Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Richard spent a lot of time at the Wrangler. Cindy Murphy, a local gal who tended bar for proprietor Bob Burns, remembered him often arriving alone. Brautigan sat by himself drinking all night without saying a word to anyone. Cindy recalled that Richard always tipped well. Mary Burns, the owner’s daughter, was about nineteen when Brautigan started coming into her father’s place. He told her he was planning to raise ducks. “I ordered a bunch of baby ducklings,” he said. “They’re coming in soon on the train.” After that, whenever Mary saw him in the bar, she’d ask about the ducks. Had they arrived yet? “Nope. Not yet, any day now.” This went on for a couple of years until it dawned on her that he was pulling her leg.

  One time, standing at the Wrangler Bar, Brautigan was accosted by a weary salesman in a rumpled plaid polyester suit, wide necktie undone. After a difficult and frustrating day, the fellow radiated truculence and glared red-faced up at Richard. “You hippies certainly have it made,” he said, his voice acid with disapproval.

  Whiskey glass in hand, Richard peered down imperiously through his bifocals at the angry little man. “I am not a hippie, sir,” he declared, enunciating each word precisely. “I work for my living.”

  On another occasion, Richard came into the Wrangler with Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison after a day of bird hunting. Dick Murphy, Cindy’s brother, remembered it was “a pretty crazy night in there.” McGuane and Harrison elbowed to the bar, shouting out drink orders. Richard had something else on his mind. “Brautigan’s got this paper sack,” Dick recalled, “like a big grocery bag, and he’s got it kind of necked down, funneled down from the top, and I’m watching him, and he’s got people sticking their hands in there, and people would scream. ‘Stick your hand in there,’ he’d say, ‘so you can tell what it is.’ The girls especially would all come out screaming.”

  Murphy himself gave it a try. The bag contained seven or eight dead grouse. “There were so many in there that they were all still warm, of course, and so all you felt was this kind of plump feathered bodies. It was pretty funny. He was getting a big kick out of it.”

  One night, after knocking back round after round of Black Jack and water, no ice, a drink known locally as a “ditch,” Richard and a group of fellow patrons straggled across the street to Martin’s when the Wrangler closed at 2:00 am. An all-night café slinging hash seven days a week in an Italianate brick building that once served as a dining room for the Northern Pacific passenger depot, Martin’s had a Renaissance villa exterior that matched the baggage room, one of three imposing structures built between 1901 and 1902. Inside, the place was pure 1950s moderne, Formica-topped tables and a color scheme running to pumpkin and aqua. Dedicated Livingston barflies all headed to Martin’s for a greasy breakfast after last call.

  The crowd from the Wrangler numbered about ten, including Cindy and Richard, an artist named Donna Bone, and a couple guys who recently moved to Montana from New Jersey. They sat at a long table in the middle of the large, high-ceilinged room. Orders were taken: eggs prepared various ways, hash browns, omelets, short stacks, biscuits and gravy. At some point, Brautigan, who hadn’t been saying much, got up and walked silently away from the table. No one really paid attention. Richard was quite drunk, yet moved with a certain lurching dignity. Cindy Murphy remembered a gradual awareness of the displeasure building behind her, a barely perceptible murmuring, an uncomfortable mirthless laughter: the uneasy sound of people wondering if the joke was on them.

  The folks at the long central table spun around to see what was going on. They beheld Richard, passing from group to group, deliberately sticking his finger in everyone’s food, one plate at a time. He did so with casual indifference, like a royal taster working the house at the king’s request. The stunned reaction behind him wasn’t exactly that of a lynch mob, but people were plainly puzzled and patently pissed. The bunch from the Wrangler looked on in helpless bewilderment, having no ready explanation for their companion’s peculiar behavior and expecting a massacre at any moment.

  Brautigan wove between the tables, serene as a drunken angel, dipping his finger dispassionately into the cheese omelets and sunny-side-ups on his way to oblivion. There were perhaps thirty other customers, railroad workers and ranch hands, the usual late-night crowd, and nothing like this had ever happened to any of them before. Not looking back, Richard made his way to the cash register by the door. He picked up the tab for everyone in the place. Three dozen free breakfasts anointed by the touch of the poet.

  forty-one: the five-year plan

  RICHARD BRAUTIGAN’S NEW Montana home and the Hjortsbergs’ place to the north across Pine Creek shared a common underground gravity-feed water line. It was an ancient affair, the iron-bound wooden conduit laid sometime before the end of the nineteenth century. The line fed off two source boxes, the lower one, for use in winter, was located directly in the creek; the uppermost placed in an irrigation ditch running only in summer. A control valve regulated the flow down the branch line to Brautigan’s house.

