“Where have all the flowers gone, gone to graveyards every one….”
Claudine Laabs was a pistol. Not your everyday pistol, mind you, but a handgun of some distinction, silver in color, perhaps, with turquoise inlay, always polished and never content to sit in her holster. She spent the last years of her life quietly among the bluebloods of Palm Beach, a prominent professional photographer with a studio on fussy Worth Avenue and President of the Everglades Audubon Society. The messages in her online Memory Book speak in hallowed tones of a staunch environmentalist who protected the mangroves and the estuaries from urban developers and sprawl, “a poet among bird photographers” and “a painter with light.” Claudine even had a flower, a rare orchid, named after her, for crying out loud. I thought about it for a moment and I realized that, no, this Memory Book was not a place the likes of me should be visiting. If I were to publish my own recollections of the woman, they would send the Worth Avenue crew running into the streets in horror, unwilling to believe. “Not OUR Claudine! There must be some mistake!”
In the horseracing business, we say there are “horses for courses,” meaning certain animals fit in better on certain racetracks. A very shrewd girl, Claudine figured out how to excel on the Palm Beach track. But long before that, back in the late sixties, Claudine Laabs was a University of Florida Fine Arts student, a Gainesville Regular with a penchant for action, men, and, if the situation called for it (as it often did), what polite society calls “illegal drugs.” This is neither a eulogy nor an elegy. It is not a pure tribute because tributes have a way of stripping from the record any personal qualities or deeds deemed less than canonization-worthy. This is instead a story, a story about a strong and unique woman who grabbed Life by the nape of the neck and shook the devil out of it. This is a story about the people who surrounded her and the magical era in which it all took place. We reserve a special niche for that time in the attics of our memories and every so often—like now—we visit those places, open the keep chests and shake the dust off. So, once upon a time….
Claudine And Patti
I first met Claudine at the behest of her fellow art student Danny Levine, he a friend of my Subterranean Circus partner, the famous Pamme Brewer. Pamme had cajoled me into hiring Danny even though he had been recently released from a mental facility in San Francisco, a move which paid off in spades when he sold 50 pair of bellbottom jeans the first day of his employment. Danny adored Claudine and thought we would make a perfect match. Neither of us was so sure. The girl was certainly attractive enough, having won a Riviera Beach beauty contest she would barely admit to, but she was also a little cocky and a smidge sarcastic. I also think she considered that it was somehow not within her dating purview to muck about with capitalists, her previous consorts all being enmeshed in the arts. The first time we went out I asked her why she decided to step outside her comfort zone. “Well,” she said, “I really trust Danny’s opinion. And you looked pretty good in that translucent hippie shirt you were wearing the other day. Oh, and Danny said you could write a little, so I guess I’m not a complete sell-out.” That was Claudine.
The years 1968-69 were for many of us in our late teens and twenties a whirling dervish, a long ride on the runaway train of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The Circus was expanding by the day, buying up property and adding a second retail outlet, a clothing boutique called Silver City, next door. The days were filled with buying trips to New York, Atlanta Pop Festivals and making sure you had enough marijuana in your stash to carry you through the weekend. Relationships were casual, almost nobody was looking for permanency, having fun was the order of the day. Timothy Leary, the Grand Poobah of LSD, was advising everyone to turn on, tune in and drop out and he had plenty of subscribers to the philosophy. Gainesville was a drug-dealer’s paradise and virtually all of them were among our best customers, including a biker named Rick Wheeler who sauntered into the store one day with his stunning wife Patti in tow. Patti was a big flirt. It was indigenous to her, a basic component of her makeup. It didn’t even mean she liked someone, just that she wanted them to like her. It worked, too. I took my place in line and by the time she separated from Rick, I was first at the door.
