The Smiley Smile Message Board

i got this news in a very brief e-mail earlier this evening...

L.A. Times obit (http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-landy29mar29,1,4518880.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california)

Interesting: more interesting is how Brian is going to react...............

Eugene Landy, psychologist who treated Brian Wilson, dies at 71
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES - Eugene Landy, the psychologist who gained notoriety for his controversial treatment of and control over Beach Boys legend Brian Wilson, has died. He was 71.

Landy died March 22 in Honolulu of respiratory complications of lung cancer, said his longtime colleague, William Flaxman.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern_california/14212276.htm

Well now.

Yeah, I could see something like this having a big emotional impact on him, either sending him into a depression or really freeing him up.  Hopefully the latter, but what a complicated relationship.

Wow, is this a rumor or true?  Saw it on the blueboard
Carly

I didn't know that Brian was 300 pounds in 1975!  ::)

I'm sure Brian's emotional reaction will be complex.  Despite Landy's outragious and unethical dealings, he saved Brian's life IMO.

Here's a link to info on his "longtime colleague William Flaxman":

http://www.gpasc.org/memberpages/Bill_Flaxman_memberpage.htm

Holy merdae. I'm torn on this one. After all, he did save Brian's life, and it's against my beliefs to wish ill on someone, but....yeah...you know.

edit

and how ironic he died of the same thing that killed Gary Usher, considering the mutual dislike the two had.

Wow. You know, I often have these sort of weird psychic flashes. Just last night I thought to myself, “Gee, doctor Landy must be getting old”.

I feel kinda sad about it. I wish he had spoken publicly following the breakup.

Whatever the truth is about Landy--and I feel he saved Brian--I'm more concerned about Brian's reaction to this.  I hope he can tap into that inner strength he has gathered these past years.



Dan

Well, he hasn’t seen him in 15 years, so it seems like it shouldn’t destroy him. He realizes that he was mistreated. And he’s lost those much closer to him (Carl, Dennis, Audree). So hopefully he’ll be able to move on, although I’m sure he does feel some sadness about losing someone that was involved with a large chunk of his life.

I wish Landy had written his memoirs so we could hear his side of things….oh wait, he did, it was called “Wouldn’t it be Nice? My Own Story” by Brian Wilson.

Still, the situation was so peculiar. I don’t think we’ll ever truly understand what happened. But we must be thankful to Landy for keeping Brian alive. Without Landy we wouldn’t be listening to the complete Smile today. It’s just too bad the good work he did got corrupted by greed.

Mixed feelings over here.  :-\

Mixed feelings for me too...of course I appreciate what he did for Brian in terms of saving his life (twice).  But the damage he caused was pretty severe, and it's a good thing Brian got out when he did or else who knows what may have transpired.  I'm curious about Brian's reaction to this too...I'm hoping he's emotionally strong enough and far enough removed from those days to say "that's a bummer" and move on.

I am devastated

RIP, Eugene Landy.  Condolences to family and friends.

Mixed feelings on my end. Not that it's ever a joyous occassion when someone passes, mind you. I sort of wonder if in retrospect Landy had some regrets about letting the relationship cross the line and owned up to that not being the most responsible behaviour on his part. I'd hope so, but I guess we'll never know.

In reading the obit, I was surprised to see that Alice Cooper was a patient of his as well. I wonder how extensive the treatment was and if Mr. Cooper has ever publicly commented on Dr. Landy.

Dean

I didn't know him. So like anyone else in the world, it's sad that he died yet inevitable.

Brian's comments on this surely will be an interesting read.

I can't wish any ill will on Landy, at least when he finally got out of Brian's life, he had the decency to stay away knowing it was everyone's wishes.  I've seen Brian say in even recent interviews (sometime last year) that he was sad to see Landy go and that he was his best friend.  I don't know for sure that Landy thought or knew he was hurting and manipulating brian, maybe he didn't think there was anything wrong with what he was doing.  I've certainly heard stories about some pretty quacked out psychologists.  Ultimately his license was taken away, so at least (hopefully!) he wasn't able to harm any others. 

As bad as the stuff with Brian was, what really got me about Landy was him giving cocaine to a female patient and then allegedly raping her.  >:( 

Alice Cooper...and also Rod Steiger. Also, didn't he claim to co-write Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" and manage and/or produce George Benson?

Some rambling thoughts ...

It's hard to believe it's been 30 years since Dr. Landy started treating Brian, and almost 15 years since he stopped...another one who Brian out-lived...didn't Gary Usher and Carl Wilson die from lung cancer; was Landy a smoker?...I'm not expecting any revealing comments from Brian regarding the passing...oh how I wish Brian and the guys would get together and do something, anything that would help heal some wounds...I get paranoid when I pull up the board; you never know who is going to have R.I.P. next to their name...I'm in no way disputing that Dr. Landy did irreparable damage to Brian with his (over)prescription of drugs. But can anybody post an article from a non-Beach Boy-related source who could shed some concrete light on this issue. I would be interested in reading it...I think Dr. Landy only had his license revoked for a year or two, but I'm not sure...I feel old(er)  tonight...

