My Library

As Zelda later confessed, she was shocked that Mr. Erickson was going to spend $1,000 on a painting and she wanted to come and see if it was worth it. Zelda thus arrived at my apartment, then in lower Greenwich Village -- and burst into tears upon seeing the painting. I naturally and promptly fell in love with her, a love and a deep friendship which lasted until she died. Zelda had a remarkable PAST. With her former husband she had owned and managed no less than three nudist camps during the 1930s-1950s, and had the honor of presenting her plump, Mother-Earth body as the first full frontal nude in PLAYBOY magazine (in black and white.) Zelda knew just about everyone who was anyone, for most of them had come to her camps when it was daring and thus fashionable to do so -- big movie stars, the early TV personalities, philosophers, cutting-edge scientists, physicians, etc. She had a life-long interest in SEX and was a consulting sexologist, an hypnotist and one of the first to do past-life regressing, and was interested in all kinds of psychic stuff. I popped a couple of bottles of cheap wine and Zelda and I got drunk together while sitting before "Requiem." She said I had undercharged Mr. Erickson and would write out the check. The Erickson Educational Foundation funded a program at Johns Hopkins University for transexual research and sex changes, and for a while also funded psychedelic research. So Zelda knew everyone involved in all that, too -- and here we are talking about a cast of really "fabulous" persons.