Chapter 24
Tranquility Base, but with sharp splinters ... Cannabis in Connecticut
JAC: Several months after completing my deal with Steve, I was introduced by a mutual friend to Charlie Bluhdorn, the honchissimo of Gulf & Western, the megacorporation that was the master tenant in our new office building. Making conversation, my friend said, "And Jac just sold his company to Steve Ross." Bluhdorn exploded. He was furious that one of the few precious independent music companies was in the hands of a hated competitor. He screamed at me: "What are you doing in MY building?"
Aside from the chance of running into Charlie in the elevator, our new offices were splendid. And the new working arrangement with Warner was all I could have hoped for. But one insight from the encounter group was that if I wanted to work on myself, I needed some distance from the daily rat race—perhaps a retreat away from the city. Ellen wanted that too.
ELLEN SANDER: When we first got together, Jac asked me what my plans were and I said, "Well, I'm thinking of moving to LA." I said the people were friendlier, there was more space, you could live in nature and still be in the city. I had California fever. I was into, "I hate New York, I can't live through another winter like this one." Paul Simon had said in 'The Boxer'—"The New York City winters are bleeding me." And Jac would say, "Oh, the New York City winters are bleeding you?" After a few more months I said, "You know, I really am on my way to LA." Jac said, "Please don't put me under this kind of pressure. I can't leave New York. What can we do to make this work?" I said I really needed a place that had more space, where I didn't feel the urban pressure constantly. We came to the idea that a country house where we could spend long weekends would take care of my needs.
JAC: I told Bill Harvey I wanted a place north of the city, about an hour's commute, and would he keep his eyes open? A few days later Bill said, "I think I've found something that would be perfect for you, in South Salem, just a few miles east of the thruway." I made arrangements to see it the very next weekend.
George was out of town so I took the limo up myself, not knowing what to expect, but trusting Bill's enthusiasm and taste.
The land was forty-six glorious rolling acres with a driveway that ran a quarter mile from the main road to the house. The house itself was a barn, built in the latter part of the eighteenth century, dismantled and reassembled, turned inside out so that the weathered wood gave the interior a stunning patina of antiquity. The owners had lavished money and love on it. The living area was a huge, beamed, atrium-like space, with a peaked ceiling twenty-six feet high, with eight-foot-wide windows up top and sliding glass doors at ground level. There was a sunken brick area with built-in couches and an equipment cabinet. The fireplace was large enough for a matched set of Great Danes on either side and a yule log that could burn for a year, and the stone floors were heated. It was wonderful and livable.
ELLEN SANDER: I had a deadline and didn't go with Jac. When he came home that night he said, "It's really wonderful. I can't wait to bring you up there. It's an old barn." I said, "You want me to live in a barn?" He said, "No, no, it's all been redone. It's been turned inside out. There's heaters under the floor, you can walk around barefoot in the winter, there's a huge swimming pool. I really want this place, I love it, and I want you to see it as soon as possible." I just heard it in his voice. Jac doesn't take to rustic things, he's not Mr. Country Boy, this is something he's doing for me, and whatever it is, he loves it. I said, "Jac, I don't have to see it. Anything you love that much"—
And when I went up there the building was beautiful, the property was exquisite. It was like someone painted a picture out of my dream.
Jac at "Tranquility Base." South Salem, NY, 1971
JAC: I bought it for $250,000, money from the sale. Ellen christened it "Tranquility Base," after the Apollo astronauts' first landing zone on the moon.
Marty Richmond had impressed me in Paxton days with his ability to get a wide range of tasks accomplished in good humor; he was responsible for winding down the project with as much style as could be salvaged under the circumstances. He was now at liberty, and I thought he would be the perfect choice to help me set up my new home in South Salem.
MARTY RICHMOND: Jac and Ellen had this huge king-sized bed built of thick wood beams, constructed by a friend of Ellen's and assembled in the room. No way anyone could move it after it was built. Jac put an English coat of arms over the top of it, four feet tall, five feet across, that he had found in some antique store in London. I hung it up for him, very carefully.
ELLEN SANDER: In the center of the living area we put a water bed and a hammock.
MARTY RICHMOND: One of the other bedrooms was turned into Jac's office, and another into Ellen's.
Ellen was on every company's list to get free records. After she started living there much of the time, the number of records arriving began increasing. The mailman would drive up and stack them on the porch. I think we were getting thirty, fifty a day, six days a week. With all that, there's not enough time in the month to listen to them all. The stream of stuff was coming in bags, most of which she never opened. Some she would listen to. Sometimes she would literally throw them up the stairs, and the top three she'd listen to. Or the ones with red covers.
JAC: I never saw so many records. The shipping containers alone would keep the fireplace going for days.
