On January 12, 1950, some three weeks after my father's acquittal, Superior Court judge Thomas Ambrose entered an order directing that certain items be released to the district attorney's office investigators. Those items were the pornographic books, the satyr, centaur-piece statue, and the fifteen or more "photographs."1
Five weeks later, on February 1, 1950, a small article appeared in the Los Angeles Times, under the headline "Probation Given in Morals Case":
Barbara Shearman, 21, [sic] a central figure in the morals trial of Dr. George Hill Hodel, yesterday was placed on three years' probation after she pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Judge Ambrose sentenced Miss Sherman to one year in jail, then suspended the sentence and placed her on probation, ordering her to refrain from any further association with Dr. Hodel or any of his friends.
The trial was over. My father was acquitted. Tamar was gone. And the late-night parties at the house had stopped. But just when I thought that life for the family would get back to what we had had before the arrest and trial, my brothers and I, without any explanation from our parents, were enrolled in Page Academy, a highly regimented military school in Los Angeles. We had been banished from the castle to a place that was little more than a prison. Worse, Father was gone. Without a word, he simply seemed to have disappeared. Not even our mother, who would occasionally visit us on weekends, would talk about where he had gone. All we knew was that he was selling — or had already sold — Franklin House and was moving away. Out of the country. After a long silence, I later learned that he had moved to Hawaii, where he had remarried.
In retrospect, I was too young to know what was really going on during the Franklin House years, other than a child's awareness of lots of people, noise, music, laughter, and my mother's mix of joy and sadness. Knowing what I now know about both my parents, I realize she was walking a high wire with no net. The fact was, Mother was living there at his pleasure. They were divorced, so Father's womanizing could and did go unchecked. Her drinking, and most likely drug use, was excessive, and she was dependent upon him for supplying all of her and our material needs. In addition, I know that Mother was bisexual and hedonistic by nature, and I am certain she took a willing and active part with the other adult partygoers. I also know that, unlike Father, she had her limits, which most certainly would not have included sex with Tamar or other minor children. I now see Father's role as panderer — using Mother's weaknesses and addictions to sex, drugs, and alcohol for his own and others' benefit. He controlled her like most pimps control their women, through intimidation and threats. Father's arrest and trial for incest was a last straw, which likely forced Mother to break and run with her cubs. There was no turning back. I expect she and most other family friends and intimates fully anticipated that Father would be convicted and sent to prison.
I make no moral judgments of my mother. I loved and love her as most sons do — unconditionally. She had great strengths and great weaknesses, but above all she protected and raised her three sons as best she knew how, under the most difficult circumstances.
A few months after our arrival at Page Academy, Mother visited us with a friend we knew from the Franklin House, screenwriter and director Rowland Brown, a large gray-haired man who looked like a grandfather. Mother told us that she and Father had divorced and my brothers and I were going to live with her in the desert far from Hollywood, near Rowland Brown and his family. While we were still recovering from the dual shock of our sudden release and the news that our father and mother had divorced, we were told to put our belongings into a large truck that Rowland had parked outside the school. Mother was crying, even as she tried to tell us how wonderful life was going to be without Father, and that made the rest of us cry as well. We knew it was a lie, but there was nothing we could do about it except climb inside the back of Rowland's truck and ride out of the city and into the isolation of the California desert and a place we had never seen called Rancho Mirage.
It was there, Mother kept promising us through her tears, that we would have a whole new life.
1This seemingly innocuous notation in the court records became a blinking red light for me. Why were investigators from the district attorney's office requesting that the judge release court evidence from an LAPD case to them? Procedurally this was highly unorthodox. Normally only the primary investigators — in this case LAPD Juvenile detectives — would be permitted physical custody of the evidence. It would be many months more before I would learn the answer.
Gypsies
IF THE LIVES WE LED in the fairy-tale beauty of the Franklin House, with Father holding court every night, were rich and magical, our lives with Mother, until I left the family to join the Navy, were marked by starkly desperate periods of privation and transiency. At first we settled in the harsh California desert, in a small dusty town forty minutes from Palm Springs inhabited by sidewinder snakes and scorpions.
We liked the desert because it was different. The night sky was a spread of a million bright stars against a chorus of howling coyotes somewhere in the distance beyond the scrub and chaparral. During the day the hot winds would blow, sending tumbleweeds like an advancing phalanx before them. But amidst all the fragments of memory of those first few months in Rancho Mirage that I can bring to mind — Mom in the real estate office, Mom and our neighbors, Mom in a stupor on the couch as the duties of carrying the empties out to the garbage fell to us — what stands out the most is the brief, few-hour visit from Dad. He came from Hawaii and brought us as a gift a dog named Aloha.
We loved her, but she quickly ran away and was lost to the desert, where she might have been eaten by a puma. And Dad too had left, returning to his new family and his new life.
We didn't stay in the desert very long, moving back to Los Angeles in less than a year. We had also discovered Mother's secret drinking problem, only it wasn't a secret anymore. Her binges would last sometimes for days, and after the second or third day she could not work, cook, clean, iron our clothes for school, help us with homework, or even stand up and walk. Although we were only nine, ten, and eleven, the three of us had to figure out how to run a household around our semi-comatose mother. We couldn't even bring anyone home, because we couldn't let anyone see her lying on the couch, unable to get up, unable to do anything. We made a pact to protect her and just make do, all the while hoping that we would be rescued, that this bad dream would end, and we'd be back inside the castle. But it was not to be.
By 1951 we had become gypsies, always on the move, because every time our mother went on binges she would lose her job, fall behind in the rent, and wind up with an eviction notice pasted on the door. Fortunately, when she did work it was for real estate offices, where she would jump on the rental listings before they became public. That gave her an inside advantage when cheap apartments came up. So we bounced around from town to town throughout Los Angeles County, moving on an average of every three months. In the early 1950s Mother was arrested several times for child neglect, when neighbors would discover her passed out after she was well into one of her two-week binges. On several occasions, the three of us were taken away from her by social services and placed in county homes, but somehow she would get us back. At which point we would move to another area, another town, and start over again.
Our nomadic existence lasted for two years before we finally wound up in Pasadena, where Mother managed to stay sober long enough to save some money and rent a large home on Los Robles Avenue on the west side of town. Just as we were allowing ourselves to relax and enjoy our new place, she started drinking again, and before long she lost her job and another "pay or quit" notice was stapled to our door. Desperate for money, having tapped out all her usual sources from her friends, and already having been advanced a month's salary from her real estate manager, Mother chanced to see an article in the newspaper about John Huston's return to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards.