Chapter - 39 - The Red House

THE COLOR RED can symbolize many things. It can represent love, anger, warning and even death. It is the color of blood and the color of the heart—the color that is most associated with sex (she was a red-hot mama, or daddy or whatever your preference is). There is a term code red, meaning high alert and when someone sees red they are ready to boil over with anger. It is also the color of power and prestige, when we "roll out the red carpet" for someone of great importance or royalty.

The first time I walked into the "Red House" on Fountain Avenue I was nauseated, sick to my ever-loving stomach. This is the place where Christa Helm and Patty Collins had rented to work on their music to get ready for their recording at Larrabee Studios with Blair and Stephen. They had hired Richie Moore to do the engineering and practiced for hours by singing karaoke style into their two-track tape recorder they had lovingly nick-named Gort. If you want, you can google Christa Helm and find out about her story, but it really has no relevance to the Silverspoon story other than playing a small part in driving a wedge between the band members that was already happening with its own momentum and it was picking up speed.

As I said before, Blair had met Christa on Halloween of 1975 at a party that Bonnie Yardum was hosting at The Daisy. He ran into her again with Rudy Mazzella in the summer of 1976. Another female back-up singer from Texas was brought onto the project and she immediately clicked with Christa. It was believed that Patty and Christa were a lock and had their vocal parts secured but Christa still felt they needed another female harmony. That's when they hired, let's call her Darla, and there was a lot of jealousy in that house of ill repute. It was another bitch-fest. I can't remember the name of the disco song they were working on at the time, but I hated it. I couldn't believe that Stephen and Blair would stoop so low in their musical endeavors, but Disco was hot and so were the girls. Fortunately, I was involved with my Robin and we both thought the "Red House" was bad news. I had a sick feeling that something terrible was going to happen there.

On February 12th of that year, actor Sal Mineo was stabbed to death in the parking garage of his suite on Holloway drive near La Cienega. This case is still unsolved. A year to the day later, Stephen's brother, Jon Gries, was living at his mother's house on Lloyd place in West Hollywood. It was in the wee hours of the morning; Jon was restless and found it hard to sleep. At around three am he got out of bed and a few minutes later he heard something that sounded like a cross between a cat getting skinned, a baby crying and gurgling noises. He went outside to see what was going on but didn't venture far enough to see anything unusual. Later that morning, a West Hollywood Sheriff came by Jon's place asking him if he had heard anything unusual late the night before. He was still groggy from a lack of sleep but remembered that, yes, he had heard those terrifying screams. The sheriff then told him that a young woman was stabbed over 30 times and bludgeoned with a blunt instrument, she bled to death under a parked car just a few hundred yards from his mom's house. It was Christa. As of now, like the Mineo murder, the case remains unsolved. 

        Christa may have gotten a bad rap from people at the time, saying was a social climber and unscrupulous, but according to Blair, she was a sweetheart who was totally focused on making a hit disco record and she provided a loving environment for him to live and work. Stephen's recollection is a bit dubious at best. As for me, I was glad to be as far as humanly possible from that scene.