ELLEN SANDER: My room looked out over the pool. It was set into this beautifully manicured lawn. We kept it heated in the winter, there would be snow on the ground, the pool would be steaming, and ducks would be floating on the water, swimming around.
Jac, ten-lb. Hershey bar, and Cat 'Moon'
JAC: I loved to get loaded and run naked out to the pool, jump in, and stay there until my skin shriveled.
MARTY RICHMOND: All night, every night, there was steam off the pool because it didn't have a cover. A propane truck was coming every week.
JAC: Marty and I built a small studio adjacent to the living room, where we could pre-record artists. Cables snaked under the part of the floor that was raised wood and were hooked into a McIntosh C-28 pre-amplifier, one of the best sounding ever. Marty hung, God knows how, two Altec Voice of the Theater speakers in the northwest and northeast corners of the living room. They were supplemented by Bose reflecting speakers arranged strategically for either surround sound or quad playback, driven by 300-watt Crown amplifiers. It was a formidable battery of top-notch componentry.
MARTY RICHMOND: You could hear the music in Rhode Island.
JAC: Many weekends we invited guests. Sharing Tranquility added greatly to my enjoyment. With all the space inside and out, it was a wonderful place to entertain. I would come up from the city on a Thursday evening and go back on a Monday morning. Artists and friends would arrive late Friday or early Saturday and happily adjust to the quiet—sunbathing by the pool, reading, long walks.
ANN PURTILL: It was like being at a friend's house that you had been to many times. Very relaxed, very informal.
JACLYN EASTON: It was a very pretty house. But that barn wood turned inside out, it was splinter city, so you could not go barefoot, and God forbid you should put your hand on a banister. There were tweezers in every room.
ELLEN SANDER: Paul Williams would come to visit us a lot with his writings and we would read them. Others that we would invite, the first thing they would do was just fall asleep. They would sleep the whole weekend, just be wiped out on the water bed or in their room.
MARTY RICHMOND: For those awake, the weekend would be food and music.
ANN PURTILL: There was a monastery-like refectory table.
JAC: Either Ellen or I would cook.
Inside Tranquility
MARTY RICHMOND: Jac became a gourmet cook, doing Beef Wellington and all this Henry the Eighth kind of food—
JAC:—With a brief relapse onto a brown rice diet at one point. The meal might be followed by music pouring out of all the speakers, or a sixteen-millimeter print of a movie. One of my favorites, part of the deal with Warner, was a set of Roadrunner-Wile E. Coyote cartoons, which I thought hysterical, especially if nudged in that direction by a friendly toke or two.
Ellen decided to grow some grass. I kidded her about it, saying that it would never flourish in the soil of New York State. But our land extended across in the direction of Ridgefield, up to the Connecticut border, and Connecticut used to be a tobacco-growing state. She found a sunny spot a quarter of a mile from any surveillance. I forgot about it until she walked in at the end of Indian summer with an armful of plants twice her height. She and Marty dried and prepared it. I smoked some, it was Connecticut-strength, and I passed out. I dubbed it "South Salem Sledgehammer."
Ellen Sander and Jac toke some 'South Salem Sledgehammer'
For me, after twenty years of chasing the holy grail of music and business success, the house in the country was an oasis of serenity.
ELLEN SANDER: We had the encounter group over for a weekend. I was happy enough to be the hostess. It was more fun than anything. That was the most people we ever had up there. We just kept going at it, twenty-four hours a day. But then Kandy, who was supposed to be a recovered addict, had to be rushed to the hospital because he had been doing cocaine the whole time.
MARK ABRAMSON: Kandy was officially not using drugs, but he was. And he was still a con man. He was a wonderful person and taught me a lot, but he was bad news in many ways.
JUDY COLLINS: I came away thinking that kind of encounter, the deliberate attack to break down the ego, was destructive. And divisive. At the end of that time, none of us wanted to see each other, let alone contemplate owning any land together. It was very destructive.
JAC: I was pissed at Kandy's sneakiness and manipulation, but the group experience helped open me to myself and I decided to continue the personal work by different means. Many years later, in a long profile of me in Los Angeles Magazine, Merrill Shindler quoted a friend as saying, "Jac is obsessed with the perfect life." Merrill, with his reporter's cloak of confidentiality tightly wound around himself, would never tell me who said it, but it was intuitively correct, so right that it was one of those moments where you read something and your body shakes. I wanted to send that person, if it was a woman, a dozen silver roses, and if it was a man, perhaps a bottle of out-of-this-world 1945 Petrus Bordeaux. Other people obviously saw that obsessive perfectionism in me, and the encounter group enabled me for the first time to glimpse it in myself and begin to deal with it.
