- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Unhoused City
- Transnational City
- Racialized City
- Greenwashed City
- Georgia Heritage
- Mississippi Heritage
- Florida Heritage
- Roadside Heritage
- New Mexico Desertscapes
- California Waterscapes
- New York Landscapes
- New York Streetscapes
- Imagining Bel Paese
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- Authentic New Orleans?
- In Progress: Jacksonville
- CONTACT
PLACE: THE VALUE OF HOME PART 3
Chuck and Mary initially pitched their tent in the historic Movie Colony of Palm Springs, renting a house across the street from the former home of actors Janet Leigh (Psycho) and Tony Curtis (Some Like It Hot). But the allure of homeownership, which had been a unifying principle of their marriage from the beginning, was too strong to resist. Two years later, Chuck and Mary bought a house around the corner from the rental and proceeded to give it a full makeover, reenacting in the Movie Colony their Covina project of a decade earlier.
Dad had seen enough of the iconic post-and-beam, mid-century modern architecture of Palm Springs to know that their new house needed fewer walls and a lot more glass in order to take in the spectacular view of Mount San Jacinto and capture the Movie Colony vibe. Within no time, he rolled out an ambitious home improvement plan, hiring a crew to blow out the back of the house, incorporate a portion of the pool deck into the living area and enclose the whole addition in window walls. This was Dad's way of claiming his territory, putting his personal signature on his desert home. A curious neighbor, drawn by all the racket and wondering what the new owner was up to, dropped by one day and after listening to Dad explain all his big plans, asked, "Why didn't you just buy a bigger house?" He obviously didn't know my father.
But Chuck and Mary encountered the same problem that had bedeviled their earlier efforts to conjure up a home that would make sense of all the hard work, sacrifices and satisfactions they had experienced in their scramble up the ladder of wealth and status. The problem was coherence, or rather the lack thereof. The Palm Springs remodeling project was launched without an overall plan or "aesthetic vision," and the effect was more mishmash than mid-century modern. Holdovers from their French period which made the migration from Covina to Palm Springs stuck out like a sore thumb, the last thing one would expect in a Movie Colony home. A pair of 19th-century Louis XV settees, a gilt bronze Louis XVI cartel wall clock, a marble-top black commode with chinoiserie finish, a landscape painting in the style of Corot—these represented everything mid-century modern disdained. If Mom and Dad had been interested in postmodern pastiche, the French antiques might have made the cut. But the postmodern aesthetic left them cold. Why? Because for them it lacked coherence, that elusive quality that were looking for, not only in their home but in their life.
It didn't take long before Dad became dissatisfied with his second foray into home remodeling and interior design. This wasn't the kind of DIY job he was used to, which required a Skill saw, power drill, sledge hammer and strong back. He needed to enlist professionals to help transform the empty space he was creating into the meaningful place he had been dreaming of since the West Covina starter home, maybe since his childhood home back in LA.
According to brother Mike, Dad experienced an epiphany when touring the home of screen star Bill Holden of Sunset Boulevard fame. Holden bought his 4,559-square-feet, 5-bedroom, 5.5-bath trophy home in the Movie Colony in 1966, and lived there for eleven years, so it seems likely that Dad got his first peak at its interior in 1977, when Holden put the property on the market. Mike recalls Dad saying that he was floored by the "complete vision" of the modernist interior, from the furnishings and finishes to the LeCorbusier backlighting. Determined to bring such a vision into his own home, Dad tracked down and hired the visionary himself, Palm Springs-based James Callahan, "designer to the stars and the Sultan of Brunei," in the words of one realtor who was pitching a home that had received the full Callahan treatment.
Thus began Chuck and Mary's deep dive into modernism. Bourbon bric-a-brac was out; glass, chrome and sleek lines were in. Most of the antiques headed back to Abell Auction from whence they came, except for the landscape that now hangs above our fireplace, which Mom somehow managed to intercept before it reached the auction block and send our way. When the dust, din and drama of the Callahan makeover was over, the Steffens finally had their trophy home. In a marriage of two postwar strivers who were engaged in a project of self-presentation through interior design, they had worked their way through the art history textbook, beginning with their French chateau on the top of the hill and culminating with Callahan's modernist creation in the desert. It was as if Chuck and Mary were trying on different architectural styles to find the best fit, the one that materialized in space their dream of success. If their new home was not quite in Holden's league, it was a worthy addition to the Movie Colony. Chuck and Mary had spent ungodly sums of money on the project but were pleased with how it turned out. It fit like a glove.
