Lifestyle
'It was sexy, it was fun': Why these waterbed devotees never gave up on the jiggle
The bed in Nancy Gerrish’s bright Los Feliz home appears perfectly normal — carved wooden headboard, fuzzy brown blanket, cream-colored bed skirt. The sheets are a tasteful leopard print. A few brocade throw pillows lie atop the spread to complete the earth-tone look.
But beneath that plush exterior, Gerrish’s bed hides a jiggling secret.
Sit on the mattress’ edge and it wobbles and undulates. Lie down and it rocks gently, as if you’re floating above a temperate pool of water.
And indeed, you are.
In L.A., water rules everything around us. Drink up, cool off and dive into our stories about hydrating and recreating in the city.
“I tell people I have a waterbed, and everyone laughs,” says Gerrish, 78, a financial planner with white curly hair and manicured lavender nails. “But it’s a very comfortable bed to sleep in, and I personally don’t know why the world doesn’t have this.”
If you thought waterbeds had gone the way of 1970s trends like Troll dolls and polyester pantsuits, you are mostly correct. The wavy vinyl mattresses that became a symbol of the era’s sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll lifestyle may no longer be part of the collective consciousness except as the butt of a joke in a period film or as a forbidden item on a boilerplate apartment lease. But they can still be found gently rippling in a handful of Southern California bedrooms.
Waterbeds account for less than 2% of all mattress sales today, according to the Specialty Sleep Assn., but the few remaining retailers receive daily calls from stubborn holdouts like Gerrish — mostly older folks who bought a fluid-filled mattress decades ago, fell in love with its wavy motion and won’t sleep on anything else. Now, these waterbed enthusiasts scour the internet for replacement mattresses, heaters and water treatment systems, determined to resist sleeping on standard mattresses — what they call “dead beds” — for as long as they can.
“I worry,” said Donna Martin, 77, of Glendale, who has been sleeping in a waterbed for 50 years. “I think to myself if I ever have to go into a home, they won’t give me no waterbed.”
Forty-seven students from UCLA pile on top of a water bed , March 10, 1976, to establish a new record for a human pyramid on a water bed in Los Angeles. They broke the old record of 16, according to the press agent, in a stunt to publicize a then-current Hollywood production.
(Wally Fong / Associated Press)
The ‘Pleasure Pit’ boom
The modern waterbed was invented in 1968 by Charles Hall, a graduate student at San Francisco State, as part of his master’s thesis in design. Hall, then 24, had originally set out to create the world’s most comfortable chair, filling a plastic sack with gelatin and then cornstarch with disappointing results. Eventually, he landed on a winning formula — an 8-foot water-filled square vinyl mattress. He called it the “Pleasure Pit” and imagined it as a bed-chair hybrid — the only piece of furniture one would need.
“It was new, it was exciting, it was different, it was sexy, it was fun. It was our generation’s bed.”
— Denny Boyd, former president of the Waterbed Manufacturers Association.
His prototype was featured in a show called “Happy Happenings” at the San Francisco Cannery art gallery that summer and articles about a new-fangled waterbed soon were appearing in newspapers and magazines across the country. A modern sleep trend was born.
“It was new, it was exciting, it was different, it was sexy, it was fun,” said Denny Boyd, former president of the Waterbed Manufacturers Assn., who once owned 35 waterbed stores throughout Texas, Missouri and Louisiana. “It was our generation’s bed.”
Waterbed sales skyrocketed from an estimated $13 million in 1971 to $1.9 billion in 1986, according to the New York Times. The mattresses were fairly cheap, but sales of the heavy wood frames that kept the mattresses from flopping around, plus water heaters and conditioners, brought in big bucks. By 1991, roughly 1 in every 5 mattresses sold in America was fluid-filled, according to the Washington Post. Hall received a patent for his invention in 1971 but rarely enforced it, and young entrepreneurs quickly turned the waterbed business into a lucrative industry.
“There were a whole lot of people who were millionaires by the time they were 25,” Boyd said.
It was a wild, sex-soaked business. One early ad declared, “Two things are better on a waterbed. One of them is sleeping.” Boyd remembers hosting pajama party sales events at his stores where customers would show up in outrageous sleepwear — see-through nighties and G-strings. The store served wine and cheese and stayed open until 3 or 4 a.m.
“It was more than R-rated,” Boyd said.
Competition among the mostly male sales force was fierce. “People used to throw rocks at each other’s stores and look in dustbins to see client lists,” Boyd said. “At the trade shows, you had to hire a security guard to watch your space so people wouldn’t sneak back in and poke holes in your mattress.”
