Drawers spilling with take-out menus and closets stuffed with the itch of winter coats leave little room for the average New Yorker—in some cases having no more than four damp walls and a cracked hot plate—to accumulate some personal history. Sidewalks are filled with hand carved headboards and record collection milk crates just waiting for some relocated 20-year-old with a band. Or, perhaps the veteran downtown resident with a perennial curiosity and a love for strange finds—a hell-bent passion for history and for plunging her own fifty-five years deeply into it—to lug them up three flights of pre-World War-era stairs through concrete atomic-proof halls and into an apartment above a 24-hour bodega.

This is Bettina Ewing.

A tour of the apartment: a bottle of red number one.
Whether it’s making her own furniture, including a delicate Japanese Shoji screen — which gives me extreme wine stain paranoia; her seemingly inexhaustible supply of books on New York history and Manhattan arcana; the lovely and original artwork by her old friend Charles Bukowski dressing her walls, and filling my gut with envy; her three Emmy’s, among numerous other television broadcast awards from 18 years at NBC, collecting dust on top of her kitchen cabinets; or simply her two stout and ghostly Blue Russian cats (of course she has cats), the conversation whirls in circles—she resumes abandoned stories, she veers down California tangents, always fascinating. She’s full of insight, intelligence, and humor. And she’s a looker. She still has the surety and worldly confidence present in the pictures I see of a younger Bettina, but the lines on her face are expectedly more dramatic, well earned. She shows me much patience, understanding my excitement over things that in time may have proven less exciting than my romantic imagination will allow. Yet, her eyes light up at the mention of endless topics, as many as the books that line her walls.

But let us begin at the beginning—and I mean the beginning.

Nineteen fifty one. The first mile of American paved concrete at the storied intersection of 7 Mile and Woodward in Detroit, Mich.. Bettina Ewing is born in the back seat of neighbor’s Chevy and it takes years before she runs south.

Jacksonville, Fla.’s Flagler College. The College of Knowledge she calls it, in the former Hotel Ponce de Leon, “a well preserved example of Spanish Renaissance architecture” and a registered “U.S. Historical Site of Preservation”: at least that’s what the Web page says.

Down the road in St. Augustine—Bettina’s next stop—500 years ago this month, Ponce de Leon’s spies land and christens it La Florida, and Ponce is convinced he’s found the mythic Fountain of Youth. It turns out he’s wrong, and he dies there some years later. The stone cross with which he marked the legendary ground, and the well itself, remain there today and draw countless numbers of bored young boy scouts. Further down the road, with less press but far more personality, L.H. “Buddy” Hough runs the St. Augustine Museum of Tragedy in U.S. History until his death in 1996. After which, apparently, the city bought and whitewashed the grounds. Now all any tourist can hope for is a peek at Bonnie and Clyde’s shot-up car.
“They had Jayne Mansfield’s car too,” says Bettina. “JFK’s autopsy pictures, and believe it or not, pictures of the car of Oswald’s neighbor who drove him to Dallas and even Oswald’s hotel furniture from Dallas. The rooms were lit by cheap lamps swinging from two-by-fours; there was a handwritten sign outside of each room that said ‘please turn lights off when you leave.’”

She left. Florida was in the rearview mirror, and by now she had a husband. It gets a little hazy here… probably my fault. I believe at this time I was wearing her cowboy hat and looking for my glass, taking notes as I followed her from room to room.

“Of course,” she says, “that was before I found out he was still married to wife number three. I was just a stupid kid, like all kids. Now he’s on wife number nine. Maybe I wasn’t so stupid,” she turns, and somehow I get a quick glimpse of what it is to have real history.

And I know my 33 years will soon be 40, and I hope to have just some of what she’s got.

And after Florida?

“What else in 1970? We went to California,” she says.

Which makes sense. She’s almost 20, newly wed (not too mention, hot stuff—and I mean in every photo), and free love is in the air.

“We lived in East Hollywood. Court apartments built for the movie people in the twenties. And that’s where we met everyone; most of them were friends of my husband already. Hank—Bukowski—was the first person I met in California. And he was such a lovely, lovely man. I mean he could be really bad I imagine. But I never saw that.

“We were offered the job as superintendents to the court complex…Hank needed a place to stay. He was living in one of those Hollywood apartments…all pink and turquoise lights, really bad. So we got him a place with us in East Hollywood.”

She starts to tear up. “They were such good times. We were just kids.”

On my lap she places four photo albums as thick as phone books, sepia cracking with age.

The bottle is empty: red number two
Tell me all about these people, I insist, and we go through pages and pages of black-and-whites from Midwest adolescence, and then it’s to the good stuff: the shit-filtered photos from the 70’s that make every one look like a living hero. I see George DiCaprio, renowned editor and underground comic artist for Last Gasp Comix. “That’s Leonardo’s father. He was a hunk too,” she says. Even shots of little Leo in his parents’ tie-dyed arms. “That’s Verna Bagby, she did set design for John Casavettes. We got in a fist-fight once and we rolled around on the floor of the bookshop.”

The bookshop is Wilton Book and News, on Hollywood and Wilton that Bettina ran with her husband and, judging from the pictures, everyone else in Hollywood who was destined for underground greatness or just looked insane.

“We all worked for a friend who ran a magazine distributorship, loading trucks. We sold his magazines at the shop and it was enough income to keep the shop going for a while. I did drawings of everybody loading and unloading the trucks for school.

“That’s Gus. He brought in the pinball machines for us to play in the shop. He was in the Manson family! Someone had taken a picture of him I guess, and he knew we had it and he asked me for the negative one day—before everything went down—so I gave it to him.

“That’s Michael C. Ford, a great writer, and he’s from the Midwest too,” and one of the legendary L.A. bards, a contemporary of Bukowski, nominated for a Pulitzer and still working.

“That’s Mr. Mellow,” she laughs, “‘the voice of the mellow sound’ on KNX FM in the seventies.” I see a young Robert Williams, editor of Juxtapose magazine, extraordinary painter and ringmaster of pop-culture.

“And of course, that’s Hank,” Bettina says.

I can see the sweat stains on his t-shirt despite the photo’s lack of color. Pages and pages of Hank laughing, drinking, goofing with his friends. All of them younger than him. Maybe he fed off of that.

“I’ll tell you a sweet story about him,” she says. “My husband and I had been arguing, so I was upset and went outside to sit on the porch. Hank comes along and says ‘How you doing kid?’ I said fine. My shoulders were all slumped, I’m sure I looked so sad, and he’s on his way to the track. But he says, ‘Alright kid, come on in,’ and we had a long conversation about people and how love is so tough. He was so sweet to me. I was just a kid. That was when he was just starting to get a lot of attention in the U.S. People would just show up at his place…I didn’t want to know anything about writing, I never asked for anything, I think that’s why we got along.”

I ask her how they knew him to begin with.

“My husband had seen him years before at a reading. Hank got so drunk that he fell and he dropped his wallet. My husband found it, with a lot of money too. He went to the address the next day and returned it. Hank was so impressed by that…they became friends.”

I beg Bettina for permission to use the photos.

“Everybody who knew him feels some kind of ownership with Hank — a very proprietary kind of relationship. I don’t want that. I don’t want to ‘cash in’ on him. He was my friend…these are pictures of my friends.

“This is Linda,” I don’t need the last name. She and the bust she made of Bukowski’s head live on practically every page of his novel “Women.”

“Hank told me she broke into his house through a high window and took all of his first editions and hid them in a bush outside. What made him laugh was that she climbed back out the window. She was so crazy that she climbed in and out of that window the whole time with the books instead of just using the door after she broke in. That night she swung his typewriter around her head and crashed it through someone’s windshield.

“One time at our place, Hank was drunk, she was upset. Hank gets up to leave, bends to tie his shoe, and Linda comes at him with a bottle of Jack Daniels. She holds it above his head, as if she’s about to crack his skull with it. He says ‘You better kill me with that thing because I’m coming back at you.’ We’re all waiting to see what she does…she lowers the bottle and does nothing. Hank stands and says, ‘You ain’t shit!’ and leaves.” Bettina stands, laughing. She shakes her head

“We used to sit and drink while he tried out ideas for his column Notes of A Dirty Old Man. Once, we sat and he was showing me all these pictures by Michael Montfort—Hank just got back from Germany—and he’s trying all these funny lines on me, commenting on the photos. Of course, I didn’t know that would become “Shakespeare Never Did This.”

“I did a painting of him once, in the bungalow. After his new wife entered the scene, I gave it to her. I wanted to borrow it later for an application to art school. She wouldn’t. These are our Beauty and the Beast photos.”

And here is Bettina in her birthday suit, stunning, on Hank’s lap. The atmosphere is sweet, even innocent. Hank in a Hawaiian shirt, and Bettina vamping for the camera.

“I danced for three years,” she says, “until that whole scene changed. Things got dangerous.

“Anyway, Linda was furious. The Polaroids fell from Hank’s shirt pocket as he bent to tie his shoe. She tore them to shreds. Someone found them and tried to tape them, sell them. Make it something it wasn’t.”

I remember what she says about cashing in.

She shows me pictures of a psychiatrist with a foot fetish, sleeping with shoes in the nude. I see photos of Bettina at the track: “So many people want to claim that they were the only one Bukowski took to the track. Well, I have pictures,” she laughs.

I see photos of a guy known for contraband covered mirrors and incredible exclamations that I hope to use one day myself, like “Bring me a plate and a knife!” I see photos of Claude: trash-man turned riverboat captain, a friend from Jacksonville later murdered in New York City.

Which brings us to New York.

And I wonder if she ever saw Hank again.

“No…I really loved him as a friend though, he was a lovely man. He said ‘See you kid, have a good life.’ And that seemed the right way to leave it.

“The husband was long gone, and I met someone at a Rolling Stones concert. He invited me to visit him in New York City. It turned into a relationship and I stayed until I knew it was over. He yelled at me for putting my boots on his rug (and) I was out of there. Love has gotten me into all the trouble in my life. Then it was two years of roller skating parties in my loft, and more art school. When I moved to Tribeca, neighbors actually picked up my boyfriend’s Firebird and walked it two blocks away, because it was a ‘suburban eyesore.’ I’ve been here ever since.”

Where to next?

“Italy, with my sister. And we should go around the world…call your wife. Let’s plan it,” she instructs me.

Bottle number three
She tells me about all of her current art projects including two photo book projects. This brings us to her collection of Meiji period Japanese memorabilia, early nineteenth century cosmetic boxes, a Meiji lunchbox, kimonos, and more photos. She also owns an extensive collection of Meiji photo post cards: “They’re less expensive. It was an ephemeral time,” she tells me.

“Japan had just opened its doors to the world. It was untouched. People flooded the city from all over the world to document it. Even now they throw these things away. There’s no interest in their history,” she says. “I love it.”

There’s something in the faces—artful and beautiful, but by nature of the time, alien, frozen. Maybe it’s the wine, but I can’t help but see the exceptional grace in Bettina’s albums; the stills of her exceptional life.

I love these, I tell her.

Scott Cheshire is a writer who lives and works in New York.