Bare footed we danced across the terrace leaping and twisting to music of ancient Greece from the Fassett record collection. Lolly lounged on her great couch in the "Trotter" log cabin and, through the window, looked down upon us as we  played the chorus to her tragedy.
I love her still as a boy who has lost his mother She wasn't my mother and she wasn't my lover. She was my friend.
    She  could have been a writer because she was a great listener, many secrets hid behind her lips. From her ashes the Phoenix Bird, stirred by the spirit of truth, speaks of her girlhood days on the Isle of Capri. It remembers  Carmel, California, in the 1930's and 40's when she and Bill were young and beautiful, as were their peers' Greek artist Varda and sculptor, Gorden Newel, with his artistic wife, Emelia, Dr. John Williams and his wife Cynthia. Multi-media artist and inventor, Bruce Ariss, and his wife, the auther, Jean Ariss. It was the world of Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck. It was a bohemian  world of utopian  dreams and artistic schemes.
    Lolly told me how the free-loving artists and intellectuals of Carmel had ostricized  handsome Helmuth Detchen and his lover Helen because she was immensely fat and not considered a proper love object. Helmuth ("Pa, Detchen") retreated to Big Sur, bought his  property less than a mile south of where Nepenthe now stands and, amidst the towering redwoods, hand-built a classic medieval inn where he lived with his grand love and a multitude of cats.
    Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal W.P.A. road crew had ceased building the Coast Road with the outbreak of World War ll and Detchens Inn was the end of the road. During that same period the Trotter brothers built the redwood log cabin that was meant to be Orson Wells' hideaway for his new wife, Rita Hayworth. That marriage was short. Lolly and Bill Fassett acquired the property with plans to run a simple roadside sandwich stand and raise their children; Griff, Dorcus, Kaffe , Holly and Kim. However, Rowan Maiden, a red bearded  brilliant young architect and disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, came into the picture with an economical, yet daring, redwood and glass design that exemplified the best of California's indoor/outdoor life-style. It subtly framed the awesome view of Big Sur's south coast. Tragicly, in the final stage of construction, Rowen fell from a ladder and his life ended.  Under Lolly's direction the simple sandwich stand became Nepenthe, a cultural and historical landmark restaurant with a view challenged only by the Amalfi coast of Italy or the west shore of Australia

ãcopyright 1998 EGGINK "a family business"