Chapter 21
Let the Synanon games begin ... Encountering the self and other startlements ... Kandy, Sandy, and Stacy Keach
MARK ABRAMSON: I was very interested in alternative lifestyles, the idea of the Woodstock nation, talking it up a lot. There were enough of us who were thinking of that, and we met. I did an introduction: "Why don't we live communally? We have a lot of talent in this room, lots of energy, we've even got lots of money, we're all very successful, we've been there, so let's think of what else we can do with our lives." We went around the room, and everybody had an entirely different idea of what they wanted to do. Including, "I don't want to belong to any kind of group," or "I don't want to do anything," from "We should be politically active, support Chavez's grape strike," to "Let's go away and buy four hundred acres and make our whole commitment." Totally chaotic, and I'm pissed, because I had a very specific idea in mind. One person wrote me a letter saying she was very upset: "Why can't we be more politically active, why can't we help other people, why are we so selfish? In this age, when we really need to help each other, and black people are struggling for their lives, and the poor migrant workers, et cetera, and all you want to do is go off and live off the land and probably off those people." A typical late Sixties letter. Very disturbing.
So we decide to have another meeting, just for the people who are interested in alternative lifestyles, so we can be focused.
It's in Judy Collins's living room on West End Avenue, packed, there's got to be thirty people in the room, most of them people I've never seen before.
JUDY COLLINS: Here we were, this kind of upwardly mobile jumble of creative folks, mostly Upper West Side.
MARK ABRAMSON: And two very good-looking black guys with scarves around their necks. Very different from the rest of us, who were sniveling Jews and New York WASPs from the prairies and New England.
JUDY COLLINS: They were from Phoenix House, the drug rehabilitation center. I met them through Nancy and Tom Hoving. The Hovings had me to dinner, and there was this big articulate black man, Kandy Latson, who had escaped from Synanon.
MARK ABRAMSON: Synanon was a famous drug program in California which became a cult. The founder of it went on that kind of cult power trip. Dangerous. Guns all round, nobody leaves. These two guys, Kandy Latson and Sandy Jackson, escape at two in the morning. They come to New York, to Phoenix House, and start running programs there.
JUDY COLLINS: Nancy Hoving became friendly with Kandy. At dinner I told him—this big, articulate, sober man—that my friends and I, including Mark Abramson and his wonderful wife Janet, were talking about buying some land together. He said, "Well, you wouldn't dream of doing anything like that without encountering each other." I said, "What on earth is that?" and invited him to the meeting, and Sandy came too.
MARK ABRAMSON: So I'm saying, "We're all here for the same thing." But somebody said, "Wait a minute, let's be democratic, why don't we go around the room and everybody say what they're interested in." And it's chaotic again. Even the people who were into alternative lifestyles at the first meeting were now not into alternative lifestyles at all; I was the only one.
It got around to these two black guys, and Kandy said, "I've never seen people so untogether. I heard you was comin' here to do somethin' real specific, and you're all over the place. You need to get it together. What you people need is encounter. You need to play the Synanon Game."
The Synanon Game—what the hell was that? There was something about the way these guys talked. Kandy was extremely good-looking, charismatic. People started asking them questions. They said, "Well, we don't want to tell you too much about it, it's the game, the Synanon Game. You get yourselves together, and what you want to do, you do it."
It sounded really good. They said, "We'll have a group. And we'll run it, and you pay us, if that's what you want to do, because we're available and we'll be glad to do it."
A bunch of us said, "They're right. We're all over the place. Maybe that's what we should try."
A few weeks later we show up at somebody's apartment, to do this encounter group. Didn't know anything about it, scared to death. After that it was once a week.
JUDY COLLINS: It was a moveable feast, a different person's apartment every time.
MARK ABRAMSON: And different people would come and go. And then a lot more people came in. All kinds of people. Psychiatrists. You never knew who was going to show up.
Many were related outside the group. A lot of musicians, Judy's friends, people who worked for Judy, Judy's boyfriend at the time, Stacy Keach.
And eventually Jac. It had been going several months. Jac had been circling this interesting behavior, the way he did with drugs. He would ask us questions about the group. I think he was intrigued by it.
I remember talking to Judy: "Wouldn't the group be good for Jac? But would Jac be good for the group?" I was a little doubtful. I think Judy was positive that he should be included.
ELLEN SANDER: With me, Jac would go into the depth of our relationship to try to examine the power of the love we had, because he would feel so entirely different and at peace in a way that he told me he hadn't found before, and he was curious to understand the phenomenology of that. That's just the way his mind works. Everything has a technical reason which he theoretically can master. Maybe that's the dynamics of his searching. We're all searching for the mysteries of life and happiness and he apparently felt that it was a set of skills he could master, which on one level it is. On the other level, if you're going to have the authority in every situation that you're involved in, it's rather difficult to get to the central importance of interpersonal things. So that was always a dilemma.
Jac always had the authority in any situation in which he was involved. That was the basis for all of his relationships that I observed. Except ours, from time to time. It could be just very simple things, like, "I'm paying this person a lot of money. Does he really like me?" But as soon as Jac met this person and liked this person and admired this person, he would establish a relationship where he was in authority.
