I’d already repudiated the word, because many other people before that were using it. It was a catch word. You remember everybody went around going, “What’s happening, baby?”
…I remember one ad showed a floating woman in outer space, a starry background, and the legend was, “I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere.”
So by that time movies and the Supremes and all were in general usage around the word in ways that had nothing to do with my original sense, which became so foreign to me that I just dropped it. However, it’s like your name, you can’t drop it without somebody coming and picking it up and saying, “You dropped something mister.”’