“What Really Happened to the Class of ’65” – Revisited

On the 50th anniversary of Palisades High’s most famous graduates, co-author Michael Medved talks about his best-selling 1976 paperback confessional, which inspired a TV series and a sequel book.

Driving up Temescal Canyon Road from Pacific Coast Highway, it’s tempting to wonder what Palisades Charter High School must have been like 50 years ago when the school was brand new: How did students deal with the pressures of sex, drugs, political turmoil and the Vietnam War? What were their personalities like? What made them tick?

In 1976, Michael Medved—future television movie critic and conservative radio personality—did just that when Random House published his book “What Really Happened to the Class of ’65?,” a no-holds-barred, one-decade-later look at 30 students from Medved’s 1965 graduating class, co-authored with his Pali High classmate David Wallechinsky.

While some of the subjects of “Class of ‘65” came from broken backgrounds, “the only abuse I can cite was my parents moving me from San Diego to Los Angeles in the middle of high school,” Medved told the Palisadian-Post.

In fact, he had finished up 10th grade at San Diego’s Point Loma High before his family relocated to a Kenter Avenue address in Brentwood, from where he was able to attend Pali High. Co-writer Wallechinsky also spent his teen years in Brentwood, on S. Bristol Circle.

“Everybody at the time felt lucky and privileged to be there,” Medved said; students such as school beauty Lynn Marble, “Golden Girl” Debbie Gordon, “Big Bad” Ron Conti and “outcast” Reilly Ridgell.

“It was a new school, but they really had outstanding teachers. LAUSD was a famously good system and Pali [High] was the best of the best,” Medved added, rattling off his favorite teachers: Miss O’Brien, Miss Hernandez, History teacher Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Cole in Chemistry.

Pali High’s first graduating class was in the Spring of ’64. Nevertheless, Medved and Wallechinsky’s Class of ’65 felt the school’s newness, which definitely impacted the dynamics of its student body.

“There weren’t traditions,” Medved said. “Classes were given these stupid names. We were the Corinthians. We had the fight song: “We’re the Dolphins, don’t be nervous/ if you come near us, we’ll make you serve us!”

In the midst of a losing football game, Pali High cheerleaders would shout: “Hey, hey, that’s okay!/You’re gonna work for us one day!”

“The attempt to establish Pali traditions was really pathetic,” Medved said.

ROLL CALL

The chapter titles of Medved and Wallechinsky’s book essentially shorthanded its dramatis personae —“Mark Holmes: The Quarterback,” “Lisa Menzies: The Bad Girl,” “Mike Shedlin: The Goof-Off,” “Brock Chester: The Dreamboat,” “Candy McCoy: The Flirt,” “Gary Wasserman: Mr. Slick,” etc. (Medved, a big prankster back then, nicknamed himself “The Walking Commotion.”)

“We were tracking them at the same time [Pali High was] planning the 10-year reunion,” Medved said.

Book-ended by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Medved’s recollection of being at the Ambassador Hotel when Robert F. Kennedy was killed, “Class of ‘65” set out to set the tone for the era. The book offers a parallax view of each subject by his/her teachers and other students before said subject delivered updates on their lives, not unlike in Michael Apted’s “Seven Up” documentaries. In one of the most compelling chapters, “Jon Wilson: Jon Who?,” Wilson discussed his post-Pali High life joining the military, visiting call girls in Taipei and at bordellos in Vietnam while fighting in the war, as well as his post-war shenanigans as a drug mule, busted by customs in Lebanon, where he served half of a three-year incarceration for transporting hashish oil.

“The 30 people we included were the right mix,” Medved said. “We were disproportionately interested in the prettiest girls in the class. That’s a fairly typical reaction: ‘What happened to the girl that everyone wanted to get close to?’”

One chapter queried former students to recall their first (often awkward) sexual experiences, which Medved and Wallechinsky also courageously share.

“The pretty girls didn’t want to answer that for the book,” Medved said, chuckling. “If you notice, most of the people who talk in that section are male.”

As the classmates interviewed in 1975 were part of Medved and Wallechinsky’s extended circle of friends, locating them a decade after graduation was relatively easy (even in the days before the Internet and Facebook). Dubbed by the authors as “The Invisible Man,” Williams Quivers, the graduating class’s only African-American student, was hardest to secure.

“He wasn’t close to anybody,” Medved said. “Turns out he lived three doors away from my parents.”

As the class’s only Asian female, the outgoing (if insecure) Carol Shen, on the other hand, “was popular” and super-smart.

Many in the Class of ’65 did well for themselves, attending America’s finest universities such as Yale (Medved) and Berkeley (Shen).

“No one was surprised she became successful,” Medved said of Shen, who after high school attended Berkeley, where she met and married architect Bill Glass and together formed a San Francisco architectural firm.

The book’s photo insert resembled a twist on the personalities of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Jeff Stolper was definitely Pali High’s Jeff Spicoli: a total surfer who did not leave the Palisades vicinity after graduating. Another photo showed hippie chick Judy Tomash topless, snapped minutes after giving birth to her first son, Suresh (“Lord of Gods” in Sanskrit).

“She gave that to us,” Medved said of Tomash, who was among the six subjects unhappy about the resulting book.

Eleven subjects interviewed did not make it into the final edit.

“One of the people we did not include in the book was a friend I knew very well at Point Loma. She showed up the year after I did [from San Diego]. She was absolutely brilliant.”

She also killed herself at the age of 28 following a terrible marriage.

Meanwhile, Wilson the veteran and drug smuggler later died in a car crash while Marble recently passed away from ovarian cancer.

“CLASS OF ‘65”—THE TV SERIES

“What Really Happened to the Class of ‘65?” materialized because Medved needed money during his educational downtime.

“I had taken a leave of absence from law school to work in political campaigns,” Medved recalled. “My five years was just about up and I really didn’t want to be a lawyer and go back to law school.”

So he found a literary agent.

“I submitted six different book proposals, three of them sold,” Medved recalled. The first to sell was ‘Shadow of Presidents,’ the next was ‘Class of ’65’ and the last was a book that helped make Medved’s name as a movie critic: “The 50 Worst Movies of All Time,” co-written with one of his brothers, Harry Medved.

“That was the last idea I had and it was a joke,” Medved said. “The joke was so successful, it spawned three sequel books.”

Medved credits younger brother Harry (also a Pali High graduate and today the head of publicity for Fandango and an author of movie location books) for researching the bulk of that book.

“Harry was always more interested in the entertainment industry,” Medved said.

As Harry Medved was 14 at the time, “he didn’t drive,” Medved recalled. “My mom had to drive him around  to see all the awful movies playing at second-run theaters.

“Basically my job was to write it,” he continued, admitting that “there are films in the 50 that I haven’t seen. My brother, he absorbed the punishment.”

When Los Angeles Magazine ran an excerpt of “Class of ’65” before its publication, “much to my shock and to David’s shock as well,” it generated Hollywood interest, Medved said. “We got a TV offer and a movie offer from George Roy Hill.”

Medved was more excited about making it as a motion picture than as a TV series.

“I’ve always been prejudiced against television. I have lived without TV since I left my parents home when I was 16,” Medved said.

Medved and Wallechinsky met with “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting” director Hill twice. At both Universal meetings, the sentiment was “‘Oh, it’s terrific, we’re going forward,’ and then nothing,” Medved recalled. “We got paid something for selling the rights, but it wasn’t going to be anything.”

As the book was still a property owned by Universal, the studio heads thought of “Class of ’65” when they had a problem coming up with a TV lineup one season.

“They needed something to put next to ‘The Richard Pryor Show,’” Medved said, chuckling. “They tentatively had ‘The Bionic Dog.’ I think it was [Universal executive] Frank Price who mentioned that they had this property.”

By the time it reached the network airwaves, they had taken the Pali High out of it.

Medved cringed when “Class of ’65” aired on NBC as people immediately assumed the authors were involved in what was a totally misguided program. The point of Medved and Wallechinsky’s book was completely lost on the TV version’s producers. Medved speculates that the Universal people must have barely read the book.

“There was no connection other than the title,” Medved said of the series, which starred Tony Bill and Annette O’Toole and was produced by Richard Irving (actress Amy Irving’s father).

“Everything was wrong with the series,” Medved said of this “bittersweet look back. None of it was based on people in the book or stories in the book at all.”

“The message of the book was that the ‘60s sucked. The message of the TV series was that the ‘60s was great,” Medved said.

Thankfully, the misguided series was short-lived, lasting 14 episodes across the 1977-78 season.

“I don’t think [its cancellation] was a great loss to Western culture,” Medved quipped.

THE AFTERLIFE OF 

“CLASS OF ‘65”

As 1990 rolled around, marking the 25th anniversary of their graduation, Medved and Wallechinsky were approached to do an updated sequel. Unfortunately, the old high school friends did not see eye to eye conceptually on how to approach the sequel, as Wallechinsky proposed expanding the concept beyond Palisades High. Medved preferred to “follow up with core people” from their original tome.

So despite both getting paid their share, Wallechinsky wrote “Midterm Report” solo.

“They couldn’t say it was a sequel since I wasn’t part of it,” Medved said.

Today, Medved has little interest in pursuing another update on his high school class.

“Most people my age are kind of boring,” Medved said, laughing. “Other than Jamie [Kelso], whose life is so incredibly bizarre. Jamie is a whole book by himself.”

Shockingly, Kelso, who Medved described as an ardent liberal back in high school, grew more and more politically extreme. By the time Medved and Wallechinsky checked in on him in ’75, Kelso had become a hardcore member of the John Birch Society, planning a 1976 run for U.S. Congress.

Even in Medved’s book, Kelso’s intensity comes through: “My life is designedly simple,” he is quoted as saying. “There is no distraction from my study excepting the hours spent earning my livelihood.” That meant no movies (the last one he had seen was “Zorba the Greek” in Paris in 1965), no booze or drugs, no partying or dancing, no concerts. “My favorite eatery is McDonald’s, where I ritually partake of the Quarter Pounder, large fries, two o.j.’s and a cherry pie. $1.94. That’s the fanciest meal I eat, and I love it.”

“Reconnecting with Jamie was really influential to me,” Medved said. “Jamie was sort of a very smart Right Winger.”

Twenty years ago, on Medved’s last day in Los Angeles before relocating to Seattle, where he and wife Dr. Diane Medved live today, he spent the evening discussing music with Kelso.

Today, according to Medved, Kelso is an active, high-profile white supremacist.

Medved still marvels at Kelso’s evolution: “All of Jamie’s friends were Jewish at Pali High.”

IN HIGH-NDSIGHT

Truth be told, then-Brentwood resident Medved, who would not get a driver’s license until his junior year at college, never really explored the Palisades beyond his high school campus.

“I had very little connection with the Palisades itself. If I wanted to go to movies, it would be [in] Westwood,” he said.

He remembers attending the old Bay Theatre only once: to see a closed-circuit broadcast of Richard Burton’s “Hamlet.”

Perhaps it was his insular time spending 11th and 12th grade on campus that put his fellow students under a microscope.

“I was viewing Pali as an outsider,” he said, “but what an intense two years!”