While Claudine was serious and sophisticated, Patti was reluctant to leave her childhood behind. Claudine measured people by accomplishment, intellect, talent. Patti appreciated friendliness, warmth and a great sense of humor. Claudine had an affinity for great art, Patti would just as soon watch Stuart Bentler operate his electric yoyo as visit the Taj Mahal. But before anyone goes running off making assumptions about an intelligence differential, know this: while Claudine graduated with honors in English and an MFA in Fine Arts, Patti was a mathematics wizard, a straight A student who graduated in four years with a degree in Engineering. Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder.
For all her wackiness, Patti did not just jump into relationships willy-nilly. She was comfortable with me partly because we shared the same Catholic upbringing. And despite the profligacy of the times, she hadn’t completely dispensed with her religion. One night, she turned to me in bed and reminded me that “All this stuff we’re doing is a sin, you know.” I couldn’t tell whether she was kidding or not. You seldom knew with Patti. One minute you were a nacre, the bad kind, the next minute she wanted to be your little girl. If there were two more disparate souls on the planet than Patti Wheeler and Claudine Laabs, I couldn’t name them. And I wound up going out with both of them at the same time.
Patti Wheeler (left) with Danny Whiddon, Guy Thibaut and Debbie Adelman in front of the Circus.
Lucy In The Sky With Seashells
As time went by, I spent an increasing amount of time with Claudine. We swapped keys to our apartments but spent most of our nights at her place, a small but homey upstairs rental on a side street about two blocks from the intersection of University Avenue and 13th Street near the UF campus. Claudine was heavily into her preferred field and took her camera everywhere, chronicling even our weekend Circus croquet matches vs. the university’s Architecture Department, led by the legendary malleteer Leland George Shaw, who was also designing a house for me on the croquet grounds. These affairs were madcap come-one, come-all freakfests with more action on the periphery than the croquet courts. Lovers skittered through the woods. Motorcycles crashed into trees. Danny Levine could be counted on to wear his uniform of the day, which one weekend looked like a giant pink rabbit suit without the ears, though Danny called it his “monk’s robe.” “Where else can I get this kind of lunacy?” Claudine wanted to know. She was in Photographer’s Heaven.
We went to a lot of movies, some of them foreign art films which she loved and I didn’t. We sat up at night, her showing me every photograph Ansel Adams ever took, me assuring her it was alright if she simultaneously loved and hated On the Road or explaining why Norman Mailer couldn’t write a book like The Naked and the Dead every time. Claudine surprisingly brought up The Search for Bridey Murphy, certain she was Salome in one past life and Cleopatra’s housecat in another, undoubtedly the most unlikely words I ever heard her utter. Then one day, she decided it was time for us to take acid together and what place better to do it than St. Augustine Beach, a mere two hours away? I had dabbled in the stuff, usually in the safety of someone’s apartment in the company of a Designated Abstainer, a reliable observer who could quickly summon the ambulance if things moved beyond the pale. But sometimes the call comes from the Major Leagues and you have to pack up all your gear and wave goodbye to the minors. For me, this would be that time.
In those days, Vilano Beach, just north of St. Augustine, was a long stretch of mostly unoccupied sand, few houses in evidence. We drove down the coast road until we found an opening in the high banking which led to the ocean, then parked and followed the path to the sea. It was a perfect evening, not too hot, and clear. The sun behind us was giving serious consideration to calling it a day as we moseyed down the beach. LSD, as if you didn’t know, takes a different amount of time to manifest in different people. We ingested our little squares and figured on about an hour for the roller coaster to get moving. We toddled on down the beach for about half an hour and then turned back. Thirty minutes later, the process was ongoing. I was a little concerned about driving back to our cottage ten minutes away, having had no experience driving while acidified, and rightly so. The biggest problem is convincing yourself you are not speeding when you are traveling over 25 miles-per-hour. Thirty-five mph seems like Warp Speed 8. If you continue at these tortoise speeds for very long, police intervention is likely to occur so you have to force yourself to watch the speedometer and pick up the pace. We finally made it back to the cottage, thanking God, and crawled down what now looked like a very narrow path into the parking lot. “I don’t know if I can squeeze through there, Claudine,” I worried. “What are you talking about?” she wondered. “You could drive a BUS through there.” We made it back to the cottage, giggling like fools, and stumbled inside. I would tell you the rest, but this isn’t that kind of column. You’ll just have to wait and buy the book.
