The famous director needed a fresh star. The cult needed a foothold in Hollywood. The unbelievable true story of Antonioni’s forgotten film and the lurid cult that came to Hollywood.

WHEN THE POLICE entered the apartment in the early morning hours of Oct. 1, 1967, they found exactly what they expected. Mattresses on the floor, piles of clothing, psychedelic drawings all over the walls. They found marijuana, thousands of unidentified pills, and a 17-year-old girl in a closet, high on LSD, not even conscious.

The police had been surveilling the apartment for weeks. Mayor Daniel Hayes of Cambridge, Massachusetts, made sure the raid was televised. “A flophouse,” he declared for the cameras, looking thick-necked and barrel-chested weeks before his re-election bid. “I never saw such a filthy situation.”

The Health Commissioner boarded up the apartment’s windows — “unfit for human habitation.” Twenty-one hippies were dragged out into the night and arrested on drug, vagrancy, and nuisance charges, including the LSD-addled girl. “All we were trying to do was groove together,” one of them said, bewildered.

The raid was the beginning of Cambridge’s “War on Hippies.” Hayes’s declaration of war days earlier circulated in newspapers across the country, as if it had tapped a national nerve. “The great unwashed” threatened their peaceful community, he said, home of Harvard and MIT. Hippies live in squalor—ten people to a room—and destroy apartments. They take doors off the hinges to use them as beds. They steal everything, including, in one case, a kitchen sink. They’re drug addicts indulging in “love-ins and boys and girls living together without benefit of clergy.” Hayes urged health officials to find code violations and called on landlords to reject hippie tenants. “We must rid these people from our city.”

Hours after the raid, three hundred people protested outside Cambridge police headquarters, chanting “Let them go! Let them go!” Everyone knew the raid was just the beginning.

The main target in the War on Hippies was an underground newspaper called Avatar. Even worse than filthy apartments were filthy hippie ideas spreading so flagrantly — waved in pedestrians’ faces, shoved into innocent hands. Avatar was a cheaply printed tabloid with psychedelic covers and articles about smoke-ins, the Vietnam War (“Fuck the Army”), and draconian drug busts. It was part of a wave of underground newspapers sprouting up across the country, featuring astrology, Sci-Fi, and sex columns alongside ads for headshops. But Avatar had something else—an oddly belligerent mysticism.

Jesus was not a gentle lamb, he was a MAN he FUCKED and he FARTED. . . . . .. and he HATED! and I know WHY he hated I hate the false goodness done in his name. He was a HOLY TERROR!

Avatar was the mouthpiece of a swaggering folk musician named Mel Lyman. “In all humility I tell you that I am the greatest man in the world,” Mel announced in the first issue. “I am going to show you things as they REALLY ARE.”

The Cambridge Vice Squad was not impressed. They arrested dozens of Avatar editors, staffers and street peddlers over several months. The Boston police raided offices and seized an entire print run, and judges started handing down obscenity convictions to a group of eccentrics who seemed eager to bear any burden to spread their message, including prison. The crackdown made Avatar more defiant, more obscene, and more menacing. Mel berated the police:

if you don’t lay off I’m gonna smear your filthy sex starved faces all over the Boston area, I’m gonna draw pictures of you all fucking each other in the ass and sucking each others [sic] cocks and I’ll have you doing things so terrible you’ll wish you never HEARD of AVATAR and I won’t just paste them up in public places or distribute them in mailboxes late at night. I’ll rent a goddamn airplane and drop them all over the whole goddamn motherfucking state. This is just a polite warning, you’re playing with dynamite, don’t fuck with me ...

Nationwide interest in Boston’s First Amendment fight began to shift to the strangeness lurking beneath it. The courtroom testimony of a Harvard-dropout Avatar editor, for example, took bizarre turns. “We’re a ‘family’ of 50 or 60 young people who live together at Fort Hill in Roxbury,” he said about Avatar’s staff. “We’re centered around the personality and ideas of Mel Lyman, who embodies the highest philosophical ideals.”

The few people who had heard of Mel Lyman knew him as an incredibly talented musician who played banjo and harmonica in a folk group with several television appearances—The Roger Miller Show, The Al Hirt Show (Mel got into a tiff with Johnny Carson on the Steve Allen Show). Mel himself gained fame at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the year Bob Dylan caused a furor by going electric. Mel had seen visions of himself playing an old hymn in front of thousands. “I wrestled with it for two nights and days,” he said, and he understood that this was his moment. As the festival ended, Mel strode onto the stage with his harmonica and played a ten-minute solo of “Rock of Ages.” The spirit consumed him, and the crowd was mesmerized. “I must’ve lost ten pounds during that song. The sweat was just pouring down.” Mel wrote in his diary about how powerful it felt—like Christ when he mounted the cross.

There were rumors he had a commune of about a hundred people at the top of Fort Hill, a predominantly black neighborhood in Boston, and that they had taken over several dilapidated houses and started rebuilding them. It was mostly hippie antics—LSD, music sessions, families blended together—but the commune had a draconian streak: constant labor and strict rules with violent enforcement. There were reports of pervasive surveillance, forced isolation and captivity, all of it in the service of Mel’s Messianic vision. “We’re building a new world,” a commune member told the Boston Globe.

TIME magazine defended Avatar against obscenity charges but couldn’t help noting that its chief contributor claimed to be God. Esquire smelled a story, so they dispatched a reporter and their photographer Diane Arbus to Boston. Arbus’s portrait of Mel captures a slender figure with a beaming smile and a banjo case. The headline splashed across the page: “GOD IS BACK—He Says So Himself.” The billing was tongue-in-cheek, but Lyman was serious. His followers called themselves The Lyman Family, and his word was gospel. “I have BECOME the truth, I have BECOME the soul, I am INSIDE of you, I am God.” Genuine understanding, this God preached, requires sacrifice. “I have destroyed some people and I will go on destroying them,” Mel wrote in Avatar, “to destroy the crap in them and thus save them.”

