Mel Lyman: Banjo, Fort Hill Community, Avatar, Kweskin...
Steve Trussel
beginning of his Fort Hill / Avatar Community, at which point I lost
contact with him. He was certainly a great banjo player, song writer,
and singer -- and he taught me to play the banjo, for which I'll
always be grateful. With the Kweskin band he was primarily a harp
player, but he sometimes played back-up banjo -- nothing like his solo
playing.
Since at least December 1994, there have been various postings about
him on alt.conspiracy, rec.music.country.old-time, rec.arts.books,
rec.music.folk, and alt.banjo, and I've been trying to find more
information myself.
Since many people have expressed curiosity, and there's quite a bit of
misinformation flowing, here are some articles I've located which at
least add a few "facts". (I'm not sure if these articles are
complete.)
I'd appreciate hearing from anyone with additional information.
Steve
http://www2.gol.com/users/steve
***************************************************************
Lyman's "Declaration of Creation"
(http://www.irdg.com/mep/nni/decovcre.txt)
Two articles by David Johnston, Los Angeles Times, Sunday August 4,
1985
Article by Roger Wolmuth, People Magazine, September 22, 1986
***********************************************************
~ DECLARATION OF CREATION ~
by Mel Lyman
I am going to burn down the world
I am going to tear down everything that cannot stand alone
I am going to turn ideals to shit
I am going to shove hope up your ass
I am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble
and then I am going to burn the rubble
and then I am going to scatter the ashes
and then maybe SOMEONE will be able to see SOMETHING as it really is
WATCHOUT
*************************************************************
Copyright 1985 The Times Mirror Company
Los Angeles Times
August 4, 1985, Sunday, Home Edition
MEL LYMAN: SPECIAL PLACE IN FAMILY; MAN THEY WORSHIPED AS GOD IS
NOWHERE TO BE FOUND
By DAVID JOHNSTON
I am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble. And then I
am going to burn the rubble. And then I am going to scatter the ashes.
And then maybe someone will be able to see something as it really is.
-- Mel Lyman
Mel Lyman often said he was God, the leader of a cosmic race.
"It is a race beyond this world," Lyman once said. "If people are
of my race they would recognize it. If not, it would never occur to
them."
To anyone who challenged the idea that he was God, Lyman would say
he was joking, just trying to shock them out of their complacency.
Almost every room of every house the Lyman Family owns from coast
to coast includes a framed color photograph of Mel Lyman.
Each Lyman Family house has a black vinyl notebook listing all of
Lyman's favorite movies under the heading "The Lord's List of All Time
Movie Greats."
It is a solid selection of pre-1976 films but curiously missing is the
title of the only feature film the Lyman Family was connected with,
"Zabriskie Point," in which two then-members of the commune starred.
Each day a "TV Bulletin" lists the old movies to be aired on
television so Family members can videotape any of Mel Lyman's
favorites that are not already in their collection.
But Lyman is nowhere to be seen.
His Family says that he died in April, 1978, after a lingering
illness. He would have been 39.
But there was no funeral and no death certificate, and the Family's
leaders will not discuss with strangers, or even some members, what
they did with Lyman's body, if he did die. They deny rumors that he
fled the Family and lives in Europe.
"I was told that Melvin died and I believe that," said Wayne
Hansen, a Boston businessman who belonged to the Family for 13 years
until he left in 1979. "If they didn't get a death certificate it is
because it really isn't anyone else's business. I have to take on
faith that he died."
George Peper, the Family photographer, said the secrecy stems from
the Family's experience with Rolling Stone magazine, which put Lyman
on its cover two issues running in 1971 with long articles comparing
the commune to the homicidal Charles Manson Family.
At the time of Lyman's purported death, Richie Guerin, a Family
leader, wrote: "There is no doubt in my mind that Mel is the Creator.
He is the center of Creation . . .. He makes me feel the Spirit. He is
next to God, if not God himself and although I feel that I wrestle
with it."
The dozens of framed photographs of Lyman that hang in the Family's
houses depict a man growing progressively ill. His private writings
suggest grave illness and speak intimately of approaching death.
Lyman wrote extensively, as many leaders of groups do. The
following are some of his last writings, which one of his wives, Eve
Lyman, said should not be read literally, but as metaphor:
"I know I'm done and I'll stop keeping that body alive. . . . It
really is a lot of dead weight and I don't feel its got much more use,
do you know what I'm saying, I was Emerson, I was Lincoln, I was Woody
Guthrie and many more but only for short periods of time and I used
those instruments because they were ready for me and I used Mel Lyman
in the same way and I am nobody, I just am. Don't be sad, I'll be Mel
Lyman as long as I can and in fact I may bring him back with a bang
and light him up like a neon bulb and if I don't it's because it
wasn't and if I do we will have a real Melvin Christ on our
hands . . . "
"Melvin is like that to us," she continued. "He is not recognized
by the world, but he is recognized by us.
Today, Lyman is worshiped by his followers, not so much as God
incarnate but as a greater man than they, a great spirit.
The world, Eve Lyman said, perceives God as Father, or perhaps
dead. But the Lymans conceive of God as a quality of experience and
attachment to the universe, a sort of spiritual high.
*******************************************************************
ONCE-NOTORIOUS '60S COMMUNE EVOLVES INTO RESPECTABILITY; AFTER 19
YEARS THE LYMAN FAMILY PROSPERS AS CRAFTSMEN AND FARMERS
By DAVID JOHNSTON, Times Staff Writer
Today they are prosperous builders who remodel homes for the stars,
the 117 members of a notorious '60s commune who a decade ago wrote off
the rest of the world as hopelessly corrupt and withdrew so completely
that they adopted their own calendar to number the years.
They are the Lyman Family, an eclectic band of musicians, artists,
writers, philosophy students and psychic explorers who comprise one of
the few '60s communes to survive the era.
The 60 adults have stuck together for 19 years, evolving from
poverty, drugs and even a bank robbery into an unusual version of
familial joy with 49 children, 10 of whom are now adults. There are
eight other young adults who have joined the Family in recent years
after growing up elsewhere.
They have taken a different, and yet in may ways parallel, path
from the rest of America. They believe that their success in raising
charming and studious children shows that their unique life style is
worthy of examination.
Unusual Magazine
Now they are coming back into the world, publishing an unusual
magazine without ads or credit lines, called U and I, to explain
themselves. They are hoping for the ultimate in their vision of
success, hoping the rest of America will recognize their
accomplishments and perhaps even emulate their
life style.
Prosperous today because of their industriousness and a small
fortune inherited by one of their leaders, the Lymans own two
Hollywood Hills mansions worth at least $4 million, with formal
gardens, a peaceful stone pond filled with koi, a swimming pool and a
classroom for the children. There is a huge underground garage where
they keep their old white Lincoln limousine, two sports cars and a
luxurious recreational vehicle, and surrounding all of this is a high
brick and mortar wall.
They also own a scenic 280-acre Kansas farm, a Manhattan loft, a
hilltop compound of eight residences above Boston's poor Roxbury
section and a Martha's Vineyard retreat, plus three deep-sea pleasure
fishing boats.
In all they own 20 homes, each filled with Victorian furniture and
dozens of paintings by their benefactor, Thomas Hart Benton, and their
own artists. Their Hollywood Hills homes feature a small museum
celebrating American history. Another room holds thousands of old
recordings dating to 1902, each packed in a protective sleeve in case
of an earthquake.
Picture of Rudy Vallee
A framed letter from the late Henry Miller hangs on one wall above
an elegant old pool table. A picture of Rudy Vallee, whose singing the
Lymans adore, hangs on another wall. A 1955 calendar featuring Marilyn
Monroe stretching on an expanse of red satin adorns one room.
They dress casually, even sloppily, the men often in blue-collar
work clothes. Some of the men say they do not own even one suit.
Master craftsmen, the Lymans remodel homes for actors Dustin
Hoffman and Richard Chamberlain, producers Steven Spielberg and Larry
Gelbart and others made rich by Hollywood.
Their own homes reflect extraordinary craftsmanship. In one Kansas
farmhouse the wooden banister's finial is a delicate carving of a nude
woman. Lavish rugs that one of the women hooks enhance the Hollywood
Hills mansions.
The word commune evokes images of free love or, at least, casual
relationships. But the Lyman Family has evolved strong values about
marriage and sex, mixing traditionalism with the practical needs of
their life style.
Typical Marriages
Marriages typically last three to seven years, but there is no
divorce, in their view, because when a couple breaks up, they only
stop sharing the same bed. Former couples are expected to maintain an
enduring emotional relationship.
Having many homes in five cities means that if the strain of
getting along is too much, though, a couple who break up can live in
different cities until time heals their wounds.
Adultery, a serious social offense, is unheard of. The singles
among them are celibate. Homosexuals are not welcome, they say.
The Lymans, a strikingly attractive group, believe women should
wait on men. The women raise the children communally and, until last
year, most of the children were educated at home.
None of them are alcoholics, drugs are rarely used anymore and only
two members are in psychotherapy, family leaders say.
All of this, they say, indicates that their life style works better
than that followed by most Americans.
Most evenings, after an early supper for the children and main
adult dinner at 9 p.m., guitarist Jim Kweskin of the Jug Band, a
popular '60s folk group whose members included singer Maria Muldaur,
and other musicians gather in the parlors of whichever homes they are
then living in and play their own music.
Sometimes they talk about their visions of Emerson and Thoreau,
Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, Woody Guthrie and other great men
they count as heroes, their conversations fading only with the ink in
the sky.
Model Students
Their children are model students all, according to Kansas school
authorities. Their teen-agers, except for the few who are married, all
say they are virgins.
But as the children come of age some of them are exploring what to
them are the outside world's exotic offerings. Several have moved out
on their own for a few months before coming back, one with a husband.
So far, only one young man has left for good.
More than anything else, the Lymans say, they believe in caring for
one another.
They say America has become so corrupted by greed that spirituality
is beyond most people's understanding, causing millions to flock to TV
preachers whose God is Mammon.
Slowly, they contend, greed and lack of spirituality, is destroying
democracy and freedom in America. "Selling the soul for money, that's
our President's way," said George Peper, 39, the Family photographer
and one of its leaders.
"We are our own separate universe," said Jessie Benton, 42, the
daughter of artist Thomas Hart Benton and the Lyman Family's most
influential member. "We are a microcosm of the world. We have
everything you have -- even criminals."
Eve Lyman, 33, the Family historian, said the Family has "all the
elements you find in the rest of the world, we just put them together
in a different way. We have all the same problems, too, but we deal
with them differently."
They also view life differently.
Friend and Admirer
"MASH" co-creator Larry Gelbart and his wife, Pat, are among the
many Hollywood people who have hired the Family's company, Fort Hill
Construction Co. The Gelbarts have become friends and admirers of the
Lymans.
"These people have values," Pat Gelbart said. "They work so hard,
and in a world full of people who gouge and cheat, they are honest.
Their children are delightful and very well educated.
"But I want to protect them, too, because they are kind of, oh,
naive . . . sort of supermystical. Once we were talking about what a
great man Abraham Lincoln was when one of them looked up at the sky
and said, 'Did you see that fleet of spaceships go by?' "
They came from diverse backgrounds. The children of Kennedy men and
Brooklyn laborers, they all became '60s cultural revolutionaries,
witnesses at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. They dropped out of
Harvard, Brandeis and Michigan State to seek God in vials of acid;
they found him in an odd-looking banjo player named Mel Lyman.
Esquire profiled Lyman in a 1968 piece by screenwriter L. M. Kit
Carson titled "God Is Back -- He Says So Himself." The title seemed
apt since Lyman called his first book "Autobiography of a World
Savior."
Back then they were so poor they gathered waste fruit and
vegetables from the Boston produce mart, cutting off the rotted parts
and throwing the rest into a common stew. Their home was open to
anyone who dropped in and lots of hippies crashing on drugs did just
that, staying until someone put a hammer or a saw in their hand.
The Lymans toyed with Ouija boards as oracles and the language of
astrology became almost a second tongue. Even today the Lymans
sometimes refer to each other by their first names with astrological
signs substituting for surnames.
Trouble in 1966
The Lyman Family first came to public attention in a case that
helped redefine the First Amendment. In 1966, the Boston police
arrested commune members on 55 felony obscenity charges for publishing
four words authorities deemed unacceptable.
Surrounded by psychedelic flourishes, the words filled the center
two pages of the Avatar, an underground newspaper that featured as
many as five columns per issue by or about Mel Lyman. Avatar is a
Hindu word meaning God come down to Earth in bodily form.
Eventually the courts set the accused, and the four words, free.
In 1971, Rolling Stone magazine put the Lyman Family on its cover
two issues running, ominously comparing them to the homicidal Charles
Manson Family.
Writer David Felton, a pioneer in the impressionistic school of New
Journalism, warned that Lyman was forging a new style of
drug-and-personality cult that Felton called "acid fascism."
Deny Worshiping Manson
Today, Family members insist they never worshiped Manson, never put
his picture above a vase of flowers that were changed daily, as
several outsiders report they saw. Their deeds back then were no more
crazy than the times, they say.
