My distant cousin Doug Michels, a brash and enthusiastic futurist who, as a member of Ant Farm, helped create Amarillo’s iconic Cadillac Ranch fifty years ago, once wrote about the night that changed his life. Like his best tales, it was captivating, self-mythologizing, and hard to verify.
His story went like this: Doug came to Texas from San Francisco in the spring of 1969 at the age of 25 to teach a seminar at the University of Houston architecture school. He led students on a wild journey of experiential learning, fueled by acid and pot, exploding conventions around the shapes and materials that make a building. They spent a night in the Astrodome raising parachutes with balloons. On the night of the moon landing, they inflated a big black dome across the street from NASA and climbed inside.
And one night, they drove to Padre Island. Doug, his girlfriend, Cindy, and another woman broke away from the group and stepped out of their clothes and into the surf. “We swam from sandbar to sandbar, where we were able to stand,” he recalled in an email to an acquaintance almost thirty years later. “We never actually went too far from the beach, but at night it seemed as if we were on another planet. Suddenly, out-of-nowhere . . . sleek shapes glided into view and circled us at very close range (but just out of touching distance). Our immediate reaction was fear, absolute fear.” A group of dolphins had surrounded them. Nobody spoke. Then the creatures splashed their tails and swam away, but one lingered. Cindy spoke to the dolphin, and it came close enough for her to touch its fins. “The atmosphere was totally hypnotic. The motion of the dolphin, the moonlight, the mirror-like water,” Doug wrote. Then, from the shore, they heard their friends calling for them. “The spell was broken . . . when we turned back to the dolphin, it was gone. Although I did not know it at the time, that brief aquatic encounter would have an incredible influence on my life and sense of the future.”
Doug left Texas soon after, on a round-the-world journey that ended back in San Francisco. But five years later, he returned to the state to create the work that became his most lasting legacy: ten Cadillacs planted, tail fins-up, in a field along a highway west of Amarillo.
Cadillac Ranch might be an American Stonehenge, an ironic commentary on consumerism, a pit stop for the kids, a curse, a canvas, or a dump. It depends on who you ask. “A monument to the rise and fall of the Cadillac tail fin” is generally considered the real answer. But by the last decade of his life, Doug had settled on his own story, one that led back to that night in the Gulf of Mexico.
“To me, it was a dolphin idea,” he told Texas Monthly in a 1994 story on Cadillac Ranch’s twentieth anniversary. “Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, and I were standing in a wheat field off Route 66 in the rain. And you know how the wheat waves and ripples in the wind? Well, suddenly we imagined a dolphin tail fin sticking up out of the wheat. Then the dolphin tail fin became a Cadillac tail fin. That was it. There was Cadillac Ranch.”
Like lots of Doug’s ideas, it’s hard to know how seriously to take it. But he lived for creating big, strange concepts, and there was never one he cared more about than the dolphin dream. Chasing the memory of that night in the water, envisioning a future where humans and dolphins could speak and learn from one another, became his life’s work. It’s the idea he was pursuing on the day in 2003 when he climbed a tower overlooking an Australian bay where local fishermen really did communicate with orcas—the largest in the dolphin family—and fell to his death.
The obituaries tended to divide his life in half. First came Ant Farm, the architectural collective behind Cadillac Ranch and other madcap inventions and stunts that Doug was best known for. (The New York Times described Doug as part Buckminster Fuller, part Abbie Hoffman.) The second half of his life was a messier story: a smattering of other projects, years spent in Texas, and that dolphin thing. Stories said he’d become obsessed, alienating and concerning his friends. One story after his death was titled, “Trying to understand Doug Michels,” but nobody quite seemed able.
On the occasion of Cadillac Ranch’s half-century mark, I went back to these stories. I’d always relished knowing that I had a personal connection to this Texas legend, but I never met Doug and didn’t know his side of the family well. I’d wondered at the thought of such an eccentric guy in my family tree. And I was intrigued by the second half of his life and the suspicion that his frantic, discontented search might say something about the cost of devoting your life to creation, even after you’ve made one of the most powerful symbols in American culture.
