The Son of Saroyan Also Rises : Icon’s Offspring Moves Beyond Literary Preoccupation With His Family and Into a Contemporary Crime Sage

With the publication this fall of the dark, kinky “Rancho Mirage,” Aram Saroyan is taking his distinguished family name into uncharted territory. The book--a true-crime saga about sex, psychosis and homicide--is not in the same league as his sensitive personal memoirs and collections of minimalist poetry. Nor is it anything like the work of his father, William Saroyan, the literary icon whose sweet, magical novels and plays brought cheer to Depression-era America.

“I can see Pop shaking his head and saying, ‘Aram, trying to make a buck,’ ” the son says with a wry laugh. “But then he would have said, ‘Good for you.’ ”

With “Rancho Mirage,” Saroyan effectively concludes his longstanding conflict between commerce and art. Commerce won.

Over the last three decades, Saroyan, 50, has been a successful serious writer, receiving critical praise but not much money. Although he gained a measure of notoriety for his one-word poem, “lighght”--which sparked a congressional controversy in 1968 after winning a $500 award from the National Endowment for the Arts--he wasn’t able to convert his literary reputation into life-altering megabucks.

Saroyan’s biggest payday was $75,000 for “Trio,” a modest bestseller about his mother, Carol (who is now married to actor Walter Matthau), and her best friends since their Manhattan debutante days, Gloria Vanderbilt and Oona O’Neill Chaplin.

Despite an endless money crunch, Saroyan and his wife, Gailyn, tried to make art while raising a family. As much by necessity as desire, they maintained a no-frills bohemian lifestyle, from macrobiotic diets to natural childbirth. For 12 years, their home was a converted barn, heated by a wood stove, in Bolinas, a reclusive artists’ colony on the coast just north of San Francisco.

“It took us a good 10 years to notice we didn’t have the things our parents had,” Saroyan says.

After three projects fell through in the mid-’80s, he finally awakened to a fundamental reality: He needed to make a living.

Writing a mass-appeal book about a sensational murder was only one of his concessions to commerce. Four years ago, soon after moving into a Thousand Oaks townhouse, Saroyan finally gave up the free-lancer’s independence and entered the everyday world of 9-to-5. It was then, says his writer friend Carolyn See, that Saroyan “went from enfant terrible to mature grown-up.”

But it wasn’t easy. “Getting a job was a wrenching thing to do,” Saroyan admits.

It also meant, in effect, giving up his dream of “doing something comparable to William Saroyan,” he says. “I’ve taken survival more importantly than a little immortality.”

A BOY AND HIS DAD

In July, after spending a few years learning public relations, Saroyan became communications director of the Job Training Policy Council, a federally funded nonprofit corporation based in Oxnard. But his abrupt transition from quintessential longhaired hippie of the ‘60s to PR Man of the ‘90s neither offends nor surprises friends. Some wonder what took so long.

“Dealing with his own life and getting himself on an even keel to lead a stable life were always the main issues with him,” says Jerry Nicosia, author of a biography of Jack Kerouac.

Putting his family ahead of his writing, his reminiscences make plain, enabled Saroyan to ease the pain of his own childhood. By the time he was 8, Saroyan’s parents had married and divorced each other twice. Their first marriage, when William was 35 and Carol 18, was by all accounts a disaster, leaving psychic scars on Aram and his younger sister, Lucy.

In an effort to decipher his own life and understand his father’s, Saroyan wrote the memoir “William Saroyan” and “Last Rites,” a journal of his father’s death from cancer in 1981. They were intimate looks at the renowned writer that revealed his troubled private side.

William Saroyan was raised in Fresno, the fourth and youngest child of Armenian immigrants. After his father’s death in 1911, he lived in an Oakland orphanage from age 3 to 8, an experience that his son believes closed him emotionally.

