Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Watching from behind the camera, Dink Bruce almost couldn’t believe what he saw. “Because here [Richard had] been sedentary this whole time, but he knew that Guy was up against the wall and he knew he needed a piece of Richard on this film because he’s selling it, it’s French TV, right? And they really liked Richard. And he put out this ten-minute special effort for Guy.”

  Valdène shouldered the blame for the main fault of the final cut. He felt they had “fabulous footage” of wild fish and the Key West scene, but thought he didn’t include enough coverage of his writer pals because he didn’t want to be “a pain in the ass.” Instead of bugging Tom, Jim, and Richard for repeated filmed interviews, Guy more or less let them off the hook. “When we got to the editing, we had hundreds of thousands of feet that were not specific enough,” he said. “So, in the movie it was like what are these guys doing?”

  Tarpon, the finished film, with a musical score by Jimmy Buffett, was eventually presented on French television, but the first showing was at Richard Hodge’s Page Street law offices later that year. Richard and Nancy hosted the celebratory event as one of their regular Thursday night soirees in the posh Victorian mansion. Guy Valdène was the guest of honor.

  Others in the invited audience included Richard Brautigan, Curt Gentry, and Don Carpenter. Richard’s cinematic concerns at the time were more involved with Hawkline’s chances in Hollywood than his friend’s fishing movie.

  Back in March, Flora Roberts had forwarded a copy of a letter from Peter Bogdanovich to Brautigan in Key West. The filmmaker found Hawkline to be “a very intriguing and beautiful story,” but it was not something he was interested in directing himself. Roberts next planned to submit the book to Arthur Penn (her “very good friend”) and, if that didn’t pan out, to Sam Peckinpah. Tom McGuane’s first original screenplay was soon to begin filming in Montana, and the notion of scoring copious quantities of Tinseltown coin seemed a distinct possibility to all of his ink-slinging amigos.

  After a visit lasting “two or three weeks” in Key West, Brautigan flew back to San Francisco with Ianthe. Richard returned his daughter to Ginny’s care and resumed a busy romantic life, keeping simultaneous company with Jayne Walker, Anne Kuniyuki, and Mary Ann Gilderbloom, none of whom knew the others existed. Mary Ann remained his current main squeeze, dining with Richard at Vanessi’s as often as three times a week. “There was copious amounts of drinking,” she recalled. “It’s amazing that I staggered through it.”

  Olav Angell, Brautigan’s Norwegian translator, had recently arrived in town to consult with Richard about the upcoming edition of Trout Fishing to be published by Gyldendal in Oslo later that year. This necessitated much heavy drinking. One subject they discussed over multiple shots of aquavit concerned the handwritten signature of Trout Fishing in America. In the original Four Seasons edition, this had appeared as a printed facsimile of Brautigan’s own cramped penmanship. The production department at Gyldendal had struggled to render Richard’s peculiar signature in Norwegian without success. The aquavit did the trick. Under Olav’s tutelage, Richard carefully wrote the words “Orretfiske i Amerika” on a sheet of paper for Olav to bring back to his publisher in Norway.

  It was time to collect Mary Ann after work for the evening’s frivolities. Brautigan and Angell, in the company of another Norwegian writer, arrived at Philobiblon dead drunk. “Richard was only halfway there,” Gilderbloom recalled. They all bundled into a cab and headed to Enrico’s for further drinking. “We sat there and drank and drank and drank,” she said. “Then we went into Vanessi’s and sat in a booth in the back and continued to drink.” Mary Ann realized she had crossed the line of her capabilities. She was far drunker than she had ever been before. Fearing she might get sick, Gilderbloom staggered to the bathroom and decided it was time to go home. There were people she knew from the book industry having dinner in the restaurant, and she had no intention of embarrassing herself in front of them.

  When she returned to the booth, Brautigan ordered her another drink. Mary Ann declined, saying she had to leave. “It was the one and only time I ever saw him get really pissed at me,” she said. Richard didn’t want “his lady to be drunk and out of line and then drop out of the party,” but he walked her outside to Broadway and hailed a cab, giving her $20 for the fare. Brautigan concluded his Norwegian translator’s last night in Frisco with a wildly inebriated cable car ride. The next afternoon, Richard called Mary Ann to apologize for how he had treated her the previous evening. “Oh man, I feel really bad,” he said.

