Christina,
Today, May 26th, year 1972, you & I took our first walk together. You had been in New York & New Jersey for the past two months. You were placed in my backpack & off we went.
Now at the beginning of our walk you weren’t too happy and had been suffering with your first teeth. As we walked along, I placed my finger in your mouth. That seemed to do the trick, and you were suddenly fast asleep. We walked up around the back roads of our home, to the top of a big hill. There we sat for a while, looking out over the countryside. You were still asleep, but I knew you were content with the situation. We started back down the hill only to be stopped by a beautiful brown and white bird who so proudly sang for us. As we walked a BIG German shepherd said, “Hello,” and guess what? That’s right, you opened your big blue eyes, but only for a moment, then back to sleep. When we arrived by home, you were, shall we say, sort of awake, sort of asleep. And that was our first walk together. It was a happy moment.
Daddy
PS. Six months old… wow.
My father has filled the subsequent pages with pictures of me, of him, of me and him, and of me and my mother. He has decorated the pages with pressed flowers, and with pictures of flowers and children. As I turn the pages, I see my father on a snowy mountainside; there he is again, smoking a joint (he’s written “Peace!” on that photo—of course he has). There I am in a red outfit and white Mary Janes; sitting on his lap on a carousel horse; again on his lap as he plays a piano, no shirt (him, not me). There I am in my mother’s arms, and at a birthday party; in a stroller, or peering in surprise at the flash from a photo booth, my father’s huge beard scratching my baby face.
But there are no pictures of me and my parents together. Instead, there are pictures of my father with a different partner, a different family.
In his note, my father references a trip east to New York and New Jersey. Right after I showed up that Thanksgiving in 1971, my paternal grandparents asked to see me—they lived in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. So when my mom went to New York for work, I went to see my grandparents.
In New York, my mom was to tape an episode ofDays of Our Lives,and I was in the episode, too. I was three months old. The episode, number 1,597, aired on March 7, 1972. In it, I play baby Burt Grizzell, “son” of Mrs. Grizzell, played by my mother. (I would be invited back for a subsequent episode, though without my mother this time, and still a boy.) Mom and I also did a Playtex Nurser commercial together, in which my mother is bottle-feeding me with a Playtex collapsible bottle while saying, “What a difference! Now she has less gas… because natural nipples mean less air in her tummy!”
(Three and a half decades later I would write in my diary, “Sat up again. Sponge bath humiliation. So gassy. That was funny. Walked to the window.” This was four days after the double mastectomy that saved my life.)
Two months later, my father wrote another letter to me in that album.
Oh my child we are together again, only to find that we shall be together always. We are in Big Sur now, and you are 8 months old—wow! Can you believe it? What is Big Sur, you asked—well, it’s a paradise for those who understand, those who wish to get back to the basics, but wish to grow…
That reference to Big Sur hangs heavy. When my mother called my father to say she was heading home from that first trip to the East Coast, his two-word reply devastated her and set in motion a chain of terrible events for me and my mom, events whose ripples still move through both of our lives.
“We’re on our way home,” my mom said.
“Sosoon?” my dad said.
He really didn’t need to say anything else.
There is a photo from that time that haunts me now because it presages so much of what was to come. In it, my heavily bearded father is sitting cross-legged in a white sleeveless tee, head shaved, at the foot of what looks like two redwoods. This is him at Big Sur—it appears he’s communing with something, almost Buddha-like, the once-slick music executive in a suit now replaced by this uncompromising figure in combat boots. He looks more like he’s spent time in San Quentin than Monterey County.
With those two words—“Sosoon?”—Dad headed away from Nancy Priddy, away from his newborn, to make a new life in Big Suron the Pacific Coast, six hours north of Laurel Canyon. When we arrived home, he was gone.
My father never came back.
For us, it was a disaster; for him, it would prove to be a kismet move. On the first day he got to Big Sur, a woman staying at the same rooming house told him that she could feel his presence in the building. Family lore goes that she wandered downstairs and said to Bob Applegate, “Are you a Scorpio?”
“Yes, I am,” he said, and that was about all it took—something ignited, and they were together from that moment on, early in 1972, right up until Tuesday, March 18, 2025, at 4:59 a.m., when my father died.
What to make of my father’s abandonment of me and my mother? He always claimed that he was convinced that my mom was continuing to have an affair with Stephen Stills while she was pregnant with me, but anyone who’s ever been pregnant knows that the last thing you want to do is have sex with someone who’snotthe father—if you want to have sex at all. I think it was simply my dad’s way of justifying leaving us.
There is a third letter to me in that photo album.
Christina’s World by Daddy
We’ve been here now for 2 days. You, my darling, have caused quite a rush, not only for me but for everyone who touches you. These two days, as the few times we have spent together before, have been the highest, and most peaceful and fulfilling days of life.
Later tonight if it’s okay with you, we shall sit by the fire and together become one. So high—you make me so high!
I don’t think I was the only thing making my father high back then. My father was doing a lot of acid in the early 1970s, and his brain seemed in chaos. Acid will force a mind into telling lies to itself, lies like the one about my mother continuing to have a relationship with Stephen Stills. They were lies my father believed, and lies that crushed my mother and would eventually confuse and hurt his new daughter, when she became old enough to know that her father was gone.
But there was so much more to my father’s life than LSD-generated stories. And it all began long before I showed up. When I uncovered the real story, everything changed, but that would take me another thirty years.
Bob was gone, into a new relationship, a new orbit, so high, so high, and my mother and I were left entirely alone. I went to Big Sur as a little baby a few times, until my father and his new wife moved first to Burbank, in the Valley, and then to Woodland Hills, out on the 101 near Calabasas. I was court-ordered to go to his new house, which had a pool, at least, every other weekend for years—I hated it, but I’ll admit I loved the pool and idyllic setting. My father was by now back in the music business full-time, and things had gone well enough that he drove a Mercedes.
Mom and I had our beaten-down Nova and lived in a little row house.
