Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  The Missouri Breaks, directed by Arthur Penn, was in production at locations in Nevada City and the vicinity around Billings. Starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, the cast included several familiar faces. Harry Dean Stanton was back, as a member of a horse-thieving gang, along with Randy Quaid and Frederic Forrest. Stanton and Forrest became very close and hung together throughout the shoot. Siew-Hwa Beh idolized Brando, and Harry Dean told her he would introduce them. Richard, knowing of Marlon’s fondness for Asian women, fell into a jealous snit, afraid his girlfriend might run off with the movie star, and the proposed meeting never took place.

  McGuane’s coterie made regular excursions to Billings to visit the set. One afternoon, Tom McGuane, along with Forrest, Stanton, and a group of other movie people, rode up to Brautigan’s house on horseback. Richard had prepared for this unexpected visit. He bragged of a new possession. The best thing he ever had, Brautigan claimed. Anticipating hot summer weather, he purchased an electric fan. Richard brought the machine into the room, turned it on, and focused the air flow on Harry Dean, who was “stoned out of his mind.” At the same moment, Siew-Hwa switched on a portable tape recorder. “Harry Dean, I’m your biggest fan,” the recorded voice chimed. “Harry Dean, I’m your biggest fan.” Everyone laughed. Curt Gentry got the impression that Stanton didn’t have a clue what was going on.

  During his stay, Curt also observed that Richard and Siew-Hwa “were fighting just constantly.” In spite of the bickering, Gentry thought Brautigan’s girlfriend “had a pretty good sense of humor.” He noted that she was able to put up with his friend’s numerous idiosyncrasies “but wouldn’t do any work for him, cooking or anything.”

  Richard did the cooking, aided by Tony and Ianthe. At times, the wives of his guests pitched in. Gail did her part during Curt’s short stay. Terry de la Valdène, Guy’s lovely blond wife, took “over the organization of the kitchen” during their several visits that summer. “Terry and I would wash the endless dishes together while she told me funny stories about growing up,” Ianthe recalled. The two of them grew very close. Guy observed Ianthe “sort of used Terry as a mother figure.”

  The Valdènes always arrived bearing boxes of shellfish and oysters packed in ice, along with cases of top-shelf booze. They stayed in the bedroom on the second floor of Brautigan’s house. Jim Harrison usually came at the same time without his wife, Linda. Being a solo guy, Jim was relegated to a smaller room at the bottom of the stairs on the left, a grade above Tony Dingman’s quarters, which Guy described as “a miserable little room.”

  Brautigan arose early, even if drinking heavily the night before, and went to work on Sombrero Fallout in his writing studio high in the big red barn. Later came a substantial breakfast, frequently prepared by Richard, who favored hearty fare, biscuits and gravy or Hangtown fry or eggs with sausage and bacon. On occasion, he served his friends fried rice or turkey dressing in the morning. Afternoons, the boys went fishing. “We were great pals,” Guy observed.

  Harrison had finished a first draft of the novel Brautigan’s loan set in motion, but he was stuck for a title. Jim based the main character on his mother’s only brother, who died in the 1919 flu pandemic, imaging his life story had he lived. At one point, Jim told Richard, “I’m having trouble with a title.”

  “I charge a quarter for titles,” Brautigan replied.

  “I’ll take three,” Harrison said, giving him six bits.

  “It’s about a farmer, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about calling it Farmer?”

  “Okay.”

  In the evenings, numerous dinner parties provided the agenda, Paradise Valley being a moveable feast in the summer of ’75. Tom McGuane became a frequent host on Deep Creek. Margot Kidder was pregnant but didn’t let it slow her down. She kept busy filming a behind-the-scenes, making-of documentary on The Missouri Breaks, transforming the converted chicken coop/guest cottage into her office.

  Becky had divorced Tom and bought Wilbur and Doretha Lambert’s place adjacent to McGuane’s spread, The Raw Deal Ranch. She wanted their son, Thomas, to have only to walk across a hayfield when he wanted to see both parents in a single day. Peter Fonda flew Becky down to San Antonio, where he was shooting Race with the Devil with Warren Oates. He rented the best room in the city’s finest hotel and filled her suite with hundreds of yellow roses (a symbol of loyalty), an extravagant floral welcome marking the beginning of their life together. They got married on Armistice Day in Sonora, Arkansas, where Peter was working on another film, Jonathan Demme’s Fighting Mad.

