The Wilson Family of Hawthorne, CA
Part 2 of A History of Brian Wilson.
Part 1 of A History of Brian Wilson briefly summarized the Beach Boys’ roots in Southern California. The post left off with the introduction of two young Southern California families of the 1940s: the Wilson family of Hawthorne, CA, and the Love family of neighboring Los Angeles.
To continue:
1.
Until 2016, the public knew next to nothing about life in the home that Glee Love kept with her husband Milton. Mike Love had either been guarded about the nature of his upbringing or nobody had bothered to ask him about it. Nevertheless, some basics could be gleaned from different sources. It was known that Mike’s father was himself a Los Angeles native and second-generation sheet metal man, with the sources sketching the outline of a pragmatic businessman, prosperous in the sheet metal trade. Homemaker Glee was musical, and seemingly able to make her active presence felt in her children’s lives. Beyond that, information was at best speculative or second-hand, such as Brian Wilson’s one-time comment that Mike “had a lot of hassles” with his parents. In his book about Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys published in 1978, David Leaf wrote that Mike’s childhood was “difficult,” but offered no explanatory details. In his own 2016 memoir, Mike Love does not necessarily confirm these views but does say that there was an aspect to his childhood that was “gritty” and “discordant.”
In his book, Mike recalls his father as a decent, hard-working, and taciturn man who equated the expression of feelings with weakness. He was not above strapping his kids with a belt or smacking them, although “never to hurt us” and in any case there were times when Mike and his siblings “deserved to be smacked.” Mike’s mother had apparently emerged from the violent home of Buddy and Edith Wilson as an intelligent, attractive, and multi-faceted young woman but also, and understandably, with a tendency toward fear and anxiety.
In those days, social norms dictated that the ambition of a smart, capable, and healthy young woman should be directed toward finding a suitable man to marry, bearing his children, and making a home, where she would be happily settled and at peace with her own feminine nature. This is true for some women, but not all. Glee married Milton while in her late teens—a common age at which to marry—and spent approximately the next 25 years or more bearing and raising six kids in a middle- to upper-middle class setting. Later, she candidly explained that as a young woman she had “given up all the things I personally wanted to do” and channeled her drive toward “raising children who were going to be perfect.” Her methods of ensuring perfection remain unknown. There is evidence, though, that she was the primary authority figure in the home, and in any case the Love kids did become achievers in sports, music and academics. Mike Love says that as the oldest child he both bore “the brunt of her insecurities” and found her increasingly unavailable to him as each new child was added to the family. Looking back, he now writes that he was closer to his paternal grandparents than to either his mother or father.
2.
Quite a bit more has been written about what transpired in the modest, two-bedroom home Glee’s brother Murry made with his wife Audree on 119th Street in the small municipality of Hawthorne. Coming from the same chaotic background, Murry and Glee shared in common a strain of fear and insecurity. However, Murry was positioned to address his problems differently than his sister.
Murry would later confess to Rolling Stone magazine that after the birth of his first child in 1942, he had been “one of those young, frightened fathers.” He didn’t say what the source of his fright was, though it could have been any number of concerns—how to keep the baby clothed, fed and sheltered, how to protect him from illness and disease, how to educate him, how to be a parent. Also lurking in the back of Murry’s mind would have been reminders of the past, and the fear of regenerating the misery that stained his own childhood. This fear is common among abused kids, boys and girls alike. At a time during which their peers might not be thinking so far ahead, severely mistreated children think about their future adulthood—what they will do for their kids and what they will never do to them. (Brian Wilson would subtly broach this topic in his early music.) Like any other recipient of abuse, Murry would have at some point during his childhood sworn to himself that he would never raise his children in the kind of environment he was then faced with. Now that he had a child of his own, he was standing at the most important crossroads of his life, and it had to have been unsettling.
If Murry is given the benefit of the doubt and is assumed to have wanted to be a better father for his own children, he would not have had much time to straighten himself out. Ideally, before Brian’s birth Murry would have gained a conscious understanding of the violence that had been unleashed upon him. He would be able to remember not just that his father had attacked his mother, but him too. And he would need to understand that it was wrong for his father to do this.
It might seem an easy task for a young person to recognize that it was wrong for his dad to beat him with a club, and that such treatment could never be justified, but it’s not. For Murry Wilson at least, it was complicated. A person’s dormant or suppressed feelings relating to childhood can (and will) be dislodged by the birth of his or her offspring; the parents in a sense forced to revisit the psychological experience of their own childhood as they gaze upon and interact with their newborn, infant, or toddler. Brian’s birth not only left Murry “frightened,” but also very likely confused—at the deepest level—about what in fact had happened to him during childhood and what it meant. Among other things, Brian’s birth also stoked Murry’s raw fury and thirst for vengeance.
There’s no way to know when, exactly, Murry began to attack Brian, but it almost certainly happened so early that Brian never knew any other life, perhaps beginning before he could speak in sentences. Dennis Wilson, arriving 2 ½ years after Brian, was treated similarly; Dennis would later recall as his earliest memory his father punching him hard in the solar plexus, and then hitting him again for crying. We are dealing, in any case, not with a man who waits until his son is say, 9 or 10 years old to begin the onslaught, nor a man like Mike Love’s father Milton, whose occasional resort to “corporal punishment” was more in line with what was then (and today) generally accepted as a viable method of child-rearing.
