I remember well how excited I felt being invited to a party at Tommy Smothers’ home in September 1968. Donovan was in town to headline a show at the Hollywood Bowl. During the week before this show Tommy hosted a party for Donovan, and guests included Janis Joplin, Cass Elliot, Steve Stills, Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell, Michael Ochs and his brother, Phil Ochs, and Tommy’s brother, Dick Smothers. And me. I couldn’t say whether this was a “typical” Hollywood party, but it seemed anything but to me.
Tommy’s house was high up in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. Like many houses in the Hollywood Hills, this house was cantilevered over the edge of a hill. After I drove up the winding road to the house, I found a non-descript wooden fence and the garage door (not unlike the amazing houses in Malibu that looked out over the Pacific Ocean). Luckily, that night, Tommy had someone stationed at the gate checking the guest list and giving directions to enter the house. This “bouncer” looked like any other canyon hippie, and he told me to go through a gate in the fence. Once through the gate I found myself walking on a stone pathway, which led to the front door of the house. To the right of the pathway, among the plants in the lush landscaping, was the top of a stone waterfall that emptied into the swimming pool, which was also cantilevered over the edge of the hill.
A huge two-story affair, this was the first Hollywood house I had seen with its own media room. The liquor flowed freely, people would steal away to the media room to smoke pot, and Tiger shrimp were set up in what looked like a multi-layered wedding cake.
Donovan performed on top of the very high diving board over the swimming pool for forty-five minutes, non-stop. Throughout his performance, people danced, wandered around the pool, drank, and ate. At the end of his serenade to the guests, he stood up, walked to the back of the diving board where he put down his guitar, ran forward and dived into the pool, flowing caftan and all. Some finale. The crowd of guests applauded like thunder.
Even more firsts were in store for me at this wild Hollywood gathering. Michael Ochs, who was head of publicity for Columbia Records and sponsoring the party, gave each of us a ticket as we arrived for the door prize drawing later in the evening. Murray Roman, a comedian and one of the writers on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, got everyone’s attention by doing a little banter, then pulled out a random ticket to read the number. Who would be holding the winning ticket, but Phil Ochs, one of the more famous “protest singers” of the day. Things became even wilder at that point.
Like many of the guests, Phil had been drinking. When he came forward to accept his “door prize,” he was handed a huge gift basket of wine, cheese, caviar, and fruit. With his basket in one hand, Phil climbed up to the top of the diving board. He began haranguing the crowd of “beautiful people” about how disgusting it was that we were all partying while our soldiers were dying over in Vietnam. Along with the other guests, I was stunned. As a final gesture he took his basket of bourgeois goodies and flung it out to the center of the pool. Before his death in 1976, Phil wrote a song called “Basket In The Pool,” and the lyrics speak of the events of that night.
Things settled down after Phil’s outburst, people went back to eating, drinking, and mingling. I continued to observe the “beautiful people” and made mental notes for my next column.
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