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Is the World Big Enough for Mary Duncan?

Illustrations credit: Yishai Minkin

(page 2 of 2)

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.

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.

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