Betty and Gordon: A love story
The shared artistic life and transcendent love of Betty and Gordon Evans is exhibited at the Hermosa Beach Historical Society
and Mark McDermott
Betty and Gordon Evans at the beginning of their life together. Photo courtesy of the Evans family
Betty Eckhoff first laid eyes on Gordon Evans one September day in 1942 in her freshman English class at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles. She saw his shock of black hair and knew immediately she wanted him.
Betty was already well beyond her years in maturity. She was a beautiful, bright-faced 15-year-old girl, and somehow she seemed to see a glimpse of her life stretching before her as she looked at the handsome boy across the classroom.
“She was a person throughout her life who knew what she wanted, and she wanted our father,” said Suzanne Evans-Ackerman, Betty and Gordon’s daughter. “…They wanted each other.”
She wasn’t alone in her admiration. Many other girls sought Gordon, but nobody drew him in like Betty. Gordon, who was a year older than Betty, was already a self-possessed young man. He’d left a troubled home in Utah and learned to fend for himself before reuniting with his mother in Los Angeles, where he spent his early teenage summers working in his stepfather’s foundry. He saw in Betty not only an extraordinary beauty, but a seriousness of purpose and a sense of adventure that matched his own.
They fell in love, a love that would soon be mightily tested. Gordon found it impossible to stand by while the United States became more deeply embattled in World War II. He managed to successfully lie about his age and enter the U.S. Marine Corps in September of 1943, rather than finish his senior year of high school. He shipped off to the Pacific theater, where he would take part in some of the bloodiest battles of the war – including Guadalcanal – as an infantryman and expert marksman.
Betty wrote Gordon every single day. Her thoughts never wavered from him, a focus so intense that it troubled some of her family.
Betty and Gordon with artist friends in their tiny shared studio in the Montmarte district of Paris, circa 1949. Photo courtesy of the Evans family
“It was being faithful,” said Jeanne Rosen, the youngest of the couple’s three children. “Her friends and even her family would say, ‘Betty Jean, you are young, you are beautiful. Date other men. Go out, you are giving up your youth.’ And she didn’t listen to any of that. She wrote him every day for two years.”
Gordon wrote back when he was able. His letters were unsparing. He described the horrors he witnessed, and more – he drew them. Gordon was already a gifted artist, and he sketched battlefield scenes that were both horrifying and astonishing in their honesty. The letters, in their passionate entirety, were Betty’s lifeline to Gordon.
“It was a real bond,” Rosen said. “And my father, when he wrote those letters back, was illustrating all over them with scenes from the battlefield, and political sarcasm, even at that age, 18 or 19. And then my mom – I just learned this from my aunt this past year, would get these letters and pin them on the wall, and it would give my aunt shivers and nightmares because here are all these gruesome pictures from the war.”
Betty’s sister, Barbara Hall, recalled that sometimes when the family was away from their home, Betty would suddenly insist they return to see if a letter from Gordon had arrived.
She would throw such a fit that her mother would relent. Her father, a sportswriter for the LA Times, would often look at Gordon’s drawings in astonishment.
“Oh my God,” her father would say, according to Hall, as he beheld the artwork. “Gordon has a sensitive soul.”
The Evans family in Italy.
The Evans children were aware of their mother’s letters but not their father’s until his passing in 2010, five years after Betty’s death. Their son, Bob, was packing up Gordon’s art studio in the backyard of the family’s Hermosa Valley home when he came across a cache of the letters.
The Evanses are among the most creatively prolific families the South Bay has ever produced. Gordon was a painter and sculptor whose work seems destined to become posthumously much more well-known. Betty was a food writer who wrote a column for the Easy Reader for more than two decades and produced nine books of simple, elegant, yet worldly recipes. Bob Evans, the oldest of their children, is both an accomplished marine photographer and the inventor of what are widely considered the greatest diving fins ever made, Force Fins; Suzanne Evans-Ackerman is a chef and artist who resides in Zurich, Switzerland; and Jeanne Rosen is a musician and visual artist.
The family’s greatest pride is the legacy their parents left in that most simple yet elusive art of all, that of living life to its fullest. This was a family with deep local roots who traveled widely and in wonder together. Bob was born in Paris, where Gordon studied art on the GI Bill and Betty delved deeply into the culinary arts. In the 1950s, the family returned to California, where their two daughters were born. In 1958, the family journeyed again to Europe to live in Rome with three small children exuberantly in tow. Upon their return to Hermosa Beach, the family created a home that would become one of the most beautifully executed scenes of domestic vibrancy and happiness anyone who witnessed it would ever experience.
