Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  The following morning (October 26, 1984), pathologist Ervin J. Jindrich, MD, performed an autopsy on what was left of John Doe number 9. Dr. Jindrich repeatedly noted the presence of extensive maggot activity. In the thoracic cavity he found only residual tissue, with a few fragments of identifiable lung and heart within the pericardial region. In the abdominal cavity there was a small amount of dried parchmentlike material appearing to be residual intestine. He uncovered no evidence of internal hemorrhage and no trauma to the ribs, thorax, or vertebral column. What was left of the head was deformed, flattened in a transverse direction, with the superior scalp and calvarium absent. The skull was massively fractured and in numerous small fragments, containing no remaining brain tissue. Contrary to police speculation, the external genitalia revealed an identifiable penis.

  Dr. Jindrich finished his work by eleven o’clock. He was unable to detect any powder residue on the victim’s head and found it impossible to determine whether a large defect above the right ear was antemortem or caused by insect destruction. His diagnosis revealed only a gunshot wound to the head with marked postmortem decomposition. Before typing up his report, the pathologist completed a couple final tasks. He surgically removed Richard Brautigan’s blackened hands for neutron activation studies. These tests would reveal the presence of microscopic gunpowder particles and demonstrate whether the subject had discharged a firearm prior to his death. Dr. Jindrich also retained the lower jaw and excised the upper for odontologic examination. Most of the upper front teeth were missing, avulsed from the impact of the fatal gunshot, yet many molars remained and hopefully surviving dental work would positively identify the victim.

  A dentist’s bill from Dr. Bennett Dubiner, DDS, who maintained an office on Sutter Street in San Francisco, was among the miscellaneous papers taken as evidence from Richard Brautigan’s home. Contacted by the Marin County Sheriff’s Department, Dr. Dubiner telephoned the Coroner’s Office the same day as the autopsy and reported he had last seen the writer professionally on September 9, 1984. During that office visit he had taken three bilateral bitewings and one periapical X-ray.

  The forensic odontologist for the Coroner’s Office, Dr. J. Robert Laverine, was notified and immediately called Dr. Dubiner. Subsequent phone conversations compared the September X-rays with the victim’s remaining postmortem teeth. There were three full gold crowns, two three-quarter crown bridge abutments, and two onlays in addition to two amalgam-filled molars. A couple of impacted upper third molars were also significant. The gold restorations and their radiographic outlines showing numerous concordant points proved beyond a doubt that the body in question was Richard Brautigan.

  A set of x-rays from Dr. James E. Smith, DDS, Brautigan’s Montana dentist, were being shipped down from Livingston over the weekend. Although a positive identification had been made, Dr. Laverine would not complete his final report until he had a chance to study this additional material. At the same time, a media bottom-feeding frenzy was well under way. The AP and UPI both put the story out on their wire services on the morning of the twenty-sixth, date line: Bolinas. Although the sheriff’s office stated they had not positively identified the body, Seymour Lawrence publicly announced the author’s death from his office at Delacorte Press in New York City.

  Phones started ringing. Reporters from all over the country called Brautigan’s friends, acquaintances, and lovers, past and present. Don Carpenter, among those contacted, remembered the interviews with a certain ironic relish. “It would have destroyed Richard to know how his friends are talking about him,” he said. “It would have upset the shit out of him in a wonderful way and I sort of enjoy that. Because he was so secretive and he swore you to secrecy over the most minute details and now he can no longer swear anyone to secrecy. All the secrets, all the little secrets that he bottled up over the years, were being garbaged all over the place.”

  The quality of the news stories varied widely. One paper printed the AP wire copy, severely truncated, slugging it with the headline Hippie Author Dies. The Oregonian went with most of the AP story, running it as an obituary. The staid New York Times charted a more prudent course, not without certain inaccuracies, running the piece (October 26, 1984) above the weather map on page 6 of the second section, just before the classified ads. (“A body discovered yesterday by the police in a house in Bolinas, Calif., was believed to be the remains of Richard Brautigan, a quixotic counterculture poet and writer, his publisher said.”) The San Francisco papers, the Chronicle and the Examiner, each carried long stories with the basic AP text sufficiently enhanced by staff writers to justify bylines.

