|
It’s no wonder that the authorities would not wish to divulge any information about Bird’s forced stay in Camarillo state mental hospital in California in 1946. It is rather a scandal that an artist of his stature was incarcerated there for six months against his will, due to a single episode of abberant behavior outside of his hotel room while he was undergoing heroin withdrawal.
The accepted story is that he accidentally set his hotel room on fire before going downstairs without his clothes on. He was then arrested and transported to the state mental asylum. But according to a 1982 interview with trumpeter Howard McGhee, who arrived on the scene after Bird was taken away, there was no fire; evidently Bird had walked outside the hotel in the nude and was quickly spirited away by the cops. Public nudity is not tolerated in Los Angeles; even now the nude public beaches have disappeared . . .
The facts are that Bird was unable to obtain heroin at the time, was experiencing severe withdrawal symptoms, and evidently was medicating himself with large amounts of alcohol along with, probably, amphetamines; the result was that he became disoriented and physically ill, which accounts for the disastrous results at the notorious Lover Man session, followed by his strange behavior at his hotel room.
It was quite usual then for psychiatric patients who became unmanageable during a treatment session, to be toted away in handcuffs by the police to a state mental facility and put into a strait jacket (this happened to my own mother in here in Los Angeles in 1970). The off-handed diagnosis of “paranoid schizophrenia” was a convenient recourse by the medical authorities in these facilities to justify the illegal and unwarranted incarceration of individuals for prolonged periods, despite efforts by relatives to secure their release. The film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” depicts with some realism, the type of treatment that unwilling inmates routinely received in mental hospitals as a matter of course.
Bird was not a paranoid schizophrenic, was not psychotic at any time, and apparently was able to communicate quite lucidly with his visitors soon after his arrival at Camarillo. Nonetheless, he was forced to stay in that institution for a period of six months, during which time he recovered his health and was free from his drug addiction for the first time in years. So it could be said that this sojourn was salubrious for him, but it’s difficult to understand why an individual of sane mind should have been imprisoned in a mental hospital for half a year merely on the basis of a single instance of extreme behavior brought on by heroin withdrawal and excessive amounts of intoxicants. Considering the great artistic stature of Charlie Parker and the remarkable productivity and creativity he sustained at all points of his short career despite a chronic addiction to heroin, it would seem that his lengthy interlude in the Camarillo mental institution was an example of persecution of a difficult and eccentric black artist by uncomprehending and hostile petty bureacrats who represented the repressive and mediocre-minded white establishment in Los Angeles. Remember, bebop itself was an innovative new extension of the jazz language which had found a very poor response in Los Angeles at this time, and there was also an extreme amount of racial prejudice among the Los Angeles police as well; so Bird found himself in the most unfortunate milieu here, which was of course, perhaps his own fault for pawning the plane ticket back to New York instead of returning with Dizzy Gillespie and the other musicians who had made the trip out to Hollywood in 1946 for a gig at Billy Berg’s.
Today, the Camarillo State Mental Hospital is much as it was in 1946, a pleasant complex of white stucco one-storey buildings with palm trees and green lawns, surrounded by acres of vegetable fields and a rustic community of inhabitants; but it is now a college campus, part of the University of Southern California. I visited it a few years ago and found it to be exactly as it appears in the film Bird which had scenes that were shot there. It is really an attractive place, no doubt a pleasant environment in which to go crazy. It is a tribute to the stability of Charlie Parker’s mind that he emerged from there in a state of perfect mental and physical equilbrium despite the depressing circumstance of being trapped in a lunatic asylum with an uncomprehending medical staff for so many months. And as is well-documented on his many subsequent recordings, Bird went on to create some of his most polished and brilliant musical masterpieces after this sad episode despite his many personal problems; one of the first recordings he made after his release being the session that included the ingenious, ironically-titled 12 bar blues theme Relaxin’ at Camarillo, which clearly exhibits the remarkable musical lucidity and inventiveness of which Charlie Parker was still in fullest possession.
|
