Rock’s Family Feud

The set-to over the ice cream has ended. Ditto for the battle over the trust for the youngest child. The guitar maker’s bequest is still pending and the war over the lithographs still has some loose ends. But the ex-wife and the ex-girlfriends and the guy who stood guard during acid trips have been dealt with, and the acupuncturist and BMW dealer have been paid.

In short, the affairs of the late Jerry Garcia appear at last to be reaching denouement, six long, strange years after the Grateful Dead’s famed lead guitarist died in his sleep in a local drug rehab facility. While harsher priorities occupied the headlines, a petition was quietly filed this month in Marin County Superior Court to close the estate of the ‘60s icon. A hearing is scheduled for Oct. 30, after which the last bits of a hippie fortune valued at $9,936,492.27, give or take a guitar pick, are expected to be disbursed.

The approaching deadline is seen, here in Garcia country, as either the last fadeout of Garcia’s playful, idealistic era or as the finale to one of the rock world’s saddest family feuds. “This is basically the end, and I think everyone’s glad,” said David Hellman, Garcia’s longtime tax attorney and the estate’s co-executor.

But as anyone who has ever sat through one of the Dead’s famously drawn-out jams knows, things can also only seem to be over. Already the many lawyers involved are talking about a “post-estate phase.” At issue are, among other things, some $4.6-million worth of annual royalties and six years’ worth of bad energy between the children and widow of the affable, wildly popular musician.

“It’s too bad,” said the attorney for three of the five kids.

“Unfortunate,” agreed the attorney for Garcia’s third and last wife, Deborah Koons Garcia.

“Who would have ever thought it would have turned out this way?” sighed Garcia’s second and best-known wife, the Merry Prankster earth mother Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Adams, who sued for roughly half the estate and settled in 1998 for $1.25 million. “I’m sure Jerry would have been really annoyed.”

The back story to the Garcia battle could fill--and has filled--volumes, though, under the current circumstances, has the feel of something plucked from a parallel universe. Grievances pale in the aftermath of Sept. 11, and the stakes are barely middle class by tech-boom standards. Still, San Francisco is both Garcia’s hometown and a city with a real soft spot for time warps, and the estate remains a point of intense local interest.

People here can recite from memory how Jerome John Garcia was born to a San Francisco nurse and her husband, a Spanish immigrant jazz clarinetist, who named him after composer Jerome Kern. How his big brother Cliff accidentally chopped off Jerry’s middle finger when they were children, fooling around with axes. How his father died on a fishing trip and his mother supported the family, even after remarriage, by managing working-class bars.

Biographies and oral histories offer accounts of Garcia’s first puff of pot (in 1957) and of his beatnik years around Palo Alto, playing guitar and dabbling in art school. The tales typically have a playful, nostalgic glow: the folkie years with Sara Ruppenthal, his first wife; the “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” years as the house band for the LSD-tripping Merry Pranksters; the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury with his bandmates and the free-spirited Mountain Girl.

Never mind that the drugs grew harder with each decade the Dead remained in business, to the point that Garcia’s heroin-and-cigarette-wracked body nearly gave out several times. By the time he died at 53 of heart failure, he was seen, not just as a rock artist, but as a symbol of tenacious lightness, the Cal Ripken of reprobate flower children. President Bill Clinton mourned him on MTV as a “genius” even as he spoke of Garcia’s “demons.” San Francisco authorities hoisted a tie-dyed flag over City Hall in his memory. National newspapers ran his obituary on the front page.

But Garcia’s private life was more complex than the public perception. “Deadheads will tell you what a peaceful guy Jerry was and what a trippy scene it was and how it was all love and peace, but it wasn’t,” said Oakland musician and author David Gans, who has written three books on the Dead and hosts the nationally syndicated radio show “The Grateful Dead Hour.”

“It was a real backstabbing scene, Byzantine and complicated. Some of the entrenchments went back decades. It’s a shame, truly, that he left such a mess behind.”

Vibes were especially--and famously--harsh between Adams and Deborah Koons Garcia, a dark-haired filmmaker whom Garcia had met the year Adams gave birth to their second daughter, and whom he married in 1994 after he and Adams finally split up.

Blair Jackson, author of “Garcia: An American Life,” reports that the widow “pointedly” left Adams off the guest list for the invitation-only funeral. Robert Greenfield, who edited a 1996 oral history about Garcia, writes that Garcia’s cremated remains had to be scattered twice because of a dispute among Adams, Koons Garcia and various band members over whether Garcia would have wanted his ashes to go into San Francisco Bay or the Ganges River in India.

