Anita Hoffman obituary | | The Guardian

With Pegasus the pig and other rascals With Pegasus the pig and other rascals On New Year's Eve 1967, a group of friends were partying with Abbie Hoffman at his Greenwich Village apartment in New York. 'There we were,' as Hoffman remembered later, 'all stoned and rolling around the floor, when someone said "Oink" for

Obituary

Anita Hoffman obituary

With Pegasus the pig and other rascals

With Pegasus the pig and other rascals On New Year's Eve 1967, a group of friends were partying with Abbie Hoffman at his Greenwich Village apartment in New York. 'There we were,' as Hoffman remembered later, 'all stoned and rolling around the floor, when someone said "Oink" for pig.'

'And so', he added with characteristic inconsequence, 'YIPPIE was born, the Youth International Party.' The Yippies, led by Hoffman and his friend Jerry Rubin, duly went to Chicago for the 1968 Democratic national convention. They came equipped with a whole series of projects calculated to draw attention to themselves, to outrage conventional Democratic politicians, and in particular to offend Mayor Richard J Daley's old-fashioned Catholic puritanism in matters sexual.

One of those present at that party back in Greenwich Village had been Abbie's new wife, Anita, who has died of cancer aged 56. They had met earlier that same year. Anita Kushner, as she then was, had just finished a master's degree in psychology, and like Hoffman was active in civil rights groups. He was running a store selling the produce of rural black communes in Mississippi. He said later that 'If I had been born a woman, I would have been Anita. Sometimes couples take 50 years of living together to look and act alike; we began right off. The first night we spent together we fell in love. She was a born rascal.' Anita was present when Hoffman disrupted trading on the floor of the New York stock exchange by throwing money at the traders. She was there too when he and other yippies tried to levitate the Pentagon with the help of chants of 'Om', delivered in a basso profondo by the Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg.

The politics of the yippies, Hoffman once explained, were compounded of 'charisma, myth and put-on'. Their modus operandi was a mixture of cheek and satire. So they said they would float, nude and 10,000 strong, in Lake Michigan; they would recruit Yippie hookers to seduce delegates and slip LSD into their drinks. They would release greased pigs in Chicago's business district, or 230 hyper-potent Yippies would make love to the wives of the delegates at the Democratic convention.

All they actually did was to nominate a large pig, called Pegasus, for president of the United States; his platform, they said, was garbage. In the end, Hoffman's most significant achievement was to be put on trial for conspiracy, along with a motley group of pacifists and Black Panthers known as the Chicago Seven. He was fined $5,000 and sentenced to a year in jail. When Abbie was sentenced, Anita was ordered to leave the court. Before she went, she shouted to Judge Julius Hoffman, 'They will dance on your grave, Julie, and on the grave of the pig empire!' Later, she travelled to Algeria to meet the Black Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver. But she was so horrified by his arrogant and sexist behaviour that she climbed out of a window, and flew to Paris to get away. In 1971 she bore Abbie a son whom they called 'america' with a lower case 'a' (he now lives in North Carolina and works as a carpenter).

Hoffman boasted that he had been on 60 LSD trips, and in 1974 he jumped bail and went underground to evade drugs charges. Anita supported him, sending money through mail drops like an intelligence officer running agents.

Hoffman eventually settled down with Johanna Lawrenson in a village near the St Lawrence river, where he began a new career as an ecological activist. Although she was aware of the relationship with Lawrenson, Anita continued to support her husband with money and regular, affectionate letters. At one point she helped him find a psychiatrist to treat his depression.

Eventually they divorced, after Hoffman came in from hiding and served a short prison term in 1980. She worked for a while helping women on welfare, and then moved to California, where she got a job reading scripts for a Hollywood studio. She also ran a rare book store in Petalauma, north of San Francisco.

She was involved in the production of a film about the Yippies, Steal This Movie, which is due to be shown this summer. Under the pseudonym of Ann Fettaman, she wrote Trashing, a fictionalised account of the Yippies, and also published a memoir, To America With Love: Letters From The Underground.

Anita was diagnosed as having breast cancer three years ago. She is survived by her son, her sister and her mother.

Anita Hoffman, civil rights activist and rare books dealer, born 1942; died December 27, 1998

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