He wanted the depth of experience, but it was difficult for him to be vulnerable. Those two things competed and it puzzled him. Even though he would set up the situations, he would be puzzled about how people were responding to him.
JAC: Ellen is right. I was "in authority" in my relationships and preferred the safety of my chosen position, but at the same time I was aware that in shaping my interactions with people to such a model I was probably missing out on the juice of life.
When I was growing up, my parents routinely held up to me, as a paragon of ideal behavior, Zev Putterman, the son of the cantor at Park Avenue Synagogue. My mother would say in exasperation, "Why can't you be more like Zev?" Years later Zev got strung out on heroin, then found his way back through the Synanon Game. Zev was concrete evidence that encounter worked. On that basis alone I was intrigued. So I decided to try it.
My pace had been so frenetic that I was running ahead of who I was deep inside. In the small hours when there is no place to hide, I felt a big empty space at my core, rather like a partially inflated Macy's parade balloon that would have trouble staying aloft because it was not filled with its own authentic helium. For the first time I was really willing to look at my life.
ELLEN SANDER: Jac got me involved in the group. At first I flat out refused. I didn't like the sound of it. I was busy, I needed my time for more productive things. But when he kept saying it was very important for him . . . well, nobody wins many arguments with Jac. If something is important to him, he has a way of making it happen. So I eventually did join. Or I came to meetings. I never quite admitted that I joined. But I came to meetings in deference to him.
At the very first meeting, Judy attacked Jac, saying that she didn't think it was right that he make more money out of her records than she did. Which I thought was grossly unfair, to get him into that kind of a situation. She wanted to negotiate on a business level, but she was sitting in with it on an emotional level when he was trying to make himself emotionally available, with which he always had a difficult time.
MEL POSNER: Jac and Judy being in the same group therapy thing, it was insane.
JAC: I remember Stacy Keach, with the full force of his actor's intensity, assaulting me for not taking good enough care of Judy. That wasn't something to be argued out in front of people who had no direct involvement and didn't live the dynamic. I had two options: either scream at Stacy myself, or recognize that this was Stacy Keach the actor doing Stacy Keach. And why did the group leaders allow professional performers to act out in an encounter group anyway? They had the skill to intimidate and few of us were capable of handling that. To attack could look synonymous with telling the truth, but it wasn't necessarily so.
JUDY COLLINS: I think it was a painful time for Jac. I don't think he had a lot of experience with people sitting around and being forthright with one another, and the kind of forthright that was happening was just very painful.
JAC: I was scared and vulnerable, but I stuck it out and learned—for one thing, learned to keep quiet, which was hard for me.
MARK ABRAMSON: The interesting thing was how many people had issues with Jac, over all kinds of stuff.
ELLEN SANDER: "Why do you think you're different than we are, Jac? Just because you have money?" People would say things like that to him. Or he would try to express some area of difficulty, and people would scoff at him: "Oh, you don't have any problems."
JAC: I felt like some poor little Japanese soldier hiding in his cave near the end of the war, emerging into the light and being vaporized by flame throwers. First the light, then zap!
BILL HARVEY: Apparently they ripped him up and down and really tore him apart.
JAC: After the first session, it felt like I had reached down my throat, grabbed my asshole and pulled myself inside out.
BILL HARVEY: He comes into my office and sits down, and he is visibly shaken: "Boy, they really said some terrible things about me." And I said, "For Christ's sake, what are you listening to that shit for? Look at you. Look at where you are. You're so far ahead of them it's not even funny. You're just somebody to shoot at, that's all. When you're on the top, they shoot at you." That made him feel a lot better.
JUDY COLLINS: Of course there was hostility. Under the guise of honestly revealing how we feel about each other, let's not pull any punches. If we are going to be revealing, let's also be, if it strikes our fancy, not just honest but mean.
MARK ABRAMSON: To see Jac be in the group and not be in the group was quite extraordinary. I think it highlighted that interpersonal—I don't know if it's an empathic lack. Judy and I would say, "OK, Jac, what's the problem? Why do we get into friction? Why is there somehow this feeling of discomfort?" And Jac says, "Whatever you want to do, that's fine." He would never cop to anything. It was very difficult to get him to open up about anything of his own. There was a lot of emotion, people would get very upset, people would cry in there, and Jac was still a closed book.
ELLEN SANDER: I remember Mark once saying to Jac, "I want to thank you, but I never think that I can. You've done so much for me, I want to tell you how much I love you and how grateful I am." And Jac withdrew from that. I'm sure it meant a lot to him, because I know how he loved Mark. I think that's maybe what he always wanted from Mark, but he didn't know how to respond. He didn't know how to handle that.
In the middle of this group time, Jac's father was dying. He had a stroke, and Jac was terrified. He would go to see his father in this condition, and he'd never take me, and he'd come home devastated—to know that he was losing his father without any possibility of reconciling. He used to weep. And he'd say, "I don't want to die like that." It frightened him.
Maybe that was one reason why Jac was in the group. But in the group he never said a word about it. To this day I don't really know why he was involved in that group, except that Jac was always searching.