By the mid-1990s, however, the party was over. After a precipitous rise, the waterbed market dried up. Boyd says the decline was due to a handful of factors, one of which was the advent of the “softside” waterbed mattress, which looked and felt more like a traditional bed and didn’t require pricy bed frames or special sheets — accessories that generated the bulk of the revenue for waterbed stores. At the same time, several new alternative mattress technologies hit the market, including airbeds, the Sleep Number, Tempur-Pedic and memory foam.
“These were more conventional beds, easier to sell and less complicated,” Boyd said. “They also had lots of advertising behind them.”
In 1995, the Waterbed Manufacturers Assn. rebranded itself as the Specialty Sleep Assn.
Donna Martin, 77, rests on her waterbed in her apartment in Glendale. Martin has used waterbeds for the past 50 years.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Dedicated ‘water heads’ remain
For some, the waterbed was never a passing trend. It‘s a lifelong devotion.
Gerrish, the financial planner from Los Feliz, bought her first water-filled mattress in 1996 after sleeping on a friend’s waterbed. “I couldn’t believe how comfortable it was,” she said. “It’s very soft on all your joints, and if you like to cuddle, your arm sinks into the bed so there’s no pressure on it.”
She moved her waterbed to Los Angeles from New York 21 years ago. When she eventually sells her Los Feliz home, she hopes to take it with her wherever she moves next. (She was relieved to learn that it is illegal for landlords to forbid waterbeds in California in rental units built after 1973, though they can require tenants to have insurance for damage caused by the bed.)
“I feel so cozy. It’s hard to get out of it,” she said. “And anyone visiting me loves it. I think the [traditional] mattress companies don’t want this information getting out.”
Gerrish has been sleeping on a water-filled mattress for 28 years, but several L.A. waterbed lovers have had an even longer relationship with Hall’s 1968 invention.
Martin, the 77-year-old in Glendale, has been sleeping on a waterbed since she got her first one as a hand-me-down from a friend.
“I’ve had five mattresses since the first time I set one up. I love it,” she said.
Recently, she slept on her sister’s Swedish memory foam mattress while taking care of her pets for the weekend. The verdict? No, thank you. Martin has a squashed disk in her spine and finds the waterbed is easier on her hips.
“At first it was OK, but then the same thing happened, too much pressure,” she said. “I would rather not sleep in something else.”
A closeup of a waterbed at the Afloat factory in Corona.
(Chris Carlson / Associated Press)
City Furniture CEO Keith Koenig shows the new waterbed on display as he speaks during an interview with the Associated Press in Tamarac, Fla., in 2018. Koenig and inventor Charles Hall, pioneers of the waterbed industry in the United States, are hoping to generate a new wave of popularity for the old furniture concept by using a wholesome new pitch.
(Brynn Anderson / Associated Press)
Steve Hertzmann, 62, of San Pedro, gets it. He’s been a waterbed devotee for 40 years and is surprised that the wavy mattresses have never made a comeback.
“The best part is in the wintertime when you’re freezing cold,” he said. “The waterbed has a heater, and you hop in and you’re all warm.”
Marty Pojar, who has a store called the Waterbed Doctor in Westminster, would love to see a renaissance, but he thinks the technology needs a rebrand.
“The word ‘waterbed’ creates a stigma,” he said. “When people hear it, they are thinking of the big, old wood-frame waterbeds with lots of wave action.”
In fact, waterbeds have evolved over the years. Consumers can now pick among mattresses that offer old-school full-motion waves and others that are semi-waveless or have almost no waves at all. Many beds also have two separate water mattresses, one on each side, so if two people are sleeping together and one person gets out of bed, the other doesn’t experience any rocking.
With enough advertising dollars behind it, Pojar thinks renaming waterbeds “flotation sleep systems with temperature control” could bring in new customers.
“Reeducating the public is a big challenge, but there is a big opportunity there, I believe,” Pojar said.
For now, longtime devotees are keeping his business alive. Change can be difficult for a lifelong waterbed fan, as Larry Johnson of Mar Vista has learned firsthand.
The accountant slept on a waterbed for 50 years, until May, when his wife convinced him that a standard mattress would make it easier to get out of bed as they age.
A few days in, Johnson was on the fence. The “dead bed” was not as soft as his waterbed. He missed the rocking motion.
“It’s going to take some getting used to,” he said.
Thirty years ago, comedian and actor Tig Notaro didn’t have a clear direction in life, so she followed some childhood friends who wanted to get into entertainment to Los Angeles. Secretly wanting to do stand-up, Notaro decided to try her luck at various outlets in town, which became the start of her successful career.
