“My money is currently tied up in wheat futures,” Richard said, matching her mocking tone. “While we’re currently on the subject of grains, would you like a drink?”
“A glass of white wine. We’ll toast your wheat futures, so you can get out of this goddamn rat hole.” She sat down in a green wicker rocking chair. “Really, you should think about better ways of investing your money. I have a feeling that your wheat futures aren’t that promising.”
When Richard gave Sherry a glass of white wine he wondered why she didn’t take off her jacket. He wanted to know what her body looked like. Fifteen minutes later, after another glass of wine, Sherry still had not unbuttoned her coat. “Aren’t you warm with your jacket on?” Richard asked. “The dinner reservations I made aren’t until an hour, and it only takes a few minutes to get there. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable? Don’t worry, I’m not going to get you drunk and try to seduce you.”
“I don’t trust you,” Sherry said with a smile. “Are you sure you made reservations for dinner? I think you’re trying to use the wine to take advantage of a little person’s limited alcohol capacity.”
“You found me out,” Brautigan confessed.
“It wasn’t hard to do. You may write books but you can be read like one, too.”
“The lady’s too smart for burning.”
Sherry smiled and started unbuttoning her velvet jacket. “The wine does make me hot,” she said. “Maybe your plan is working. A man who has all his money in wheat futures has to get lucky sometime.” She finished unbuttoning her coat but didn’t open it.
This drove Richard crazy with anticipation. “What in hell did her body look like!” he thought.
“I’m certainly hot,” Sherry continued, holding out her empty glass. “Can I have a little more wine? Maybe it will cool me off.”
Richard filled her glass from the jug in the fridge, facing away from Sherry.
When he turned back toward her, wineglass in hand, she had removed her black velvet jacket and sat with her arms resting on the arms of the rocker, grinning like Sylvester after swallowing Tweety Bird.
Richard stopped dead in his tracks. Sherry wore a sheer antique lace blouse. She wore no bra beneath it. “I saw her sitting there with her breasts totally exposed under the delicate transparent blouse from another century,” Brautigan wrote many years later. Vetter had the face of a teenage girl, and “an incredibly erotic body with very large breasts.” Richard felt momentarily at a loss for words.
“The wine, please,” she said, still smiling.
Richard thought it looked like the smile of someone having a great deal of fun and trying hard to conceal it. “If I can still move, I’ll try to bring you the wine,” he said at last.
“I certainly hope that you can move,” Sherry replied, her mischievous smile a promise of further surprises still to come. This began a relationship that was to last, on and off, for almost a decade.
“I was supposed to do the photograph for [Revenge of the Lawn],” Erik Weber said, “but Richard was pissed at me.” He and Brautigan got together in New York that May and Weber took a number of pictures. Richard was mad about a photograph taken of him leaning against a wall in Helen Brann’s office. The picture ran in Mademoiselle when the magazine published three of Brautigan’s short stories in July. “Richard thought it was the worst photograph ever taken of him,” Weber said, “so he decided to use Edmund Shea, rather than me.”
The photo session for Revenge of the Lawn took place in the kitchen of Sherry Vetter’s Noe Valley apartment. She lived in a big Victorian building “with Yuri and several others—one girl from Sweden—it was great. We had fun.” Brautigan had the idea to include a chocolate cake in the picture, a visual reference to a line in the title story. “He believed that he was six years old and it was a cloudy day about to rain and his mother was baking a chocolate cake.”
Two cakes were used for the cover shoot. Sherry baked the first herself at Richard’s request. She remembered Edmund Shea took pictures for about two hours. “Periodically Richard would say, ‘Okay, now change clothes.’” Sherry went through six outfits, searching for just the right look. One choice, “a white nylon thing that was like a halter top,” was particularly revealing. Edmund suggested she lean over and gouge big pieces out of the cake. She tore into it, eating chunks by the handful, at once innocent and carnal, “a sexual thing,” Sherry said. “And Richard thought that was great.”