In “William Saroyan,” Aram wrote: “In a sense, it would not be inaccurate to say that the child survived this period of his life in a manner more or less parallel to the way the lake would survive its winter--by freezing. Or perhaps, in this case, it would be more accurate to say that he crystallized. For in freezing, his surface and interior did not become opaque and impenetrable. He remained, like the lake, a mirror--but the consistency of his inner nature had changed. It was no longer fluid. It was hard now, like a glass mirror. And in this sense, perhaps, he became a potential artist.”

But not, apparently, a caring father and family man. It was this dichotomy--between William Saroyan’s public image as the beloved man of American letters and his son’s perception of him as an abusive husband and father--that was difficult for Aram to deal with. As a boy, Aram couldn’t fathom why the man whose books dripped with sweetness wasn’t the most wonderful, empathetic father in the world.

Some of his father’s fans and relatives felt betrayed by the son’s tell-all books. There was even an editorial in the Fresno Bee denouncing him. It didn’t help when California magazine headlined an excerpt from “Last Rites” with “Daddy Dearest.”

But Saroyan doesn’t believe the books are exploitative. If anything, he says, doing “Last Rites” helped him make peace with his father. Estranged for the last 3 1/2 years of his father’s life, they reconciled as the elder Saroyan lay dying in a Fresno hospital.

“Now, at 50, I realize, God, what an amazing guy he was,” Aram says. “I miss him. I miss his sense of humor--we could both laugh at things together. As his son, I couldn’t appreciate him as much as I would have liked to.”

In the foreword to “Friends in the World,” his 1992 reminiscence of the ‘60s, Saroyan explains that he turned to writing “as a possible means of coming to grips with the emotional confusion of my situation (with my father).”

BOHEMIAN GROOVE

But Saroyan’s reasons for becoming a writer go beyond self-analysis. To bright kids of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, especially in New York, serious writers were idolized like today’s rock stars. To Saroyan, who cut his teeth on the works of the Beat Generation, the possibility of being a cultural hero enchanted him, he says.

After going through the motions at the University of Chicago, New York University and Columbia University, Saroyan dropped out of college in the early ‘60s and began writing poetry. Publishing poems in the Nation and the Paris Review, he was part of a New York underground scene that included Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac and Ted Berrigan.

In 1964, Saroyan started a literary magazine, publishing the work, among others, of Andy Warhol and William Burroughs. The venture made no money, and neither did his poems--once in a while he would sell one for a whopping $100--but none of that mattered. He was a young artist at a time when the country seemed to be paying attention.

“The high culture of that period was also the popular culture,” Saroyan says. “On that level, it was a breakthrough. To me, it was also profoundly liberating, a way into my own life.”

In the fall of 1965, Saroyan sat down in his Manhattan apartment and typed a single word in the center of a blank page: “lighght.” The poem, he says, is a variation on the phenomenon of light, especially how it relates to his generation, the first to grow up with television. In the ‘60s, “light got a little thicker and time slowed down and the quality of space became more emphatic.”

George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, wrote in the August, 1981, issue of Mother Jones magazine: “The poem . . . may be one of the most important poems of the 20th century (and) is probably the shortest poem of significance yet published.”

The hyperbole was less about the poem’s literary merit and more about the furor around the National Endowment for the Arts monetary award. For more than a decade, before Robert Mapplethorpe really blew their minds, conservative critics of the NEA, including Ronald Reagan, used the poem as an example of boondoggling and nearly dismantled the NEA.

“The Mother Jones headline was ‘The Most Expensive Word in History,’ ” Saroyan says with a smile.

For Saroyan, “the 60s meant happiness.” He admits spending a lot of time getting stoned and hanging out with other young writers, “learning the parameters of the scene (while) keeping up each other’s courage with our companionship.” But he also was learning the hard knocks of being a serious writer, the toll it takes on body and soul.

“I have friends who died being successful bohemians,” Saroyan says. “Today, I see people my age who are gifted but who insisted on staying in this group, and it’s beaten them so bad. They have to spend so much time on ego maintenance, they can’t get any work done. They’d be very happy to sell out, but there are no buyers, and that hurts.”

MY FAVORITE YEAR

In 1967--the Summer of Love, Saroyan points out--he met artist Gailyn McClanahan on his way to see his editor at Random House. He remembers they both shared an appreciation of sculptor Donald Judd. She remembers their being “like instant soul mates.”

Their marriage in 1968 and the birth of a daughter in 1970 brought out a sense of responsibility in Saroyan. After a 1972 misadventure in England--he and two friends proved comically inept in trying to finagle a publishing deal--Saroyan moved his family to Bolinas and made writing secondary to his children: Strawberry, now 23; Cream, 20, and 17-year-old Armenak, who is named for his great-grandfather.

“Aram never socialized in Bolinas, not even going down to the local hangout,” Nicosia says. “He was totally into being with his kids. It was almost as if he were making up with a vengeance for what he didn’t get from his parents.”

In the mid-’70s, Saroyan began writing prose, mostly personal stories about his father and mother and himself. In her 1985 review of “Trio” in The Times, Carolyn See advised Saroyan to “start telling his own stories.”

Saroyan agrees he has tapped the family well dry. “I pretty much used it all.”

When the Saroyans moved to Thousand Oaks in 1987, money was scarce, creating tension at home. Out of desperation, he says, he began looking for a job. “I knew if I didn’t do this now, I’d be too depressed to write.”

Aside from teaching writing at UCLA Extension and reviewing books for The Times, he worked for a bit as an agent and began learning the PR business, eventually landing his present job.

The couple went through a midlife crisis in reverse: Instead of running away from responsibility for one last existential fling, they buckled down and, gulp , conformed. Gailyn put aside her art career--a painterly realist, she has had one-woman shows in New York and Beverly Hills--and took a regular job with a Northridge furniture company as an interior designer.

“I want to sock some money away,” she says, “and be comfortable in my old age.” Which was the same motivation that drove Saroyan to his latest book.

A couple of years ago, he was having lunch with a writer who wanted to do a true-crime book. Saroyan, who was acting as the writer’s agent, loved the idea as soon as he saw a photo of the subjects: a beautiful young blonde sitting on the lap of a distinguished elderly man. When the writer had to drop the project, Saroyan jumped in and wrote “Rancho Mirage” (Barricade Books), which bears the subtitle “An American Tragedy of Manners, Madness, and Murder.”

Although Saroyan’s move into true crime surprises his mother, she thinks the genre plays to his strengths. “I always thought he was best in a journalistic sense and would make a marvelous reporter,” says Carol Matthau, herself a published author.

(Saroyan won’t comment on reports of a rift between him and his mother. Matthau confirms they haven’t seen each other “in quite a while . . . but there isn’t any family feud.”)

Indeed, a funny thing happened to Saroyan on the way to the office. He discovered that he likes the grind.

“You’re isolated as a writer, so I always envied people who could get up early and drive to work and fit into society,” he says. Then he adds with a smile: “This has been the happiest year of my life.”

DID THE DAME DO IT?

“Rancho Mirage” contains the standard gruesome elements of the true-crime genre but also goes deeper, revealing “a complex, morally ambiguous crime,” says Thousand Oaks author Aram Saroyan.

Robert Sand, 69, was a wheelchair-bound millionaire with a boundless appetite for unconventional sex. His wife, Andrea, a ninth-grade dropout and former high-priced call girl, was 39 when Sand was found slain in 1981, stabbed 26 times at their condo in Rancho Mirage, a ritzy enclave near Palm Springs.

Andrea Sand, victimized by men her whole life yet beautiful enough to manipulate them, was probably schizophrenic. Whether she was crazy enough to kill her husband is the essence of the story.

A recent article in Kirkus Reviews called the book “a knife-edged retelling . . . through a film of ice,” and praised Saroyan for his cool writing and objectivity.