Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  “What is this guy, nuts?” she thought, making a rude reply and hanging up. Brautigan never got discouraged, and he tried again. “His strength is that he was persistent,” Siew-Hwa related, and she agreed to go on a date with Richard. He invited her to his new North Beach apartment on Union Street. “He cooked for me,” Siew-Hwa said. “As the evening wore on he paid me a lot of attention. He read to me, and I’ve never had anybody spend time reading to me. And I was so charmed.” After the first couple dates, their passion grew “so intense” that they couldn’t bear to stay apart and Beh moved in with Brautigan. Ginny told Siew-Hwa, “You are the woman Richard has been waiting for. You are the one.”

  Fueled by their mutual passion and a shared love for the movies, Siew-Hwa adopted a partner’s proprietary interest in Richard’s film script. This came to the fore at the Pine Creek fish dinner with G. Haller and her kids. “Siew-Hwa was very challenging at the end of this visit,” G. recalled. “Kind of challenging my credentials. It’s like ‘Who are you?’ and ‘What are you doing here?’ Like maybe she could make a better deal.”

  They all watched television after dinner. Eric and Bret fell asleep on the couch, and Ianthe covered them with a blanket. The grownups “sat and talked and talked” until it was time for G. to wake her kids and walk them back down the center of the road to their cabin at the Pine Creek Lodge. The Hallers returned to L.A. the next day without the Hawkline screenplay. Eventually, Brautigan mailed his script in, addressing it to “The Beautiful Hal Ashby.”

  Richard waited a bit too long. By the time his script arrived, Ashby was preoccupied with the production details of Bound for Glory, his Woody Guthrie biopic starring David Carradine. Mike Haller assured Flora Roberts in August that the project was still “in the works.” By early October, more than six weeks had gone by with no word from Hal Ashby. Richard Hodge wrote Flora Roberts to say Brautigan had expressed “a great disinterest in working further on the screenplay, given the problems of communication to date.”

  All was silent on the Hollywood front until the middle of March 1976, when Helen Brann wrote to Richard: “I understand that Hal Ashby is stirring the pot again and that maybe a movie will be made of THE HAWKLINE MONSTER.” Ashby had other pots to stir. He was busy with another project, Coming Home, a tale of injured Vietnam vets featuring Jane Fonda and Jon Voigt. Penny Milford received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for the role of Vi.

  Ashby continued to express interest in Hawkline, paying $10,000 in June to renew his option for another six months. He renewed again in December, adding an additional $10,000 to Brautigan’s bank account. False promises and outright lies prevail in the film industry, but this kind of capital investment signified a genuine desire to make the picture. Richard told Keith Abbott, visiting Pine Creek in the summer of 1976, that his goal now was to earn $1 million in Hollywood. “‘One million dollars a year,’ he kept repeating, almost as if hypnotizing himself,” Abbott wrote in his memoir. “‘I’m going to make one million dollars in one year.’”

  The road leading Brautigan toward the $1 million mirage proved both long and winding, as such routes tend to be in Tinseltown. Hal Ashby trudged the same path. While looking for his leads in Hawkline, he set his sights on Being There (1979), starring Peter Sellers and arguably his finest film. Along the way, Richard’s “Gothic Western” grew in popularity, appearing in England as well as in translations in Japan, Italy, France, Spain, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

  By November 1976, Hawkline had sold 49,211 hardbound copies in America and an additional 73,750 in quality paperback. The mass-market paperback, released in September, had already reached 160,985 copies in sales. These figures were not lost on Hal Ashby, who planned to move ahead with Jack Nicholson. Harry Dean Stanton had been dropped in favor of Dustin Hoffman.

  In June of 1977, Hal Ashby again renewed his Hawkline option. He hoped to begin shooting in Montana that fall. Dustin Hoffman, yet to sign on the dotted line, stood in the way of starting principal photography. Hoffman never signed. Ashby and Nicholson moved ahead to other projects. Ashby had already spent what Helen Brann described as “a small fortune” on option payments, and did the sensible thing, buying the film rights to Brautigan’s novel outright.

