Sleeping Where I Fall
Coyote, Peter
Peter Peyote's Astonishing Journey to Nowhere Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle Peter Coyote Counterpoint /368 pages / $26 REVIEWED BY Marc Carnegie I had never heard of Peter Coyote before...
...Even after Hubbell went to prison, Phillips and his wife kept in touch with their disgraced friend...
...She called me not long afterward and told me that she'd found "God" and was moving in with him...
...When I read, for instance, that his commune used to make a ritual of eating the afterbirth of their group's newborns, I couldn't stop laughing...
...You know, John, I'd love to have all the money I'm supposed to have," he said...
...STILL TOGETHE As difficult as it was, the failed article deal did not destroy the relationship between Phillips and Douglass and the Hubbellsat least not at first...
...They were a high-powered, energetic group, continually building and rebuilding their communal houses to last for eternity...
...Asked what they discussed, he said, "Just life in prison...
...But Hubbell "put a lot of his friends in the situation of great disruption, expense, embarrassment and the like —like me...
...Her guide for this trip was Mel Lyman, a harmonica-playing astrologer and guru to a community of souls centered in and referred to by the name of their locale at Fort Hill, near Boston...
...Coyote has obviously taken to Hollywood as well...
...L York/Douglass (Continued from page 32) ment...
...But no—Sleeping Where I Fall is weighed down by that humorless mixture of New Age earnestness and Aquarian screwed-upness that has come to signify a generation: While Jessie [his live-in girlfriend] summered in Martha's Vineyard with her family, she took LSD for the first time...
...Phillips is no longer in contact with Hubbell...
...Alternately he might have learned to chuckle at himself...
...but the only thing Coyote admits to being embarrassed about is that, as a child, he was driven to school with a chauffeur and limousine...
...Or just give me half of it...
...A few minutes later, Phillips brought up some recent news articles...
...Three days earlier, New York Times columnist William Safire had written a piece revealing a few details of Hubbell's payoff from the Lippo group...
...In addition to his film work he appears in a weekly hit television program, and has been the exclusive model representing a major Italian fashion designer...
...Mel spent the night cleaning up her vomit and witnessing her fear and confusion, and she fell in love with him...
...I went to church with Webb," Douglass remembered...
...As it turns out, Hubbell's calls, like those of all other inmates, were recorded by federal prison authorities—with the prisoners' full knowledge...
...With terminal idealism he had been hoping to give his kids a glimpse of the beautiful promise the counterculture once held forth for him and his comrades...
...He MARC CARNEGIE is correspondent-at-large for The American Spectator...
...Now that's hip...
...the two have not spoken since early 1997...
...But someone should have tipped him off that it would have been a much better career move not to be so dreadfully earnest...
...He faked a psychiatric exam to avoid going to Vietnam...
...Alas he doesn't see the humor in this either, and instead bangs on at length about the pride he took in getting politicians to "look past" his greasy clothes, ponytail, and earrings, how he concocted various schemes to cadge more tax money for his fief, and how he distributed the booty to various interesting and creative and important projects...
...she agreed to pay the rest by the end of March 1996...
...Hubbell said he was reading Ulysses...
...H e doesn't go into how his career got started, but it's not hard to imagine Hollywood cottoning on to him...
...Phillips told the committee that he visited Hubbell three times in prison...
...In The American Spectator May 1998 79 the most frightening moment of the book, Coyote claims that his success on the Mau-Mau front led to him being approached to take over the California Department of Education...
...Furthermore, over the years they have maintained their communal family integrity and are now respected as master builders and artisans...
...The two discussed the upcoming presidential election...
...The community published a locally famous counterculture newspaper, The Avatar, and generated wildly bipolar feelings in outsiders...
...To which the correct response is: because you spent all your time screwing and getting high, you idiot...
...Well, that's the Journal for you...
...Are you sad...
...He's got me making a quarter of a million dollars from them, which was real interesting [laughter...
...I was trying to help him 80 May 1998 • The American Spectator...
...Peter Peyote's Astonishing Journey to Nowhere Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle Peter Coyote Counterpoint /368 pages / $26 REVIEWED BY Marc Carnegie I had never heard of Peter Coyote before reading this autobiography, which is surely a sign that I've been moving in the right circles...
...Chuckles...
...The most valuable was a signed 1937 lithograph by American artist Grant Wood, valued at $5,000...
...Coyote, ne Cohon, "has performed in more than fifty films," and Sleeping Where I Fall begins at Whoopi Goldberg's wedding: "I knew most of the actors there, though I did manage to confuse Harry Hamlin with Peter Gallagher...
...You know, understand, Webb was a friend of mine...
...Hubbell: On Riady, yeah...
...The end of Phillips' deposition is filled with a sense of disappointment...
...Clearly he is a savvy character who knows how to play the game...
...the book is liberally sprinkled with references to actors and producers and directors—like the "luminaries" Geffen and Spielberg—that have about them a whiff of the brown-nose...
...Four hundred pages of this is pretty much to take, and Sleeping Where I Fall is surely the only memoir that ever gets (fractionally) more interesting after its author becomes a government bureaucrat...
