“Babies and flowers,” a pretty little girl breathes. “But that’s so beautiful, that’s the whole point.”
“Ginsberg was down here one weekend,” recalls a dreamy boy with curly golden hair. “He brought a copy of the Fuck Songbag, but we burned it.” He giggles. He is holding a clear violet marble up to the window, turning it in the sunlight. “Joan gave it to me,” he says. “One night at her house, when we all had a party and gave each other presents. It was like Christmas but it wasn’t.”
The school itself is an old whitewashed adobe house quite far out among the yellow hills and dusty scrub oaks of the Upper Carmel Valley. Oleanders support a torn wire fence around the school, and there is no sign, no identification at all. The adobe was a one-room county school until 1950; after that it was occupied in turn by the So Help Me Hannah Poison Oak Remedy Laboratory and by a small shotgun-shell manufacturing business, two enterprises which apparently did not present the threat to property values that Miss Baez does. She bought the place in the fall of 1965, after the County Planning Commission told her that zoning prohibited her from running the school in her house, which is on a ten-acre piece a few miles away. Miss Baez is the vice president of the Institute, and its sponsor; the $120 fee paid by each student for each six-week session includes lodging, at an apartment house in Pacific Grove, and does not meet the school’s expenses. Miss Baez not only has a $40, 000 investment in the school property but is responsible as well for the salary of Ira Sandperl, who is the president of the Institute, the leader of the discussions, and in fact the eminence grise of the entire project. “You might think we’re starting in a very small way,” Ira Sandperl says. “Sometimes the smallest things can change the course of history. Look at the Benedictine order.”
In a way it is impossible to talk about Joan Baez without talking about Ira Sandperl. “One of the men on the Planning Commission said I was being led down the primrose path by the lunatic fringe,” Miss Baez giggles. “Ira said maybe he’s the lunatic and his beard’s the fringe.” Ira Sandperl is a forty-two-year-old native of St. Louis who has, besides the beard, a shaved head, a large nuclear-disarmament emblem on his corduroy jacket, glittering and slightly messianic eyes, a high cracked laugh and the general look of a man who has, all his life, followed some imperceptibly but fatally askew rainbow. He has spent a good deal of time in pacifist movements around San Francisco, Berkeley, and Palo Alto, and was, at the time he and Miss Baez hit upon the idea of the Institute, working in a Palo Alto bookstore.
Ira Sandperl first met Joan Baez when she was sixteen and was brought by her father to a Quaker meeting in Palo Alto. “There was something magic, something different about her even then,” he recalls. “I remember once she was singing at a meeting where I was speaking. The audience was so responsive that night that I said ‘Honey, when you grow up we’ll have to be an evangelical team. ’” He smiles, and spreads his hands.
The two became close, according to Ira Sandperl, after Miss Baez’s father went to live in Paris as a UNESCO advisor. “I was the oldest friend around, so naturally she turned to me.” He was with her at the time of the Berkeley demonstrations in the fall of 1964. “We were actually the outside agitators you heard so much about,” he says. “Basically we wanted to turn an unviolent movement into a nonviolent one. Joan was enormously instrumental in pulling the movement out of its slump, although the boys may not admit it now.”
A month or so after her appearance at Berkeley, Joan Baez talked to Ira Sandperl about the possibility of tutoring her for a year. “She found herself among politically knowledgeable people,” he says, “and while she had strong feelings, she didn’t know any of the socio-economic-political-historical terms of nonviolence.”
“It was all vague,” she interrupts, nervously brushing her hair back. “I want it to be less vague.”
They decided to make it not a year’s private tutorial but a school to go on indefinitely, and enrolled the first students late in the summer of 1965. The Institute aligns itself with no movements (“Some of the kids are just leading us into another long, big, violent mess,” Miss Baez says), and there is in fact a marked distrust of most activist organizations. Ira Sandperl, for example, had little use for the V. D. C., because the V. D. C. believed in nonviolence only as a limited tactic, accepted conventional power blocs, and even ran one of its leaders for Congress, which is anathema to Sandperl. “Darling, let me put it this way. In civil rights, now, the President signs a bill, who does he call to witness it? Adam Powell? No. He calls Rustin, Farmer, King, none of them in the conventional power structure.” He pauses, as if envisioning a day when he and Miss Baez will be called upon to witness the signing of a bill outlawing violence. “I’m not optimistic, darling, but I’m hopeful. There’s a difference. I’m hopeful.”
The gas heater sputters on and off and Miss Baez watches it, her duffel coat drawn up around her shoulders. “Everybody says I’m politically naive, and I am,” she says after a while. It is something she says frequently to people she does not know. “So are the people running politics, or we wouldn’t be in wars, would we.”
The door opens and a short middle-aged man wearing handmade sandals walks in. He is Manuel Greenhill, Miss Baez s manager, and although he has been her manager for five years, he has never before visited the Institute, and he has never before met Ira Sandperl.
“At last!” Ira Sandperl cries, jumping up. “The disembodied voice on the telephone is here at last! There is a Manny Greenhill! There is an Ira Sandperl! Here I am! Here’s the villain!”
It is difficult to arrange to see Joan Baez, at least for anyone not tuned to the underground circuits of the protest movement. The New York company for which she records, Vanguard, will give only Manny Greenhill’s number, in Boston. “Try Area Code 415, prefix DA 4, number 4321,” Manny Greenhill will rasp. Area Code 415, DA 4-4321 will connect the caller with Keppler’s Bookstore in Palo Alto, which is where Ira Sandperl used to work. Someone at the bookstore will take a number, and, after checking with Carmel to see if anyone there cares to hear from the caller, will call back, disclosing a Carmel number. The Carmel number is not, as one might think by now, for Miss Baez, but for an answering service. The service will take a number, and, after some days or weeks, a call may or may not be received from Judy Flynn, Miss Baez’s secretary. Miss Flynn says that she will “try to contact” Miss Baez.”I don’t see people,” says the heart of this curiously improvised web of wrong numbers, disconnected telephones, and unreturned calls. “I lock the gate and hope nobody comes, but they come anyway. Somebody’s been telling them where I live.”
She lives quietly. She reads, and she talks to the people who have been told where she lives, and occasionally she and Ira Sandperl go to San Francisco, to see friends, to talk about the peace movement. She sees her two sisters and she sees Ira Sandperl. She believes that her days at the Institute talking and listening to Ira Sandperl are bringing her closer to contentment than anything she has done so far. “Certainly than the singing. I used to stand up there and think I’m getting so many thousand dollars, and for what?” She is defensive about her income (“Oh, I have some money from somewhere”), vague about her plans. “There are some things I want to do. I want to try some rock ‘n’ roll and some classical music. But I’m not going to start worrying about the charts and the sales because then where are you?”