  Several newspapers (including the Times and the Chronicle) reported that Brautigan was born in Spokane, Washington (Tacoma, in fact), and that his first wife was named Virginia Dionne. (Virginia Alder’s middle name was Dionne). Norman Melnick, writing in the Examiner, proved sufficiently inventive not to rely on the AP for his mistakes. He wrote that Brautigan “apparently did not complete high school” and that Trout Fishing in America was “a novel written during the San Francisco flower child era.” Nearly every subsequent newspaper article included a quote from Tom McGuane: “When the 1960s ended, [Brautigan] was the baby that was thrown out with the bath water.”

  Over in his office at the Sheriff’s Department Investigations Division in the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Marin County Civic Center, Sergeant Tony Russo had too much work to spend time reading newspapers. At ten in the morning on October 26, he interviewed Richard Brautigan’s daughter, Ianthe, and her husband, Paul Swensen. In her statement, Ianthe mentioned her father’s financial difficulties, calling him “cash poor.” Recently, he had begun borrowing money against the properties he owned in Montana. Her father had been depressed for quite some time, she told Sgt. Russo, and had been drinking heavily for the past five years. When alone and drinking, he would threaten suicide, most often talking about killing himself with a gun. In any case, he never believed he’d live a long life. Ianthe also said her father loved large-caliber nickel-plated handguns.

  “Mrs. Swensen did not have any frequent direct contact with her father,” Sgt. Russo observed in his report. He noted some confusion concerning their final conversation. Ianthe mentioned she last spoke to her father at the end of May, when he called her from the neighbors’ house, not yet having the phone connected at his place. She also indicated that she had talked with him on Father’s Day. In any case, it had been at least three or four months before Richard Brautigan’s death since she last heard the sound of his voice.

  Just before two, Sgt. Russo spoke with Judge Richard Hodge at the Alameda County Superior Court. Hodge was the executor of Brautigan’s will and had been his attorney for a number of years. He remembered that during their last conversation, Richard said that he was writing a screenplay and sounded more “upbeat” than usual. Sgt. Russo asked Judge Hodge if Brautigan had been having problems with anyone.

  Thinking it over, the judge replied that Richard had been concerned “about some sort of conspiracy to get him by some woman poet who lived in Bolinas.” Rumors had circulated in the community that Brautigan had made “disparaging remarks” about a Vietnam veteran also living there. Judge Hodge had heard a story that the angry vet had come by to see Brautigan with a gun but that he had talked the matter over with him and had “gotten it settled.” The judge observed in closing that he had never heard Richard Brautigan ever mention anything about suicide.

  At 2:15 PM, Sgt. Russo called Joel Shawn at his law office in San Francisco. Shawn represented Richard Brautigan’s legal interests in California but said he not seen his client recently. A lunch date for September 5, 1984, had been broken when Brautigan missed the bus into the city.

  Shawn described the writer as being almost “childlike”: honest, righteous, a “straightforward guy.” Recently, he had seemed like “good old Richard” again, excited by the work he was doing in spite of financial problems. Asked about suicide, Joel Shawn said that Brautigan had never talked about it with him.r />
  Twenty minutes later, the detective telephoned Joe Swindlehurst in Livingston, Montana. The attorney stated that he last spoke with Richard Brautigan on September 13, when his client called to ask about selling his Montana property and to request some tax information for his accountant. Swindlehurst indicated Brautigan was experiencing financial troubles. Cash was not coming in, and he had mortgaged his Pine Creek place to raise money. Brautigan drank too much, Swindlehurst said. He hadn’t heard any talk about suicide, but it would not surprise him as Richard had a fascination for large-caliber firearms. Swindlehurst told Sgt. Russo about the times the writer had shot off a handgun inside his ranch house. “Maybe somebody will notice the holes Richard Brautigan put in the floor.”

  At 3:00 PM, Sgt. Russo made his final phone call for the day, contacting David Fechheimer at his home and office on the corner of Hyde and Lombard. Fechheimer told Russo that, having spoken with Becky Fonda in Montana, he had called Bob Junsch the day before, instructing him to check out Brautigan’s Bolinas house. If the sergeant informed him his friend’s death had been a suicide, he wouldn’t be surprised. Brautigan had long been interested in Japanese culture, he said, and in Japan suicide had “an altogether different meaning than it has in the United States.”

  Sgt. Russo asked the private detective his routine question, had the victim been having “any problems with anyone.” Fechheimer and Judge Hodge had heard the same stories. He replied that Brautigan told him that he’d been involved in a feud over a Vietnam veteran with Joanne Kyger, a poet in Bolinas. Sgt. Russo heard the name wrong. He wrote it down in his report as “Kieter.”

  Over the weekend, the press coverage continued unabated. Richard Brautigan was back in the headlines one last time. With each subsequent newspaper story, the spread of misinformation widened. Inaccuracies included referring to Brautigan’s daughter as “Ianthe Wiston” and stating Richard’s body “was found by a private investigator hired by the author’s New York agent.” Most egregious, an utterly fictitious story reported that a half-empty whiskey bottle, “with sunlight refracting through it,” had been discovered standing close beside the corpse.

  On Saturday, October 27, Brautigan’s obituary ran in the New York Times. It referred to him as “a literary idol of the 1960’s who eventually fell out of fashion.” Another obituary in the Times of London appeared the same day, incorrectly giving the author’s age as fifty-one and saying that “in later years, feeling that he had been unfairly discarded by public and critics alike, he became depressed and began to drink heavily.”

  One piece so teemed with malice as to be worthy of Tom McGuane’s adroit bon mot: “urinal ism.” Warren Hinckle III (whose black eye-patch, Falstaffian manner, and ever-present basset hound, Bentley, made him a local San Francisco celebrity since the days when he edited Ramparts in the midsixties), had an eponymous column, “Hinckle’s Journal,” running in the Chronicle. In a piece he called “The Big Sky Fell In on Brautigan,” Hinckle spun a vituperative tall tale suggesting the author had been destroyed by “a macho sense of competition” in what he termed “the jet-set enclave in the wilds of Montana.”

  The source of this dubious information was Ken Kelley, an Oakland-based journalist, acclaimed for his incisive Playboy interviews. It was Kelley who brought down Anita Bryant, letting her babble buoyantly about “queers.” A recent friend of Brautigan’s, Kelley had been invited to Pine Creek in the summer of 1979. Hoist by his own petard, Kelley rambled on and on to Hinckle, Jack Daniel’s in hand. “A bunch of artistic weirdos living in rancher country,” claimed Kelley. “It was the whole mental macho thing in Montana that I think really got to Richard.”

  Hyper and excitable, discursively elaborating to the eager note-taking Hinckle, Kelley appeared almost possessed as he furiously paced the deck of his shabby penthouse. “And the artists seemed compelled to compete in macho terms against the cowboys, and then tried to out-macho each other. Every night seemed to be the boy’s night out. You had to get drunk and get your gun and shoot off more bullets than the other guy. It was all so competitive and so incestuous. Everybody knew everybody else and was sleeping with everybody else, et cetera.”

  Hinckle, after the easy score, made no effort to follow up or check on other sources. Ken Kelley found himself caught in the crossfire when the story broke. Two weeks later, he published more reflective feelings (“That’s the way I am right now. Richard is dead, and I just feel rotten.”) in a piece for Express, a free weekly newspaper serving the East Bay. By then it was too late.

  Seymour Lawrence, Russell Chatham, and Terry McDonell (assistant managing editor) of Newsweek wrote letters to the Chronicle, denouncing Hinckle’s column. Chatham called Warren Hinckle “a piece of festering tripe,” and denounced Kelley. The painter suggested that “The word macho should be sculpted out of used razorblades and rudely rammed up the ass of every insensitive moron like yourself, who misunderstands and misapplies it every time they are called upon to discuss art or artists who are not domesticated or properly shelved and labeled.” In a note to Ken Kelley, Hinckle called these letters “Hit mail from the Brautigan Mafia.” The Chronicle never printed any of their angry words.

