Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Not everyone was an autograph-seeker. Many who passed them on the street simply said, “Hi, Richard,” and Brautigan would return the greeting.

  “Do you know that person?” Helen asked.

  “No,” Brautigan replied. “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

  At Enrico’s or Vanessi’s, “quiet places” where they went to eat, pretty young girls would come over to him, which absolutely delighted him. “When he came east it didn’t happen at all,” Helen Brann observed. “Nobody knew him really. He was never happy in New York at all. It was an alien place.”

  Brautigan was scheduled to read at UC Santa Barbara in the middle of May. His $200 Reading Circuit Tour standard fee was double what he’d last received there. Richard honored his year-old pledge about demanding more money, buying Kendrick Rand a ticket to fly down and attend the event. Valerie Estes, Kendrick, and his girlfriend, Annie, waited for Richard at the terminal. Carlos Santana and his band were on the same flight, also heading for a gig in Santa Barbara. Kendrick and Richard knew most of the musicians, and they partied together on the short trip down the coast.

  The church where Brautigan read this time was not “a big stone edifice” but a more modern structure with folding chairs. Kendrick observed Richard off the top of his form that night after three events in three days. “It wasn’t his greatest poetry reading.” Valerie had looked forward to a fun weekend in Santa Barbara with the Rands, but Richard heard from Gary Snyder about a ceremonial walk around Mount Tamalpais he promised to attend. He decided, to her “dismay,” to return immediately to San Francisco. This meant sitting up all night on a Greyhound bus. Kendrick Rand observed “he had a commitment and that was one of the wonderful things about Richard.”

  Jack Shoemaker traveled down to a reading in Claremont with Richard during this period, when he telescoped his appearance to what he called a “quick trick,” extremely short readings, “to leave them wanting more.” Shoemaker thought Brautigan’s abbreviated turn “annoyed lots of folks who felt ripped-off by Richard accepting a decent fee and then reading two dozen short poems.” At Claremont, it was all over in under fifteen minutes. Brautigan “cackled” and walked off the stage.

  The California Poetry Reading Tour ended at 8:00 pm, on May 27, at UC Santa Cruz. Posters around the campus advertised the event as a “poetry diddey-wah.” Lew Welch shared the stage. Brautigan began by begging for something to drink: “Water, water. Can anyone get us a pitcher of water?”

  “They promised us water,” Welch complained. “We came here for free, man.” Not exactly the truth. Richard received $200 for his appearance.

  Waiting for water to arrive, Brautigan and Welch discussed the reading order. Richard listed a number of new poems, and Lew asked, “What are you rejecting?”

  “Lighthouse,” Brautigan replied.

  “All right. Enough! Enough!” the audience cried.

  After more easy bantering, Richard read a few of his most recent poems. “It’s very hard to follow Richard,” Lew said, when he took over the podium. “Oh, he’s bringing out his new book, folks. He has a new book every two weeks. They call it prolific. You know what we say about girls when they do that?”

  “The muse has made me an easy lay,” Richard replied.

  “Right on!” Lew Welch shouted.

  Rommel’s sales remained brisk, propelled by the energy of Brautigan’s meteoric success, but this time around the reviews were somewhat less than scintillating. Many of the poems were slight, even by Richard’s minimalist standards, and four were merely blank pages with titles attached. “A cloying, cute, half-assed collection of rather uninteresting tripe,” sniffed the Los Angeles Free Press, suggesting Brautigan “may yet turn into the Rod McKuen of the hip set.” Jonathan Williams, poet and publisher of the Jargon Press, wrote in Parnassus 1 that “there is less here than meets the eye [. . .]” saying Brautigan “writes for kids who eat macrobiotic food [. . .] You’d starve to death on these no-cal poems.”

  In early spring, two East Coast journalists showed up in Frisco wanting to talk with Brautigan. Richard had met John Stickney in Boston. The proposed Life magazine article had been approved, and he was in town on assignment. Stickney spent some time at “the Museum” and traveled with Richard and Valerie up into the mountains outside the city, where photographer Vernon Merritt posed Brautigan crouching on a rock beside a stream turbulent from recent rains. They spotted a celery stalk sweeping along on the runoff, and Richard launched in on an improvised verbal riff, his voice rising in high-pitched excitement: “That could be the first hors d’oeuvre! Suppose there were more, an entire table full of them, canapés and all? Then a bar, with drinks and setups for everybody! And finally an entire cocktail party, man, floating down this crazy stream!”

