Paul Reffell, a Marshall mainstay who sailed around the world, penned two books, sparked multiple protest movements, and loved fiercely, died on Jan. 3 following complications from chemotherapy. He was 68 years old.
As a young adult, Paul left his job in England as a tax collector and set sail. His journey eventually brought him to Hawaii, and then to West Marin, where he settled on Tomales Bay. He was one of KWMR’s original programmers, and he co-hosted a call-in show, “Let’s Talk,” for the past five years. He had a gift for bringing people together socially, he acted in theater productions and he organized local nights at Tony’s Seafood. He is remembered by friends as a host of great parties, a generous handyman and a devoted community advocate with a wry sense of humor.
“He was really funny and really gentle,” said Sally Phillips, his girlfriend for the past five years. “His life was dense with adventure and real richness.”
Charles Schultz, a friend in Marshall, said Paul had figured out that to love someone else is completely engrossing. “He was out of step with the culture, where it’s, ‘What am I getting out of this?’” Charles said. “He understood that giving is the getting.”
It’s impossible to separate Paul from Donna Sheehan, his partner in West Marin for 21 years. Paul was intensely loyal to her, and together they were eccentric activists for peace, gender equality and environmental health. They authored two books together, including “Seduction Redefined,” which sought to teach how to create a true partnership between men and women. The book empowered women to rediscover their seductive potential, which they could use to put men in their place as equals.
Their house was always open to visitors and they hosted discussions and parties. Paul wrote poems for friends on their birthdays and read them aloud in his British accent. He had an interesting life story, yet he was more interested in hearing yours, Sally said.
Paul was born on Feb. 5, 1951 in north London. His father, Leslie Reffell, worked for the government and his mother, Joan Sansom, was a homemaker. In school, Paul learned French and German, but studying was not his strength—one of his teachers assessed him as a “lovable sluggard.” As a teenager in the 1960s, he saw legendary musical acts like The Who and Jimi Hendrix.
His family took summer trips to Cornwall, a rugged peninsula at the southwest corner of England, and he eventually moved there. He spent time working as a bartender and briefly attended architecture school, but soon followed in his father’s footsteps as a civil servant and became a tax collector.
His job was to go from farm to farm, collecting money for Inland Revenue. But Paul was too nice for the job: farmers were allowed certain waivers from taxes, and Paul would just give them to everyone.
When Paul was 23, he left England and never looked back. With no nautical experience, he started out on his friend’s 32-foot sailboat. They had to be rescued on their first voyage because it was so foggy, but, in time, Paul would become a captain and log thousands of miles on the water.
He took work on various boats, and his passports were loaded with stamps from exotic countries. He crossed the Atlantic four times and did charters around islands in the Mediterranean. He then headed east through the Suez Canal and across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, where he enjoyed the island cultures and untouched shoreline. He crossed the Pacific twice, as a crew member and a captain.
Sally said she once asked Paul where his favorite place in the world was; his answer: two weeks from anywhere on the ocean. “He was just all about the unknown,” she said.
In Guam, Paul met Teresa Palumbo, an artist whom he would later marry. The couple continued around the world by boat, but when they reached Hawaii, they stayed.
Beginning in 1981, Paul and Teresa worked as caretakers at a nice home on Mount Tantalus, above Honolulu. Paul worked as a handyman but never again took a nine-to-five job. Sally and Mike Gale, now ranchers in Chileno Valley, at the time lived in the same neighborhood, which consisted of about 100 homes along a 10-mile road in the rainforest.
When Paul’s marriage with Teresa unraveled, the Gales were planning a move to West Marin to restore their ranch. He was fun to be around and very handy, Sally said, so they invited him to come along and help out. Paul thought it sounded like a great adventure, so he threw his belongings in with theirs and flew to California.
It was 1993 on the Gale ranch, and the buildings were decaying shells. Paul lived in a trailer that was too small for him to stand up in, with two chairs and a wobbly table outside. Every day, Sally drove out from Novato and they worked together to take apart the house and clean its redwood boards. It was a lot of hard and tedious work, but Sally said Paul made it fun. He always played music, and they had bread and butter for lunch every day because Paul had a bread machine.
“It was an adventure, and Paul was an important part of that adventure,” Sally said of the project.
At an open mic in Marshall in 1994, Paul met Donna. He was 43 and she was 64, but that didn’t stop her from pursuing him. Bert Crews, a friend of theirs, said that at first Paul was slow to follow up after dates.
Donna asked Bert what she should do. “I said to her, ‘Just go over to his house while he’s at work, leave a trail of rose petals and wait in his bed naked… You can either have a moment of shame or a lifetime of bliss.’”
The seduction worked, and a dynamic relationship began.
“He just took off and became what he wanted to be, and I honestly think he achieved a great deal of happiness with Donna,” Sally said. “It was quite the relationship. They sustained one another and inspired one another. You can’t really talk about Paul without talking about Donna.”
Donna was constantly coming up with visions and projects, and Paul relentlessly supported her. Not long after they got together, they spent time living in a concrete igloo in Baja California, where they wrote their first book together. Paul was the wordsmith, Donna had the ideas, and they edited each other. “BrainLines” proposed that the wrinkles between a person’s eyebrows can tell you about their personality traits. They identified seven basic patterns of lines and suggested that people with shared patterns had similar interests.
While living in Mexico, Donna and Paul were visited by their friend Michael Sykes, who invited them to manage a bed and breakfast in Cedarville.