Murry Wilson was a fully-grown man who, for openers, had no compunction about punching a very small child. Certain of his acts have been related in a number of published sources over the years, and have by now settled into a bundled set of atrocities: he hit the boys with both open palm and closed fist. He whipped them with a belt, and later upgraded to a wooden board. (Brian Wilson refers to it as “the stud” in his 2016 book.) Murry burned his son Dennis’s fingers with matches, and scalded his skin with hot water. This sort of treatment often took place in the bathtub or shower stall, so as to prevent Dennis from damaging property in the home when he tried to defend himself. Murry would slap Brian suddenly, without warning and for no discernible reason. Dennis was forced to eat food that he didn’t like, with his father hitting him as he chewed and swallowed. On at least one occasion, Murry tied Brian to a tree. On another, he ordered Brian (surely on penalty of a beating) to defecate on a newspaper inside the home, as his entire family watched.
Murry had lost his left eye in a freak workplace accident shortly after Dennis’s birth and held the brothers responsible for the injury, forcing them to stare into the pulpy void of his empty eye socket as punishment. (Dennis once flinched in revulsion, for which he was then physically beaten.) Though there are scarcely any reports of youngest brother Carl being assaulted like this, he, at the least, was forced to witness it and try to make sense of what was going on around him.
These are the occurrences that have been made public, their veracity unchallenged by any credible source. Unfortunately, the possibility will always linger of even worse acts that will remain forever obscured by secrecy, shame, premature death, and the fragmented memory of the trauma survivor.1
I think that the type of character that a person develops comes largely with the background of family living. A family should live coordinately and happily together.
— Brian Wilson, age 17
Murry characterized his predation as “protection,” “security” and “love” for his sons. He would certainly have also rationalized it as mere “discipline” purposefully engineered to benefit the boys by teaching them right from wrong.
In taking this stance, Murry could reassure himself that he had received love and security in his own childhood. For if Murry was loving and protecting his boys by beating them, didn’t it mean that his own father had done the same with the baseball bat and/or lead pipe? This false reassurance—that he could both give, and had received love—came at a dear cost. Murry was at one point a decent young man who deserved better than he got, but by waging a campaign of sadistic attack against his children, he damned himself.
Still, there was one way in which Murry did not replicate his father’s behavior but actually diverged from him: Murry Wilson did not beat his wife. That is, a survey of more than 50 years’ worth of writing and research about Brian Wilson and his brothers yields no indication—including from Brian, Dennis or Carl—that Murry ever laid violent hands on the woman who was his spouse and the mother of his children. Watching his own mother take beatings had enraged Murry and scarred him deeply. For that, neither he nor his sister Glee had ever forgiven their father. It can be said therefore, that Murry spared his sons that particular strain of domestic misery.
To be continued in A History of Brian Wilson, Part 3
Selected References for Part 2
Edmonds, Ben. “The Lonely Sea.” MOJO, November, 2002.
Farber, David. The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.
Gaines, Steven. “Brian Wilson Is Trying Hard to Catch Another Wave.” New West, August 16, 1976.
__________ . Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Signet/New American Library, 1986.
Gelles, Richard J. “The Family and Its Role in the Abuse of Children.” Psychiatric Annals, April 1987.
Herman, Ellen. The Romance of American Psychology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Laing, R.D. The Politics of the Family. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1972.
Leaf, David. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.
Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.
Menand, Louis. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Menninger, Karl. Love Against Hate. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942, 1970.
Nolan, Tom. "The Beach Boys: Tales of Hawthorne" Rolling Stone, November 11, 1971. As republished in Kingsley Abbott, ed. Back to the Beach: A Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys Reader. London: Helter Skelter Publishing, 1999.
Munder Ross, John. “Oedipus Revisited: Laius and the ‘Laius Complex.” In George H. Pollock and John Munder Ross, eds. The Oedipus Papers. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1988.
Steele, Brandt F. “Psychodynamic and Biological Factors in Child Maltreatment.” In Mary Edna Helfer, Ruth S. Kempe and Richard D. Krugman, eds. The Battered Child. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. (5th ed.)
White, Timothy. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.
Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold. Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
__________ with Ben Greenman. I Am Brian Wilson. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016.
These acts, and the overall home environment of which they speak, constitute the crux of both Brian Wilson’s life and the Beach Boys’ “California Saga.” They will be discussed further in future posts, but here at the outset readers should understand that the entirety of the A Book of Brian Wilson publication proceeds on the very reasonable, well-founded premise that these acts did occur; that the “stories” or “allegations” are true. I am under no obligation to defend my position. Nevertheless, I will further address the issue of veracity—the question of whether to credit or disregard these reported acts—in more detail on this site. To start with, readers interested in this aspect of Beach Boys history may read more about Murry Wilson and his parenting methods in the Appendix, beginning with this post.