Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  For Beh, the two years she spent with Brautigan felt like ten. “You know how you can spend a whole lifetime with someone and never have that intensity of intimacy?” she said. “The first seven, eight months were so ideal it was like I felt in my soul and in every way that I had come home. All my life I had looked for a playmate, another person to play with me. I never had a boyfriend or even a girlfriend who was such an ideal playmate. Our life was so unreal. He never had to go to an office. We read poetry. We talked a lot. We loved to eat. We had great sex.”

  There had been previous lovers, and Beh had been married for four years while in college, but still she admitted, “I was so new to a whole sexual life because I came from a place where you’re not allowed to be sexually that free.” Part of the new freedom included bondage. The ever-independent Siew-Hwa set her own rules in that department as well. “I was into freedom and being able to express myself,” she recalled, “and I said, ‘Only if you allow me to tie you, too.’ I think no woman had ever told him that and I think that thrilled him.”

  The open give-and-take early in their relationship extended beyond the bedroom into even more sacred territory, Brautigan’s work. Unlike any previous muse, when something Siew-Hwa said in conversation inspired the writing of a poem, she teased him, saying, “What part of the commission do I get from this?”

  Intrigued, Richard told her, “They’re paying me $200 for this poem; I’ll give you sixty bucks for it.”

  “That’s good,” Siew-Hwa said. “Next poem. Muses have to eat, too.”

  Beh believed Brautigan paid her so much attention that he spoiled her “in a sense.” He enjoyed drawing baths for her. While the tub filled, Richard lit numbers of candles on the window ledge and the vanity top and along the edge of the sink. After Siew-Hwa immersed herself in the steaming water, he brought in a “cold, cold bottle of white wine,” usually Pouilly-Fuissé, and sat on the toilet seat and just stared at her. “It’s like he noticed everything about it,” Beh recalled. “He would look at me in silence like he was trying to hold on to every moment.”

  Richard liked taking a book into the bathroom and reading to Siew-Hwa as she washed her hair. Often, they cracked jokes during these intimate bathing moments. “He looked so angelic,” Beh said, “but other times he would look melancholy, like he couldn’t believe this would ever last. He would be so simple and yet so complex at the same time. We were both very conscious about class. We both felt we were outsiders. We understood each other because in many ways I was just as primitive as he was. As kids, we would just run around the streets wild. And I enjoyed being a loner with him. Two outsiders found each other.”

  Together night and day during those first months, Richard and Siew-Hwa forged a unique bond. “It was a wonderful gift,” she said. “I couldn’t have dreamt of a better dream.” Beh described Brautigan as “the perfect house-husband. He cooked every day. I would just love it,” she said. A perfectionist in the kitchen as well as in his writing studio, Richard took care to get things right.

  “He was a gourmet,” Beh recalled. “He knew his wine and his food, and he knew every corner of every street, so he would go to different delis. He was playful. He was like this eternal child who would keep discovering and rediscovering and having the joy to discover again.” At home, Richard and Siew-Hwa didn’t watch much television, but their nighttime ritual before sleep involved watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Beh noted that Brautigan was not “placid” in his television watching. “He had a unique way of seeing things,” she said. “He could turn anything that’s mundane into something funny or witty. And that was such a joy because that was a real gift.”

  Richard shared his love of basketball with Siew-Hwa. Professional and college games provided more opportunities to nest in front of the television set. Another aspect of popular culture Brautigan greatly enjoyed was country music. He introduced Siew-Hwa to Dolly Parton by playing her the song “Coat of Many Colors.” “You’re a feminist,” he told his Malaysian girlfriend, “you must listen to Dolly Parton, who was really quite a feminist before her time.” (Ianthe remembered her father playing Parton’s “Jolene” over and over again during the summer of 1976.)

  The second week in April, Jim Harrison and Guy de la Valdène arrived in San Francisco for a short visit. They stayed with Brautigan at his new sun-filled apartment. Russ Chatham came over from Marin to join the fun, later described as a “riotous couple of days.” The boys were in a mood to party, wanting to visit the Golden Gate Foundation, an upscale fifteen-room Pacific Heights brothel at 2018 Bush Street. The place had opened several months earlier, quickly gaining a sub-rosa reputation by discreet word of mouth. They also gave out gold calling cards, “a member organization” advertising the “preservation of fine traditions.”