Sherry’s cake was totally destroyed. Richard went out and bought another from a local bakery. Sherry changed her outfit a final time, choosing her Swiss grandmother’s handmade lace blouse she wore on her first date with Brautigan. Grinning broadly, Sherry perched on the seat edge of her press-back oak rocking chair with the store-bought chocolate cake on the white linen-covered table in front of her, and Edmund Shea took the cover photograph for Revenge of the Lawn. After the story collection was published, the Noe Valley pastry chef baked “a facsimile cake” and placed it in the professional shop’s front bay window surrounded by a half dozen copies of Brautigan’s book.
The baker’s modest window display provided a memorial to Richard Brautigan’s singular vision of book design. Revenge of the Lawn was the last of his works to feature photographic covers with attractive young women. Three years later, Simon & Schuster published his new novel, The Hawkline Monster, and a decision was made to distance the book from Richard’s earlier “hippie” publications. Hawkline had a traditional mainstream look with commercial dust jacket art.
In 1976, Sombrero Fallout followed with an elegant dust jacket painting by John Ansado of a lovely Asian woman holding a black cat. A simultaneous publication in Japan by Shobun-sha featured a color photograph of Japanese American actress Mie Hunt, who had appeared in the raunchy 1971 British film Sex Clinic. The photo created an entirely different mood from the American dust jacket painting. Hunt, hair bobbed and coiffed like silent movie star Louise Brooks, sat on a stool, one hand between her legs, lips painted Chinese-lacquer red, black dress slit to reveal her naked inner thigh. A wanton, depraved look glazed her heavily mascara-rimmed eyes. It could well be a poster for one of the soft-core porn movies Brautigan came to love in Japan.
When Jonathan Cape brought out the English edition the following year, Richard had a final chance to dabble in art direction. He didn’t ask his girlfriend to pose for him, hiring a professional model instead. The Brebner Agency charged him $225 for the services of Mia Hara, a charming Japanese model. Erik Weber took the photographs in Richard’s Union Street apartment. It was all strictly business. Brautigan maintained final approval, but left the designing to the professionals.
In 1980, when The Tokyo–Montana Express was published, a photograph of Richard and his friend Takako Shiina floating in a small green boat off the coast of Japan near the town of Ajiro appeared on the back of the dust jacket. Ten years earlier it would have graced the front cover of the book. Instead, the dust jacket featured only the title in large slanted red letters above a photograph of a medallion depicting Japan’s last coal-burning steam engine. Richard had seen the bronze disc in the transportation museum in Tokyo. The same train image was used in the book to divide the chapters.
Brautigan promoted the photo to the front wrapper of the Delta trade paperback edition. “Cover concept” was credited to the author. Shiina, Richard’s soul-sister, owned The Cradle bar, his favorite hangout in Tokyo. She sits apart from him, leaning against the gunwale, resting her head on her shoulder. A feeling of utter resignation pervades the image. Wearing a black cowboy hat and shirt, Richard slouches in the bow, his hands forming an inverted steeple between his knees. He stares wistfully off into the distance as if searching for something precious he’s lost forever.
thirty-six: satori
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN TOLD his friend Jack Thibeau this story. It began one night in North Beach around 1970, when fame first exposed Brautigan to the blinding limelight of national attention. Richard picked up not only the tab, but a comely yo
ung admirer as well. She was just his type: willowy, blond, a hippie chick with few acknowledged inhibitions. Richard brought her back to his apartment on Geary, where the contrast between the low-rent surroundings and his newfound celebrity only intensified her ardor. Within the confines of his recently purchased brass bed, she gave him the sort of blow job he had once described in a poem as “a circle of castles” around his penis.
When he climaxed, the young blond spat his ejaculate into the palm of her hand, prodding the viscid substance gently with a fingertip as if examining some precious treasure, bright pearls from the crown jewels of an emperor. Looking up with stars dancing in her eyes, she murmured in wonder: “Richard Brautigan’s sperm . . .”
thirty-seven: fame’s feathery crowbar
“RICHARD’S GETTING LAID by a bevy of 18-year olds,” Keith Abbott wrote to a friend after a visit to San Francisco. Abbott regarded this as “only a convenient shorthand symbol” for Brautigan’s newfound fame. He was equally impressed by expensive dinner tabs, endless cab rides, and complimentary tickets waiting at the Fillmore. Like a rock star, Richard “strolled around and collected accolades from the kids. Brautigan hitchhiked until the end of his life whenever necessity dictated but rarely rode a bus again once the money started rolling in. Richard’s itemized expenses for 1969 were more than double his total income for the previous year. By 1971, the cab receipts in his income tax folder were bundled together with rubber bands in wads thicker than packs of playing cards.
