Sanctuary for a Troubled Soul : After a stormy childhood and decades in Hollywood's fast lane, Pat Donovan was devastated by menopause. She sought refuge in a New Mexico cave.

By ROBIN ABCARIAN

June 30, 1991 12 AM PT

LINDRITH, N.M. — In the firelight of the cave, her face is a living work of art, changing constantly in the chiaroscuro of the flames: She is a hag, her sunken cheeks and hollow eyes a frightening portent of death and sorrow.

A coyote howls. The light changes.

She leaps to her feet, runs to the edge of the cave, raises her face to the moon and howls back. She is cunning, a trickster who snickers as she talks of stealing back gifts from a lover who has spurned her.

Flicker. She is a kachina doll, speaking of the brutality and long-repressed sexual abuse she says she suffered as a child, and of the raging, unbearable anger that corrupts her relationships with men. Her face is a collage of fierce, lurid colors.

She giggles. Suddenly she is a nymph, a sleek and sculpted beauty spinning tales of sexual obsessions and the charms of younger lovers-- much younger lovers.

On the surface, Pat Donovan has lived a life some people dream about. She has traveled and played with the monied and celebrated, basked in the splendor of the Hollywood counterculture and its A-list: on location with David Carradine in Kansas and Dennis Hopper in Peru, parties with Brando at the Dylans, Christmastime fetes at the Bochcos. All that.

But about eight years ago, in the throes of a menopause for which she was completely unprepared, a menopause that was wicked in its torments, Donovan hied herself away from the “civilized” world to see her body through this traumatic passage without medicine or surgery.

Donovan moved to a cave near Santa Fe. After three months, she came home to care for her youngest child, who was still in school. For five years, she returned to the cave every summer. Since 1989, she has lived there half the year. During the cold season, she lives in Malibu, in a cramped 20-foot Air Stream trailer on a funky compound at the mouth of Topanga Canyon.

The months at the cave--without electricity, running water or anything remotely resembling a toilet--have been a time of discovery for Donovan, a sort of self-guided course of therapy that has given her a new understanding of the possibilities of being middle-aged and female in a culture where that is often the magic combination for invisibility.

This summer, she hopes to start writing the story of her life, which may be inspiring to anyone who was beaten as a child or raped by a family friend, or who married to get out of the house, or who had children she didn’t want, or who loathed herself, or who couldn’t cry, or who didn’t like other women, or who deadened her pain with drugs and sex. If the story ever becomes a book, Donovan will call it “Cavetime.”

“The main thing that happened to me is that I came to know myself and love myself and enjoy living with myself,” says Donovan, 56, perched on her bedroll in the early morning sun that drenches the cave with light.

“It is really important for women to hear about it because you can invent your life once you get through menopause. There are models for women when they get old--you can be a witch or a crone. But that period from 40 to 60 is like, ‘What’s going on?’ No one tells you.”

Not even her very best friends will tell you she is an angel. She left her oldest children for extended periods of time with grandparents, spent many years in a psychedelic haze, feuded with friends and was addicted to sexual relationships.

But they admire her willingness to confront--and conquer--her devils.

Her friend of 30 years, screenwriter Hampton Fancher (“Blade Runner,” “The Mighty Quinn”) sees her honesty as inspiring:

“People try to avoid what it is that can devastate them, but Patty is totally responsible and responsive to it. She is acutely aware, in an existential sense, of what life is in terms of its horrors. She exemplifies a kind of courage . . . that is helpful to anyone.”

The seeds were planted for cave time by a conversation Donovan had with American Indian activist Dennis Banks, whom she met at a party.

“He said I had no right to have the land if I wasn’t going to live there and protect it,” she says. “I didn’t know what he meant, but I never really forgot it.”

The cave is on land she owns outside Lindrith, a town roughly 120 miles northwest of Santa Fe that consists of a post office and store. Donovan and the father of her third child, actor Michael Greene, have 80 acres, which they bought for $16,000 in 1973. They found the land through Hopper, with whom Greene worked in 1971 on “The Last Movie.” Hopper had purchased a spectacular 320-acre tract close by.

Neighbors are scattered and few; the area is hemmed in by national forest and an Apache reservation.

The cave is actually a wide overhang on the south side of a mesa, 30 feet wide, 10 feet deep, hidden from view by boulders, pinon trees and scrub oak saplings. The sandstone walls are crumbly to the touch, and at night in the quiet you can hear a gentle trickle of sand along the back walls. The floors are dirt. Furnishings are spartan: two foam pads for beds, a trunk draped with a fringed serape, a couple of chairs. And though there is no telephone and no television, civilization erupts each morning--National Public Radio comes in clear as a bell from Albuquerque on a boom box.