“I stayed on my friends’ couch near the Hollywood Improv on Melrose, and a couple months later, got my own studio apartment in the Miracle Mile area,” Notaro says. “I love all the options for everything in L.A. — the entertainment, the restaurants. I like to stay active. So many people love the hiking options in Los Angeles, and I’m one of them.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
Notaro appears in Season 3 of Apple TV’s “The Morning Show” and is a series regular on Paramount+’s “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” as she was on “Star Trek: Discovery.” She’s also a touring stand-up comic and hosts “Handsome,” a comedy podcast, with Fortune Feimster and Mae Martin. The trio will be taping a live show May 4 at the Wiltern with the cast of Netflix’s “The Hunting Wives.” The live shows include interviews, but also “incorporate some ridiculous things,” she says. For example, upon hearing that some of the hosts always wanted to learn to tap dance, Notaro “hired a tap instructor to come to our live show in Austin and teach us how to tap dance in front of the audience.”
Notaro lives near Hollywood with her wife, actor Stephanie Allynne, their 9-year-old fraternal twin boys, Max and Finn, and three cats, Fluff, Linus and Skip. When she’s not touring, her ideal Sundays include sampling vegan restaurants, wandering through bookstores or museums, and doing something physically active with the family.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
6 a.m.: Up with the kids
Because we have active children, we still wake up at 6 a.m. or 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, but there’s not as much of a rush to get going. Stephanie and I will often have coffee and chat in the living room together. I love that part of the day. Stephanie may cook breakfast, but Max and Finn are pretty self-sufficient and can make certain little meals for themselves. Max is really starting to take an interest in cooking, so he’d make breakfast for himself. Our family is vegan, but he eats eggs, so he makes himself an egg sandwich with avocado a lot of times.
9 a.m.: Daily morning walk
After breakfast, we usually have a morning walk around our neighborhood. That’s a daily thing I like to do, regardless of what’s going on. Now that I’m not touring as much, tennis is back on the schedule. So I’d go to Plummer Park in West Hollywood and play for a while, then join the family for lunch.
11:30 a.m.: Hike with a side of chickpea sandwich
I love Trails, a cafe in Griffith Park, where you can eat outdoors. It serves simple food, and has good vegan options. I usually get their chickpea salad sandwich. The food there is great. Afterward, we’d visit Griffith Observatory, where there’s lots to see. There are lots of great trails in the park, so we’d go for an hour hike before leaving.
3 p.m.: Browse the shelves for rock biographies
Bookstores are fun, so we’d head downtown for the Last Bookstore, which is in a historic building with lots of vintage books. I really love all things plant-based, and I’m a very big music fanatic. So I love to look for vegan books, nutrition books, rock biographies and autobiographies. It’s just fun to browse around the stacks.
If we didn’t go to the bookstore, we’d probably go to LACMA. Our sons are huge fans of art and want to go for each new exhibit. They love Hockney, Basquiat and Picasso, to name a few.
4 p.m.: Cuddle with cuties at a cat cafe
We’d then make a quick stop at [Crumbs & Whiskers], a kitten and cat cafe on Melrose for coffee, snacks and to pet the cats. It’s best to make reservations in advance. There’s cats all around the place that need to be adopted. You can visit and pet them, or find a new roommate. I’d love to take some home, but we already have three.
5:30 p.m. Italian or sushi, but make it vegan
We’re an early dinner family. One restaurant we like is Pura Vita in West Hollywood. It’s the greatest vegan Italian food, and for non-vegans, nobody ever knows the difference. It’s the first 100% plant-based Italian restaurant in the United States. They make an incredible kale salad and I love the San Gennaro pizza. It’s got cashew mozzarella, tomato sauce, Italian sausage crumble and more.
Then there’s Planta in Marina del Rey. It’s right on the harbor and you can sit outside and look at the boats coming in and out. They have sushi, salads and other plant-based entrees. They’ve got a really great spicy tuna roll that’s made out of watermelon. They are magicians.
Or there’s Crossroads Kitchen in West Hollywood. They play the best classic rock, and the atmosphere is upscale, fine dining. The appetizers that we always get are called Moroccan Cigars, which are vegan meat substitutes fried in a rolled batter. I really like the grilled lion’s mane steak, their mushroom steak with truffle potatoes, or the scallopini Milanese, that has a chicken or tofu option. I get the chicken with arugula on top. I always love to have a decaf espresso with dessert, which is either a brownie sundae or banana pudding.
7:30 p.m.: Comfort watch or word games
After dinner, the kids often like to watch an episode of “Friends,” a show that all ages enjoy, sports or “The Simpsons.” Or we’d play a game where each of us will add a word to a sentence and create a weird or funny long sentence until one of our sons says period. Then they’ll try and remember the whole sentence and repeat it back.
