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.
“I live here,” Richard pleaded again and again, pressing his face to the glass and knocking. “I live here . . . I live here . . .” The porter sternly shook his head. Only when Ed Victor, impeccably dressed in his tailored suit, stepped forward to explain things did the porter relent and open the door. The following week, Victor hosted a party for Richard Brautigan at his home. Richard returned to the Ritz by himself this time. He was learning his way around.
Brautigan’s friend from San Francisco, the private detective David Fechheimer, was also staying at the Ritz during this period, engaged in another of his mysterious capers. He and Richard went carousing together one evening and got rip-roaring drunk. Recalling his previous difficulties gaining entry, Richard approached the hotel from Green Park, where the Ritz had a private terrace and Italian garden surrounded by a colonnaded brick wall. Brautigan observed that if he climbed up on a park fence, he’d be able to access the colonnade. Soon, he and Fechheimer were clambering aloft. “Doing sort of a Harold Lloyd,” the detective remembered.
Richard walked drunkenly atop the colonnade. The wall ascended a slight hill in graduated steps so that their wobbling progress took Brautigan and Fechheimer higher and higher. A hotel doorman, formal as a Balkan general in his uniform, appeared in the garden beneath them. “I say, sir,” he said. “Can I get you a ladder, sir?” One was produced, and the two inebriants descended, making the most novel entrance in the sixty-four-year history of the Ritz.
Fechheimer recalled one evening when there was “a whole bunch” of London’s illustrious gathered in Richard’s hotel room. “It’s hard to remember what a celebrity he was for a while.” Among the group was the supermodel Jean Shrimpton (“just gorgeous”), who stretched out on Brautigan’s bed, which “had a step up to it and spills of white bedspread and piled pillows.” It didn’t take Richard long to head over and lie down beside her. He stared silently at the twenty-eight-year-old beauty for a long time before saying, “I think I’m in love with you.”
“Don’t worry,” the Shrimp replied, “you’ll get over it.”
In truth, Brautigan didn’t feel comfortable at the Ritz. “Richard hated hotels,” Bobbie Creeley said. “He hated the Ritz.” Back in San Diego he had told her, “I can’t stay in a hotel.” The Creeleys were in London for a couple of months. They had been loaned a huge, art-filled flat in Chelsea by their friend Allen Powers, an heir to the Philips Electronics fortune. “About five blocks to Kensington Gardens,” Bobbie recalled, “King’s Road, Brompton Road. Rolls Royces stacked.” Brautigan spent a lot of time in the Powers flat with the Creeleys.
“Richard would come for dinner and then simply stay and stay and then go to sleep on the couch because he couldn’t stand going back to the Ritz.” When they all went out to a restaurant, Brautigan always returned home with them, ending up on the couch for the night.
Allen Powers’s flat was every bit as imposing as the Ritz. Robert Creeley remembered the “incredible” art collection. Powers’s father had collected the abstract impressionists, while Allen concentrated on more-recent American pop artists, of whom he was the second largest collector in England. “Every wall had at least three paintings on it,” Bobbie recalled. Even the bedroom where the Creeleys’ daughters slept had “huge uprights” to store “these gigantic paintings.” It was like living in a museum.
One night, Richard came by after a trying day spent with lawyers. “He’s already looped,” Bobbie remembered, “and in this mournful voice he says, ‘I know what they carry in those briefcases now, Bob.’” They sat drinking vodka around a metal enameled table stamped with “This Is Not a Work of Art,” which of course was a very valuable art object. Andy Warhol’s silkscreen portrait of Elizabeth Taylor stared down at them from the wall above. At some point, Bobbie began to register that she was “on the cusp of one of those drunken evenings with everyone talking [at once].”
According to Bob Creeley, “Richard was getting more and more depressed and more and more teary about the amount of money [he was suddenly earning].”
Bobbie couldn’t stand it. “Give it to me, Richard,” she said. “I know what to do with it.” Unable to bear any more aimless conversation, she told them, “I’m going to bed,” leaving the two poets wrangling around the art table.
