Bio

Lorees Yerby was born in San Francisco in 1930.  Her middle-class childhood segued from the Great Depression into the U.S. entering WWII when she was 11.  Medical issues led her to read voraciously and become enamored of Hollywood movies with Mae West and Tyrone Power as particular favorites.  At 21, she moved to New York.  Among other odd jobs, she worked as an usher at the United Nations and was a contestant on a TV game show, where she met the show’s producer Mike Dutton.   One thing led to another and they married.  After two sons were born in short order, Mike’s work brought the young family to Los Angeles where they rented a ramshackle hilltop house overlooking the Pacific in Malibu. 

A few years later, Lorees was feeling isolated and in need of social interaction so they decided to turn part of their home into Coffee House Positano, a unique gathering spot/performance space which featured a giant espresso machine, chess games, a bookstore, poetry readings, avant-garde theater performances and regularly scheduled evenings of political debate with writers, university professors and politicians.

It was there that Lorees started writing in earnest in between raising her two sons and co-managing the coffee house.  She and Mike separated in 1961, the coffee house having run its course a few years earlier.  By May 1963, two of Lorees’s plays Save Me A Place at Forest Lawn and The Last Minstrel opened off-Broadway to positive reviews.   These were followed by The Golden Bull of Boredom and A Penchant for Listening in 1964.  A contemporary newspaper profile describes her as “a tiny woman with luminous brown eyes”.   She would continue writing for the rest of her life, focusing mainly on plays, screenplays and short stories.

That same year, she met French writer/choreographer Bertrand Castelli with whom she would have four daughters over the following seven years.  They married in 1968. They collaborated on a 1972 satirical film, Richard about Richard Nixon which was released while he was still in office.  John Carradine and Mickey Rooney were featured.  Soon thereafter, Lorees and Bertrand separated.

In 1976, a second short story of hers appeared in Cosmopolitan Magazine.  She also received a Guggenheim Grant for the proposed Our Fathers operatic trilogy (Nero, Mother England, and Abraham).  She collaborated with composer John Rubinstein on Nero and eventually completed the writing of all three parts.

A restless, itinerant spirit and a woman of remarkable energy, passion and wide-ranging interests, she also loved to cook and to draw.  She died in Santa Monica in 1996.