In
Transformation, Strieber mentions a couple of names from his 1968 London period [including] an old friend, Martin Sharp. Strieber mentions that Sharp lived in The Pheasantry on King’s Road, a location he spent time at in 1968. That got my attention the first time I read the book, back in 1990 or so, because I hung out a lot on King’s Road in my late teens (it was where the gorgeous “Chelsea girls” were) and I had visited the Pheasantry night club more than once. Not only that but, right before that period, in fact overlapping with it, the house where I lived in Yorkshire (where I had my very first kiss) was also called the Pheasantry! Struck by the coincidence—and already curious about Strieber’s mysterious “lost year(s)” in London—I decided to do some more digging. . . .
Martin Sharp was the creator of the hippie-style poster/album art and a highly influential artist. He was also one of the co-founders of
Oz, “a scandalous magazine and a major part of the ’60s underground scene” (the same scene Strieber’s films were supposedly part of).
Oz was first published in 1963 in Sydney, Australia (Sharp was Australian), and in London from 1967 to 1973. Richard Neville, a “futurist,” was the editor, and Strieber’s other friend, Philippe Mora (who directed the film version of
Communion), was a major contributor along with
Germaine Greer. As well as contributing cartoons (as “Von Mora”) to the magazine, Mora made a short film called Passion Play, shot in the Pheasantry around 1967 or 1968, with Jenny Kee as Mary Magdalene, Michael Ramsden as Jesus, and Mora himself as the Devil.
That seemingly trivial detail brought up another curious connection that was almost begging to be included: Roman Polanski (who was living in London during this period and married Sharon Tate there) shot
Rosemary’s Baby (in New York) in 1967-8. In the film, Anton LaVey, the head of the Church of Satan, was a “technical advisor” and allegedly played the Devil who impregnates Rosemary (though this is apocryphal, and IMDB credits the role to an unknown actor, “Clay Tanner”). LaVey was tenuously connected to the Manson family via Susan Atkins (who was present at the murder of the pregnant Sharon Tate in August 1969), and Charles Manson lived two blocks from a branch of the Process Church on Haight-Ashbury in 1967. Manson, who studied Scientology in jail prior to creating his Family, allegedly stated that he and Robert Grimston (the co-founder of the Process) were “one and the same.” So that brings us back again to Strieber, who was getting intimate with the inner works of the Process in 1968.
The Pheasantry was a melting pot for many influential artists of the period: as well as Strieber’s friend Sharp, Eric Clapton (who later did the music for
Communion) lived there briefly, on the top floor with the Oz-ies, as did the famous rock n’ roll photographer Robert Whitaker. Sharp and Whitaker created an album cover for Cream and a three-minute film with Germaine Greer called
Darling Do You Love Me, directed by Sharp. . . .
Richard Neville wrote a memoir of his time with
Oz called
Hippie, Hippie, Shake, which was made into a movie of the same name. Although it has never been released, I knew about the movie because they’d shot part of it on the London street where I lived in 2007, during the same period I wrote my first piece about Strieber! I had hung out for an hour or so, making eyes at the star, Sienna Miller, before being moved along by one of the security staff. Before that happened, I’d found out that the director was Beeban Kidron—someone I used to play with when we were children, growing up in Yorkshire! It was Chapel Perilous: Whitley’s and my paths were slowly but surely converging. But what did it all mean—besides that “the coincidence goblin” was getting involved?
I looked into
Oz magazine and discovered that, surprise, surprise, they ran a piece on the Process Church in the May 1967 issue—just one month after I was born. The cover of the issue was done by Sharp; at the end of the article there was some artwork that included a flying saucer. . . . When I read the piece on the Process, I found [this] striking passage:
The faction is divided—more than once it seems—first of all there’s the desire to tell humanity about this divine revelation, then there’s this anti-grey masses scene which means no one is actually very keen on mingling with the ‘greys’ in order to put across the message. Thus a Process magazine is born. A lovely, remote way of making the word Process known—just pay your thousands and have it printed on glossy paper, without actually having to touch the outsiders yourself. Then you sit and wait for the right ones to come pouring in: all those Gurdjieff initiated meditating hippies . . .” (etc.; Strieber reputedly spent thirteen years studying with the Gurdjieff Foundation, immediately after this period, from roughly 1970-83).