  Brautigan was more reserved when he met Bruce Cook in a North Beach coffee shop. Cook, the book review editor of the National Observer, was writing about the Beat Generation. Richard sat at the top of his list of younger authors “who had come to be known as writers of the 1960s.” Richard brought Valerie to the interview but didn’t have much to say. He had known most of the principal actors in the beat drama and had shared an apartment with Welch and Whalen, but Brautigan remained reticent about the whole affair. “My involvement with that was only on the very edge,” he told Cook, “and only after the Beat thing had died down.”

  Brautigan described his work methods, typing away at a hundred words per minute, which reminded Cook of Kerouac’s “old Spontaneous Prose technique.” “I get it down as fast as possible,” Brautigan acknowledged. “I can’t spend time on character delineation and situation. I just let it come out.” Whenever he got stuck, Richard went out and saw two or three movies, “the worse they are the better,” and that got his juices flowing again. Cook thought Brautigan appeared “spooked” and “uneasy,” uncomfortable that he had said too much. Before rushing off in such a great hurry he almost left Valerie behind, Richard mentioned Michael McClure. “McClure’s a good friend,” he said. “You ought to talk to him about this stuff. Not me.”

  As Brautigan came to the end of his California Reading Circuit tour in the third week of May, Helen Brann was wheeling and dealing with Sam Lawrence on the terms for a new two-book contract. She reached for the sky, demanding an advance of $200,000 for The Abortion, with an additional $100,000 for a collection of short stories.

  “Shocked,” Sam made a counteroffer of $150,000 for both titles combined. In a private memorandum to the upper echelon of his publishing house dated May 25, Lawrence wrote he had read Brautigan’s new books with much enjoyment.

  No question about his being a writer of the 1970s. His style is as controlled and as pure as Hemingway’s. He looks at the world with the eye of a wise humorist and at the same time, with a child-like lyric innocence. I can readily see why the thousands of kids who make up Woodstock Nation read him so voraciously. He cuts through the sham and hypocrisy of American life. He writes with true sentiment, a deep feeling for nature and the beautiful qualities in people—with a marvelous sense of comedy. He’s the genuine article, an “original.” We should make every effort to keep him as an author.

  Helen Brann came down $100,000, but her asking price still remained too steep for Dell. By early June, they struck a deal. The advance for the two books would be $175,000. Sam had been willing to offer another fifteen thousand but played his cards close to his vest and happily accepted Helen’s lower bid. Brautigan retained all the same rights of author’s design approval held in his previous contracts.

  Flush with newfound success, Richard went shopping for real estate. The first week of July, he wrote a personal check for $500 as earnest money on a building at 418–420 Union Street on Telegraph Hill in North Beach and signed a buy/sell agreement with Nob Hill Realty. The sale price was $60,150, with a down payment set at $13,500. Two days later, the seller approved the agreement but upped the purchase price to $65,000, with the down payment raised to $28,000 in cash. Brautigan resented this and canceled t
he deal.

  Sam wrote to say he was “delighted to be publishing Richard’s two new books. Our hopes are high.” Brautigan contacted Roz Barrow to confirm Grabhorn-Hoyem’s role in designing and supervising the typography. He wanted no repeats of the corporate meddling that had botched the first Delta printing of Trout Fishing. Soon the Dell deal began unraveling. Helen Brann found a discrepancy in the Richard Brautigan contract she had just received. On page 1, clause 4 specified that the two new books would be jointly accounted with Brautigan’s four previously published titles. This meant after one year, any unearned advance for the new books could be recouped from the earnings of the earlier publications. At no point in the negotiations had Helen ever agreed to such a proposal. Sam Lawrence was out of the country in Oslo, Norway. Outraged, Brann got in touch with Dell, holding up the deal until the matter was resolved.

  Around the same time, a letter arrived for Brautigan from Spring Lake, North Carolina. It came from someone named Sandra J. Stair, who turned out to be Richard’s youngest sister. She had been married for the past three years to a soldier away in Vietnam, leaving her to care for his young daughter from a previous marriage. “How many nights have I layed [sic] awake praying that I would see you again,” Sandra wrote. “How many times had [sic] I had a problem wanting to talk with you and wanting you to understand. Please!”

  When Richard didn’t reply, Sandra wrote back. She complained about the oppressive summer heat in North Carolina and of the frightening thunderstorms. “When I’m all alone like tonight the fears that I’ve kept out of sight and out of mind during the day seem to apear [sic] before me like a ghost . . . I hate this place . . . I’m just about to go out of my mind waiting to hear from you [. . .] So please, Dick. Write or call me please.” She signed herself “Your Devoted Sister, Sandi.”

  Sandra had been eleven years old when Richard had last seen her. He didn’t know how to relate to this strange grown-up woman writing from North Carolina and had nothing to say to her. Coping with the demands of fame caused Brautigan to occasionally cluster an entire month’s correspondence into a single intense letter-writing day. When Loie Weber began working for him, she took over the chore of recording the daily tally of his correspondence in the two-bit stenographic notebook.

  On July 18, the last of eleven letters Brautigan dictated to Loie was a brief note addressed to his sister. “Dear Sandra, I appreciate your feelings towards me but many years have passed and all I can do is wish you a happy and rewarding life. I am sorry if this seems blunt and I am sorry if it causes you any pain. Again: thank you for your interest in me and I wish you good luck.” He signed off with “Best wishes.” Richard saved a carbon copy of this letter.

  Jayne Palladino almost canceled her dinner plans with Richard Brautigan at the last minute. She knew he was smart. For unknown reasons, she feared he had a “subtle master plan” to hurt her in some way. She suspected his invitation was just a ruse but got a grip and journeyed over to Geary Street at the appointed time. Jayne was not reassured by the look of the neighborhood and rang Brautigan’s doorbell with trepidation.

  Much to her surprise, Richard behaved in an utterly charming manner. He greeted her with a kiss and a glass of champagne. In the kitchen, Jayne found that he had carefully prepared a large platter of appetizers, little hors d’oeuvres, crackers spread with salmon and caviar. No man had ever gone to the trouble of doing something like that for her before. Even more amazing, Brautigan appeared as obviously nervous as she was, “maybe even a little more so.”

  They settled into an engrossing conversation about literature, and Jayne felt a bit foolish about her earlier paranoia. She loved the excitement in Richard’s voice when they talked about poetry and found it “really infectious.” As a graduate student in literature, Palladino was thoroughly versed in the canon and found Brautigan “immensely well read,” often in areas she knew almost nothing about. And as they laughed and talked, sipping champagne and polishing off the canapés, Jayne noticed “this huge army of ants marching up and down” in a line across the kitchen floor. Her first instinct was to grab the Raid. Richard refused to kill the insects. “He insisted that the ants had as much right as anybody else to be in his kitchen.” Jayne stayed for the night. They didn’t see each other again for more than a year.

  When Sam Lawrence returned from Europe, he tried to hammer out a solution to the contract problem with Helen. Three of Richard’s short stories (part of Revenge of the Lawn) had appeared in the July issue of Mademoiselle and piqued his interest. Sam worked at the last minute on a proposed payment schedule for Brautigan’s advance, spreading the $175,000 over a three-year period.

  Richard expressed his concerns to Robert Briggs in San Francisco, who wrote a memo to Lawrence, stating, “he already has more money than he wants.” Briggs felt Brautigan was “very sharp about not changing his life styles [sic], only eating and drinking better, traveling more comfortably and having the obvious privacy ‘fifteen, twenty thousand per yr can bring.’” He noted Richard was “very concerned with how he is being published.” Briggs spoke with him “about being published by heavy front money and leaving himself open to the definite and inevitable exploitation necessary to retrieve such sums [. . .] slick paper, smashing advts. etc.,” writing Lawrence that “Richard is/ was horrified by this and is most pleased about the weight of the Delta line and the manner we have handled his cloth sales, as limited as they have been.” Sam Lawrence took encouragement from his West Coast representative’s assessment of the situation.