  The problem for the gang was a shortage of funds. This was no two-bit whorehouse. Prices ranged from around fifty bucks a pop to $300, depending on the customer’s sexual preferences. Sitting at the bar at Vesuvio on Columbus Avenue, the boys discussed their dire financial straits. Richard came to the rescue. He dug through the pockets of his old army jacket and started “pulling out bills.” Brautigan found between $1,100 and $1,300 in the faded fatigue coat and turned it all over to his buddies. Curt Gentry joined their party. He had published a book called The Great Madams of San Francisco a decade earlier and had a long-standing scholar’s interest in brothels.

  Richard accompanied the gang to the cathouse on Bush Street but didn’t partake of its main attraction. They trooped under an ornate iron gate and up twenty steps beneath a drooping oleander tree to the canary yellow doorway of the Victorian mansion housing the Golden Gate Foundation. After being treated to “free” drinks (champagne), the boys took bubble baths upstairs with the girls of their choice, before retiring to the six tangerine-lit, sumptuously furnished bedrooms.

  While his friends caroused, Richard had drinks in the bar, where he encountered Joseph Alioto, mayor of San Francisco. “What are you doing?” Brautigan inquired.

  “I’m sort of running the town,” His Honor replied.

  Kitty Desmond, the madam, billed as the “executive planning director,” listed her occupation as “researcher.” She had been granted a business license by the city to operate an “emotional therapy research foundation.” Her place was raided by the police a month later and shut down for good. Russell Chatham found himself unable to collect on an arrangement to trade a large nude painting for “a dozen glorious pieces of [Kitty’s] matchless ass [. . .]”

  After returning from Montana in the fall of 1974, Brautigan’s monthly tab at Enrico’s and Vanessi’s provided an accurate yardstick of time spent at his favorite North Beach establishments. In December of ’74, Richard charged $556.04 at Vanessi’s and another $238.51 (mostly drinks) at Enrico’s. More than a convenient watering hole, Enrico’s served as a quasi-private club for its regular customers.

  In his newspaper column, Herb Caen described “an ordinary day” at Enrico’s. Caen stood inside at the bar with Charles McCabe, taking it all in. Over “at the family table,” Scott Beach played his handmade psaltery for editor Blair Fuller. “Nearby, Barnaby Conrad was arguing movies with Mel Torme. A newly bearded Herb Gold, just back from Haiti, toyed with his eggs-in-hell while listening to Enrico practice his violin.” Out on the sidewalk terrace, Richard Brautigan sat “scribbling poetry on an old envelope.” A couple tables away, Evan Connell occupied his time “staring into space.” Dressed to the nines “except for an incongruous white tennis hat,” J. P. Donleavy paused for a drink on his way to visit John Huston in Mexico. Caen felt the scene rivaled the fabled Algonquin Round Table from the 1920s.

  Herb Caen neglected to mention Ward Dunham, Enrico’s affable, bearded Herculean bartender (and occasional bouncer), who gave the place much of its character. Born in Denver, Dunham came to San Francisco in 1965 after getting back from Vietnam. Before signing on at Enrico’s, Ward worked as the night manager at a club called the Roaring Twenties while studying
history and journalism at San Francisco State during the day.

  Belying his formidable appearance, Dunham was a skilled calligrapher, whose incisive Gothic lettering was much prized by collectors. Broadway riffraff commingling with high society, “lowlifes coming into contact with the social elite of the city” at Enrico’s, provided Ward with a front-row seat for the world’s most fascinating street theater.

  Enrico’s seemed designed for the inside crowd. “All the good stuff to eat was never on the menu,” an old regular recalled. “You had to know what to ask for. “Dirty hamburgers were Enrico’s evocation of the hamburgers you ate as a child at the drugstore, with a little thin slice of pickle and a little thin slice of onion, perfectly done for a dollar and a quarter. If you wanted the Enrico hamburger it was big and thick and on French bread and inedible.”

