Writer Dan Simmons is building a house, and he muses on a number of interesting houses, including Harlan Ellison’s Wonderland:
The first time I visited Ellison Wonderland more than 20 years ago was the day I realized that most of us live in our homes more like tourists who keep their stuff in their suitcases during their entire stay somewhere (somewhere called . . . life), making little real mark on our environment. Entering many people’s homes is like coming into some place they’ve rented and expect to leave soon. Entering Harlan’s home is like entering Harlan’s mind. Actually, you don’t have to enter the house to get the first taste of Harlan’s mind.Finding his little street may be a challenge, but picking out Harlan’s home once you’re on the street should be easy. Just look for the Martian temple. Do you think I’m kidding? Just check out this photo I pulled from the Net –
Then, after you’ve parked at the curb and are heading for his front door – only a few steps from the street – you enter the next layer of Harlan Ellison’s cerebral cortex. Is it the 1949 Packard parked in the carport? No. Is it the beautiful, elaborately carved custom front door? Not yet. No, as you enter the small entry courtyard area next to the carport, the glint of sunlight on razorwire catches your attention and you glance up toward the roof of the carport and the deck up there outside his writing office, all protected by the razorwire, and you notice the gargoyles. And then you notice that the gargoyles look familiar . . . wait, isn’t that . . .?? It is. Phyllis Schafley. And the monstrosity next to it is Spiro Agnew. So Richard Nixon has to be . . . ah, there he is, that grinning saurian thing.
But the full shock awaits you inside.
I’ve heard different tallies for Harlan Ellison’s book and art collection: 100,000 books and 15,000 works of art? 200,000 books and 28,000 works of art? Depends upon who’s counting, I imagine – although Harlan and his minions have every single book, painting, poster, and collectible carefully catalogued – but let’s agree that there’s one hell of a lot of art and reading material in Harlan Ellison’s house.
Actually, during the terrible Northridge earthquake at 4:30 a.m. on January 17, 1994 – (no jokes or humor in this paragraph, folks) – a friend of mine, Ed Bryant, was staying at Harlan’s home, which, you should remember, is just below Mulholland Drive along the high ridge separating the Los Angeles basin from the San Fernando Valley, and Ed, thrown out of bed by the violent tremors, had to swim out of the house,. Everyone who escaped had to swim . . . swim through books and art and broken glass that filled the hallways to a depth of four feet.
God bless Harlan Ellison.
Maybe the little soundproofed padded room for listening to rock and roll from ‘Dream Makers’ was safe.
I just finished reading “Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends” — an account, through interviews, of the pulp science fiction golden age. It was a time when many authors, including Ellison, were living hand-to-mouth in New York boarding houses. Anyway, there are a lot of great Ellison stories in there. Here’s one of them in his own words:
“In 1959, Fantastic Universe was sold to a man named Henry Scharf, who had a publishing company called Great American Publications. Scharf was stiffing everybody, including poor Hans Stefan Santesson, who was near the end of his life and near the end of his career. Hans was a great man, a great man, and a very good editor indeed. They were doing a magazine, a pulp magazine, for a while, called Tightrope!, which was based on the television series that starred Mike Conners. They did a few issues of that and they were buying mystery stories. So Hans solicited me and he bought a terrible story, absolutely terrible, probably the worst story I ever wrote, “Only Death Can Stop It.” It was about 2300 or 2400 words and it was a penny a word, and I was supposed to be paid. Hans wanted to pay me out of his own pocket, but he didn’t have the money because Scharf was stiffing him. So I went up to collect it myself. And I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get in to see Scharf unless I managed somehow to finagle my way in.
“So I put on my one good suit, a gray flannel suit, and I wore a hat, and I had my umbrella, and I looked like a businessman. And I came in and I said to the receptionist, ‘Henry Scharf, please.’
“And she said, ‘Whom should I say is calling?’
“I said, ‘tell him it’s Mr. Dieterle from the Internal Revenue Service, Manhattan branch.’ And I was inside in about three seconds. And when I got inside, he reached across and grabbed my hand to shake my hand, and I grabbed him and I said, ‘I ain’t Dieterle, my name’s Ellison. You owe me thirty-two dollars, motherfucker. Give me my money.’
“And he started screaming and yelling and hollering. There was a huge bullpen outside with all kinds of secretaries typing away madly on things, and I went dashing out one door of his office on one side, as everybody came running in the main door of the office around the other side. By the time I got around to the bullpen area, there was nobody left. Everybody had run in the other direction. So I grabbed the typewriter, one of those great big ones. It was the Mosler Safe Building on Fifth Avenue downtown, right around 37th Street, something like that. And I ran down, I don’t know, ten or twelve flights, because I couldn’t take the elevator. I ran down the stairs, then I ran up to Ninth Avenue, and I found a hockshop and I pawned it for fifty-something dollars, and I made a clear profit of thirteen, fourteen bucks.”
If you haven’t seen Harlan Ellison interviewed, he’s definitely a character. “I’m a professional liar.”
“…he’s definitely a character.”
I once attended a sci-fi convention where Harlan Ellison was a featured speaker. I observed strange behavior by the adoring staff who were hovering around him and praising him. One of the staff members approvingly compared Ellison’s ego to a running buzzsaw that could injure or kill casual people who walked into it.
There were a couple levels of neurotypical flattery going on there that I was too autistic to interpret.