Kent Willard: Portrait of a Florist as a Young Man

This story is part three of a series.

Part One:

Part Two:

Silvia Guandique worked as Kent Willard’s main designer for 20 years. She now owns on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, where she’s carrying on Kent’s tradition of quality and elegance.  

"I know all three Kent Willards," she said from behind the counter of her store. "He was a very smart, very tough businessman, and very successful. He was also a very generous and sweet man. I call him 'Cuties.' He could be the sweetest man in the world. If he saw a dog out in the street that looked sick, he would run out to help it. That’s the kind of man he was. And then there’s Kent now, homeless in the park, drunk, dirty. But his mind is still very sharp."

I asked Silvia what it was like working for Kent.

"He was a good boss," she said. "A very smart businessman, but he could also be very tough with people. He was very demanding. If he got a shipment of flowers in the morning, and there was something wrong with it, they would hear from him. He would yell. And same thing with his employees. He was usually very nice, but if someone made a mistake, he would scream at them. He was very tough with people, a very tough businessman. But he was never that way with me. People thought we were having an affair because he was always nice to me, and we’d joke around. But we weren't. I stood up to him, and he liked that."

It wasn’t unusual for Silvia and the rest of the staff to work long into the evening fulfilling orders.

"When I am hungry, I get grumpy and grouchy – and my hands shake," she said. "And I’d tell him, 'Cuties, I never had lunch today! I need some food.' And he’d disappear and come back with bags of food for everyone. Never just for me. Always for everyone."

Though Kent would always be the first one to arrive in the morning to open the store, when Silvia arrived, he'd often leave the business in her hands and be gone for hours. Asked where he went, she shrugged and said, "I don’t know. Maybe to the bar. Maybe to take his daughter out."

But alcoholism was always something he was struggling with.

"Sometimes at night we would work and he would bring in food and beer," Silvia said. "But people started to be drinking beer more than working, so he stopped that."

Silvia receives and cashes Kent’s social security checks, which amount to just over $500 a month now, and she doles out the money to him.

"If I give him all of it at once," she said, "he’ll lose it. So I give him just enough."

She said many times she has urged Kent to let her use the money to get him a room, and help him get off the streets. But he’s always resisted.

"He knows if he goes in any program they will need him to stop drinking," she said. "And he can’t do that."

On more than one occasion, he's confided to her that he's ready to give up.

"He told me he wished he wasn’t alive anymore," she said. "And he was gonna drink himself to death. I said, 'Kent, you are a smart man. If you want to kill yourself, there are easier ways to do it.'"

Asked if there was anything that made him want to live, she gave the same answer given by anyone who knows him: Katie.

"He loves Katie," Silvia said. "I think that is what keeps him going."

Deborah Presley Brando, Katie's mother, had many kind things to say about Kent.

"Kent is the most generous man in the world," Deborah said. "He is an artist, an old soul. But he’s too sensitive for this world. I love him dearly and so does our daughter, Katie."

Though Kent told us that his clothes were stolen the last time he was in the hospital, Deborah said it isn’t so.

"The hospital didn’t steal his clothes," Deborah said. "He walked out. He does that all the time; He’s in and out of the hospital every week. Usually St. Joseph’s [in Burbank] but he’s been to Cedars, too. Call any nurse at St. Joseph’s and ask about Kent and they know him."

In our original story, Kent accused Deborah of making allegations which caused him to lose his business and his home. She stated categorically that this is untrue, and no record of any allegations exists.

"It is ludicrous when he said that I accused him of a crime," Deborah said. "It’s not true at all. You can check. He has an alcoholic syndrome which causes people to fabricate stories that have threads of reality, elements of truth, but no basis in reality — that’s what he’s doing there."

Though alcoholism seems to be the root of his problems, according to Deborah, he was carrying around guilt for years that caused him to drink.

"His father started Willard’s at the Biltmore downtown in 1948," she said. "They lived [on] La Maida in North Hollywood. His father had cancer and was dying. Kent lit a cigarette for him and went to deliver flowers. When he came back, the house was on fire. His father was too sick to get up, and he got burned in the fire. It was awful. He died soon after that. Kent always felt he was responsible, always felt a terrible burden of guilt over this."

Before his father died, Deborah said, he told Kent to always take care of his mother, an instruction Kent took seriously. Kent’s older brother, Michael Willard, ten years his senior, was a star Stanford athlete who became a successful businessman. But Kent stayed in place to fulfill his pledge to his father.

When I asked Kent about his father’s death, tears welled in his eyes. He said that he had nothing to do with starting the fire that killed his father, and it was just an awful accident. But when I asked him if it was a hard thing to get over, he stared ahead desolately and said only one word: "Impossible."

"Kent’s mom is still alive," said Deborah. "She lives in a nursing home in Palo Alto. She took over the business, and moved it to Bakman Street in North Hollywood. But business wasn’t good — and she nearly lost the place — Kent had to work hard, had to raise a lot of money to save it. And he did."

Kent opened his Willard’s at the northeast corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Burbank Boulevard in North Hollywood (now Valley Village). The shop occupied a space next to John’s Pizza that is currently vacant, a sad wound on this neighborhood where once this thriving flower shop did business 365 days a year.

He transformed Willard’s into a phenomenal success, a multi-million dollar business. Though their prices weren’t the lowest in this community, their flowers were the freshest and of the highest quality, and their designs and arrangements were works of art.