“Concerning the screaming fight on the dock ... as to who would be permitted to go along on what was, after all was said and done, Jerry’s last trip, the less said the better,” wrote Greenfield. Suffice it to say that Dead insiders were unsurprised when, in 1997, the two women became stars of “Court TV,” thanks to the widow’s decision to stop payment on Adams’ $5-million, 20-year divorce agreement. Adams prevailed but settled for a lump sum of $1.25 million when the estate appealed.

That much-publicized fight, lawyers say, was part--but only part--of the reason the estate has taken so long to sort out. Other sides of the story lie in the 16-plus volumes of the probate court file.

Garcia’s personal life, at least as reflected in legal papers, appears to have been one long, fruitless struggle to please, appease and escape his loved ones. The documents are riddled with arguments over unconsummated marriage proposals and unsigned child-support deals and under-the-table pledges and backstage vows.

There are numerous heirs, born to numerous women: Heather Garcia Katz, born in 1963 to Ruppenthal, a Stanford woman he’d wed after being informed she was pregnant; Annabelle and Theresa Garcia, his children by Adams, born out of wedlock in the brown-rice ‘70s; Sunshine Kesey, whose father was the author Ken Kesey but who was raised by Adams as Garcia’s stepchild; Keelin Garcia, born in 1987 to Manasha Matheson, a much-younger Deadhead who had known Garcia since she’d caught his eye at a Dead concert in her teens.

Five kids in all, by two ex-wives and one financially dependent mistress, plus one widow, numerous business partners and countless employees, attorneys and camp followers. In life, Garcia may have seemed the bushy-haired personification of Zen-like nonattachment, but in death--like a lot of celebrities--he was notable mainly for his earthly obligations.

“By the end, he was carrying the world on his shoulders,” said Gans, the radio show host.

Thus, no fewer than 13 law firms are being kept abreast of estate proceedings. Scores of claims have been reviewed and dispatched. The smallest: a $980 claim from a personal trainer who saw Garcia the month before he checked into rehab. The largest: a long, barely legible demand for $1.3 billion from a woman who claimed to be related to the Allman Brothers and carrying Garcia’s love child.

“If Jerry’d been buried he’d a done rolled over,” the woman had complained in a supporting statement she’d scrawled on stationery from, among other places, the Chateau Marmont in L.A. Her documentation included a letter from representatives for Duane Allman, asking that she stop sending him tapes of her music.

The personal trainer got his money; the woman did not.

In between was a litany of demands, most of which were aggressively, even harshly, challenged. Supporters of Adams and Matheson claimed, publicly and privately, that Koons Garcia, the widow, used her power as a co-executor to inflict financial and emotional wounds.

Garcia and Adams’ daughter, Theresa, ended up having to sell the Toyota 4-Runner her father had bought her as a high school graduation gift because her stepmother and the estate refused to continue making the payments, according to court papers. Esther Lerner, a San Francisco lawyer who, when Garcia died, was negotiating a child-support deal for his youngest child, Keelin, said that when she gave the estate her unpaid bill, the widow accused her of peddling stories to the tabloids.

In fact, Lerner says, she had spent considerable time trying to persuade gossip columnists not to print things that the child’s young Deadhead mother had naively told them. “I almost walked out of the mediation,” said Lerner. “I ended up taking a cut of several thousand dollars just to get out of there and get the thing resolved.”

Koons Garcia, who lives in Mill Valley, did not respond to requests through her lawyers for comment. But Hellman, the estate lawyer, says the estate had to question every outlay because by the time Garcia died, his cash flow had been almost wholly siphoned away.

Court papers hint at the size of the financial outflow: a claim from Garcia’s acupuncturist for $10,080; another from his holistic health practitioner for $4,277.80; yet another from his BMW dealer for $25,404.10 for repairs on a loaner he’d wrecked while his other BMW was being worked on; the $20,000 a month he’d been paying Adams under their divorce agreement; a $3,000 a month, three-year stipend he’d agreed to pay Barbara “Brigid” Meier, an old girlfriend he’d proposed to, then dropped--after a fight over his drug use, she says--for Koons Garcia. (“I didn’t ask for it,” Meier said from her home in Taos, N.M., where she is now a real estate agent, having finally won a posthumous claim to her last $21,000 from Garcia. “It was offered. Offered. And I was like, ‘OK, whatever. If this will make you feel better.”’) The mortgage on the half-million-dollar house in Marin County he’d bought for Matheson, now 41, and Keelin; a bill from the child’s tutor for $1,643.