  Back at home, high jinks and misrule remained the order of the day. Practical jokes abounded. One night, Jim Harrison, exhausted from the day’s frolicking, left early from a party at the Hjortsbergs’, hoping to get some much-needed shut-eye, and found a stranger bunked down in his guest room bed at Richard’s. Returning to the party and too polite to ask about his replacement, Jim failed to notice Richard’s sly unconcealed grin. Knowing his friend planned an early departure, Richard slipped out ahead and placed a dummy made of pillows in Harrison’s bed. A coconut served for a head.

  Harrison exacted his revenge a few nights later, when, after a late evening of drinking, he smeared butter all over the doorknob to Richard’s exterior sleeping cabin. Guy de la Valdène remembered Brautigan’s schedule seemed to be one “bad” drunken day followed by two “good” sober ones. “He said he couldn’t write otherwise.” Guy, being a good listener, was often on the receiving end of Brautigan’s late night bull sessions. “At three in the morning the guy can barely get the words out of his mouth,” he recalled.

  The manic hilarity seemed to reach its zenith with a mammoth food fight at Tom McGuane’s place. The season’s war cry, “Nothing is too disgusting,” rang in the air as the dinner guests ran from room to room, pelting each other with leftovers. Their clothing befouled, the women stripped down to bras and panties, transforming into fierce mashed-potato-hurling amazons. The entire downstairs was trashed. This sophomoric bacchanal might reasonably have provided the conclusion to the summer’s mischief, but reason seldom plays a part when anarchy rules the roost.

  “We knew it was going to happen,” Guy de la Valdène said in retrospect. A couple weeks later, Brautigan hosted his own big dinner party. In preparation, Richard removed his favorite possessions from the walls of his combination living room–dining room, taking down a Japanese flag and a treasured Russell Chatham painting completed earlier that year. The canvas had “1942,” Brautigan’s poem about the death of his uncle Edward, penciled on the surface over the gaunt image of a tree. Richard’s guest list included Siew-Hwa, Tony Dingman, Guy and Terry, Gatz and Marian Hjortsberg, and Bob Dattila, out for his annual rural frolic but lodging elsewhere.

  Tom McGuane and his large household of visitors were also invited. These included Moira Hodgson, petite blond Irish food critic and author of several cookbooks, and Margot Kidder’s longtime friend from Canada, writer Rosie Shuster, a gorgeous brunette with a killer wit. Rosie’s father had been half of the Canadian comedy team Wayne and Shuster, and her artist uncle, Joe, had created the comic strip Superman (with high school buddy Jerry Siegel) as a teenager in Cleveland.

  Rosie married her junior high sweetheart, Lorne Michaels, in 1972 and was on her way to New York to work on the writing staff of Saturday Night Live, a show he was producing for NBC. Their marriage wasn’t working out. She had a traveling companion, Stuart Birnbaum, also a comedy writer, in tow. Once, heading through the swinging doors into the Longbranch for a night of two-stepping, Shuster quipped to her friend Kidder, “You know how to tell the cowboys, don’t you, Margie? They’re the premature ejaculators in the big hats.”

  The dinner table conversation at Brautigan’s place was raucous and entertaining, everyone shouting amid the laughter. Richard had prepared vast quantities of his signature spaghetti sauce, and the Hjortsbergs brought fresh vegetables and a large green salad from their garden. At the end of the meal, Dattila made his apol
ogies and ducked out. Moments later, Brautigan said, “Terry, you’re one of my favorite friends in the world, and this is why I’m gonna do this.” He picked up a pitcher full of red wine, reached across the table, and poured it over the top of Terry de la Valdène’s head.

  “What the fuck!” she exploded. Guy was equally shocked. Richard had always placed Terry (and Becky McGuane) “right up on a pedestal—always the perfect gentleman.”

  Brautigan went on to calmly explain his motives to Terry. “The reason I’m doing this,” he said, “is had I started this food fight and not gotten you involved, you would have gone upstairs and missed all the fun.”

