Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,54

Donald’s: a lot of talk about being Catholic, and more of her name-dropping and cultural one-upmanship, the old stories of Grandfather Kenyon, the new ones about Georgia O’Keeffe. With Donald talking to the devil in the garbage can or pacing and fidgeting and prattling on, they saw Mimi at her worst, trying to control the eight children who remained at home while denying, at least outwardly, that anything was wrong at all.

John and Nancy tried to keep things light. They played for Mimi, which delighted her—majorcas, Chopin études, and Beethoven sonatas late into the night. But in the way that new spouses sometimes give their partners permission to feel things they’re ashamed to feel, Nancy was more vocal about what they were witnessing. She was from a small family—“normal-sized,” she’d say—and could not stop remarking on how the house on Hidden Valley Road seemed like such an emotional shambles, drenched in confusion and anarchy. The endless fighting, the absence of personal space, four sets of bunk beds, no room for anyone to be alone: How could a mother be expected to raise that many children in such a pressure cooker? And those two little girls—how on earth did they have any privacy? How could anyone who lived there have a moment just to think?

When John looked at his parents, he saw two people trying hard to claw back some small part of what they’d once had. Their early years had been filled with such promise, and now so much was going wrong. This, John thought, helped explain why his father took him aside during one of his visits and suggested that he try to be more of a success than he already was—to give up on music and study politics. “Music is a selfish profession,” Don said. “You spend a lot of time in a practice room. You don’t socialize much. What good are you doing?”

His father’s words saddened John, but he wasn’t surprised. He had always been convinced that Don never thought much of him. He’d spent so much of his childhood in the background, he never thought anything he’d ever do would catch his father’s notice, much less impress him. John was not alone in believing this about himself. Don Galvin was such a titanic figure in the lives of his sons—the falconer, the intellectual, the war hero, the classified intelligence officer, and now the counselor to governors and oil barons. All ten boys, in one way or another, grew up believing they could never be the man he was.

So no one was more shocked than John when, on the day of his wedding to Nancy in 1971, Don confided to the bride’s mother, “She got the best of the litter.”

* * *

Brian Galvin—the fourth son, after Donald, Jim, and John—was the best-looking Galvin boy, even more handsome than square-jawed, all-American Donald. Their father had nicknamed him the Black Knight, for his jet black hair. He ran faster, threw a ball harder, and his natural musical ability was leaps and bounds beyond the others’, even his studious brother John. Once Don and Mimi saw that Brian could listen to a piece of music on the radio and play it perfectly on the piano moments later—classical, jazz, blues, rock ’n’ roll, anything—they invested in private piano lessons for him.

For all his talent, Brian was also quiet, almost shy. He spent a lot of time playing chess with Mark, the eighth son, who was six years younger than he was—and happened to be a chess prodigy. But in the way that children who withhold have that effortless way of attracting the most attention from their parents, Brian’s remoteness, his mystique, made his parents want to please him even more. They were in thrall to Brian’s talent, too, and alarmed enough by young Donald’s emotional ups and downs to welcome any chance for the other boys to be successful. And so when Brian and some high school friends were forming a rock band, Don bought Brian a brand-new H?fner bass, just like Paul McCartney’s.

Brian, far left, with his band

The boys named their band Paxton’s Backstreet Carnival, after a track from a Strawberry Alarm Clock record. They played covers: the Beatles, the Doors, Steppenwolf, the Stones, Creedence, the Zombies. Brian played bass and