But perhaps the most significant legacy Gordon and Betty left behind was a simple lesson in love. The Evans family has assembled an exhibit, Gordon and Betty Evans: Hermosa Beach Icons, that they hope will travel nationally but that begins locally, at the Hermosa Beach Historical Society from June 7 through September 4. The exhibit’s banner photograph, showing the couple embracing at the beginning of their life together, reveals a love that truly endured. Theirs was a love that was a model of staying, a light around which the community they cherished could gather.
“It is a reminder of how wonderful life is and how great life can be when you are involved with and you care about other people,” said Bob Evans. “It is a reminder of the value of life, and family, and food.”
A Movable Feast
Gordon returned from the war in November of 1945. He and Betty wasted little time in establishing their life together. He finished high school in months, and on June 18, 1946, the couple married in Los Angeles.
“The wedding was over and we could finally be alone,” Betty wrote later. “So on a foggish June evening we found ourselves having a French dip sandwich overlooking the sea…We started the next day up the California coast. When you are a Mr. and Mrs. the feeling of starting up the coast in your own car is a different adventure than any you have had before. Food has more flavor and the world seems very beautiful. The cottage at Carmel was like the photos we had seen. The beach with its trees trailing down to the sand was cool and grey but with you I felt warm inside. Dining with a husband is not like dining with a date.”
Their first home together was a little apartment in Hermosa Beach that had once belonged to Betty’s grandparents. Gordon attended Chouinards Art School in LA until 1948 when they moved to Massachusetts and then New York for more art schooling. In 1949 the young couple moved to Paris so Gordon could attend the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere.
In the hallowed art district of Montmartre, they lived in a small hilltop studio with other American artists Lee Fraley, Thorton Harby, Ric Masten and their families. Draped curtains on the balcony created a small bedroom for each couple, but the friends were close and would eat together each night in sepia candlelight, the meals stretched for stragglers coming in hungry from the streets. Betty made the meals “on a wood burning pot belly stove…that seemed to [her] quite Bohemian and romantic.”
The artists believed they should drink wine with their meals to fit into the French culture. They bought red or white Algerian wine from a grocery down the hill, carrying their empty bottles back each time to refill from the spigots. The dreamy woodsy taste of wine would resurface in the years to come in much of Betty’s cooking and in the large meals the Evanses would host for the rest of their life together.
Mornings in Paris, Gordon went to school, then painted in the streets all afternoon. Betty immersed herself in French cuisine. She shopped and studied the outdoor markets twice a day. At noon she would watch a middle aged couple across the courtyard from the studio eat lunch together. “He would take off his work shirt and sit down at the wooden table,” Betty wrote later, in the preface to her Paris cookbook. “There was wine and bread waiting always for him. The woman would serve. They ate slowly and with enjoyment.” Her recipes from this time included dishes named for the markets, the trees, and the language that stirred her appetite.
In 1950 Bob was born in Paris and the Evanses, now three, returned to Hermosa Beach. Suzanne was born two years later and the following year the family moved to a home on Monterey Blvd., designed for them by Gordon’s oldest and dearest friend, Les Guthrie, who he met when he was 12, a friendship that would last seven decades.
Guthrie, one of the original developers of Redondo Beach’s King Harbor, refused payment for his home design – insisting only on a painting in return.
Jeanne was born here in 1956. During this time Gordon worked as a mold maker, sander, printer, color formulator, assistant designer, and illustrator in Los Angeles. Two years later the family picked up and moved again. This time it was no small endeavor. Gordon and Betty sold their home and embarked with their three small children for a life in Rome.
“I guess it would seem strange now, but we didn’t think twice about it at the time,” Gordon said in an interview with the Easy Reader in 2007. “You just do it. I think it was the wife. If I hadn’t a wife like that…Usually, once a wife gets perks, they don’t want to move. But she was like, ‘Let’s go!’ We both felt the same way. She was always ready for adventure or travel.”
As a young girl Betty often sat with her grandfather’s stamp collection and the family’s globe, tracing her finger round the world’s surface to locate each stamp’s origin. The memory spurred a lifelong craving for travel and adventure. The fact that they had three young children served not as an impediment but an encouragement as they immersed their family in the food, history, and convivial pleasures of Italy.
