The Loves and the Wilsons: A Family Case Study

 

Left to right: Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Brian Wilson

Mike Love, of the notoriously dysfunctional Wilson clan, is a puzzle. Everyone hates Mike Love, because he is an obvious egotist. Yet usually narcissists, true egotists, escape such condemnation; because they are skillful manipulators of their image. 

I think the solution is simple. Mike Love is stupid. He is not smart enough to put on a good front. Most narcissists are better at it.

There is evidence enough that he tries. He wrote the lyrics to most of the early Beach Boys songs; he is responsible for their obvious simplemindedness. He was tailoring them to an intended audience as calculatingly as an ad copywriter.

“She’s gonna have fun fun fun ‘til her daddy takes her T-bird away.”

“I’m picking up good vibrations. She’s giving me those excitations.”

When Brian Wilson tried for more meaningful lyrics on “Pet Sounds,” Love was reportedly upset at him “messing with the formula.” Even though the formula no longer worked: the Beatles had ended the “surf music” craze. He had the intent to manipulate and create a false image, but lacked all imagination in doing so.

His ever-present hat to conceal his baldness is similar. He never appears without it. This suggests the personal vanity and concern for appearances that mark the narcissist. Yet it also suggests a surprising lack of imagination, or initiative. If it matters so much to him, why not get a follicle transplant; he surely has the money for it. Nobody remembers that Joe Biden was bald, or Frank Sinatra. But with the hat, everyone realizes Mike Love is bald.

Looks like stupidity.

His mother Emily was sister to the Wilsons’ father, Murry. Reports are that they both had similar, “dominant” personalities. In other words, they were dominant narcissists. It runs in families.

However, Love got a treatment different from that of the Wilson boys. The instinct of the narcissist is to either possess or destroy. Being of the opposite sex to the dominant narcissist, and good looking, Mike was marked for possession. That means he would have been spoiled, thus groomed for narcissism himself.

Love fell out with his mother when he got some girl pregnant. His mother threw all of his things onto the driveway, and he was forced to find new lodgings. 

This was entirely predictable; but the issue would not have been morality or getting the girl pregnant. It was sexual jealousy. He was two-timing his mother, to her way of thinking, and she was reacting just as a wife classically would if she found that her husband had been cheating on her. 

This is what happens to the golden child when they reach adolescence; especially if they are of the opposite sex. The narcissistic parent sees themself losing a possession, and accordingly their objective often shifts from possession to destruction. The syndrome is modelled in Shakespeare’s Cordelia and King Lear. The narcissistic parent will always resent the partner of the favoured child.

Now let’s turn to the Wilsons. 

The fact that Murry Wilson physically abused and terrorized all three of his sons is well-known. We even have audio recordings of him berating them in the studio. Murry too was a narcissist, and, like Mike Love, a stupid one, who made his abuse too obvious.

Murry would have particularly hated Mike Love, because he could not control him or take credit for what he did. And Love was good-looking, too; the narcissist runs on envy. This explains why Love’s contribution to many early Beach Boys songs was not acknowledged. 

Brian, showing obvious early musical talent, would have been his father’s trophy child. He was driven mercilessly to excel.  Dennis, second in line, was excess to requirements, and dangerously handsome, making him look like a sexual rival. So he was forced into the role of black sheep. Dennis would have been implicitly encouraged to engage in and rewarded for bad and irresponsible behavior; but then “Out of the three Wilson brothers, Dennis was the most likely to get beaten by their father.” 

My own brother was forced into the same family role. I immediately see the parallels. Brian once said of his brother Dennis, “Dennis had to keep moving all the time. If you wanted him to sit still for one second, he's yelling and screaming and ranting and raving.” My brother Gerry was the same way. You could get seasick from sitting next to him on a couch.

Dennis Wilson dissolved into sex addiction, alcohol, and drugs. He died age 39. My brother fairly narrowly managed to save himself from a similar fate.

Carl, as the youngest, short, and baby-faced, was probably the golden child. He looked most like a possession. His father bought him a guitar and music lessons at age 12; and a really good guitar, a Fender Stratocaster, at age 15. This in a poor, working-class family. Despite Brian’s obviously greater musical talent, Brian was not bought instruments. He learned what he learned on the family piano, which was primarily for his father. It is probably no accident that Carl ended up as lead guitar, and the original name of the family band was “Carl and the Passions.” Their father would have insisted as much.

To his credit, Carl Wilson does not seem to have become a narcissist. This is a tribute to him personally, and makes the vital point that nobody is simply made a narcissist by their upbringing. It is always a choice, and the individual should be held responsible for it.