MISCELLANY (Continued from page 6)
Nugget in Summerland and Goleta, had been in negotiations to re-open the popular space with property developer Rick Sanders, former co-owner of what is now the Canary Hotel, who bought the site or $1,350,000 in April 2013, at the end of last year, but months-long negotiations collapsed, as I exclusively revealed in this illustrious organ, with Bob saying the demands weren’t “viable.” Warren, a native of Boston, formerly worked at Morton’s Steakhouse in Los Angeles and managed the Stateside restaurant in La Arcada....
Loud and Proud They were the Kardashians of the 70s – attractive, wealthy, and dysfunctional. They were the Louds of Santa Barbara – Bill and Pat, and their five children, ranging from 14 to 20 – Lance, Delilah, Grant, Kevin, and Michele. They were the subjects of the first-ever TV reality show, An American Family, broadcast on PBS in 12 hour-long episodes beginning in January 1973. The show took viewers up close and personal into the home of the Loud family in our Eden by the Beach. Parents Bill and Pat, who has now published a revelatory tome Lance Out Loud, edited by New York photographer Christopher Makos, an old
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18 MONTECITO JOURNAL
came with the show and charges he’d exploited the family and betrayed their trust. “What have I done? What do I do?” he asked. “I never resolved it. I don’t know what I did wrong. I still don’t.” Jokers Wild
New book by family matriarch Pat Loud lifts lid on TV’s first reality show
friend from my Andy Warhol days, and their youngsters became household names living in front of the camera for seven months taped the year before the broadcast. A record 10 million weekly viewers were riveted, watching the Loud family’s lives falling apart. On camera, Pat asked her husband to move out and Lance, the oldest son, was the first gay to come out on TV. Pat’s book, which features a fascinating collection of photos, writings, and personal papers of Lance, is published by Glitterati Incorporated in New York in conjunction with the acquisition of the private memorabilia by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Voyeuristic eyes were mesmerized by the watershed cinema vérité event – viewing unscripted moments in the family’s life that the press called exhibitionist, while members were described as “affluent zombies.” Special contempt was directed at Lance for his “flamboyant, leechlike homosexuality.” The New York Times described him as “camping and queening about like a pathetic court jester, a Goya-esque emotional dwarf.” Lance, who died of complications from AIDS in 2001, stated: “Television ate my family.” He believed the documentary fulfilled “the middle-class dream that you can become famous for being just who you are.” He didn’t shy away from coming out on TV, but reveled in the positive feedback he received from the gay community. He became a penpal of Warhol and flamboyantly embraced his own role as a gay icon. Lance moved to New York from our tony town to be close to Warhol’s Factory in downtown Manhattan, the studio that became a magnet for artists, socialites, and hipsters. He needed a new landscape that gave him the freedom to be gay – and to escape northern California hippies. Affectionate letters from friends, honoring Lance’s memory, describe
Face time for the Louds in 1973
him as loving Warhol, wind chimes, thrift shops, yard sales, Latin men, talking on the phone, cats, riding on his motorcycle, and every taco stand in L.A. It was the time of Free Love when sexuality was celebrated. The “If it feels good, do it” motto swept the country and Lance right along with it. He wanted to live art, live music, be in the music. “Lance loved movies, music, fashion, and anything with a horizontal stripe,” his sister, Delilah, writes. “Never seduced by fame, he wore it as a loose garment. Many consider him an icon for coming out on TV. Those that believe that have it backward. Lance was too impatient to wait for the rest of us, so he ran ahead and scouted the rapids to tell us the water was fine.” But Lance was pursued by his own demons and turned to drugs to “keep them at bay,” his mom Pat recalls. Author and book editor Ellis Amburn, a friend of Lance, writes: “In a world that could be cruel and catty, I never heard Lance say an untrue word about anyone. I always found his blithe spirit contagious.” An American Family wasn’t anything the family thought it would be. Pat, now 89, discusses the show and reveals there wasn’t anything negative breeding in the family with the cameras and the producers. She told The New York Times in 2013 the Pubic Broadcasting Network and the New York affiliate, WNET, viewed the family as airheads and coerced her into asking her husband for a divorce on camera. She is now happily living again with her ex-husband Bill, who is 94. The couple has their own Facebook account under the Loud Family. An American Family was a premonition for reality TV, an unrehearsed voyeuristic eye, unlike today’s reality shows. Craig Gilbert, the creator, never worked again after the documentary aired in 1973. He spent subsequent years avoiding the notoriety that
• The Voice of the Village •
Matt Lauer exposed by Ellen DeGeneres (courtesy of Today)
What began as a fun segment on Ellen DeGeneres’s eponymous TV talk show has become a fully fledged prank war between Today host Matt Lauer and the Montecito resident. In the latest tit-for-tat tease, Ellen managed to cleverly alter a Facebook video between the pair, making Lauer appear totally naked. The video was from a conversation the pair had after the last joke that Lauer managed to play on Ellen when he filled her Porsche SUV with 20,000 ping pong balls outside her Warner Bros. TV studio in Burbank, as I recounted here. The jokes between the tony twosome have now been going on for more than a month. It all began when Ellen made a video of Lauer that made him appear as though they had interviewed stars from Fifty Shades of Grey while wearing a leather harness and not much else. Despite having wreaked revenge with his ping pong stunt, Ellen spent a week’s vacation thinking about what to do next. She obviously decided the ball was back in her court. “Before I went on spring break, I found a new hobby. It was messing with Matt Lauer!,” she told her audience the other day. “It’s what I like to do.” This time she once again managed to change history by digitally tweaking a video of Lauer that left little to the imagination. Using video and audio of the original Facebook conversation, Lauer is heard in the clip saying: “You have to admit, Ellen, it took a lot of balls to pull off this prank.” As he continued to bounce a ping pong ball on his bat, he continued: “Can I just end by telling you the obvious? I adore you.” Ellen’s audience roared with laughter as the clip ended with Lauer on
MISCELLANY Page 224 9 – 16 April 2015