"We did a lot of outrageous things just to get people to open their
eyes, to see what they were blind to," said Eve Lyman, one of seven
women who bore Lyman's 12 children.
Then, in 1973, three commune members robbed a federal bank, saying
they were protesting Richard Nixon's involvement in Watergate. Boston
police killed one bandit. (Another bandit, actor Mark Frechette, the
star of "Zabriskie Point," director Michelangelo Antonioni's savage
look at American decadence, later died in prison in what authorities
said was an accident. The third bandit, Sheldon (Terry) Bernhard, 43,
served his term and has rejoined the family.)
After that some of the commune children burglarized houses on
Martha's Vineyard and burned them down to cover their misdeeds. The
Family soon withdrew from the world, believing themselves badly
misunderstood.
Today, they call themselves the Fort Hill Community after the place
above Boston's Roxbury section where they first gathered in unheated
derelict Victorian buildings in 1966.
"This is not a cult by traditional standards because they don't
have a centralized belief system that will send them off to the South
American jungle (as Jim Jones' Peoples Temple did) and because you can
leave," said Len Grayson-Christi, a psychologist who specializes in
cult deprogramming and who has become a Family friend in the past
year.
"People stay here because they have been here a long time and this
is their life," Grayson-Christi said.
Grayson-Christi says the Lymans did not fall apart as the '60s
ended, as many other communal families did, because they withdrew.
'Blessing in Disguise'
"Once you isolate yourself from the world, as they did after
Felton's articles, all of your problems start to come up and you have
to deal with them. In a way the Felton articles were a blessing in
disguise because it pulled them right together," Grayson-Christi said.
"Their pathology, looked at from an outside perspective, is
obedience," Grayson-Christi said. "They want to get along and so there
is obedience to the situation. You want to be obedient not because
there is any law or rule but because you want the family to do well."
To stay together as a family they have created social devices that
prompt communication with one another. Their style of making coffee is
one device that engenders conversation, that helps create community.
A large cafeteria-size coffee maker would be efficient. Instead
coffee is made, mostly by women, two or three cups at a time in cheap
aluminum drip pots as members drift into the kitchens and ask for it.
When one of the men wants more coffee, he may get up and pour it
himself, but more often the men just lift their cups an inch or two
from the table and one of the women or girls refills it without being
asked.
"Women should take care of men, should serve them so they can be
creative," Jessie Benton said.
"The purpose of making coffee the way they do," Grayson-Christi
explained, "is to have people establish dialogues about anything --
fish, the farm, whatever -- so they have a sense of community.
"Their unspoken law is that you must struggle with the other
person," Grayson-Christi said.
Intense Relationships
The Family operates from intense personal relationships in which
each member is expected to reveal his doubts and fears and inner self
or else face others who prod him to open up.
Boston businessman Wayne Hansen said he left the Family in 1979
after 13 years because "I felt myself drifting further and further
apart. The commitment to be there has to be total. . . .
"Their life style forces them to constantly examine and reveal
themselves, and it is not easy to live when you are constantly
personally exposed. I found it very difficult to live with my insides
on the outside after a while, and I found I had parts of myself I
didn't want to expose," Hansen said, his voice trembling.
He said this exposure comes not from cathartic group discussions,
but from living in close proximity with "people who are very sensitive
and aware" of when another member withholds feelings and withdraws
emotionally even a tiny bit.
'Real Human Love'
"Their understanding of the essence of what people are is quite
advanced compared to the rest of the world because it's quite simple,"
Hansen said. Instead of psychological theories, "it's real human
love," Hansen said, adding that "I have no bone to pick with them. I
think they are wonderful people."
Intense closeness and flexibility helps people cope with their
innermost problems, Eve Lyman said.
"There are no secrets in a family," she explained while making coffee
in the kitchen of the restored old Boston home the Family calls
Elder's after the man who sold it to them.
"We all know each other and our strengths and weaknesses and
problems," she said.
"We have criminals -- we've had criminals -- but we deal with them
differently," Eve Lyman added. "We deal with each of them personally,
as a human being, just like we deal with everything on a personal
level.
"In society if you break X law you get Y punishment. That is not
true with us. One thing we have found is any system has terrible
drawbacks because it cannot deal with people's personal needs.
"We go by what we feel, with what's right for that person and
that's why we don't have criminals anymore," she said.
