Gypsy Boots: Living at the Center of Eccentric Circles

Gypsy Boots, a disheveled figure in tattered sandals, shorts and a T-shirt, was standing on the doorstep of a Venice town house.

He was standing on his head. With one hand he shook a tambourine. His wild black hair spread on the ground around him.

Gayle Olinekova--a well-known distance runner who lived in the town house--was not expecting company. In fact, the two had never met.

“I heard a knock and opened the door, and I saw these two grubby feet--brown feet in sandals,” Olinekova said in recalling the incident. which took place a few years ago. “And I looked down and he said to me, ‘I eat the nuts and fruits! My name is Gypsy Boots!’ “

So much for formality.

The encounter was nothing extraordinary in the free-wheeling world of California’s most outrageous living health-food guru. It was only Gypsy Boots, the self-described living legend and Nature Boy, tracking down another disciple of health and bodily fitness.

Such things happen all the time.

“I don’t know how he found me,” Olinekova said. “But I was delighted. When I moved to L.A., people told me, ‘You’ve got to meet Gypsy! You’ve got to meet Gypsy!’ It was wonderful.”

Boots is 75 now, an organic-fruit vendor who has woven his way into the fabric of California culture. On his birthday last year the Los Angeles City Council presented him with a resolution. Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky called him as much a part of the city’s rich, colorful landscape as Mann’s Chinese Theater.

In a town seemingly weaned on eccentricity, Boots is a step beyond--a case of individualism run amok; a madcap, say-anything, do-anything symbol of all those things for which the city is famous: vibrancy, healthy living, free-spirited action.

He makes the scene at ball games and Hollywood fetes, at parades and tennis tournaments. Anywhere he can find an audience he’s bound to show up, dressed in his wild hats and crazy T-shirts, spouting his corny rhymes and slogans--all touting his philosophy of organic nutrition, exercise and sheer love of existence.

“I never smoked in my life; I never drank coffee in my life; I never got high on marijuana,” Boots said in a recent interview. “I only got high in a fig tree eating fruit--got high climbing way up in a tree and singing, ‘FIIIIG-arrroooOOO!’ ”

The gravelly voice rises to an excited shriek. It’s a voice damaged by years of raucous cheering at Dodgers baseball games, Lakers basketball games, Raiders football games and more. TV cameras still catch him on the sidelines: a frenetic figure holding up signs, ringing the cowbell he got while touring with band leader Spike Jones. He runs up and down the aisles with his Nature Girls--young blondes who heed his motto: “Don’t panic, go organic; get in cahoots with Gypsy Boots.”

Dressed in his running shorts, torn Hawaiian shirts and, occasionally, a multicolored beanie with a plastic propeller, Boots encourages that impression. He is likely to rip open a banana and consume it at any moment, just about anywhere. His hair, still black, hangs in scraggly locks to his shoulders. His hazel, close-set eyes gleam mischievously above a white beard.

Boots recalls times, during World War II, when he lived on a quarter a day in the berry fields and date orchards of Lodi, Vacaville and Sonoma. He picked fruit, slept in haystacks and under fig trees, and traveled the state with other self-styled vagabonds like his friend “Gypsy Gene”--killed by a jealous husband, circa 1955--and Eden Ahbez, who found unexpected fame in 1948, when he wrote a tune, “Nature Boy,” that became a smash hit by Nat (King) Cole.

In 1962, Gypsy Boots became a regular on the old Steve Allen Show. He was a hippie philosopher who rubbed elbows with the likes of Gene Kelly, Sammy Baugh, Dean Martin, Stevie Wonder and Marlon Brando.

“He would turn the stage into a madhouse about 30 seconds after he came on,” remembered Allen, who invited Boots to return for more than 20 guest appearances before his variety show went off the air in 1964. Boots would swing onto stage on a vine, wearing a loincloth, or coax Allen to milk a goat on stage, or whip up some organic concoction in a blender.

Much of that early fame has gone now. But at an age when many of Hollywood’s legends seem to be feeble or dying, Boots still totes his football into the street in front of his modest, blue-trimmed Hollywood home, firing long, arched spirals to back up one of his self-bestowed titles: the “Ageless Athlete.”

“Here I am now, at age 75, throwing the football better than I did 40, 50 years ago,” he said, voice rising. “I run up and down the sidewalk here and stop traffic and throw the ball 50 yards, 55 yards--throw bullet passes!

“A lot of people see me and say, ‘Oh, you’re living!’ Some thought I died, and some thought I went in a nut house. And the people who thought I was nuts are in the nut house. And me, who acted nutty, I’ve got to be doing something right. . . . “

As he has done for years, Boots makes a living selling organic fruit to celebrities and health-food stores scattered across town. He lectures at health shows and entertains at Los Angeles health-food restaurants such as the Sprout Garden and I Love Juicy.

“I’m not a professional singer, I’m not a professional dancer,” Boots is quick to point out. “But somehow, the people get a kick out of me. Just like people go to the zoo. The monkeys have no writers. I don’t have nobody writing for me.”

