'Mary Moe,' which is the name I have given Sexton's daughter to protect her identity, was sixty-five at the time of our first conversation. She had known our family since before I was born, and in another incredible twist of fate, as an eight-year-old girl had come with her father to the hospital to visit my mother on the day my twin brother John and I were born.
Fred Sexton was of Irish, Jewish, and Italian descent. When he was about thirteen years old, the police arrested his father on Christmas Eve and dragged him out of the house, an incident that instilled in Fred a lifelong hatred of the police. The family was then living in California, but his dad had been bootlegging in Nevada during the '20s and '30s.
Sexton had been John Huston's close friend at high school in L.A., and they remained friends through the years. As a child, Mary remembered Huston as a kind of 'godfather' who would suddenly appear with extravagant presents for her, then vanish. Mary also thought her father had been acquainted with the notorious gambler Tony Cornero, but was not absolutely sure. She did know that Fred's father had been a gambler and bootlegger like Cornero.
I learned that, like my father, Sexton had a secret and mysterious past and had concealed important early truths from his daughter. For instance, from her mother Mary discovered that her father had had an affair with a married newspaper reporter in San Francisco in the 1920s. The newswoman became pregnant and gave birth to a son. Growing up, Mary was shown pictures of a small, dark-complexioned boy, and was told these were pictures of her father. Only as an adult did she learn the truth: the pictures were not of her father but her half-brother! To this day she knows nothing further about him, has never met him, does not know if he is living or dead, nor does she even know his name.
She remembered that her father ran a 'floating crap game' in Los Angeles, where he reportedly 'made very good money.' Like my Father, Fred drove taxis during his youth, both in Los Angeles and in San Francisco.
Regarding Sexton and his women, Mary told me, 'My dad had lots of different girlfriends when I was young. He was very much like your father when it came to women. He had so many women, one after the other.'
In the early 1930s, Sexton went to Europe for a year or two, then returned to Los Angeles, married Gwain, and Mary was born. He pursued his artwork, gained some notoriety, and reportedly had several one-man shows, which received excellent reviews from L.A. art critics.
Mary recalled that in 1938 George Hodel moved into the house next door to theirs. 'We were neighbors on White Knoll for about a year,' she recalled. It was at that time, Mary said, that the two Dorothys were living together with George. 'Both Tamar's mother, Dorothy Anthony, and your mom were living with him next to us. Then, after about a year, the three of them moved not far away, to Valentine Street.'
During the war years Sexton, like my father, remained in Los Angeles:
My dad was working at all the movie studios and he worked at the shipyards, then he drove a cab again in '43 and '44. My dad wasn't in the war because he had to take care of my mom, who was bedridden for many years. Your dad, who had known my mom and was a good friend for so long, also treated her and was her doctor.
Fred Sexton had an art studio in a downtown building, at 2nd and Spring Streets. I learned from Mary that my father had an apartment on the top floor of the same building, where they could go upstairs onto the roof of a German beer-hall. According to her, this apartment was where George would 'rendezvous' with all his girlfriends. Mary had been inside George's 'apartment' with her father on one occasion around 1948, and remembered that the interior was beautiful and, in her words, had a 'very fancy decor.'
I asked if she had any information or remembered an incident related to a woman, possibly a girlfriend of my father's, who had committed suicide during those years. Her response was:
I think that the person you are talking about was your dad's office manager at the First Street Clinic. I'm not sure of her name, but it might have been Ruth Dennis. What I heard was that she didn't come to work one morning at the clinic, and your dad went to her apartment and found her dead. As I recall, it was a suicide, an overdose.
Then Mary related a telling incident, which again involved both of our fathers.
In the late '40s there was a woman named Trudy Spence, who at that time was my dad's girlfriend. Her husband found out about the affair and came after Fred at his Spring Street art studio, intending to kill him. To escape, Dad had to jump off the roof and landed in the parking lot. He tore up his leg really bad and was laid up for months. Your dad brought him a gun, which he kept hidden in a cigar box under his bed, because he thought the husband might arrive. The whole thing made me very nervous.
Though Mary told me she did not know the details of the incest scandal, she did say there was no doubt in her mind that Tamar had told the truth. Her next revelation caught me completely off guard:
I, like Tamar, was also a victim of incest. My own father sexually molested me from age eight to eleven. I know firsthand exactly what Tamar went through. When I was sixteen, a year before the trial, I had a bad argument with my father, because he tried again to have sex with me. I told him that if he didn't leave the house, I would. He left and went to live with John Huston and Paulette Goddard in West Hollywood. The next year, the Tamar thing happened. It took a long time, but Dad finally admitted the incest with me to my mom.
'Tamar was an incorrigible teenager,' Mary said, 'and seemed obsessed with sex all the time.' But Mary, without reservations, believed the story Tamar told the police about having had sex with Fred, Barbara Sherman, and my father.
'When I was around your father,' Mary admitted, 'my dad never took his eyes off me. He was going to make sure that George never touched me. Dad was very protective of me around your father.'
She learned most of the facts about the scandal from her father, who had told her that Man Ray was also involved. 'The police talked with Man Ray,' her father had told her, 'who would have been arrested and charged along with them, except he got a letter from his doctor saying that he couldn't have done anything to Tamar, because he was impotent.' Mary noted that 'Man Ray had lots of clout. I think my dad was a terrific artist and Huston was a terrific director, but they both were rotten people.'
After separating from his wife, Gwain, in the 1950s, Sexton traveled back and forth to Mexico. In the early 1960s, he remarried and lived in Palos Verdes for a short period, then divorced again. Sexton returned to Mexico in 1969, and in 1971, at age sixty-three, married his third wife, who was only a teenager. The two of them lived in Guadalajara until his death in 1995. Mary informed me that on his death, 'his wife destroyed all of his papers.' Mary said her father passed for either Spanish or Italian, and spoke both languages.
Before his final return to Mexico, Fred gave his daughter a list of various bank accounts; he had used different names on different accounts. She said, 'On his passport, he put the name of his brother Robert, who was dead. He also used another alias, 'Sigfried Raphael Sexton.''