The Acid Tests—Part II
Having come out of this sordid adventure none the worse for wear, we decided to push our luck on Trip Two. This time we would get a ground-floor motel room opening up to the Gulf of Mexico on St. Petersburg Beach, thus forgoing the automobile adventures. While we were waiting for the acid to kick in, Claudine decided we should go to a theater across the street and see a Costa-Gavras political thriller called “Z,” which ravages the Greek government of the sixties. This was probably not the best movie to see under the influence of LSD, a substance capable of making Mary Poppins paranoid. I kept looking over my shoulder for assassins all the way back to the motel. Claudine’s superb ministrations and the calming sound of the ocean alleviated most of my concerns but I wouldn’t recommend this sort of cinema for rookie imbibers. Next time I’m going to see Harold and Maude or The Sound of Music or Finding Nemo, at least.
Claudine and I never had any arrangements about exclusivity but she seemed too busy for outside engagements. I continued to see Patti Wheeler now and then, an ongoing source of irritation to Claudine, who once threw my house keys at me in consternaton and sent Danny Levine by to determine whether or not I was crazy, he being a certified expert on the subject. Most of the time, though, everything went well. If we were not the perfect match Danny envisioned, we were still a good one, happy to be together, sources of mutual support through thick and thin. Nobody pretended it would be Forever. Then one day it definitely wasn’t. Claudine arrived with Big News—she was going to Europe for the summer, largely France--surprising only because we had never discussed it for a minute. She thought it only fair to tell me that under the spell of the seductive Paris night it was conceivable there would be Romance involved because, after all, it would be criminal to waste those delicious French evenings. That almost went without saying. I told her I was thrilled for her and I was.
There is always a bit of sadness when a memorable partnership nears the end of the road, even under these, the best of circumstances. The Great Moments expand in recollection, the tiny tiffs disintegrate. For whatever reasons, you are parting ways with an enthusiastic lover, a valued friend, a woman of station, the likes of which are few. Our remaining time together was like a blur as Claudine methodically assembled her touring gear, filled with a glow that could only be the lure of Paris. When I sent her off, she hugged me long and hard, her eyes misty with emotion, a phenomenon I had never seen before. She walked off a few steps, returned and kissed me sweetly. “I feel better,” she said mischievously, “knowing you won’t be lonely.” Then she winked, turned away and strutted off into the future. Just like that, Claudine Laabs was gone forever.
Mike Hatcherson and Debbie Adelman with Claudine.
Only A Pawn In Their Game
After several productive years as a professional photographer in California, Claudine lusted again for the open road. She crossed the Atlantic in a sailboat, traveled throughout the Middle East, lived for a while in Paris and taught for a short time in an inner-city neighborhood in New York, eventually settling in Palm Beach to open her ultimate photography studio. She felt sated and content with her life.
One fine day in the early 1980s, the Subterranean Circus store manager, Rose Coward, self-appointed custodian of my social life, looked out the store window and came rushing over to me with exciting news. “BILL!” she exclaimed in a high state of dander, “There’s a woman walking down the street who is EXACTLY the right type for you!”
“And what is the right type for me?” I wondered.
“Well, she’s very European-looking. And I like the way she walks.”
I got up to take a look. And there, marching toward the Circus came Claudine, a formidable bundle under her arm. Rose, of course, was dumbfounded at this unlikely turn of events. The bundle turned out to be a large tasteful nude photograph of Claudine, suitable for showing your mother. She invited me to dinner that night at the home of Lee and Suzy Shaw, where she was staying, and rushed off claiming a tightness of schedule. “That was short and sweet,” complained Rose. “Maybe she’s not the right type for you.”