Obstreperous Sprite
To illustrate this, Eve Lyman told about an obstreperous sprite who
was not a Lyman. A famous playwright recently sent the small boy to
the family, hoping the Lymans could make him behave.
The Family had no success until one morning when the boy refused to
eat his cereal and threw a tantrum. A family leader, Faith Gude, 42,
the daughter of novelist Kay Boyle, got up and dumped the bowl on the
boy's head.
The boy was stunned, Eve Lyman said, that anyone else would act
that outrageously. Now, slowly, he is beginning to appreciate how his
conduct affects others, she said.
The Lyman Family's patron followed the winding yellow-brown dirt
road deep in the emerald country of Oz, got out the tools of his trade
and painted a picture of a broken-down farmhouse, selling the artwork
for $42,000, which is the sort of thing Thomas Hart Benton could do.
The proceeds from selling the picture paid for the farm.
"At first we didn't know anything about farming," said Dick
Russell, 37, the Family publicist and a former TV Guide writer. "The
crops failed and the animals died."
But the Family has learned to operate like a living encyclopedia:
Each time a skill is needed, someone learns it, almost becomes it, the
way the characters in Ray Bradbury's novel "Fahrenheit 451" became the
books they memorized. Each time one of the children takes an interest
in any subject from astronomy to zoology, he or she can almost always
find an adult in the community who has studied it.
In spring, when rains wet the nearby fields of winter wheat, many
people stroll across the hills kicking toadstools. Not the Lymans.
They have learned to hunt morels and the mushrooms' flavor enhances
their dinners for months.
Making Friends
Several of the men and women were assigned to learn farming skills,
and they started making friends among the locals, like Paul Jones, a
third-generation farmer.
"They've done a lot of growing since that first year," Jones said.
"They've learned how to farm and they don't waste a thing, but I can't
get 'em to use any artificial fertilizers, none at all."
In spring, when the snow melts and the wild plum trees blossom,
Lymans from both coasts descend on the farm for a few weeks. Although
there is work to be done, Benton Farm operates during these times like
a private vacation resort.
Over the years, the men rehabilitated the 50-year-old farmhouse and
then built a new house, up the hill, which looks just like the old
one.
One summer the men and boys built an innovative barn, designed by
member John Kostick, 43, a metal sculptor and one-time Brandeis
University physics major, that is a marvel of efficiency in this
community, according to Cassie Mather, managing editor of the weekly
Blue Rapids Times.
Most local farmers build their barns on flat land, lifting hay to a
loft and then dropping it down to feed animals.
The Benton Farm barn sits hard against a hillside, its floors and
lower walls made of limestone that the men and boys cut from a nearby
creek bed with hand tools.
The barn's top floor door opens onto the dirt road so trucks can
pull up and unload hay without lifting.
The cows and goats live in the lower story, their food dropped from
above. Manure falls onto concrete gutters that slope down to a pit on
the ground outside. A tractor scoops up the manure and spreads it on
the fields.
'They're Naturalists'
Mather, the editor who has covered Blue Rapids and environs for 26
years, said: "They're wonderful people. They live off the land;
they're naturalists.
"They produce their own food, they eat what they grow -- a lot of
farmers these days buy theirs at the store -- and they don't waste a
thing. They live within their means, unlike a lot of the city folk who
make some money, buy a farm and then go broke because they try to live
like city folk," Mather said.
The Fort Hill Community also saved some of the old skills of the
settlers who came here after the Civil War, when the local population
was five times or more what it is today.
A few years back they bought a rusty old sorghum mill from Clarence
Smith, an old-timer who, before he died, taught them how to raise
old-style sorghum, cut them when the first fall frost strikes, squeeze
the stalks for their green juice and boil it down over several days
into sweet molasses.
Each fall now the Family invites neighbors from miles around to
come and share the experience.
"America was founded on the rights of the individual," Peper said,
"but the essence of America is community. The way in which the
individual is supreme is community."
Richie Guerin, 39, the Family architect, said a sense of community
is what the Blue Rapids area has lost with the rise of cash-crop
farming and big machines.
Town No Longer Exists
"Bigelow, a town down the road that doesn't exist anymore, used to
have two threshers for the whole area," Guerin said. "When harvest
came, everyone would share them, everyone helping to harvest everyone
else's crop. "But now everybody has their own machines and they work
alone," Guerin added. "There's a lot of pride and vanity, a lot of
'I've got a bigger and newer tractor than you do.' "
David Gude, 45, a sound engineer and son of a famous Manhattan
talent agent, sees in that a parallel to other aspects of American
life. "Everyone wants to have their own space because it's easier to
go off on your own and not work it through," he said, observing that
growing numbers of adults now live alone.
