Long ago, and oh, so far away, I went to see the most beautiful place in California: the campus of The University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC).
I was brought there by a dear friend from Yale Law School, Chris X.
He drove down the Freeway from San Francisco to San Jose, then turn into Hwy 17, over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the town of Santa Cruz, then a small town.
Chris knew the land well.
We turned up another set of smallish mountains and onto the endless, boundless grassy lawns of UCSC. I had never seen anything like it, and still have not.
There were eleven individual colleges, each perfectly landscaped, most of them facing a breathtaking view of The Monterey Bay.
There was a light breeze blowing through the pines and the roses and off the new mown grass. And in that breeze was the suggestive scent of jasmine.
I made a vow that I would come back to UCSC and teach there.
By one of the many splashes of good fortune that have pelted me, I had a wonderful friend named Stanley Kauffman who had taught about film at Yale.
By a similarly great stroke, he knew all of the powers teach film at UCSC.
A modest letter to him got me a job at UCSC.
There, I proposed a course in the political and social content of film.
Soon, I was indeed teaching at UCSC in what was called College V, the “Arts College.”
I was unpaid but I had a tiny “Preceptor’s Apartment.”
I arrived there from D.C. just about one month before classes began for Fall Quarter.
There were only a few students there working as a crew carrying furniture into the students’ dorm rooms in “The B Dorm.”
I befriended them and we were all pals from then on.
One of them was named Joe. More about Joe later.
The first night I was in College V, I walked around the magnificent campus.
I could not describe how beautiful the buildings and the foliage were.
My apartment gave on a large court yard and the back yard of the dorm itself gave on an immense endless redwood forest.
That forest was the scene of hundreds of lengthy nature walks for me. It was also the scene of the murder of way too many coeds by a tall, frighteningly strong looking young man named Ed Kemper.
His mother was a huge and hostile woman named Clarnelle Strandberg.
She was the secretary for a novelist named “James B. Hall.”
He was the top dog of the faculty members in College V.
He was to change my life in a drastic way that would not have been foreseeable at the time.
The first night I was there in College V, I parked in the faculty parking lot in my rented Rambler station wagon.
As I did so, a young woman in a beat up American made station wagon pulled up next to me. She was attractive but exhausted looking girl.
We struck up a conversation, which is what I do with almost anyone near me, young or old, male or female. I am a born glad hander politician.
The girl told me she had just driven in and was exhausted.
She needed a bed and a shower, which I cheerfully gave her. My apartment had a small but neat and clean bathroom.
She undressed and went into my bathroom.
I stepped out into the court yard of College V. It was early evening and that same sullen sexual smell of jasmine that had lured me was everywhere.
I had never known anyone with a name like that. But after all, I was in Santa Cruz, and whatever names I had known in D.C. or New York or New Haven might as well have been in prehistoric times.
“McKenzie” crawled into bed with me and was asleep in seconds.
When I awakened, there was a note from her on my desk.
I have no recollection of what it said besides a cursory thanks in an amazingly neat handwriting. I never saw her again.
But that jasmine smell is in my mind and in my heart everywhere and every day. It’s in the swimming pool area of our home in Beverly Hills, which I will soon no longer occupy.
It’s in the cabana café near our house in Beverly Hills. I associate it with hippie times, which for me were great times of love and laughter.
The Santa Cruz days were over for me long ago – an unforgivable anti-semitic outburst from a faculty member and a reply from Ronald Reagan changed everything.
Clarnelle was murdered by her son, who had also killed some other females.
I came back to D.C., and by an astonishing stroke of luck, got hired to be a speech writer for Mr. Nixon before his political demise.
Long ago, and oh so far away, and now I am an old man. And those memories linger.
Of the jasmine and of “McKenzie” and of a glorious night in the redwoods.
