lot of us male writers designing our own homes are, I suspect, a bit too much like boys planning their private treehouse. It’s hard for some of us grown-up-boy writers to avoid sticking secret rooms and passageways in our house designs.
I’ve visited Stephen King’s summer house, a very pleasant but unpresumptuous second home on a lake in central Maine, but I’ve never been to his home in Bangor. Still, many of us know that his main writing area in the expanded Bangor home is a hidden room with access through a secret door on a landing.
I don’t know if King has any other secret rooms in his home (I would hope so), but I do know that our mutual friend Harlan Ellison has seven secret rooms in his house. (Or is it eight now? It’s so easy to lose track.) There is a secret room made up of black rock and black carpet to simulate a cave. There are secret rooms, humidity controlled, in which archival racks of sliding shelves hold thousands of classic comic books and other collectibles. There is a hidden door opening on a low secret passage leading to a ladder opening on a hidden tower in which . . . but to tell more would be to ruin the fun.
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.
Harlan himself was working at that early hour in his mezzanine writing area, above the long billiard room (shades of Mark Twain!) which is accessed through the low, beautiful hobbit door which is just the right size for Harlan but usually makes guests duck low, and at the first serious tremor he started to run down the stairway to the billiard room (somewhere near which is a secret door which opens into a room designed as a cave which I made the mistake of sleeping in during my first stay with Harlan, but that’s another story) when the real earthquake hit, traveling up to the ridgetop with a force equal, engineers later figured, of a negative six gravities . . . .
Harlan was launched up and over the stairway railing in the sudden darkness and then fell ten feet to the floor, his head missing the edge of the huge billiard table by less than an inch. Books and artwork were falling by the thousands. The billiard room is windowless and there was no light at 4:30 a.m.. Harlan lost consciousness for a few seconds and when he came to and started swimming his way up through the the books and papers – including thousands of pages of manuscript for the legendary and still-unpublished The Last Dangerous Visions which had been stacked up all around the mezzanine railing twenty feet above him – suddenly a heavy framed and glassed poster fell in the pitch blackness and struck him in the face, breaking his nose, giving him a serious concussion, and knocking him out again.
The Last Dangerous Visions and a ton of other literary and artistic treasures, now fluttering detritus, continued to fall until he was buried alive.
Harlan survived. (And he’s never appreciated my suggestion that death from being suffocated by a ton of The Last Dangerous Visions pages, now twenty years overdue to the publisher, would have been the most fittingly ironic obituary in the history of obituaries.) A few days after the earthquake he was standing at his sliding glass doors to the patio watching a raging storm outside and had just stepped away when the heavy metal canopy over the patio, weakened by the earthquake, gave way and smashed through the doors, destroying everything in its path. Again, Harlan survived.
Every collectible broken during the earthquake was painstakingly repaired or replaced. Some seemed irreplaceable – such as a unique, handcrafted cookie jar that I believe was given to him by Robin Williams – but Williams came through with a replacement that same week. Now every work of art is earthquake-proofed double-anchored, all the tens and hundreds of thousands of books now held in place by tasteful and expensive yachting bungee cords, every part of Ellison Wonderland itself patched and repaired and strengthened for the next earthquake.
The house may look like a Martian temple on the outside, but inside it’s a physical, three-dimensional celebration of the mind and unbounded imagination of Harlan Ellison. I’ve never encountered a home quite like it, even among the very, very wealthy or the very, very artistic. Oscar Wilde once said – “Put your talent into your work but your genius into your life.” Harlan Ellison’s home, Ellison Wonderland, is a strong argument that this man has put his genius into both his work and his life at home.
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