At one end of the cave is a fire pit; at the other, a “kitchen” of several boulders large enough to accommodate a Coleman stove and some tins. Her food comes from the local health food store and from a friend’s garden. A vegetarian, Donovan eats salads and fruit (stored in an ice chest) and whips up blue corn meal pancakes for breakfast, nachos for lunch. For serious cooking, she built an horno --a wood-burning adobe oven--with clay from the mesa above. In the horno, she bakes fruit cobblers, muffins and potatoes.

She chops firewood from fallen pinon, oak or cedar, and pumps water from a 200-foot well on the mesa. She carries the water in gallon jugs, two at a time, back to the cave, about a 15-minute walk.

When she is alone, she reads and writes and wanders the landscape deep in thought.

Friends visit occasionally. Donovan says that men and women react predictably: Men talk home improvement. Women sleep.

“Men have told me I should wall in a part (of the cave opening), or put up an adobe wall with windows,” she says. “One guy suggested some kind of glass roll top to cover the cave for the winter. Women never say anything like that. They are always so happy to be here, they just lie down.”

Her intense introspection started in 1983, the first summer she was here. One day is especially memorable:

“I was sitting on top of the mesa at sunset and these (mental) pictures start going by and here comes this picture that has been in my mind forever. Instead of letting it go by, I said, ‘Hey! Wait a minute!’ So I brought it back and went into it. I am a little girl and I am standing on this sink, and it’s turquoise tile and there is this man with his hand up my vagina. The whole universe just started shaking. And in that moment, I understood who I was and where I came from, and why I had been with all these men, and why I was a sexual addict and why I had taken drugs all my life. It all made sense. It all came back. It was so connected to the rage . They say that the rage is covering the sorrow.”

Her old friend in Santa Fe, Joan Pappe, remembers that summer vividly: “She would walk into my house, a crazed woman. Her eyes were just pools of emotion and strangeness. She was out there by herself, in this rowboat without oars in the middle of the ocean.”

To understand the transformation of Pat Donovan, it is important to understand where she is from.

She grew up in a working-class home, but she has never been working class. Her best friends are actresses, Hollywood wives or ex-wives, rock-and-roll royalty, screenwriters and directors. The man she calls her ex-husband (though they never married), Greene, was under contract at Warner Bros. when she met him in 1961. He is a recognizable face, if not name, in films such as “Moon Over Parador” and “Lost in America” and on television.

She has no money to speak of and is virtually anonymous, yet her friends covet her attention, her approval and her love. She has immense mystique.

“The answer is simple,” says Fancher. “She is a total, consummate, natural-born aristocrat. In an animal sense, they sense it and Pat knows it.”

Donovan’s innate nobility is appealing, but there is something else: her freedom. She is unconstrained and because she operates outside the traditional sphere of the workaday world and spurns its comforts, she has the luxury of being able to call her time her own, which is, after all, what most people slave at jobs to accomplish.

“She worries about nothing, and you know, when you don’t worry, there is nothing to worry about,” says Pappe. “She gets treated to the best restaurants, taken on trips, all expenses paid. She will retreat to this cave and people from Pari s will show up. She is a modern-day guru.”

Friends who have visited the cave include her best friends, Sara Dylan (Bob’s ex-wife) and Barbara Hershey (who has taken her to Cannes and Singapore), Paul and Betsy Mazursky, John Densmore, John Barrymore Jr. and Barbara Bosson.

“People like to hang out with her because she is adventurous,” says Ellen Blake, an actress and casting director who has known Donovan for 30 years. “When I first knew her, she was difficult to get to know, difficult to get close to. She was cruel, a very hurt creature and the way she kept people away was to be cold. She is one of my most remarkable friends because of the work she has done on herself, because of the transformation. She has become a really compassionate person, very caring, very interested in people, in helping women, especially younger women. Because she is so interested in how her own psychology works, she is very useful as a teacher. My therapist calls her my ‘positive shadow.’ ”

This April, before she moved to New Mexico for the warm months, Donovan is sitting in a big chair next to her trailer in the mouth of Topanga Canyon, soaking up the sun. Her trailer is on property leased by Greene, who has built a house for himself and one for their daughter, Moonstar, 21, nearby. There is the sense of being in a time warp, as though the ‘80s never happened here.

“It’s a magical life,” she sighs. “We’re all just big kids who can’t seem to grow up.”

Donovan has always lived a fantasy. A tomboy who grew up in Culver City, her first memories are of the midgets who were making “The Wizard of Oz” down the street. She was 5. Her childhood hiding places were along the catwalks above MGM sound stages and in the Western sets of Hal Roach Studio.