In the privacy of her room, Bobbie engaged in “this wifely thing of lying in bed listening to the conversation.” The meandering drunken discourse continued until she heard her husband exclaim in alarm, “Oh, god, look! Did I do that with my chair?” Robert Creeley had just discovered a “ping pong ball–like depression” on the surface of a huge Barnett Newman painting. Newman died the next day, and the damaged piece quadrupled in value overnight. “I felt like I killed him when I heard the news,” Creeley said.
“Should we try and fix it?” Bobbie heard her husband say through the wall. “Maybe we shouldn’t touch it.” She resisted an impulse to get up and help. “Fuck it,” she thought, pulling the covers up over head. After a while, Bob Creeley came to bed, carrying a reservoir of rage and ready to start an argument. It was 3:00 am. Bobbie wanted none of it. “To hell with it.” She got up and put on a wrapper. Slamming the door behind her, she headed back through the apartment with Bob in hot pursuit.
“Okay, Richard,” she said, “You and Bob can take this up because this is yours. I’m going back to bed.”
“For Christ’s sake, Bobbie,” Richard complained, sitting up on the couch. “It’s three in the morning.” He lifted his sheet demurely.
This cracked Bobbie Creeley up. The gesture with the sheet reminded her of the coy young maiden in “September Morn.” They soon got into “this incredible argument” over who would be the first to phone for a taxi. Richard got a cab and went back to the Ritz. Bobbie took another cab and checked into a different hotel. Bob was left in the apartment with his sleeping children to dolefully survey the big dent in the Barnett Newman painting.
They all met “sheepishly” the next afternoon and went off together to the Tate Gallery to look at the Whistlers and Turners and Blakes. Brautigan particularly liked the “later atmospheric abstracts” of J. M. W. Turner, having been “profoundly impressed” by a traveling show of the early nineteenth-century landscape painter’s work in San Francisco.
When Allen Powers called and heard about the damaged Barnett Newman painting, he told Creeley not to worry, there was an art restorer who lived downstairs in the building. He said, “You just put some moisture on the back and it will straighten itself out.” Powers also told Creeley the American sculptor John Chamberlain, famous for his crumpled automobiles, “was throwing chairs around up there,” and had injured the Newman painting while staying as a previous guest.
To repay the Creeleys’ generosity, Richard Brautigan took them all to dinner at the Ritz, which boasted “one of the most beautiful dining rooms in the world.” First, he showed them his own room upstairs, a bedchamber Bobbie described as an “incredible iced cake.” Their most pressing problem involved the dress code, jackets and neckties being required for gentlemen. The cravat was not an item of apparel favored by Richard. He didn’t know how to tie a Windsor knot or even a simple four-in-hand. Bob Creeley did it for him, knotting the borrowed tie first around his own neck before slipping it off and snugging it up under Brautigan’s collar. “Don’t take it all the way off,” he told him, “so you can save it for future use.”
In the Ritz dining room, things went from bad to worse. Bobbie remembered the wh
ole “nightmarish” experience as “ghastly.” None of them understood the menu, much of which was written in French. The haughty, disdainful waiter provided no help, maintaining an attitude of supercilious superiority as his guests squirmed in discomfort. Their ineptitude much amused a couple seated at the next table, “obviously having the time of their lives listening to these Americans be completely stupid and out of it.” They settled for the simplest possible fare. The Creeleys’ daughter Kate wanted “spaghetti and an artichoke.” The waiter dutifully wrote it down. Their other daughter, Sarah, ordered a hamburger, “with great aplomb,” Bob Creeley thought. Bobbie said they all eventually “came up with something,” but couldn’t remember what. “We were suddenly so provincial and so stupid,” she recalled. “Here we all were in London, and this should be wonderful and interesting, like artists abroad, and we just had no style for it.”
They still managed to have fun together. One day, Richard joined the Creeleys and their daughters on an hour-long train trip to Brighton, a seedy and disreputable seaside resort. Londoners came down for a weekend “on the razzle,” wandering from pub to pub in search of something wicked. As with her more glamorous American cousins, Vegas and Atlantic City, there is a lingering air of the underworld to Brighton, the pervading atmosphere of criminality Graham Greene captured in his novel Brighton Rock. Brautigan and the Creeleys met up with thirty-one-year-old Surrey-born poet Lee Harwood, whose first book, title illegible, was published in 1965.