I found Chip Lord, Doug’s Ant Farm cofounder, waiting by the elevator at the Amarillo Museum of Art on June 20, the day before the fiftieth birthday of Cadillac Ranch. We were headed to an upstairs gallery that featured an exhibit marking the occasion. While we stood there, Lord opened a copy of that 1994 Texas Monthly to show me old pictures of him and Doug and a line of Cadillacs parked before they were buried. Seizing the opportunity to test my premise, I pointed out this was the article where Doug had described his vision of dolphin tails in the waving wheat. “Oh yeah, right,” Lord said. He laughed and added, “I think the dolphin idea came up later, to be honest.”
The story of Cadillac Ranch usually goes that a bunch of hippies from San Francisco blew in and left the cars buried in Amarillo, like a cryptic gift from distant aliens. The only Texan typically associated with the work is the eccentric Amarillo millionaire Stanley Marsh 3, who paid for the Cadillacs and on whose land they were buried. He died in 2014 amid accusations that he had sexually abused a number of teenage boys and subsequent calls to dismantle the most famous piece of his legacy. Although he’s sometimes mistakenly credited with creating Cadillac Ranch, he was skeptical of the idea at first and never claimed to be more than its patron.
The guys who did make it—Doug, Lord, and Marquez—had indeed come from San Francisco. But Doug returned to Texas many times, teaching architecture at Rice, Texas A&M, and the University of Houston (he returned in the nineties). He became part of Houston’s off-beat art scene, the world of the Orange Show and art cars. In the eighties, as an architect in Philip Johnson’s New York-based firm, he helped design the Williams Tower at the Galleria, which is still the tallest building in the country that’s located outside a downtown.
Doug dreamed up grand plans for Texas that were never built: A 55-story statue he called the Spirit of Houston, of a chrome woman with her arms raised against the wind, and a domed metropolis, dubbed Lone Star City, for car-free living on a remote stretch of Texas prairie. His life and art were about the search for timeless ideas on epic themes, and the state gave him plenty to work with.
I’m sure I heard stories about Doug when I was younger, but my strongest memories date to my first move to Texas, for a college internship at Texas Monthly. My dad and I road-tripped to Austin from the West Coast, and our first stop in Texas was the Cadillac Ranch. I had dreamed of living in this state but knew no one here, so it meant something to me that a Michels had come here before and made this weird beloved thing. Doug was my dad’s second cousin, and they never met. Their grandfathers, Ernest and Bill, were brothers who were raised in Vermillion, South Dakota, the university town where my dad grew up. Doug’s parents met at the university, but—like me—Doug only knew the town from childhood trips to visit family.
Doug was born in 1943, during World War II. His father, Bob, served in Europe and then became a lawyer in the U.S. Air Force; his mother, Caroline, was an art historian and later a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. The family moved often between Air Force bases. He grew up steeped in post-war optimism, in a design context of new interstate highways and rockets to the moon. As a boy, Doug could always look out the window and identify the model and year of a passing car. He loved creating things. He’d get a new pack of colored modeling clay, sticks of red, yellow, green, and blue as hard as butter from the fridge, and work them with his hands into a single ball of gray, his favorite color.
He studied at Oxford and graduated from Yale in 1967 with an architecture degree. Doug was mentored by Charles Moore, the Yale School of Architecture dean whose work emphasized sensitivity to the context around a building. (Moore would later teach architecture at the University of Texas in Austin until his death, in 1993). Progressive Architecture magazine featured some of Doug’s early work, and after he graduated he toured college campuses, including the University of Houston, lecturing on the need for architecture schools to give students more control. In late 1968, he was living in San Francisco, working at an auto body shop, when he got the call from the University of Houston.
The students had staged a revolt against the new dean of the architecture school. One of their demands was to hire Doug. They’d received him enthusiastically on his lecture tour the year before. Students met him at the airport with a coffin and told him to climb inside. They carried the coffin down the aisle of a lecture hall on campus, and Doug emerged before the gathered students signifying “the rebirth of architecture.” In early 1969, Doug returned.