  Brautigan flew up to Seattle at the end of the third week in April to confer with Peter Miller about the remodeling project on his new Montana home. Peter introduced him to John Marshall, the contractor he was working with, “a wild man who drank forty cups of coffee a day.” Marshall was from New Orleans. “Richard liked him, although he was sort of wary of him.” Brautigan described the project he had in mind and asked, “Why don’t you come?”

  Miller and Marshall thought it sounded great, agreeing to get a crew together and be out in Montana in a matter of weeks. While in Seattle, Richard noticed all the houses for sale. “How much for this house?” he asked Peter, pointing one out.

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Miller said.

  “Buy me five,” Brautigan replied. “I want to buy five houses up here.”

  Nothing came of it, Peter recalled. “I don’t know that I even took him seriously.”

  Preparing for a return to Montana, Richard decided it was time to upgrade his fishing gear. While he had been content since childhood with bargain basement equipment, Brautigan’s new fishing companions, McGuane, Harrison, and Valdène, favored the finest tackle as a matter of aesthetics and dependability. McGuane suggested the R. L. Winston Company in San Francisco. One afternoon Richard set off with Keith Abbott and his shopping list to investigate. Keith related how Brautigan “often enlisted my aid before trips, especially for any equipment purchases, not only because I owned a truck, but also because he relied on second opinions to counter his sometimes screwy, overamped takes on reality.”

  The R. L. Winston Company, a venerable Frisco fly-rod-building firm established in 1929, was located in a nondescript cement block building on Third Street, south of Market, an area better known for winos and panhandlers than fly fishermen. In this environment, Winston maintained a profile so low as to be almost invisible. Brautigan had come prepared with a wallet stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills.

  Doug Merrick, present owner of the company and a master rod-builder, barely raised his head in his backroom workshop when he buzzed them in. He wasn’t impressed when Brautigan dropped McGuane’s name. Richard was in a mood to splurge, but steered clear of the pricey custom-made split bamboos that were Winston’s specialty. Merrick also sold excellent fiberglass rods. Brautigan bought a couple in differing lengths, along with the appropriate reels and properly weighted fly lines. Abbott felt he was “validating his new savvy friends and, by extension, his new fascinating life as a celebrity.”

  Richard’s final purchase was a pair of chest waders. “I never owned or needed them before,” he told Merrick. “When I was a kid, my waders were tennis shoes.” Comparing various brands, Brautigan decided he wanted them extra-long, sufficient for the Yellowstone’s deep, swift-moving water. As he contemplated the baggy, clownlike waders, Richard’s inherent paranoia brought various scenarios for disaster to mind. “What happens if these fill with water?” he asked. “I could drown.”

  “Son,” Doug Merrick drawled in his confident Western manner, “to fill those waders with water you’d have to climb up on a rock and dive headfirst into a stream.”

  Brautigan returned to Pine Creek in late April with all his new fishing gear, anxious to keep a close eye on the ongoing construction project. The Dills welcomed him back to their lodge, but Richard was unable to take up residence in cabin number 2, his favorite. He had to settle for number 1, the noisier cabin close by the narrow highway.

  A young couple from
Los Angeles had rented cabin number 2. Michael Haller was an art director and production designer who had come out after Easter with his wife, G., and their two sons, Eric and Bret, scouting locations for Rancho Deluxe, the movie Tom McGuane had written. They chose to live in the valley, rather than in town with the rest of the cast and crew, so the boys could attend the Pine Creek School, a traditional two-room country elementary school about a half mile down the road.

  By the beginning of May, Rancho Deluxe was shooting all over Livingston and Park County. The film was directed by Frank Perry (David and Lisa, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Play It as It Lays), and McGuane’s offbeat script had attracted a diverse and talented cast, including Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, Elizabeth Ashley, Slim Pickins, Clifton James, Harry Dean Stanton, and Richard Bright (who had starred as Billy the Kid in Michael McClure’s The Beard).

