Jubilee Hitchhiker (102 page)

Back in New York in early April, Richard stayed at One Fifth Avenue, a twenty-seven-story art deco hotel built between 1927 and 1929 at the intersection of Eight Street and Fifth just above Washington Square Park. The room rate was $25 a day. On the ground floor, the hotel housed a restaurant and bar decorated all in white with salvaged remnants of the luxury Cunard liner
SS Caronia
, launched in 1905 and scrapped in 1933.

By chance, Erik and Loie Weber were in New York at the same time, having come over from England on their return from India. They were visiting Loie's parents. Erik was surprised to get a call from Richard. “I don't know how he found out where we were or the number, but he did.” Having been in the Far East for three years, the Webers suffered from culture shock. Seeing an old friend in such a new light only added to their confusion. “It was hard for me to grasp,” Loie recalled. “The Sterling Lord agency, Richard's books, the money. He was really getting known, so Richard the personage was emerging, and that wasn't the Richard I knew for ten years before.”

Erik and Loie hung out with Brautigan for a week or more. They went with him to a celebrity party. Rip Torn and Andy Warhol were among the other guests. “I remember Richard was very impressed that Andy Warhol was there,” Loie said. Warhol was with one of his Factory leading ladies, Ultra Violet or Viva Superstar. “A not-real female,” recalled Loie, who “had just come back from a totally other culture” and felt the alienation of sudden reentry. “This is too weird,” she thought. It got weirder. Warhol pulled down the top of his companion's gown, exposing her superbreasts for a barrage of snapshots.

When Erik Weber, who had very little money after three years in Asia, saw that his
Trout Fishing
cover photo had been used on the Delta edition, he wrote to Sam Lawrence asking for a payment of $200, “as soon as possible, so we can go back to the West Coast.” Erik also resumed
his role as Richard's court photographer, expressing astonishment at his friend's newfound affluence. “When I left him [to go to India], he was still in rags,” Erik said.

Weber went with Richard to the Getty Building on Madison Avenue, where the offices of the Sterling Lord agency were located, and took pictures of him in the lobby and standing in the elevator, holding the doors open. This upset the doorman, who came over and said, “No more photographs,” trying to kick them out. They had to call upstairs and have Helen Brann explain it was OK.

Erik took several more shots in Helen's office. Richard looked prosperous in his new herringbone tweed jacket and long woolen scarf, his hair coiffed in a modified pageboy cut. The haircut was Loie's work. “That's what he wanted,” she said, “and I helped him to do that. Crafting his image, his style. Because he had that look [long hair] for so long, and then he debated and debated, and looked, and talked.” Richard described the hairstyle he had in mind to Loie. “I don't think he hardly did anything impromptu,” she said. “He was one of the most measured, the most calculating people, terrified of being caught.” Loie also thought Richard now “seemed a little more lighthearted.”

When Keith Abbott saw Weber's New York pictures for the first time, he found Brautigan's poses “studied. He knows what he wants to look like.” Keith thought Erik captured “Richard shining in his newly minted fame.” They showed his “clearest attempt to break free of his social class.” Carefully posed in his agent's office, “he is in on a joke. His fingers are on his temple, mimicking the standard thoughtful back cover author poses. He smiles at his unbelievable good luck.”

Brautigan's lingering smile might have resulted from a chance encounter with Carol Brissie, an attractive young woman who worked at the Sterling Lord agency. She spent time with him and the Webers during his brief stay in New York. Wanting to see more of Richard, she tried to reach him the night before he left for Cambridge but called too late. Richard flew with Erik and Loie to Boston. “It was the beginning of Richard's largesse,” Loie recalled, “of having money, having his friends be with him.”

In Cambridge, Brautigan introduced the Webers to Ron Loewinsohn and the Trout Fishing in America School people.
Life
sent photographer Steve Hansen to take Brautigan's picture seated on the sidewalk in front of one of the storefront schools with the students and faculty assembled behind him. Erik Weber captured the event with a photograph showing Hansen crouched over his tripod-mounted camera and Richard posing in the background. Erik and Loie returned to San Francisco about the same time Brautigan came back from Boston. Flat broke, the Webers moved in to a little house on Rhode Island Street on Potrero Hill.