A compelling aspect of Cadillac Ranch is that there is no sign explaining who put it there, or when or why. It invites you to wonder. Doug’s archives are like that too.
That time in Houston, along with Doug’s dolphin encounter, planted the seeds of the work, spanning most of the seventies, that would go on to make Ant Farm influential in counterculture art and design. When Doug returned to San Francisco, he and Lord spent months together in a van, filming their nomadic life on the road between colleges and truck stops. On San Francisco’s Pier 40, in the decaying remains of the city’s industrial waterfront, Doug secured a headquarters for Ant Farm in an old warehouse. Curtis Schreier, another trained architect who dreamed up daring and quirky designs, became a core member. They were cultural critics on commercialism and mass media, and agents of chaos, but more than anything else, the work was about humor and hope.
“They were among the preeminent comedians of architectural culture,” the critic Michael Sorkin wrote, “genius practitioners of the carnivalesque.” They staged an event called “Media Burn,” in which they invited the local press to film as Doug and Schreier dressed as crash test dummies and piloted a modified 1959 Cadillac Biarritz through a wall of flaming televisions. Many of their projects occurred in Texas: the House of the Century, a bulbous, otherworldly lake house built for the Houston art collector Marilyn Oshman; the Eternal Frame, a reenactment of the Zapruder film staged in Dealey Plaza just a dozen years after Kennedy was killed (Doug played Jackie, in a pink dress and pillbox hat); and, of course, Cadillac Ranch.
In 1974, Ant Farm persuaded Marsh to let them bury ten Cadillacs in a row in a dryland wheat field he owned along what was then Route 66. Marsh gave them a budget of $300 per car, and Ant Farm spent six weeks around Amarillo looking for the right vehicles. They needed one of each model made between 1948 and 1961 to demonstrate the evolution of the tail fin; the audacious height of the 1959 tail fin symbolized of the peak of the nation’s post-war ego. Then, they dug ten holes and tipped a car into each.
It was a hit beyond anything they’d expected. National news reports wondered at the origins of the roadside novelty, postcards of the installation became top sellers, and Bruce Springsteen would even write a song about it. “Doug realized the potential it had, in terms of the media value,” Lord told me that day at the museum. “It was a calling card for him. And, you know, it’s a calling card for all of us. But what can you do to follow it?”
A few months after they installed Cadillac Ranch, Schreier sketched an idea for a boat where humans could speak with dolphins. At the time, John C. Lilly’s research into dolphin intelligence was gaining popularity, particularly among young Americans exploring psychedelics and new modes of consciousness. Schreier’s drawing imagined a triangular, organic research vessel with a collapsible sail and a series of pods where dolphins could meet with human scientists. Instead of being confined to a tank, the dolphins could come and go. Esquire published the image in 1975. “For them, it was just an oddity,” Lord says. “And then Doug latched on to it as something that could be promoted to raise money to actually build a dolphin embassy.”
Lord says Doug took control of the idea. Ant Farm had secured a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to advance the project, which Doug used to finance a trip to Australia. He told Lord and Schreier they could join him there. “The way Doug framed things was, it’s either my way or it’s not going to happen,” Lord says. “I didn’t share the obsession with the idea.” Instead, Doug found new collaborators in Australia who were more enthusiastic.
In August 1978, Schreier was working in Ant Farm’s headquarters at Pier 40 when he awoke from a nap one day to the smell of smoke. The warehouse was engulfed in flames. The fire consumed the space and much of the group’s work, and Schreier barely escaped. Ant Farm was already coming apart, but that was the end.
The Doug Michels archive, in a library at the University of Houston, consists of 160 linear feet of schematics, photographs, hand-decorated letters, printed emails, and one custom light-up model space station. Doug assembled the archive himself. When he died, his parents left it to the university, where he taught during his final years. This past June, I spent four days with the archive to read his story in his own words.