Among the few luxuries Brautigan bought were a television set and the antique brass whorehouse bed he had long coveted, most useful for a man beset by groupies. Not all were one-night stands. Doralyn Foodym, a fellow Aquarian and student of anthropology at Berkeley, recalled “a time when we were very fond of each other.” Once, in an “absurd” moment, her Mustang was towed away after Brautigan “moved it,” one of several hints that he really knew how to drive when he wanted to. Doralyn remembered sitting on the brass bed at Geary Street with Richard, talking about Edmund Shea, when he told her that there were lots of things she’d be better able to understand as she grew older. At the time, she “resented the comment like hell,” but five or six years later, she wrote to Brautigan from Copenhagen, where she was about to receive a PhD from the Institute of Social Medicine, to say he had been right. Now she knew how odd it felt “to be with those who are naive but don’t know it yet.”
As the summer of 1969 wound to a close, the book design for the Delacorte omnibus edition was completed to Brautigan’s satisfaction. Sam Lawrence wrote, calling it “beautiful [. . .] I’m grateful to you and Roz Barrow for making it possible.” An ad was prepared for the New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice, and the Sunday Examiner & Chronicle in San Francisco. It featured a triple photo of Richard’s face above the heading, “The great three-headed Brautigan is now at your bookstore.” Franklin Spier, Inc., the advertising agency responsible, thought it “wacky, to be sure,” but a “stopper visually,” something with appeal for the Brautigan audience. The opening line of their copy read, “From out of the West comes the thundering typewriter of the great Richard Brautigan just in time to save avant-garde writing from the bad guys.” The text went on to quote the well-worn John Ciardi quote from the back cover of Trout Fishing, adding “Mmmm, that right, Kimo Ciardi.”
Brautigan hated this ad, and it did not run. Instead, Delacorte followed his detailed instructions to the letter. Richard’s own design for a new advertisement had no cute Lone Ranger references, only a photograph of the book’s cover. He simplified the text and included quotes from Time and the Examiner & Chronicle, eliminating the Ciardi blurb entirely.
Again, Richard’s instincts were more on the money than the crass selling notions of the Big Apple publishing wizards. Sam Lawrence recognized a winner and wrote Brautigan, “I like the way you’ve changed the ads.” Orders began “literally pouring in” at the beginning of September. The “extraordinary” demand for the three Delta paperbacks (scheduled for publication in November) was so great a planned first printing of twenty thousand copies for each title had to be increased to fifty thousand each before the end of September. The Delacorte hardback had its publication date moved ahead to October 31, but the first edition still bore the date September 1969. A second printing had to be ordered by November 5.
One afternoon during the third week in September, Richard and Valerie showed up at the Minimum Daily Requirement with Abbie and Anita Hoffman, who were in town trying to raise money for Abbie’s fast-approaching conspiracy trial in Chicago. Paul Krassner was on his way up from Los Angeles with some film they had made of the riots during the Democratic National Convention the previous summer. Brautigan had an idea that the MDR might be a good place to show it and dispatched an employee over to Kendrick Rand’s Vallejo Street apartment to say Hoffman wanted a word with him. By the time Kendrick arrived at his restaurant, “Richard had a fair amount to drink.” He and Valerie got into a fight, ending when she poured a pitcher of beer over his head. “They soon left in a huff,” Rand remembered. “I stayed up until about three in the morning with Abbie.” Kendrick agreed to let Hoffman show his film at the MDR the following Sunday.
Rand had some trouble rounding up a projector but “finally got one from someone who was connected with the Committee [Theater].” With only word of mouth for advertising, “the place was mobbed.” They showed the film against the back wall and people who couldn’t get in stood out on the sidewalk staring through the big picture window. Richard and Valerie, at peace once again, sat with Kendrick and his wife, Annie. “It was a wonderful night,” Rand remembered.