  After that, all hell broke loose. Terry reached into the pot of spaghetti sauce and hurled a handful at Richard’s face. In seconds, the entire party grabbed leftovers and flung them at the first available target—everyone except Margot and Siew-Hwa, who ducked into the safety of the bathroom and locked the door. Moira Hodgson, wearing a white antique crocheted Irish lace blouse, her coppery hair arranged in an elegant coiffure, ran upstairs for the safety of a guest bedroom.

  The battle raged on for fifteen or twenty chaotic minutes. Marian Hjortsberg poured a bottle of sweet sticky liqueur all over her husband. The others ran back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, flinging cold spaghetti, booze, and wilted salad. When all the leftovers were gone, they raided the garbage pail, hurling coffee grounds and orange peels, whatever came to hand, pelting each other with filth.

  After the trash was exhausted, Guy filled the garbage can with water and doused it over the survivors’ heads. Brautigan’s downstairs had been reduced to shambles, walls an abstract spaghetti sauce action painting, floors slick with water and trampled leftovers. Somewhat chagrined, the befouled and bedraggled gang took their leave. McGuane blew his Land Rover’s horn for stragglers. Marian ran to rescue Moira Hodgson from her hiding place. “It’s all right now,” she said. “It’s over. You can come down now.”

  Moira tiptoed like an immaculate princess through the wreckage. Brautigan made a little formal Japanese bow, holding out his hand to escort her through the doorway. In on the plot, Richard laughed his excited high-pitched laugh. Jim Harrison waited in hiding on the front porch, pressed against the wall with a half-gallon of mountain red. When Moira stepped out, he upended the bottle over her head. The cheap burgundy poured through her perfect hairdo, streamed across her face, and stained her antique blouse a deep purple.

  Moira stood stock-still in disbelief, and her Celtic temper built. Her features darkened. “Bitch!” she exploded, thinking Marian Hjortsberg had set her up. Moira whirled around and slugged Marian so hard she “went flying to the other side of the room.” Everyone was laughing “just like satyrs.”

  The next day, Ianthe awoke to the swish of a lawn sprinkler. She looked out her bedroom window at the front lawn and saw the dazzle of the oscillating spray in the morning sunlight. The sprinkler sat dead center on the stained living room rug, “going slowly back and forth [. . .]” After it dried out, the rug showed few battle scars. The interior of the house was another story. Guy went into Livingston and bought several gallons of latex paint. Tony Dingman repainted the kitchen and the living room ceiling. He left a small patch of the original yellow in the kitchen where Brautigan had calibrated his daughter’s growth with pencil marks.

  At fifteen, about to start her sophomore year in high school, Ianthe no longer stood against the kitchen wall to be measured. Her mother planned a move from Sonoma Valley to Hawaii. Ginny and Richard talked things over, deciding it would be best for Ianthe to spend the winter with him and attend school in Montana. Before Labor Day, Terry de la Valdène took Ianthe into Livingston and registered her at Park High. They shopped in town for new school clothes. Brautigan took an interest in his daughter’s education, asking about her reading assignments. Her English teacher had assigned Faulkner’s “The Bear,” and Ianthe found it boring. Brautigan loved Faulkner. He wanted Ianthe to be properly introduced to his work, having her read As I Lay Dying instead.

  In the last week of August, John Fryer gave Richard a small notebook. Brautigan said he wanted to keep track of how he spent his time every day. “This book is a record of my reality,” he noted on the first page. “It is not a diary. I am writing it because I am curious about what I do with my life.” Between the end of August and the first Monday in November 1975, Richard maintained an accurate day-by-day autobiographical compendium. He recorded daily events, the trivial and the important.

  Brautigan noted everything he had for breakfast (“a hamburger with some grapefruit juice,” “country sausage and eggs [. . .] at a truck stop café,” “fried rice,” and “fried potatoes and deer steak [. . .] I made a really good gravy and poured gravy over the potatoes. It was a fine breakfast.”) He detailed the number of hangovers he suffered (fourteen over the two-month time span). Most remarkable were his omissions. Richard made no mention of fifty-one days when he had almost nothing to drink. When he drank, Brautigan really tied one on, but there were periods (some lasting almost three weeks) when he imbibed nothing stronger than wine with dinner.