Esquire’s reporter dug up Mel’s book, Autobiography of a World Saviour, where Mel describes descending to earth from another planet in order to raise earth’s vibration level. Pronouncements about civilization, race, and gender roles appeared alongside mystifying prose without punctuation. “The mind is the center of a sphere and the periphery of that sphere is created FROM the center just as the center is created from the PERIPHERY.” Earth, he wrote, isn’t equipped with an adequate language for his thoughts.

At the height of the War on Hippies, and with Avatar in judicial crosshairs, a television show called What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? aired a 30-minute interview with Mel. Bob Silver sat across a table in the commune as Family members stood around watching. Mel was short and skinny, with bad teeth, a nasal voice, and a country bumpkin affect—he didn’t look like a God, but he had charisma. He had a powerful gaze, and when he walked into a room, people felt the intensity. That evening Mel wore a turtleneck and closely cropped hair, and he gave cryptic responses.

“Divinity then, by its very nature, is not something you own?” Bob asked.

“It’s something that owns you,” Mel responded.

Mel was simultaneously aloof and penetrating—they’d lock eyes in long silences. Mel would laugh and turn serious. It was eerie. Bob had to pause the interview because he felt sick to his stomach. He could tell that Avatar was only the beginning for these people.

“What is the next step?” he asked.

“Television, films, more communication.” Mel continued, “Television really turns me on.”

Why did he like it so much?

“I can make an hour film and reach a million people.”

It was clear that the folk band was not enough for Mel’s depth and intensity. Music was not enough. Avatar was not enough. If the Family was going to transform the world, they needed to be on film.

MARK FRECHETTE had Hollywood looks—tall and slender, chiseled features and a luxuriant mop of dark hair. He was striking even when he was grubby from carpentry work, even when he was cuffed and jailed for selling newspapers without a permit on the streets. Mark had dropped out of high school and endured several turbulent years (drinking and fistfights, panhandling, odd-jobbing, house-wrecking parties). He had a family. Betsy Schmaling was 17 and Mark was 18 when they married in 1966, a couple months before their son Tristan was born.

In the summer of 1968, Mark was standing at a bus stop in Boston watching a sailor and his girlfriend arguing when someone opened a window and threw a geranium at them.

“You motherfucker!” Mark began screaming, shaking his fist.

Suddenly someone grabbed him from behind.

“How old are you?”

“I’m 20,” he said. The MGM casting scout led Mark into an idling limousine and gleefully announced to casting director Sally Dennison: “He’s 20 and he hates!” A beautiful man. Angry enough to shoot a cop. No acting experience. Exactly what Michelangelo Antonioni was looking for.

The Italian director was 55 years old and at the peak of his career. His latest film, Blow-Up, had just made over twenty million dollars, an incredible success for the time. Antonioni was charismatic and taciturn. He was an old-world sophisticate with a shock of graying hair, shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled up. His cool, cerebral filmmaking style (not to mention Vanessa Redgrave’s full-frontal nudity) defied Hollywood standards and suggested a new direction for the struggling U.S. film industry—something daring and original. Young audiences were critical to MGM’s future, and the studio wanted Antonioni to make the film about the American counterculture.

MGM was desperate. It was the most illustrious of the big Hollywood studios, but the days of The Wizard of Oz seemed ages past, and their recent productions were flops. So MGM gave Antonioni everything: a multi-film contract, a bottomless budget, and minimal oversight. Antonioni only had a kernel of a story inspired by a newspaper article—a young man gunned down by the police while returning a stolen airplane—but he felt the film’s energy. There would be explicit sex and drug use, radical activists and rock and roll. The plot could come later. “Until I edit a film of mine,” Antonioni once said, “I have no idea myself what it will be about.” Antonioni was risky — he was a socialist, for God’s sake—but a big gamble could launch the studio’s renaissance. It would have to. His film was one of MGM’s only movies in production.

Antonioni’s nationwide casting search started in 1968. He considered Harrison Ford for the lead before deciding that he didn’t want professional actors. He wanted someone real. Auditions involved people shouting fuck you!, explaining what made them angry, and discussing whether violence was a fixture in their lives. He hired Sam Shepard to write the screenplay and then discarded it. He hired an activist to write protest scene dialogue and discarded that, too. Spontaneity was key.

Then there was the countercultural tour. Antonioni went to concerts and love-ins, ghettos and protests. He watched cops with helmets and truncheons beating kids with flowers in their hair at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He was tear-gassed twice. He was fascinated by LA’s blaring signs, but when he saw Death Valley he couldn’t believe it. Nothing in Europe was so vast and primitive — “like the moon,” he said.

A National Parks ranger took the director and his executive producer to a promontory called Zabriskie Point where they could gaze across the continent’s geographic nadir, all the badlands and sand dunes, the blankets of crumbled rock and bone, the salt flats stretching out across Death Valley’s floor, and the Funeral Mountains on the eastern horizon.

The artist was inspired.

“I want to see 20,000 hippies out there making love—as far as you can see.”

The park ranger had to break the silence.

“The answer to that is a flat no.”

By the summer, hippies were lining up for auditions at nightclubs and theatres. “We can’t find this boy,” Sally Dennison said. “We know he must exist.” When they saw Mark screaming on the street they recognized their man immediately—Mark had the energy.

Being plucked from obscurity by Hollywood was a dream come true for any young kid, but for Mark Frechette, it served a larger purpose. He had been discovering a sense of stability and meaning in his life, and he owed it all to the Family. And now, surely by divine intervention, he had a chance to repay Mel Lyman—a man he loved but had never met.

ALL THAT SUMMER, Mel’s plans for media dominance accelerated. He acquired Bolexes with telephoto lenses, booms, editing tables, and expensive sound equipment, and he began making films of commune life: children waking up, people on acid, a pregnant woman on a bad trip. Documentation (films, photos, recordings, letters and diaries) was a form of art-making for Mel, and he searched for more. The Family started building a two-story structure called the Magic Theater. There would be a recording studio, a sound stage for movies and shows, and storage for equipment and props. A theatre for immersive multimedia performances had a tiny master control room where Mel could manipulate everything — lighting, projections, music. Mark Frechette now looked like another great tool for manipulation.