  Sometime in the fall of 1974, Brautigan reconnected with private detective David Fechheimer at a party at Men Yee’s lavish Pacific Heights apartment. At the time, Yee and a friend named Pat Bell planned to go into the publishing business together. “They were going to do a Book of the Month or something like that,” Fechheimer recalled. “Some crazy scheme.” Richard and David started a conversation at the party and ended up spending the next couple days together, “drinking and talking and screwing around.”

  After that, they met regularly through the winter and spring of 1975 at Enrico’s. Once, sitting together drinking at Brautigan’s favorite table, they were approached by a young man. “Obviously a star-struck graduate student wanting to be a writer,” Fechheimer said. The aspiring author asked Richard’s advice regarding his potential literary career.

  “I think I can help you,” Brautigan replied. “I’ll be willing to sell you some verbs. You’re going to be a writer, you’re going to need a lot of verbs.”

  Not knowing quite what to make of it all, the young man asked, “How much do verbs cost?”

  “Well,” Richard said, “they start at a dollar.”

  Still unsure where this was leading, the young man handed Brautigan a dollar bill.

  Richard took the money, folded it, and put it in his pocket. “Go,” he said, without cracking the hint of a smile.

  Along with good food and energetic sex, a passion for the movies provided another enthusiasm Brautigan shared with Siew-Hwa Beh. He and his new love often saw several films on a single day. They watched Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away one morning (they liked it) and, after a lunch of creamed herring on Union Street, went to Three Days of the Condor (which they hated) at the Northpoint Theatre. Following a quick pizza dinner, they dropped over the hill into Polk Gulch and saw The Harder They Come (“a sweet movie”) at the Lumiere, the venerable art film cinema on California Street.

  At the time, Brautigan was writing his Hawkline Monster screenplay while Beh continued to work on her magazine dealing with women in film. Richard was “very pleased” by this tangency, Siew-Hwa noted, “because he thought it would really strengthen our relationship.” She told Brautigan that Hal Ashby was the perfect director for the Hawkline project and was entirely supportive. “He was very puritanic,” she said. “He never drank anytime he worked.”

  By the first week of May, the work had been going really well and Richard’s script was nearly done. He decided to celebrate, advertise, and mock his good fortune all in a single gesture. At San Francisco Posters in North Beach, he ordered 250 custom one-and-a-quarter-inch white pinback buttons printed with sold out. why didn’t i think of it sooner? in blue letters. At a tourist novelty shop near Fisherman’s Wharf, Brautigan bought a couple dozen white cotton T-shirts and had the same slogan stenciled on the front in blue. Throughout the summer, he gave these souvenirs away to his friends and acquaintances. The inner circle received the shirts.

  As the Hawkline screenplay wound to a conclusion, Richard made plans to return to Montana for an indefinite stay. Siew-Hwa would spend a lot of time with him at Pine Creek but needed to pursue her own career in San Francisco and planned to travel back and forth as her schedule demanded. Unable to drive, and knowing he’d be living alone twelve miles from town with a teenage daughter who had only a learner’s permit, Brautigan cast about for a companion to serve as a chauffeur, provide entertaining company, and help with the cooking. He found the perfect candidate in Tony Dingman.

  Richard Brautigan had been introduced to Dingman by Lew Welch in the fall of 1969 at the San Francisco opening of American Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s and George Lucas’s new production company. Tony had been studying poetry with Lew for about a year as part of a UC Extension course. Dingman’s sister, who introduced the film director to his future wife, Eleanor, provided the connection to Coppola.

  Born in Los Angeles, Tony graduated from Stanford University in 1960, then worked for a year as a social worker in L.A. before moving to San Francisco. Dingman spent the next three years at UC Hastings College of the Law. After failing to pass the bar exam three times in a row, he hit the road in the summer of ’66, living for fourteen months in Brazil teaching English as a foreign language.

  When he returned from Rio in February of ’68, Tony found work on Coppola’s production of The Rain People. “They needed to give a poor fuck-up a job,” he said. Having been a Bekins moving man the summer before he left for South America, Dingman had a Teamsters card and became the transportation captain on the shoot. After spending the summer shooting in a dozen eastern states, Coppola and Lucas (associate producer on Rain People) returned to Frisco and found a first home for the fledging Zoetrope in an unused warehouse.

