March 30, 2006

Brian Wilson's "new lease on life came with a deed restriction."

And now that landlord is dead:
Eugene Landy, the psychotherapist who was variously called a savior and a snake oil salesman for his unorthodox, round-the-clock treatment of Brian Wilson, the famously dissolute leader of the Beach Boys, in the 1970's and 80's, died on March 22 in Honolulu. He was 71....

"Landy definitely transformed Brian's life and knocked him off of what was a suicidal death spiral in the early 1980's," Peter Ames Carlin, the author of a forthcoming book about the Beach Boys, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "But his new lease on life came with a deed restriction, which was that Landy wanted to be part of Brian's creative and financial lives."
You can find more lurid versions of the story than this NYT obituary, but the man just died, and I'm not going to go looking for them.

2 comments:

Ann Althouse said...

Me: Wilson was disaggregated from Landry many years ago. Check the timeline before making conclusions about causality.

Anonymous said...

Landy was a babysitter 24/7 for Wilson. He only ran into trouble when he started pretending he was in the band.
Anyone can be an honor student under 24 hr. surveillance.