Les Guthrie’s wife, Maryanne, who would later travel extensively with the Evanses, said that watching the two of them delve into other cultures was a thing of wonder in itself.
“They were like children, both of them, in the best of ways – that sense of discovery and adventure, being open to things,” said Guthrie, whose husband passed away last year. “They were like world citizens. I mean, to pick up and go live in post-war Europe with young children? And Betty supported Gordon and his art. She made it happen…It was so much fun to be their friends.”
Naomi Parker, an educator from Manhattan Beach, first met the Evanses in the fall of 1959 in the midst of the family’s three month camping trip from Rome, across Italy, and into southern France. Parker encountered Bob, who was then ten years old, and was immediately mesmerized by Bob’s deep attention to archeology and his earnest love for communication at such a young age. She quickly became friends with the entire family. Gordon and Betty’s children were “encouraged to pursue what they were interested in, they were never required to be artists, but they all are,” Parker said, continuing that the children “made the world lie down with them, they followed their own individual bliss.”
“Our parents gave us the virtue…to be one’s self and be happy,” Suzanne Evans-Ackerman said. “It’s like Billie Holiday sings, ‘God bless the child who has his or her own.’”
After two years abroad Gordon and Betty decided to bring their family home.
Home
In 1960 the Evans returned to California and found a house on Valley Park Avenue in Hermosa Beach. It was one of those quick little California houses built on a cement slab in the 1950s. From the outside it had the appearance of a sugar cube. The front door was lemon yellow, always with a wreath beneath the knocker. The door opened directly into the kitchen, where, as Betty and Gordon’s grandson Zachary Rosen remembered, “notes of bacon lingered in the air.”
This was the Evans’ home for the next 49 years. It was from this simple abode that Betty and Gordon would serve the Hermosa community with a warmth and generosity that made them legendary in an emphatically local manner.
Betty was a docent at the LA Natural History Museum from 1965 until 2002. She was the Hermosa Garden Club’s Beautification Chairman, Hermosa Friends of the Library California Book Chairman, and the Easy Reader’s recipe columnist for thirty years. She could be spotted walking back and forth to her various enterprises, dressed in paisley blouses and striped pants.
Often, Gordon served as her chauffeur, driving Betty to her civic destinations in the blue VW bus that he kept running for nearly 30 years (they’d had an equivalent red VW bus in Europe). Betty always sat in the backseat – she’d been seriously injured in a collision with a motorcycle in Italy, and Gordon never again took the slightest chance in keeping her safe.
“He’d say, ‘No, no, she has to sit in back, it’s too dangerous in front,’” Maryanne Guthrie recalled. “He’d say, ‘My little sweetheart…’ like they were teenagers. They were just so in love.”
Headstrong and warm, Betty made time for everyone. She was a member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and published a series of cookbooks between 1978 and 1999. Betty prefaced each simple, though delicious recipe in her books with a story. Her introductions circle the main ingredient, not only stirring our appetites, but our minds.
In the forward to Betty’s Paris cookbook, Ric Masten writes “and now let us praise the chef/ the only artist whose creative work/ must speak to every sense.” Betty believed in the power of affection and the deep necessity of nourishment. During the rising trend of slick cereals and diet drinks, Betty fed the kids a soft-boiled egg with their breakfast, so they’d have something that’d stick to their insides, keep them from getting hungry in half an hour. She continued to make lunches for Bob all through his years at El Camino College.
She was a master in the kitchen, an artist of necessity.
“Our mother just didn’t ‘cook something’ for our dinner or the meals she made for us…we were always told what we were eating, what it was, from what culture,” Suzanne said. “She would buy artichauts [artichokes] and I recall some of my girlfriends had never had one…as well as the marinated spicy green jarred peppers from Italy. She would put one in my sack lunch and all my friends would say ‘Ugh, what is that?’ I was proud and said they are peppers from Italy and full of vitamin C. My sack lunch bag usually got wet and smelly from them, but they were delicious and I knew, with considered love, that they were put in my lunch bag for me.”
When one walked out the back door of Betty and Gordon’s home on Valley Park Avenue, they were greeted by a lush garden, beans, tomatoes, squash flowers that Betty plucked and dropped in egg and flour, fried, and served with olives, cheeses and bread. A delicate wisp of bamboo, a pool for the goldfish, lemon trees and the cloths line occupied the pebbled yard. From the door up the hill to Gordon’s studio, grew a row of cypress. In later years, an arbor was built in place of the cypress, with concord grapes planted along the base, growing to form a canopy under which countless meals were served – always on a tablecloth, the table centered by a vase of flowers. If it was Sunday, spaghetti was served.