Brian has lost a lot of best friends...

i'm surprised some people have mixed feelings on this board. i only had indirect contact with him. here's what i saw. 1) he was a total control freak. 2) he wanted to be famous and didn't have a truly creative bone in his body (oddly, many people who have gotten close to brian don't have a creative bone in their bodies). 3) he manipulated events to his gain or just plain fabricated what, when, and where he wanted to. 4) he got in waaaaaay over his head with brian. 5) this saving brian's life thing is overrated. he helped brian to some extent initially, but hurt him far worse over the years. *this is a fact, folks.*

i believe that landy himself was mentally ill and brian certainly didn't need "friends" like him. he was just another hanger-on, taking advantage of brian's sweet, guileless-though not blameless-nature. brian is a producer, landy was a consumer.
 

^ Mixed feelings because even when someone who wasn't a very good person dies, most people commonly react by searching out the positive instead of the negative.  So even if you didn't like somebody, when you hear they're dead... you kind of go "well... am I happy about that? I didn't like the guy.. .but... dead?"

Exactly, Ron.

There's a lot I could say, but I won't say it in this thread, or at this time, for a respectful period, other than Rest In Peace, and condolences to his family and friends.  This is not a time of judgement.

ron and surfer joe...yes, dead.  ::) during this "respectful" period.

Another thing I find off is that he died a *week* ago, and we're just now hearing about it.


Same here. There's a lot I *want* to say, really, but I won't. Not yet.

ding dong landys dead

I'm not saying anyone else needs to be respectful of someone on the day they die, that's just part of my own values, I'm speaking for me only.  I'm generally much more on the irreverent side of things, but I'm not a piss-all-over-everything-all-the-time guy, or if I ever was, I've long since outgrown it, and I think there's a time to let things slide- even something as priceless and rare as a personal opinion ::). 

Besides, I'm saving it all for the day that Dan Hill merges with the infinite.  Got a bottle put away.

Brian must be saddened by this news.  He really loved ol' Gene-o.

Can someone please post some good photos of Brian and the doc?  I can't find crap on the web.

What do I think?
A person has died, and Eugene Landy must have had family and friends who will mourn his passing  My condolences go out to all who miss him. Was he a 'bad' person? Not for me to know...he probably saved Brian's life but in the video footage I've seen, he seemd to treat Brian as a project rather than a person. By the 90's things were really awful, was it a conscious decision to take over Brian's life or did Landy just slip further into it? Did he perhaps still think he was doing good? Not for us to know...

What will Brian make of Landy's passing?
Up to the man himself to say, should he choose...but he did say in the Larry King interview in '04 that he sometimes misses Landy. I suspect there will be some sadness, and I do wonder just how much Brian remembers of the worst of the Landy years (he was pretty drugged up).  We must remember that Landy and his people were Brian's 'family' for some years.

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/114371158197520.xml&coll=2
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/31/db3102.xml&sSheet=/portal/2006/03/31/ixportal.html
http://www.ktvu.com/entertainment/8337602/detail.html

can someone PLEASE post some good pics of Brian w/Landy.  I seriously can't find anything online.  thanks!

Only one I can find so far.

(http://surfingbeatle.tripod.com/brian14.jpg)

(http://brian67smile.tripod.com/3smland.GIF)

(http://www.musicpictures.com/ln_pictures/sysiphus/mpcom/600/ER1004_Brian_WILSON_6.JPG)

(http://www.musicpictures.com/ln_pictures/sysiphus/mpcom/100/CR0001_Brian_WILSON_1.JPG)

Please, no pictures of Landy during the hideous, bleached blonde era. Or any of the pics of him with Brian on the surfboard.

Hello all, first post here, greetings and all that...
Fill me in, one of those articles says that "Wilson's family" stopped the whole Landy charade. Who was that then? Was it Carl? Melinda? Marilyn? Or just, you know, lawyers? How did they go about the whole 'hey, we don't want you around anymore' thing, especially considering the whole Landy-didn't-want-Brian-to-have-anything-to-do-with-Carl-et-al thing. I'd like to think that it was Carl, but I might be wrong.

All of them, plus Audree.

Who was bleached blond?  Landy, or Brian?  I rather liked Brian with blond hair, as he appears in the theremin documentary.  Or with blond streaks, as he had before that.  What I could live without is Brian in a Speedo, sprawled over a piano.  Inappropriate!

Landy. As odd as it may seem, there are pictures of Landy with horribly bleached hair, looking like the guy from Def Leppard does now.

How about an epitaph on his stone?

MIKE LOVE SUCKS

IT'S GREEN!

(fill in cheesiest Sweet Insanity lyric)

Oh man, that is so not the visual image I had of Landy.. I had always imagined him as a creepy frowning gray-haired elderly guy with glasses.