Time capsules were important in the Ant Farm oeuvre—they’d left them in Paris and Houston and upstate New York—and Doug went on to assemble capsules from his own life too, for significant projects or relationships. His archive includes stern letters to corporations demanding money for their use of Cadillac Ranch in commercials. There are birthday cards and drawings from his nephew. There are original copies of important work boxed up with tourist brochures and a grocery list from 1980. I wondered why Doug had saved all these, but then I grew more curious about the things he’d left out. His papers include two red, hardbound page-a-day diaries for the years 1983 and 1993, and these are the only diaries in the collection. I had been interested to learn what Doug thought about the allegations against Marsh, the Cadillac Ranch patron, but found only one reference to them: a printed email where Lord had forwarded a 1997 news story with no comment.
A compelling aspect of Cadillac Ranch is that there is no sign explaining who put it there, or when or why. It invites you to wonder. Doug’s archives are like that too. I had some preconceptions of his politics because he was a counterculture artist. But then, in the archives I found a friendly, yearslong correspondence with Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon speechwriter and agitator of the nineties culture wars, about Buchanan’s presidential aspirations and the role of the arts in the political right. At the end of each day spent with Doug’s papers, I felt like I’d met a different person.
One of these evenings, I called Alexandra Morphett, an Australian designer who had worked and lived with Doug for years, beginning with his first dolphin embassy lecture tour. She told me Doug was just as mercurial in the flesh. “He was like a chameleon. A shape shifter. He could be whoever he wanted to be,” she said. “When I met him, it became the most intriguing, disturbing, creative, volatile, expansive period of my life.”
As Doug and Morphett collaborated, Schreier’s initial sketch for the human-dolphin boat expanded into a research vessel called Oceania. They tried to find funding to build it, and when that didn’t materialize, the project became a screenplay. Morphett’s uncle, a successful writer for Australian film and TV, penned the script about a girl who discovers she can talk to dolphins. A stripped-down version of Oceania would appear in the film as a prop, and the box office riches would finance the construction of the real thing.
While they worked on the movie, they moved around together from Sydney to San Francisco, Houston to New York. They spent a difficult month as dolphin handlers at Sea-Arama Marineworld, in Galveston. They visited Lilly and floated in the darkness of his sensory deprivation tanks. A 1979 Houston Chronicle story featured them as “ambassadors to the sea,” building an interspecies revolution from an apartment in Montrose. But interest in the screenplay was underwhelming, and revisions dragged on.
Doug sought refuge in the conventional design world. He took a job in the Manhattan offices of Philip Johnson’s firm Johnson/Burgee, with a desk just down the hall from the legendary architect. “Doug was very proud that he was in the design part of Philip Johnson’s office,” Lord says. “But, at the same time he was designing a tiling pattern for a high rise in Pittsburgh.” Doug eventually impressed Johnson enough to get a more substantive assignment—a new skyscraper at the Houston Galleria. The Transco Tower, now known as the Williams Tower, is by far the tallest building around. Doug’s signature contribution is the 7,000-watt rotating beacon on top, which for decades has helped lost drivers find their way through Houston’s west side.
Doug had the high-rise view and the wardrobe of a prestigious architect, but he wasn’t making things. As a younger man, Doug had lampooned Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the modernist orthodoxy of the grid. Now he was reporting for work at the Seagram Building, one of Mies’s signature skyscrapers. One day, the story goes, Doug’s old Ant Farm friends came to visit his New York office and couldn’t get past the reception desk. That’s when he knew he had to leave.
In 1981, he opened a solo practice in Los Angeles before relocating it to Washington, D.C., still hoping to rally support for the dolphin screenplay. For the next decade or so, he often invited his friends to work with him on some wild new idea. Many of his closest partnerships were with women, close monogamous working relationships.
