How Carlos Castaneda Made Up Don Juan

How Carlos Castaneda Made Up Don Juan

from Laid Bare, by John Gilmore

John Gilmore (July 5, 1935 - October 13, 2016) was an actor, director, sleaze paperback author, true crime author, and chronicler of Hollywood Excess. Laid Bare, his 1997 memoir of his career during the 1950s and 1960s, is filled with anecdotes and reminiscences about a variety of fellow actors and L. A. citizens and is well worth reading.

On pages 206 - 207 of Laid Bare (Amok Books, 2003), Gilmore describes what his friend Jim Davidson had to say about rooming with Carlos Castaneda in L.A. in the early 60s:

Along with another mutual friend, kid Golden Gloves champ Manny Samon, and a ‘Mexican’ named Carlos Castaneda, the three had sort of stumbled into a dumpy guest house behind some apartments near L. A. City College……Carlos – in love with moonbeams – wrote poems to a female college teacher who’d said he showed promise.....Samon was the first to hook up, driving off with a big black cleaning lady after trying to hang himself in the shower. He tied the rope to the fixture, but being chunky and thick-boned, he only managed to pull the pipes from the wall.

With no shower, Jim and Carlos moved into a front apartment managed by another friend, Frank, a would-be writer working at the VA crazy house. Sharing the cramped quarters throughout the year, the two had little space for furniture. “Carlos would sit around on these tatami mats,” Jim said, “with those big chubby legs crossed, trying to look like a Buddha. We’d hang around a little all-night restaurant up in Hollywood……

“Carlos liked to tell tall tales all the time,” Davidson said, “personal things, making things up. He was a creative guy with a vivid imagination, but made up these ridiculous stories, and I’d call him on it, but he said it made him feel important. He made up a story about some Indian like Tonto, only this guy was a medicine man. He’d tell a couple of girls we talked to about this Tonto character, like he had this close friend who was weird and important. None of the girls were impressed enough to do anything with Carlos…..

“This medicine-man Tonto was just like some imaginary playmate you make up when you’re little,” Jim recalled. “When we started at UCLA, it was Tonto who was sharing his secrets with Carlos. We’d sit around this little apartment on Madison while he wrote his thesis about this Indian character. We had another friend with a doctorate in literature who accused Carlos of being a liar and a phony, and found himself in agreement with the anthropology department, which became furious when they found out Carlos’ tale seemed to be nothing more than a piece of fiction.

“One girl really liked Carlos, but she was a chinless Olive Oyl. He was trying to call her one night when some guy got mad at him for hogging the phone and pulled Carlos off it and slapped him.

“Carlos came back and sat on the tatami mat crying, sitting on pillows without his pants on. His short, bare legs were chubby and brown, and he looked at them, poking at his legs, and said he was a nothing. “I’m nothing,” he said. “I’m just a little brown man.”

….

”People who told the truth were fools, Carlos said. He believed lying was more creative than telling the truth. There was never any such person as Don Juan,” said Jim. Even the name was Carlos’ joke about his inability to get laid. The whole Indian thing was just his imaginative wanderings – like he’d wander at night, never sleeping much. He’d just sit around making up stories to get people to think of him as an intelligent and important person.

“After he got that stuff published, he got some fat checks and moved to Malibu, had a big security system set up, and you couldn’t even see the house. He said, ‘Nobody is going to slap Carlos Castaneda……’ He told me he didn’t care that UCLA thought he was a fake, or that anyone thought he was a fake. He was going to keep on lying because a superior man never tells the truth – he tells what he wants to be the truth.”

...

“There was no depth to Carlos,” said another friend, a PhD. “He wouldn’t go out on lecture circuits because he was afraid of being challenged. His theory of the superior man who lies was okay as an individual position behind a security wall at Malibu Beach, but on the podium he feared those who could dig into his lies. When UCLA found out there was no medicine man, they kicked him out. It was all fake….”