Susan Sisson Interview

--(Interview begins)--

GASSER: Susan, what are your first remembrances of Mountain Drive?

SISSON: I was a student at Westmont College and I arrived about 3 weeks before the Coyote fire in 1964. I was 17 and the first remembrance I had of Mountain Drive was the drums, the drums, the drums. I'd never heard drums like that before. They were conga drums, but I didn't know that.

GASSER: You heard these at...

SISSON: ...at Westmont College. Yes, I was in one of those awful nasty dorms and my parents sent me there to reform me because I was hanging out with way too many Berkeley beatniks; they called, as they called them, quote, unquote, in the Bay Area where I lived. They were afraid I would become a beatnik. So, what they 00:01:00did was, they sent me to the straightest college that I would permit them to send me to. Since they were paying board, they got to choose. When I first got there, the first week or so, I started hearing these drums in the night and it was absolutely flaming to my curious, passionate, uninhibited, unchristian 17-year-old self.

GASSER: What year was this?

SISSON: September, 1964.

GASSER: Oh, right. The Coyote Fire.

SISSON: There were a number of people in those days who played conga drums as a kind of meditation, as a form of jazz. The nice thing about it was that it would have an antiphonal flavor because people would play, this happened for years after I moved out of Mountain Drive: it happened for years before. People would have drums, conga drums, out on their porch or patio or something. Somebody, 00:02:00somewhere up and down the hill would start playing a riff and somebody up or round would hear the sounds bouncing around and would answer. And somebody else might be inspired to go out. Pretty soon, you'd have drums up and down the mountain answering and playing and answering and playing and joining together, and swirling and fading. It was very mystical and magic. And, of course, it made everyone believe, like especially at Westmont College, that they were strictly heathens up there, which made me, of course, quite curious.

GASSER: So, when did you come to the Drive? After the Coyote fire? Were you one of the people that helped from Westmont College, helped the people after the Coyote Fire?

SISSON: No, and that story has been vastly overrated. The president of Westmont College, actually, he was the Dean of Men at the time, but his name was Lyle Hillegas and he ran off with a 17-year-old girl eventually himself.[1] Lyle Hillegas had been a friend of my father's at Theological Seminary, so I wasn't, I knew him from when I was a 00:03:00child, but that was purely accidental, but we ended up at Westmont College together. He came out to help fight the fire in matching madras shorts, shirt and tennis shoes with knee socks and that was fairly typical of the Westmont fire assistance, aside from a few young men that just sort of pitched in. No, I was evacuated. I'd been playing tennis when the fire started and I watched the fire.[2] I was, I'd been stung by a bee that morning so I was sitting out playing tennis in the tennis class, so I had a very clear view of the fire as it started and as it spread. It started over by Greyson's house and spread up the hill and burned up where Dana and Liliane live now and then came over the top. Then it started down. Then they beat it back over the hill 00:04:00and I'm sure you'll hear from others that they had a big party that night, a wienie roast to celebrate. What happened to me though, was a student who didn't know Mountain Drive yet, was that that evening I was with a friend who had a convertible and he said, "Hey, let's go look at that artist colony," which was what everybody called it and see what happened with the fire. My foot was getting more and more swollen from the bee sting. It turned out I'm deathly allergic to bees, but I said, "Oh, come on, I'm game." We started up the hill and we got almost to the intersection of Cold Springs and Mountain Drive and I looked up on the mountain and I saw something that I will never in my life forget. I saw tongue of flame, one continuous tongue of flame, reach forty feet in the air. It curved up and lingered and then it went whoosh. I said to him, 00:05:00"Turn around. The fire trucks are going to be coming right through." He got out of there just in time because the fire trucks came up and we went back to Westmont. That night was when a lot of Westmont burned down also, and Tom Arnold's place went, and we were evacuated two more times and both places were evacuated burned down. We evacuated one home in Montecito that night and the next day, we were evacuated from that place because the first place had been burned down. Then we were moved closer to the sea and the second place burned down. On the third day, my foot was about three times the size it had normally been and the fire looked like it was never going to end. The sky was dingy yellow red and the sun glowed weakly and my girlfriend, who lived in Carmel, said, "Let's get out of town and fix your foot." So, that's when I first became 00:06:00aware of Mountain Drive, because it burned.

GASSER: And how did you get more intimate contact with Mountain Drive?

SISSON: Robbie Robinson, Frank Robinson's oldest son, came down to Mountain Drive, down to Westmont, to sell candy bars. He came down to the dining commons too late for everybody. I looked at him; he was about 12 or 13. I looked at him and I said, "Holy moly, that is the most cutest little kid. Oh, my God! Does he have bedroom eyes? He has that Tom Jones look." He had this cute little way of whipping his hair. So, I said, "Listen, Robbie, it's Robbie, isn't it?" He was in the junior high school band and they were selling candy bars to raise money for new uniforms; 1964. I said, "Hey, you want to make money on candy bars? You come to my dorms right after lockout." In those days, Westmont College locked the women in at 10:15pm on weeknights and midnight on weekends. They were very 00:07:00strict; if you exceeded as a freshmen, if you exceeded your, the lockout privileges more than 15 minutes, you could be expelled and your tuition not refunded. They were very, very strict. I don't think they do that now. That's what it was like. So, he came 5 minutes after lockout and sold out every single one. He said, "Can I come back tomorrow night?" And I said, "Sure." About a week later, I was with a girlfriend at the El Paseo and my girlfriend and I had got, struck up a conversation with Tom Mooney, who fancied himself an Irish poet and hung around the El Paseo quite a bit. He and his wife, Doris, had a candy shop in the El Paseo at that time. Tom, who saw of himself a sort of American Dylan Thomas, he was his hero, invited us to sort of a soiree where a bunch of Mountain Drivers would be, that night. But, that afternoon I met Frank.

GASSER: The same afternoon?

SISSON: That same afternoon at the El Paseo. He sat next to me. He said they teased him, here somebody from Westmont, cause Mountain Drivers traditionally disliked Westmonters. I looked at him. After we sort of exchanged conversation, I was extremely in awe of the man.

GASSER: For what reason?

SISSON: Frank is extremely impressive as a person. He had an earring in a day when no one had earrings in his ear and a goatee and a beret. I was told that he was one on California's foremost architects.[3] So, I was very, I was in awe. I was 17, after all. He looked so very much like a character out of a book. So, he asked me out to his office to see his etchings, with a 00:09:00little bit of a leer and quotations around the etchings. And I said, "Sure." All of a sudden, I remembered what he reminded me of, because he took his beret off and he ran his fingers back through his hair and he put his beret on and I said, (snapping fingers) "Wait a minute! Don't you have a son?" I described his son and the situation selling the candy bars. And he said, "Yep. That's my boy." All of a sudden, we had something to talk about.

GASSER: Besides the etchings.

SISSON: Right. Besides the etchings which was, of course, a joke. So, Lord knows how things go from there. But somehow or another, we started running into each other, I think would be how I would describe it.

GASSER: Did you actively pursuit to run into him or was it...?

SISSON: I think we were both absolutely smitten. It was asinine, it was absurd. 00:10:00There's no way in the world I would allow any 17-year-old daughter of mine to get involved with a 42-year-old married man, which is exactly what the case was. I couldn't live with the guilt after we became involved and quit Westmont College and went back up north to San Francisco. But my guilt was vastly relieved when I found out that Peggy'd been having an affair with Mervin Lane, her neighbor, for over a year, about a year and a half and Frank was the only one who didn't know although he sensed it. So, I felt a little better about that. Then, eventually, that spring, Frank and Peggy broke up. I was living up in San Francisco, at that point. I had gotten my first apartment and my first job and so on. I was living in the Marina in San Francisco. I went down to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire with Frank. I went down to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire with Frank and Peggy was there. There were a whole bunch of fireworks and 00:11:00the week after that, Peggy moved out and went up to Mervin's. Well, actually, what happened was that Peggy, Frank decided that they shouldn't do it; Peggy decided that they should get back together again. So, I spent one long, very sad night at Gill Johnston's house. Frank came by. I went down to Frank's office to say goodbye. We hugged and it was just as if we couldn't possibly be ever separated and then, about ten minutes later, Peggy came in crying and she said, "Just a minute, dear. I'll join you." Because she'd been trying to say goodbye to Mervin and that wasn't working, either. So, what happened was, Peggy and I then sat down with Frank and talked, us together decided, and talked Frank into a divorce. The next weekend, which was June 17, 1965, Peggy moved out on Friday; 00:12:00I moved in on Saturday.

GASSER: Then there was a period of time whenever you and Frank, I know, went to Mexico. Was that shortly thereafter?

SISSON: Three years, 3-1/2 years later. We lived on Mountain Drive for those years, raised the kids. Initially, we had the oldest 3 children: Robbie, Maia and Tamar. Peggy initially had, took Louie and Rema with her. But Rema wasn't terribly happy up there with Mervin. She didn't get along too well with Mervin. Mervin's an interesting person, but he doesn't get along well with children; his own or anyone else's. He does better with adults. He was tough to live with. None of the children particularly wanted to live with him, but Louie was the 00:13:00youngest. Rema was so damn miserable that I arranged for Rema to come and live with us and she did ever after. So then we had four children. There were a couple of exchanges back and forth for a while. I had the three girls and Robbie moved up there and then Robbie moved back and Rema moved up there. A few weeks after I moved in, I called up Peggy and asked if I could have Louie down, or at that time, it was Louie and Rema, down for dinner so we could have a family dinner night. And she said that was a terrific idea. Could I ask to have the children up for dinner? Because, you see, we lived hailing distance from the other. She just lived up the hill from me. I would come up on my front porch and say, "Hey, Peggy, have you seen Louie?" And she would yell down, "I haven't seen him all day. I thought he was with you." So, we had to cooperate and there were 00:14:00these children that would have been the victims of a divorce if we weren't terribly careful about them. I was always extremely concerned about the children. So, Peggy and I then started Family Dinner Night. We switched it around from year to year to year, but on one night a week, all the children would be up at her house for dinner and another night of the week, they would all be down at our house.

GASSER: Was it hard being substitute mom on the Drive? Was it hard being a mom on the Drive?

SISSON: In those days, there was quite a bit of community. Children had a sense of being raised in common in a way that I'm not sure exists although I'm not familiar with how things are now exactly. But children came and went. They were mostly grubby and rather dirty from playing in the dirt, not because they didn't 00:15:00get bathed. It wasn't grime; it was dirt. They sort of ran in and out of households and, in those days, so did people. All the paths and trails went through people's houses on purpose, so that if you had to walk from point A to point B, you passed through neighbor D, E and F, and said hello and maybe had a glass of wine. The children would sort of run in and out and if you had counted noses at dinner time and you had seven people and two of them were excess children, you didn't worry about it. You would just phone up the appropriate parents and say they turned up at my dinner table and vice versa. It was rather nice.

GASSER: Did you do other things besides be a fulltime mom? I mean, that's a lot of children to have.

SISSON: I'm 17 years old and I took on five children. I was a stepmom. Very 00:16:00shortly, I became a foster mom because Frank and I created a very fun place for children to be. I created instant family institutions. There were all these family dinner nights and traditions and so on. We allowed the children a fair amount of freedom. All their downtown friends kept showing up at our house and they would run away to our house. I usually had 2 or 3 extra children who lived with our children up in the children's loft. So I had, pretty steadily, I had 5 to 7 children who I kept track of. Frank worked downtown and supported me although I worked at the library, the public library, that first summer, at the main entrance desk, pushing the button and checking books in and out. Maybe it was the second summer, it's hard to keep track. It was the second summer, 1966, that I worked at the library. Then the 1966-67, I worked at Santa Barbara Junior 00:17:00High School. I was the textbook clerk, which meant that in addition to the textbooks and ordering and keeping track of and issuing and upkeep of same, I handled all the audio-visual materials and had the worst hooligans in the school who ran around and ran the machines and had to whip those guys into shape and teach them how to run the machines and, you know, films. Course, I didn't know a damn thing more about it than they did when I started the job, but I learned quickly and taught them as if I'd done it all my life..., which is sort of how I'd done my job as a stepmother.

GASSER: What was the oldest of Frank's children at that time?

SISSON: Robbie.

GASSER: Robbie?

SISSON: When I walked in the front door, there they all were, literally, lined up. Louie was 6, Rema had just turned 9, Tamar was 11, Maia was 13 and Robbie 00:18:00was 14. Almost all the children, except Rema, had their birthday in a 6-week period in the fall, so a few months later, they all turned 7, then Rema stayed being 9 because she was the oddball, 7, 12, 14 and 15 and so on.

GASSER: What kind of recollections do you have of Bobby Hyde and the other members of the community? When did you first meet Bobby Hyde?