Another significant figure who lived at the Pheasantry during the period was David Litvinoff. Litvinoff was an adviser on the production of the cult movie
Performance, shot in London in autumn of 1968, around the time Strieber was scattering his marbles across Europe. The film was made by Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell, and Cammell, it turns out, was in Kenneth Anger’s
Lucifer Rising as Osiris, along with Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil, as Lucifer! Cammell was the son of Charles Richard Cammell, a close friend and biographer of Aleister Crowley, and in fact Cammell was Crowley’s godson. For his role in Performance as “Chas,” a violent organized-crime figure, actor James Fox was trained by Litvinoff, an associate of the notorious Kray brothers, and spent time with the Krays.
(Litvinoff eventually fell afoul of the Kray brothers and was the recipient of “the Chelsea grin”: “the shocking sword punishment meted out to [him] whereby Ronnie pushed a sword into his mouth virtually splitting his face in two from ear to ear.”
http://film.thedigitalfix.com/content/i ... -word.html The Chelsea grin (worn by Heath Ledger’s joker in
The Dark Knight) is said to have originated in the Glasgow underworld, yet it was named after the district of London where Litvinoff lived, and where the Pheasantry is located. In another strange personal overlap, Jimmy Boyle, who was among the most notorious Glaswegian criminals of the 1960s, was my late brother’s business associate and lover in the 80s. My brother lived in Chelsea at the time he met Boyle (he later moved to Edinburgh and opened a charity workshop with him).)
Mapping these same shadowy and labyrinthine connections, comic book writer Alan Moore included Litvinoff as one of the characters in his
League of Extraordinary Gentleman series:
Litvinoff is one of the few concrete real life examples of the process Moore is trying to describe in 1969. The archetypal London face, he was a living link between the various contemporary, queasily cohabiting underworlds of criminality (boyfriend, or at least sometime arm candy of Ronnie Kray), showbiz (the Performance film-making /art scene connections) and psychedelic occultism (probable sideline in good acid). He somehow survived getting heavily in debt to the Krays, but speculation remains that the eventual reason for his demise was the embarrassing secrets supposedly revealed in an expose he was writing based on his experiences and insider knowledge of these various nefarious milieus.
. . . .
Strieber’s forgotten London odyssey now showcases not only strange occultists, UFO-heads, and leading entertainment industry players, but organized London criminals and pedophiles. It places him, as a twenty-something “underground filmmaker” making a documentary on the Process Church, at the very heart of the scene in the years 1967-8. . . . The only mention he does make of this period in his life in
Communion is suitably scrambled and bizarre (and oddly reminiscent of a scene out of
The Godfather Part Two):
Then, in July (of 1968), there was another incident. I cannot recall what happened with any clarity. It was simply too confusing, too jumbled. I was at a friend’s flat in the King’s Road, Chelsea. For years I have described it as a “raid” from which I escaped by “crossing the roofs.” What I actually remember is a period of complete perceptual chaos, followed by the confusing sensation of looking down into the chimney pots of the buildings. Then there was blackness (p. 137).
Once again blackness. So what was behind it? A little digging uncovered the fact that there was a massive series of police raids in early May of 1968 (directed by one John du Rose) targeting the Krays’ London operations. The Krays were the first to be arrested but many other homes were targeted. Litvinoff, who lived at the Pheasantry, was allegedly running a gambling joint for the Krays at that time on the King’s Road.
. . . .
In a 2006 interview with Peter Levenda, the author of
Sinister Forces, Strieber mentioned having had “a certain involvement” with the Process Church:
[B]ecause we were in film school and we had a documentary to make, that this would be our subject. And we began making our documentary. Soon we were called, or more accurately I was called, by a gentleman in the British foreign office, to come and meet with him. It was rather surprising because how they found me and, etc., etc., I never found out. In any case, we met with him and he told us this: he said that in their opinion the Process Church of the Final Judgment was seducing young people and taking them to Mexico, wealthy young people on a yacht that they had access to, and in Mexico, they were sacrificing these young people in pyramids in the Mayan country. And a number of young people had disappeared as a result of this. We finished our documentary and I ended up—Mike got away Scott free but I ended up being chased. They unleashed dogs on me in their building in Mayfair and I ended up having to escape across roofs. It was really pretty dramatic.
As far as I know, this is the only time Strieber has gone on record about his “involvement” with the Process Church, and typically, he just throws it out there as one more bizarre incident in a life overflowing with anomalies. Was this the event he described, as a fragmented memory, in
Communion? If so, why did he describe it as “a raid” in 1986 if he remembered the incident with the Process dogs which he described to Levenda in 2006? [etc, for the full PDF go here:
http://crucialfictions.com/wp-content/u ... ity-10.pdf]
[After that there's, a RAW quote about CP:]
“Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called ‘I,’ cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn't seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous.”
—Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger