The 21st president of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, was largely a forgettable head of state, aside from his gigantic muttonchops. By contrast, his grandson is a completely different story. And that story includes a sex cult, a revolution and a bunch of hippies.
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Born in 1901 and financially buoyed by a family fortune, Chester Alan “Gavin” Arthur III ping-ponged across the globe for much of his adulthood. His mother was a socialite and his father was a playboy who earned the moniker “The Prince of Washington” when his father was president. In Gavin’s early 20s (and during the Roaring ’20s), he was a devotee of the Omnipotent Oom, the famous (and infamous) guru of a popular-at-the-time tantric sex, magic and yoga group who also had a lot of really murky and creepy encounters with young women.
After marrying his first wife and leaving the sex cult, Gavin dropped out of Columbia University and headed to Europe for his next adventure. He began calling himself “Gavin” while living in Ireland as a nationalist and activist, funneling money to the Irish Republican Army for guns and bail. At some point — perhaps when Ireland gained its independence, although the details are a little murky — Gavin left Ireland for Switzerland and started his movie career.
He jumped from funding a revolution to making the avant-garde movie, “Borderline,” with famed actor Paul Robeson. Shocking upon its release in 1930, “Borderline” is about an interracial, extramarital affair and is now considered an important cinematic work.
And then Gavin headed to California, again with an itch to do something new and exciting. This time, he founded a colony of bohemians in the sand dunes of Pismo Beach called Moy Mell. The colony became a stop for artists and free thinkers as Gavin played host to luminaries such as John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair and American composer John Cage, who would sit around beach bonfires and share their ideas and new works with the Dunites.
After Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Moy Mell’s Pacific Ocean beachfront became prime real estate for the Coast Guard. Gavin offered it to the service and then joined the Army, Navy or Merchant Marines (or some combination), depending on who tells the story.
During the buttoned-up, post-war era, now middle-aged Gavin became an astrologer, a friend to many Beat Generation poets, a prison educator and — when he found himself down on his luck — a newspaper salesman.
Throughout his life, Gavin was an out-and-proud bisexual man who called himself a “pre-hippie hippie.” In the early ’60s, it seemed as though the world was catching up to him. He wrote and published “The Circle of Sex,” a quasi-scientific read about the spectrum of human sexuality that added “sexologist” to the growing list of his descriptors.
As a leader of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and an early gay rights activist, Gavin was involved in choosing the date for the now-famous Human Be-In through careful astrological divination. Gavin did his job well: Held on Jan. 14, 1967, the stars aligned, and the event drew between 20,000 and 30,000 young people from across the country.
The Human Be-In skyrocketed the notoriety and popularity of the hippie movement, which had previously been local. An eclectic mix of notable cultural touchstones such as Allen Ginsberg, Dizzy Gillespie, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Hell’s Angels participated in the festivities. During the event, psychologist and psychedelic drug activist Timothy Leary famously directed the crowd to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” The event became a cultural phenomenon, spawning other similar gatherings and setting the stage for the Summer of Love and the first U.S. rock festivals. In two years, the excitement of mass gatherings as both social and political demonstrations, which began with the Human Be-In, would lead to the most famous of all: Woodstock.
In 1972, the 21st president of the United States’ grandson died at the Fort Miley Veterans Hospital in San Francisco. It was perhaps the most conventional thing Gavin did in a life that was anything but.
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