I had been to the Shaw manse before, a nicely-appointed edifice overlooking a prairie, just off Wacahoota Road near Micanopy. As always, the place was impeccably arranged, a tribute to Suzy’s taste and patience, with nary a crooked photograph adorning the walls. Lee and Suzy had an unconventional marriage, he often in the company of a protege, she regularly flirting with guests at the croquet matches, but we were, after all, barely out of the seventies so who cares?
Dinner was perfect and the hosts repaired to the kitchen, leaving Claudine and I to rehash old times and see what happened. Or so I thought. After about twenty minutes, Claudine excused herself and disappeared into the rear of the house. She was promptly replaced by the always-effervescent Suzy, for what I thought would be a brief chat. Being an inexperienced fool in these matters, I expected Claudine would be back any time. When five minutes turned into fifteen, however, the handwriting was on the well-decorated wall. Lee and Claudine, great friends over the years, were consummating that relationship in the friendliest way possible and I had been Claudine’s ticket to the ball. What an outrage! Although I do have to admit, it’s always nice to be asked for. And I had no complaints about the trade. Suzy turned out to be the perfect blind date—freewheeling, funny and flexible. I’m taking it on faith that a good time was had by all. Suzy said thanks for the memories and escorted me to the door. Now, I know you’re not going to believe this because of the limitations of the human senses and the significant distance involved—but I’m just about positive I could feel Claudine wink.
Sad to report, she’s really gone this time. But wherever she is, she’s still on some riverboat, stoking the boiler and shuffling the deck. Claudine Laabs lived life on her own terms, unwilling to be commanded or categorized, always exploring, constantly turning the page to see What’s Next. She was as aware as anyone that life is too short to be timid, even if it turns out you have more than one of them. Which reminds us that we have one more request for her. Claudine, the next time you’re wandering down The Golden Strand and Cleopatra passes by, will you give her a big hello from us? Or, if that turns out to be impossible under the circumstances, how about a polite meow? Just wink and we’ll get the message.
About The Photographer
There are many photographs by Claudine Laabs but not so many of her. Fortunately for us, we know Chris Thibaut, lensman extraordinaire, who went to school with Claudine and was a close friend. Chris has photos of everybody who ever entered the Gainesville city limits, and that includes Claudine. Chris also provided sparkling automobile shots for our Cars column many months ago. He currently spends most of his time cruising around the environs of Sarasota with his wife and expanded family. Chris, by the way, has also been voted Vice-President of Invitations for the Great Gainesville Reunion, coming sooner or later to a theater near you. See Chris, that’s what happens when you ask to be included.
When you look at the shots of Debbie Adelman and Patti Wheeler you’ll probably ask yourself if it’s possible that ALL the girls from the Winter Park of that era are beautiful. You don’t know the half of it, there’s plenty more where they came from. See, in those days the WP City Council sent inspectors around to all the homes and any girl who was not absolutely gorgeous was asked to move. We know that’s difficult for some people but you’ve got to have standards. Debbie still lives in the Orlando area, where she is banging the gong for Jesus, perhaps to atone for her sordid past. Patti, meanwhile, has disappeared from the face of the Earth, although diligent Flying Pie reporter Marcia Dalton testifies that reliable witnesses have placed her somewhere in the vicinity of Atlanta. Unaccountably, Patti, like Garbo, just wants to be alone. We might be able to prod her out of there with Stuart Bentler’s electric yoyo but Stuart is otherwise engaged. Mike (Jagger) Hatcherson is currently residing in his own private Idaho, where he recently overcame a life-threatening experience with good humor and a little help from his friends. Danny Whiddon is an avid Republican in Orlando, something we attribute to insufficient longevity as a Circus employee. We don’t know much about Guy Thibaut but we are certain that, if extant, he is a wonderful human being. Not photographed but prominently mentioned, Danny Levine has been and might still be a professor of Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design. If we forgot anybody, well, they’re obviously not that important anyway.
That’s all, folks….
