"Princess Leda Amun-Ra and the Mysterious World of the Hollywood Hills, 1969"
A1 Digital India News: In August, Thomas Lee, son of photographer Bud Lee, contacted me about an interesting mystery about a colorful fairy. Found my post, Gothic in Los Angeles, and wondered if I had heard anything about Princess Leda Amun-Ra and her colorful friends. His father had visited her at a “palace” in the Hollywood Hills in 1969 when he was working with writer Tom Burke on an article called California Evil for an issue of Esquire. This was all new to me, and, given my interest in Los Angeles history, psychedelia, and the occult; I was legitimately curious.
I was in fourth grade when I learned about the 60s. Obviously, I would argue that this was a decade before the decade where I was born – but I was probably about ten years old when I fell under the spell of the Beatles, the Byrds, and the Doors.
When I reached fourth grade, I spent most of my free time reading about dinosaurs and Pleistocene megafauna. However, in fourth grade I finally paid attention to my mother's vinyl LPs. One song that immediately affected me was Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It sounds a bit like I'm watching a movie without a picture - or a picture in my mind. My mother explained to me that it was inspired by lysergic acid diethylamide - LSD. Lucy-Sky-Diamonds. I made my own picture, a kind of collage, that best represented the song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." I particularly remember cutting out a picture of a taxi from a newspaper. The 60s were weird to me because of the saber tooth and pterodactyl animals.
I didn't like President Reagan. I wrote to him in fourth grade about the Sandinistas and the threat of nuclear war. I received a letter with the presidential seal thanking me for the birthday wishes. "Just say no," the first woman yelled. I wanted to say "yes". I remember reading books on drugs in the library. He was very old. That was when crack hit the streets and I was doing Angel Dust (phencyclidine) Beanies (amphetamine), Blue Heavens (amobarbital), Purple Hearts (dexamyl), STP (2,5-dihydroxy-4-methylamphetamine) and Yellow Jackets (pentobarbital). He was writing the facts of the case. I watched Ken Russell's Altered States - although I hardly understood what was going on.
Our school teamed up with the sheriff's department for an anti-drug program called Junior Deputies. I refuse to pay the dollars or listen to the anti-drug co-opted pigs! I tried my best to act like I was on acid based on what I read (and re-read) in the library. My teacher pulled me out of class and put me in an empty classroom, where, unsupervised, I read from encyclopedias and sniffed from a tube of green glowing glue, vainly hoping to acquire de Quincea's visions. I was still in fourth grade when a made-for-television miniseries called Fatal Vision aired (see the entire series with Dutch subtitles here). It's about Jeffrey MacDonald, an army captain and surgeon whose wife and children were murdered in February 1970. MacDonald described the perpetrators as a hippie cult. Someone had written "pig" in blood on the wall. One of the hippies, holding a candle, yelled, "Kill the pigs. Acid is great." I was horrified and informed by Charles Manson and his gruesome 1969 murders. After that, I didn't look at hippies the same way.
I love a good Los Angeles mystery story. In fact, nearly every local historian wonders who killed the Black Dahlia. But there are other kinds of mysteries, too, like what happened to Craig Smith, whose clear-cut murder turned him into the talented but terrifying acid folklorist, Maitreya Kali. Mike Stax's 2016 book, Swim in the Dark: My Search for Craig Smith and the Mystery of Maitreya Kali, is definitely on my "must read" list. I thought Gary Baum's 2017 piece, "Mystery of L.A. Billboard Diva Angeline's True Identity Finally Solved" was fascinating — though a part of me wants Angeline's origins to remain mysterious. Still, Thomas Lee's question got me thinking about the identities of Princess Leda Amun-Ra, King Amun-Ra, Leda's red-haired friend, Leda's servant and the rest of the characters, so big as to seem like something someone has to remember.
The inspiration for Esquire's "California Evil" edition were two gruesome ritual murders. On the night of June 8/morning of June 9, 1969; Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Sharon Tate, Steven Parent, and Wojciech Frykowski were brutally murdered in the Benedict Canyon home of Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate.