Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Two weeks after returning to San Francisco from their trip to the upper Sacramento, Richard Brautigan flew to New York. Again, he stayed in $25-a-night rooms at One Fifth Avenue. Brautigan was in town to meet his new editor at S&S and get to know some of the production people at the publishing house.

  After a small welcoming party at the S&S offices, Richard Snyder (later CEO and chairman of the company) suggested they all go up to Elaine’s Restaurant. Long a bastion of literary and showbiz celebrity, Elaine’s, on Second Avenue between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth streets, like Toots Shor’s famous gin mill long before, gained a reputation for exclusivity based on brash rudeness and the arrogance implied by serving mediocre food for inflated prices.

  Brautigan wanted to go there, Jonathan Dolger observed, because he felt “it was some sort of acceptance.” Widely regarded as the “in” literary hangout, Elaine’s was, according to Dolger, “under the best of circumstances a terrible place. It’s noisy and the food isn’t any good.” Even so, Snyder, Dolger, Brautigan, Helen Brann, Christopher Cerf, and “two or three girls” got into cars and headed uptown. According to Helen Brann, “Elaine treated us like shit, and we got a horrible table, and the food was not to be believed, it was so terrible, and the service was lousy, and everybody got drunk, and nobody had a good time.”

  After every drink, Dick Snyder grew louder and louder, while Brautigan, inherently shy, became ever more quiet. At one point, Jonathan got up to visit the men’s room and Richard followed him in. “Can we get the fuck out of here,” he pleaded. Helen, Jonathan, and Richard made their escape like “liberated slaves, away from all these people.” Dolger recalled heading downtown on First Avenue like Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow skipping along “the Yellow Brick Road” to Brann’s Sutton Place apartment and a final tranquil nightcap.

  Helen’s apartment often served as a place of refuge for Brautigan when he was in New York. She claimed she never cooked (“I try not to cook dinner for clients or anybody else”), but Brann realized how much Brautigan enjoyed the sanctuary her apartment provided, “so maybe I would have a couple people over. I would give parties for him. Very small. Just people he knew and liked.” Helen felt flattered that Richard ate everything she cooked. At the time, she owned two small dachshunds, Denver and George, who loved Richard. Brautigan didn’t care for the dogs, yet they seemed especially fond of his blue jeans, and when he sat in Helen’s big chair in the living room, they would bite at his cuffs.

  For “serious business conversation over breakfast,” Brann and Brautigan went to the Edwardian Room at the Plaza Hotel, an elegant corner restaurant with views of both the park and Pulitzer fountain. For dinners they favored The Palm, a high-end steak joint with bold celebrity caricatures painted on its tobacco-colored walls. Jonathan Dolger remembered how Richard always ordered a “cull,” a lobster with a very large claw, a specialty at The Palm. “A genetic aberration. Huge thing.” It was a big step-up from beanie-wienies.

  Richard left New York before the end of July, taking a TWA flight to Albuquerque. Roxy and Judy Gordon had moved to Moriarty, a small town east of the Manzano Range, forty miles from Albuquerque. Roxy had recently published his first book, Some Things I Did, with Bill Wittliff’s Encino Press in Austin (which had also issued In a Narrow Grave by Larry McMurtry). Roxy’s book, an account of his VISTA training and other adventures, was dedicated to Brautigan (“whose favorite gun is the Colt Navy .36”) and to his wife.

  Roxy and Judy had started a country music magazine, Picking Up the Tempo. The Gordons tried to interest Richard in outlaw country music, teaching him the names of various singers and urging him to listen to Waylon Jennings. Ianthe later encouraged her father to do the same. Eventually, Brautigan used an imaginary Waylon singing a make-believe C and W song at the Grand Ole Opry to conclude his novel Sombrero Fallout.

  Richard brought Roxy a present, “a wrecked old straw cowboy hat” that had once belonged to the experimental novelist Rudolph Wurlitzer (Nog, Flats), who had achieved some measure of pop culture fame by cowriting the screenplay for Two-Lane Blacktop. Roxy and Judy gave Richard a lift up to Santa Fe, getting a flat along the way. Brautigan took a $9 room at the De Vargas Hotel. While there, he got together with several Santa Fe friends. Richard phoned Jorge Fick to say he was in town. Brautigan first met Fick, a local painter who’d known Bob Creeley at Black Mountain, during his trip to Santa Fe with Valerie Estes in 1969. Jorge thought he was calling from the bus station. “He was living his own story,” Fick recalled. “He was the pearl in the oyster.”

  Brautigan returned to San Francisco and resumed his life where he’d left off, dictating his correspondence to Loie Weber, hanging out with friends, picking up again with Sherry Vetter. In mid-August, they went on a five-day fishing trip to the North Fork of the Yuba River in Nevada, returning to the general area of his previous Blunder Brothers misadventure. Sherry was attempting to write at this time. On these long drives she often discussed technique with Richard. He criticized her poetry, telling her what was good and what was not and why.

  Brautigan was fond of Gustave Flaubert, who spoke of “the moral imagination of the reader.” Richard explained to Sherry that what he meant was “that you can’t tell the reader everything, you have to leave room for the reader to make [his] own moral choices about things that are happening.”

  Working on a poem, Brautigan utilized an instinctive anti-intellectual method he called “floating.” He instructed Sherry in this technique, saying, “Let your mind float through it first and then, floating through it, you’ll find it. You’ll find the way that the words have to line up.” She’d been working on a poem she called “Father’s Day Out,” about a phone conversation between a woman and a man who had not spoken for a long time. Sherry felt “the first couple of sentences were not good.” Richard offered to help. Sherry loved the opening line he came up with, amazed at how it floated off the top of his head: “After years of restraint he returned to me his mind unaltered in the use of clever cutting innuendo.”

  Vetter observed that at the literary dinner parties they attended, when Richard told a story about people everybody present knew, he never used any actual names. “He would change little things to hide who it was.” After one party, Sherry asked Richard, “Why didn’t you tell them who that was? It would have made it more interesting.”

  “If you use the name it’s gossip,” Brautigan said. “If you don’t use the name, it’s fiction.”

  Earlier that year, Brautigan’s lawyer Richard Hodge and his law partners bought 273 Page Street, an elegant two-story Victorian mansion built in 1877 with two original fireplaces gracing the eighty-foot living room. Located near Hayes Valley, an area where the outer edges of the Tenderloin, the Mission, the Haight, and the Fillmore converged, the ornate old silver-gray house became the legal hub for Hodge, Green & Zweig. During the seventies, the place acquired local fame as a salon and party palace.

  Nancy Hodge, a slim, attractive brunette who had once been the bareback riding champion of California, possessed impeccable taste and decorated the venerable mansion with gleaming antique furniture, a grand piano, Persian carpets, and crystal and brass fixtures. Thursday nights developed into a regular open house at Page Street. Musicians, poets, journalists, artists, lawyers, and ex-cons gathered together amid the candlelight and floral arrangements, sipping drinks before twin blazing fires, helping themselves to fine food arranged on silver platters beneath a cut-glass chandelier. Being a close friend and esteemed client, Richard Brautigan was a frequent guest, mingling with local notables Commander Cody, Jessica Mitford, Congressman Pete Stark, Boz Scaggs, and Toad the Mime. “A house can be like the map of a mirror / reflecting a decade and the people / who come and go in it,” Brautigan wrote, celebrating 273 Page Street in his 1978 poem “San Francisco House.”

  Tom McGuane was among those who came and went. A couple years after buying the mansion, the Hodges hosted a party for McGuane on the occasion of the 1973 publication of his third no
vel, Ninety-two in the Shade. Tom brought Robert and Katherine Altman. The film director was interested in acquiring the movie rights to McGuane’s book. In Altman’s honor, pornographic movies played in the basement law library.

  James D. Houston was at the party, talking with Altman for “only three or four minutes.” Even in such a short time, he was impressed with the director’s amazing powers of observation. “You recently had a mustache,” Altman said.

  “That’s right,” Jim replied. “I shaved it off last week.”

  At one point in the evening, Brautigan and Don Carpenter cornered Altman and began lecturing him. “You’ve got to learn something, mister,” Tom McGuane remembered them saying. “You’re not in L.A. anymore; you’re in San Francisco.” The verbal assault lasted for more than half an hour. “Their whole pitch was San Francisco is the center of the civilized world. Self-righteousness with a little Orientalism laid in.”