Harwood had lived in Brighton for the past three years. “It’s always good to be by the sea,” he explained. Together, they explored the Lanes and Marine Parade with Bobbie recording their adventures on her eight-millimeter movie camera. They dutifully trooped through the Chinese-style interiors of the Royal Pavillion (completed in 1823), the ornate onion-domed pleasure palace designed by John Nash for the prince regent (later George IV) for his saturnalian escapades. Unlike the British and French thrill seekers who came in search of sin, Richard and the Creeleys took an evening train back to King’s Cross Station.
On another afternoon, Bobbie Creeley prepared a big picnic lunch and organized a fete on Hampstead Heath, a favorite spot since she was nineteen and studied painting in London. Situated between the hilltop villages of Hampstead and Highgate, four miles from the sprawling city, the Heath provided an open, rolling greensward very popular with Londoners. In the summertime, magicians, clowns, and Punch-and-Judy shows entertained the children and band concerts calmed their parents. On windy days, kite fliers gathered on Parliament Hill to launch their fanciful creations skyward. Bobbie invited Stuart Montgomery, Lee Harwood, and a couple others, along with Richard and her husband and kids, filming it all with her home movie camera.
Back in New York, Helen Brann phoned Jonathan Dolger, an editor she knew at Simon & Schuster. Dolger, a native New Yorker from a literary family, had worked in publishing since 1962, starting out in the S&S publicity department. Helen explained her recent difficulties at Delacorte, the whole joint accounting mess, and asked if Dolger would be interested in acquiring Richard Brautigan for the identical terms. Brann’s timing was calculated and precise. A year or so before, Robert Gottlieb, Simon & Schuster’s editor in chief, had decamped for a similar position at Alfred Knopf, taking with him twenty-one of the firm’s top literary authors, including Joseph Heller and Bruce Jay Friedman.
It proved an ideal situation for the agent. Simon & Schuster was actively searching for new writers to fill the vacuum left by Gottlieb’s departure and additionally was developing two new trade paperback lines, Fireside Books and Touchstone Books, perfectly suited to showcase Brautigan’s work. They were Jonathan Dolger’s project. A fan of Brautigan’s, Dolger pounced at the opportunity, immediately phoning Richard Snyder, president of S&S, who was vacationing on Fire Island. Within three or four hours, they hammered out an acceptable deal. Helen Brann sent over the proposed Delacorte contract, which S&S adopted with all of Brautigan’s stipulations, omitting only the language regarding the joint accounting.
When Richard returned from England at the end of the first week in August, the new contracts were ready for his signature. He stayed over in New York for another week, and Simon & Schuster gave a party for him. “A lot of the younger kids in the office were very excited about this,” Jonathan Dolger recalled, “and wanted to meet him.” Helen Brann came to the party. So did Carol Brissie, who no longer worked at Sterling Lord. Richard spent the entire afternoon talking only with her. Carol had left in January to take a job at Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, the Madison Avenue advertising agency. Dolger surmised it was a case of “Richard essentially being Richard and being shy didn’t talk to anybody. Except one particular girl, naturally. I remember people were upset about it, not annoyed, just disappointed.”
Carol Brissie was not in the least disappointed. She called Richard her “blond bear” and spent “a very happy week” with him in New York. She had been “near despair.” It was “a pretty black time,” and the week with Richard provided a bright spot. When Brautigan asked about her astrological sign, she didn’t have a clue. Richard made a calculated guess that she was either Aquarius or Libra rising. Carol promised to have her horoscope charted and let him know if he was on the money. The Life article came out on August 14, just as Brautigan prepared to depart. Carol enjoyed reading it, finding it “very real.” Right after Richard left town, she came down with trichomonas and went on medication for a week. She waited until Brautigan returned to Frisco before writing to delicately suggest he “might want to have a checkup.”