  By 1982, Ashby, slowed by health problems, turned the director’s chair over to Mike Haller, assigning himself the role of producer. A deal was made with Universal Studio, and Gatz Hjortsberg signed on for a couple drafts of a new Hawkline script. Completed, bound copies were delivered to the executive offices high atop the tall glass executive building known as the Black Tower. Thom Mount, head of motion picture production at Universal, was fired that same weekend. On Monday morning, his successor, Frank Price, swept the desk clean of all Mount’s projects.

  The Hawkline Monster languished in development hell once again. New drafts were written. Mike Haller tried one himself. Nothing came of them. Hal Ashby died in 1988. Haller ten years later. It seemed for a time as if their dream of a Hawkline movie might follow them into the grave. Ianthe Brautigan later regained the North American rights to her father’s book, and another deal percolated in the promised land.

  Richard Brautigan began work on the second book of his five-year plan early in 1974. This time, there was no need for a long list of potential titles. He knew what he wanted right from the start: Willard and His Bowling Trophies. Brautigan appended a subtitle, A Perverse Mystery. This had been his practice since writing The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966.

  Willard became Richard’s first project in his new writing studio high in the rafters of the barn at Pine Creek. On the first day of summer in 1974, seated at his desk in front of the big picture window facing the Absaroka Mountains, he wrote “46 pages, behind 2” in the date square of a spiral-bound 1973/1974 reminder calendar. He had completed nearly fifty pages of his new novel, but Brautigan felt he was two pages behind schedule. He recorded his daily page tally in his calendar, a process Hemingway called “keeping yourself honest.” The totals varied. Some days Richard wrote eight pages; often it was only two or three. At the end of the first week of July, he exclaimed: “hot dog! 14 pages 38 pages ahead.”

  July was a productive month, many eight- or nine-page days. On the seventeenth, a thirteen-page day, he jotted “finished” in the date square. After a three-week break, the daily tally began again on August 11, continuing, with another three-week hiatus at the end of the month, until September 26, when Richard wrote “finished” following an eight-page day.

  Willard takes place over the course of several hours in a single evening, ending tragically “a few moments past one in the morning.” The backstory of the Logan brothers’ three-year criminal hegira in search of their stolen bowling trophies wanders haphazardly across the roadmap of America, but is almost an adornment embroidered onto the texture of the novel. The events emotionally involving the reader all take place in Bob and Constance’s apartment in a three-story building on Chestnut Street in San Francisco, where the author lays bare secret desires and embarks upon an investigation of his private sexual nature.

  Unlike Bob, his fictional hero, Richard’s predilictions for S&M were not occasioned by sexually transmitted diseases. A taste for bondage predated Brautigan’s herpes infection by many years. Richard told his lovers a story about when he was young and newly arrived in San Francisco. He claimed his first love affair was with an older woman who enjoyed being tied up. She instructed Brautigan in the practice. Because sex was a new experience, he learned to associate bondage with intercourse. Richard claimed it had “ruined him” for traditional sexual activity. There’s no way of knowing the truth. Richard’s first sexual partner was his wife, Ginny. She was born a year earlier than Richard, hardly “an older woman.”

  Sherry Vetter recalled one evening in her early twenties when she had recently started dating Richard. She wandered down the long front hallway at his Geary Street apartment, “and I’m discovering the doors leading to different places.” Sherry open
ed one and stared into a narrow closet. A row of wire coat hooks screwed into the wall held five or six silk neckties. Brautigan came up the hall from the kitchen. “I didn’t know you wore ties,” Sherry said. He slammed the closet door. “Richard, you’re always telling me we can’t go to certain restaurants because you refuse to wear a tie,” she protested, following him down the hall. “You’ve got perfectly nice ties in there!”

  Not too long after that evening, Sherry Vetter found out why Brautigan collected neckties. “I used to say to him, ‘Richard, it’s so amateur. It’s so silly. Why are we doing this? I mean, for one thing, it’s silk ties. Do you think I could not untie this? I mean, nothing here is real. It’s so silly.’ And he’d stand up and stamp his feet up and down, and he’d say, ‘Just do it! Just do it! I don’t care how silly this is!’”

  In 1982, more than ten years after Sherry met Richard, when they’d both married and divorced others, she saw him for the last time. They “holed up” in the Kyoto Inn, a high-rise Best Western hotel in San Francisco’s Japantown. Sherry awoke to find Richard standing beside her “ripping up these white sheets.’ This struck her as so funny she couldn’t stop laughing. Richard sat down on the other bed and laughed along with her, taking off his glasses, laughing until tears formed in his eyes. He gave up the sheet-tearing and looked over at her nude figure. “I like the way your body matured,” Richard said sweetly, and they dressed and went out for a late night dinner.

