Jubilee Hitchhiker (132 page)

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 the 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.

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.”