Is the World Big Enough for Mary Duncan?
By Carl Larsen
San Diego Magazine June 2009
MARY DUNCAN has nothing to declare.
That was the joke others told about the globe-trotting professor from San Diego State University who regularly bluffed her way through customs at Moscow’s airport. Her suitcases were filled with books to stock her English-language bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, in the Russian city.
But in a life that plays out on a stage stretching from La Jolla to Moscow, and centered on Paris, Duncan indeed has plenty to declare. Much of it is revealed in a juicy, 167-page autobiography, Henry Miller Is Under My Bed: People and Places on the Way to Paris (Starhaven Press, 2008).
It’s a tale of pushing the boundaries, a remarkable adventure of a woman overcoming a difficult childhood in National City to become a respected university department chair whose specialty, recreation administration, took her on an unlikely course to becoming an expert on terrorism long before al Qaeda became widely known. For years, Duncan was the go-to resource for San Diego journalists working on stories about international terrorism and “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland.
With San Diego as the formative base, she has pursued a personal journey to understand the world, a quest notable for its exploration of eroticism and feminism as well as its fascination with avant-garde writers including the late Henry Miller, whose expatriate life in Paris inspired Duncan. His long-suppressed novel Tropic of Cancer led to a 1964 Supreme Court decision finding the book, challenged under pornography statutes, to be a work of literature. Duncan owns an important collection of Miller memorabilia, including recordings of interviews with the author.
“She makes her dreams come true,” says San Diego friend Jacque Lynn Foltyn. “Mary always finds a way to do what she wants.”
Obstacles become challenges, including walking through a no man’s land in divided Belfast.
“I’m more afraid of dying bored than of dying,” she once said.
Her second marriage, to Russian architect Yuri Loskutov, the son of a general and military scientist–along with her work on a Soviet-American committee and at the Moscow bookstore–led to suspicions among friends that she was really a CIA agent, which she adamantly denies. Others had suspicions as well. Shortly after the couple married in 1989 at a 24-hour wedding chapel outside Lake Tahoe, FBI agents visited Duncan, suggesting her new husband might be a Soviet spy. “He’s no more KGB than I’m FBI,” she assured them.
With not much to hold her back, Duncan has the knack of parachuting into seismic events of the human spectacle. From sexual liberation through the culture wars to the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the rise of global terrorism, Mary Duncan can say she has been there, sometimes at great risk to her life.
Elements from her book demonstrate the breadth of her experiences:
* Engaging in a long affair with the late pundit Max Lerner, a married man twice her age who also had relationships with Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.
* Rummaging through Simone de Beauvoir’s Paris flat after her death. Through her pioneering book on feminism, The Second Sex, “de Beauvoir had understood early on the problems of women living their lives as an extension of somebody else,” Duncan writes.
* Going au naturel regularly in renowned Life magazine photographer Bradley Smith’s La Jolla hot tub. One time, as she and a date joined others already in the steaming water, there was a surprise tub mate: “Apparently I forgot to tell you we decided to wear bathing suits out of respect for the mayor’s new protocol officer,” the hostess informed the naked couple.
* Befriending IRA partisans in Belfast while undertaking a research project. “That was when I learned that nice people could be killers,” Duncan says.
* Arriving in Tehran to give a lecture and being told by a sympathetic American amid the turmoil at the airport, closed to ground traffic: “Lady, nobody’s going to pick you up. We’re in the middle of a damned revolution.”
TODAY AN SDSU professor emerita, Duncan most recently founded a modern literary salon in Paris, where she lives in a small apartment in the 6th Arrondissement. She’s a regular visitor to San Diego, returning to tend to a condominium overlooking La Jolla Cove and to visit friends. Her husband, Yuri, lives in Moscow, where the bookstore Duncan started remains open, though she is no longer a partner. The couple maintains a long-distance relationship aided by Internet webcam.
Duncan’s formative way stations are familiar to many San Diegans: growing up near Kimball Park in National City; attending Sweetwater High and San Diego State; working summers for SDG&E and during college at an old Carnation restaurant on El Cajon Boulevard. Her father, a bus driver, died when she was 4, and her mother remarried twice. Heavy drinking and verbal abuse were fixtures in her family life.
“We never doubted that our mother loved us,” she writes. “She worked hard, always encouraged us and did her best. … She survived by getting married and working at various low-paid jobs. … This instilled in me the drive to get an education and never be dependent on a man.”
A streak of anti-authoritarianism lies at the heart of her personality, Duncan concedes. It may come from her childhood, where anyone wearing a suit or a uniform invariably meant bad news. “I am not sure why, but I love flouting rules–not in an outrageous, illegal or deceitful way but in a humorous, in-your-face sort of way,” she says.
Even with such chutzpah, it’s a long way from living in National City to delivering lectures at Oxford, a journey she fleshed out on a recent San Diego visit over lunch at Albie’s Beef Inn, a Mission Valley restaurant worlds apart from her Parisian hangouts: a second-floor perch at Cafe de la Mairie or at Brasserie Lipp. A woman of a certain age (as the French would say), Duncan is a short, pert blonde gifted with gab.
“Mary has an Irish gift for storytelling, a hearty laugh and smiling, Irish eyes,” sums up her longtime friend Foltyn, a sociology professor at National University. “She’s a good listener and generous.”