“We just loved being together,” said Mina Chow, an architect and documentary filmmaker who met Doug in 1994, shortly after her graduation from Harvard. I contacted her after coming across Doug’s “time capsule” of their correspondence and mementos in the archives. “My family didn’t understand it,“ she told me. “They questioned my relationship with him, but I really loved him.” Chow and Doug would work late into the night developing fundamentally silly ideas like the National Sofa—a long marble slab facing the White House, with a pop-up Jumbotron where the president could address the nation. “He was always looking towards the future, and I think it was optimistic,” she said. But his doubts were intense. “I remember him waking up in the middle of night, like with this horrible sound. He was worried that his greatest works were behind him.”
In his diary on the last day of 1993, he wrote, “To the muse, I am totally dedicated. The agony of solitude is a small price for the ultimate thrill of creation. Each new idea arrives with a jolt of pleasure unknown to most mortals on earth.”
Through it all, there were always dolphins. By the mid-eighties, Oceania had become Bluestar, an outer space think tank where humans and dolphins could mind-meld in zero gravity. This one came with a screenplay, too, in which a dolphin is rescued from the circus and reaches the station as a violent conflict erupts on Earth involving orcas and a greedy mining conglomerate. By the mid-nineties, Bluestar was an interactive CD-ROM game. The project got far—LeVar Burton even joined as voice talent—but the software developer shuttered before the game’s release. The highs and lows of the concept are preserved in agonizing detail in Doug’s archives, most memorably in a sketch of a blue star with a feminine face and a stake through her heart.
In the late nineties, he decided he was done with the muse and determined to take refuge in one of the big firms he used to hate. “I am very excited to shape the future, be a grown-up corporate officer designing curved skyscrapers and marketing my merry ass off,” he wrote to a friend.
He applied to jobs and pitched his work to magazines—the rejection letters comprise another time capsule in his archive. A 1997 letter from Playboy said the staff did like a proposal he’d sent, “but no one was enthusiastic enough.” Texas Monthly editor Gregory Curtis thanked him for reaching out but wrote, “I just don’t see a way we could present a piece about your projects.” These Doug collected under a cover sheet headlined, “The Last Desperate Days of Doug Michels.”
Then Texas threw out a lifeline. Joe Mashburn, one of the University of Houston students who demanded they hire Doug in 1969, was now the dean of the college. He offered Doug a job. So, thirty years after students there had raised his coffin and heralded him as the rebirth of American architecture, Doug came back. The times had changed, though. He announced a class on futurist design, and just two students signed up. In a Houston Press feature about the hiring, one faculty member said Doug’s career was “over.” Another dismissed him as an anachronism, a futurist from the sixties.
But Doug was ready for the fight. “You’re only as good as your last big hit,” he told the paper, but “at least I had a last big hit.” He was energized by the change of scene and the new publicity. He got to work on new projects, designs for an art installation at Hobby Airport with a giant heart, a series of great arches along 19th Street in the Heights, and space-age homes and swimming pools for his friends.
In Houston, he found the community he’d been missing since the Ant Farm years. One day, local artist Jack Massing told Doug that he’d recovered a time capsule Ant Farm had left with the Houston Contemporary Art Museum in 1972. Together, they organized a party to reveal its contents, and Lord and Schreier came for a reunion. The capsule—a thoroughly rusted fridge stocked 28 years earlier with Pearl beer, Pepto-Bismol, Coffee-mate and Cascade dishwasher soap—had survived a flood in the museum basement. Friends crowded around to see what remained. Doug told a Houston Press reporter, “This will be the part that I remember. The anticipation.” The door was finally pried open, revealing a mess of cans and sludge. Doug was delighted by the spectacle.
In 2003, Doug, Lord, and Schreier were planning an Ant Farm retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum. Doug’s sixtieth birthday, on June 29, was approaching, and his family planned a big bash for him at his parents’ place outside Washington. Before his party, though, he had one more exciting opportunity. Doug, who never let go of the dolphin idea, had been offered a consulting job that might finally open doors in Hollywood. According to Chow, Mel Gibson’s production company was exploring a feature film about orcas that worked with fishermen to catch whales near a town in Australia called Eden.