Soon after Mel heard about the Hollywood casting, he summoned Mark to an upstairs room where Mel was spending more of his time alone. Mark heard a powerful sound as he entered. “I can’t explain it,” he later said. “I mean the whole damn room was humming.”

Mel sat Mark down and told him how important films were to him and what a great opportunity they had with MGM. It was important for Mark to make contacts in Hollywood. It was important for Mark to be successful. Hollywood, he said, was “the next step in the evolution of Avatar.” Wouldn’t he want to make that evolution happen?

Mark flew to L.A. in July 1968 and met his co-star, Daria Halprin. Big blue eyes and long brown hair. “I was nailed to the floor when I first saw her,” Mark said, “otherwise I would’ve been blown over.” Daria wasn’t an actor, either. She was a dancer. Antonioni discovered her in a documentary about San Francisco hippies called Revolution, where she appears in a psychedelic dance sequence—nude, arms spread wide, slowly rotating. “She is so sincere,” Antonioni later marveled, “she can communicate anything, everything.”

Mark was slouched in a chair, guarded and surly, when they met. “Are you wearing a wig?” he asked. They weren’t likely to hit it off. Daria was a 19-year-old freshman at Berkeley, capping off her elite education. Her parents were Anna Halprin, a pioneering postmodern dancer—founder-director of the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop—and Richard Halprin, a landscape architect who designed Ghirardelli Square and Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza. Daria was in an art department studio when someone said she had a phone call. “It’s Antonioni!” Oh, yes, of course. The man asked if she’d like to be in his next film. “Sure,” she laughed, thinking the prank was elaborate.

The film would be called Zabriskie Point. An innocent, vital young woman crosses paths with the angry young man in a prehistoric landscape. Two divergent impulses unite in the heart of America—and yet entirely outside of it. That was the counterculture.

DEATH VALLEY is a brutal film location. MGM trucks and jeeps rumbled over old Indian paths to a dry riverbed near Furnace Creek. Shirtless men moved dollies, boxes, and wind machines in scorching summer heat. Harrison Starr, in his mid-thirties, his first time as executive producer, found himself on his walkie-talkie trying to stop the noise from distant fighter jets. “Call Colonel Trimble and tell him to get the F-105’s out of the north end of the valley!”

Antonioni, meanwhile, would be gesticulating in his desert attire: boat shoes and a lavender button-down shirt. An elegant British woman beside him was Clare Peploe, his 27-year-old assistant, translator, and girlfriend. Antonioni brought several Italian craftsmen he deemed essential, including cameramen who could be spontaneous rather than bureaucratic Hollywood cogs. They spoke no English, which rankled the Teamster crew. And they weren’t thrilled with Antonioni, either, “pinko dago pornographer,” they called him.

Skirmishes between Teamsters and Italians popped up (an “accidentally” crushed espresso thermos, grumblings about special treatment) and union rules violations were quickly reported. Starr handed out bribes to move things along. They were several months behind schedule, there were no storyboards (Antonioni memorized sequences), and the plot kept changing. “After six months of shooting and one year of preparation,” an on-set reporter wrote, “only Antonioni seems to know what is happening.”

They were burning through money. They erected billboards across Los Angeles. Antonioni would gesture casually just before shooting a scene: “Put another billboard over there, and I’ll wait.” The crew built a set on top of the Mobil Oil building just to get an American flag in the frame. He brought five tons of “dry color” to paint the desert pink and green only to discover that tons of color meant nothing in such a vast landscape. He wanted a Death Valley rock concert—he suggested the Beatles or the Rolling Stones—and he wanted the final scene to be a sky writer over L.A. spelling out, “Fuck you, America!”

When MGM nixed this idea, Antonioni settled on a more expensive finale. The crew built a full-size replica of a luxury home on a desert hillside and lined the walls and foundations with explosives to create what some believed was the largest cinematic explosion ever—the vicinity’s airspace had to be cleared. Seventeen high-speed cameras positioned in several bunkers would allow the cinematic audience to see the explosion from different angles, over and over again, in slow motion, with furniture, clothing, and Wonder Bread flying.

Filming Mark and Daria was more difficult. They hated the script. “This isn’t me,” Mark complained. Sam Shepard flew to Death Valley to help with the dialogue, and even after they settled on spontaneous lines the actors would ask questions, resist, demand changes. Antonioni wasn’t used to this. “What do YOU know about making movies?!” he yelled. They fought regularly. “When we’re angry, we’re really angry,” Daria told a reporter.

“You’re so stupid!” the director told her. She kept taking more than the directed number of steps in one scene. “I thought you were intelligent!”

“Goddamn it if you could speak English, maybe I could understand you!” The crew loved it. Mark caused more trouble. The film needed more intensity, he said, and he started telling Antonioni about Mel Lyman. He’d leave copies of Avatar in Antonioni’s trailer. The director threw them out, but Mark persisted. He’d plant copies on the set so that covers featuring Mel were visible on camera. Antonioni would cut filming and grab the unauthorized prop. “What’s his picture doing in my picture?”

Mark walked off the set and flew back to Boston twice, halting production and panicking MGM. During one departure he was charged with breach of peace and resisting arrest. Harrison Starr kept trying to lure him back: “It will cause a scandal if you leave, it will reflect badly on Fort Hill.” But only Mel’s persuasion mattered. During Mark’s first departure, he and Mel stayed up all night smoking weed, discussing creativity, and listening to Mel’s music. Mark returned to Death Valley with some of Mel’s recordings and asked Antonioni to put them on the soundtrack. The director sat “twitching” to one upbeat song, but Mark was pretty sure he wasn’t getting it.