So, he basically wrote a version of "How to speak Hip"!

Amen. I've had nightmares.

The pic w/ Brian and Bush Snr is not 1987 (beard was gone and so was a feww more pounds), one would assume the pic w/ Lindsey Buckingham would be circa '87 writing HCGHPOBTM for the BW'88 album sessions.

That's what I was thinking too. Looks like 1983 or 1984. In '87, Brian was BONY.

Milieu therapy as adapted by Eugene Landy was somewhat of a twist of the traditional institutional approach. In essence, if the patient wouldn't go to the institution, Landy brought the institution to the patient.

There is an element of therapeutical control in milieu therapy that can intoxicatingly play right into the hands of codependence, and push the therapeutic relationship over the ethical line into where the professional is doing ALL the work and the patient is passively complying, enjoying the ride, espcially if he is a dependent personality like Brian.

The idea of therapy is that the PATIENT does the work, the transforming. What occured in the Landy and Wilson relationship was a form of therapeutic jiu-jitsu. Brian's passive dependence, played right into Landy's huge ego, and Landy somehow got the idea that he was the one doing the transforming of Brian.

The first rule of therapy is to keep the therapist's ego OUT of the mix. The patient does the work, the patient transforms himself. This is the crux of what happened with Landy. He somehow thought he was transforming Brian, when in fact, Brian transformed him. What an ultramaroon. Brian Wilson played him like a banjo.

Landy saved Brian Wilson but in alot of ways destroyed him as well even further.

Dr. Landy died 10 yrs ago today (March 22nd, 2006)

R.I.P. Gene!

More like ROH (rot in hell).

Geez, that would mean Landy would be 81 if still alive....

I'm inclined to say thank you to Landy for saving Brian's life in the early '80s, but then I remember, you know, all the OTHER stuff he did, and then I start feeling conflicted. So I guess I'll just say:

R.I.P. (Rest in purgatory, where everything's all neutral and whatnot, but mostly unpleasant)

I had a feeling today was the 10th anniversary of his death. Sucks to die of pneumonia, but good riddance nonetheless.

Sucks to die of lung cancer too.

Sucks to die.

Has anyone ever heard of Landy speaking of his time with Brian, either in an interview, or just to a friend/fan who asked him, at any point between 1992 to 2006? I mean, surely he must have had conversations about said topics with Alexandra Morgan, but I would think maybe others too. I can't believe that Landy didn't look back and have an ounce of realization that he acted like a big giant turd, especially about trying to sneak into Brian's will and take as much as his actual children got.

He *must* have had a twinge that this was wrong, in hindsight, in the back of his sick mind. Maybe it's my misguided belief that all people have *some* good in them that makes me think this...

Did anybody go to Hawaii and try to find him during this time?

There was only one victim in that whole sorry mess, and his initials weren't EEL.

I do recall hearing this quote, but I still just can't conceive how Landy could have justified trying to steal a chunk of Brian's will as being an acceptable, commendable, and defensible thing to do. I mean, obviously, Evan Landy in his interview completely sidestepped this part of the story. That tells me that he knows it's wrong in his heart and was an indefensible action, even if Evan thinks other aspects of his dad are misunderstood.

But Eugene and Alexandra, whether they were willing to talk about it publicly or not, knew what they did with the will issue. Either they actually felt that was "ok", or they perhaps thought they went too far in that respect (not to mention other respects of course) but just wouldn't admit it.

Was Landy even aware of the physical/cognitive effects suffered by Brian due to over-medication under Landy's watch? I can just picture him avoiding the question if posed to him, just like he avoided other questions 20/20.

But if forced to actually a list of questions posed to him, without avoiding/dodging questions, I cannot conceive that Landy would actually defend all the things he did. Impossible for me to fathom anyone could be that insane.

I can imagine him justifying it to himself because they were 'partners,' Brian's actual family was bad for/to him and Landy became his real family, Brian owed him his life and later career, etc. I think all those justifications would be BS and he should've been prosecuted, not just have his CA license withdrawn, but I think these are the sorts of justifications a narcissist would make.

I suppose so. Hard to understand a sick mind like that. Landy seems to be the most mentally ill person in the entire BBs story. Or maybe neck-and-neck in a race with Murry.

I recall in the 20/20 interview, there was a moment where Diane Sawyer said that Landy himself experienced some known mental health issues, but that Eugene wouldn't comment on that. This wasn't some "guess" or armchair diagnosis made by Diane Sawyer, but as I recall it was said to be an actual, documented incident of some sort. Does anyone know more about this? I think it's important to know more about the psychology that goes into that kind of sick behavior, kind of how people studied Nazis in the decades following WWII to understand how it happened. I wonder if Landy, much like Murry, was destined to be as sick a person as he was, or if he ever could have gotten his narcissism in check.

Eugene Landy or Rocky Pamplin?

Go!

fmk?

Murry Wilson

Bruce's mike-stand.