9:30 p.m.: Bubble bath then bed
The boys usually go to bed at 8:30 p.m. and bedtime for us is 9:30 p.m. Stephanie and I would read or chat. I like to take a bubble bath, if people must know. The best Sundays for me mean finding a good balance of relaxing and being active. I feel very lucky that my family and I can do those things together.
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then the soft sound of my door opening. He moved like someone practiced in disappearing.
His name meant “complete” in Arabic, which is what I felt when we were together.
I met him the way you meet most things that matter in Los Angeles — without intending to. In our senior year at a college in eastern L.A. County, we were introduced through mutual friends, then thrown together by the particular gravity of people who recognized something in each other. He was a Muslim medical student, conservative and careful and funny in the dry, precise way of someone who has always had to choose his words. I was loud where he was quiet, messy where he was disciplined. I was out. He was not.
I understood, or thought I did. I thought that I couldn’t get hurt if I was completely conscious throughout the endeavor. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel like the whole world shares your freedoms — until you realize the city is enormous, and not all of it belongs to you in the same way.
For months, our world was confined to my apartment. He would slip in after dark, and we’d stay up late talking about his family in Iran, classical music and the particular pressure of being the son someone sacrificed everything to bring here. He told me things he said he’d never told anyone, and I believed him.
The orange glow from my Nesso lamp lit his face while the indigo sky pressed against the window behind him. In our small little world, we were safe. Outside was another matter.
On our first real date, I took him to the L.A. Phil’s “An Evening of Film & Music: From Mexico to Hollywood” program. I told him they were cheap seats even though they were the first row on the terrace. He was thrilled in the way only someone who doesn’t expect to be delighted actually gets delighted — fully, without guarding it. I put my arm around his shoulders. At some point, I shifted and moved it, and he nudged it back. He was OK with PDA here.
I remember thinking that wealth is a great barrier to harm and then feeling silly for extrapolating my own experience once again. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were just two people in love with the same music.
Outside was still another matter.
In February, on Valentine’s Day, he took me to a Yemeni restaurant in Anaheim. We hovered over saffron tea surrounded by other young Southern Californians, and we looked like friends. Before we went in, we sat in the parking lot of the strip mall — signs in Arabic advertising bread, coffee, halal meats, the Little Arabia District — hand in hand. I leaned over to kiss him.
“Not here,” he said. His eyes shifted furtively. “Someone might see.”
I understood, or told myself I did, but I was saddened. Later, after the kind of reflection that only arrives in the wreckage, I would understand something harder: I had been unconsciously asking him to choose, over and over, between the people he loved and the person he loved. I had a long pattern of choosing unavailable men, telling myself it was because I could handle the complexity. The truth was more embarrassing. I thought that if someone like him chose me anyway — chose me over the weight of societal expectations — it would mean I was worth choosing. It took me a long time to see how unfair that was to him and to me.
We went to the Norton Simon Museum together in November, on the kind of gray Pasadena day when the 210 Freeway roars in the background like white noise. He studied for the MCAT while I wrote a paper on Persian rugs. In between practice problems, he translated ancient Arabic scripts for me. I thought, “We make a good team.” Afterward, we walked through the galleries and he didn’t let go of my arm.
That was the version of us I kept returning to — when the ending came during Ramadan. It arrived as a spiritual reflection of my own. I texted: “Does this end at graduation — whatever we are doing?”
He thought I meant Ramadan. I did not mean Ramadan.
“I care about you,” he wrote, “but I don’t want you to think this could work out to anything more than just dating. I mean, of course, I’ve fantasized about marrying you. If I could live my life the way I wanted, of course I would continue. I’m just sad it’s not in this lifetime.”
I was in Mexico City when these texts were exchanged. That night I flew to Oaxaca to clear my head and then, after less than 24 hours, flew back to L.A. No amount of vacation would allow me to process what had just happened, so I threw myself back into work.
My therapist told me to use the conjunction “and” instead of “but.” It happened, and I am changed. The harm I caused and the love I felt. The beauty of what we made and the impossibility of where it could go. She gave me a knowing smile when I asked if it would stay with me forever. She didn’t answer, which was the answer.
I think about the freeways now, the way Joan Didion called them our only secular communion. When you’re on the ground in Los Angeles, the world narrows to the few blocks around you. Get on the freeway and you understand the whole body of the city at once: the arteries, the pulse, the scale of the thing.
You understand that you are a single cell in something enormous and moving. It is all out of your control. I am in a lane. The lane shaped how I drive. He was simply in a different lane, and his lane shaped him, and those two facts can coexist without either of us being the villain of the sad story.
He came like a secret in the night, and he left the same way. What we made in between was real and complicated and mine to hold forever, hoping we find each other in the next life.
The author lives in Los Angeles.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
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