While the modernist movement was going full bore in the Movie Colony, Chuck and Mary doubled down on their investments in commercial real estate, perhaps no coincidence considering the eye-popping fees and markups charged by the designer to the stars. In 1977 they sold the apartments in El Monte and Monterey Park, and bought a 435-unit complex in Las Vegas, a 4-hour drive from Palm Springs if you take the highways, which they rarely did, opting instead for backroads that cut through the desert from Twenty-Nine Palms to Amboy. A stretch of this route was unpaved. I mention this detail because on one occasion my speed-demon father lost control of the station wagon in which they were traveling, and rolled it across the burning desert sands. When the car finally came to a stop right-side up, Mom, who was sitting in the passenger seat, panicked at the sight of pinkish goo all over her blouse and pants, which turned out to be strawberry yogurt that she had packed in an ice chest for her health-conscious husband. This was one reason, among many others, that Mom came to dread these regular runs to Vegas and back.
The home remodeling project and the new business venture seem to have lifted Dad out of his malaise. Or maybe the cause and effect was the other way around: the lifting of the malaise may have been the decisive factor allowing him to undertake these ambitious enterprises.
Either way, Dad seems to have recovered a sense of purpose and direction at just the moment when his sons were leaving home. This was surely no coincidence. For the first time in his married life he could savor the sweet taste of free time unburdened by the daily grind of parenting. Raising four boys, each of whom had different needs, interests and personalities, had taken its toll on him, another source of stress to go with his adequate-man syndrome. When Mark, the last bro standing, left home for college in 1975, Dad was more than ready to explore the possibilities of being an empty nester. Nowadays, when the four brothers get together and the conversation turns to Dad, as it inevitably does, it's as if we are talking about two completely different people. Mark probably has the best perspective on this double vision, as he was the only one of us who was able to observe Dad's behavior as the countdown of resident sons went 4-3-2-1-blast off. He believes that "young Dad," the one Mike and I had to contend with growing up as surly teenagers in West Covina and Covina, had morphed into "tired Dad" by the time the family reached Palm Springs. This distracted, convalescing Dad was the one he and Dan knew during the years 1970-1975.
As the house emptied out, an opening was created for yet another metamorphosis. From the chrysalis of tired Dad would emerge reborn Dad. This abrupt about-face was perfectly in character for a man who could never stand still, rest on his laurels or stop striving. As part of his middle-age renaissance, Dad went back to school, first at a local community college, where he enrolled in Spanish language and history courses, and later at the University of California Riverside, a fifty-minute drive from Palm Springs, where he earned a BA with a double major in History and Philosophy. He even took a few graduate seminars in preparation for a MA in Philosophy.
In lock step with his immersion in the humanities, my Renaissance father also rekindled the old flame with dermatology, both as a clinician and researcher. He joined a medical clinic in Palm Springs, which allowed him to see patients without the headaches of running a business, which had been a major factor in his decision to walk away from his Covina practice. He eventually decided to give private practice one more try, renting an office and hiring a staff of receptionists and nurses. As best as I could tell, Dad was never happier than when seeing his desert patients with their skin cancers, who included the aforementioned Bill Holden and who, he told me, "think I'm God." On top of all this, Dad mastered an entirely new sub-specialty, becoming a board certified dermatopathologist, which entailed making regular trips to New York to study under one of the preeminent figures in the field, A. Bernard Ackerman, with whom he co-authored the book Neoplasms with Sebaceous Differentiation, a 751-page tome published in 1994. Dad dedicated the book to Mom.
When all this was happening, I took Dad's intellectual journey for granted or, even worse, dismissed it as yet another case of his all-too-familiar pattern of turning the page and never looking back, never taking stock, never making amends. How differently I see things now that he is gone. I am simply blown away by the creative energy that he was able to summon and channel toward productive ends during this come-back period of his life.
Yet, as he acknowledged in the book dedication, behind it all was Mom. There was no Chuck without Mary.