Not to mention Garcia’s employees: The roadie who wanted “undisclosed” compensation for “babysitting Garcia and [late bandmate Ron] ‘Pigpen’ [McKernan] when they were tripping.” The personal assistant and the housekeeper who, together, claimed some $27 million in royalties for handling his art.

His office manager, who said he had promised her half of the licensing fees from Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream as severance if her work with him ever ended. (The roadie’s claim was rejected, the art claims have tentatively settled for much less money and the office manager settled confidentially for a lump sum.)

Then there has been the matter of Garcia’s guitar maker, Doug Irwin, the only non-family member to be named a beneficiary in the will. Garcia willed Irwin five electric guitars Irwin had built for him in the 1970s and ‘80s. The instruments have become so closely associated with Garcia that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland has borrowed three to display in its lobby.

But Irwin, who has been destitute since a 1998 hit-and-run accident nearly killed him, had to sue because the Grateful Dead contends the band owned all its instruments communally, and therefore the guitars weren’t Garcia’s to give away.

“The thing was, Jerry really, truly cared about the people around him,” said Irwin, a long-haired man with a nervous laugh who became one of the Bay Area rock scene’s master artisans after learning guitar-making on a welfare program. He now lives with his mother in Hemet.

“Jerry,” he said, “had this uncanny ability to give people dignity.”

But that uncanny ability to connect came with a price tag. In court declarations, Koons Garcia said that handling her husband’s affairs had helped her see how used he was by the weak souls around him, and “how insidiously Jerry was repeatedly victimized and misled.” She has been criticized for the compensation she has drawn for executing the will--more than $450,000, not counting her one-third inheritance and a claim to nearly $650,000 more in community property. But even her critics acknowledge that the estate is now being competently handled.

“There wouldn’t be an estate to distribute if if weren’t for Deborah,” said her lawyer, Max Gutierrez Jr. He added that she had a fiduciary duty to avoid being swayed by sympathy for “the huge, huge number of hanger-on-ers” whose dependence compelled Garcia to keep working even in ill health.

“She comes from independently wealthy means,” Gutierrez said. “She has no need of this estate. She’ll be very pleased to see this closed, so she can get on with her life.”

At least one big item, however, remains outstanding: the future of Garcia’s intellectual property and licensing empire.

Besides his songwriting royalties, valued in court papers at $1.5 million a year, and the million-dollar-a-year lithograph business spawned by his paintings, Garcia’s work generated more than $2 million a year in merchandising income, according to court records. There is the Ben & Jerry’s license, worth $250,000 a year. There are royalties from Jerry Garcia ties, T-shirts, snowboards, wine, Birkenstock sandals and a $15.99 Jerry Garcia action figure “in a beautifully trippy package,” according to the toy maker.

Court documents indicate that the estate is negotiating for a line of Jerry Garcia scarves and Jerry Garcia linens, and hoping to get financing for an estate-sanctioned Jerry Garcia documentary. But the $4.6-million-plus stream of income depends on the heirs’ ability to negotiate as a united front, and to do that, lawyers say, they must create a limited liability corporation through which to sell exclusive rights to Garcia’s art, music and image. The problem, they say, is that children and widow have been unable to agree on a manager because both sides want control. Consequently, all sides are girding for fresh rounds of “post-estate” litigation, in the event that the feuding kills the golden goose.

The threat of further court battles is disappointing to all parties.

Adams and Matheson say Garcia’s children are ready for resolution. Heather, 37, is a violinist and co-principal concertmaster with the Redwood Symphony in Redwood City. Sunshine, 35, is a glassblower and is moving her business from the Bay Area to Eugene, Ore., where Adams lives now, she says, in a “big wooden house with, like, five bedrooms and a lot of fir trees.”

Annabelle, 31, is a painter married to a musician and lives a few miles from her mother. Theresa, 27, is a Bay Area art teacher.

Keelin, 13, plays piano, sings in three choirs and lives in the Marin County house that Garcia bought for her. “She has Jerry’s same dark eyes and beautiful smile and charming personality,” says Matheson, who describes herself as a painter and film and music producer. The approaching resolution of the estate, she adds, has left her “very relieved.”

“Life goes on,” said Adams, who, after her court battle, “decided that I had to let go. It took a couple of years, but I had a long conversation with myself and now I’m happy. I see my kids on a daily basis. I live quietly.”

At 55, she says, she writes poetry and makes art and stays close to her “Merry Prankster roots, ever dancing, ever prancing.” She lived for a while with a lover, but that ended, and she hasn’t remarried.

“My only wish is that Jerry would have lived longer,” she said. “It would be nice to have him around today.”