“I don’t want any more contact with Casey. I can’t.”
“I think that’s understandable. We’ll reach out from our office to a family law attorney who I’ve worked with.”
“Family law? Is that a euphemism for a divorce attorney?”
“Yes.”
“I feel like I lost a decade of my life. I don’t know how it happened.” I was bone-tired, on the verge of tears.
“Things work out best for those who make the best of the way things work out,” Luther quoted.
“John Wooden?”
He nodded. “It’s true. You won’t get the last ten years back, but you’ll do something with the next ten. But take some time. And go see your mother.”
Chapter 3
The drive to Ojai from Pasadena took about an hour and a half, just enough time to lose confidence, regain confidence, and then lose it again before seeing my mother. It’s not that she was difficult—quite the opposite. My mother practiced acceptance every day, at least that’s what she told me dozens of times on the phone, when she’s called me after her hike to Meditation Mount, an Ojai landmark. “It is what it is,” she’d say in response to almost any whine I might offer. Honestly, it was starting to drive me crazy, her ability to let go of conflict or pain. She used to be fiery, fully engulfed in the hustle and bustle, but now she accepted the bad with the good like it was her spiritual duty. If I’d learned anything over the last decade, it was that everyone has his or her own way of coping. Her retreat to Ojai, a small, lush artists’ colony wedged against the mountains in between LA and Santa Barbara, had been her first gesture of acceptance that her life would never be the same after that day in September.
I knew I had to tell my mother the whole horrible story in person, especially the part about the Motel. It wouldn’t be fair to tell her that over the phone. Casey’s ten-day trip to Asia gave me a ticking clock, as if I had to have the whole thing settled before he touched down again, like a game show quest. Thinking about the tasks I’d have to accomplish like a simple To Do List (Change Locks; File Divorce Papers; Admit to Family and Friends I’ve Been an Idiot) was the only way I could plunge ahead with life; otherwise, I couldn’t keep the images of his other life at bay, the life where he already had everything I thought we wanted together. When did he buy the boys those red bikes? Did he celebrate Christmas with them that year he told me he had the flu and was too sick to drive to Ojai? What did that mean, ‘I’m not with their mother anymore’? When did that end? Or was he lying? Yes, he was definitely lying.
That morning, I’d called work and had a short conversation with Caterina at the museum, explaining, “I have a few things I have to take care of this week, so I’m not coming in. Tai will cover anything that needs covering.” Fine, she answered quickly, without asking any follow-up questions. Did Caterina already know about Casey’s other family? She was so connected to everyone and everything, it wouldn’t surprise me if some art director or stylist Casey had worked with had spilled the story to Caterina. How was I going to get my side of the story out? I’d deal with telling her and everyone else in town later, like Thursday. But first I had to break it to my mother, Suzi Clements Blakely—model, muse, photographer, manager, activist, widow.
My mother, born Susannah Claire Clements, was the daughter of a San Francisco lawyer and a socialite, a term that truly applies to my grandmother Adele, who still enjoys a gala and has her hairdresser come to the house on Nob Hill three days a week. In the early seventies, my mother headed off to Barnard to study art history and bite the Big Apple. According to her personal mythology, moments after registering for her freshman year, she was discovered by Eileen Ford in a coffee shop on the Upper East Side. A modeling contract quickly followed, and then she landed her first big Revlon ad about six months later. She was touted as “an American Catherine Deneuve,” tall, blond, and patrician with a veneer of sophistication. By the time she was twenty-three, she was the face of the newly launched Lauren perfume, beginning a relationship with Ralph Lauren that extends to this day.
According to the story I’d heard a million times, she dropped out of Barnard after her freshman year and spent the rest of the decade traveling, modeling, and, as she told me on my eighteenth birthday, “doing many other things you’ll never know about, some of which I hope you experience yourself. It was a singular time.” Fittings in Milan, album cover shoots in Morocco, restaurant openings in London. There were lead singers and Kennedys and Glamour covers, but my mother got out before she got old. She picked up a camera in order to have something to do at parties other than drugs and started taking pictures, like an uber-insider photojournalist of the Rolling Stone magazine set. The camera gave her the freedom to approach anyone and the cover to hide behind the lens.
She met my father on what was supposed to be a long weekend in LA for Rod Stewart’s birthday. She and another model, Annette from Sweden, made the trip from NYC. The birthday party was a dud, so they headed over to the Motel, an unlikely spot for artists and musicians to gather in suburban Pasadena, a stone’s throw in distance but a million miles away in attitude from the Hollywood Hills scene. It was Annette who wanted to meet the owner of the Motel, artist Henry Blakely. “He’s a genius. He does lighting design for big rock shows and then does his own stuff. And he works out of this old motel that his parents used to run. I hear it’s crazy day and night.”
But it was my mother that caught Henry Blakely’s eye, not Annette. As she tells the story, “One hour after I met him, Henry told me I couldn’t leave him and that was that.”
That was in 1979, and my mother had stayed in Pasadena twenty years. When they met, Henry Blakely was a Light and Space artist, respected within his own community but not well-known outside the art world’s elite because of the ephemeral nature of his work. You couldn’t hang a Blakely on your wall like a Warhol. He was as much of a craftsman as an artist, building scale models of the light boxes and projection devices for each project that would later be sent to fabricators for giant versions. The studio was filled with metal cutters, welding tools, lathes, a wall of saws. He created his own filaments, experimenting with custom crafted paints and fabrics to get the reflections right. He conceived, designed, built, and installed every project with care.
Fifteen years older than Suzi and from a different world entirely, he was broad and barrel-chested, looking more like a blacksmith than a sensitive artist. He told Suzi that night that he was headed off to Paris for a year to stage what would become his breakout project, Joan Bright & Dark, a guerilla-style exhibit illuminating various public artworks that featured Joan of Arc, a commentary on war and faith in the streets of the City of Light. As he described his vision of “Art for the People” to my mother, in the concrete courtyard of the Motel, Steely Dan in the background, she was entranced. “In that moment, I knew one part of my life was over and another had begun,” she told Barbara Walters once in an interview. My parents married at Pasadena City Hall three weeks later and set off for France. I was their honeymoon baby. They named me Joan Bright. Joan Bright Blakely.