How Henry Dropped Harry

In his last years living in The Huntington, the once-infamous erotic writer Henry Miller was as callous with his friends as he was with his wives. In a forthcoming memoir, Harry Kiakis recalls his rise and fall on Ocampo—and why part of him still misses Miller.

By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief

Harry Kiakis sensed the moment when Henry Miller, literary lion and sexual iconoclast, started to turn on him.

They were standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the playroom of the writer’s home on Ocampo Drive, watching visitors play ping-pong, sending wild shots over a piano, while, outside the glass doors, light skittered on the pool where Miller and friends loved to dawdle nude and horrify the neighbors.

Kiakis can’t remember who was playing ping-pong: It might have been Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, Steve McQueen or Jack Nicholson, or fellow writers such as Lawrence Durrell and Erica Yong.

Or even a fresh-faced future governor, Jerry Brown, who loved listening to Miller spin tales of Paris slum life, where he had wandered and philandered hand-in-hand with the queen of bohemian writers, Anais Nin.

Anyway.

Miller turned to Kiakis and asked him, almost plaintively, “Harry, I have betrayed every friend I have ever had. Why do I do that?”

Kiakis, who protected the writer’s feelings even as Miller trampled on his, fumbled for a polite response.

“Well, I suppose it’s because you need your independence at all costs. Something like that?”

Miller gave him a deep, dark look, clearly seeking something on the line of “because you are too important to be bored,” and changed the conversation.

This was not the celebrity who once boasted he was the happiest man on earth, a flip comment that would haunt him as the title of an all-too-honest biography.

“Henry was a complex man with deep-seated contradictory impulses,” recalled Kiakis, speaking from his home in Laguna Beach.

He was discussing a memoir of his year with Miller in Pacific Palisades that is about to be published.

“He once showed me a shoebox full of pictures of people he said he had dumped, women and men, people to whom he would abruptly never talk to again,” Kiakis explained. “From that day in the playroom, I knew that I would end up in the shoebox. I knew that one day he would, as he put it, dump me. And so he did.”

This was a pattern established in the 1930s, when Miller was writing and living his long-banned masterworks “Tropic of Cancer” and “Tropic of Capricorn,” that would repeat time after time, with five wives, business contacts and friends who loved and trusted him.

The pace picked up during his later years when, well-fed off 1960s counter-culture notoriety, former Socialist Miller sought a certain quiet in the ostensibly conservative Palisades.

In the memoir, “Henry Miller in Pacific Palisades: Selections from a Journal,” to be published by Nexus, Kiakis does not explain on what pretext Miller dumped him.

He had been his secretary, friend and chauffeur, all rolled into one.

There is a final line at the end of the 214-page memoir: “Phone call from Henry’s aide, Connie Perry: Henry has asked me to call you and let you know you are not to come here anymore.” And that’s about it. Dumped.

The Nexus editors added a line or two, against Kiakis’s advice, which illuminate little.

But in an exclusive interview with the Palisadian-Post, Kiakis, now 87, explained a little more.

“Henry asked me to sneak into a film version of his 1970 novel ‘Quiet Days in Clichy’ [which had been turned into a Danish sex comedy], at an afternoon screening at a shabby theater near Sunset junction. It was a depressing experience, maybe 20 people there that afternoon.

“I reported back in a letter, repeating another Miller quote about himself, ‘What a service to humanity if you had vanished into the Himalayas,’ rather than been associated with this film. He did not take it well. Yes, I think I was dumped because of the letter. And also because he dumped people.”

Miller is taught as a great writer but still a little out of fashion. His erotica is all too metaphorical compared to what excitement is a click away on the net.

But back in the 1930s, the Brooklyn boy was a scandal.

He exiled himself to France, where his semi-autobiographical writings peppered obscenities and sexual shenanigans into an intoxicating and mystical blend of “hopped up” jazz prose.

Yes, you had to be there. He truly had his moment.

For generations Miller’s naughty books were seized by U.S. Customs and enjoyed under bedcovers all the more for their outlaw salaciousness.

But that era ended with the Kennedy White House—the ban was lifted and Miller traded in on his youthful adventures with movie deals and Playboy magazine assignments. He took refuge from the written word by creating watercolors.

He was, after all, 71 when he moved into a 4,000-square-foot home in the Huntington, and wanted to be near his kids, Tony and Val. He deserved a few creature comforts after a creative and strenuous life.

But he remained restless, Kiakis recalled, a skinny bald man who would cycle around the Huntington seeking out new entertainments.

Kiakis was a young man from New England on the rise in California, supplying East Coast stores with West Coast goods.

“It meant that I did not have a boss looking over my shoulder, so I could take time out to explore Los Angeles—and through friends of friends get to visit Henry, whose works I loved.”

On the first visit, on Saturday, March 30, 1968, Miller, 76, was “down in the dumps” and hiding in bed. He really hated getting older.

Three months later, Kiakis returned to the Palisades, joining a talk circle in the house with Miller and friends who were all on good form. The conversation ranged from belly dancers and wrestling to student demonstrations against the Vietnam War. It helped that Miller was smitten by Harry wife’s, Connie.

Kiakis was pulled into the Palisades circle for many reasons, including the luck of a driver’s license, which meant one week later, he could drive Miller to meet his estranged daughter, Barbara, in Pasadena.

The memoir reveals the domestic life of the aging writer. It was a massive house—still is—but he slept in a small windowless room, just off the ping-pong room so he would not have to walk up stairs. He kept a machete there to ward off burglars.

Not that it would have saved him from the bare wires that poked out of the bedroom wall. Kiakis got those replaced before Miller electrocuted himself.

He was the victim of identity theft—a forged check used to buy $730 worth of kitchen equipment, which bothered him beyond the lost money.

His attitudes toward women, foreigners and homosexuals were old school, even by old school standards. He got lonely and looked for women. His Japanese wife, Hoki, a famed pianist and singer, spent a lot of time back in Asia.

Harry and Connie joined the family, which included colorful characters such as Joe Gray, an ex-boxer also from Brooklyn who was the writer’s “court jester.” The house rarely emptied, even when Miller made a 10-week trip to Paris in the summer of 1969 for the filming of “Tropic of Cancer.”

That was when Kiakis house-sat on Ocampo Drive, dealing with crazy fans and permanent house-guests.

Miller, who helped create a modern form of writing journals, encouraged “the man from Sears” (one of the stores that Kiakis worked with) to write a book about him. But only after he was gone, and after 60 literary rejections.

The relationship was sundered in the spring of 1971, after 33 tumultuous months, after which Kiakis had had enough of the artistic life and focused on his own family and a quieter, more authentic life in Laguna Beach.

He still has, he admitted, mixed feelings about the two sides of Miller: the brilliant and the callous.

But, he said, he would not have missed those experiences in the Palisades for a writer’s ransom.

“Henry was brutal and brilliant, and different from anyone else I have known. And even in the 1960s, most people living in the Palisades did not know who they had living in their midst—a most extraordinary man.”