The next time he left the set, Mark barged into Mel’s room announcing he had quit for good. “The whole thing was a big Hollywood lie, it wasn’t real,” he explained. “So I put a stop to it.” He was teaching Antonioni a lesson. Mel calmed him down and redirected him toward their larger Hollywood goals. Why don’t you make this little lesson temporary, Mark? When Mark finally answered Antonioni’s calls, Mark insisted on changes, new dialogue, new scenes.

Mark became relentless. He tried converting Daria to Mel. He tried converting on-set reporters. The new publicity agent, Beverly Walker, supervised his press interactions to keep the Lyman Family under wraps. But a Look magazine reporter managed to get some details from him. Beverly immediately called up Mark to confront him, but the awful sound she heard coming from his end of the line was terrifying. “It was like nothing human.” She dashed out of her motel room in terror, tears in her eyes, looking for Harrison. She was the film’s third publicity agent for a reason. Minutes later, Mark knocked on her door, barefoot and apologetic. He got her a glass of water and a cloth for her eyes. It was as if there were “two warring sides of Mark Frechette,” Beverly later said.

MGM knew the risks. The studio had compiled a psychiatric report on Mark that detailed a history of violence, psychiatric hospitalizations, and the use of straitjackets. His arrests were substantial—breaking and entering, aggravated assault, trespassing, and much more. He had problems with structure and authority. The report warned the studio to be careful, but Antonioni never read it.

Months of filming were hard on Mark. His wife Betsy visited him on set with their two-year-old son Tristan. She was pregnant with their second child. Daria noticed Mark’s tenderness with Tristan—there was deep love beneath his surliness. Betsy’s visit was brief, and they grew apart as filming dragged on. Mark and Daria were left in Death Valley, surrounded, surveilled and bossed by the crew, by Antonioni, by producers and assistants. They were alone together.

IN NOVEMBER 1968, rumors circulated about Antonioni’s most ambitious scene: a panoramic shot of thousands of hippies making love across the desert. Death Valley National Park rangers were so opposed to the idea that their complaints reached D.C. While officials eventually consented, MGM made Antonioni scale back—hundreds of hippies, not thousands. The sequence would focus on Mark, Daria, and about twenty actors from an experimental New York theater group called the Open Theater. They ran suggestive ads in Las Vegas newspapers looking for uninhibited extras (“no acting experience necessary”). A crowd showed up at the audition, including three Las Vegas police officers. “Just here to make sure you don’t have any problems.”

There was reason for concern. Rehearsals involved Open Theater actors breaking down inhibitions through “touch therapy” sessions: holding, breathing, synchronous movements that transformed individuals into pure loving energy. One day someone laced the refreshments with LSD, and Joe Chaikin, the Open Theater’s director, had to talk people down from bad trips. One woman was screaming. “I’d like to call my boyfriend,” she kept saying—he was a Republican congressional candidate.

When rehearsals wrapped, several hundred extras boarded buses for Death Valley with the Open Theater actors. They hiked down a mountain, spread out in couples and small groups over a square mile of rocky landscape, and disrobed in front of a bewildered crew. Everyone was parched and exhausted before the first take. The air-conditioned, carpeted rehearsal space didn’t prepare anyone to generate loving energy in blinding heat, and a production assistant called the shoot a “dehumanizing ordeal.” After six hours, Antonioni told everyone to go home.

They tried again the next day with the Open Theater actors, a smaller group of extras, and a few adventurous crew members. Teamsters trucked in hundreds of pounds of synthetic sand (it was less abrasive) and hoisted giant wind machines up the dunes. Everyone donned facemasks as Antonioni started rolling.

The seven-minute scene begins with Mark and Daria nude, embracing and kissing as Jerry Garcia guitar riffs play. It cuts to various couples rolling around sun-bleached dunes, covered in sand, lunging, kissing and play-fighting in various stages of undress with glimpses of genitalia. The final shot is a panorama of amorous hippies meticulously placed across Death Valley.

By then, Mark and Daria were off-camera lovers. She knew it wouldn’t last, but they both felt it. “We had chemistry,” Daria recalled. “We didn’t have anybody else.”

OPPOSITION to Zabriskie Point began to build. Park rangers were furious that Death Valley became a set for an orgy. MGM middle management was skittish about unpatriotic messages. Rumors spread that Antonioni was shooting a scene in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen where Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The press reported that MGM paid Black Panthers to join a Berkeley protest—the Alameda County sheriff’s office claimed it had proof. The Teamsters began organizing slowdowns and sickouts, and “major conservative organizations,” according to Harrison Starr, were trying to halt production altogether.

Before long, cooperative locals and businesses were getting anonymous phone calls saying that Zabriskie Point was anti-American. Permissions were rescinded. Deals fell through.

“It was like fighting shadows,” Beverly Walker recalled, “impossible to ascertain or even prove the source of the opposition.” Everyone was convinced the phones were tapped.

Maybe it was because Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver was featured in the film’s opening scene. (Her husband Eldridge Cleaver was on the run for the attempted murder of an Oakland police officer.) The Panthers demanded exorbitant sums to improvise an activist meeting in Berkeley. “A Molotov cocktail is a mixture of gasoline and kerosene,” one Panther says. “White radicalism is a mixture of bullshit and jive.”

And maybe it was bad timing. J. Edgar Hoover announced in the FBI’s annual report that the Black Panthers were “the greatest threat to internal security of the country” — “without question.” In any case, the FBI began investigating Zabriskie Point. Agents asked about potential strike provocations and traitorous sentiment. “They were looking for something—anything—on the film,” Harrison Starr said.

What they really wanted to know was what all those young people were doing out in the desert, where they came from, and how they got there. It’s a federal felony to transport a female across state lines for “prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” The Mann Act was designed to curtail prostitution—it had never been used against a filmmaker—but as soon as the Open Theater actors and all those extras jumped onto buses in Nevada, the Justice Department had a case.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Sacramento issued about a dozen subpoenas to people connected with the film, including park rangers and crew members. U.S. Attorney James Simonelli took the government’s case against MGM and Zabriskie Point to a federal grand jury. Eleven witnesses testified, including a cameraman, an accountant, and someone from makeup. No indictments were issued, but testimony condemning the now-infamous love-making scene leaked to the press: “Its realism was shocking,” one witness said. An extra claimed that Antonioni asked her to perform oral sex, which Antonioni denied. “I’m not crazy after all,” he told the New York Times. He just wanted “the gestures of love.” No one was actually having sex on camera.