  Richard Brautigan left San Francisco on a journey to London in mid-July, his first trip abroad. Roxy and Judy Gordon had breakfast with Richard before driving him to the airport. “He gave our waitress this huge tip and it just blew [her] mind,” Judy remembered. “He just kind of grinned about it. He really liked waitresses to have big tips.” Helen Brann met Brautigan’s plane in New York between flights and convinced him of the disadvantages of joint accounting. She sold Richard on the wisdom of seeking another publisher in case things didn’t work out with Dell.

  It turned out to be a timely meeting. Brann stuck to her guns in the contract dispute, and the publishing firm wrote to her “just for the record” that Dell no longer wished to negotiate further and was “withdrawing all offers on the Richard Brautigan books.”

  The attitude of the Dell hierarchy (excluding Sam Lawrence) can be summed up by a Robert Briggs aside in his memo: “It might be of relief to us to let someone else paddle the Brautigan ship while we float behind, smiling, with our four Brautigan titles.”

  Richard traveled alone. He had wanted Valerie to accompany him, but when he asked her, she refused. Even telling her that his English publisher was covering all expenses didn’t make her change her mind. Knowing the Creeleys planned to be in London around the same time prompted Richard to call Bobbie. She was part of the extended support group he turned to for advice. “Valerie won’t let me just take her to Europe and pay for everything,” he whined on the phone.

  “Would she go if you loaned her the money?” Bobbie inquired.

  “I’ve asked her that. I told her I’d give her the money. I’ve told her I’d loan her the money.” Richard sounded desperate. “I’ve told her, and she just won’t go. She just won’t go.”

  “Well, Richard,” Bobbie Creeley said, “I think maybe she doesn’t want to go to Europe with you because you’re famous.”

  Brautigan didn’t get it. What difference should that make? Bobbie explained to him the weird thing that happens with fame. How “if you’re next to a person who’s famous, you’re made completely unreal because people who adore that person treat you better than they would think you deserved if you weren’t affiliated with [the famous] person. They treat you like you’re special, but actually you’re kind of an annex.”

  Brautigan arrived in London jet-lagged on the morning of July 21. His two-week foray deliberately coincided with the publication of the English editions of his books. Ed Victor at Jonathan Cape arranged for Richar
d to stay at the Ritz Hotel at 150 Piccadilly in St. James’s. “I put him up at the Ritz because I thought it was a great joke,” Victor recalled with his mocking patrician smile. A five-star hotel built in 1906, the Ritz overlooks Green Park toward Buckingham Palace, another elegant London residence.

  When the bellman escorted Richard into his sumptuously furnished bed chamber, one of 133 Louis XVI–style rooms and suites each individually decorated in the hotel’s signature colors, blue, peach, pink, and yellow, he had no way of knowing about the fourteen-year hardscrabble journey it had been for the hotel’s new guest, all the way from a $6-a-week flophouse on Jessie Street to damask-covered antiques and twenty-four-karat gold leaf detailing, with gift baskets of flowers and bottles of expensive wine waiting from his publisher.

  A letter from Tom Maschler, Richard’s editor at Cape, awaited at the Ritz, inviting him to lunch that day if he wasn’t too exhausted. Maschler wanted to greet his new author and discuss “one or two tentative arrangements” the firm’s publicity director had made for “a television appearance and a broadcast and so-on.” Brautigan chose not to do any interviews. Walking to the Jonathan Cape offices later in the day, Richard grew confused and stopped to call for further instruction, stepping into one of those red public telephone booths bearing the royal crest once so common in London. Brautigan picked up the receiver. Before he could put in his coins—crossed lines were quite common then—he heard a very proper, cultivated, upper-class English voice say, “Whatever happens, my name must be kept out of this.” Richard hung up the phone. “It was a total Brautigan moment,” Ed Victor observed after hearing the story.

  Richard and Ed went for dinner on his first night in town and later meandered through a sequence of clubs and pubs. They returned to the Ritz quite late and extremely drunk. Richard had dressed up in Valerie’s “Confederate” coat for the occasion. Victor thought he looked “very strange. He had a hat, the hat had a big feather. He had a real kind of hippie outfit, like some old army uniform or something.” When they reached the hotel, the front entrance was locked. Richard knocked on the glass. The night porter came over, took one look at Brautigan, and turned away.