Barbara explained. It was sexy and I really wanted it. As it happened, Barbara had some prints and she signed one and gave it to me.
For years that drawing hung on my wall from Boston to Canada to Chicago to San Diego--until my 80s L.A. then-husband eventually objected because he thought it depicted two gay men having sex.
Update
A couple days ago, I received a note from Ed's mother thanking me for the photos and letter that I sent her upon news of his passing. I'd asked if she knew where Barbara was and she wrote back that Barbara sends her a Christmas card every year from Washington. "They wanted to get married but I asked them to wait until graduation. Then she married someone else."
Blogger's Note: Memory vs. Truth
After I wrote this post, I purged my files of diaries and letters about my relationship with Ed Clark. Some match my memories, some don't. Others fill in blanks. One thread runs through all the episodes and communications: our inability to say we loved each other at the same time. I said it first and he shrugged. Then he said it years later long-distance and by then--as always--it was too late.
When I decided to quit college and move to Boston, my diary reports:
"Ed called my idea 'crazy.' He said, 'You need a break. Stay in Tallahassee. Work. Go back when you're ready.' He gave me many reasons to stay. Except the one I was waiting for: 'Because I need you and love you.'"
But I'm getting ahead of the story. The next post will simply be my diary from the time covered so far. Please remember it's the breathless writing of a 19-year old in the early 70s.
In all my writings, there's not a word about Woodstock, Jane Fonda, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, or any of those iconic stylemakers who rocked the worlds of my fellow students. That Ed Clark was pursuing philosophy and Eastern mysticism while listening to Bartok and Beethovan means he was pursuing what seekers pursued during that time. He was more Alan Watts than Abbie Hoffman. More Timothy Leary than Tom Hayden. More Allen Ginsberg than Bob Dylan.
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