  Richard’s nondiary detailed his writing life during the completion of Sombrero Fallout, including descriptions of several short jaunts to San Francisco, when he left Ianthe in Tony Dingman’s care. A four-day fishing trip to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in September was also recorded. Brautigan flew from Bozeman to Seattle (with stops in Great Falls and Spokane, “a long and boring flight”), where he spent the night in a TraveLodge. The next morning he met Russ Chatham and two other fishing companions. They took the car ferry to Victoria and drove nine hours north to Port McNeill, the final fifty miles on a dirt road.

  Along the way, they stopped at the harbor city of Nanaimo and bought nonresident angling licenses for $15 at Murphy’s Sporting Goods. Brautigan listed his address as 314 Union St., San Francisco, although he always claimed Montana as his primary residence when buying his annual local permit. The fishing in B.C. proved terrible. Richard caught the only salmon. Eating wild blueberries in the woods provided a more interesting activity.

  Brautigan left his friends, flying on Pacific Western to Vancouver and on to San Francisco, where Siew-Hwa picked him up at the airport. Richard was gone from Montana for ten days before returning to his daughter. He resumed his urban life in Frisco, breakfasting with Don Carpenter at Mama’s Café on Stockton Street, lunching with Ron Loewinsohn in Japantown, going to the movies, hanging out at Enrico’s, making love and fighting with Siew-Hwa.

  The mercurial seesaw nature of Richard’s relationship with Siew-Hwa was duly recorded in his journal. A sampling of the early entries spelled out their domestic tribulations. “Siew-Hwa and I got into a big argument [. . .] I slept in a separate bed again.” “I had a good day with Siew-Hwa. Didn’t argue and made love.” “We almost had an argument but fell asleep before it could get off the ground.” “Siew-Hwa and I continued arguing until I left to go to the airport.” “I talked to Siew-Hwa on the telephone. It went alright. We didn’t argue.” “Siew-Hwa and I started off the day with a terrible argument. It lasted until 3:00 pm when we found something better to do that pleased us a great deal.”

  Siew-Hwa’s volatile behavior stemmed from a fierce independent spirit. On her many trips back and forth from San Francisco, Beh always paid her own way, unlike most of Brautigan’s former female companions. Arguments with Richard frequently grew out of heated conversations, intellectual disputes escalating to a shouting match. Between outbursts they enjoyed a special harmony, loving and nourishing. The day before Siew-Hwa arrived for a visit early in September, Richard went fishing on Mill Creek and caught two brook trout for her breakfast. Later, they drove to Yellowstone Park. Brautigan fished the Gibbon River until twilight. They spent the night at the Old Faithful Inn, dining very late on “mediocre” Rock Cornish game hens.

  After “a horrible lunch” the next day, Richard vowed to bring his own food the next time he visited the Park. “It is a mistake to eat
any food that is cooked for you at Yellowstone.” He and Siew-Hwa toured Geyser Basin, viewing the steaming pools and geysers. Brautigan found the colorful algae “beautiful, like other worlds.” After leaving by way of West Yellowstone, Brautigan fished the Gallatin River in the afternoon. They drove down Gallatin Canyon to Bozeman, checking into the Holiday Inn, where they marveled as “lightning mixed itself in the sunset.” After dark, they watched the Miss U.S.A. pageant on TV. The next morning, Richard saw Siew-Hwa off at the airport. They’d enjoyed four harmonious days without even the hint of an argument.

  On the first of October, Brautigan had breakfast in the morning with Don Carpenter, returning to Montana from San Francisco later in the day. Back in Pine Creek, he paid Tony Dingman $2,000 “for services rendered: specifically as chauffeur-painter, for the months of June, July, August, September, 1975.” That night, Richard went to a party at Tom McGuane’s. He got “very drunk,” staying up until 5:30 am. The next day was lost in a hangover fog.

  On the second Friday in October, after Richard worked on his novel and watched the last few moments of a high school football game in Livingston, he and Tony met an incoming flight bringing Siew-Hwa, Curt Gentry, and Gail Stevens. Back at Pine Creek, Brautigan “drank a lot, got maudlin and fought with Siew-Hwa.” The next morning he woke up with a “horrible hangover.” Brautigan spent the day in bed, out in his little sleeping cabin. “It seemed to be the best place for me,” he reflected. Richard got up as it grew dark and joined his friends and family in the main house, joking “about being a vampire cowboy.” Curt cooked a massive steak Brautigan thought was delicious. Later, Harmon Henkin dropped by and stayed up with Richard until one in the morning, discussing future trades.