SISSON: I met him that spring before I even became Frank's co-habitator, housewife and eventually wife. I met him at one of the Pot Wars, one of the initial Pot Wars.[4] This is before, well, the Pot Wars which you probably know by now, started the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. The Renaissance Pleasure Faires grew out of the Mountain Drive Pot Wars.[5] Well, anyway, there was a spring Pot War in 1965, spring of 1965 and I came down that weekend from San Francisco, visited 00:19:00Frank. We went to the Pot War. Old Bobby was such a damn dog. He was probably in his seventies then easily. He was old and frail already in appearance. He asked for a kiss, son-of-a-gun French kiss and pinched me in the rear. His eyes twinkled very, very, very laughingly before and after that.

GASSER: And what about Floppy Hyde?

SISSON: Floppy was a wonderful, wonderful lady. She was always such an example of, she was really an example of a Victorian English colonial which is what her heritage had been, actually. She was the kind of person who could appear to be ladylike and be having tea in the middle of absolute chaos in the middle of the 00:20:00jungle. She was the epitome of the Victorian colonial and the fact that she was seldom wearing any clothes when she was having her decorous teas in the middle of the Mountain Drive jungle just added a little more flavor and spice to it. She was always a lady and always cordial and charming and loving and warm.

GASSER: Nice description. Perfect description. What other things from those early days, when you first came to Mountain Drive, what other people or what other incidences come to mind?

SISSON: Well, if you have the next 24 hours of tape, I can tell you about my first three years on Mountain Drive, 3 or 4 years. Oh, Lord. The endless, endless, endless parties, Pot Wars and, oh, well, the first few weeks I went with Frank, we did "Rock Around the Crock", we did the Seconds movie which I'm sure you've heard about which we called, "Rock Around the Crock."[6]

GASSER: I haven't heard that one.

SISSON: Yeah, that's what the ticket said. Dick Johnston did formal engraved invitations to the actual thing because we really had to limit it. Everybody in the world wanted to come up for that filming. So, I think they limited it to 65. Of course, all these conferences were held at the El Paseo, at the wine cellar there, because it was sort of basically Mountain Drivers free bar. Dick and Jack Boegle worked there. They doled out the wine. That's where I learned to drink sherry.[7][8]

GASSER: This was the El Paseo?

SISSON: Right at the El Paseo, golly, is there a toy store there now? It's right at the corner, right by the café.

GASSER: Oh, yes. Yes.

SISSON: I think it has sort of curving, well, it was a wine cellar, it was Pierre Lafond's first store. It was Pierre's shop, but he had the bad judgement, misfortune, or whatever, to put all these Mountain Drives in charge of it which 00:22:00is like fox in charge of the chicken coop because Mountain Drivers came in there and drank up all his wines, of course, in the name of sampling it.[9]

GASSER: Right, wine connoisseurs.

SISSON: Yes, right, WCTU.

GASSER: So, "Rock Around the Crock", all of the meetings took...,

SISSON: Well, all the planning stages were done down at the El Paseo. Then we did the wonderful, wonderful party. It was just a gas. I don't know if you've seen that, but it's a wonderful picture of Mountain Drive. Everybody's in it. Maia, I can still see even the short version that they run. I can see Maia, Robbie, the family dog, Bowser. Let's see. Maia, Robbie, Rema. Maia, Robbie and Tamar all were in that, Frank and I. I was the girl with the tambourine as I came right behind Frank, who was the high priest. (Clapping) Always. It was a 00:23:00marvelous party. It went on to about 3 or 4 in the morning. I think Frank and I stayed about 12 midnight. One of the funniest instances, you may have heard this already, but we had originally told them, well, I guess, the problem was they didn't believe that Mountain Drivers would take their clothes off, so they had brought all these nudie bathing suits and after the big dinner party, we told them we could, oh, I know what the problem was, we had told them that we couldn't get the guts up to take our clothes off unless they threw us this wonderful fabulous catered dinner which George Greyson catered and of course, in order to get up the guts to take our clothes off, we would have to have, oh, let's see, what was it, oh, golly, it was 1956 or 1947, one of the great vintages, French vintages. We had Jeroboams, one of the great French champagnes, 00:24:00Dom Perignon. We had Jeroboams of Dom Perignon at that dinner, as many as we wanted. We were drinking out of Jeroboams and of course, that's absurd. But that's what we told them. We couldn't take our clothes off. But it was a big scam.

GASSER: So, who told them that?

SISSON: Oh, God! Let's see, who was the liaison? Wily Bill Neely, I think, was the one who told them that. Dick Johnston, who worked at the wine cellar and Neely and Frank and there was sort of a meeting of the elders and Stan Hill and various ones, we ran the scam, but Bill was the one who never minded looking a man in the face and telling him a bald faced lie. So, it was old Bill, I think, that ran that nonsense past them. Oh, Mike Peake, who's a damn good liar himself. I'm using liar in the sense that it's used in the South, southern United States. That means...

GASSER: ...tall tales.

SISSON: Tall tales. Anyway, let's not get into that. Anyway. So, after the dinner, they had the procession. That's where the Mountain Drive section, segment, of the Seconds movie starts is with the group session. We went from old Gill's down at the frog path, pond up and over the hill past Tom Arnold's place which had burned down the year before and down to the Sacred Grove, which is what we called the wine cellar area, down below Neely's and Bobby Hyde, at the corner of Neely's and Bobby Hyde's land. That story of how that got founded was Frank Robinson building and Bobby Hyde founding it together. Every time Bill told the story, Frank Robinson had no part. Interesting, but anyway.

GASSER: Every time Neely tells the story?

SISSON: Every time Neely told the story, Frank Robinson was neatly cut out of it 00:26:00because he didn't want to admit that Frank had built the house, the cellar. Frank built the cellar. Neely donated the land and Bobby donated the money. And, when Neely told the story subsequently, in later years, he had done everything and he owned everything and it was all his. But the truth of the matter is, if you go back and ask Frank about that, he'll tell you how it got started. But, anyway, it had been happening for ten or so years, by that time, 10 or 15 years, they had been doing Wine Stomps. So, we marched over the edge and we were milling around and Frankenheimer was there and all of a sudden there was this big thing. Veona Larson was talking to Frankenheimer and Frank and Bill Neely and they had very worried looks on their faces. Lorna Greyson and I came up and we could tell trouble. We marched right up and we said, what's going on. John 00:27:00Stack was standing there. John Stack turned away in disgust. They want us to wear these little nudie bathing suits. I just looked up and said, "Well, tell him we won't do it. Do you hear that? We will not do it." And Lorna joined in and pretty soon, everybody's saying, "Hey, no, no, no...," and there's all these noise of people saying, "No, we won't do it." So, he said, "Okay, cut 'em, shoot 'em, roll 'em," and we got started on, well, "Let's just take it from the top and do it like you do." Frank did the ceremonial thing and we chose the Sacred Virgin, quote, unquote and did all those things that you see in the movie. Except, that of course, we chose Leslie Hill, the one whose, we chose Leslie Hill. Leslie Hill's body is the girl you see in "Seconds", but the head that they attached to the body was Leslie Hill's mother, Sandy, and they did that by 00:28:00the wizardry of photography. It's amazing. Leslie was one of the most voluptuous young women I have ever seen, I'm sure that has ever existed anywhere at any time, but she had pimples and a rather puffy, non-photogenic face, at the time. But, her mother, Sandy, had one of the most beautiful faces and still does, that you'll ever see. At that age, Sandy was about my age, was about 40 at the time. She was radiantly beautiful in those years, just at the peak of her form. So, when Frankenheimer came back a few months later, to our own, the real Wine Stomp, he brought a hand-held camera and he took a lot of photos and we had elected Sandy Hill our Wine Queen that year. What he did was, he pasted Sandy Hill, the mother's head onto the daughter's body in the final cuts. You'd never 00:29:00know, never do you know that's not the same person. But, anyway, there we were, saying we wouldn't do it, so, we did it. So we're taking off our clothes, jumping in the wine vats and just then, down Neely's path, came 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 little starlets with 3-1/2 pounds of make-up on each cheek and wearing green and white polka dotted bikinis with plastic grapevines twined in the front of them. They were trotting down just like little ducks following a mother across a road. They were literally just sort of prancing down the hill, because somebody had told them somewhere and they had been hired to do this thing. Frankenheimer saw them coming and all of a sudden, he screamed, "Get them the hell out of here!" And they just went whipped. They turned right around at the sound of their master's voice. They just trotted right up the hill. We went up to him and we said, "What was that all about?" He said, "Well, we hired them because we weren't sure whether you guys would really do it. Of course, we didn't know 00:30:00about you, either." By the way, Rock Hudson was a horrible, horrible old stick in the mud. That wasn't only the character he was playing. This fricking guy was a square. Salome Jens had a hell of a good time and had a wonderful party and was a very real human being. Rock Hudson couldn't get over being Mr. Rock Hudson and the fact of the matter was that we as Mountain Drivers refused to relate to him in any other way than a person. He wanted to be and was used to being treated like a star. And when nobody treated him that way on Mountain Drive, he got very, very snobby and did his job and disappeared as soon as his job was over. I got to rip the shirt off his back.

GASSER: Oh, you did. Tell us about that.

SISSON: He finally, in the story, finally gets up his guts and goes and gets in. So, Frankenheimer says, I need some people..., Lorna and I volunteered and went 00:31:00up, jumping on him, attacking, taking out our animosity on him, because he had been such a damn snob the whole, you know, you'd say hello and he'd look the other way. So, we had a wonderful time ripping the shirt off his back and dumping him, I mean dumping him, jumping on top of him and pushing him down under the grape juice.

GASSER: Did this appear in the movie?

SISSON: Yeah.

GASSER: It does also appear in the movie. I mean, they didn't cut that out. But, he was not naked, right, he was wearing...

SISSON: He was wearing a naked bathing suit or some damn thing. They did an amazing thing because this was very risqué. The whole thing was ahead of its time. The plot of the story was sort of a bionic man type. But it was really a little early for that. Nudity wasn't going to be in vogue for another ten years or so in any way, shape or form. So, it was very risqué for the time. We had a 00:32:00lot of fun with that. After that, Frank and I would come up to the real grape stomp...

GASSER: ...in the fall?

SISSON: Yeah, just a few months later. Oh, and after they did the "Rock Around the Crock" party, everybody was so smashed. Oh, God! I could talk for hours about just that party alone. But, anyway, two days later, nobody knew what to do because Paramount had purchased for Mountain Drive this enormous wine vat. The real wine vat was about the size of this table, 3 feet across and about 2 feet deep. He purchased this thing that was big enough to bathe you and 34 of your best friends in. It's huge and it was full of this grape juice. The women of Mountain Drive, at the time, made a lot of grape juice, grape jam, the next day 00:33:00because they'd use table grapes, you see, because the wine grapes weren't in season yet. So, you can't make wine out of table grape juice stuff; you'd make grape jelly. So, women came and drew off some of the stuff the next day for grape jelly quickly before it... And then old Dick Johnston and Bill Neely and John Stack and a few others made moonshine out of it. Out of a still out of Bill's place..., the Mazatlán Café. We had a still going on for about 3 days and we put down probably 50 gallons of white lightning, which we called Old Banana Peel. At that time, nobody knew that if you could taste bananas in it, it's not terribly pure and there's a lot of awful stuff in it that's going to do extra damage to your brain cells, but we had Old Banana Peel cocktail hours. Old 00:34:00Dick Johnston, who lived over at 999 Coyote Road, at that time, made it into gin, with juniper berries. So, we had cocktail parties every Friday night happy hours, for months off Old Banana Peel, which was the result of the "Rock Around the Crock."

GASSER: What did you do with the large vat?

SISSON: That became a giant hot tub, so that when we did, when Bill Neely gave parties, he used his own private hot tub. But, at the Wine Stomps, we would heat up water in it and make it a sort of after-you-finish-crushing-the-grapes soak which was very pleasant.

GASSER: Was that the hot tub that was at Neely's, that large wine vat, even up to recent times.

SISSON: I'm sure. I haven't been down to the Sacred Grove in ten years, easily.

GASSER: What other parties do you remember? They were..., I know Frank has the 00:35:00same Robert Burns Birthday party.

SISSON: Robert Burns birthday was run by George and Mona Greyson[10] and was done up at The Castle at that time.[11] I think it's now done at Frank's house because Frank's born on that day. As a matter of fact, that was the first Mountain Drive party I went to when I was still a student at Westmont College. It was just before I quit it. Frank was very nervous about inviting me, but it turned out to be okay because Peggy came with Mervin, so he showed up with me, so, but we dodged each other all night long and I danced the Highland Fling to the bagpipes. I just begged him to go because I had, in high school, being a part of a girl's bagpipe band dance troupe. We used to march and dance for the Caledonian Pipe Band in San Francisco. So, it was right up my alley. So, I wore my kilt to the party and we did that. Old George did the most wonderful address 00:36:00to the haggis. Although, in the early years, somebody else did it. You need to interview George Greyson about who did it before he took it over. He took over giving address to the haggis in about '66, '67. I think he did a better job than the old man who did it originally, who was from Scotland, well, as so was George. But, I think George made it better, did all the cooking for them. Then, the 7-Up Bagpipe Band came up and played and people danced for hours. It was wonderful.