  Jimmy Buffett signed on to write the musical score. He also contributed an original song, “Livingston Saturday Night,” which he performed with a local band in a scene filmed in the Wrangler Bar. In an uncredited appearance, actor Warren Oates played harmonica with Buffett’s group in this scene. Oates had wandered up to Montana to hang out with his actor pals. He lived in a large motor home dubbed the “Roach Coach.” Bob Watkins, an old sidekick from Kentucky who had once done time for bank robbery, served as the designated driver and all-around majordomo.

  Because Michael Haller had to be on the set almost every day, G. became a stay-at-home mom. Always a good neighbor, each morning after he finished writing, Brautigan tapped on the door of cabin number 2 and visited for a while. Usually it was to quote a line or two of poetry, often his own. “Sometimes he would ask my opinion,” G. recalled. “‘What do you think?’ And it really didn’t seem to matter what I thought, but it was just throwing something out. And one morning, when he came over with his little recitation for the day and he said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘It sounds like William Carlos Williams.’ And he was flabbergasted because it was William Carlos Williams. ‘Today is William Carlos Williams’s birthday.’ And we celebrated William Carlos Williams’s birthday.”

  They read Dr. Williams’s poetry aloud. Brautigan told G. how much he admired him. “This man who could have a full-time medical practice and be delivering babies and bandaging wounds and doing all this and be a family man, because he was successfully married and had children, and that he could also write poetry and be a champion for all these writers.”

  Richard’s admiration sprang from self-awareness. He possessed virtually no skills other than his ability to write. What was curious about the day’s celebration was that Williams had not been born in May, a fact well-known to Brautigan. Just the previous fall, he wrote “September 3, The Dr. William Carlos Williams Mistake,” a poem stating that Williams had been born on September 17, 1883, not on September 3.

  Throughout the late spring, Richard lived alone in cabin number 1. As much as he might have wished for female companionship, recent events prevented that happy possibility. Anne Kuniyuki’s mother died one morning early in May, and she flew back to Hawaii the next day, having just gone home to Honolulu a couple weeks before. (She sent Brautigan a coconut on that previous visit.) Kuniyuki returned to San Francisco before the end of May. It had been a hard time for her, and Richard flew down for a few days to keep her company.

  Much as she wanted to come out to Montana, it was not to be. Anne stayed in the city, checking Brautigan’s mail and forwarding anything he deemed essential. She also kept an eye on the Bolinas house from time to time. In June, to stimulate his imagination, she mailed him a photo of her wearing “an honest-to-god real live muu-muu” taken at her mother’s Honolulu yard the previous month.

  Kuniyuki might not have made the effort had she known about Jayne Walker, whom Richard was also trying to entice out for a visit to Montana. Walker felt nervous and frustrated by the demands of writing her dissertation and the anxiety arising out of her impending move to Ithaca, New York, where she planned to teach at Cornell in the fall. For a while that June, she toyed with the notion of taking “a working vacation,” but found herself stuck in the middle of a chapter and felt she had to finish it before allowing herself any time off. Feeling too broke to phone, she wrote Brautigan a somewhat hurried letter hoping she might make the trip to Montana early in August.

  Living at the Pine Creek Lodge meant Brautigan could check in regularly on the progress of his remodeling project just down the road. At the last minute, John Marshall had backed out, deciding not to come to Montana. Peter Miller was left in the role of sole contractor. “Which I was probably only half-fit to be, but Richard said, ‘Let’s do it. It will be fine.’” So, Miller set about putting together a makeshift crew. Eventually, he signed up fifteen.

  Peter came out to Pine Creek with his girlfriend, Cathy Rogers, and stayed in one of the Pine Creek cabins while waiting for the crew to assemble. A trained naturopath, Cathy hung cheesecloth sacks full of tansy on their screened windows to ward off the bothersome nighttime mosquitoes. When Brautigan spotted these sachets the next morning, he had a fit and ripped them all down. Furious at this violation of her privacy, Rogers got into a “big fight” with him. “I’m paying for it,” Brautigan shouted, stalking off in a frenzy.