MGM executives washed their hands of Zabriskie Point and claimed ignorance about whatever was happening in the desert. Rod Taylor, the film’s only well-known actor, disavowed the film’s filth and told FBI agents that he’d forbid MGM to use his name for promotion. The FBI commended him for his patriotism.

By the end of 1968, amid all this turmoil, Mark and Daria grew closer. Daria could see the tenderness beneath Mark’s explosive nature and the endearing awkwardness beneath his good looks. The entire Hollywood experience made him “uncomfortable in his own skin,” as she put it, and his vulnerability drew her closer. So did his passion—he believed in something. He kept telling her about the future of the country, of the world, about his Family and about Mel. Suddenly, during a fight, she began shaking and crying. “She had a vision,” Mark said. A vision of the face of Melvin Lyman. She was immediately converted. So, in April of 1969, when Zabriskie Point filming wrapped, Mark filed for divorce from Betsy, and Antonioni’s new stars drove across the country. Daria was joining the Lyman Family.

The Family was growing quickly. Outposts formed in New York and San Francisco. They had their sights set on a farm in Kansas, retreats in Martha’s Vineyard, and mansions in Hollywood. With the Family’s soon-to-be movie stars, Mel wanted film and television dominance more than ever, and their first television coup was shaping up to be with CBS. In the summer of 1969, Don West, assistant to the president of CBS, proposed filming daily life in the Fort Hill commune. West thought Mel’s extensive commune footage was impressive enough to form the basis of a CBS documentary he planned to call The Real World. West and a PBS crew started additional filming, but when Family members saw footage, they hated it—superficial bullshit, they said.

David Gude, one of the Family’s rule-enforcers, was incensed. “You talk about the Real World—this is the real world.” He pulled out a Luger and held it to West’s face. “This is our real world!”

CBS executive Bob Wood seemed offended by the material — “far too radical,” as West said. He felt so unwelcome at the network that he resigned. To make things worse, the commune wouldn’t return thousands of dollars’ worth of high-end television equipment they’d borrowed — a half-inch system with a camera, an Angienux lens, and a Sonheisen microphone.

Network distaste for the footage had a lot to do with timing. In August of 1969, the director Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four others were brutally murdered in Polanski’s Beverly Hills home. Some victims were shot with a long-barreled pistol, and two others, including Tate, were stabbed over a dozen times. The killers made clumsy efforts to pin the crimes on the Black Panthers—they tied a rope around the necks of Tate and another body and scrawled the word “PIG” in blood on the front door. The police eventually arrested Charles Manson and several of his cult followers. Manson’s Family killed upon his orders, and Manson himself participated in a similar murder the following night.

Resemblances between Manson and Lyman were hard to miss: both were ex-convicts, diminutive but charismatic musicians experimenting with LSD and attracting devotees. They created Family bonds by mixing free-love and paranoia, mysticism and violence. Followers rejected mainstream society to serve a leader claiming to be God.

Manson’s photograph hung in several Fort Hill commune rooms, the press reported, including one in the children’s playroom that had fresh flowers placed beneath it daily. Was the Lyman Family capable of murder? “If you won’t learn gracefully then you will learn by force,” Mel preached in Avatar. “Go to war, start a fight, get somebody to beat you up, smash your car into something, break a leg.” His words seemed more menacing after Manson. So did his Family’s actions.

When a man named Howard Kilby failed to fix Mel’s VW bus that summer, another family enforcer named Richie Guerin called him up. “We’re gonna kill you,” he said. In the middle of the night, Guerin broke Kilby’s window open, jumped into his bed, and began whipping him with a pistol.

“I’m gonna kill you, you son of a bitch!” Suddenly, Guerin broke down into tears—“What am I doing? What am I doing?”—before quickly resuming the beating.

DARIA was in a trance-like state. She had been feeling adrift — untethered from family and friends — but when she and Mark arrived at Fort Hill, the commune felt as if it could be home. “Oh, this is an artist community,” she told herself, “from very interesting families like my own.” Musicians, writers, architects.

Keeping Mel’s Hollywood plans alive, the couple went to Yugoslavia, where Mark was shooting an Italian World War II film. Daria was reading War and Peace, and they were hanging out with the director, Francesco Rosi—she found it fascinating.

But when she returned to Fort Hill before Mark, the Family began addressing her independent streak, including her distaste for how the commune’s women served the men. It didn’t feel right. Daria began retreating and eventually went to New York for acting classes. Family members followed her. They moved into her tiny apartment. Then they took her money. She called up an MGM publicist to help her find advertising work for income, but by the time the publicist called back, Daria was gone—the Family sent her back to Fort Hill for “retraining.” She reportedly had violent encounters with several Fort Hill women, especially Jessie Benton, Mel’s “wife.”

After several months, Daria’s independence seemed to have been washed away, leaving her like a smooth, featureless surface. She began describing her move to Fort Hill exactly the way Mark did: “It was the beginning of my life,” she told the Boston Globe. She adopted the Family’s outlook: “Hollywood has to destroy itself,” she told the reporter, “to get down to rock bottom, before it can go anywhere.” Would she make more films? “Yes,” she said, “if that is what I am expected to do. I will do it for Mel. I’ll do anything to serve my purpose of living.” When the reporter asked what her purpose was, she replied softly, “Mel, to serve Mel.”

AFTER NEARLY ENDING production several times, MGM finally decided to premier Zabriskie Point in February 1970. Antonioni left the states early (“I hate premiers—especially mine”), and when he landed at Heathrow he and Claire Peploe were arrested for marijuana possession and spent a night in jail.

Zabriskie Point was a disaster. The box office was abysmal—the seven-million-dollar film grossed just nine-hundred thousand—and the reviews were vicious.

“Entirely pointless”... “A movie of stunning superficiality ... completely absurd”

—Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“Such a silly and stupid movie... our immediate reaction is pity”

—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“Corny? You bet your ass it’s corny”

—John Burks, Rolling Stone

“A rather pathetic mess... a huge, jerry-built crumbling ruin of a movie”

—Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

Several critics were outraged by Antonioni’s subversiveness. “That sonofabitch!” one prominent critic shouted after a screening. “He ought to be shot!”

The film’s own stars badmouthed Zabriskie Point. “I didn’t like any of it,” Mark told the Boston Globe. “That love scene was a total disaster.” Daria agreed: “The whole movie embarrassed me.” Beverly Walker, the publicity agent chaperoning Mark and Daria on their west coast press tour, found them so disrespectful that she quit, which didn’t help.

Mark and Daria appeared on The Merv Griffin Show with activist Abbie Hoffman (his controversial stars and stripes shirt was blacked out) to debate two conservatives about the counterculture. TV personality Virginia Graham objected that giving guests like Mark and Daria publicity was “degrading to our country.” “You should be spanked,” Graham told the young radicals. So Mark presented her his ass.

The mood deteriorated from there. Mark glowered at a conservative writer and folk singer from Yale named Tony Dolan, who had mocked the Lyman Family in the National Review. It dawned upon Graham that things might turn violent—and they did. After the show, Mark and Dolan got into a fist fight in the alley behind the studio.

A few days later, Mark and Daria were on the Dick Cavett Show alongside comedian Mel Brooks. Cavett began by admitting that he hadn’t yet seen Zabriskie Point.

“Save your money,” Mark said, surprising Cavett.

“You’re not recommending your own film?”

Mark launched into his grievances against Antonioni. “I was desperate, you know? Working with a guy with his reputation and with what he knows about cinema, I wanted to learn something, but he wasn’t teaching. So I got mad.”

Beyond that, Cavett kept getting one-word responses and awkward silences.

“OK, Daria—talk, talk!” Brooks prodded at one point. “Say something.”

“I have nothing to say yet,” she replied calmly. Her earrings dangled down at her collarbones. Cavett tried asking about the Merv Griffin Show. “Did you actually get into a fight with the guy from Yale?”

“That was about the best thing that happened,” Daria jumped in. “Something was really created from that.”

“Yeah,” Mark said, gesturing, “he got a lump on his jaw about that big.”

“You live in a commune, is that right?” Cavett asked.

“It’s not a commune,” Daria said.

Cavett wanted more. “It’s not a commune, it’s a....? What would you call it?”

Silence.

Mel Brooks prodded Daria again: “...a breadbox—something.”

Mark tried to get everyone to understand. It’s a community, but communal living isn’t the point. “The community is for one purpose, and that’s to serve Mel Lyman.”

Daria tried to add something important about Mel, but Mark kept talking. And by the time Cavett circled back for her thoughts, they were gone. “I forgot what I was going to say.”

MEANWHILE, stories of Lyman Family violence were becoming routine: an unfriendly reporter’s car window smashed, an uncooperative editor slapped, an ineffective sales manager for Mel’s memoir kicked in the face. And so it was no small act of courage when a Rolling Stone reporter named David Felton began poking around, asking questions, interviewing parents of Family members, wronged acquaintances, and perceived enemies. He got a detailed account of several Family members invading KPFK radio station in L.A. because of its disrespect for Mel’s music (it wasn’t aired at a sufficient volume). They destroyed shelving and tormented the staff, following them down hallways, accosting them at their desks. “Wake up,” they’d yell with stares of emptiness and rage.

“This place is dead,” one Family member shouted, “we might as well go ahead and blow up the building.”

“Terrorizing” wasn’t exactly the right word for what was happening. “They were mind fucking us,” one employee said. Mark guarded the back door with a crowbar so no one could leave.

Mel promised more raids to come and called for all rebels to unite. “The whole world is against you,” he told them. “The heart of God is a vast darkness that only the brave can know,” he wrote. “WE MUST GET TOGETHER AND FIGHT THIS CREEPING DECAY.”

Felton’s investigation was especially courageous considering that he had co-authored Rolling Stone’s investigation of the Manson Family the previous year. He nevertheless managed to dine with the Family in L.A. and on Fort Hill, working his way closer to meeting Mel. Family Members were comfortable enough to give Felton good material. Jim Kweskin toyed with the Manson comparison when Felton brought it up: “The Manson Family preached peace and love and went around killing people,” Kweskin said. “We don’t preach peace and love.” Then he smiled, “And we haven’t killed anybody—yet.”

The Family eventually got worried about Felton’s intentions. So in August 1971, Jim Kweskin, David Gude, and another Family member showed up at Felton’s San Francisco office. He got the whole conversation on tape.

“You know, we’ve opened ourselves completely to you,” Gude said, “and now we’re getting a very funny feeling back...”

“I truly don’t feel like you want to be my friend,” Kweskin added. They wanted human feeling from him. They wanted to set the record straight about how KPFK had wronged them. “They crucified us down there,” Gude said.

Gude began pacing, examining the fourth-story office, and circling closer to Felton. When Felton asked about the Family’s upcoming plans, Gude put on a tough guy voice. “Yeah, we’re going to tie you up in the chair and beat you till you understand. We might dangle you out the window by one leg. Perhaps knuckle you around the room a little bit.” They all laughed.

“Are you scared of us?” Kweskin asked.

“No.”

“In any way whatsoever?”

“No.”

When Felton suggested that they respected him as a truth teller, Gude became livid.

“There’s a little bit more to life than just your fucking newspaper!”

“I know that.”

“I don’t think you do,” Gude said. “I think you’re a vicious con man and a killer. You kill us. You kill the spirit—you and a million people like you.”

