The Coolest Couple in Beachtown Bohemia
A party at their house was like Jules et Jim in the Redwoods
As we enter the season of holiday celebrations, I am reminded of a certain spirit of entertaining in beachtown bohemia that was about irreverence, camaraderie and mischief. People came only vaguely dressed up, but with a good book to recommend, platters of poached salmon, and a bottle of something chilled and potent. They came to be in a room full of wild originals: you’d not be surprised if Henry Miller showed up, or a cowboy in a fully-embroidered western suit, or the foremost scholar in medieval illuminated manuscripts. Some parents brought their kids, some kids brought their friends, and in the end it was the closest thing I can correlate in my own life to the raucous, food-saturated party scenes in Igmar Bergman film Fanny and Alexander. Allow me to describe this scene, and the hosts who made it their annual holiday tradition.
At a holiday party hosted at John and Harriet Deck’s house, you could expect several rooms full of creative people. Nobody was rich, but everyone was accomplished in some realm or another and lived extraordinarily well: Dickens scholars, economists, chefs, oceanographers, potters, chefs, the couple that owned the big leather tannery in town. The Deck’s house was a big old Victorian tucked into a clearing in the redwoods, in a location proximate to The Mystery Spot (the tourist attraction in the Santa Cruz Mountains that appears to demonstrate the defiance of gravity.) You crossed from a windy rural road to their house over a private wooden bridge and into another world where the cool kids from school —now grown into adults — congregated. At their parties they served soft-shell crab from the wharf and chilled wine in mismatched glasses: cut crystal, Paris Review coffee mug, brown speckled hand-thrown vessel by some noted ceramicist. Out back, you might find two men with astounding vocabularies playing horseshoes in the soft earth by the redwood trees. The living room had high ceilings and books books books and beat-up velvet sofas and a wall of records. In the diagonal wood-paneled seventies bathroom, would I study framed movie posters of Jules et Jim. (Harriet, herself a sort of femme fatale, bore a resemblance in her youth to Jeanne Moreau — and she wanted everyone to make that connection while washing their hands in the little room’s Victorian sink. At the Deck’s parties, the old and bearded, the young and bell-bottomed, the published and unpublished spent evenings together being erudite and tipsy. They were a couple who knew their hosting strengths and worked as a unit: John ran the turntable and told stories, while Harriet refreshed platters of caponata and cheese, kept the champagne flowing, and introduced people.
Harriet and John had lived in a lot of places before settling in Santa Cruz— Puerto Rico, Spain, San Francisco during the beatnik era, and had accumulated primarily books, records, and friends. John was a writer and Harriet had a real estate agency. Their house was large for Santa Cruz, but not professionally designed. It was more like a fraternity house with worn carpets and glamorously fraying upholstery and silver ash trays out on the wrap around veranda. As a little girl, I admired their teenage daughters and coveted the hand-me-downs they often gifted me: a fine violin, a pretty pine desk with remnant stickers in the drawers from the U.S. Bicentennial, and lavender wool sweaters. They were older than me and both sparkly-eyed and beautiful, like their parents. These teenagers and their friends orchestrated edgy activities at these parties for us little kids, like playing family down the road in a gypsy wagon or sliding down the grand staircase in vinyl sleeping bags at the heaving height of the cocktail party. Imagine a pig-tailed daisy chain of kindergarteners careening directly into a cluster of grown-ups clutching champagne flutes. I now see these parties at the Deck’s as my first taste of rock and roll glamour. There was nothing designed about their house, but it was deeply sophisticated. It was a vessel of worldliness and generosity of spirit and more free-wheeling way than any other friend’s houses. At the Deck’s, there was more booze, more conversation, more volume, more laughter, more danger, and more fun. I love a good party, and I suspect my own feelings of inadequacy in hosting a holiday rager stems from comparing my efforts to the effortlessness of this fine couple.
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