Newly pregnant, Loie started working for Richard as his secretary/girl Friday. She remembered the apartment on Geary Street looked much the same as it had before she left for Asia. Her first job was organizing Brautigan's chaotic files. Richard bought a new filing cabinet. “We spent a week, two weeks, billions of little pieces of paper and making piles. Because he had things in paper bags, things in envelopes. Brautigan had one file for correspondence with fans. Another, where Richard disposed of requests from assorted crackpots and pushy wannabe interviewers, was marked “Pests.”.

Loie also took dictation, typing business letters. Richard carried the typewriter out of his sacred writing room (“this dank little cavey place that was totally unappealing”) into the kitchen,
and she worked at the round oak table. At times, they collaborated, writing letters together. “We had quite a lot of laughter over the writing of some of those letters,” Loie recalled. She felt Richard tried to cope with his new fame “with a certain grace and integrity.” He seemed more relaxed and had even stopped biting his nails. “He was a worrier, a fretter, a nail-biter,” she remembered. “The same attention to detail, that same gnawing mentality that went into crafting his style and his work, a lot of that was also internally applied to himself.”

All during the first year of Richard Brautigan's enormous success, his life seemed touched by magic. Later, Richard frequently complained of the ill treatment he received at the hands of critics and book reviewers. This time around, in the bright spring of his fame, praise came his way in rushing laudatory torrents. Even a mass-market magazine like
Newsweek
proclaimed, “Brautigan makes all the senses breathe [. . .] He combines the surface finality of Hemingway, the straightforwardness of Sherwood Anderson and the guile of Baudelaire.”

J. D. O'Hara, writing in
Book World
, observed, “Brautigan at secondhand is all too likely to sound merely whimsical and cute. He is not; what underlies these games is a modern fatalism, not maudlin fatheadedness.” Dan Wakefield called Brautigan “a real writer,” on the front page of the
Los Angeles Times
Books section. In the
New York Times Book Review
, Thomas McGuane wrote “These books are fun to read,” comparing Brautigan's style to Kenneth Patchen, Thoreau, W. C. Williams, and “the infrequently cited Zane Grey.”

Across the pond in London, Tony Tanner in the
Times
described
Trout Fishing in America
as “a minor classic” and “one of the most original and attractive novels to have come out of America during the last decade,” while John Coleman in the
Observer
found the novel “a pleasant surprise [. . .] an excellent and pretty original compilation [. . .] streets ahead of Burroughs or Kerouac [. . .]” The esteemed Guy Davenport declared in the
Hudson Review
, “Both these works show Mr. Brautigan to be one of the most gifted innovators in our literature.”

On the other hand, Jean Stafford lamented in
Vogue
that she did “not understand [. . .] Richard Brautigan's what-you-may-call-its.” Stafford had been puzzled by Richard's work, and before writing her review, she called Sam Lawrence at home one night at 10:00 pm, “in her cups and rambled on about Brautigan.” She wanted the “lowdown” on the author “and why the book looked the way it did.” Sam assured her “there was no ‘lowdown,' just what was in the book.” She still didn't get it.

After receiving his graduate degree from Harvard early in April, Peter Miller found himself wondering what to do next. The Trout Fishing in America School ran along on its own energy, and Miller felt at loose ends. Peter mentioned this when Richard phoned to ask how things were going. “Why don't you come out to California?” Brautigan said.

Miller had never been to the West Coast. Richard sent him an airline ticket, and he flew out for the first time. Brautigan's hospitality included providing a place to stay in San Francisco. Richard invited Peter to crash for a while at the Geary Street apartment. Miller remembered the Museum as “the weird one with all the stuff on the floors.”

During Peter's visit, Richard received a call from Michael McClure, who needed to dig up a pipeline in his backyard. “We'll go help him,” Brautigan said. He and Miller headed over to McClure's place. They put on work gloves, but the poets appeared unfit for manual labor. Richard and Michael stood around talking while Peter got to work with the shovel. “I dug this fucking hole,” he recalled, “because that's just not what they did.”