The oldest child of a fireman and a housewife, who she says were very strict and religious, she does not have fond memories of her home life.

“I was this wild creature and I was just always being punished,” she says. “I was beaten constantly. To survive, I developed a very, very vivid imagination.”

Her brother, John Donovan, a San Francisco teacher, remembers her unbreakable spirit.

“It was a very neurotic household,” he says. “My father used to beat her. Pat was the only one who stood up to my parents. The rest of us were terrified. She would laugh in their faces.”

Her mother, Teddy Donovan, says her daughter was spanked, but she has no memory at all of any beatings or abuse. “I just want peace in the family,” she says. Donovan’s parents live in Palm Desert.

At 18, Donovan escaped into a brief marriage with a man she didn’t like. She married again briefly, and had a son, Devin, when she was 22, and a daughter, Dionis, 11 months later. She was never without a man, but the cast was constantly changing: Black Panthers, Arab intellectuals, mountain men, poets, bicycle racers.

“I had no right to have children,” says Donovan, of her two older children. “I wasn’t a very good mom at all. I was a serious drug taker. I did horrible things to them. I found myself hitting them. I knew it was wrong, but I had all this fury in me. I was a speed freak. I slept only half the time. I was mostly awake and talking. I would tell my kids what I came from, how badly I was treated.”

By the time she had Moonstar, she felt she was able to be a good mother. In Malibu, Donovan lives within shouting distance of her younger daughter; they’ve had the usual mother-daughter problems, but they are close.

Dionis Burke, 33, who has not seen much of Donovan in the last eight years, says her mother’s nickname was “Big Mean Pat” because of her black moods and abusive silences.

“She is definitely a very heavy person,” says Burke, who lives in Salinas. “When I was a teen-ager, I could barely bring people over. She would just be in these moods. I think, though, that she has learned to accept the things that happened to her. I think she has been able to open up and love herself.”

Devin, 34, is in the international shipping business and lives with his wife and four sons in Marina del Rey. He is close to his mother, he says, and thinks she was a pretty good mom.

As for her comments about being a bad mother, he says, “I think she is going through a stage where she feels guilty about a lot of stuff. She didn’t want me and my sister because she was too young and back then, it was like, ‘You better get married and have a baby.’ She said if it was today, she would have aborted us. I can understand her being honest. It is not something I like to hear, but the good thing about her is that we were able to be pretty honest with each other. That has helped me in my own marriage.”

Donovan and Greene met on the street in Venice in 1961.

“I had been making overtures and eyes and she just wasn’t paying attention,” says Greene. “One night, I ran up to her and kissed her and she bit my tongue really hard, and made it bleed. It just went from there. It was a very tumultuous relationship.”

The pair became deeply involved in psychedelics, lived in Topanga Canyon and Hollywood, then moved to British Columbia for a year or so, where they quit heavy drug use and had their daughter, Moonstar, who named herself at age 5.

They moved back to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, split up, and Donovan started a business that still supports her financially.

A skilled seamstress, she began making Chinese-style clothes from rare silk damask that she found in forays to Chinatown. She eventually built a business that catered to the cream of ‘70s Hollywood: Cher, Diana Ross, the Dylans.

Sewing was more than a way to make a living, though. It was therapy.

“While I worked with my hands, this compulsive, crazy mind had to get centered, so it became like a Yoga discipline to make these clothes because I didn’t want to take drugs,” says Donovan.

“People got addicted to them. Beverly Coburn must have had 70 Chinese suits in every fabric you could imagine,” she said. “This was in the cocaine days and these women just got addicted to the clothing instead of the cocaine. They all felt the clothes were magic.”

They certainly commanded magical prices: Donovan charged $700 and $800 for shirts, more for suits. She still earns just enough money to live on by sewing clothes for her monied pals during the winter.

Except for writing a book and maybe traveling to Ireland, Donovan doesn’t think much about what happens next.

She would love to share her life with a man, but doubts long-term love is in the cards.

“I think it would be extraordinary if I could ever meet a man I could sit around the cave with. I have this one I really like in L.A., but he is 30 years younger than I am.”

She laughs.

“That is the part of life that really astounds me. I used to think you reach a certain point and leave other things behind. But it’s not like that at all. Your life gets broader and richer. I can be with a 26-year-old and act like a kid, then I can be on top of a mountain by myself and have a religious experience. It can all happen at the same time.”

Donovan is a woman for whom having it all and not having anything are not contradictory.

“I don’t need money, I don’t need drugs, I don’t need sex,” she says. “I don’t need a cigarette, or a drink. I don’t need music. I don’t even need to read. It’s gotten to a point where I can just sit in the cave and feel really sweet inside.”