Happy 54th anniversary of the party Joan Didion gave to celebrate the publication of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, at which Harrison Ford and record label boss Earl McGrath got wrecked and played living artworks.
This was, perhaps, appropriate, given that the book is an account of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters travelling across America in a bus full of acid.
Didion and McGrath had been friends for about six years at this point and often gave parties together, apparently. This one is described in a Vanity Fair article about artist Eve Babitz:
Didion was married to writer John Gregory Dunne, whose nephew Griffin — his American Werewolf days still way ahead of him — provided one of the best eyewitness accounts of the occasion. Mind you, “in junior high and up way past his bedtime” he wasn’t off his bollocks.
Still, the young man did manage to make a useful contact in the industry — a legendary director. Or, at least, this would have been a useful man to know if he’d been likely to have the smallest memory of the occasion…
Perhaps the best bit of the article is the bit when Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & The Papas goes to see Star Wars, and suggests where some of the gear that was doing the rounds might have come from:
Earl McGrath died in 2016, and was friends with Harrison Ford for the rest of his life
![Harrison Ford’s friendship with McGrath also spanned half a century. “Earl was the first person I met in Los Angeles,” he says. “I had come here to be an actor [in 1964]. And I became a carpenter when I started working on the house my wife and I bought in the Hollywood Hills. I borrowed $150 from Earl to buy a radial arm saw. Earl introduced me to Joan and John, and I built their deck in Malibu.”](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*xW_R7Jv5m0vZ2fdxK7FUVw.png)
Harrison Ford, who, in his pre-movie star days, did some carpentry for Earl and sold him weed, too.
I think Harrison Ford, surely now into his TOTGAS* years, might like to shed some light on this himself, instead of just sticking to tales of the type of circular saw which is mounted on a sliding horizontal arm (thank you, Google).
(*too old to give a shit)
Anyway, here’s a photo of young Mr Ford c.1968 from that Vanity Fair article, which may appeal to some of you
…and if all that isn’t intoxicating enough for you, today is also the 20th anniversary of the bizarre end-of-play jig performed by Mark Rylance and the cast of Richard II at Shakespeare’s Globe, and broadcast live on the BBC:
