Woodstock to Woodland Hills : Newsweek’s Hippie Cover Girl Says She’s ‘Still a Love Child’--25 Years Later

She was 22, stoned and dancing on her knees with a boy named Fantuzzi when the photographer from Life magazine captured a glowing Joan Bryant at Woodstock.

For many, the grainy black-and-white became a symbol, a summary, of all that was pure and impure about the hippie era: free love, dope and wide-eyed kids searching anywhere and everywhere for a way out of 1950s conservatism and the growing horror in Vietnam.

On the 25th anniversary of the seminal hippie celebration, the photo is on the cover of the Aug. 8 issue of Newsweek. And for Bryant, now a Woodland Hills resident, the past has come rushing back. The cover photo has brought a wave of media types, curious about a 47-year-old grandmother who owns a fashionable Malibu boutique and a French poodle named Pierre and is once again the poster child of a generation.

“The idea that you can change the world with love--we thought that was true,” Bryant said. “I still think that’s true.”

At her shop Wednesday morning, Bryant entertained reporters, answered media calls and conducted phone interviews with radio stations from as far away as Scranton, Pa.

Newsweek was due in the afternoon for a 25-years-later photo.

“It’s so surprising that people care what I have to say,” she said. “But I guess it’s part of the nostalgia.”

More than half a million people grooved to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. Now everyone seems to be looking to her for an answer to the proverbial question: Where are they now?

In Bryant’s case, she is more than 3,000 miles from Woodstock. As the Grateful Dead lyric goes: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Twenty-five years ago, Bryant was married with two children and studying costume design in college when she and a girlfriend hitched a ride from Bloomington, Ind., to Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Upstate New York. Somewhere in the purple haze she stumbled on Luiz Fantuzzi, an acquaintance from Bloomington.

“He was a bronze, exotic figure, and he only wore loincloths,” Bryant recalled with a chuckle.

The two got high, and far in the back of the crowd where it was difficult to hear the featured performers, began their sensual dance to the rhythm of an impromptu jam session. Bryant said she was so close to nirvana that she hardly noticed the photographer.

She said goodby to Fantuzzi--not to hear from him again until the Newsweek fanfare began--and went back to her husband. Fantuzzi, who keeps an answering machine in Topanga and is a traveling musician, called her when he saw the magazine cover.

Bryant’s first marriage eventually ended. Her ex-husband and the girlfriend she had hitchhiked to Woodstock with later married.

She came West in 1975 to pursue a career in film costuming and, like so many other Woodstock alumni, settled into a more traditional life.

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Now married 17 years to a politically conservative computer consultant, Bryant has traded in her love beads for a 2 1/2-carat diamond wedding ring and a Ford Explorer.

“A mommy mobile--that’s what my kids call it,” she said.

Although she has no plans to be among the expected 250,000 to attend this weekend’s Woodstock event, Bryant says she still remains true to many Woodstock ideals.

She’s still a vegetarian. Clad in a flowing dress printed with ethereal sea creatures, she spoke of angels and cosmic forces, of searching for the human thread of goodness. Her shop, Indiana Joan’s, smells of fresh flowers and Chilean flute music can be heard in the background. Between customers, such as actress Shirley MacLaine, she crafts jewelry and hat boxes out of discarded goods.

“I’m more disciplined and more focused now, and that’s very different than in those early years,” she said.

“But I think in my heart, I’m still a love child.”