GASSER: The 7-Up Bagpipe Band?

SISSON: Yeah.

GASSER: Could you tell me a little bit about that?

SISSON: George would be the one to ask. It's the 7-Up, it was at that time, it was a bagpipe band that was in Santa Barbara and it was sponsored by 7-Up Bottling Company.[12] On one of the drums, it said 7-Up Bottling Company or 7-Up Bagpipe Band or some absurd name, but it was just because they paid some of the freight on the, the costumes alone, authentic 00:37:00costumes which they all had, terrifically expensive, at that time, a man's kilt and the sporran and the plaid, which is the cape over the top and the whole thing would probably cost $250 at an age when that would be a month's salary easily for a man.

GASSER: Were the women responsible for a lot of the costumes that were worn on Mountain Drive?

SISSON: Yes, yes. One of the things you did was you were continually making costumes for various parties because there were so many costume parties. Take you round the year. There was Twelfth Night party which was held at The Castle in those days. Now, I think it's also been held at Frank's in recent years, but it was at The Castle. Then there was the Robert Burn's Festival on the 25th and 00:38:00St. Pat's Day, old Bill would throw a party at his house. Then there was the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. In those days was in the spring. They later moved it to the fall, which was asinine and absurd because, and they still do it at that time, it's poor taste on the part of the McPherson's but then they showed extraordinary poor taste anyway, ripping off our holiday, and then ripping it off from KPFA.

GASSER: KPFA?

SISSON: And KPFK. They ripped it off from both. They did it up there, north in Berkeley, which was the sister station of KPFK was KPFA. They took it out and made it a profit-making venture for themselves. But, anyway...,

GASSER: KPFK is a radio station?

SISSON: Yes, down in LA. Free public radio. It's the only place in the world that you can get a Communist; I mean in the U.S., that you'll have a Communist 00:39:00commentator regularly on the air. There was a lot of...

GASSER: How were they attached with the Renaissance Pleasure Faire?

SISSON: The Renaissance Pleasure Faire was a variation on a theme from a Mountain Drive Pot War, started by the McPhersons.[13] He was the program director and she was the secretary at Los Angeles station KPFK. They desperately needed money to stay on the air. They got the idea from the Mountain Drive Pot Wars. They were friends of Colin Young's. Colin Young ran the cinematography school at UCLA, but he was also first cousin of the Hyde's.[14] So, that's the connection there. Mountain Drivers got very involved with helping them get together the first, second and third Pleasure Faires because they were benefits for the radio station. But after they'd done it four years, all total, down in LA and the first year up in 00:40:00Berkeley for radio station KPFA, the McPhersons got greedy and took it out and made it a..., strictly a profitable organization for the McPhersons. Although they have since come up with some quasi-legitimate historical project up north.

GASSER: Okay, that takes us through the St. Pat's Day, Renaissance Faire, through the rest of the year...,

SISSON: Oh, well, there's the Summer Solstice Party, where we would always put on a play. Bill Neely would organize the play. One year we did Lysistrata.[15] I was Melanie and I played her as a 20s vamp. She's the strike breaker. I played her as a 20s vamp. I didn't chew gum, but I had a fox fur around her and I twirled it and did my best Mae West come-up-and-see-me-sometime. I was very convincing. I was also very drunk 00:41:00because I had such terrible stage fright that I drank probably a liter of wine all by myself just before I hit the stage. Everyone said it was quite convincing. It was a wonderful production. We used to have them in Bobby Hyde's swimming pool in those days.

GASSER: Could you tell me a little bit more about Lysistrata and the other characters who...

SISSON: Oh, we had Betty Camerie was the vestal virgin and she was an opera singer, she's quite a successful opera singer now in Europe. But at that time, she was a student at the Music Academy of the West and Betty and her husband, Gene. And she dressed...

GASSER: And her husband, who?

SISSON: Gene. Gene Camerie. Betty was a simple girl from Ventura High School with a gift and a goal and she made it. And Gene helped her do that. That meant 00:42:00moving to Europe and relocating the family there, and she did. That was the last time I saw her. She was making it on the stage as an opera singer. But, anyway, she was the virgin, the vestal virgin and, oh, Lord, I forget what her name was... she lived down in Mission Canyon, Jan, Jan, Jan..., Noel Young would know her? She had short black hair. Her husband was a poet. She was Lysistrata. She was the only one who had really enough stage experience to do the, to carry off that character of Lysistrata because there's a lot of heavy lines. And, of course, we rather liberally, as we always did, we wrote plays so we had local jokes. In every single Mountain Drive play, we had old Ray Hawthorne, who lived down where Laura Peake now lives. His lines were always, you'd probably heard 00:43:00these stories.

GASSER: No, I have not. Please, do tell me.

SISSON: Old Ray Hawthorne's lines were always, "I am a wall." That started because a few years before I came to the Drive, so probably 1960, old Ray Hawthorne, who was about a 65-year-old car mechanic, Okie from Oklahoma, Okie. He was po' white trash and we all loved him. He could barely read and he built this little shack and he had, probably 20 cars. I was about to say a zillion, but he had probably, without exaggeration, 20 cars in his front yard. Those were the cannibal pieces and he was our local Mountain Drive mechanic and everybody took their cars to him and Ray would patch them up from the junkyard in his front yard and move them off again. But, anyway, old Ray, he couldn't remember a line and he always, so we just always wrote in a line for him, "I am a wall," 00:44:00and he could do that. We'd put him into every play no matter how. We put him in Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night Dream. We put him into Lysistrata. A few years later, I organized a comedy revue, the First Annual Mountain Drive Revue. We plugged him in as a wall telephone. He had to learn an additional word for that line, "I am a wall..., telephone." But he was written into every line.

GASSER: What was the revue like? I haven't heard about that.

SISSON: Mountain Drive Revue? Oh, gosh! We were going to do it every year, but we only managed to do it one year and that's the truth. In 1966, I took my girls down to the pumpkin patch for Halloween. Frank was driving. As always, we sang everywhere we went with the children, everywhere we went, we sang. We were like the Trapp Family Singers. We sang all the time. On the way back, the kids 00:45:00started doing something that was just, I thought a riot. They started... (mimicked sounds) and imitating the, "I'm sorry, this number is no longer in service," operator and they started doing several of those different recorded messages, holding their noses and (mimicked noises) at different times. I said, "That, would make a great skit." From that came the Mountain Drive Revue and I called together numerous of them, and Bill Neely only wanted to take over the project, so he was kicked out of the project. Because Bill Neely felt that he should be the only one to be a Mountain Drive theatrical producer or director, so he was kicked out of that project. Every other one, he organized, he started them, he bloody well could direct them, but this one, I was very happy to have him in the damn thing but he wanted to take it over and make it a Bill Neely production. What I had done was something kind of more, I think a little more 00:46:00inventive and fun. I called together all the ardent hams and we thought up all, we brainstormed together what were the available shticks and skits and so on. It was a marvelous production. We did it up at The Castle. It opened up with can-can girls I had taken, let's see, the Picket's daughter, Chrissy; they were a very straight family, the Picket slide rule that lived just on the other side; Chrissy, Maia, Tamar, Erica, not Erica Hill, but Erica, I can't remember her last name, Erica, it was Erica Rickets, who was one of the girls who had lived off and on with me as an additional step. I had children and stepchildren and step steps, as I called them. She was one of my step steps. So, it was Erica Hill and Rita Greyson. No, not Erica Hill, Erica Rickets and Rita Greyson. They 00:47:00were can-can girls. I had them start on the stairway above the stage and come kicking down the stairs. I choreographed this. I had, when I was young, I could do anything and everything, not because I knew how or received training in choreography, but because I had a wonderful imagination and I truly believed that anything was possible. Which is why I was such a damn good stepmother. Because I believed I could be. I wouldn't possibly, wouldn't think of taking on anybody's five children now. But, then, anything was possible because I was so young. So, anyway, they were choreographed and they can-canned and they, we'd gotten them all these bright colored petticoats out of various closets and rouged up their faces and done curls. They looked just right out of an 1890s 00:48:00revue. They kicked and they poofed their skirts up and they moved back and forth on the stage to the can-can music which we had gotten somebody to do, to play the piano. We wanted that sound. That de, de, de, of the old ivories being tickled for this revue. After that, I marched onto the stage. I had wore black body tights, like you wear, black leotard, and black tights with the fishnets and black heels. But the thing was that there was a giant hole, I'm embarrassed to say it now, but it was a part of the shtick then. There was a giant hole right over my rear just above the asshole. So, when I turned around, which I made it a point to do, in the course of carrying the marquee across. I was the marquee girl. I would carry the next act and carry it across. I would always manage to turn around, and people would always laugh to see that hole right 00:49:00above the asshole. You know, see the little piece of cheeks. It was just hysterical. I had put them on in that haste just before I realized I had the hole. Then when I realized where it was, realized it would be funny, so, kept that on. Anyway, I marched across and did the marquee for the next act. I don't remember the sequence of the acts. But, one of the acts, was the wall telephone skit, with the 3 girls who'd originally started this all off, holding their noses, the plot is that somebody comes up, drops a nickel into the wall telephone, who was Ray, who held up his hands and said, I am a wall telephone. Then somebody dropped a nickel in, what he got was one recorded message, then 2 recorded messages, then 3 recorded messages and he's shouting into the phone to try and get a call or something from Ray, but he can't get Ray because of all 00:50:00these multiples of messages. So, that was one act. Another act was the, one of the things that the guys used to get together and sing was, We are the Joy Boys of radio. This is the Sunset Club. Hello, hello, hello, hello. So, we had the Joy Boys come up. That was John Stack and Frank and oh, golly, Howie Bowie, who lived on the Drive, was an anthropologist at the time and Howie Bowie and oh, we had Robert Venable come in. Robert was very, very, this is Liliane's first husband, Robert. He was French. Robert was too shy to join them, so we had him wear a pith helmet which went down over his eyes, so, like the ostrich in the 00:51:00sand, he couldn't see the audience. But, at certain points, we had them sing (sings French song, Chevaliers de la Table Ronde...) You know, that song. Well, I'll sing a little more. (sings French song, Chevaliers de la Table Ronde... oui, oui, oui). At that point, Robert would pull up his pith helmet so you could see his eyes. You see, this was all shtick, pure comedy slapstick shtick that came from night after night after night of getting all these people together and having them put layer and layer and layer of, God, wouldn't he be funny if..., and then doing it once or twice and so, we had about 10 times where we did it, then we had two dress rehearsals down at our house. So, while I, and that was 00:52:00the difference this production and Neely's production. This production grew from one little thing because of all the contributions of everybody rather than one person, Bill Neely, having an idea and then hierarchically making it grow bigger down. So, it was sort of like a mass movement to put this thing, well, anyway...

GASSER: Brainstorm.

SISSON: Right. The Joy Boys sang. Then they sang some close harmony things with kazoos, like (Sing: Down by the Old Mill Stream), you know, with all the harmonies. They ended up with the closing, with their hats, everybody had a hat and a cane, including the pith helmet, of course, which was the funniest part of the whole shtick. Robert refused to be in the Joy Boys thing. He came on just for the Chevaliers de la Table Ronde...song, but he did go off with them, with 00:53:00his pith helmet (Sing: We are the Joy Boys of radio). They shuffled. I taught everybody how to do a shuffle off to Buffalo. My high school in the antique age before women became liberated or expected to know a damn thing, insisted that women were taught dance for four years, so six months a year, I had dance in high school. One of the things we were taught the first year, in freshman year, you learn soft shoe. So, I learned how to shuffle off to Buffalo and a few other useful stage shtick, so I taught soft shoe to people, various and sundry people for this event.

GASSER: Where did you go to high school?

SISSON: Piedmont High School, Piedmont, California, sort of a Beverly Hills type place, but it's in the East Bay, the Oakland hills. It's a community that's 1 point 25, point 65 miles wide. Robert Louis Stevenson stayed there in 1865.

GASSER: Very good.

SISSON: It's an enclave of very, very wealthy, often very Jewish people.

GASSER: How many brothers and sisters do you have?

SISSON: A brother and one sister, younger. So, it was perfect. Really, what I did for Frank Robinson besides be his loyal and loving and occasionally, obstreperous wife was to continue to do what I had done all along, which was raise a younger brother and sister, only now, I just had gobs more. But we were talking about the Mountain Drive Revue. We ended, oh, we had, I forget all of the skits we did. I really don't remember. We had Lorna Greyson, who was really very Cockney from London. Lorna Greyson and George did an old shtick from the London stages about the wheelbarrow man in completely dialect, so I can't really do that. (mimics Cockney accent) It was a very funny, the baarrrel maann. It was 00:55:00probably from the London music Hall of 1893. It was probably a big hit then. But, they remembered it, from their childhoods and they brought it to that night.