"Nobody wants to feel any pain so they do everything they can to
avoid pain. But people don't learn except by painful experience," he
said.
'Lack of Remembering'
Peper believes that "there is such a complete lack of remembering,
of teaching," that many youths are growing up today without an
appreciation for democracy and education.
"Once we were talking with some teen-agers -- who grew up outside
(the family) -- about Kennedy's assassination and Miguel Rivera, our
neighbor in Boston, said, 'You mean George Kennedy? He was president
once.'
"And Joel Luna (a black youth from the Dominican Republic who
recently married into the community) said he didn't know who Martin
Luther King was," Peper said, shaking his head.
The Lyman children know about such things, even though most of them
have been home schooled. A few went to Kansas schools for a spell, but
when the Rolling Stone pieces appeared, the children were jeered and
beaten by classmates, Family members and Blue Rapids residents alike
say.
Letters of Acceptance
Recently, Corrina Kweskin, 19, wanted to attend college. None would
take her because she lacked a transcript. Then she took the Scholastic
Aptitude Test and got letters of acceptance from Columbia University
and Barnard, Sarah Lawrence and Reed Colleges accepted her and offered
aid.
She chose Reed.
"One of the things wrong with this society is that we don't look up
to anyone and it permeates our society," Eve Lyman said.
"Look at how we teach art in the public schools. They don't show
children pictures by great artists, instead they show children
pictures drawn by other children and say to them 'you can be as good
as anybody else.' But I can't. I can't be Leonardi da Vinci. But I can
aspire to be like him and I can appreciate what he has done.
"We don't show children great art to aspire to," she said, her
voice gaining force and speed. "Instead we teach children that to be
mediocre is OK -- but it's not OK. It's not."
Eve Lyman and her sister, Gale, 31, are the daughters of Abram
Chayes, a Harvard Law School professor who went to Washington with the
Kennedy Administration to become the State Department's top legal
counsel, and Antonia Chayes, who was the first woman Air Force
undersecretary, serving in the Carter Administration.
"My parents are typical liberals," Eve Lyman said, invoking a
political label that most Family members speak of with derision.
Friends brought Eve to Fort Hill 15 years ago, when she was 18.
Later Mel got her pregnant. "I wasn't legally married, and my parents
couldn't deal with it," she said.
When Eve and Gale joined the commune, "it broke our hearts,"
Antonia Chayes said.
"At the time, in the end of the '60s, this was a deviant style. It
seemed to us to be rooted in magic and in drugs and it had the
earmarks of violence. The Rolling Stone articles absolutely terrified
me, although my husband didn't believe it," she added.
"We wanted the girls to live what we considered a normal life, but
as a consequence of their joining there was a lot of hostility in the
beginning.
'Nothing We Could Do'
"We began to recognize there was nothing we could do and the only
way to keep in touch was to accept what they had done and to love
them," she added, noting that the Lyman Family encouraged them to
visit their grandchildren.
One day the Chayeses hired Fort Hill Construction to build an
addition to their house and were delighted with the quality
workmanship. And they began listening to stories about how the family,
most of them urban residents, learned to work the farm successfully.
"They have educated themselves to do work that takes a lot of skill
and a lot of discipline. Really remarkable. That told me their ideals
and the discipline of living together has to be somehow parallel,"
Antonia Chayes said. "It seemed to me instinctively that they were
maturing.
"They have to bear responsibility for their lives and I think they
are," she added. "It seems to me they are really happy. It also seems
to me that they are, as my husband said, no different than anyone else
of their own age -- they are questioning. They are sophisticated and
naive."
The second generation is coming into maturity now. The history of
communes in America is that the children leave when they grow up.
"That won't happen to us," Eve Lyman said. "Most of our children
will stay."
One night at dinner in Kansas, Bellina Kweskin, 14, explained how
she and Deirdre Goldfarb, 17, went to a dance at Valley Heights High
School in Waterville, Kan., where hardly anyone danced.
"They didn't know how to have a party," said musician Jim Kweskin,
Bellina's father. So the Lymans organized a party at Benton Farm to
teach the other youths how to dance and have a good time.
"Getting drunk is the best way a lot of the kids at school know to
have fun," Bellina said. "My favorite ways to have fun are playing
music or going to the river and swimming or taking the little kids out
to play tag."