“How are you going to change me? And a million people like me?” Felton asked.

“We’ve been trying for a long time now, haven’t we!” Gude yelled. “What’s it gonna take?” He swiped the tape recorder off Felton’s desk. It crashed on the floor but somehow kept recording.

“Get out, all of you,” Felton said.

“You feel anything?” Gude screamed.

“You want to know what Mel Lyman is?” Kweskin asked the reporter. “I’m going to tell you what Mel Lyman is. Mel Lyman is the person who made me want to feel people. He made me feel something. And now I can’t live without it.”

Gude agreed. “He made us care.”

Coercion, force, violence—Daria wanted none of it. When the publicity tour ended, she flew to L.A. for acting classes at the Strasberg Institute. Family members followed her again. She ended up living with Mark and Family members in Hollywood until September, when Mel arrived and things fell apart. Her independence resurfaced, and the trance was breaking. Mark would get angry that she wasn’t embracing their vision, but his anger didn’t matter anymore. “It’s not me,” she concluded. “I am done.”

Daria’s Peugeot was still sitting in the driveway when she left for good, without warning. She found refuge with an old college roommate in L.A. Mark kept trying to win her back until the Family sent him back to Boston. For good measure, they’d call Daria up and threaten to assault her. She told her parents she was afraid of getting killed, and she kept relocating to escape a Family that always seemed to demand more.

TWO MEN CONCEALING long-barreled Smith and Wesson .38 Specials walk into the New England Merchants National Bank, and it’s exactly what you think: briefcases, sunglasses, big fake mustaches. One was wearing a pink shirt, and a coat over his arm concealed his revolver. The other was in a brown suit and tie and a straw hat. “Hi,” he said politely as they walked in. He inquired about a loan and was invited to sit. How much was he seeking? the loan officer asked. He said $2,500. Movie star or not, she didn’t recognize Mark Frechette.

Even with Daria gone and his Hollywood career in shambles, Mark still dreamed of making movies. He knew he could be a star for the Family and for Mel. Hollywood was the problem—capitalist, bureaucratic, dead. “They go on making films even though they know it’s a shuck. It’s an incredible abuse of the one medium that demands the truth.” Their products were shiny and empty. “It’s a real sin.”

Mark had befriended a Hungarian named Dezsö Magyar. He was fresh off the boat—a University of California drama student and a film director who shared Mark’s politics. Modern America, they thought, wasn’t a typical Hollywood story.

It was Dostoevskian—dark and brooding, surreal and menacing. The American counterculture wasn’t hippies making love in the desert. It was a desperate, pent-up energy stalking city streets like Raskolnikov.

Mark and Dezsö decided to make an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. They knew it would be a hit—all they needed was several million dollars. Mark apparently appealed to the Family for money, but they were strapped for cash. They could hardly afford to feed the commune at the time.

So Mark hatched a plan. If Raskolnikov could kill a pawnbroker, Mark figured he could rob a bank. “It would be like a direct attack on everything that is choking this country to death,” he said. It was perfect—a Dostoevskian crime to finance a Dostoevsky movie. And besides, Mark insisted, “banks deserve to be robbed.”

It was busy—fifteen to twenty customers at the end of the day. People cashing paychecks. A café employee making his deposit. Two doctors in white coats were in line (the Brigham Hospital was across the street). There was a big guy (6’3”, 220 lbs) with dirty blond hair and sunglasses wandering around who looked like security—a light blue open-collared shirt with a red patch on the sleeve. The bank’s actual security guard took a closer look from his post. The patch, “Medical Center Police.” Purple socks. Right hand inside a brown paper bag. The guard asked him if he could be of assistance.

Mark’s mustachioed accomplice was Terry Bernhard, a Juilliard grad who played piano with the Lyman Family band. But they had help from someone else: a guy named Chris that everyone knew as Hercules—Herc. He was new to the Family and loved playing with all the kids. He himself was “like a real big kid,” one Family member said, 22 years old and a wanderer. No one knew where he got his gun.

Herc said he wanted to deposit a check, so the guard handed him a deposit slip. But Herc just stood at the courtesy counter staring blankly at the employee talking to Mark. Mark was slipping her a note. “There are three of us, we’re going to rob you, don’t get alarmed.” She waved the security guard over, as instructed. Mark pointed his gun and told him to unholster his weapon and slide it across the desk. He put the guard’s .357 Magnum in his belt and demanded access to the tellers’ cages just as Terry walked over. “We don’t want any trouble,” Mark said, “we don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

The look in the loan officer’s eyes made it clear. A teller locked her drawer. Two other employees pushed silent alarms beneath their desks. The guard opened a security door, walked the robbers through the employees’ lounge, and unlocked the combination lock to the tellers’ cages. Mark kept the loan officer and security guard at gunpoint. Terry went into the cages and told the tellers to line up against the wall. He put on black gloves, and instructed one of the tellers to throw all the fives, tens, and twenties into his briefcase. “Can you do it without being a hero?” They went from drawer to drawer, stuffing bills inside.

“Move it,” Terry ordered. “You’re too slow.” Stand still, he told a fidgeting teller. He asked how to get into the vault. Nobody answered. He asked again. The head teller is the only person with the combination, someone explained, and he had left for the day.

Herc tried keeping people calm out front, telling everyone where to sit, explaining to new arrivals that they were witnessing a bank robbery. “Keep quiet and you won’t get hurt.” A mother walked in with her four-year-old daughter who used to live with the Lyman Family—the commune was only a mile away.

“We want five minutes before you set any alarm after we leave,” Herc announced.

Terry escorted the tellers into the lounge where Mark was holding his two captives. Mark greeted everyone before getting down to business.

“Did you get everything?”

Everything except the 50s and 100s, Terry said.

What about the vault?

“We can’t get into the safe since the head teller has gone home.”

Mark told Terry to go back for the 50s and 100s—they still had enough time.

