From the Tiger Beat Archives, February 1972
It’s fantastic—I’m writing this column at one end of our enormous dining room table, about six inches thick like in some Knights and Ladies movie, and I feel totally different—like a baron or something!
Hey, guess what—I’ve actually got some real news this time! We’ve moved!
But I’ll tell you all about the house and what it’s like in a little bit. That’s sort of getting ahead of the story.
First, we’ve really wanted to move for some time—about six months. David never really felt like the big house was completely right. It was like we always sort of felt like visitors! The walls didn’t have enough color, and it was just too—well, modern, I guess, and it just didn’t really have our personalities in it! We always had the feeling, late at night, like we were going to have to get up and go home or something!
But there was another problem, too. We were located by some of David’s fans on the second day we were there. They just saw David driving and followed him home! That was okay, and we talked to them for a few minutes, but they told a bunch of their friends, and then those friends told their friends, and it just kept going until we felt like we were in a parade—only the parade stood still and the spectators drove by! It got so that the first thing we did when we woke up in the morning would be to wave out the window!
David loves his fans more than anyone, but he works about a twelve-hour day, and he really needs to be able to rest when he gets home, without having to be waving at people all the time and worrying about whether it will hurt their feelings if he doesn’t come out and talk to them! Anyway, after a lot of discussions, we decided that it was really time to move.
But then David got sick, and that slowed us down a bit, and as soon as he got out of the hospital, we started looking. We were lucky—we found this place almost immediately! The minute we saw it, we knew it was what we’d been looking for
Our moving day was typical Cassidy-Hyman togetherness. For about a week in advance, we’d sort of sit around looking at each other, and every once in a while one of us would say, “We’ll be moving in a week. Better go get some boxes.”
“Yup,” the other one would say, and then we’d sit around for a while, or play music, or turn on the TV and laugh at the soap operas.
The day before we moved, we decided that it was really time to get some boxes. We actually got up and made it to the door, but something came up—I guess. At any rate, there we were, the morning of the move, tearing frantically all over the San Fernando Valley, raiding supermarket trash bins for boxes!
We were hopelessly behind schedule by that point, but David figured out the fastest way ever to move. You simply pull out every drawer in the house and hold it upside down over a box. When one box is full, you carry it out to the car and start emptying drawers into another box. It is extremely speedy, and we were laughing and carrying on about how clever we were, all the way up to our new house, when we suddenly realized that we were going to have to unpack them, too. As of this time, a few days later, all the boxes are standing completely full all over the place, and we don’t know where anything is! So here we are, living in this beautiful house on bare wooden floors, surrounded by boxes of our belongings. Sooner or later, I suppose we’ll get everything under control, but I really I don’t know when! At least we managed to throw out some of the old junk that had been cluttering up our closets.
Let’s see, here’s what the house is like. You drive up this long, long driveway (the house is on about two acres of oranges and lemon trees) and the house is old, big, and Spanish with a big, dark wooden door. You go straight into the living room through the door, and it’s really big with a dark wood floor and big beams beneath the ceiling, and this gigantic fireplace that you could roast an ox In! It’s a very beautiful room, but there’s so little stuff in it, and so much of what is in it is in boxes, that it looks like the basement of a department store!
From there you step into the dining room, which is where I am now. It’s also very big, with the table I told you about, and the whole feel of the room is right in line with the feeling you’d have living in a big, drafty castle, except it’s more homey. I can’t wait until David and I have it together enough to unpack the kitchen and eat our first meal at opposite ends of the table, sliding the salt back and forth to one another like a hockey puck!
This is all sounding very palatial and majestic, but I’ve got to tell you that it has a really funky feel to it! That’s one of the things I really loved about it, and I think it was the thing that really sold David on it, especially after the more modern trip our last place was on!
The master bedroom, which will be David’s, is a kind of complex of three quiet rooms. There’s the main room, which is the actual bedroom, and a large closet. Then there’s a sort of listening room, where David will have sound equipment and musical instruments, I guess. And then there’s this absolutely tiny little room that David will use as an office—if he can fit a desk in it! This gives David all the space he really needs to be alone, to work, or whatever, without having to be bothered by whatever other insanity is happening elsewhere in the house!
I’m currently sleeping in the maid’s room (no jokes), but my permanent sleeping quarters will be this really far-out little guest house that’s behind the big house, out in the lemon trees.
It’s got a bedroom and a kitchen, and two little rooms, which we’ll probably use for storage and stuff. I can’t wait to get in there and start fixing it up! It’s all full of this neat pine wood, and I really think it’s going to look out of place.
Another thing I love about the guest house is that it’s kind of in the middle of a jungle! There are all these fruit trees behind it, and the grass is as high as your knees because it’s not really the kind of backyard where you mow the lawn—we want it to be as natural as possible, so we can feel like we’re about 1200 miles from the city! Right near the guest house is the swimming pool, and it’s really enormous. This summer, I have a feeling that we’re never going to get out of it!
From the outside the house is especially neat, with this absolutely enormous California Maple tree that grows up from the center of the big “U” the house is built in, and completely shades the roof. The tree is in the center of a big courtyard, and I think there used to be a fountain there, because it’s all tiled like there was once.
Of course, we’ve got decorating plans for every square foot, if we ever get around to it! I can just see us painting the entire house and then arranging our boxes for the nicest effect, because we hadn’t even unpacked yet!
Anyway, the people who lived here before us weren’t frightened by color, and they splashed a lot around, which is really nice because it’ll save us some work. There are deep blues and rust oranges, and we’re going to keep those colors going. In fact we’re going to paint the ceiling a deep, deep blue that’ll look like the night-time sky, and we’re going to look around for old Spanish furniture, really heavy and dark and old-looking, like hundreds of really far-out people have been using it–tables that old love letters were written on, and chairs that nobles sat on. And then we’ll have a ghost party and invite all the people who have ever owned any of these things, and we’ll share a silent glass of champagne with all these cobwebbed old ghosts in their stiff, dusty clothes. All right, I’ll drop it.
Anyway, that’s the story about our new house. There’s a ton of stuff I haven’t told you, but I’ll hold onto it and drop it cunningly into future chapters whenever I need it!
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