Growing old has meant something to Gypsy Boots: For half a century, he has browbeat everyone with the same health-and-fitness message--a serious message, underneath all the clowning. Everyone thought he was crazy. But now look at him: He’s got a pulse rate of 68; blood pressure, 131 over 80.

One recent day, in the deepening orange light of dusk, a van rumbled out of the Hollywood Hills, heading south toward the Sprout Garden Restaurant, where Boots was to perform. The vehicle, a 1975 Dodge (mileage: 180,000) is a Boots trademark. On the side is a six-foot likeness of a grinning Gypsy Boots. The rear doors are a forest of hand-painted Boots slogans: Nuts and Fruits and Gypsy Boots. Go Dodger Blue! Go Lakers! Go Angels! Go Raiders!

The restaurant is a two-story structure with an outdoor patio and candle-lighted tables. Dinner is uncooked, organic fare: sprouts, tomatoes, marinated cucumbers, fresh kiwi pie.

When the plates are taken away, a crowd gathers in the foyer. Patrons encircle the room on chairs and small couches and fill a wood-banistered staircase. Boots takes the floor wearing a feather hat, suspenders and a bow tie that reaches from shoulder to shoulder. As an organist plays, a singer takes the floor and Boots moves into action, stamping his feet, slapping a tambourine, improvising.

“Yahoooooooo!” he hollers.

One song follows another. In the middle of one, he looks for his wife, Lois, who is sitting out of view.

“Wait a minute!” he cries out, and the music dies. “Lois, would you please come down from the bathroom? God Almighty!” The crowd laughs, grins--can’t stop grinning. The foot-stamping resumes. The singer belts out “If I Were a Rich Man,” from “Fiddler on the Roof.” Gypsy dances. He and Lois do the Charleston. Patrons soon join in along with waitresses.

The romance of Gypsy and Lois, fodder for more laughter: The story comes across in bits and pieces in his nightclub act--quips about Lois’ chronic nearsightedness (the reason she married him); about the carrots she never ate; apocryphal tales about her studies of psychiatry in college. “And after 28 years with me, she needs a psychiatrist!”

Yet marriage has played a surprisingly important role in the life of this seemingly ageless social maverick. Boots can talk for hours about the unlikely courtship that brought together the conservative, academic young lady from Fort Wayne, Ind., and the snaggle-haired organic fruit salesman who never finished high school.

Both were living in San Francisco--Lois with her sister in a two-story Victorian home atop Nob Hill. Boots was already known around town as the “Nature Man,” a long-haired fruit seller in oversized jackets. Lois’ sister dragged him home one day from a gymnasium where she worked out--something to amuse her sibling.

“He was strictly for laughs,” Lois recalled. “Three months later we were married.”

On their first date Boots climbed to the turret of the sisters’ Victorian home. Never mind that it was nearly midnight; Boots threw open the window, singing out over the city: “Figarooo! ‘FIIIG-arrroooOOOO!”

It was a romantic gesture.

Family life would become a stabilizing force in Boots’ otherwise unstructured existence. Ultimately, the years of living in orchards and hay fields would give way to this home in Hollywood, to telephones, to tax bills. He would find himself a bread winner for a wife and three growing children.

The offspring are Boots’ greatest pride: Alexander, 31, is a classical pianist; Daniel, 27, is a trumpet player, artist and aspiring screenwriter; and Freddie, 23, is a flutist and saxophonist. Unlike Boots, they are scholarly and refined, good students who adopted serious pursuits.

Freddie, a music major at Los Angeles City College, said he is not a fanatic for health food. He eats at McDonald’s. He had a normal, happy childhood--neighborhood friends, family trips to the mountains.

“A lot of people wondered who this guy was,” he said of his father. “Everybody seemed amazed that I was related to him.” All three sons would be less flamboyant, less inclined to live for the moment.

Family life also helped cushion Boots’ disappointment over his entertainment career. Despite his notoriety throughout Hollywood--or perhaps because of it--he never became more than the zealous health fanatic from the Steve Allen Show. He did a few other shows--Mike Douglas, Regis Philbin--but he never really made it big in movies or on television. He’ll never own an Oscar. No star shines for Gypsy Boots on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“People told me I should go to Hollywood and I should be in the movies,” Boots recalled. “So when I came to Hollywood I told all the casting directors, ‘I’m from Northern California . . . I pick fruit.’ And they looked at me and said, ‘You’d better go back and pick fruit again.’ ”

The rebuffs have disappointed him. He shot a small segment for the film “Pumping Iron” with weightlifter Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the segment never made it onto the screen. He also appeared in a few scenes in “Childish Things,” a 1969 film starring Don Murray and Linda Evans.

Few other chances have come his way. But he dreams of writing another book. He dreams of opening a celebrity health retreat in the mountains. And dreams that his son, Daniel, the aspiring screenwriter, will write a movie about his father’s life: “Gypsy Boots--the Living Legend.”