GASSER: Wonderful.

SISSON: We had old John Stack, who was very proud of being Irish and Lorna, who was very proud of being English, we had them competing against each other. John Stack, it was a marvelous evening. John Stack did, he sang, My favorite pastime after dark is goosing statues in the park. If Sherman's horse can do it, why can't I? When the trains in the station, we encourage constipation, let's see. And it goes on and on and on and on and that same silly thing. But, the climax 00:56:00of it is...

GASSER: Who wrote those lyrics?

SISSON: Oh, it's an old ditty from the Boer Wars, some damn thing, you know. But the climax of the song is, That was how they formed Great Britain. It was from the seagull shittin'. And dropping little droplets in the sea, la, la, la. Anyway, so it makes fun of the British Navy. And the evidence is there for all to see. Well, what happened was, John Stack sang that song which ridicules the British nation. And Lorna brought on a bunch of her friends to ridicule the Irish and they came out and sang, That was the night..., let's see. That's how 00:57:00we showed our respect for Patty Murphy. That's how we showed our honor and pride. That's how we showed our respect for Patty Murphy. Respect for Patty Murphy on the night that Patty died. Well, what they did was, they cut the ice right off the corpse and put it in the beer. They cut the pig from out the door and made him dance an Irish jig and so forth. It ridicules the Irish. So then, we have the two of them shouting insults at each other on the stage and we did the wonderful schtick. I brought out the can-can girls and they started, this was the finale, of course. The can-can girls came out and they came can-canning out while Lorna and George are, I mean John Stack are hurling insults and he goes and gets a pail full of water and he's chasing her all over the stage with 00:58:00the pail of water, of course, and just when he gets it and he tosses it at her, it's been exchanged because the can-can girls have closed in in front of him. It's been exchanged for, of course, the confetti which flies all over the audience and then, we had the can-can girls go up and down and up and down and go (Sounds) and then flip up their skirts, you know, turn around and flip up their skirts and everybody came in behind them, the Joy Boys, and bowed. It was a marvelous show.

GASSER: Marvelous.

SISSON: It was a marvelous show. Well, the reason why it never got to be annual was everybody gave it their all the one year.

GASSER: Ah, for a video tape.

SISSON: Oh, Lord. Yes. Nobody did. Nobody had those sorts of things then. It was a wonderful evening.

GASSER: What other women's festivals, what other, were there women's groups, there was the Sunset club I heard you mention and were there other women's groups?

SISSON: Oh, yeah. Well, there was the famous Mu Ralpha Ki story and you'll just have to ask Audrey Johnston for that story. That was an infamous, infamous story 00:59:00when I got to the Drive. About two years before, the women had gotten tired of being excluded from Sunset Club, so they started their alternate club, called Mu Ralpha Ki which was a pun on sororities. Then, the women, maybe it was about a year, Barbara was still alive, Barbara Neely. The women had, maybe, so it was about 1962, this had happened. They had thrown a party and somebody came along and threw peyote buttons in the party, mashed up peyote buttons into the punch so everybody was extremely crazy. Evidently, all sorts of people just broke loose the bounds of propriety and were chasing each other in bushes and the Drive was rocked on its haunches and all sorts of divorces were threatened and everybody recovered eventually from the Mu Ralpha Ki party but the women never held Mu Ralpha Ki anymore. It sort of died there in about 1962-63. Well, one of 01:00:00the on-going things that women on the Drive got together for, you see, we got together all the time, around raising children and gardening and recipes and exchanging of children and the sort of the mutual raising of children and at all the parties and the costumes for the parties and the food for the parties and the preparations for the parties. There was a little bit of competition to be the best cook. So, Mountain Drive women were into what we might call gourmet cooking, meaning French and European and different styles, long before it became the fad that it's been for the last five or ten years. It was very big on Mountain Drive when you couldn't hardly get cookbooks for foreign things. People were bringing them in. But, we did have Sit and Stitch. I put that down on that little form there, 'cause that's about the only organization besides the 01:01:00Democratic Party which I joined.

GASSER: Sit and Stitch.

SISSON: Sit and Stitch. The men called it Snip and Bitch, naturally. But what we did, we'd get together on an informal basis at various people's houses and it would lag and then it would lag for a while and people wouldn't do it and then somebody would start it up again. You'd have it every Tuesday or every Thursday or every Wednesday afternoon. For years, we'd had Sit and Stitch religiously the first day of school, when the kids went back to school. All the ladies would sit around and get drunk and have a glass of wine and celebrate the fact that the kids were now in school again. But, I think we had a potluck on those days. But, it was held probably 36 times a year, would probably be a good average for the sporadic nature of it. It would be held regularly for 3 months and then somebody just wouldn't be energized to do it. Or you'd run out of all your back sewing to 01:02:00do because you brought your sewing projects; your mending, your knitting, or a pattern you would be cutting out while you sat around and gossiped. Usually, we drank coffee. Audrey Johnston, down at the frog pond, had it a lot. It lapsed for a while. I started it up one time. We had it at my house for a while. Every Mountain Drive woman, just about, was invited, by word of mouth. It was not really terribly formal. There weren't members. There weren't minutes. There weren't any of those things.

GASSER: Nor were there at the Sunset Club.

SISSON: It sort of just was announced that Sit and Stitch was happening at Susan Robinson's or Audrey Johnston's, Liliane Venable had it, Sandy Hill had it, Susan Neely had it and so on.

GASSER: What was a typical day like on Mountain Drive for a woman?

SISSON: That's really hard to say. If it were a Sunday, I would get up at a quarter of seven. Every morning I got up at a quarter of seven. Frank kicked me out of bed at a quarter of seven, when I rolled down the stairs from the love tower into the room, naked and shivering, go outside and pee, go into the kitchen and make breakfast. Sunday morning breakfast was a big deal because all of the children who were in the house at the time would be invited to Sunday morning breakfast, but if you were at Sunday morning breakfast you had to work because we had Sunday morning work project afterwards. If you didn't want to stay and work, you had to leave before breakfast. Our children, of course, had to stay and work, but I threw this big opulent meal with waffles or eggs and 01:04:00potatoes and turnovers and this and that and the other. I cooked for an hour and a half just to put on breakfast for 10 or 12 people. It became too damn popular for all the kids to have two or three kids over and then they just wanted to have a fantastic breakfast. So, we said nuts to that. So, I would serve the big breakfast and then I imposed that rule. If you want to stay for breakfast, you could bloody well stick around and work. It's amazing how many other people's teenagers enjoyed being there and they enjoyed the work, even though our kids bitched about it continually, without stop. The work included things like painting, mud patching, adobe brick making. A popular one was weeding the ivy bed, cutting brush in season, painting, did I mention mud washing, patching the adobe. We laid the tile on the roof for the upper, the girl's room which had 01:05:00burned out in the fire to be reconstructed but not been tiled. Actually, Frank never got around to tiling the roof. So, we tiled the roof. We laid tiles on the floor. Once a month, I would get everybody and we'd wax, hand paste wax all of the floors in Frank's house. They've probably never been so clean since I left.

GASSER: Probably not.

SISSON: But, once a month, I hand pasted and waxed all the floors. I finally was allowed, Frank finally allowed me to utilize all of the enormous amount of young teenage bodies that we had on Sunday morning for that project. For the first year and a half, I waxed the floors every 3 weeks to a month on my hands and knees alone and that took about 8 hours, for me working, working, not goofing off. It took me about 8 hours to paste, wax, because I had to move furniture and 01:06:00clean, mop and clean. It took about 2 moppings to get it cleaned up, paste wax it, then wait for it to dry and then come back and buff it until it was a high polish. There's a lot of tile floors in Frank Robinson's house. He has a lot of them.

GASSER: Did, it sounds like such a good idea, did other people adopt the same thing for...

SISSON: No, the Vueles had a Sunday morning work crew and Neely may have had it. But I instituted it with Frank. In the first weeks that I was there, I instituted all these family traditions and we followed them all the rest of the time when I was together.

GASSER: This was?

SISSON: Family dinner, raised a rule structure of the house.

GASSER: Which was?

SISSON: Which was that you had to be home for dinner 4 nights a week. Monday night, you went to your mom's for dinner. Tuesday night was family dinner at our house. Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, and you couldn't go out 01:07:00thereafter. But Friday night, you could stay out as long and as late as you wanted. You could be overnight. You could anywhere you wanted, as long as you signed out. And then the sign-out sheet was a big deal. Then, you had to be home, you couldn't spend the night at somebody else's house on Saturday night because Sunday morning, you had to be up and put in your 4 hours of work and then you could scatter and disperse and nobody cooked for you on Sunday. But I made a huge pot of soup and put it on the back of the stove on Saturday afternoon and I didn't cook Saturday evening nor Sunday evening, but everybody ate out of the stew pot and I was known as "Souper Sue," because of that. That was a pun; Robbie. So, you had to be home on Saturday night, couldn't be out too late because you had to able to be up and work. When people had birthday 01:08:00parties, we had a big dinner party for their birthday and it was a big deal. Everybody would be invited. Then there was the, oh, I could go on.

GASSER: Go on!

SISSON: One of the traditions that I'm not responsible for, Frank and Peggy thought of this. There were other Mountain Drivers that did it or copied it. I'm not sure whether Bill Neely thought of it first or Frank Robinson thought of it first. So, you all have to ask him. But in the Robinson family, there was put down for them a bottle of fith and port when they were born. When they turned 21, we had a big family formal dinner and everyone opened this bottle of port that had been down there that they'd been looking at and going past and saying, See, there's mine.

GASSER: Lovely!

SISSON: We drank the bottle of fith and port that been sitting for 21 years. There's still one Robinson child who's not yet 21. My son, Morgan, will be, he's 18 now, he'll be 21 in two years. And I'll be damned if I miss his bottle of 01:09:00fith and port.

GASSER: You had Morgan when you were in Mexico?

SISSON: Yeah. I joined Frank's household in June of '65 and Morgan was born in December of '68.

GASSER: What made you go to Mexico and what made you come back?

SISSON: Things got very crazy, you know, psychedelics came. You know, Timothy Leary came and stayed on Mountain Drive.

GASSER: Who did he stay with?

SISSON: He stayed with Audrey Johnston, who we used to call the Little Shepherdess of LSD. Psychedelics came, marijuana and Mountain Drive embraced them because it was just all a part of our great brouhaha lifestyle and there was a little bit a sort of religious mysticism, meligious rysticism, I like that better, that sort of filtered through the Drive, various meditators, transcendental meditation, Audrey and Stan got into that. There were all these 01:10:00things happening and that was fine. The big bugaboo for Mountain Drive was alcohol. That's what wiped out most of the people and a good part of the marriages there, was alcoholism. But Mountain Drive had such a joie de vivre that the other things didn't wipe anybody out particularly. But, all around us, the children, not our children and not our children's best friends, but their friends, the Montecito rich kids who had way too much money and not enough supervision, started coming up with heroin habits and scary things. Remember, Jimi Hendrix died of heroin and so did Jim Morrison, and so on in those late 60s, early 70s. Things were getting freaky. We were very worried about our own children. So, what we moved to Mexico for was to get them out. So, we looked for 01:11:00the opportunity. The opportunity didn't come to us. We'd looked for the opportunity. Frank went down there to develop low-cost housing. I went off the pill when Frank and I decided to go to Mexico and two weeks later, I got pregnant. I had no time to have fun making babies. I was 20 and as fertile as any human being on Earth, I guess. I went off the pill and 2 weeks later, 10 days later, got pregnant. What can I say. So, we rented the house to Scarlet, no, we rented the house to Stevie Schott, who was up on the Drive...

GASSER: Stevie S...

SISSON: Yeah, she was Stevie Schott in those days. She wanted to live in our house. She offered to buy, she offered to trade it for the house she lived in. She lived in that fancy, schmancy Montecito style house, which Frank had 01:12:00designed, about 10 years before, designed and built in Montecito over further on Mountain Drive. She called up Frank out of the clear blue sky one night and said, Frank, I know this is going to sound sort of weird, but how about trading my property for your property. They're worth about the same and if anything, yours is more run down but yours is on Mountain Drive and I want to live on the Drive. You live in a Frank Robinson house; I live in a Frank Robinson house, so why not trade? But Frank wouldn't, of course.

GASSER: Why?

SISSON: Why? Because he built that house with his own hands. That was the family home. Although, very frankly, I as a woman, would have much rather have lived in the other house because it was so damn much work to keep up. You know, the adobe, the walls bleed dust, they must be patched, mud washed and painted every other year.

GASSER: That's inside and out?

SISSON: Inside and out. The whole entire house or it starts falling apart. The 01:13:00floors had to be hand paste, waxed and buffed every 3 weeks to a month. I mean, it's a very high maintenance house. Who provided the maintenance for that? Mountain Drive women and Mountain Drive women worked at it.