You might be asking yourself why I have written so much about my father and so little about my mother. I've asked myself the same question, many, many times. The reason, I have come to see, is that in our family, Dad was the one in the driver's seat, the one in the public eye, the one in our faces (at least mine and Mike's), when we kids were living at home. Mom, on the other hand, rode shotgun, avoided the limelight and showered her children with unflagging affection and good humor. If I have less to say about my mother, it is partly because I wasn't paying close enough attention to her, for which I am ashamed; partly because I feel an instinctive affinity with people who are simultaneously driven and redeemed by their flaws, which might apply to Dad but not to Mom, whose flaws, if there were any, escaped my notice; and partly because I am a historian by training who is most comfortable working with documents, of which Dad left many and Mom very few.
Let me tell you a story about my mother and her invisible presence. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, when Dad was hard at work transforming himself into a top-tier dermatopathologist, a decision was made to host a series of annual symposia in Palm Springs, starring the renowned Doctor Ackerman, Dad's mentor. Dermatologists, pathologists, and dermatopathologists from across the globe would converge on the desert resort to enjoy the nice winter weather and sit at the feet of the master. The symposia would last for days, sometimes a full week. Dad agreed to handle the local arrangements, which involved booking meeting places, overseeing hotel reservations, settling bills, mediating disputes and misunderstandings, babying big egos and making sure that Herr Doktor Ackerman received his honorarium in a timely fashion. But as Dad would be the first to admit, it was my mother who did the lioness's share of this thankless leg work. The moment one symposium ended, she would start working on the next one. This went on year after year. I recently did a quick Google search, looking for announcements of the symposia in old medical journals. I found plenty of them, which included local contact information in Palm Springs for those planning to attend. Does Mom's name appear there or anywhere else? Nope. Mom did not leave a paper trail or fingerprints. She would have made a great cat burglar.
By the 1990s the cat burglar was tired. Tired of hair-raising drives to Vegas, tired of being a landlady, tired of real estate, tired of organizing symposia, tired of sweating through the blistering heat of Sonoran Desert summers, tired of watching her beloved irises shrivel up and die no matter how often she watered them, tired of nursing a needy husband and four no less needy sons. What she wanted was (1) to sell the Vegas apartments; (2) to get out of commercial real estate for good; (3) to wash her hands of whatever professional activities my father and his colleagues might cook up in the future; (4) to pull up stakes and leave the Movie Colony; (5) to pitch a new tent at the beach, specifically Oceanside, a two-plus-hour drive from Palm Springs; (6), to grow her irises and watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean rather than behind the 10,800-feet Mount San Jacinto; (7) to take walks along Carlsbad Beach, where she liked to collect the polished stones that are now prized possessions left behind for family and friends; (8) to take a good, long rest.
The balance of marital power was definitely shifting for Chuck and Mary. In his come-back iteration, Dad was anything but tired. On the contrary, he was raring to go. At first, reborn Dad agreed to consider selling the Vegas property but only on the condition that they roll over the money to buy an even bigger apartment complex, such as one he had his eye on in far-off Kansas City. He agreed to relocate to Oceanside, but provisionally and only on weekends. During the workweek they would continue to live in the Callahan trophy home and he would continue to see the patients and run the practice he had grown to love.
It would take several years of negotiation to find a marital modus vivendi, but in the end Mom got most of what she wanted. In 1999 Chuck and Mary sold their home in Palm Springs and bought one in Oceanside. In a repeat of the Covina home-sale debacle, they took a big hit. The Callahan imprimatur didn't seem to matter much to anyone except Dad, and the money he spent on the remodeling turned out to be, in purely financial terms, money down the drain. Two years later, they sold the Vegas apartments for $2.8 million, paying the capital gains tax rather than deferring it through a 1031 exchange, as they had done with their LA properties. Dad continued to make one-day commutes back to the desert to assist with surgical procedures that required the presence of a dermatopathologist, but he eventually found his footing in Oceanside, joining the medical staff of the Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base located a few miles away from their new home.
Had Dad morphed once again, shedding his reborn skin to become wise Dad? Had he come to accept the truth that there was no Chuck without Mary?
Not exactly, not fully, not yet.
Chuck and Mary. Breakfast Table Oceanside. 2007