At the dinner table beneath the grapes that Gordon would later simmer into jams, only conversation rounded the ocean air – no music, no television, the telephone off the hook.
“We argued, cried, laughed and sometimes were sad at our dinner table,” Suzanne said. “There were no favorites. We were all treated equally.”
Discussions would often be spirited, particularly when his good friend Les Guthrie was at the table. Guthrie was a conservative; Gordon wasn’t so much left-leaning as he was just a wild contrarian with a penchant for conspiracy theory. They had a gift for rankling each other.
“I don’t know who this guy is!” Guthrie would tell his wife, Maryanne. “He’s a patriot, a democrat, an ultra-conservative. He’s a radical! I don’t know what he is.”
“And the conspiracy theories!” Maryanne said. “Les would start challenging Gordon, and he was well-read…testing Gordon’s theories after a couple bottles of wine. Gordon got hot, Les got hot and kept probing him, and Gordon would finally go, ‘What do I know! I’m an artist!’ And everyone would howl with laughter.”
The backyard dinners epitomized the life the Evanses built for themselves and their friends.
“There was the art in the home, which was phenomenal,” Jeanne said. “There was the food. There was the music. They lived so simply, yet none of us every wanted for anything.”
Gordon and Betty were people who addressed the moment. Life was simple not in the sense that materials weren’t prized, but that material possessions did not determine their dreams. The real dream, the real art was the family, and what earnest, disciplined, and immediate attention that family was given by both parents.
Bob, for example, was always considered something of an odd boy at school. He was nicknamed “Speciman” after an Egyptian sarcophagus containing an embalmed pigeon and a black widow spider were discovered in his locker at Pier Avenue School. A teacher once told Betty that Bob was either an idiot or a genius. Neither Betty nor Gordon ever for one moment doubted their son, a faith that would serve Bob throughout his life. His Force Fins – which were inspired by the way marine wildlife moves and were greeted by skepticism within the dive community when he first designed them – would later be used by Navy Seals, the Cousteau family, and displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Bob said his parents never pressured him or his siblings to become artists but instead fully embraced whatever enthusiasm the kids developed.
“My parents never laid any trips on any of us about that,” Bob said. “They just loved us for whatever we did. And they encouraged us – like my interest in boats. I have more books on boats and ships because my mom realized I had a fascination for that. And so parents with your children – if your kid isn’t interested in being a doctor but is interested in being something else, you have to encourage that excitement…When you have an idea, look at me, pursue it. Don’t let people tell you are going to get ripped off. There are so many naysayers….there are always people telling you that you can’t do something. It’s like, ‘Thank you, I don’t need to hear that. I’ve heard that all my life.’ And thank god my parents installed in me a rock…like the pinnacle of a pyramid.”
“Suzanne,” according to her aunt Barbara Hall, “can look at a potato and make a meal.” Suzanne is a chef in Zurich, Switzerland, a deeply spiritual person who holds a profound gratitude for the guidance her parents gave her. As a young girl she once asked her mother, “Why don’t we have a lot of furniture in our home like everyone else?” Betty replied very calmly, “Honey, we don’t have a lot of furniture but we eat well.” Suzanne said, “I will never forget that. We did grow up very simply, and a lot of good commonsense took place every day under our roof.”
Jeanne, the youngest of Gordon and Betty’s children, has hands that know hard work. Each gesture has a subtle patience. She studied as a musician early in her adulthood before moving into the visual arts; now she and her husband form a single artistic entity called Jeanne Dana and travel constantly to art fairs, such as the Fiesta Hermosa.
Jeanne had an especially close connection with Gordon.
“The relationship I had with him, he would get home from work…he was biking to the Aerospace Corporation and back,” Jeanne said. “We’d go to the beach at 16th, we’d swim together to the pier, and swim back, go home, my mom would be making this phenomenal dinner, and you know we’d rinse off with the hose in the backyard, get the salt water off, go have red wine, an amazing dinner, and then it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s work on those cello pieces and piano.’ We weren’t too advanced. We liked Saint Saens, you know, the Swan solo… I mean, that’s a really amazing day.”
