Chapter 1
Kris Eldridge called last week to tell me Scarlett Harper Cline was dead. I’ve heard that when you die the events of your life pass before your eyes. That’s the very thing that’s happening to me hearing about the death of this woman whom I knew well fifty years ago.
When I was twenty-four, I lived in an apartment in Cambridge, up Massachusetts Avenue on Shepard Street. I was the entertainment critic for Boston’s Subterranean Free Press. The year was 1967. My boss, Marilyn Anne Dorsett, editor-in-chief, called me about seven one Sunday morning in September to tell me to cover what she called a “Be-In” that Andy Warhol was organizing on the Boston Commons. She thought it started around one o’clock.
“Why me?” I asked her.
“Because” she said, “Warhol’s events tend to have a theatrical component to them, making you the best man for the job.”
In those days flattery often worked on me. I’m older and wiser now.
I ate breakfast at the Pewter Pot Muffin House in Harvard Square and took the subway to Park Street, arriving on the Common shortly after noon. The day was mildly overcast but not cold. There are a couple of wood and cement benches at the top of the hill on the ‘great lawn’ and there I did find Andy Warhol, a thin waif of a man in large black sunglasses, his hair dyed white. He was in low-key conversation with a fat white man in his late forties wearing a knit beret of Rastafarian colors. This guy declined to give me his name. Warhol, too, was amazingly reserved, answering my questions with an amused nod. I began to wonder if this really was the renowned artist or just some skinny guy dressed up to look like him.
“How do you happen to be in Boston,” I asked him.
“Oh, we’re just mustering the troops,” he said in a breathless little voice.
I was not, at that time, a man-in-the-street style reporter. I read books and watched and listened to what we now call ‘media’ and made an analysis that gave my readers an idea of what they were missing… or not. I had no skill, or interest frankly, in persuading the taciturn to talk or getting to the heart of some publicity stunt, which I began to think this was.
I backed off and left them to their conversation. But even as I retreated down the hill, the masses began to arrive. Summer was over and hippies were showing off their fall finery, fringed buckskin jackets, Sgt. Pepper satin band uniforms, floppy hats, boots with brass rings fastened around the ankles to no apparent purpose, Beatle boots and long hair. Bubbles blown by little girls, some barely in their teens, floated around the park. The sweet smell of cannabis filled the air. It occurred to me that Andy Warhol was not really the story here.
As guitars came out of cases, the convocation rolled out quilts and blankets, opened knapsacks and baskets and paper bags. Bottles of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, Mateus Rose, Andre’s Cold Duck, and reefer in pipes and joints circulated freely among the growing multitude. Slowly, I began to recognize people I knew from Harvard Square and Beacon Hill. Kenny Silverstone, sound man from the Golden Bowl Coffee House over by BU beckoned to me. He was accompanied by two very pretty girls, so I joined them. I explained what I was doing and Kenny introduced me to his companions, Myra Hettinger, who passed me a joint, and Scarlett Leigh, both students at BU.
Scarlett said she thought I looked like George Harrison. She also said she wanted to be a writer and I was curious about her first name so we started talking. According to her story, her parents met because they were both reading Gone With the Wind on a New York subway train. Her father was in the army. Her mother wrote to him during the war. He came home in ’46, they married in ’48 and she was born in ’49 so they had to call her Scarlett.
Somewhere near the end of her story, while Scarlett munched a raw carrot, I kissed her and she responded enthusiastically. We wended our way back to my Shepard Street apartment and went right to bed.
It was one of those spontaneous connections unsurpassed for passion. She was twenty-one and we were both in excellent physical condition. Her gynecologist prescribed birth control pills to regulate her period and she was making good use of the side-effects of that treatment. It was the early hours of Monday morning before I collapsed from physical exhaustion.