GASSER: Did they all work as hard as you did? With the paste, wax...,

SISSON: Yeah. Susan Neely did. Sandy Hill did. Audrey Johnston did less, but she did more gardening. The domestic arts were very, very, very highly prized and practiced.

GASSER: Appreciated?

SISSON: Yes. Not nearly enough, of course.

GASSER: Always true. So, in Mexico, you were pregnant and you had Morgan?

SISSON: Yeah, a few months. I got pregnant, well, he was born in December of, 26, so I got pregnant in the spring. We finally were able to move down to Mexico 01:14:00in August and we got down there just in time for the Mexico City Olympics in '68. And we saw them. Actually, I don't think we ever got to one of the actual Olympic events, but the Mexico City had enormous, it was very colorful. They had all these cultural events. They had the Cultural Olympics which was the first year that concept had been tried. It was great fun. We went to a number of those events, including absolutely the most moving thing I've ever seen, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, 110 people in the orchestra, 120 people in the chorus and the New World Ballet, about 150 people dancing. It was just an extravaganza of song and..., Anyway, it was a gorgeous land. We participated in that as much as possible. We lived in Puebla. Most of the kids were with us, and then some. Dana 01:15:00and Liliane had dumped their, well, Dana and Liliane had dumped Liliane's oldest boy, Danny, Venable, on us. Danny had later committed suicide. He broke all our hearts.

GASSER: I didn't know that.

SISSON: Anyway, Danny came down with us. So, we had Danny, Tamar, and Rema originally. Robbie had gone off to Australia, just before that on the first of his round the world trips. And Louie stayed at home. I taught the girls by correspondence course there and Danny. Then, in the spring, some of the other family decided they wanted to send down their delinquent son for the same reason. He just arrived on our doorstep. He and Danny were too much. Danny was a 01:16:00drug addict and Charlie was a drug addict and we'd moved down there to get our kids away from that. Here, we had these children imposed on us. We had consented to having Danny Venable with us, but Charlie would just literally, arrived on our front doorstep. His mother had written us and asked us to take him and we had written her back and said, no. He arrived 5 days later. She just sent him. So, Charlie, I forget his last name. I understand he might have committed suicide, overdosed. With the two boys, it was getting too crazy and they were going to Mexico City and getting drugs, not heroin, but drugs. I didn't want that association with the kids and besides, Mexico had a very different attitude 01:17:00than the United States about drugs. We were very terrified, living in a foreign country, that any kind of drug possession or use or something would be, Lord knows, what would happen to us. We could be thrown in prison and they could throw away the key there and we could care less. We were very concerned. So, we sent back Charlie, Danny and Maia because Maia wanted to graduate. She was due to graduate from high school that year as a senior and she wanted to graduate from Santa Barbara High, so we sent her back for her last semester. We had Rema and Tamar until September of the next year and then we sent them back which was a mistake, but we did send them back. Because the schools had said they would only give them credit for one year's correspondence school, which was bullshit because they were getting far better educations with the correspondence school, I mean, I had school with them every damn day. I sat my kids down and we had 01:18:00school. I taught school. They were getting much better educations with us. We were sorry to see Danny go, by the way. We didn't want to send him back. But, we didn't know how to get rid of Charlie unless we got rid of Danny and we were already sending Maia back, so we just sent them all three back.

GASSER: Why did you yourself, why did you decide to come back to Santa Barbara? Was Mexico not what you had intended?

SISSON: We'd intended to go down for a year. We ended up staying there for 3-1/2 years.

GASSER: It was not a permanent move, then, to get away from the drugs and the influence...

SISSON: No, it was intended to just be down there for a year or two, maybe two, and it just kept dragging on and dragging on and dragging on and dragging on... Things were different when we came back. Number 1: We'd been gone for 3-1/2 01:19:00years. Even though I corresponded extensively with people, a lot of things had happened in those 3-1/2 years. We rented out the house the first two years to Stevie Schott and then we rented out to Tom and Charlotte Shelton, the last two years, basically. A lot of things had changed in those 3-1/2 years and it wasn't the same with the children, too. Peggy had gotten bloody well tired of having an adolescent that she couldn't control on her hands and Louie was already a terminal drug addict, so she dumped him on us at age 14. He'd never lived with us before and by that time. And Louie was terribly jealous of Morgan because he felt, really, that he'd been ripped off for his place in the family. It wasn't my fault. It wasn't anybody's fault. The truth of the matter was that, he'd always been the baby boy. When he finally got to live with father again at age 01:20:0014, there was a baby boy, Morgan, who was just about, who wasn't a hell of a lot younger than he had been when he left his father's home the first time, to live. He was extremely jealous, petty and awful to Morgan. He smoked marijuana every day before school. He hung out with the absolute worse kids on the Drive, the Rozelle boys, who were drug addicts. I don't know what kind of drugs Louie used at that time, but I know they smoked an enormous amount of marijuana before school, after school, to wake up, to go to bed and this and that. It was very hard for us because we occasionally smoked marijuana, openly in front of our children, with our children on an occasional basis and yet we knew damn well that it was horrible to smoke marijuana constantly. We were appalled by the fact 01:21:00that Louie had been smoking marijuana every day by 9 years because we made a distinction between a 14 year old and a 9 year old. The fact that Louie had been permitted at age 9 to smoke marijuana was entirely different, we thought, at the time with whatever wisdom we could pull together.

GASSER: Do you think that was the permissiveness of Mountain Drive or just the general structure of society that allowed that to happen?

SISSON: The society was that way and Mountain Drive was more so. Mountain Drivers always had a lot of trouble with the idea of rules or limitations although they're quite popular now with raising their children because Mountain Drive children, who've grown up on Mountain Drive; Maia and Robbie and all of these people who I've mentioned are now adults raising their families and most of them are really quite strict with their children. Although, they want their children to take the best of their childhoods, which had a marvelous kind of 01:22:00carefree freedom to them.

GASSER: So, you think Mountain Drive has improved in its child rearing with this generation?

SISSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. The second generation, or if you like, you could call them the third generation of Mountain Drivers. The young children being raised now are being raised far more responsibly than the generation than I helped to bring up. But, those generation of children are marvelous people, so we can't be all that bad. Briefly, the ones that survived did very well. This, I would say, would be true of the entire bunch of kids that came of age in the late 60s. I went back to my high school in '72. My class in high school never pulled off a high school reunion, 25 years, we're going on. Nobody's ever managed to have a reunion. The Class of '63 has had a reunion; the Class of '62 has had one every 5 years; Class of '65 has, but the Class of '64 Piedmont High 01:23:00School has never managed a high school reunion. I know because I keep checking back at the high school. Nobody's gotten organized.

GASSER: Maybe you should do it.

SISSON: I've been told that when I've called them. But, anyway, when I went back in '72, I talked to the principal about it. What his comment was, that we were sort of a lost generation. There were a whole bunch of people who just kind of disappeared during those years. Those who survived often have large gaps in their experience where they didn't do things; they weren't productive which is sort of lost time.

GASSER: In other words, drugged-out, so to speak?

SISSON: Yeah, zoned out. But, it's not as if that was a waste of years, but they certainly were lost for a lot of people. I feel my years were far more, my wasted years were spent being a productive housewife and mother on Mountain 01:24:00Drive. That's why...

GASSER: You consider them wasted?

SISSON: Only in the sense that I'm almost 40 and I'm just about to finally pick up my college degree. That's the only thing that's wasted in that I didn't forge ahead with that.

GASSER: However, you know what you want to be now.

SISSON: Yeah, but I wouldn't, I cannot imagine my life without the years I spent on Mountain Drive and those experiences. So, anyway, those last 2 years that Frank and I were together, after Mexico, we were together about 2 more years on Mountain Drive. Frank's alcoholism had gotten a lot worse, very bad. He got to beating me up when he was angry and he was angry a lot and drunk a lot. Finally, one night, I was afraid for my life, literally. On several occasions, I was afraid that he would kill me. On one occasion, I called up old Gill Johnston, 01:25:00whose his oldest friend that's around, whose known Frank since a month before I was born, in '47 at the old college up on the hill. And Gill came up and Gill's not a small man either and literally fought for me all night long, for my life. We're talking life. So that when I decided to leave him, Louie was a 10th grader and I didn't feel too bad about leaving him because when I signed on with Frank, I agreed to stick around long enough to raise up Robbie, Maia, Tamar and Rema. I never made an agreement to raise Louie.

GASSER: That was a verbal agreement?

SISSON: No, it was like, it was like, it was like my internal agreement with myself. I agreed to stick around through thick and thin, no matter how bad things got, and Frank had had serious alcoholism problems a few years before and halfway through our marriage, he was so bad he was beating me up a lot. And I had to leave him then, for a while to...

GASSER: Why did you go back?

SISSON: Because Morgan was a small child and because I loved him.

GASSER: Those are reasons that many women go back.

SISSON: And I, the realities of trying to raise a small child, meaning you have to work to support it, are extremely, are hard. And also because Frank was sincerely willing to give it a go and for about 2-1/2 more years, he did. He was doing very well. That is, he managed to cut back his drinking so he was a moderate drinker who maybe tied one on once a week. But, his alcoholism started sneaking up on him again. The alcoholism story runs very, very, very, deep. Most Mountain Drive men are alcoholics. Most Mountain Drive women are co-alcoholics, and martyrs and saints and victims. They're very few of us that are with the 01:27:00same men. Most Mountain Drive men have been left. Women have gone on. When they've gone on, they never again will experience such a vivid place or a vivid time and they've lost as much as they've gained. They may have gained freedom from worry and freedom from abuse and freedom from being beaten and freedom from being overworked, but they'll never, ever, ever, ever again experience such joy and a sense of community.

GASSER: Those are very important aspects of life where I can see where one would be torn from wanting to stay and needing to go.

SISSON: Mountain Drive is a special place. Nowadays, 20 years later, 22 years later, I go back and I visit. It's a little bit like coming home to your 01:28:00parents' house. I go and I stay with Frank or Rema or Maia, Robbie. I stay with my kids. I still occasionally get Mother's Day cards from them, you know, hey, I spent 9-1/2 years raising those kids. That was a solid part of their lives. Rema came up to visit me in San Francisco a few years ago and she said that she realized one day that somebody asked her, "Where did you learn to cook, Rema?" She started starting a soup or whatever. And she said, "Oh, Susan taught me." The person looked at her wall and said, "Where did you learn to crochet?" She said, "Oh, Susan taught me." She told me, she drove all the way up there just to tell me this. She told me that she starting thinking about it and I taught her, not to read or write, but I, when she was in Mexico that year and a half with 01:29:00me, I tested her out initially and she was at the second grade reading level, a sixth grade graduate of Cold Springs School, she was at a second grade reading level and math level. So, I had to bring her up to grade level to teach her. So, I brought her up to grade level and then got her through 7th grade in 5 months, working her 6 days a week, 8 hours a day. So, she said...

GASSER: Education on both your parts!

SISSON: Which shows you how inefficient our whole damn school system is. If you really, I taught her through Calvert Correspondence School, which is this marvelous correspondence school in Baltimore, Maryland, that educated most of the diplomats and missionaries' children since 1895. My father had been raised on Calvert schools and his mother, who was a missionaries' child in Japan, was raised on Calvert schools, so I knew where to go when I needed to teach my 01:30:00children in a foreign country.

GASSER: You said that your father had been born in China?

SISSON: Right, and his mother was born in Japan. She was the daughter of a missionary, who was the daughter, who was the son of a missionary. Her family were the, they came in on the second boat to Tokyo, after Perry came in.

GASSER: We must really get these straight. That's absolutely fascinating that, especially, that you're so involved in the history of your family. Back to whenever you came back from Mexico, you said there were many changes that you observed on the Drive. What were some of other changes, other than just in perhaps Frank's behavior towards you? What other changes did you observe?

SISSON: Our family structure was a little different because I didn't have all my girls, my girls. I just had Rema, and Louie. Rema and I were very, very, close. Rema was sort of psychologically my baby. Louie was this problem. He was this 01:31:00grunky problem child and then there was Morgan. But I missed, like the family, that big family. We'd been a huge family. We'd had not just had 4 kids; we'd had 5 or 6 kids or 8 kids living with us at all times. Well, I had a step-step, Scott Shelton, who now lives with Frank and is married to Sharon Creek, who was one of my stepchildren. She stayed with us for almost two years of her life down in Mexico and so on. Scott Shelton stayed with us for two years and now they're married, years later. But, they were both, some of my step-steps, in those years.

GASSER: Enlarged family.

SISSON: Yeah, and Susan Neely had left Bill Neely, I think, by that time. Or she lived in, no, she'd left him in that time. Brigitte Johnston, well, Brigitte, she wasn't Brigitte Johnston, I forget her last name, but she had been with Dick Johnston and she was the one that was voted Wine Queen and she got so enraged at 01:32:00Bill Neely for being so outrageously adulterous in front of everybody's eyes and in front of Susan's eyes, Susan Neely's eyes, that the Wine Queen took a giant, not full, but empty, half gallon jug and crashed it over Bill Neely's head at the Wine Festival and then left in tears. So, that year's vintage had, Bill Neely used to make a tile for each vintage, if you've ever been in the wine cellar. That's the one with the lightning bolt, Brigitte.

