All my ideas about Pasadena—about LA itself—were undergoing a molecular transformation. We were going from Little League to a home run in the World Series. Even my father thought it was a great idea, driving home in the car, although my mother did say, “If you change your mind, darling, it won’t matter.” Still, this was Pasadena, the home of gracious ladies painting watercolors on afternoon outings, so I said, “You better ask people, Julian, and make sure it’s okay.” It’s not usual for the human race to produce rare, skilled, larger-than-life persons and personalities. It’s even less usual to ever meet one. And even less is it usual for one of these interesting people to meet another one of this select group. But here, we have graphic evidence of just such a marvelous meeting. At this point the reader must be saying something like, “But this is Marcel Duchamp, one of the most influential, consequential, luminaries the art world has ever seen, and some wild party girl who scribbles about Hollywood and her misspent youth.”

It says right here on the brochure,” George showed me, “he’s supposed to speak, but I don’t even know if he’s in L.A.” For a long time afterward, I thought he might have been pretending to be surprised, but he told me later, “I had no idea. I came into the museum as usual, a few minutes before it opened, blind and cold. I could feel weird vibes in the air, it was so quiet. But then I go into the gallery, and there you both were.” Irving Blum: At the beginning, Andy couldn’t have been nicer, couldn’t have been more agreeable, couldn’t have been more open. I mean, all those things totally changed after the shooting. Anyway, I knew that a couple of days later there’d be the public opening of the show and my parents had been invited, so I could go with them. My father didn’t care about Duchamp but he did have this interest in chess, and since Marcel had announced that he was “retired” from art to only play chess, my father thought he might go and see just what a master this guy was. George and I walked to Fred Segal’s, this fancy clothing store with a café inside. And sitting there, George told me Chico stories, the one I especially loved being about how, when Walter curated this huge California Art show in San Francisco, he wanted to go to the party thrown by the artists who’d been omitted—and George said he’d go with him as his bodyguard if Chico would give George money for his rent in exchange. Since Walter couldn’t possibly go into this room full of people he’d personally excluded without a bodyguard, he agreed. “He promised to give me the money before he left,” George explained, “but suddenly I looked up and he’d gone. Without paying me. The party lasted all night. The next morning, Chico shows up again….”Laurie Pepper, not at the party but in the vicinity of the party, 23: Cousin of Eve and Mirandi. She’d later marry jazz musician and junkie Art Pepper and co-write his memoir, Straight Life, also a dynamite Southern California book.

I never met his parents, but nobody else did either, they never set foot inside the Ferus, the Pasadena Art Museum, or anyplace else they were likely to run into him. They probably were home wondering where they went wrong, why they’d ever allowed him to go into that program for gifted children, ruing the day he set off on that field trip for the Arensbergs’, the only people in L.A. with a houseful of Duchamps. Maybe it was the spectacle of Walter playing chess with Duchamp “for art” that gave Julian the idea. After all, by 1963 it had been about forty years since Marcel had retired to play chess (or so he wanted the world to think). For forty years someone could have come up with the idea of photographing the master of Nude Descending a Staircase playing chess with a naked woman. But nobody in Paris or New York thought it up. Eve Babitz: I was introduced to Julian by my friend Marva Hannon. Marva got her mother to pay for her nose job, and her mother was a socialist. Do you know how hard it is to get a socialist to pay for a nose job? Jewish girls were just starting to get their noses done, and Marva was the first. Whatever Marva did was the height of style. When the guy who owned Fred Segal met her, he fell at her feet and said, “Come to my store, do anything you want.” Anyway, Marva told me Julian took the most marvelous pictures—you know, naked pictures that you could show guys. She met him when she was at Beverly Hills High. He had an apartment across the street, and was always trying to think of ways to get girls to take their clothes off. A visitor looks at Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). The public urinal that Duchamp transformed into a work of art and is seen as the paradigm of the readymade. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/REX

The story of a picture

Eve Babitz was a well-known party-girl in the bohemian circles of California where she met and became acquainted with a lot of celebrities, among them Harrison Ford, Steve Martin and Jim Morrison. She met the musician in 1966, one year after Morrison had founded "The Doors" together with Ray Manzarek and others. When he met Babitz Morrison was only 22 years old. Eve Babitz later remembered: "With Jim it was as if you had Michelangelo's David in your bed but with blue eyes. Jim's skin was so white." Babitz later published several books about her youth in California. After the symposium Julian Wasser showed up looking younger than he did when he took the pictures. He’s now such an adept paparazzo he hired a helicopter to crash Madonna’s wedding. We all walked over to the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, where Julian had a display of his pictures, the ones he’d taken at the party, the public opening, and that day I played chess with Duchamp and surprised Walter. Looking at the pictures of Walter in those days, so pale, almost unearthly, I said, “If I’d known you were so young, I wouldn’t have been so mad at you.”