When Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams Garcia discovered that her longtime love, Jerry Garcia, was seeing another woman, she became incensed.

The younger of her two daughters with the Grateful Dead guitarist, Theresa, wasn't even a year old.

Desperate to hold her family together, Carolyn Garcia said, she drove to a Mill Valley film studio and confronted Deborah Koons, who was working there on a movie about the Grateful Dead, and pleaded: "Please go. Please let Jerry come home."

She said she had handed her rival a one-way plane ticket to New York, where Koons had been living when she met Jerry Garcia. Carolyn Garcia said Koons had "laughed" and said, "The spoils belong to the victor."

Koons Garcia remembers it differently.

"She told me she hadn't had a conversation with Jerry in years," she recalled.

"She felt like a waitress."

She said she and Jerry had cashed in the ticket.

Twenty years later, the two women are still battling. Now, they've faced off in Marin County Superior Court over the late musician's estate. Carolyn Adams Garcia, 50, of Eugene, Ore., has sued to get her $5 million divorce agreement restored. Deborah Koons Garcia, 47, of Mill Valley, the widow and third wife of Jerry Garcia, cut off the $20,883 monthly payments to Carolyn Garcia after the musician died in August 1995.

Benefit concert canceled

Just last month, the Rex Foundation, the charitable arm of the Grateful Dead, canceled a planned benefit concert at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco after musician David Grisman pulled out because of trouble between the two women.

"Our (the Rex Foundation) executive director found out that if David played the benefit or any benefit for Rex as long as I was on the board, she (Deborah Garcia) would block releases of records that David recorded with Jerry over the last two years of his life," Carolyn Garcia charged.

Deborah Garcia told The Examiner she knew nothing about a canceled concert, but Carolyn Garcia's account was confirmed by Diane Blagman, a Rex Foundation board member who works as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C.

"We were disappointed. The purpose of the event was not for us - it was to put money back into the community," Blagman said. "We were upset. The Rex board is a separate entity but dependent on the Grateful Dead."

Carolyn Garcia resigned after the cancellation.

The ongoing clash between the two women is part of the bizarre legacy of Jerry Garcia and his extended family of three wives, assorted girlfriends and four daughters (with three different women).

Deborah Garcia insists the apparent animosity between herself and Carolyn Garcia is completely one-sided.

"There's no feud," she said in a phone interview with The Examiner. "I believe she feels that way. I do believe they (Carolyn Garcia and her daughters) feel rivalry, but it's one-sided. I don't feel that way.

"It's a strategy on their part to take the focus away from the facts," she said. "I do believe they're jealous of me. They're basically jealous of Jerry. He was talented and very creative. He had a life. They don't really have one.

"They're so jealous of me because I'm beautiful. They're jealous because I have money. They're jealous because Jerry loved me."

Carolyn Garcia seemed taken aback by Deborah Garcia's comments.

"I had a great life with Jerry," she said. "I had nothing to be jealous about. Besides, she didn't have kids. I have kids."

Little in common

Both women are strong-willed with forceful personalities. But the similarity ends there.

Carolyn Garcia looks very much the middle-aged overweight hippie earth mother with her long, graying hair, loose-fitting clothes and love beads. She's relaxed and smiles on the witness stand.

Carolyn Garcia grew up in upstate New York and caught a ride to California in 1963 with her brother, Donald, a graduate student at Stanford University. She met Jerry Garcia two years later in Palo Alto.

She became an instant icon of the '60s in Tom Wolfe's book

"Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," his chronicle of a drug-laced adventure across America by novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters.

"Mountain Girl" Carolyn Adams appears in the book as a free-spirited, beautiful Prankster - Kesey's main lover and mother of his infant daughter, Sunshine. Even then, she was part of an extended family. Kesey's wife, Fay, would occasionally meet up with the Pranksters, her own three children with Kesey in tow.

Carolyn Garcia would later have two more babies - Annabelle and Theresa - with Jerry Garcia.

Slim, cool and professional

Deborah Garcia is slim, cool and professional, and almost always wears expensive tailored black pants suits and a single strand of pearls in court. Garcia, whose dark hair is cut in a chin-length bob, rarely smiles in court and speaks so fast that her lawyer has asked her to slow down.

Deborah Garcia grew up in Ohio and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina and a master's of fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. She runs her own filmmaking company.

Both women had on-again, off-again relationships with Jerry Garcia. Carolyn Garcia first became involved with Jerry Garcia in 1965 and soon began living with him in a commune in the Haight-Ashbury. She came with him to Marin and later moved without him to Oregon with their two daughters. They were married in 1981 and divorced in 1993.

Hitching a ride

Deborah Garcia met Jerry Garcia after a 1973 concert when she hopped aboard the band's bus for a ride back to Manhattan and he sat next to her. She went to Europe for a year, and they exchanged letters. When she returned, she contacted him and embarked on a relationship in 1975 that lasted several years. They got together again after a chance encounter at a Mill Valley health food store in 1993 and were married the next year.

The enmity between the women came out in force after Garcia's death from a heart attack at a Marin drug rehab center.

Deborah Garcia refused to allow Carolyn Garcia to attend the musician's funeral at a Belvedere church. She also excluded her from a ceremony scattering his ashes at sea, leaving Carolyn Garcia sobbing at a San Francisco dock.

"I was devastated," Deborah Garcia said of her husband's death. "He didn't like Carolyn. He wanted her out of his life. I think if my husband says he wants her out of his life, he wants her out of his death.

"She stands on the dock and goes back and forth, begging to get on (that day)," recalled Deborah Garcia. "I said, "She ain't coming.' "

Theresa Garcia, 22, a San Fransisco art student and the youngest daughter of Carolyn and Jerry Garcia, recalled:

"She was screaming at my mom right in front of me on the day she was going to spread my father's ashes."

Deborah Garcia said Carolyn Garcia had brought Groucho Marx-style glasses onto the boat before anyone arrived - and planned to make a mockery of the sea service.

"She was expecting everybody to put on Bozo noses and Groucho glasses when we put the ashes in," Deborah Garcia said.

Not true, said Carolyn Garcia. "We took two huge boxes of gardenias and many, many bouquets of flowers to put over with the ashes. We were going to simply throw over the Bozo noses to lighten it up a little because Jerry was fond of Bozo noses and Groucho glasses. It was to be a touch of lightness."

Carolyn Garcia said the incident was still very painful:

"The whole thing feels like an open wound." &lt;