California’s Bitter Cliche Gets Fodder

Of course it happened in California. Where else would 39 keyboard-tapping monks, holed up in a $10,000-a-month adobe mansion in what the real estate agents here tout as “the Beverly Hills of San Diego,” choose to “shed their containers” and hitch a ride to the Next Level on a spacecraft said to be trailing the Comet Hale-Bopp?

Iowa?

Kansas?

The county medical examiners who brought down the bodies in refrigerated trucks Thursday told of finding little travel bags near the dead, packed for the trip. Some had carried five-dollar bills and loose change. This money, it was whispered outside the Colina Norte mansion, was to cover the toll fee for crossing into the beyond.

“How could anybody want to kill themselves in such a beautiful place?” a woman named Jill Kooken was saying after the trucks rumbled away to the morgue. She was a tourist from Chicago. She said mere curiosity had drawn her to the place where the California cultists died, along with the fact that her daughter wanted to watch the television crews work. She wore a bandanna festooned with happy faces.

Of course, most of the dead were not exactly from California. They almost always come from someplace else, drifting out from the corn states, the Southwest desert, the Eastern cities, to make their stand on the continent’s edge. William Money, first of California’s legendary cult leaders, was a Scotsman who migrated to Los Angeles in 1840 only after--his telling--he received his marching orders from Jesus on a New York street corner.

Jim Jones founded his Peoples Temple in Indiana and obliterated it in the Guyanese jungle. And yet, because his church gained prominence in San Francisco, he was to go down as one more piece of evidence in the case of Normalcy vs. the Lotus Eaters. So, too, will these poor lost children of something called Heaven’s Gate be attached to the list of crazed Californians. It will matter little that, according to the driver’s licenses and passports they tucked carefully into their kit bags, all but a few had come from elsewhere--New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Arizona.

The cliche has been fed anew. It is a well established stereotype. Listen to journalist Bruce Bliven, writing about California in 1935: “Here is the world’s prize collection of cranks, semi-cranks, placid creatures whose bovine expression shows that each of them is studying, without much hope of success, to be a high-grade moron, angry or ecstatic exponent of food fads, sunbathing, ancient Greek costumes, diaphragm-breathing. And the imminent second coming of Christ.”

Callers to talk radio--its own sort of cult, no?--were quick to make the connections Thursday, linking the madness at Rancho Santa Fe to Manson and Jonestown and beyond.

“Why does this stuff seem to happen only in California?” Alan from Vista wondered aloud on one AM talk show. “It must be the water or something.”

“Let’s hope it’s not the water,” the show host replied earnestly. “I mean, that’s another conspiracy theory we can get into later. . . .”

Well, it does no good to be overly defensive. Perhaps there is something to this notion that geography can influence lunacy. Why do so many cults come to attach themselves here? It is a question that has been asked for as long as there has been a California. Curt Gentry, in “The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California,” listed the leading theories:

“According to one, in moving to California people wanted a new start; they shopped not only for a new job, new house, new furniture, new auto, new friends, but also for a new religion. . . . Another explanation had it that California was so democratized, so lacking in a clearly defined society, that people craved something extra-exclusive. Still another thesis claimed there were so many other distractions in California life that religion, to compete, had to be startling, sensational, different.”

It’s possible that some of these mystic travelers expect too much of a place. To grow up in, say, Fresno is to regard the California Dream as something of an inside joke, a booster’s hustle. The literature, and cult-awareness programs, are filled with case studies of disappointed migrants who came here seeking transformation, only to find themselves no less miserable than they were back in Des Moines. Remember that Manson, son of Cincinnati, headed west with the dream of becoming a Beatle, not a mass killer.

And maybe it is, most simply, the weather. As John Steven McGroarty, poet-historian, pointed out a half-century ago: “Los Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies--no day passes without the birth of something of a nature never heard of before. It is a breeding place and a rendezvous of freak religions. But this is because its winters are mild, thus luring the pale people of thought to its sunny gates.”

Finally, tolerance must be added to the “Why California?” list. Certainly the state can be forgiving of weirdness. Across the dial, the radio talk kept evolving Thursday into debates over what differences, if any, there were between the Heaven’s Gate travelers and the early Christians. They all died for their religious beliefs, declared one caller after another. From there, the discussions typically would lurch toward the enigma of Dr. Kevorkian.

Indeed, Rancho Santa Fe had taken little notice of the newcomers at 18241 Colina Norte. “Meet your new neighbors,” the owner of the house had told Bill Strong, who lives next door. “They’re going to be opening a convent.” The conversation occurred last fall, while the two men hosed down their rooftops in anticipation of a brush fire. Strong recalled that his reaction was only to laugh: “I thought it was a joke.” Still, when the vans with out-of-state plates began arriving with loads of young strangers and computer equipment, nobody seemed to feel a need to get nosy.

“They seemed odd,” said Tom Goodspeed of the Rancho Santa Fe Polo Club, which had contracted with the newcomers to design a Web page, “but living in California, odd is nothing strange to us.”

Not that this particular piece of California would ever be confused with some of its funkier corners. They could easily have taped “Dallas” in Rancho Santa Fe. The main difference between the Beverly Hills of San Diego and the real thing is space. No overbuilt lots here. Everything is spread out, isolated. The houses are set apart from one another by circles of accouterments, horse arenas giving way to small orchards, small orchards giving way to tennis courts and pools, the courts and pools giving way to lush lawns.

At the entrance of the Heaven’s Gate house Thursday was a chaotic scene. Satellite trucks, camera crews, reporters, all waiting to interview somebody, anybody. The only people talking for the record were the residents who knew nothing of the dead, but who had plenty to say about the distasteful intrusion they brought to the neighborhood. One woman offered this view from the saddle of her horse, while a block away the bodies were being packed.

In the end, these 39 people left as they came, as strangers. Nobody here knew them. A waitress at a pancake house a mile away was interviewed nonstop Thursday because, as she put it, “it’s been speculated that I may or may not have served them once or twice.” This anonymity lent a decidedly detached quality to discussion of their demise. The gallows humor flowed early and free.

They were strangers who died strangely, and now they will be boxed up and sent back to wherever they came from. And those who knew them best will search for answers in it all. And how many will begin by saying, everything was fine until they got to California?