  In the spring of 1974, while Richard’s house was being remodeled, Gatz walked him up through the woods, attempting to explain the intricacies of their antique waterworks. The valve control was of special interest as Brautigan planned to shut off his supply in winter. Richard, unmechanical as always, proved a disinterested student. He preferred discussing books, his own work in particular. Brautigan told Hjortsberg about his “five-year plan.” Richard explained he would write a new book in a different genre every year for the next five years.

  The first of these genre novels, The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, had already been written. By the time Brautigan moved in to his remodeled house, the book was three months away from publication. There were no interviews or plans for a book tour. Once again, the designer in charge of Simon & Schuster’s book production was Helen Barrow. Richard Snyder, president of the company, had some new ideas about how to publish Brautigan. Instead of releasing Hawkline simultaneously both in cloth and as a trade paperback, Snyder decided to bring it out first as a hardcover.

  The new marketing approach called for a corresponding shift in the overall book design. Instead of placing Brautigan’s photograph on the front cover, Simon & Schuster hired noted dust jacket illustrator Wendell Minor, who produced an evocative sepia-toned painting of the turreted Hawkline Manor. Brautigan approved Wendell Minor’s cover. Jonathan Dolger recalled that Brautigan loved Minor’s work. Richard asked his friend John Fryer to take his dust jacket photo. Fryer, a talented amateur photographer, maintained a professional darkroom in the basement of his store in Livingston. Early in June, shortly after his housewarming party, Fryer took a photo at Pine Creek. Richard wore jeans, a dark untucked Western shirt, and the high-crowned black hat he had favored in Key West, his long blond hair hanging free past his shoulders. John Fryer was paid $125 for his work.

  The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western was published in August of 1974 with an initial printing of forty thousand copies. No text accompanied the author photo, nor was there any biographical information about Brautigan printed inside on the flaps. Helen Brann agreed with Dick Snyder. Publishing Brautigan’s new novel in a more traditional format would lead to increased hardback sales. By the beginning of October, Simon & Schuster had sold enough books for Jonathan Dolger to order an additional printing of ten thousand copies. The usual array of naysayers lined up to lambaste Richard for “triteness and banality,” “self-indulgent whimsy,”and “irreverence and obscenity.” In the New Statesman, Julian Barnes regretted the novel’s “watered style and paper-thin narrative.” Roger Sale (Hudson Review) said, “It is a terrible book, deeply unfunny, in no need of having been written.” There were a few exceptions. Playboy called Hawkline “certainly Brautigan’s most simultaneously unified and eclectic work,” while Booklist raved, “With just the right blend of cowpoke humor and touches of the macabre, Brautigan hilariously spoofs the traditional western as well as the classic horror tale.”

  Even as the bad notices started rolling in, ther
e was much to celebrate. Hawkline was selling well, and Hollywood came calling, checkbook in hand. After Rancho Deluxe wrapped, Michael Haller returned home to Los Angeles and talked enthusiastically about The Hawkline Monster with his friend, director Hal Ashby. Haller first worked with Ashby in 1971, as the production designer of Harold and Maude, and again on The Last Detail, Ashby’s third film as a director, finished the year before and featuring rising star Jack Nicholson. Michael thought that Hawkline was a perfect lead role for Nicholson. Harry Dean Stanton was eager to play the other hired assassin cowpoke in the story.

  Taking a giant step into the deal-making process, Brautigan traveled down to Los Angeles to meet with Ashby. Richard had never been fond of L.A., which he called “this strange sprawling city of gothic vegetation and casual clothing where I am changed instantly into a child thinking that all eight million people here somehow work in the movies.” Hal Ashby brought Brautigan to a lunchtime meeting with Jack Nicholson at the actor’s home high up on Mulholland Drive. Brautigan, understandably apprehensive at having to sell himself and his work to Nicholson, fortified himself with ample doses of bourbon whiskey.

  More cocktails followed chez Jack. By midafternoon, Brautigan, far from being nervous, felt no pain at all. Richard played an afternoon game of “horse,” one-on-one basketball, with Jack Nicholson at a hoop the actor had set up in front of his garage. They bet $50 on the outcome. Brautigan, six inches taller than Nicholson, won the game and the wager. As they sat around the living room later that afternoon, the conversation touched on financing. Richard launched into a lengthy discourse detailing his disdain for money. To demonstrate this scorn, Brautigan resorted to an old Digger tactic. He took out his wallet and removed all the bills, including his basketball winnings, slowly tearing them into tiny pieces. Ashby and Nicholson looked on in astonishment as Brautigan scattered the bank note confetti into an elongated crystal bowl on the coffee table. Jack had another business meeting scheduled at that hour, so Hal and Richard politely took their leave.

  The moguls arrived as Ashby’s car pulled out of Nicholson’s driveway. Jack had no time to tidy up, and the bowl of shredded money sat on prominent display as the small talk started. It was hard to ignore. One of the big shots, knowing Nicholson was a collector, asked, “What is this? Some kind of art piece?”

  Jack flashed his famous grin and strung the guy along, telling him it was a conceptual work designed to express the artist’s contempt for commerce. “You know,” he said, improvising the gag as he went, “people just like make contributions.”

  Quick as a high-roller tossing down a bet, the mogul whipped out his wallet and tore up a wad of hundreds, dropping the pieces into the crystal bowl. It was the start of a long-running comic tradition. For years afterward, the bowl full of torn money sat on Jack Nicholson’s coffee table, a memorial to Richard Brautigan, as sucker after sucker ripped up his bankroll in the name of art.

  Nicholson would not commit to the Hawkline project until he read a script. Hal Ashby negotiated a deal with Helen Brann and Flora Roberts early in June 1975. Dick Hodge worked for seven and a half hours, helping to facilitate the deal. Ashby obtained the underlying film rights to The Hawkline Monster and contracted Brautigan to write the screenplay. The amount agreed upon for both came to $125,000, although, separate from his screenwriting fee, Brautigan received only a $10,000 option against an eventual sale price.

  Ashby hoped to make Hawkline his next picture, planning to start shooting in Montana in the summer of 1976. Richard hired a private secretary, Glenise Butcher, to assist him in typing the many preliminary drafts of his screenplay. Glenise, a beautiful young Englishwoman, proved extremely useful to Richard. Not only was she a swift typist, she could take dictation in shorthand.

  Don Carpenter served as Brautigan’s “in-house critic” on the Hawkline project. In 1972, Don wrote and coproduced the film Payday, starring Rip Torn as a self-destructive country-and-western singer modeled on Hank Williams. The film featured original songs by Playboy cartoonist and children’s book author Shel Silverstein, who had worked with Don on Stars and Stripes in Japan during the Korean War. Payday received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival and impressed Richard Brautigan, who regarded his friend Carpenter as his unofficial ambassador to Hollywood.

  Brautigan brought Glenise Butcher over to Carpenter’s place and had him explain the format and structure of a screenplay. She took it all down in shorthand. After learning the structure, Brautigan began writing the script. The previous year, when Gatz Hjortsberg had scored his first Hollywood assignment, Richard offered some advice. “You know the secret to writing screenplays, don’t you?” he quipped. “You have to leave all the writing out.”

  Brautigan’s Hawkline screenplay ran very long. Industry standards dictate anything over 120 pages to be an unwieldy epic. His script was peppered with wry Brautiganesque touches, like adding a line of dialogue after a description of an owl sitting in the rafters of a barn:

  OWL

  Hoot!

  “He called me up maybe, what, six thousand, seven thousand times, with little line changes and things like that,” Don Carpenter recalled. “And then he brought over his first draft with Glenise to take notes. He would read the scene to me, and I would tell him what I thought about how the scene would play and what I thought should go into it, what should come out. What he was interested in getting from me was how to make a drama, how to make a dramatic scene. I’ve never done a better tightrope job in my life. I didn’t touch content or style or approach.”

