Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled. In another sense the Sixties did not truly end for me until January of 1971, when I left the house on Franklin Avenue and moved to a house on the sea. This particular house on the sea had itself been very much a part of the Sixties, and for some months after we took possession I would come across souvenirs of that period in its history–a piece of Scientology literature beneath a drawer lining, a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land stuck deep on a closet shelf–but after a while we did some construction, and between power saws and the sea wind the place got exorcised.
I have known, since then, very little about the movements of the people who seemed to me emblematic of those years. I know of course that Eldridge Cleaver went to Algeria and came home an entrepreneur. I know that Jim Morrison died in Paris. I know that Linda Kasabian fled in search of the pastoral to New Hampshire, where I once visited her; she also visited me in New York, and we took our children on the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. I also know that in 1971 Paul Ferguson, while serving a life sentence for the murder of Ramon Novarro, won first prize in a PEN fiction contest and announced plans to “continue my writing.” Writing had helped him, he said, to “reflect on experience and see what it means.” Often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on “Midnight Confessions” and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.
Most of your references do not resonate with me because we had our own. But the Manson murders were obvious here as well. I may be a bit older than you. For me there were a few things that still linger, Pall Mall and Camel cigarettes, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg and the Vietnam war. And girls. And going to parties and there was no problem driving home with a skinful.
I still don’t know how I ever made it home in one piece driving Coast Highway in LA in the 70s with a bottle of so of bourbon in me.
I’ve told my children and they don’t believe it.
I don’t blame them. I have a hard time believing it myself and I was there.
I ran out of Joan Didion stuff to read all too quickly. But she’s one of those writers you can go back to time and time again.
I feel the same way.
The 60s ended in 1979
It’s nice you have a definite answer for that.