PATROLMEN Dan Fitzgerald and Mo Flaherty were slowing to a stop across the street when they heard the call on the radio. Robbery in progress. Fitzgerald was a 25-year veteran—49 years old with “a face that carries centuries of Irish history,” as one press report later put it.

The men felt a kinship. “Christ, he’s my father,” Flaherty said of his partner. “He used to help me cross the street down at Columbia Road and Dorchester Avenue when I was at St. Margaret’s.” Flaherty was 31, young but not green. Both men had a wife and kids. Neither had ever fired their service weapon on duty.

Flaherty sped across the street and pulled the patrol car up onto the sidewalk. They headed straight for the front doors, Fitzgerald first, just as Terry was returning with the rest of the cash. Mark started to leave but couldn’t open the door. Turn the handle to the left, the guard said. When he opened the door for the robbers, Mark was grateful. “You’ve been very cooperative.”

Everything seemed normal as Officer Fitzgerald walked in. Customers were just standing there. When the security guard turned around, Fitzgerald saw him holding a brown paper bag. His right hand was stuffed inside it.

“Anything wrong?” Flaherty said.

Herc pulled out his revolver and yelled, “Throw your gun in the middle of the floor.”

Fitzgerald lunged for the weapon. Herc darted aside, and Fitzgerald fell down—“ass-over-tea-kettle,” as he described it.

Herc took aim, and Flaherty fired two shots into Herc’s chest. He collapsed. Customers hit the floor.

Are you okay? Flaherty asked his partner.

Yes.

Flaherty grabbed Herc’s gun. “Anybody else?” That’s when he saw the two men in fake mustaches.

“Hands up!” They threw their guns down. Fitzgerald got up on one knee, drew his revolver, and the officers scanned the room for accomplices.

Any more? Flaherty kept saying, Any more?

Herc was loaded onto a stretcher and carried to Brigham Hospital’s emergency ward across the street. He was dead on arrival—a bullet had torn through his lung.

Mark Frechette was on the ground when they put the cuffs on him, and he realized his plan had failed. The briefcase on the ground next to him contained $10,156.

He wasn’t cooperative during his interrogation. He told the FBI’s special agents that he had been a Lyman Family member but said he’d been evicted for not paying rent. He said he had never been arrested, which they knew was false—the FBI’s file on Mark included his arrest record and his Vietnam War protest activities. He said he was a carpenter, but didn’t specify. He said he had lived in California, but wouldn’t elaborate. He said his gun was a gift from a friend he wouldn’t name.

He said he didn’t really know anything about Herc, didn’t know his last name or where he was from—maybe out west? Mark thought he had a brother somewhere. The police ran Herc’s fingerprints and identified him as Christopher Thein, 22 years old (he had been arrested for jaywalking in Tacoma). Chris’s father flew to Boston to identify his son’s body. The Family’s big kid had gray eyes with contact lenses and a Hercules brand belt. His belongings at Fort Hill included an unsent letter to his mother in the hospital.

Reporters focused on the movie star’s fall from grace—it was an irresistible story. Mark Frechette, given a microphone once more, brooded on his general disillusionment. The Lyman Family was still trying to make a difference, he told reporters, but everyone else disappeared. “Where did they go?” The Sixties’ vitality was gone and the country was falling apart—political corruption, gas prices, food scarcity. “All of the energy, all of the food, the leadership. It’s disappearing,” Mark said, bewildered. “Why can’t somebody do anything about it?”

THE FAMILY faulted the police for Herc’s death. They claimed the first chamber of his gun was deliberately empty, and there were press reports that none of the guns were loaded, implying that the FBI and the police were lying. “We are the soul of this country,” Jessie Benton, Mel’s wife, told Rolling Stone. “This was the most honest thing those three boys could do.”

The Family seemed to be plotting vengeance—Family members warned of a fight to come and harassed the bank’s employees to get the name of the person who sounded the alarm—but Herc’s death had changed something. The Family’s wall had been breached. Its Manson-like anger weakened. The Fort Hill commune began to shrink, Avatar had stopped circulating, and the Family’s message faded from public view.

Mel Lyman drifted further into isolation until he disappeared—when and how he died remains a mystery. Without Mel, the remnants of the Lyman Family began operating as Fort Hill Construction: the next—perhaps final—stage of the Family’s cosmic evolution is a luxury construction and remodeling business offering high-end clientele premier craftsmanship and custom detail. Steven Spielberg, Madonna, and Quincy Jones were all clients.

Mark and Terry weren’t so lucky. They pled guilty and were sentenced to 6 to 15 years in prison. “Slowly, slowly, slowly they drive you bananas,” Frechette said after his sentencing. When a reporter asked him what brought the bank robbers together in the first place, Mark couldn’t find an answer. “Just say a dream, a crazy dream.”

And yet the apex of Mark’s career was still to come. A year into his sentence at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Norfolk, Massachusetts, Mark directed a play performed by a prison theatre troupe calling themselves Stars in Stripes. “The White House Transcripts” was based on Richard Nixon’s secret tapes—the performance was a protest against the president’s recent pardon. A first-degree murderer played White House Counsel John Dean. Terry wore a prosthetic nose to play Nixon on a convincing Oval Office set. Mark had the inmates rehearsing nine hours a day for two months. The troupe read books and studied a televised version of the production.

Governor Dukakis and Senator Ted Kennedy were expected to attend the opening night. In the end, about 60 civilians, including government officials and business leaders, removed their shoes, belts and hairpins to pass through the prison’s metal detectors and join an audience of inmates. The crowd roared with approval, and the press loved the production’s poignancy. “I held up a bank,” Terry told reporters, “And got 6 to 15. Nixon held up a country, and he got a pardon.”

Mark’s directorial debut was covered favorably by the New York Times, People magazine, and the Boston Globe. NBC noted his timely accomplishment and the CBS Evening News aired a sixty-second clip. He finally got his theatrical acclaim.

KEVIN BIRMINGHAM is the author of The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, and, most recently, The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer who Inspired a Masterpiece.

For all rights inquiries, email team@trulyadventure.us.