  After reading the final draft of Hawkline, Carpenter told Brautigan “it was one of the best screenplays I’d ever read, and there was no chance it would ever be made into a movie, because it’s schizophrenic.” Don considered the script “beautifully written, beautifully, beautifully written.” He thought the only way a Brautigan movie could ever get made was “to not try to make it like every other movie, not try to make it conform to any kind of movie, but to make it a Brautigan movie, so that it’s totally weird from beginning to end.”

  Richard refused to believe Don’s dire predictions. He wrote down his friend’s words, “This screenplay of Hawkline Monster will never be made into a film,” and passed the paper across to Carpenter. “You sign this,” he said. Don signed. “I’m going to make you eat that in public,” Brautigan said.

  “I will eat that at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Don replied, “at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I will pay for lunch on the day this film is completed.”

  By midsummer, Brautigan finished his 145-page first draft of the screenplay. Ashby and Haller enthusiastically awaited its arrival in L.A., but Richard refused to mail it. G. Haller speculated that it had to do with a previous trip made to Hollywood during his first Trout Fishing fame. A big-shot producer courted Richard with a dinner invitation to his Beverly Hills home. Brautigan was “limoed” up to the mogul’s mansion and served an “obscenely long three-foot [baked] trout.” The sight of it made Richard feel like he was some rube from the hills who only ate trout. All through the meal, the talk focused on the genius of Trout Fishing. After dinner, the producer offered Richard $250 for an option on the book. The experience made Brautigan leery of movie executives. G. was dispatched to Montana “to find and deliver the script.”

  G. brought along her two boys, and they stayed once again in a cabin at the Pine Creek Lodge. As soon as they settled in, she walked over with Eric and Bret to pay a call on Richard. Brautigan announced that he was going to take the kids fishing. G. felt disappointed when their destination turned out to look like a trout farm. It was Armstrong’s Spring Creek, which also supported a fish hatchery. Richard took pains to set the boys up and show them what to do. “He was very, very emphatic about the kids catching fish,” G. recalled.

  All of them caught fish. Richard invited the Hallers back to his place that evening for a trout dinner. Ianthe was spending the summer with her father and helped him prepare the meal, assisted by Tony Dingman, who had com
e to help with the chores and drive Brautigan around. Siew-Hwa Beh, Brautigan’s new girlfriend, rounded out the party.

  Born in Penang, Malaysia, of Chinese ancestry, Siew-Hwa first came to the United States in 1963 at age eighteen on an American Field Service scholarship. She returned to the States two years later with $100 in her pocket, two suitcases, and another grant. She was one of the first women to attend the UCLA film school. The writer-director Paul Schrader was among her classmates. Frustrated by the subordinate position of female students expected to make coffee instead of movies, Siew-Hwa scraped together $600 in 1969 with her roommate and created Women & Film, the world’s first feminist film magazine.

  In the late fall of ’74, Siew-Hwa dated a Chinese journalist named Min who wrote for several local papers and was a friend of Brautigan’s. Min brought her to a bar in North Beach, where Richard spotted Siew-Hwa through the boisterous crowd. “There was a lot of dancing,” she said, “and I had no idea that he was so smitten.”

  Five feet, one inch tall and extremely thin, Beh wore tight pants and no bra under a sleeveless, collarless bib. Brautigan described her a few years later in a short story (“A San Francisco Snake Story”): “She was very intelligent and also had an excellent figure whose primary focus was her breasts. They were large and well shaped. They gardened and harvested much attention wherever she went.”

  When Richard approached Siew-Hwa to make his introductions, she asked him what he did for a living.

  “I write,” Brautigan said. “I wrote Trout Fishing in America.”

  “Well,” Siew-Hwa replied, “I really am not into fishing.”

  That she didn’t know Richard was a writer “turned him on,” Siew-Hwa later recalled, “because he had never met anybody who was educated who’d never heard of him. He was thrilled that I didn’t know him.”

  Brautigan wheedled Beh’s phone number from Min and called her a couple days later. “He called me only when he was drunk,” she said. “I guess he was too nervous.” Their first conversation was a lengthy recounting of an argument he’d recently had with his ex-wife, Ginny, about Ianthe’s dental problems. Virginia wanted to have the bad teeth removed and Richard thought she should save them. “You’ve got to have your own teeth to chew your own food,” he told Siew-Hwa.