  Don Carpenter recalled the evening with chagrin. “Altman sat there, and we passed a bottle of wine around among us while I excoriated the man for his career. For his destruction to The Long Goodbye. Just a complete drunken asshole, no worse behavior on earth.”

  At last, Altman had enough. “Listen, boys,” he said, “I’ve heard as much of your shit as I’m going to listen to.” With that, “he read them the riot act.” All the while, Richard Hodge sat on a couch chatting amicably with Altman’s wife, who assured him of the great career awaiting him in Hollywood. Hodge had hoped the party would help broker the arrangement between Altman and McGuane. In the end, things didn’t pan out.

  Revenge of the Lawn was published in the fall of 1971 by Simon & Schuster simultaneously in hardback and as a Touchstone trade paperback edition. Richard traveled to New York for a publication party. While in town, he got together with Sam Lawrence, down from Boston on business. Brautigan also went out to Connecticut to spend a weekend with Rip Torn and Geraldine Page, who were starring in Marriage and Money at The Westport County Playhouse.

  Torn was at a point in his career when he “had been eighty-sixed from films, television, and Broadway.” Summer stock was his last resort. Richard called him before he opened in Connecticut, wanting to come fish in the Catskills. Rip told him he “barely had time to piss, much less fish.” He’d probably be able to see him only at night after performances. Once Torn found some time, he called Brautigan in the City with an invitation to spend a couple days talking and fishing. Richard caught the New Haven train at Grand Central, alighting in Westport where Rip, Gerry, and the kids were staying at a farmhouse by the salt pond.

  Brautigan seemed “itchy and perturbed,” the moment he set foot in the home where the Torns were guests. He didn’t care for their hosts. After dinner, the head of the household told stories about the old days in Connecticut. Rip enjoyed the tales and, staying up late with Richard afterward, asked if he enjoyed them, too. “Hell, no!” Brautigan retorted. “They’re so goddamned middle-class. I come across a continent to talk with you and what do you do? You sit around bullshitting with those damn people. I’m going to see your plays, we’re going to fish, and I’ll ride back to the city with you and your family because I want you to go to my publishing party.”

  “Okay, General,” Torn said.

  Rip and Richard did fish the Saugatuck River, which flowed into Long Island Sound at Westport. They hoped to catch some sea-run browns but only landed “five small bluegills and one stunted bass.” The Torns did not attend Simon & Schuster’s party for Brautigan, and he traveled back to Manhattan by himself. Richard was standoffish and didn’t talk to anyone at the party “except one particular girl” he had his eye on. Jonathan Dolger and Helen Brann felt upset and disappointed. They had hoped to take their star author out to dinner with some people they knew, but Richard made other plans.

  While sales of Revenge remained brisk, cresting on the wave of Brautigan’s enormous initial success, the numbers fell short of the totals racked up by the three Delacorte titles. The reviews were something of a mixed bag as well. “Brautigan at his most puppy-mannered and inconsequential,” sniffed Kirkus Reviews. “At its worst, [it] sounds simultaneously like a clumsily written children’s book and a pretentious piece of avant-garde impressionism,” carped Anatole Broyard in the New York Times.

  On the plus side, Sara Blackburn called Brautigan an “American folk hero” in the Washington Post Book World, and Larry Duberstein, writing in the Saturday Review, proclaimed Revenge to be “one of Brautigan’s best books, and at his best he is a writer of surprising talent and vision.”

  Collaborating in the December 9 issue of Rolling Stone, Gurney Norman and Ed McClanahan turned their review into a lively discussion on the art of the short story, detailing the many ways Richard expanded the boundaries of the form. Norman, contrasting Brautigan’s humor with his perception of Ernest Hemingway’s lack of same, observed, “Suicide may have been inevitable for Hemingway, but you’d never think such a thing about Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor or Brautigan.”

  Richard was so pleased with their review he invited Gurney and Ed out to lunch in San Francisco. They were scheduled to pick Ken Kesey up at the airport at 4:30 pm and figured a free meal courtesy of Brautigan would be a fine way to start the afternoon. When they arrived at Geary Street around noon, Richard greeted them with a fifth of Maker’s Mark bourbon, an improvement on Ed and Gurney’s jug wine tastes.