  The most astonishing Brautigan news story to break on that late October Saturday originated in Tacoma, Washington, the city of the writer’s birth. Having seen a report of Richard’s presumed death on television in San Francisco the night before, his half brother, David Folston, telephoned their mother, Mary Lou Folston, at her home in Eugene, Oregon, to deliver the sad news. She told the press they had “corresponded frequently,” but in truth, Mary Lou had not seen or heard from her first-born son in over twenty-eight years. Still, she proudly followed his career and growing fame since he burst onto the national scene in 1969.

  After the call from her surviving son, Mary Lou phoned her sister, Eveline Fjetland, in Tacoma, to share the bad tidings and ask for a favor. This involved making contact with her first husband, a seventy-six-year-old retired laborer named Bernard Brautigan, who still lived in the area. When she left him, five decades earlier, Mary Lou neglected to mention she was pregnant. Now, she wanted him to know the truth. When Eveline phoned the elder Brautigan and told him Richard had been found dead in Bolinas, he replied, “Who’s Richard? I don’t know nothing about him.”

  Confused, Bernard Brautigan made a long-distance call from Tacoma. He had not spoken with his ex-wife in fifty years. Their conversation was brief and unpleasant. When Brautigan asked Mary Lou for an explanation, she snapped, “You know I was pregnant when you left.”

  “The hell I did!” he said and hung up.

  Denying ever having had a son to the press, Bernard said, “If I had anything to do with it, how come she waited fifty years to tell me?” In her own telephone interview, Mary Lou was also evasive. “He asked me if Richard was his son, and I said no. I told him I found Richard in the gutter. I just packed my things in a bag and left. Richard never questioned who his father was and never was interested in it.” In her opinion, there was no need to dwell further on the matter. “It’s a dead issue,” she said.

  The next day, Sunday, October 28, Richard Brautigan’s remains were cremated at the Pleasant Hills crematory in Sebastopol, California. There was no formal service. Mary Lou Folston had not been informed of the funeral plans. Like some perverted metaphor, the writer’s hands and his jaws remained sealed in evidence bags, awaiting further tests. What became of them is not known. Brautigan’s ashes were placed in a Japanese ceramic funeral urn. When he departed Montana for Europe and Japan the year before, Richard left the mysterious container in the care of Tom McGuane, along with his guns and fishing rods. Contacted following his return from New York, McGuane shipped the urn to California.

  Twenty-seven years after Richard Brautigan’s death, his ashes remain unburied. The Japanese urn resides, along with a bottle of sake, in the top drawer of a dresser in his daughter’s Santa Rosa home. “I won’t keep him forever,” Ianthe told an interviewer for the Pacific Sun on August 29,
2000, “but he’s safe now.” A slat nailed to the wall prevents the drawer holding the urn from being pulled out more than a couple of inches. “He can’t get out,” she said, “whenever I think of putting him to rest, so to speak, I just can’t. My stomach just churns.”

  On Monday morning, October 29, 1984, Herb Caen’s column in the Chronicle led off with a long paragraph about Brautigan. The “Sakamenna Kid” recounted the first time he met the writer (1968) “standing at a Powell St. cable car stop, handing out seed packets on which he had written poems, a different one on each packet.” The columnist remembered Please Plant This Book. Caen’s piece ended incorrectly. Repeating the weekend’s erroneous story that his New York literary agent had hired “the S.F. private eye who found Brautigan dead,” Caen added a final dramatic irony. “The agent had news that might have saved Brautigan’s life: an offer of a two-book contract.”

  Over in Marin County, Dr. Jim Smith’s dental x-rays arrived from Montana. Dr. Laverine took the delivery and completed his odontological presentation. At five minutes after ten, Sgt. Tony Russo was on the phone, conducting his first interview of the day. He contacted James Sakata, proprietor of Cho-Cho, a restaurant on 1020 Kearny Street in North Beach. The .44 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver Richard Brautigan had used to end his life was registered to Mr. Sakata, and his name was engraved on the butt. He stated he had loaned the gun to Brautigan in March or April of 1984, around the time he returned from Japan. Brautigan told him that he didn’t have any weapons in his Bolinas residence and “just wanted one around.”