On a plane bound for North Carolina, Mary Lou Folston found a copy of Life in the seat pocket in front of her. Leafing through it, she came across the article about her son. A photograph filling the bottom half of the piece’s last page showed Richard and Ianthe walking across a street on Telegraph Hill. This was the first time Mary Lou had ever seen a picture of her ten-year-old granddaughter.
Brautigan detoured down to Texas on his way home from New York, stopping off in Austin for a visit with Roxy and Judy Gordon. They were living near Bee Cave, a little town on the outskirts west of the city. Their friend Bill Wittliff, a publisher, photographer, and eventually screenwriter (Black Stallion, Barbarosa, Legends of the Fall, A Perfect Storm, and Lonesome Dove) had arranged for them to look after A. C. Greene’s ranch, San Cristobal. Abilene-born, Alvin Carl Greene, “the dean of Texas letters,” was a journalist, historian, author, and Dallas television news commentator. At the height of his success, Greene had published the critically acclaimed A Personal Country the year before. Roxy and Judy occupied a smaller place close by Greene’s sprawling rock-and-adobe-walled main residence. They had the use of the big house for parties when friends came out from Austin.
With Brautigan as a houseguest, fishing topped the agenda. “Richard always wanted to fish,” Judy said. The Gordons took him further west out to Hog Creek, a tributary of Pecan Bayou that connected Lake Brownwood with the Colorado River. Roxy’s parents had a log cabin there. Brautigan got a Texas license, and they fished, not for trout, but warm-water species: perch, bass, and catfish. “I discovered Richard was not the famous fisherman,” Roxy, a lifelong angler who knew something about technique, recalled. “Couldn’t fish and didn’t know what to do when he caught one.” Judy was more specific. “He would bop them on the walkway.”
Visiting graveyards was another favorite Brautigan pastime. One sweltering afternoon when the temperature soared to 105 degrees, Roxy and Judy drove Richard to the cemetery at Byrd’s Store, a tiny settlement close by the Hog Creek cabin, where he took notes and watched an old man with skin cancer raking the graves. Looking at the dry landscape surrounding him, Brautigan judged the view to be “godforsaken.”
“Godforsaken is beautiful, too,” Judy Gordon replied.
Another time, Bill Wittliff took Richard and Roxy to the old Rosario Cemetery, outside Austin. Brautigan scribbled twenty-six pages of notes in his fifteen-cent Velvatone memo book. Of particular interest was the Manderfield Tomb, a
crumbling ruin distinguished for its decay even in this decrepit necropolis. Richard made crude sketches of the dilapidated mausoleum. “The Manderfield Tomb is the eyesore of the cemetary [sic],” he wrote. “The death slum . . .” Brautigan was fascinated as always with the overt symbols of mortality, and his copious note-taking was intended as research for a projected poem or short story that he never wrote.
Back home in Frisco, after his Texas sojourn, Richard bragged to Joanne Kyger about his time in London. “I got to run with the Creeleys,” he boasted. He began spending more time with Sherry Vetter. At first, she met him for lunch from time to time when Ianthe was visiting. “He got to me because here was this little girl who couldn’t handwrite,” Sherry recalled. “She didn’t know math. She could barely read, and I started out tutoring her.”
At the time, Ianthe lived up in Sonoma with her mother and attended a “free school,” which Brautigan thought, not without justification, wasn’t providing a proper education. He wanted her to go to a “regular school.” Ianthe told her father she hoped to be a veterinarian. “She was really interested in animals and stuff,” Sherry said, “and he knew she could never be that unless she had some math and some science.”
Richard, for his part, tutored Sherry in his literary preferences, trying to influence her reading tastes. He introduced her to the work of McClure, Snyder, and Creeley and to classic writers “he thought were really great, like Baudelaire and Sappho.” He recited poetry to her. Vetter recalled Phil Whalen’s poem “Three Variations All About Love,” a personal favorite, misquoting it slightly: “Behind my eyes at Benares, Over my shoulder at Port au Prince.” They took long walks together, studying the turn-of-the-century San Francisco architecture. “He loved Bernard Maybeck,” Sherry recalled, “especially the copper gutters.”
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 78