  After laying the dead soldier to rest (Gurney was the designated driver, so Ed and Richard did most of the drinking), they headed out to a posh Japanese restaurant, where Ed recalled they feasted on “inscrutable Oriental comestibles” washed down by quantities of Pouilly-Fuissé (a pricy French white Brautigan favored) and numerous snifters of Courvoisier. McClanahan dimly remembered them all having “a raraparooza of a fine old time.”

  When the hour arrived to head down to the airport and collect Kesey, Brautigan elected to go along for the ride, suggesting they all come back to the City and go out to dinner. Kesey, in town for a two-day residency at Stanford, immediately fired up a doobie in Norman’s VW bus. Richard insisted they stop at a liquor store for another fifth of Maker’s Mark. By the time they made it back to Geary Street, nobody was feeling any pain.

  Brautigan called Sherry Vetter, inviting her over, and the discovery that the winsome schoolteacher hailed from Louisville (Norman and McClanahan were fellow Kentuckians) occasioned round after round of toasts “to Southern womanhood.” Before long, the second bottle of Maker’s Mark joined the empties.

  Richard called ahead to a fancy Chinese restaurant, reserving a booth and ordering up a banquet known as “The Feast.” This was composed in part of several whole fishes, which were consumed along with a fresh deluge of Pouilly-Fuissé. Around this time, things got a little strange. McClanahan later claimed the fellow didn’t exist, but Sherry remembered a fifth man with red hair she thought was Ken Kesey’s “valet.”

  She had a conversation with him in the restaurant hallway, and he referred to the gathering of writers as “the knights of the boothtable,” telling her that they all already hated one another or would shortly, “a bunch of guys who were praising each other face-to-face, and also putting down each other’s foes, and what would they do behind each other’s backs?” The redheaded stranger was hardest on Kesey. “Can you imagine,” he said to Sherry, “writing three hundred pages and expecting the world to support you for the rest of your life?”

  After dinner, the rowdy sextet repaired to Enrico’s for round after round of Irish coffee. Seated at the sidewalk café on Broadway, they loudly engaged in the popular local diversion of “spotting cheesy local celebrities” among the passing crowd. Amid shouts of “There goes Herb Caen!” and “There goes Mel Belli!” Brautigan grew sulky over the misguided notion that Kesey had been making a pass at Vetter. His unpleasant mood came to an abrupt end when Gurney, who had not been drinking and had wandered off on “a meditative stroll” through the side streets of North Beach, reappeared suddenly in front of Enrico’s. In a single motion,
Ken and Richard jumped up, shouting in enthusiastic unison: “There goes Gurney Norman!”

  It had been a wild and woolly night. A relatively sober Gurney ferried Ken and Ed safely home to Palo Alto. The next morning, looking back from deep in the black hole of his hangover, McClanahan couldn’t remember very much of the festivities, but “one thing remained luminously clear: From the Oriental inscrutables to the Irish coffee, from the first drop of Maker’s Mark to the last drop of Poozley-Foozley, Richard had paid for everything.”

  James D. Houston recalled a similar evening two years later in 1973, not long before the party at the Hodge law office. He and his wife, Jeanne, had a book signing at Minerva’s Owl on Union Street for Farewell to Manzanar, their memoir about the Japanese internment camps. Brautigan, always interested in Japanese culture and history, made an appearance and met the Houstons for the first time, inviting them to join him for dinner after the event.

  “He really had a festive spirit about him,” Jim Houston recalled. When the book signing ended, they all repaired to Vanessi’s. By this time, the guest list had expanded to include Leonard Gardner, author of Fat City, and his companion, writer Gina Berriault, as well as a couple of other writers. The headwaiter knew Richard as a regular customer, greeting him with formal effusiveness: “Right this way, Mr. Brautigan.”

  Once they were all seated, without a word from Brautigan, several dozen blue point oysters appeared on the table. “He had a great generosity that way,” Jim said.

  “He loved doing it,” Jeanne added. “I thought he was a very nice man. I didn’t think it was ostentatious or anything like that. I felt like he just wanted to share his success.”