GASSER: Was that a big problem amongst the women in the marriages on Mountain Drive, the sort of licentious behavior?

SISSON: Well, yes and no. You have to remember that there was a late 60s and the early 70s and they were pretty crazy everywhere. My parents did things that, so when I heard about later in those years, that were so appalling considering the 01:33:00way I was raised. I mean, good Lord, my father was a minister. In those years, they got involved in some kind of swinging singles group sex club. I mean, you know, people were crazy all over the country in those years. When I tell those stories, I don't want the listeners to take that out of the context. We were only slightly crazier than everybody else and we'd been doing it for a longer amount of time. In other words...,

GASSER: We were, during the pause and changing tapes, into some, many different areas of interest; one, about the attitude that men had, on the drive, as far as how much they were doing and, I believe, Susan, you were saying that all Frank would ever do would take a, the most you could get him to do was to take a...

SISSON: The most I could get him to do, literally, this is really and truly the truth, the most I could get him to do to contribute to the household, in terms 01:34:00of maintenance, was that occasionally, to please me, he would pick up his plate, after he had been served and eaten and so forth, and carry it to the kitchen counter. He would not rinse it off, however, even if I asked him. And the typical day, you asked that question and I got sidetracked because I, these stories I'm trying to compress very quickly and so I've gotten about halfway through about 6 or 7 stories and the listener is going to have to imagine that these things are leitmotifs and that we will return to them again and again. So, the, I was asked about the typical day. I'd just got all hung up describing a Sunday and I didn't finish that and I'm going to finish that very briefly. After Sunday morning work, we would come in and have lunch and I had always, I would 01:35:00make in addition to the big soup, I would make some big thing like a potato salad, was a biggie for the family. I mean, there were things that everybody just was crazy about, you know, I'd make a big potato salad or sandwiches or something and I'd leave them out. People would come in from work when they were done with their tasks and sit around and read the paper and snack. I took no responsibility for feeding people, aside, on Sunday aside from that one breakfast.

GASSER: The motivator to get them going.

SISSON: Yeah, right. The big breakfast, which by the way, I spent an hour and a half cooking and an hour cleaning up after them. Then I went out and made adobe bricks. I mean, you know, come on. So, anyway, and I would come in and I'd be hot and tired and sweaty and it would be about 1. And then we would go somewhere. We'd go visiting on Mountain Drive on Sundays. In those days, it was a fabulous place to go visiting and that's what you did on Sundays. You went visiting. We'd go to Dana Smith's house when he lived on Gibraltar Road with 01:36:00Peggy Smith, his first wife, and go skinny dipping and hang out at his pool or we'd go down to Neely's and BS with him and he'd get out the accordion and play wonderful old dance tunes. (Hums tunes) And somebody would come along with a violin and pretty soon, we'd have people singing and drinking and talking and telling stories. Well, that happened anywhere Mountain Drivers got together, but it happened especially around Neely because that was his shtick and he was this magic. And that was what he brought to the Drive was this special kind of magic. Or we'd go down to Gill and Audrey's and hang out around there, especially during the LSD years, and Audrey would have a couple of hits of LSD and we'd pour them into a vial and a glass of wine and everybody would take a sip for 01:37:00just a little... giggle of psychedelia in your day.[16] Or, we'd go over to Stan and Sandy's and see what they were working on. Stan was always so industrious and hardworking and Dutch. And eat. Sandy was, I like to think of myself as the second or third best cook on Mountain Drive, but Sandy Hill was, without doubt, the queen of the fine cooks. So, it was always wonderful to be invited there. Or, we'd go up to, later on when Dana got involved with Liliane, and they moved onto the Drive, we'd go to Liliane's and Dana's and..., by the way, that was another change. Here's another leitmotif, guys. That was another change that there'd been, innumerable couple shuffles in 01:38:00the 3-1/2 years we were in Mexico. Mountain Drivers had a very bad habit of swapping partners and they still do it. They still do it. You know, Mountain Drivers sort of like the law of conservation of matter. Nothing is ever destroyed or created. It just sort of shifts around. So, anyway, and then Sunday evening, we'd come back, usually semi-hungover and Frank would go up to Sunset Club and I would herd all the kids in and start the week because the kids had to be back by Sunday night at 8 o'clock. That was part of the rule structure. The rule structure was they could do anything they damn well pleased as long as they didn't break the law, slash, or get into trouble which was the most important thing. They could go to school. They had to go to school. School was compulsory, 01:39:00although lots of Mountain Drivers were real lax about forcing their kids to go to school. I insisted that the children went to school all the time. But when I caught them cutting, I realized that children had to have some cuts. So I, one of the rules was you had to go to school except that you were allowed 3 days per semester to cut classes for any reason whatsoever and I would write the little excuse notes about the horrible flu you had or whatever the next day. The excuse could be..., the reason could be, it was too nice a day. The excuse could be you didn't feel like it. The excuse could be you want to go surfing or any one of the above or anything else that teenagers come up to. But, you were only allowed 3 per semester and once I did that, cutting, class cutting which had been rampant around my children, was cut back tremendously and, because they could do 01:40:00it, you see, but they could only do it a little bit. And, but they had the control about when they could do these things. See, I really was a terrific parent without even knowing about being a parent. You know, I just sort of responded to situations. Robbie, we got a call and he hadn't been to school for two weeks, was how this started. Finally, the schools, I think they're more up on things now, but that time, they called up and said, "Gee, Robbie hasn't been in school for two weeks. Is he sick?" And we said, "What?" That's when I put in the rule about the cutting. But anyway, to get back to the typical day, I would wake up at, get out of bed at quarter of six, quarter of seven and go downstairs and on a weekday, and I would, Frank would go into the bathroom and shower and 01:41:00primp. He would spend 10 or 15 minutes cutting his beard very carefully, hair by hair in front of the mirror. I knew that. He wouldn't ever let me in and it took me years to find out why he had false teeth and I didn't find that out for about 3 years after we had been together. I opened the door anyway, not realizing he was in there and he was brushing his teeth and all that time, all of that secrecy in the morning had been because he didn't want this young voluptuous creature to know he had false teeth.

GASSER: Was he furious?

SISSON: He was furious. But, you know, everyone should be allowed their little vanities. I tried to pretend like I hadn't seen him, but I had and he knew it.

GASSER: Did that change your relationship?

SISSON: For a few days, it strained things. But, when he realized I loved him anyway, it didn't matter. But, I still love Frank Robinson. I'm damn glad I don't live with him anymore, but I sure as hell still love him and it's mutual. 01:42:00Anyway, and then when Frank would come out of the bathroom at 7:10 every morning, at that moment that he came out, it was 20 minutes later from the time he'd gone in, exactly by the clock, he would come out, and just at that moment, I was to put his breakfast on the table. I was to time it for that time. He would have 2 eggs sunny side up and 1 piece of whole wheat toast and coffee and juice. That's what he had every single morning fried. Occasionally I could make an omelet or something else. I did that for years and years and he wouldn't marry me and then about two years later, actually two years, not years and years, I made eggs benedict one morning and he proposed. So that was the trick. You know, ladies, if you want to get a proposal, make eggs benedict. I recommend it. I recommended it to several of my friends and they've gotten married, too.

GASSER: Did you marry?

SISSON: Yes, we did, in '66 at Dick Johnston's house.

GASSER: So, why did you stay? What was so attractive? I mean, here was this tremendous chauvinism.

SISSON: It was really maddening. Number 1: I was born in '47. Most of Mountain Drive women had been born in '37, if not '27. So, they were raised with different expectations. I sort of, having graduated from high school in '64, I was sort of like at the tail end of the 50s consciousness. Years later, when I read Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, I said, "Holy Shit, that's it." But, I was still raised with the idea that the purpose, other than men were served first, that men were, what a man said was law. I mean, I was raised that way and I expected that that was the way things were and I think the women had 01:44:00basically been raised with these rather old country, rather old, we were selected for that. That was one of the things that Mountain Drive selected, Mountain Drive men selected their women for, was, was excellent, as one person, Gill LaFreniere, an old Mountain Driver who now lives up in Salem, Oregon said once. Mountain Drive women are beautiful class A domestics. But they had to be subservient. And, we were all quite subservient. A lot of Mountain Drive divorces happened in the 70s. Mine was a part of it. As women's consciousness grew and the women's liberation movement, women started saying, "Damn it all. You take out the laundry." And, Mountain Drive men usually responded by getting drunk and beating them up. It was very simple. They wanted the old regime. By 01:45:00that time, women had the same economic forces that started Mountain Drive. They had been working or their children had grown up and many had some other ideals and so, the general forces of the liberation movement of the 70s contributed to an awful lot of women waking up and saying, "I refuse to be treated this way anymore and in spite of the fact that I will never ever experience community and such a loving place, I must go on with my life elsewhere." Some Mountain Drive women went for men who were Mountain Drivers who were a little younger or were a little better at it, who had benefited from the breakup of their particular previous marriage and had learned a little bit. Some of them, by that time, for 01:46:00one reason or another, because of by bequest or money they had, were able to buy places of their own and become Mountain Drivers in their own right. One Mountain Drive woman, and actually there were a number of Mountain Drive women who came from wealthy families. Laura Peake was a good example. She bought that house from Ray Hawthorne and wrote him out a check for $14,000 when that would support a family of 5 very nicely for a year, and gave it to him. She said, "Well, how much would you want for it?" He said, "$14,000 maybe?" Which to him, at the time, about '66, '67 was a lot of money and she said, "Sure," and wrote him out a check. He nearly fainted because he couldn't imagine $14,000.

GASSER: What subsequently happened to Ray Hawthorne? Did he leave the Drive?

SISSON: Ray Hawthorne left the Drive and wandered around the United States in a trailer. I think he died up north about 3 years later. He was probably about 70 01:47:00when he died.[17] He sort of just wanted to retire and move on and do some traveling. Even then, everybody knew it was an extraordinary cheap price.

GASSER: You were also, earlier talking about on the last side of the tape a little bit, if we could go back a little bit into the area of the women as they sort of moved around in...

SISSON: Oh, the adultery, the musical beds, oh, Lord, the fooling around.

GASSER: Didn't that cause a lot of problems?

SISSON: It caused enormous problems. I don't know that, I don't think there was a single human being on Mountain Drive that was absolutely faithful. I used to say I haven't been faithful but I've been true, myself. Because there were a few moonlit nights and gassing parties where I ended up in the bushes with somebody else on Mountain Drive, myself. Don't you dare play this tape for Frank Robinson, even all these years later, I won't say who, what, when or where.

GASSER: We won't ask you that now...

SISSON: ...terribly faithful although Frank and I were mostly monogamous. Frank is a very monogamous man although I know he was not absolutely 100% faithful to me. I found that out years later, sort of thing. Right towards the end of our marriage, he was extremely, flagrantly pulled off an affair with my best friend in Mexico, my best friend's best girlfriend in Mexico and then made damn sure I knew about it and I was very angry and so on. I felt very betrayed about that. Because he tried to tell me about it, you see. If he had just bloody well done it and not brought home any diseases thereby, I wouldn't have minded so damn much. I mean, hearing about something years later is one thing, I mean, thrown in your face is something else. That was, I think, the difference. Frank and I had every pretense of monogamy and were actually a, for Mountain Drive 01:49:00standards, were monogamous. I only had a few midnight rolls in the hay and they were individual one-night stands and to giggles and sometimes didn't amount to much of anything, anyway. There were attempts, seeing as how Mountain Drive men drank so damn much, if you know what I mean.

GASSER: Do you think that it was harder on the men or the women, this kind of behavior, did more women suffer or did more men suffer, or was it just individually depending on who you ran off with?