  Richard and Tony hit it off immediately at the launch party and quickly became fast friends and drinking buddies. “Things were good for a long time,” Dingman recalled. “He never pissed me off. I never pissed him off.” Both men shared the virtue of punctuality. Ianthe remembered Tony as “one of the few people who could get along with my father for long periods of time.”

  By the summer of 1975, the ranks of the Montana gang had realigned. Tom and Becky McGuane split up. Tom sold his original screenplay, The Missouri Breaks, to producer Elliott Kastner, at the same time finessing a side deal to direct the film version of his novel Ninety-two in the Shade himself. While shooting in Key West that winter, McGuane fell in love with Margot Kidder, the picture’s female lead. By the time the movie wrapped, Margot was pregnant. Becky moved out, divorcing him in March.

  Beautiful, bright, and big-hearted, Becky didn’t remain a grass widow for very long. A handsome movie star waited in the wings. Peter Fonda, one of the leads in Ninety-two in the Shade, had his eye on the petite blond throughout the shoot in Key West. “I couldn’t help but notice that Tom wasn’t paying close attention to his promise or duty,” Fonda wrote in his memoir, Don’t Tell Dad. “He was after every skirt in town.”

  Regarding his own feelings for Becky, Peter stated, “From the get-go, I had thought she was a gold mine.” To celebrate their love, Dink Bruce carved rings for them from a sabadilla tree growing in Becky’s backyard. When Ianthe attempted to get some answers from her father regarding “all the couple shuffling,” Richard declined to satisfy her curiosity. “If I tried to keep track of the substance of my friends’ love lives, that’s all I would have time to do.”

  When school got out early in June, Ianthe flew to Montana with her father. Tony Dingman followed a week later, flying Western to Bozeman. Ianthe later wrote she “always felt very safe when Tony came to stay with us.” Owning an automobile was essential. Richard and Tony soon went used car shopping. They settled on a big white ten-year-old Plymouth Fury. Brautigan dubbed his new set of wheels the “White Acre.”

  Richard remained in a good mood through the start of the summer. Work on his novel was going well, and in the middle of June, Helen Brann sent him a huge batch of foreign contracts, twenty-one altogether, for five different books from countries as varied as Finland, Japan, Holland, Sweden, Norway, and Mexico.

  With Tony Dingman ensconced at Pine Creek, life ran a bit smoother. He helped manage the house, did t
he shopping and pitched in with the cooking. Tony also nursed Richard through the worst of his drunken nights and never objected when Ianthe played her favorite Bob Marley records over and over and over. Both being poets, Brautigan and Dingman respected each other’s work time. Tony recalled that Richard had only one hard-and-fast rule: “No yogurt in the refrigerator.”

  Summer in Montana was houseguest season, and a steady flow of visitors began appearing at Brautigan’s Pine Creek home. Curt Gentry and his girlfriend, Gail Stevens, were among the first to arrive, showing up in time for the Fourth of July, always a rambunctious holiday in cowboy country. Gentry had enjoyed an enormous success in 1974 with Helter Skelter, his hardcover best-selling account of the Manson killing spree, coauthored with prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. The book received an Edgar Award for best true crime book of the year from the Mystery Writers of America.

  Flush with best seller earnings and a new woman on his arm, Curt Gentry felt in a mood to party in Montana. July had been unseasonably cool and wet with sky-blackening thunderstorms and hailstones bigger than cherry bombs. Cowboys never complain about rain, and the Independence Day festivities went on without interruption. After the town’s annual parade, the main event was the Livingston Roundup, a three-day rodeo spanning the second, third, and fourth of July. Held in conjunction with other three-day rodeos in the nearby cities of Red Lodge, Montana, and Cody, Wyoming, the Roundup attracted talent at a national level. The hands competed in all three towns over the long weekend, potentially tripling their winnings if Lady Luck rode with them all the way to the whistle.

  Most of the Montana gang was in attendance at the fairgrounds arena the night Curt, Gail, and Tony Dingman came with Richard and Siew-Hwa to the rodeo. The Hjortsbergs were there, as were Tom McGuane and Margot Kidder. Gentry recalled that when the announcer asked all the native Montanans to stand, “Richard was up before anybody else.” The rodeo was a long affair, with two rounds of every event and a halftime show featuring trick riders, trained bison, and a clown whose chaps-wearing monkey rode a bucking border collie.