Son Returns
Suddenly dogs barked outside. "Must be Padrick," George Peper
guessed, running outside to meet his son, who was returning, alone,
from a regional track meet.
"How'd you do?" someone asked the 6-foot, 2-inch blond youth as he
strolled into the old farmhouse dining room.
"Fourth," Padrick, 16, a broad jumper, said.
The room came alive with praise for Padrick, who beamed as he
soaked in the adulation. How did Padrick feel that his parents did not
come to see him?
"It's much better when they don't come and I can tell them all
about it than to have them come and wait hours to watch me make three
jumps," he said, waving his hand about the room.
The next day eight of the family's teen-agers sat on some rocks and
talked about their lives, their futures.
Eligible Males
One of the girls, Daria Lyman, 16, named each of the boys who are
not half brothers and might, she said, some day become her husband.
She counted 14 eligible males, some of whom were present.
"What about Joel?" asked Saskia Given, 19, naming her husband of
six months and a recent addition to the community.
"Oh, yeah, well, 15," Daria said, chuckling.
Saskia, who was named after Rembrandt's wife, said she was "just
being realistic, that someday Joel and I might break up and marry
others."
The eight teen-agers interviewed at length, plus four others, said
they could not imagine leaving the Family.
In recent years a few young men, Boston street kids, have joined
the family.
"My parents are just glad I'm off the streets," said one. Another
said he no longer has trouble with the police and feels worthwhile
learning carpentry.
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Copyright 1986 Time Inc. All Rights Reserved
People
September 22, 1986
AFTER TWO OFT-TROUBLED DECADES, THE LYMAN FAMILY COMMUNE SCORES A
SWEET SONG OF SUCCESS AT LAST
Written by Roger Wolmuth, reported by Gail Buchalter and John Callan
At the moment, tonight's guest of honor at the Lyman family commune
is resting before dinner. Resting on a platter, which is where a
smoked bluefish properly ought to be. Shipped earlier today by commune
members on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, the fish was booked
aboard a westbound plane in time for tonight's meal at the family's
Hollywood Hills mansion. Judging by the hungry looks the entree is
getting, it is a welcome guest. And why not? "We enjoy good food and
wine," says Jessie Benton Lyman, 42-year-old daughter of the late
painter Thomas Hart Benton. "We're happy we no longer have to eat
radish soup."
It's been quite a while, of course, since the family's 78 adults
and 39 children have had to resort to meager fare. In its 20th year
the Lyman clan now stands as perhaps the most durable -- and
financially successful -- of any commune to come out of the Aquarian
'60s. With income from the family-owned construction business expected
to reach $3.5 million this year, the group is now less a commune than
a conglomerate whose holdings include a 280-acre farm in Kansas, a
downtown Manhattan loft, an eight-house compound in Boston and three
homes on Martha's Vineyard.
Headquarters for their Fort Hill Construction Company -- named for
the Boston neighborhood where the tribe's founders banded together two
decades ago -- is on this manicured three acres where the
transcontinental bluefish has come to its end. Besides the centerpiece
mansion, a two-story, nine-bedroom home built in the 1920s for Kodak
founder George Eastman, the grounds include a Spanish-style
six-bedroom house, an underground garage, a swimming pool, a two-room
schoolhouse, aviaries and, on an adjoining plot, offices for the
construction business. The latter neither advertises nor bothers with
contracts ("We work mostly for people we trust, so a kiss on the
cheek or a handshake will do," says its foreman), but it counts Steven
Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman and Richard Chamberlain among its clients.
Encircling the grounds is a vine-covered fence reaching to the
trees, and from beyond it there is no view of the property or its
inhabitants. The fence is a reminder of troubled times, when
allegations of drug use, violence and cultism drove the clan into a
seclusion from which it just recently, and warily, emerged. At the
heart of it all stood the young musician who was the commune's
founder.
Mel Lyman had grown up in Grant's Pass, Ore., and traveled the
country as a folk musician before landing in Cambridge, Mass. in the
mid-'60s. It was the age of the counterculture, and Lyman, 27, playing
banjo and harmonica in the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, had little trouble
persuading a handful of friends to seek cheaper housing and closer
companionship by moving to the slums of nearby Roxbury. "We weren't
flower children," says Kweskin, now 45. "We just gravitated towards
living together. It was the natural thing to do."