“Breaking out” is a central theme in Duncan’s life … breaking out of an unhappy existence in National City, of the expectations placed on a 1970s middle-class San Diego housewife and, ultimately, out of San Diego. Her first marriage to a General Dynamics chemist who became a local Protestant minister put Duncan, raised as a Roman Catholic, in an awkward situation. “I didn’t know what a minister’s wife did. I knew about priests,” she says.
That marriage ultimately failed. Although work at the church led her to the women’s movement, it exposed a route she definitely did not want to take. “I was bored stiff,” she writes.
From a supervisory job working in the San Diego Park & Recreation Department, she made her way onto the faculty at San Diego State in the 1970s, ultimately winning tenure and heading her department, recreation administration (which no longer exists). She developed a focus on Northern Ireland’s uprising and the conflict’s impact on children, slowly and bravely making contacts within the nearly impenetrable IRA cells.
Although Paris is the center of her world now, Duncan still holds to her San Diego connections as important and nurturing. It was the La Jolla cocktail and dinner-party circuit that sparked her wanderlust. In the hills overlooking the Village, she was a frequent guest at the intellectually stimulating parties thrown by photographer Smith and his wife, Elizabeth. Smith, who died in 1997 at 87, was the founder of the American Society of Magazine Photographers and author of more than 20 books.
Duncan also was friends with prominent society photographer Tony di Gesu and his wife, Alice. And her friendship with eccentric Point Loma millionaire Dan Dixon (who was slain in Ensenada in 1992) opened the door for her to use Dixon’s pied-a-terre in Paris, where Andy Warhol was the next-door neighbor. Through these connections, Duncan found herself among the likes of Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick and his wife, Odile, other scholars and San Diego’s cultural elite.
BUT THE DOOR to a more exotic future was opened through Duncan’s long affair with the late Max Lerner, a man more than twice her age who was once a guest lecturer at the former United States International University in San Diego. (During their relationship, they co-authored an article for San Diego Magazine on the rise of gated suburban developments.) His biographer, UCSD professor Sanford Lakoff, notes that New York-based Lerner was a captivating figure who frequently appeared on TV talk shows and on college campuses. Through his syndicated newspaper column, essays, reviews, books and lectures, Lerner was influential in shaping American public opinion from the early 1930s until shortly before his death in 1992. For most of his life, he was a staunch liberal, but he did an about-face late in his life, embracing neoconservatism.
Lerner had another side. Intrigued with sexuality and eroticism, he was an unrepentant womanizer, conducting affairs with scores of women during his lengthy second marriage. Among his liaisons were trysts with Elizabeth Taylor, who called him “my little professor,” and Marilyn Monroe. One of his great friends was Playboy founder Hugh Hefner.
“Max became where I wanted to go,” writes Duncan, who first met Lerner at a Palm Springs conference. “What Max gave me [was] access. Access to an intellectual and diverse life. Systematically, he set about seducing my mind as a prelude to the body. He called me Ma-ri-a after the song ‘They Call the Wind Maria,’ because, he said, I was like a soft wind that blew love into his life. Very corny, but it worked.”
In his book, Lakoff notes that Lerner, while teaching at USIU, had several other affairs, including an intense relationship with a graduate student for whom he nearly left his wife. Through intimate notes from Lerner, shared with this writer and in her book, Duncan makes it clear that for years she occupied a special place in his life. Much of their affair transpired at the Playboy Mansion. Lerner joked with her, “I teach Hef about sex, and he teaches me about politics.”
But there was no illusion held by Duncan about her entree into the hedonistic Playboy world. “I wasn’t kidding myself. If it hadn’t been for Max Lerner, I would never have been there.”
For more than a dozen years, Duncan was a frequent overnight guest at the West L.A. mansion. There, she became a confidante of Jessica Hahn, who had brought down evangelist Jim Bakker in a sex scandal. The passing parade also included film director Richard Brooks, writer-illustrator Shel Silverstein and actors Warren Beatty, James Caan, Tony Curtis and Jack Nicholson.
“The best-kept secret was that intellectual life thrived between the parties, sex romps and movies that went on,” Duncan writes.
INTRIGUED WITH Henry Miller for much of her life, Duncan acquired a collection of photographs, tapes and manuscripts of the famous author in 2005 from the estate of Smith, who had known him well. “I longed to have Henry under my bed,” she writes, noting that was where the materials, a virtual treasure trove, were stashed for a time. (They since have been sent to archivists for preservation.)
Playing one of the newly acquired tapes, Duncan was flummoxed as she listened to an interview. On the tape, Miller, whom she reveres for breaking many of society’s taboos, discusses an escapade in National City–a visit to a bawdy house where he had contracted a social disease. “What? I stopped the tape, and played it back. A whorehouse in National City? My hometown!” Duncan writes. It emerged that Miller, as a 19-year-old in 1910, had worked on a nearby ranch clearing brush. On another tape, Miller revealed that he had for the first time suffered a complete loss of his identity in National City.
“How strange, I thought. He lost his sense of identify in the very town where mine was forged,” Duncan says. “Paris, on the other hand, is where he said he’d found freedom. Likewise, I thought.”
Carl Larsen, the former Homes section editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune, is a San Diego-based freelance writer.