  Another of Brautigan’s lovers close to the end of his life echoed Vetter. “It was nothing serious, and it was a game,” she observed. “And I knew it was a game. It was kind of silly. Sometimes I would say, ‘Richard, do we have to go through that tonight?’

  “And he’d say, ‘Well, maybe just a little one. Maybe just the wrists and nothing else.’ It was like we’d bargain. ‘Just the wrists and nothing else. Not the feet and the gag and the . . .’ He would say that. He was so funny. He’d say, ‘I’m just going to tie you up. It’s okay. It’s not going to hurt.’ And do it. ‘There. That’s nice.’ You know, talked like he was talking to a kitten he was petting. Very bizarre.”

  Sherry Vetter later insisted, “Every girl you’ll talk to will tell you it was totally so amateur, such a joke.” One time when her brother called the apartment, “Richard and I were fooling around, the tying-and-gagging stuff.” Richard jumped out of bed and answered the phone. When Sherry’s brother asked for her, Brautigan said she couldn’t come to the phone, adding by way of explanation, “She’s all tied up.” Vetter also remembered how, after a bondage session, Brautigan begged her never to mention what they did in the privacy of their bedroom. “Don’t ever tell anybody about this,” he said. “I’ll never write about this.”

  “And then he did,” Sherry reflected almost wistfully. “And remember who the girl was who got tied? It was me. The big green eyes, remember that?”

  Another of his former girlfriends said, “The fact is it’s only when he was really drunk that he would have the slightest inclination to tie people up.” Brautigan never willfully caused his partners any physical pain. Although Richard practiced what many consider deviant sexual behavior, he wasn’t a sadist. He regarded bondage as something playful and no more wicked than wearing sexy lingerie.

  Lawrence Wright reported in Rolling Stone that girls would warn each other about Richard’s “penchant for bondage” in the restrooms of North Beach bars. There was a young woman, a one-night stand Brautigan picked up at a midseventies Russell Chatham art opening in Livingston, who appeared the next morning, ashen and shaking, in the Hjortsbergs’ kitchen pleading for coffee and a ride to the Greyhound station. No mention was made of gags or silk neckties. She’d obviously just had an unpleasant and totally unexpected experience. Three of Richard’s girlfriends complained to Margot Patterson Doss about what they felt was weird sexual behavior. She got on his case about it. “But, Margot,” Richard replied, “I always tie them up loosely, and I never hurt them.”

  Don Carpenter had lived in Japan in the fifties and felt that Willard and His Bowling Trophies was “a Japanese sadist novel.” Richard’s game plan was to write books “each in its own way a surrealistic version of a popular genre.” Elaborating further, Carpenter observed, “Sadomasochism is the national sport of Japan.” Brautigan was well versed in contemporary Japanese literature, having read and admired the novels of Yukio Mishima, Kōbō Abe, Yasunari Kawabata, and Junichiro Tanizaki. He had long appreciated classic Japanese poetry, especially the work of Bashō and Issa.

  It wasn’t just Brautigan’s sexual habits and his pet papier-mâché bird that made it into Willard. He added a three-volume set of The Greek Anthology, one of his favorite literary works, to the narrative mix. Richard owned these books. His description was specific: “a 1928 Putnam edition, a part of The Loeb Classical Library, with gold lettering on a dark cover.” The anthology, a collection of mostly anonymous ancient Greek poetry, songs, epigrams, and fragments, first compiled by Meleager in the first-century BC, held great appeal for Richard.

  It’s easy to see the influence of The Greek Anthology on Richard’s work. Much of his poetry depended on fragmentation for its effect. What was left out, the empty spaces, give many of his poems their power. Four Anthology selections (all used in Willard) sound almost like Richard’s poetry. (“Deeply do I mourn, for my friends are nothing worth.” “I know the tunes of all the birds.” “And nothing will come of anything.” “The dice of Love are madnesses and melees.”) The author of the last is known. His name was Anacreon. Brautigan used this quote as an epigraph for the novel.