SISSON: I don't think anybody ever gets away with adultery scot-free. And I really didn't believe it at the time, completely. I mean, I'd always suffered enormous guilt. And I didn't do that even every year. I did it a few times during the time, but I mean, every single time, Holy shit, oh, God, Frank's going to find out. He's going to kill me. When you get into the subject of adultery, there were some affairs that everybody knows about because marriages 01:50:00broke up and people regrouped with each other. I mean Dana Smith had an affair with Liliane Venable and that resulted in the fact that they've been married all these years since. So, there were those kind of affairs, but I could sit here and spend another 2 hours telling you about everybody's indiscretions for 10 years and who slept with whom because everybody knew eventually and I really don't think that anybody would be benefited by that. The truth of the matter is that adultery always hurts somebody sometime somewhere. It, your spiritual values are very confused. Your, whatever spiritual values and whatever gods there be that you acknowledge are very much put out of synch and balance and I cannot see how anybody can do that without feeling extraordinary guilt which 01:51:00then affects the way they behave with each other. Some people were extremely open about it. Bill Neely was flagrant. Bill Neely killed his first wife, Barbara. Everybody believed and hated him for years. They believed truly, and this is a matter of record. This is not scurrilous gossip about who did what with whom at somebody's party in the dark. Bill Neely was so unfaithful with somebody whose name I will not mention, at the time that his wife, Barbara was dying of cancer, that many people felt that was why she committed suicide, which was how she actually died.[18] She saved her pain pills even when she was in great pain for a long time and she saved them up and then took an overdose and died. It may have been also that she was dying of stomach 01:52:00cancer anyway and she just wanted to go. But Bill was so flagrant. Bill was an asshole all the way through and Bill got a great deal of pleasure out of doing it to his wife in front of his wife and he did it all through his marriage to Susan. He was so awful that no one could stand him when he was doing that. When Brigitte hit him over the head with the wine jug, everybody cheered. People were ecstatic. There were two or three people that were outraged; everybody who were Bill Neely partisans. Everybody else said it was about time. But, for the most part, most of the adulteries and affairs were just that, midnight giggles in the dark that nobody talked about and everybody just sort of went, "Huh."

GASSER: As you said, it was happening in the general populace as well, although that's a mystique of Mountain Drive, you know, a certain kind of people that 01:53:00seems to be something that is fascinating, I guess, it's not fascinating just about Mountain Drive, but also about the larger community, Peyton Place, a la Peyton Place or a la...

SISSON: Everybody on Mountain Drive probably slept with everybody else, at one time or another, almost. I mean I didn't sleep with every man. I never slept with Stan Hill. That is for the record. I won't tell you about anybody else. But, I'll tell you I never slept with Stan Hill. I don't think Stan Hill ever slept with anybody else, including his wife, either. Don't put that on the record. For posterity, Holy shit! It was a very crazy time and Mountain Drive, oh, listen! I had friends in the larger Montecito community. My friend Haley Fiske told me that he slept with everybody in the Junior League in 1947, every single member of the Junior League in 1947, Santa Barbara Junior League. Montecito was just as much, if not more so, than Mountain 01:54:00Drive. It's just that Mountain Drivers knew each other so intimately. One day, we'd had a death. I forget which death it was. We'd had a death and it wasn't a good death. It wasn't, oh, I know. Oh, golly! This gal who lived up above the mailboxes in Gavin Hyde's old house. I'm referring to it as Gavin Hyde's house because he originally built it. But it's just where the big main mailboxes are, you know, you go up to Marty's house and down to Gill's and Laura Peake's and so on, right above that, there's a house, a little house and that was Gavin Hyde's first house that he built as a teenager. You know Gavin was the son of Bobby and Floppy, okay. There was a woman who lived there, and once again you'd have to go to some of the older people for her name. She was an extraordinary beauty. She was about 45 when she committed suicide, we felt. She took her sports car and 01:55:00she went down the Coyote Road at about 60 miles an hour and instead of making that turn at the bottom of the hill, she went straight off. And about 2 days later, Richie Richardson found her. He was the one that found her. Well, afterwards, I forget her name, damn, that was about 1966 that she died. But we had a number of deaths. We'd had a number of suicides. We had tragedies; Barbara Neely dying of cancer. Let's see, not Lazell, but at Lazell's house, another woman whose name I don't remember, about '62, committed suicide by shooting herself in the gut and bleeding to death. We'd had children die. You know, we'd had, people had, children die of diseases. We'd had Gene McGeorges's wife, Kajsa 01:56:00Ohman[19] had a child with some old Mountain Drive person, who's no longer on the Drive, by the way, and Christopher and he drowned in the McGeorge's pool about 1960. He was 5. We had a big party and all the children were swimming in the pool and all the adults were around watching them. Pretty soon, the adults went one by one into the house and the older children kind of drifted away and Kajsa, about midnight, wanted to go find her son and started asking, "Have you seen Christopher? Have you seen Christopher?" Nobody had seen Christopher. Christopher was at the bottom of the swimming pool. I mean, we'd had a lot of tragedy. So, when this lady died, and she had a name like Valentine, was her last name. She had jet black hair and one of those absolutely voluptuous figures and she had been involved in Santa Barbara theatrical productions for many years. A lot of us, a lot of the older Mountain 01:57:00Drivers who'd known her for years, felt that she just couldn't face being old. She was looking at the loss of her youth and she, in particular, couldn't face it. And now that I'm going on 40, I begin to understand why people commit suicide in their middle years. They've lost their youth. They've lost the joy. They never picked up any long term goals and all of a sudden, it really isn't worth going on. So, they pick their own way out. It wasn't Ivana Gardner...[20] I keep wanting to say that, but this lady did that. Anyway, I was talking to Dana Smith at the Cinco de Mayo party at Gill Johnston's house. Richie had gotten a deer and Liliane had hung it and cured it, 01:58:00whichever tragedy it was. I was reeling from it and I talked to Dana and I said, "Do you think that Mountain Drive has more tragedy per square inch than downtown?" And he said, "Yeah," assistant county counsel, he should know. And he said, "You know? I don't really think so. I really don't believe so." He said, "It's just that we know each other and so we know about and feel all of these tragedies intimately whereas downtown and even in Montecito, one man doesn't know that his neighbor's daughter died of cancer and he doesn't know that the guy at the corner of the street just went bankrupt or why." And people don't know each other intimately like we do, but numbers of deaths per square mile, 01:59:00numbers of tragedies in the households, oh, God, the Neelys, their accidents. Susan broke her neck, we were afraid Tessa was going to be several feet, inches, short in one leg than the other. No, not more tragedy, just more intimacy. I would say the same for adulteries. I mean, this is how well we knew Mountain Drive. Up until about 10 years ago, I could tell you which cat begat which cat owned by whom for 10 years of Mountain Drive history. That information has blessedly slipped from my mind. I couldn't do it for you now. But, I mean, that's how well we knew each other. We knew whose, who the great grandmother of each other's kittens were.

GASSER: What was the best thing about Mountain Drive?

SISSON: I just said it. The intimacy, the extended family. And the, and the 02:00:00sense of parties and sense of good times and it still goes on. There's magic there that's nowhere else. My stepchildren as adults have these wonderful birthday parties that adults and children, because birthday parties were always adult-children everything parties, anyway. I mean, a party's a party. Let's get in on a party. "Oh, your 2 year old's going to be 3 tomorrow. Great! Let's have a party." Any excuse for a party. A party at a drop of a hat. A party is when 2 or 3 Mountain Drivers are to be gathered together in whatever name, to paraphrase a Biblical quote. That sense of that came from that because people put so much of their energy and creative energy into community parties and community events and barn raisings and tile roofings and gardenings and 02:01:00pump-doos. That's a pump-doo, is when you pump out somebody's sewage ditch or somebody's, I mean, any excuse for a party. That included work parties and helping parties and fund-raising parties and assisting parties. We were very intertwined in this, about, so instead of having a very small nuclear family with nothing to do on a Friday night, but watch the tube or rent a VCR movie, you had any one of a number of 100-200 people's lives to roll around and mess in and hug.

GASSER: Has the question been asked if; did most of the men work while most of the women kept house and stayed up on the Drive?

SISSON: Yeah, that was true until about the mid-70s, as women started discovering their own role. Then for about 10 years a lot of women worked on the Drive and now there's another resurgence of 50s mentality and women having children, and small children practically mandate being at home unless it is 02:02:00absolutely necessary.

GASSER: Do you see Mountain Drive continuing, and how has it been, do you see it continuing into more generations?

SISSON: Absolutely. Frank Robinson has Maia, his daughter who's just down the way. Robbie lives off the way and Rema lives at Robbie's little rental across the way. So, Frank Robinson has 3 adult children and if you count Morgan, who turned 18 yesterday, living as fourth, Frank has 3 adult children living on the Drive, 2 of whom own property and have established there and have children. Tessa Neely, married one of the, they're all intertwined, Scott Shelton, who used to be Rema's boyfriend, married, who was Rema's first love, married Sharon 02:03:00Creek. It gets more complicated than this. Maia, so in a sense, the incestuous love relationships have also gone on to second and third generation, folks. Maia's first boyfriend was Ricky Weaver. Her second boyfriend was Stan Kerwood. Stan Kerwood, boyhood friend of Robbie Robinson, also. Stan Kerwood went to Cold Springs with the kids, but his family lived down there, down there in Cold Springs Circle. Stan's best friend, Jimmy Falletti was with this gal that used to be with Robbie and then Jimmy Falletti was with Sharon Creek. Now Jimmy Faletti is married to Tessa Neely, who used to be with Scott Shelton. Did you just hear his name ago, a while ago? Yes, right, etcetera, and so forth. Practically all of that generation have been involved with each other. You see, Mountain Drive, something when we were on the adultery issue that because people 02:04:00tended to sort of be in relationships of whatever duration and then go on to other Mountain Drivers, male and female. There was an enormous amount of recycling so it wasn't just adultery that allowed everybody to have slept with everybody before it's all over. It was also this sort of this serial nature of relationships. That's gone on. All of those kids that I just mentioned: Scott, Sharon, Jimmy, Tessa. You know. And there's Chris Neely. He's married and lives on the Drive. Let's see, and so on. There's a whole other generation that are Mountain Drive children. They're going up there raising their children.

GASSER: Do you think that the community there will change by the influence of all the other people that are coming to Mountain Drive, the so-to-speak, the city is moving up, the county, the city is beginning to have building checks and building code regulations? Is that, how is that going to influence...

SISSON: I think it's going to be a tremendous influence. I think it will be to 02:05:00the detriment to the community. Because and this is been a process that was hotly debated when Frank and I came back from Mexico because the rapid inflation of Mountain Drive and Santa Barbara real estate, that happened during the 70s. It very much changed things. It meant that you couldn't be a tradesman and own a house on Mountain Drive. The original people bought them and they were all, almost all, of very modest means. The Mountain Drive homes, because they were all sort of handmade jerry-built, lousy electrical, you know, they were thrown together by people who didn't know jack-diddly, for the most part, about building, who used recycled materials, old doors, old..., the original homes were built on the car stake principle because they used railroad ties.

GASSER: Car stake principle?

SISSON: The car stake principle. You should ask one of the old-timers about that, the car stake principle is. But that's what the old, that was the modular of all the homes. Car stakes in the old days, were pieces of really beautiful wood, pine and oak that were stuck in railroad cars, down, and then they had wood. They were wooden railroad cars and they were the pieces that went down and they were square beams and they were always a standard size. And Mountain Drive homes, originally, were the size of one car stake. There was the one-car stake house and then there was the two-car stake house, you see. And so, Mountain Drivers were sort of like a combination of Okie, dust bowl Okies, artists and highly educated people fleeing from middle class antecedence and none of those 02:07:00three particular groups had, especially a lot of money. And that's how Mountain Drive was founded. And originally, I mean, Bobby Hyde sold his place for $50 down and 50 a month. And when I came to the Drive, people were still paying Bobby off. Gill and Audrey had the mortgage burning party about 1965. And then in the late 60s, a funny thing started happening. There was this very uptight woman named Mrs. Burpee. She had been, was the widow of Washington Atlee Burpee, which is after all the seed company. She was Mrs. Seed Company, Burpee Seed Company is what she was. She moved into the house just below us that Frank had originally built with Gene McGeorge, years before and she bought it for $42,000. 02:08:00We were furious at the people that sold their house to her for that house and we were also sort of saying, Those people, there has never been permanent people in that house. It's turned over a lot. $42,000!! We flipped out. We could see the handwriting on the wall, even then.

GASSER: Who was it that sold the property to her?

SISSON: A young couple who moved up to, whose name I don't remember.

GASSER: They bought the land, originally, from Bobby Hyde.

SISSON: No. They had bought, that house had turned over and over and over and over and over and Frank Robinson knows the history of that house intimately. He, which is another way, by the way, to approach the history of Mountain Drive. You go to one house and you find out who lives there, when and then all these stories will come out. Then you go down the hill and you say, "Okay, who built it, who lived in it? When?" But anyway, that house had a lot of turnover and the 02:09:00young couple who had had it, when they first moved on the Drive, they had a pig and 2 Australian shepherds. They were pets. The pig was the house pet, just like the Australian shepherds. They bought a piece of property up by San Luis Obispo and Templeton, that area and formed a winery. Well, that was a very wowie strange neat thing to have happen.

GASSER: Is that where they went to get grapes?

SISSON: And that was where we, that wasn't where we went to get the grapes, but that was very, where they bought land was very near where we would get the grapes. They sold it to Mrs. Washington Atlee Burpee 'cause they wanted the money to, you know, buy the place. We were just reeling from that sale. Pretty soon...

GASSER: Because it was a high price?

