By Gene Felder
Did M.F.K. Fisher have a connection to Laguna Beach? Over a decade ago, while a board member of the Laguna Beach Historical Society and volunteering at its Murphy-Smith Bungalow, hearing this funny-sounding name, I responded that I had never heard of M.F.K. Fisher. I recently joined the Historical Society’s Book Club, and in the first book assigned to read, “Laguna Beach and the Greenbelt, Celebrating a Treasured Historic American Landscape,” is the following 1934 quote from M.F.K. Fisher: “Artists, old settlers, young enthusiasts for life in the raw with no hate and no golf clubs want to keep it just as it is….[Laguna Beach’s] other lovers, just as sincerely, want to exploit to the bursting point its strong and attractive character…”. A timely quote.
According to Wikipedia, “Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher Parrish Friede (July 3, 1908 – June 22, 1992), writing as M.F.K. Fisher, was an American food writer. Over her lifetime she wrote 27 books, including a translation of Brillat-Savarin‘s The Physiology of Taste. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the ‘arts of life’.” According to lizzyoungbookseller “Few writers have made the same mark on American culinary literature as M.F.K. Fisher. Her fresh perspective and inventive prose have made Fisher a favorite among collectors of food literature.”
As a girl, she and her family lived in Whittier and in summers would encamp in a tent in Laguna Beach, later buying a cabin there. Mary Frances wrote then: “I decided at the age of nine that one of the best ways to grow up is to eat and talk quietly with good people”.
M.F.K. Fisher briefly attended UCLA and Occidental College where she met and married Alfred Fisher. In September 1929, the newlyweds sailed to France where Al Fisher studied for his doctorate. After he received his doctorate, they returned to California. “They later moved into the Laguna cabin. This was during the Great Depression and work was hard to find. Al spent two years looking for a teaching position until he found one at Occidental College. Mary Frances began writing and she published her first piece — “Pacific Village” — in the February 1935 issue of Westways magazine. The article was a fictional account of life in Laguna Beach.”
“In 1933, Dillwyn Parrish and his wife Gigi moved next door to them, and they rapidly became friends.” Dillwyn Parrish was an American writer, illustrator, and painter. “Dillwyn Parrish fell in love with Mary Fisher…Their relationship came at a point when his marriage was already in difficulty, and eventually both couples divorced. He married Mary Fisher in 1938. They lived at Le Paquis in Switzerland until 1939, when war broke out again in Europe. In January 1940, they bought land with a pinewood cabin in the San Jacinto Mountains near Hemet, California.” Dillwyn Parrish was diagnosed as having Buerger’s disease causing him severe pain, necessitating multiple amputations, leading to his suicide August 6, 1941.
In 1944, Fisher met and fell in love with publisher Donald Friede who provided her entree to additional publishing markets. Fisher and Friede divorced on August 8, 1950. In 1953, she moved to Napa Valley, in 1954 to France with her two young children, then back to northern California in 1955, in 1959 to Switzerland, in 1961 she returned to San Francisco. Finally in 1971, the appropriately named “Last House” was designed by Fisher and built in Glen Ellen, California where she lived and wrote until her death at the age of 83 in 1992.
More details can be found on Wikipedia, but not the text of M.F.K. Fisher’s Westways 1935 “Pacific Village” article about life in Laguna Beach. But thanks to long-time serving Laguna Beach Historical Society board member Nelda Stone, we have a copy of the article. M.F.K. Fisher used the fictional town name Olas, I have changed to Laguna Beach for easier reading, comments include:
“Two main divisions separate it roughly into the artistic and the progressive elements, but that is a crude simplification. Each element has its interweaving intricacies, with all the bad and most of the good qualities of a small-town society long and firmly established.”
“For two days the beaches teem with people. …Monday morning is like dawn on another planet. The hordes have fled. Six or seven cars are parked sheepishly in the quiet streets. [Laguna Beach] is normal again, living that life so completely unsuspected by the people who come and go each weekend.”
“And it is these muse-fed villagers and these old settlers who lead the artist faction in [Laguna Beach]. It is they who cry ‘Down with billboards! Away with publicity! Out with subdividers and go-getters!’ And they are very bitter. ‘[Laguna Beach] has been ruined, prostituted,’ they howl. … And they stay in [Laguna Beach] and bring their friends, who usually stay too.”
“To the progressives it is a natural, a logical thing to want [Laguna Beach] to be bigger and noisier and more popular. They are patient enough with the grumbling, sneering artists, and, most ironically, use them as part of their publicity program. [Laguna Beach], Famous Artists’ Colony, the billboards blurb, and Visit [Laguna Beach], Artist Haunt.”
“So the two sides live together in the little village. One could not well exist without the other. Each fights with the tactics of righteous sincerity: each fights dirty.”
If you would like a copy of the article, just email me at gene@felders.net.
Gene is the treasurer of Laguna Residents First, treasurer of the Laguna Canyon Conservancy, president of the Top of the World Neighborhood Association, and serves as an alternate on the Coastal Greenbelt Authority. He is the former president of the Laguna Beach Historical Society, and was co-author, with Foster J. Eubank of the Arcadia Publishing book “Laguna Beach, Then & Now”. Gene graduated from Cal State Fullerton in Business Administration, and has an MBA from UCLA.