  A second epigraph for Willard came from a quote attributed to Senator Frank Church of Idaho: “This land is cursed with violence.” When Helen Brann wrote the senator to verify the quote, Church replied that he remembered making the observation to a reporter when word arrived of Robert Kennedy’s death in June 1968.

  Willard and His Bowling Trophies was the only one of Brautigan’s books that bore no dedication. Many years later, Siew-Hwa Beh claimed Richard intended to dedicate the novel to her. Brautigan asked to use her photo on the dust jacket. She refused, saying, “You are not going to collect me the way you collect other women.” Siew-Hwa had not met Richard when he completed Willard. The book was published in the late summer of 1975, and they were living together by then. The day after publication, Don Carpenter phoned Siew-Hwa. “Well, he paid you the highest compliment,” Don said. “He never put a name there because the book was supposed to be for you.”

  Toward the end of summer, Dell asked Brautigan if he’d be interested in writing an introduction for a planned American edition of The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. Having enjoyed his own tenuous personal connection to John Lennon, the Beatles, and Apple Records, Brautigan agreed. In October, Richard wrote a brief essay at the Pine Creek house. “The Silence of Flooded Houses.” He quoted a couple lines from “Eleanor Rigby” for poetic emphasis and mailed the piece off to Helen Brann, never anticipating the tempest in the corporate teapot engendered by his simple reference.

  In September, Brautigan called Erik Weber, saying, “I want a photograph for Willard.” He also hired Loie to proofread the Willard manuscript. Erik journeyed over to Geary Street from Potrero Hill. Richard was not in the best of shape. He was full-bearded and overweight, his shoulder-length hair thinning on top, and his image no longer reflected the ethos of a generation. Erik took ten shots in the apartment, the last film he ever exposed in the Museum, all grim frowning portraits of Brautigan. At the All American Bowling Trophy Supply, a simple storefront selling bowling balls and other nine-pin paraphernalia, Erik photographed him frowning in front of the entrance.

  The next stop was a bowling alley on Chestnut Street. Weber fired off eighteen frames (Brautigan grouped with golden trophies, peering over a gleaming rack of balls, kneeling before an altarlike wall, balls shelved like polished skulls behind him). One of these became the cover of the British edition. Another graced Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, Richard’s first collection of poe
try in six years.

  Weber remembered Brautigan wanted to “cover his belly. He didn’t want people to see it. Felt embarrassed by it, a very vain person.” Around this time, Richard suggested Erik take photographs of him naked in the bathtub with his feet sticking out. “We couldn’t do it,” Erik recalled. “He said no. I don’t want to do it now because my stomach’s too big.”

  Brautigan received a $50,000 advance for hardcover and quality paperback rights for Willard and His Bowling Trophies, identical to what he got for The Hawkline Monster. Helen Brann also secured a straight 15 percent hardback royalty. Again, the dust jacket art featured a striking painting by Wendell Minor, a stylized portrait of Willard surrounded by gleaming golden bowling trophies. Early in 1975, unhappy with Erik Weber’s pictures, Richard contacted Jill Krementz, noted photographer and wife of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Five years earlier in New York, Krementz took pictures of Brautigan in his new-look pageboy haircut.

  She sent proofs for Richard to consider. He selected a pensive head shot for his Willard author’s photo, uncharacteristically not wearing his glasses. Jill Krementz wrote Brautigan in May asking which of the other photographs he liked. She wanted permission to use them. “Your book will be coming out in no time at all and I’m sure I’ll be getting requests.”

  When Willard appeared, it was not a critical success. The reviewers stood in line to slam it. Cole William, writing in the Saturday Review, called it the worst novel of 1975. “Up to the author’s usual standards: fey and wispy.” In the New York Times Book Review, Michael Rogers suggested, “Perhaps Brautigan should make a retreat from the novel form.” When the novel came out in England the following year, Julian Barnes sneered in the New Statesman: “It’s like following a cartoon strip [. . .] one step back for every two forward, terrific of course, for those with spaced-out memories.” Willard had fewer foreign sales than Brautigan’s previous books. It appeared in translation only in Japan, France, Spain, and Germany. Even Don Carpenter was no fan of the novel. “I hate that book so much I may not even have [a copy],” he stated. No matter. Willard sold thirty-five thousand copies by October 10.