...Largely he and his roving commune lived by stolen credit cards and other dodgy practices...
...But according to Phillips's testimony, that agreement was thrown out when the Hubbells came up with a plan to repay the rest by turning over some works of art to Phillips...
...That would have been, at least in Hollywood terms, respectable...
...But I suppose it would have been very difficult to get the educrats to look past his filthy Levis, and Coyote made the logical and more rewarding decision to become a film actor instead...
...Bruce Chatwin gives a bleak and unflattering portrait of them in his book What Am I Doing Here, but other than losing my lover to them and their playing a few mind games when I visited years later, no members ever harmed me...
...Well, what Safire says is that his sources believe that's what I got...
...And Safire's, too...
...During those wilderness years Coyote fathered children with various women, and while seriously abusing heroin, LSD, peyote, speed, and anything else in the pharmacist's cabinet...
...in fact over nearly 400 pages of deathless prose it gets very much worse...
...Nothing...
...Hubbell: Between that and the money that's been airlifted from the Mena Airport and everything else, next thing you know I'll be on the Grassy Knoll...
...She had, she said, come to Hubbell's assistance in a time of need...
...Sleeping Where I Fall is a memoir of Coyote's squalid odyssey in the 1960's counterculture, before it (and he) moved to Hollywood and became simply the culture...
...both agreed that things looked good for the president...
...Jeez...
...According to an appraisal sheet given to the committee, it included twenty-one lithographs and paintings...
...Instead Coyote winds up Sleeping Where I Fall by taking his youngest children to the site of one of his former communes...
...Much of it stayed in the Hubbells' possession, but Douglass and Phillips also visited the Hubbell home and picked out some of their favorites, which they took and hung in their own home...
...she asked...
...those reports were soon followed by coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Phillips: You read all the Wall Street Journal pieces...
...After so preposterously a misspent half-life, he might at least feel some remorse...
...In addition, the couples kept in touch by phone...
...For after a decade and a half of unemployment, fighting the capitalist system, and fornicating for freedom, Coyote joined— what else...
...Phillips: Aaaahhh, God...
...Certainly it would have made for a much better book...
...I don't know where he got that....I'm sure this is coming from, you know, the Republicans, cause it was in Safire and then it hit the Wall Street Journal...
...Harry's riposte when I apologized with a lame 'Of course, what was I thinking' was a quick-witted 'You must have been thinking of yourself.'" What I was thinking was: (a) neither he nor his editor knows the meaning of the word riposte...
...She asked me to send her stuff...
...From there the conversation meandered off...
...and (b) oh God, give me a break...
...Douglass, in an interview with TAS, expressed some of the same disillusionment...
...The total value of the collection—as determined by Hubbell's appraiser—was $39,450...
...Phillips told the committee that Hubbell called about once a month (Douglass also talked with Hubbell from prison...
...the California State Arts Council...
...There are many, many endearing qualities about Webb," he told Burton committee lawyers...
...Hubbell: Yeah...
...He considered me a very good friend...
...The collection also included works by Alexander Calder, Joan Miro, and Thomas Hart Benton...
...Levity aside, the friendship did not last much longer...
...and when his dad died, Coyote didn't go home to console his mother for several months, because he thought it more important to continue leading his caravan of merry travelers in a chaotic, psychedelic cross-country voyage...
...For fifteen years Coyote left no turn un-stoned, and the acid trips and freak-outs and be-ins and happenings and lower-case-only poems that defined the Age of Aquarius are recalled here in mind-numbing detail—sort of like one of those vacation slide shows that friends bore you with, except here the sights are hippie communes and free-love space cadets named Stargidget and Aural Sprout (I quote from memory...
...When Phillips made a passing reference to "this Riady stuff," Hubbell was quick to respond...
...Imagine it—sure I bedded hundreds of women and took thousands of drugs and wanted to smash the state, but now I'm a top model and actor, and have been through rehab, and just made you shell out almost thirty bucks for my memoir, so you can read about how fabulous I am...
...Recently the Burton committee released a transcript of one such conversation, a 20-minute talk between Hubbell and Phillips that took place on October 10, 1996...
...Suzy Hubbell and Phillips reached an agreement under which Phillips would hold a lien on the art...
...It's not that the book doesn't get better...
...A good-looking former heroin addict who wanted to overthrow the United States government...
...When they moved into his father's beloved farm estate, they absolutely destroyed it...
...Yeah...
...Jessie had a bad trip...
...They have constructed homes for such luminaries as David Geffen and Steven Spielberg, and their cohesiveness and fidelity to their original intention are, in my opinion, to be regarded as a triumph...
...I cannot conceive how such a flamboyant people," he pines, "people so visible in the moment, can be invisible to history, can have left no indelible mark...
...But there is nothing there: no building left standing, not even sodden boards or foundation stones...
...The two men chatted about the possibility that Hubbell might do some probono work after his release...
...hardly ever worked, except occasionally as an actor in (I swear) a non-silent mime troupe...
...Hubbell had a fairly extensive collection...
...Phillips: Did it say a quarter-million dollars...
Vol. 31 • May 1998 • No. 5