Tromping up the hill beneath the arbor, tucked into the hillside, one found Gordon’s studio. Being a military man, he organized the space with a meticulous aesthetic sensibility. Classical music lofted on the stereo, photographs and postcards graced the walls. Sometimes the family was welcomed in as part of the art process, to pose for a sketch, or a model for a bronze bust – an art form he turned to in the last quarter of his life.
“Due to a book Sculpture Inside and Out by Malvina Hoffman, a gift from my wife,” Gordon wrote, “the past 15 years have been spent sculpturing in terra cotta and wax, the wax being transformed into bronze…” He created busts of all the people who were dear to him, several for each of his children at various points in their lives.
In the family’s collection, there is a photograph of Gordon in his studio, when he is maybe thirty years old, holding a pallet clouded with different pools of paint. He has shifted his attention from a soft plate of pears, ripening near the top of his canvas to the camera’s lens. The darkness of his hair is parted and sunlight seams the part, the white of his undershirt, the highlight of the three pears huddled behind his uplifted right arm. Every angle of his posture has a purpose and an ease, maybe the way an animal would stand on the edge of a field, just having become alert to your presence. He was a man completely in his element.
Jeanne’s husband, Dana Rosen – who was a musical composer before turning to the visual arts – said Gordon instructed him not only in art but in life.
“Not many people have seen what Gordon has seen or have experienced, living that art,” said Dana, whose family emigrated from Poland and helped establish the San Fernando Valley. “I have got to say, living with a very wealthy Jewish family…nobody was as wealthy as Gordon Evans. Nobody. Nobody even came close. I’ve never seen anybody live a richer life than Gordon and Betty. He’s not driving a fancy car, he’s driving an old VW bus for 30 years…But they traveled the world… What a great spirit, what a lot of love. So I learned a lot about being a person, being an artist, and being successful in life from them – more than having any degree.”
Couplet
The rhythm of Betty and Gordon’s lives did not keep time by routine, but by ritual. The sonnet, the high art of the love poem, ends in a rhythmic pairing of two lines that tie the poem to its close and pronounce its celebration.
“I hope people come away holding each other’s hands,” Bob said, speaking about the Historical Society’s exhibit. “Enjoy life because it’s so short. My dad said the most profound thing to me before he passed away. He said, ‘Son, nothing good lasts forever.’ So I think you have to enjoy every moment while we are here.”
“My parents were never into celebration of their deaths. There was never a service; they didn’t want one. They wanted people to remember them for who they were, and I think that is what this exhibit is.”
In 2005 Betty passed away from cancer. Her cancer had progressed more rapidly than anybody had anticipated, yet her last days were filled with the grace with which the rest of her life was lived.
“We would all bring down food and she didn’t complain,” Jeanne said. “She was listening to Wagner operas constantly to try to get strength from Wagner singing. My sister was with her when she passed away. She just had to let go. And she let go in the most graceful, most peaceful way. She didn’t show anger. She really kept trying to live until the end. There are actually pictures of her … and you can see she is pretty darned jaundiced and she’s lost a fair amount of weight but she is smiling and she is there with her friends.”
Gordon’s grief was immense. He stayed strong for his family, but shared deep sorrow with his closest friends. Yet he kept living vibrantly. He participated in war protests, traveled to see his children and attended dinners with his and Betty’s friends.
“I thought my dad was really just going to come apart, and he was absolutely phenomenal,” Jeanne said. “I mean, he was grieving so much, at the same time he started walking every day, listening to all his political shows – he had never walked like that before.”
And he spent considerable time in the kitchen he’d built with his own hands for his wife. The kitchen itself was a work of art: Gordon had replaced the flooring with firebrick; beginning in the top corner of the front room and working slowly back to Suzanne’s bedroom. The orange-buff bricks provide insulation in kilns and were installed without grout in perfect alignment. This artistic precision paired with Betty’s artistic nurturing had softened the house, making it alluringly architectural, making it home.
And so during the last days of Gordon’s life, he continued his dialogue with Betty. He took out her cookbooks and learned how to cook. Nothing, in the end, ever really separated them.
“I always think of them as together,” Maryanne Guthrie said. “I don’t think of Gordon, and I don’t think of Betty. I think of Gordon and Betty. And that is how we all remember them. It was always Gordon and Betty.”
Gordon and Betty Evans: Hermosa Beach Icons runs June 7 through Sept. 4, Saturdays and Sundays 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and Wednesdays 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. Opening reception June 7 from 5 p.m. til 10 p.m.