A few weeks before he left for Australia, Doug had a lucid dream in which his apartment was covered in mirrors. “I laid myself down on the mirrored floor, looked up into the vast infinity reflection above, and saw myself illuminated,” he emailed a friend one Sunday in late April 2003. He’d spent the last two years growing out his goatee—an attempt to cultivate a more mysterious air—but in the dream, it was gone. He woke up, walked to his bathroom, and shaved. The same printed page included his friend’s reply: “The dream guardians have sent you a signal about re-emergence, I think.”
I’d spent most of time with the archive in the library alone in the reading room, losing myself in the life of a man I’d never met, trying to decide just how we were connected. I’d found drawings of fantastical airplanes from his youth. I’d seen disintegrating scraps of a page describing his first acid trip on the night Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination. On my last day there, I couldn’t help but notice the dwindling stack of files. Doug had a line he liked to use at the end of a letter or a meeting with a friend. Instead of “goodbye,” he’d say, “see you in the future.” But the time capsule ended here. He died June 12, 2003, after falling while on a solo climb to a whale observation point at Eden Bay.
Massing had just returned to shore after a day in his kayak fishing on Galveston Bay when he got a call from Doug’s sister Carolynn with the tragic news. “The sun was setting. I was thinking how amazingly beautiful the day was. I had some fish in the cooler; I was totally happy. And my phone rang,” he recalled.
Morphett, who was living with her husband in the Australian wine country north of Sydney, had been planning to host Doug at their place. “We were waiting for him to come that day, and he didn’t turn up,” she said. “And it was so Doug to do that. It was so dramatic; it was almost like a performance piece. You know, where else would he die but whale watching in a place called Eden?”
For days, Doug’s friends back home opened their mailboxes to find postcards and letters he sent from Australia days before he’d died. The birthday party went on anyway. “It was just very odd. We’re all here to be with him, and celebrate with him, and he’s not here,” said his sister, Annie Clark. “Doug had somewhat of a practical joker streak, and I did halfway expect him to show up.” She knew it wouldn’t happen though. Over the phone with an Australian official, she’d confirmed the identity of the body by the tattoo of a blue star on the top of his foot.
In the family, she says, it was understood that Doug was the brilliant one, destined for great things. Their parents never quit supporting and encouraging him. His death devastated them. Their father had been in good health after requiring cancer treatment years earlier. But now the cancer returned, and he died nine months after Doug. Then their mother developed dementia, and Clark spent the next ten years caring for her through her decline.
One of the first artifacts I found in Doug’s archive is a portrait of him as a boy, with short hair and a striped T-shirt, along with a yellowed, type-written page from his mother. “Your mood yesterday came across as less than optimistic… less than positive,” she wrote, “but, I feel that you know you are a success… it is others who have not the enlightenment to recognize it yet.”
“He did not have an easy life,” Clark said. “He was way ahead of his time. Way, way, way ahead of his time.”
Chow, Doug’s longtime collaborator, told me that thinking about his legacy brought to mind the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem “Ozymandias.” In it, a traveler discovers an inscription on an ancient pedestal: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Beside it are the ruins of a statue, two legs and a shattered face. Only the words remain.
On June 21 of this year, the summer solstice, fifty years after Ant Farm finished Cadillac Ranch, a crowd with paint brushes and rollers walked out across the field to the cars. Tourists were spraying names and slogans in all colors, but this group had only cans of gray primer. They included Lord and his family and former students, fans of Ant Farm, and old friends of Doug’s. Lord explained they would paint the cars gray as a way to reset the clock, a fresh start. To him, as it exists today, as participatory art covered in decades of paint from thousands of tourists, it’s not Cadillac Ranch anymore. “I like the idea that it’s eventually just going to disintegrate and be gone,” Lord said. “It might take another fifty years.”
Lord and his crew covered every one of the cars in a fresh coat of gray, Doug’s favorite color. Before the group could even take a picture, tourists were painting over the cars again.