  “Too spooky.” Peter Miller felt shocked by the incident, having always regarded Brautigan as a paragon of the New Age Male. “He hates women,” Rogers said. Miller failed to recognize that Brautigan’s outburst was not occasioned by any deep-seated anger toward women. It erupted out of his general displeasure with manifestations of the “hippie subculture.” This did not bode well for the immediate future. The ragtag crew Peter Miller assembled was a caricature crosssection of the dropout counterculture.

  “It was just like the sixties revisited,” one of the crew members recalled. “All kinds of women with long dresses, families and dogs and children.” Several of the recruits were veterans of the Liberation News Service Commune in Vermont. A woman named Emily had been hired just to cook. There was John Fenu, a former big-time acid dealer everyone called Spaceman, who arrived with his wife, Justine, and their baby. One young guy showed up with a custom wooden box housing twenty-three handmade English chisels of all different sizes. It was his contention these elegant tools were all a fine craftsman needed to complete any job.

  Peter Miller found himself with a dilemma on his hands. Without the talents of John Marshall to motivate his unskilled crew, very little real work was getting done. Straw boss Miller didn’t feel up to acting as the official foreman, so he contacted Ron Little, a former ski racer turned carpenter, whom he’d known back in Cambridge. Little lived now in Aspen, Colorado, where he and a friend named Tom Kyle were partners in a construction business. They had just lost a bid and decided “what the hell,” a job camping out in Montana sounded like a good deal. They packed up their table saws and radial arm saws and “big game boxboard tools” and drove north.

  Ron Little had known Richard Brautigan since Peter Miller introduced them six years earlier, when the writer came east to give his Harvard reading. Ron didn’t do drugs but “knew the difference between bourbon and scotch,” so he and Richard starting hanging out together. Little took Brautigan to a Boston Irish workingman’s bar “called the Plow and Shield or something like that.”

  Over drinks, Brautigan told Little about his surefire method for attracting unattached women. “Richard gave me a nudge and reached down and unzipped his fly and said, ‘This always works, this never fails. There will always be girls.’” The technique seemed not to go over so well at the Plow and Shield. When nobody paid any attention, Brautigan pulled his underwear out a bit for more emphasis. Soon, “a couple guys in the barroom started to get fidgety” and came over to tell Richard to button up. “They didn’t put up with that kind of shit.”

  When Little and Kyle arrived in Pine Creek, the long-haired vegetarian crew offered a cold reception. The first order of business was a dispute over whether to allow the power tools into their project. Ron a
nd Tom felt a touch of wry annoyed bemusement when the communal work crew voted on permitting them to use their professional equipment at the work site. The irony underlying this new age egalitarianism was that only Little and Kyle, out of all the gathered company, knew anything about building houses.

  At first, Kyle and Little shared Richard’s discomfort. The crew all camped out in the main house. On their first night, when everyone was trying to get some sleep, the Fenus’ three-year-old toddler kept “walking around, waking people up, screaming and crying.” Ron reflected on what he termed “hippie equality.” No one spoke to the child or complained about his bad behavior. When Ron’s suggestion that the kid be put down at a normal hour was ignored, he set up a tent out back. He and Tom slept there. Three days later, Tom started keeping company with Emily, one of the two camp cooks, and moved back into the house to sleep with her. For the remainder of the job, Ron had the tent to himself.

  To facilitate keeping an eye on things, Brautigan borrowed a bicycle from Gatz Hjortsberg and pedaled back and forth between the Pine Creek Lodge and his new house a half mile away. Richard told G. Haller how honored he was that his friend, whom he knew to be of modest means, had trusted him with so valuable a possession. G. remembered watching Brautigan pedal off every morning after he finished writing, wobbling down two-lane East River Road. “He looked like the witch from The Wizard of Oz,” she said, “with his big black hat and black boots and his Levi’s. A great big grasshopper.”

  Brautigan’s first order of business at the construction site involved lengthy discussions with Miller and Little regarding what he had in mind. Peter recalled that Richard “loved” the Hjortsbergs’ gracious turn-of-the-century home across the creek and hoped to re-create some of the amiable ambiance of their place. Both the kitchen and the only bathroom in Brautigan’s house were tiny. Brautigan wanted them enlarged. The front of the house by the main entrance had been divided into two smaller rooms. It was quickly decided to take out the wall between them.