Brautigan's audience consisted mainly of college students who did not concern themselves with book reviews. Richard gave twenty campus readings in 1970. All but one were in California. Fifteen had been arranged by the California Poetry Reading Circuit, a division of the Writing Center of the English Department at the University of California. They planned a spring tour, beginning the last week of April and running until the end of May. Richard traveled to Stanford, Pomona, Cal Tech, USC, many branches of the University of California (Berkeley, Irvine, Santa Cruz, Davis, and Santa Barbara) and state colleges in Sacramento, Chico, Sonoma, and Humboldt County. Brautigan always drew a large crowd. “Wherever he reads his audience runs into thousands,” Sam Lawrence wrote in a letter to the Dell hierarchy.

Brautigan began his California tour at Berkeley. Wearing his tweed sports jacket, he read to a packed house at the Wheeler Auditorium. After dinner and many rounds of drinks, Ron Loewinsohn brought him to a “depressing graduate student party” at a house close by the campus. The moment Richard and his companions “burst into the room,” the atmosphere at the effete academic gathering noticeably altered. “That's Richard Brautigan . . . That's Richard Brautigan . . .” everyone began whispering. Richard was in a surly mood. When asked “Are you really Richard Brautigan?” he replied with a curt “No!”

Jayne Palladino, a twenty-six-year-old PhD candidate in comparative literature, was among the partygoers that night. Married at eighteen and only recently divorced, Palladino had not been having a good time. She'd been looking for a polite means of escape when Brautigan barged in, hostile and obnoxious. She thought he seemed “much too big” for this company, which felt “oppressively small” to her, and she took an immediate liking to him for being different. Feeling emotionally vulnerable at the time, Jayne expected Richard to treat her badly when he struck up a conversation. At first, he was “perfectly awful,” a bragging boastful drunk laying his “famous author trip” on her. Soon, Brautigan made her laugh and listened to her ideas about poetry, becoming increasingly gentle and entertaining. Amazed that he seemed to actually like her, Jayne Palladino was further astonished when Richard invited her to dinner at his place. Although “terrified,” she agreed to the future date.

Ed McClanahan introduced Brautigan the next afternoon at Stanford, the second reading on the tour. Richard asked those standing in the back to come down and take the empty seats up front. He told the students about the cat sitting on the stage during his Harvard reading the previous fall. “At Stanford, it's a dog,” he said. “At the University of California, it's probably a frog.” After reading from
The Pill
, Brautigan launched into more-recent work. After “Jules Verne Zucchini,” he said, “I was not overjoyed with this
Apollo 13
shot. I thought it was a tremendous extravagance and waste of human energy and time and material. I didn't feel very good about the first one either. The poem's about that. I think we should wheel and deal down here.” His remarks were greeted by a slight smattering of applause. “Two people who want to live on Earth,” he quipped.

Earlier in April, Richard called Rip Torn in New York. “I'm getting another Blunder Brothers act together. Interested in a Feather River adventure?”

“Damn right!” Rip yelled.

The day after Brautigan's Stanford reading, Torn rendezvoused in Frisco with Brautigan, Price and Bruce Dunn, Peter Miller, and Paul Kantner, the lead guitar player for Jefferson Airplane. The sextet set off for Sacramento in “another old car.” Sacramento State was a scheduled stop on
Brautigan's California reading tour. They had to be there before one in the afternoon. Torn considered Richard Brautigan “a splendid reader.” This was a true compliment as it came from one of the finest performers of the time. The audience at State was energized by excitement. Richard focused on a pretty redheaded nurse who stared up at him, “enraptured.”

The party food provided after the reading proved inadequate. The participating poet had been promised a meal, but “all they had were dips and cheese balls and cheap wine.” Richard concentrated on the redhead. Leaving the party without her, he said to Rip, “I talked too damn much and ruined it. I scared her off. Dammit!” They crashed not far from the campus at “an upstairs back-of-the-house apartment with a screened-in porch.” Along with a half bottle of Jim Beam and “a few beers,” the boys augmented the party's meager fare with a vegetable stew enhanced by liberal doses of bonita flakes, lemon, and Tabasco.