The clan grew quickly, and by 1968 it numbered more than 200. They
expanded, first in Roxbury and then beyond. Thomas Hart Benton, whose
daughter Jessie had given birth to a child by Lyman, contributed a
painting toward the purchase of a Kansas farm. Their own remodeling
work, learned bit by bit, turned into a business that helped buy
property in California.
Guiding the hurly-burly growth was Lyman, the group's charismatic
leader. "People always gravitated toward him. He was full of life and
music, and people just loved to be around him," says Dick Russell, 39,
a journalist who joined the family in the '70s. "This wasn't the
Baghwan or the Moonies, free love and dope. These were strong people
dedicated to each other and to building a new way of life."
Their dedication would soon be tested. In late 1971 Rolling Stone
published a two-part series that haunts the commune to this day.
Likening the family to Charles Manson's, the magazine described
Lyman's near-total control over his followers and cited his "expertise
as an acid therapist." Some family members were armed, the articles
said, and there had been violence against both outsiders and those
within the commune. To maintain allegiance, the magazine claimed,
there was a Gestapo-like Karma Squad and a solitary confinement room.
Although the Lymans denied everything and still do, "people went
berserk with ideas of what was going on," says Kweskin.
More troubles followed in August 1973, when three members of the
commune tried to rob a Roxbury bank. One was killed and the other two,
including Zabriskie Point star Mark Frechette, were sent to prison.
Frechette insisted that the robbery was a Watergate protest. "We just
wanted to hold up Nixon," he said. "The bank was the nearest thing
that was federally insured."
All but buried in bad publicity, the Lymans went into deep retreat
and for the next 12 years avoided all contact with the press.
Frechette would die mysteriously in 1975, allegedly a victim of a
weight-lifting accident in the prison gym. Lyman, at 39, would follow
three years later, his passing as enigmatic as his life. Even now,
family members won't disclose details of his death, insisting that
their leader had pleaded for privacy and that his demise is "still too
painful to talk about."
Eight years later his presence is still evident in Hollywood Hills.
In the dining room a gold fork used by Lyman sits in a dark wooden
box. A photo of the founder hangs on the dining room wall, a second in
the music room, another sits atop the library TV, a fourth hangs in
the Fort Hill offices nearby.
Wall space in the kitchen, however, is devoted to an autographed
picture of the Gunsmoke TV cast. Family members prepare a daily guide
listing the rerun time for the old horse opera as well as those for
the long-gone World War II Combat series. "Those men had to work
together. They all helped each other," explains Carol Franck, 40, a
family member. "They had a quality of life we respect. We watch it
religiously."
That same mix of old-fashioned values with an offbeat life-style
colors the family's philosophy. Although Lyman fathered at least five
children with four different commune mates, "We are not sexually
promiscuous," insists Jessie Benton Lyman. Explains Kweskin, "We don't
believe in short-term relationships. That would be adulterous."
Despite their property holdings, they spurn fire insurance, since "we
couldn't replace what we have, nor could an insurance company." And
though they celebrate early American heroes like Washington and
Jefferson, they largely avoid national politics in favor of strictly
local issues.
Perhaps the group's most eccentric feature is its style of child
rearing. For years the commune rejected public schooling in favor of
home tutoring; now many of the Lyman teenagers live together
kibbutz-style, apart from their parents, on the farm in Marysville,
Kans., where they attend public school. Despite the surrogate
parenthood, "we are all responsible to the children, and we all love
them," says Jessie Benton Lyman, a mother of three. "Granted,
some of us aren't as interested as others. But some are real geniuses
with the kids."
Those children have been the only source of growth in the Lyman
family numbers in quite some time: New volunteers for the now thriving
commune need not apply. "If strangers knocked at your back door and
asked if they could move in, would you let them?" asks George Peper,
40, an original commune member. "I doubt it. Well, we feel like that
now." There are, however, new windows through which outsiders can
peek. Kweskin has been touring college campuses with a family folk
band, and the family has begun publishing a magazine titled U and I. A
thick, rambling collection of essays, poems, reflections and photos,
it is a magazine "about the way we live," says Jessie Benton Lyman.
How the Lymans live has changed, of course, since those first days
in Fort Hill's ghetto. There are accountants now, and lawyers, and
talk of installing a family health plan soon. The times they are
a-changin'. Back in the '60s, admits Kweskin, "we were more optimistic
about the world than now. We thought we could change it. Now we
realize we can only affect what we can." His tone implies that, after
20 communal years, it is an acceptable adjustment for an Aquarian to
have made.
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