By early October, Brautigan had received invitations to read at more than ten colleges. John Barth wrote asking him to come to the State University of New York at Buffalo. Richard had been suggested to Barth, who managed the reading program, by Robert Creeley, recently arrived in Buffalo as part of the English faculty.
The second week of October, Brautigan participated in a writers’ conference at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California. Among the other authors were Kay Boyle (who gave the keynote address), Jessamyn West, William Stafford, Caroline Kizer, and Josephine Miles. After conducting a morning seminar, “On Writing,” Richard read his work at eight o’clock Saturday evening on a program with Stafford and Miles. For three days, he was paid $180, plus $10 for expenses.
Two welcome royalty checks arrived early in October. (The first, from the Four Seasons Foundation, totaled $3,000; a second, for $695.53, came from Grove Press. After Rolling Stone bought two more short stories for $30 each, Helen Brann wrote Jann Wenner demanding a “new payment schedule.” Wenner balked, writing Brann he “would be sorry to discontinue this feature, but we cannot afford to pay the kind of money you are demanding.” He offered “$50 per short story, irrespective of length.” Richard accepted. The publicity value of appearing in Rolling Stone was worth it.
Before the end of the year, Brautigan sold the periodical two more stories at their new rate. The smallest amount Richard earned in 1969 came from Poetry magazine, which sent him a check for $3 when his poem “Wood” appeared in the October issue. Somewhat belatedly, Heliotrope (a San Francisco outfit self-described as “a learning environment open to anyone,” with courses including Swedish massage and a celebration of dusk), mailed an honorarium of $20 in October for printing Brautigan’s poem “Critical Can Opener” in their summer catalog.
Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, on October 21, 1969, of massive gastrointestinal hemorrhage brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. A lifetime of heavy drinking caught up with him at last. The King of the Beats was dead. Around the same time, Brautigan, the heir apparent, called Rip Torn in New York. Brautigan had cooked up a fishing trip to Deer Creek in Big Sur with Price Dunn, and they wanted Torn to join them. Rip remembered his words “tumbling over each other and the funny chortling noises he made.”
The actor left the matter up in the air. “If I can get a real cheap flight,” he said. Torn’s w
ife, the actress Geraldine Page, was heading for Hollywood soon to star opposite Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel’s psychosexual Civil War drama, The Beguiled. She decided to fly out early with Rip and the kids and be part of the adventure. Rip brought along a two-person kayak. The Torns landed at SFO and rented a station wagon, loading the luggage and strapping the kayak to the roof before driving into San Francisco to pick up Brautigan. Richard stashed Willard, his papier-mâché bird, in back along with his gear. After stocking up on road refreshments, they headed south to Monterey.
The Torns and their two-year-old daughter and twin diapered sons stayed with Price’s brother, Bruce, and his wife. The Dunns seated them on cushions at a round table, serving linguini with pesto. Keith and Lani Abbott joined the party. Keith found Rip Torn “high strung and nervous,” a chain-smoker of hand-rolled cigarettes. Richard told Rip that Price “knew every inch of Big Sur.” Abbott declined to join their fishing adventure. “Price hadn’t been in the Santa Lucia Mountains for years,” he observed.
Gerry put off the trip to L.A., staying at the Dunns with her sons and young daughter. Rip roared down the Pacific Coast Highway with the wild boys in search of the mythic Deer Creek. Richard claimed the stream had “a lot of trout, maybe some steelhead.” Around noon, they turned off onto a narrow dirt road. The ride in was rough. They reached an abandoned farm on a turn overlooking what Torn described as “a deep gorge carved by the tiny glint of water far below.” The fishermen had found Deer Creek.
Armed with beer and fishing rods, they scrambled down past abandoned farm machinery into a canyon choked with poison oak. Forty minutes later, the quartet reached bottom and discovered “the creek was nearly dry.” Sinkers and rusting hooks decorated the surrounding bushes; trees were draped in tangled monofilament. “Looks like an army of hippies has bivouacked here,” Brautigan quipped. After a halfhearted attempt at fishing—Richard caught a water snake—they decided to head for home. It took three hours to struggle out of the gorge.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 73