Paul made a great host, partly because his British accent gave him flair—like royalty who didn’t want to be a part of the palace anymore, Michael said. But Donna was allergic to the juniper trees in Cedarville, so they moved back to Marshall after a year and a half.
“They threw great dinner parties while they were here and made a lot of friends and gave new life to the town that was greatly appreciated,” Michael said.
After the invasion of Iraq, Donna and Paul organized dozens of women to lie naked on Love Field, forming the word “peace” with their bodies. The first photograph from the Baring Witness movement appeared on the front page of the Point Reyes Light; coverage from national news outlets followed. Versions of the nude protest were enacted all over the world, from Antarctica to Cuba. The movement evolved over the years, responding to economic inequality and the escalating war in Afghanistan.
Building on the movement’s success, Paul and Donna organized a so-called global orgasm, which called for everyone in the world to reach orgasm while focusing on world peace on the winter solstice.
“The orgasm gives out an incredible feeling of peace during it and after it,” Paul told the Associated Press in 2006. “Your mind is like a blank. It’s like a meditative state. And mass meditations have been shown to make a change.”
In a related installation, called “Wargasm,” Paul and Donna used the face of the Grandi Building to display anti-war paintings. A second installation called “Pro-Degradation” pushed humanity to consume earth’s resources as fast as possible instead of half-heartedly conserving, so the species would go extinct and the earth could heal. “Flush twice!” a cartoon figure shouted.
Paul and Donna synthesized their ideas in “Cultural Potholes,” a regular newspaper column in the West Marin Citizen and the Light for four years. They used the forum to take on both global and local issues, from patriarchy to the use of pesticides, building on a campaign Donna launched to stop Caltrans from spraying weeds along the highway.
Before she died, Donna dealt with dysautonomia, a disfunction of the nerves that regulate nonvoluntary body functions. They sought treatment in Bordeaux, France, but her condition kept worsening. Paul became her full-time caretaker, receiving compensation from the state.
It was an arduous time for both of them.
She died at their home in 2015, and Paul hosted a large memorial in her honor. He then made a solo road trip with her ashes. He came out of an introspective time of mourning with a performance in a Shakespeare play.
Around that same time, Sally was looking for somebody to share a cocktail recipe on her radio show, “Happy Hour.” She often saw Donna and Paul at the bar at the Station House Café, so she asked Paul if he wanted to try on the role of her cocktail correspondent. The only condition was that he couldn’t use his real name; on the air, Sally went by Liberacha, the self-described spiritual bride of Liberace, a deceased musician and an actor known for his flamboyance.
Without telling her what he was going to do, Paul came on the air with an overblown French accent. Claude de Boozy, the French ambassador to Marshall, was born.
“It was amazing, like an instant smash hit,” Sally said.
Claude came on the air for about 10 minutes of improv. He’d give the cocktail recipe, then he and Liberacha would banter. Claude was jealous of anyone Liberacha was interested in. Sally would mention an old actor, and Claude would challenge him to a duel. He was always challenging people to duels.
He created his own coat of arms for a shirt, and now the Claude de Boozy and Liberacha apparel is among the top sellers during KWMR pledge drives.
Once Paul fell in love with Sally, he looked like he was walking on air, Charles said.
“We had such a beautiful, easy, effortless relationship,” Sally said. “He just was so devotional.”
Paul also started “Let’s Talk,” the first strictly call-in radio show on KWMR. Each week, the show would focus on a different topic, and Paul would write briefs about the topic that were concise, engaging and well-informed. He excelled at this short-form, conversational writing style.
On Jan. 9, the topic was Paul. His co-hosts laughed at the poems that Paul wrote for people on their birthdays and heard stories from callers about his generosity and wit.
“He loved to encourage people to get together socially, and just exchange views and be with each other,” Marshall resident George Clyde told the Light. “He was a very fun and pleasant neighbor and really a great contributor to our community in terms of its well-being and communication.”
George worked with Paul on the East Shore Planning Group, for which Paul was a director. Paul had strong opinions, but they were always delivered in a light-hearted way, George said. He made statements before the California Coastal Commission and the Board of Supervisors.
Paul was upset by the degradation of the natural world and of community, but he never expressed anger toward someone he knew. He said he would not return to the islands he had once visited because he feared seeing the development of the land.
When Sally and Paul decided to move in together, she wanted him to live with her in San Anselmo. “Too many people,” he said, so, in 2018, they found a place in Tomales. He liked driving the backcountry roads in his Volkswagen Vanagon, a model he owned several times and rebuilt over and over.
His last public appearance was as a ghost in the “Christmas Carol” at Toby’s Feed Barn on Dec. 14. A week later, he went to urgent care with abdominal pain and was sent to an oncologist. On Christmas Day he was admitted to Kaiser in Oakland, and the next day started chemotherapy to fight off an aggressive form of leukemia.
In his two weeks in the cancer ward, Sally said that Paul’s selflessness made an impression on the doctors and nurses.
The chemotherapy perforated his colon, leading to sepsis. When the doctor told him that he could choose between death and a painful and risky intestinal operation, Paul decided against surgery. He thanked the doctors, who made him comfortable, and Sally called a few friends to come be by his side. He died nine hours later.
“Off I go to the great unknown,” he said.
A memorial for Paul Reffell will be held in March at the Tomales Town Hall.