SISSON: Very high price, very high price. We could see it. This means that artisans and semi-bohemian people of slightly eccentric viewpoints and so on, 02:10:00aren't going to be buying Mountain Drive properties. We'd start seeing wealthy people and people from Montecito buy properties. We had that when Stevie Schott moved in. Stevie Schott was one of our first, Mike Peake had been on the Drive for years and he was a genuinely wealthy guy from a wealthy family, by the way, the Schott family, same damn family, same piece of wealth. And he married Laura Peake, who was a Rollins daughter, daughter of one of the Rollins twins, one of the wealthiest people in the entire damn state. So, there was something. Mike married Laura, so that's, you know, okay, they're wealthy. And then Stevie Schott moved on the Drive and then Kit Tremaine in the early 70s. You asked me what happened when we came back from Mexico. One of the things that started happening was gentrification. Kit Tremaine bought the lower bunny field where 02:11:00for 20 years, we'd had Easter parties, Easter egg parties and she fenced it off. She fenced off our trail. And we had a trail that went from the mailboxes at the west Mountain Drive meets east Mountain Drive and went down to the Banana Road houses. She fenced it off. And a committee of Mountain Drivers went to see her and we asked her to put a gate there. And she said, "Absolutely not." And we said, "Nonsense, we've used it for 20 years." She said, "That's why I have to do it." And we said, "But, we're not, you know," and she said, "I have to do that or else, otherwise you have the public right of way and I don't own this, that property anymore, that part of my property." And we said, "But we haven't sued you in 20 years, you know, are we going to sue you 20 years from now, that's ridiculous," and she said, "I don't care. I have to do it this way." So, we lost our trail and we lost our bunny field and so on. And it's just gone on and on 02:12:00and on. Now, we've got, you know, the frigging downtown trying to make Mountain Drive un-Mountain Drive and more and more like Montecito and Las Canoas Road and Tunnel Road. That was already happening anyway because people are on to real estate value of Mountain Drive now.

GASSER: That will have a definite effect, I'm sure.

SISSON: However, Mountain Drive had a marvelous way of subsuming people. One of the things we used to do was, we've been very active about this. It was very up front, very often was, whenever new people moved into The Castle, Tommy White's Castle, and for all I know, Tommy White's still alive in France and collecting the revenues from that. Maybe he finally sold it.

GASSER: What's the story? Had he not sold it?

SISSON: No, it was a rental for all those years and about every year or every other year, somebody, whoever had moved in it, would move out and then we had, a 02:13:00Mountain Drive committee would go and visit them and they would tell them, they would know nothing about Mountain Drive usually, because the house was rented from, by this rental property company. Tommy White had been living in Paris for years and years. He was an old friend of Bobby Hyde's. That's the kind of story you'd get from Jack Boegle. But, there's this rental company that rented, that ran rentals, so people would show up at The Castle that knew jack-diddley about Mountain Drive. So, we'd have to visit them and inform them that they lived on Mountain Drive and that was a community and The Castle was used every year for Twelfth Night and for Robert Burn's birthday and we, of course, would clean up. We would do all decorations and preparations. All they had to do is just be there and enjoy the party. But, this was the way it was done on Mountain Drive. 02:14:00And we were able to pull that off every single time that I was there, except once. There was one year when we had to move the party down to Frank's house, though, for Twelfth Night and Robert Burns because the people up there just wouldn't let it happen. They just couldn't see it. Although, we made damn sure they came to the parties at our place that year so the next year, they would be... But we, Mountain Drivers had a way of doing that and for most people, with a little bit of imagination and goodwill, after being invited to a few parties and so on, they'd become entranced with it. As I say, we'd get subsumed in the community. There were a few people like Mrs. Washington Atlee Burpee, who couldn't make the adjustment although she did in one way or another, try, we decided to make behind Floppy's house, there's that sort of triangle land there. We decided, there's a horse pasture, there was a horse pasture there, probably 02:15:00still is. But, we decided to make that a public park, a Mountain Drive park. And she donated, we leaned on her for a donation since she was wealthy, what the hell. What we got was a, hundred pounds of seed, grass seed for the park. You know...

GASSER: ...a small contribution.

SISSON: Yeah, so, those were some of the issues and things we struggled with and I'm sure there are people still continue to struggle with. I'm out of those kinds of concerns, but I was very involved in them then. I'm very political and I used to, I was always organizing some damn thing because, for instance, when that woman had gone off the edge of the bank on the bottom of Coyote Road, I organized the first Mountain Drive Association. I got together with Marty, who's always real good and political and a few other people and we got a Mountain Drive Association. 'Cause I said, "Listen, downtown, we've asked them over and over and over again for a guardrail." They had little reflector sticks saying, 02:16:00(makes a sound uuh uuh as if someone had just fallen over the edge). But, guardrail to go around up there. But they just wouldn't pay us any attention, so I said the one thing that people downtown understand is block voting. I had to introduce sort of that kind of consciousness to the Drive. But, we, a few of us, prevailed; Marty and me and a few others and got up the first of the Mountain Drive Association. Chris Schertz, Walden Schertz, she's not Chris Schertz anymore, that was honorary anyway, but Chris Walden was also a very political, she understood politics. She helped get the Mountain Drive Association, the first Mountain Drive Association.[21] After I left, they did the Mountain Drive Fire Protective Association whatever, and did the Fireman's Ball.

GASSER: Of which I believe Frank was in charge?

SISSON: Right, right. That was after I left.

GASSER: What other ways did Mountain Drive interact with downtowners, with the 02:17:00people downtown, when you were on the Drive?

SISSON: Well, one of the things we noticed was that downtowners kept stealing our parties. You know, Summer Solstice is a Mountain Drive party. That was the party I told you about with Neely. We did Lysistrata. We did Midsummer Night's Dream one time at Neely's place with, oh, liberally, we, including the dog fight, I am the wall and every damn thing you can imagine thrown into the play within the play of Midsummer Night's Dream. Mike and Laura Peake were friends of Dame Margot Fonteyn and she came out. They didn't tell anybody that she was going to be there 'cause she's a rather shy celebrity. We'd ogle and people whispered, pointed and gesticulated and observed her sitting on Neely's porch watching it. They told us that she got tears in her eyes and started crying and she said, "I didn't think people did this anymore. You know, when I was a child 02:18:00in England, this is how people entertained themselves. They had summer musicals and festivals and plays and in the modern world, you never see it anymore. This is the first place I've seen it in America." So, but, so, one thing was, Mountain Drive was always getting its parties ripped off. So many people kept coming up to the Robert Burns Festival, and of course, we had to have downtowners in it because the Bagpipe Band were all downtowners and they had relatives and friends who, but I mean it just kept getting bigger and bigger and pretty soon, it was being held down at the Holiday Inn as well, you know, with Mayor, fucking, Don MacGilliavry as the emcee of Robert Burns night, you know I mean (makes a sound oogh). And Summer Solstice, of course, and Renaissance Pleasure Faires and probably others, too numerous to mention.

GASSER: Did you interact, in any way, politically in the downtown area or with 02:19:00arts or in some way, in some way, good way, with the downtowners or...

SISSON: Oh, sure, we interacted in a good way with them, but there was a mystique to Mountain Drive, which partially we fostered to keep building inspectors off our back and to keep our property taxes lower. That was an active conspiracy. The fact that some nosy woman with a last name like Stranger or Savage or something like that, has finally gotten on to our act, but for 20 or 30 years, people have been making a real effort to subvert the damn downtown...

GASSER: I keep picking up wonderful little bits from Susan and we were talking again about Rock Around the Crock and she was going, she told me the story of how it got to be Rock Around the Crock. Susan?

SISSON: Well, at the wine cellar that everybody sat around and drank wine at Pierre Lafond's place. One day, Dick Johnston and Jack Boegle were there and 02:20:00Kajsa Ohman, who was later married to Gene McGeorge, was in drinking wine and yakking and they told her about the party and she said, "Rock Hudson!! Oh, well, I guess it's going to be kind of a rock around the crock." And everybody laughed. The story was told over and over and over again and everybody laughed some more. Then, eventually, that got to be the name of the party. It was on the little lovely invitations.

GASSER: There are a couple of other questions that I had still yet to ask you. One was about the plays that you did: Lysistrata and Midsummer Night's Dream and I was wondering about the rehearsal times and you can elaborate perhaps a little on how your rehearsals were done and staged.

SISSON: Yeah. Bill did very heavy rehearsals for about a week beforehand and 02:21:00Lysistrata was a very major work. That was a much more serious work, for instance, it was Bunny Bernhardt, not Jan Lurie. I was trying to think of Jan Lurie. It was Bunny Bernhardt with a, extensive theatrical experience. And that was much more of a play, even though we did our little Mountain Drive things to it. But, we rehearsed from about 10 in the morning until about 2 in the afternoon probably for 5 days before that play. Furthermore, we had been doing rather serious rehearsals on it, individual parts, for probably, probably 3 or 4 weeks. We were more serious about Lysistrata than we were about some of the other things. There was a heat wave right about that time, a horrible heat wave. 02:22:00So, finally, we adjourned. A whole bunch of us women had, we revolted against Bill Neely and I took them..., you notice I was often doing this to Bill. That was just because we were both Leos, he used to say. I took all the women and we went and sat in a cold, one of a, in Cold Springs Creek. We hiked partway up Cold Springs Creek, sat in a nice dappled shaded cold pool and read all our lines for several hours afterwards. As I say, we rehearsed that probably for 3 weeks almost continuously. We'd get together in hot tubs and do our lines and talk about the roles and then the next day, rehearse them and then do hot tubs and talk about our roles and rehearse them.

GASSER: So, how was the casting done?

SISSON: Bill did it. I don't know how he came up with it. That was his own magic. Although, Dick Johnston was very much a part of that casting process. He 02:23:00was very much a part of the organizing.

GASSER: And Midsummer Night's Dream?

SISSON: Midsummer Night's Dream was a Bill Neely production start to finish and that was rehearsed about twice before it was put on. He took the play within the play and rewrote it extensively and we all had various different parts. I didn't participate in that particular production. I was in the audience for that one.

GASSER: What was the aura like when you were in the audience?

SISSON: Oh, they were always such wonderful things. That was one reason I wanted to. I'd been in all the Mountain Drive productions for a few years and I wanted to sit one out and just enjoy it. Floppy's son, Oliver Andrews?, no, Floppy's son, which Floppy's, one of the, the Floppy's son who played the harp, who was 02:24:00the professional harpist and moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia, and was married to Allen Watts daughter.[22] That Hyde child, except he was an Andrews...,

GASSER: I should know, sorry. . .

SISSON: ...that Hyde played his harp at the event and Bill Neely played the cello. We had one or two other very nice instruments. We had a couple of recorders play. And the fog came in. At the beginning, they played, this person, Andrews, I think his name was, something Andrews, I don't know why I'm having mental break but I am, but anyway..., he had his, did his [inaudible], which he did so beautifully. He'd arranged it for the harp and then we'd had another 02:25:00couple of lovely classical pieces done. Then the play started. Right towards the end of the play, the fog came up from Santa Barbara. That fit very well into the climax of the play within the play from Midsummer Night's Dream because it all happens in a mist in the forest. But, unfortunately, that fog got into the instruments. If you think about it, a cello, a harp and recorders and it affected the sounds. All of a sudden, they were going, instead of (sound effects), they were going (sound effects). It sounded like people were playing under water and they had to give up. Also, there was a dog fight in the middle of that which may be on, you'll hear that on the tape. Everybody laughed about it because somehow or another, there always managed to be a dog fight in the middle of Mountain, any Mountain Drive production, no matter how hard people tried not to have it happen. This time it happened and it brought down the house because it was almost as if whatever lines were just before it, they were almost 02:26:00on cue, the dogs came. Afterwards, several people asked if we had set up the dogfight.

GASSER: Bravo! The next question I have is about..., you said that you were also an editor for a time for the Grapevine...

SISSON: Yeah, I don't know if I got credit for it, as usual. Maybe some man got credit for it. But, yeah, for about a year there, Marty and I, after Sue and Jack left it off, it went for a while in '64. It went for a while without being published and so, Marty and I got it going again. Oh, gosh! There's just so many memories, looking at these things.

GASSER: How did you gather, in editing, what were your chores?

SISSON: Trying to get people to write stories and writing stories and getting, let's see, Chris Walden Schertz, who was also, this was all sort of part of the Mountain Drive Association. We were trying to go political with it. Also, we got 02:27:00together, and once a month, and cranked them out. It took about a day for us to produce it. We are missing, we are missing the years that I did it because I see 1967 and 1972 here and the last year I see here is 1964 with Jack Boegle. In between this and this is probably another 12 issues of the Mountain Drive Grapevine...

GASSER: You don't know anyone who might have those, would you?

SISSON: I don't. But then, Dick Johnston. They might be in Dick Johnston's stuff. He was involved with it, also.

GASSER: Well, thank you again, Susan. If there's more, we'll turn this back on. But now, to supper.

SISSON: Great.