Kent was there all day, every day, 365 days a year. Many celebrities were his clients, and they all loved him, including Alec Baldwin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hugh Hefner, Jay North and Jennifer Love-Hewitt.

Larry Flynt used to spend $30,000 every year for Kent and his crew to decorate his house for Christmas. Despite the pressure and complexity of their work, Kent kept things fun.

"We did all those beautiful poinsettias, all over Larry Flynt's mansion," Silvia said. "And he had these big columns and we had to wind flowers all the way down and secure them at the top. It was a very hard job. I remember going there and we were very hungry, and suddenly Kent disappeared. A few minutes later he came back with burritos for everyone."

Though he tried to hide his drinking for years, it started to become obvious, especially to Silvia, who knew him well.

"He stopped taking care of the business," she said. "He stopped paying the bills. I’d tell him I need a check to pay our suppliers — sometimes we have a $20,000 shipment of roses. And he’d say, 'Sorry, I don’t have any money right now.'"

He began to become mostly absent at the store, and Silvia and Sarah, the manager, picked up the reins, running the store on their own. But it got to be too much for Silvia, who had the opportunity to buy Josie’s Flowers. She told Kent that she needed to leave. 

"He was very upset," she said. "He told me I couldn’t leave, that he couldn’t go on without me at Willard’s. But I said for me, I had to go. This was the right move for me."

She gave him two weeks notice, which he attempted to ignore. But she kept reminding him when her last day would be.

"When that Friday came, my last day, he never came in," Silvia said. "He couldn’t be there that day."

It was only a few months later than Willard’s closed. Kent failed to pay his yearly taxes, which resulted in severe financial penalties that doubled and tripled, leaving him with no option but bankruptcy. Losing his business, according to everyone who knew him, wrecked his confidence and ultimately his life.

"Some people measure their worth by how much they have in the bank," Silvia said. "And Kent was like that. When he lost his business, he bottomed out completely."

It wasn’t long after he lost the business that he became homeless in North Hollywood, spending most of his time in the park, just blocks from the home he grew up in and from the former site of his store.

Deborah and Katie would be horrified driving by and seeing him there, filthy and drunk, lying in the dirt.

"Once we went by and I didn’t want Katie to see, but it was too late," Deborah said. "There he was on the ground crawling like a caterpillar, with his mouth full of dirt."

Other times they would see him in alleyways.

"Once Katie was sure she saw his hospital shoes sticking out of the alley. I said, 'No, it’s not him.' But she is strong-willed and insisted on getting out and looking. And it was him, lying in his own filth. He looked at her and then just closed his eyes. She was in tears, shaking."

Kent's family has helped him many times, but it just seems Kent does not want to get off the streets or stop drinking.

"His mother and his brother Michael helped him out with money many times," she said. "They bailed him out for about two million dollars. They’d get him a hotel room. I'd go in and if would be full of garbage, maggots. That’s how he lives.”

Silvia said that both her husband and her son have been frustrated by how much time she spends with Kent, and how much she gives him.

"My son said, 'Mom, where is my black pajama? My favorite shirt? Are they out in the park, Mom?' And they were. I always have a flannel for Kent in my car. I am always bringing him clothes."

Some nights it would be so cold, she’d worry about him freezing to death, and would go out in the dark to cover him.

"I got a lot of plastic sheeting and blankets," she said. "And I went out in the park at night with a flashlight 'till I found him. He was covered with dirt, hungry and cold. I brought him some coffee because I know how much Kent loves coffee. Then I covered him up; I made a tent around him with the plastic. The next day I came back and he was still there, underneath his tent, sleeping."

Kent sometimes has seemed hopeful about the future.

"One time," she recalled, "he looked out across [Lankershim] from my store, and saw a shop for rent. He said maybe that’s where I should put the new Willard's. I said, 'Yes, that would be great. You could do that. But you need to get help first'. And he promised he would."

Like most of his promises, it didn’t last.

"He came in the next day right in the middle of the day, so dirty and so drunk. Just a mess. And I said, 'Cuties, what happened? Yesterday you made all those promises. What happened?' And he just looked at me, and said, 'I’m sorry.'"

Both Kent and Deborah did their best to hide his problems from Katie.

"I shielded her from everything," Deborah said. "It’s why she didn’t know what was going on. I was raised Mormon. No drinking, none of that. She never saw her dad drunk once. But I married Christian [Brando] when she was 13. But then she began to see, because Kent would come in late at night and she would see."

One of the only bright spots of this story is Katie's success at transcending this anguish to work toward her dream of being a policeman. She said it would mean the world to her if her father was at her graduation later this month, but wasn’t sure "if he’d be in any condition to be there."

Kent told us he wants to be there, and I offered to drive him there myself if he’s out of the hospital in time. I could tell it meant a lot to him when I said he wasn’t alone, and that along with so many people in our community, I’d do what I could to be there for him.

"Thank you," he said softly. "It is so unusual for people to help."

There is reason for hope. As mentioned, offered their help immediately upon learning of Kent's situation. And many experts on homelessness recognize that people as bad off as Kent have rebounded to live productive and healthy lives.

I contacted Christian Brando's brother Craig Brando for this story, who has served as a liaison for Housing First Rhode Island for the past four years.

"I have seen many cases," he wrote in an email, "and some much worse off than Kent that have begun to thrive again in their lives as a result of kindness. So yes, absolutely, there is still hope."

Patch will continue to report on the story of Kent Willard as it unfolds. Thanks to all our readers for your help and concern, and your recognition that the story of Kent Willard could be the story of any one of us.