Jubilee Hitchhiker (124 page)

Taking a giant step into the deal-making process, Brautigan traveled down to Los Angeles to meet with Ashby. Richard had never been fond of L.A., which he called “this strange sprawling city of gothic vegetation and casual clothing where I am changed instantly into a child thinking that all eight million people here somehow work in the movies.” Hal Ashby brought Brautigan to a lunchtime meeting with Jack Nicholson at the actor's home high up on Mulholland Drive. Brautigan, understandably apprehensive at having to sell himself and his work to Nicholson, fortified himself with ample doses of bourbon whiskey.

More cocktails followed chez Jack. By midafternoon, Brautigan, far from being nervous, felt no pain at all. Richard played an afternoon game of “horse,” one-on-one basketball, with Jack Nicholson at a hoop the actor had set up in front of his garage. They bet $50 on the outcome. Brautigan, six inches taller than Nicholson, won the game and the wager. As they sat around the living room later that afternoon, the conversation touched on financing. Richard launched into a lengthy discourse detailing his disdain for money. To demonstrate this scorn, Brautigan resorted to an old Digger tactic. He took out his wallet and removed all the bills, including his basketball winnings, slowly tearing them into tiny pieces. Ashby and Nicholson looked on in astonishment as Brautigan scattered the bank note confetti into an elongated crystal bowl on the coffee table. Jack had another business meeting scheduled at that hour, so Hal and Richard politely took their leave.

The moguls arrived as Ashby's car pulled out of Nicholson's driveway. Jack had no time to tidy up, and the bowl of shredded money sat on prominent display as the small talk started. It was hard to ignore. One of the big shots, knowing Nicholson was a collector, asked, “What is this? Some kind of art piece?”

Jack flashed his famous grin and strung the guy along, telling him it was a conceptual work designed to express the artist's contempt for commerce. “You know,” he said, improvising the gag as he went, “people just like make contributions.”

Quick as a high-roller tossing down a bet, the mogul whipped out his wallet and tore up a wad of hundreds, dropping the pieces into the crystal bowl. It was the start of a long-running comic
tradition. For years afterward, the bowl full of torn money sat on Jack Nicholson's coffee table, a memorial to Richard Brautigan, as sucker after sucker ripped up his bankroll in the name of art.

Nicholson would not commit to the
Hawkline
project until he read a script. Hal Ashby negotiated a deal with Helen Brann and Flora Roberts early in June 1975. Dick Hodge worked for seven and a half hours, helping to facilitate the deal. Ashby obtained the underlying film rights to
The Hawkline Monster
and contracted Brautigan to write the screenplay. The amount agreed upon for both came to $125,000, although, separate from his screenwriting fee, Brautigan received only a $10,000 option against an eventual sale price.

Ashby hoped to make
Hawkline
his next picture, planning to start shooting in Montana in the summer of 1976. Richard hired a private secretary, Glenise Butcher, to assist him in typing the many preliminary drafts of his screenplay. Glenise, a beautiful young Englishwoman, proved extremely useful to Richard. Not only was she a swift typist, she could take dictation in shorthand.

Don Carpenter served as Brautigan's “in-house critic” on the
Hawkline
project. In 1972, Don wrote and coproduced the film
Payday
, starring Rip Torn as a self-destructive country-and-western singer modeled on Hank Williams. The film featured original songs by
Playboy
cartoonist and children's book author Shel Silverstein, who had worked with Don on
Stars and Stripes
in Japan during the Korean War.
Payday
received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival and impressed Richard Brautigan, who regarded his friend Carpenter as his unofficial ambassador to Hollywood.

Brautigan brought Glenise Butcher over to Carpenter's place and had him explain the format and structure of a screenplay. She took it all down in shorthand. After learning the structure, Brautigan began writing the script. The previous year, when Gatz Hjortsberg had scored his first Hollywood assignment, Richard offered some advice. “You know the secret to writing screenplays, don't you?” he quipped. “You have to leave all the writing out.”

Brautigan's
Hawkline
screenplay ran very long. Industry standards dictate anything over 120 pages to be an unwieldy epic. His script was peppered with wry Brautiganesque touches, like adding a line of dialogue after a description of an owl sitting in the rafters of a barn:

“He called me up maybe, what, six thousand, seven thousand times, with little line changes and things like that,” Don Carpenter recalled. “And then he brought over his first draft with Glenise to take notes. He would read the scene to me, and I would tell him what I thought about how the scene would play and what I thought should go into it, what should come out. What he was interested in getting from me was how to make a drama, how to make a dramatic scene. I've never done a better tightrope job in my life. I didn't touch content or style or approach.”

After reading the final draft of
Hawkline
, Carpenter told Brautigan “it was one of the best screenplays I'd ever read, and there was no chance it would ever be made into a movie, because it's schizophrenic.” Don considered the script “beautifully written, beautifully, beautifully written.” He thought the only way a Brautigan movie could ever get made was “to not try to make it like every other movie, not try to make it conform to any kind of movie, but to make it a Brautigan movie, so that it's totally weird from beginning to end.”

Richard refused to believe Don's dire predictions. He wrote down his friend's words, “This screenplay of
Hawkline Monster
will never be made into a film,” and passed the paper across to
Carpenter. “You sign this,” he said. Don signed. “I'm going to make you eat that in public,” Brautigan said.

“I will eat that at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Don replied, “at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I will pay for lunch on the day this film is completed.”

By midsummer, Brautigan finished his 145-page first draft of the screenplay. Ashby and Haller enthusiastically awaited its arrival in L.A., but Richard refused to mail it. G. Haller speculated that it had to do with a previous trip made to Hollywood during his first
Trout Fishing
fame. A big-shot producer courted Richard with a dinner invitation to his Beverly Hills home. Brautigan was “limoed” up to the mogul's mansion and served an “obscenely long three-foot [baked] trout.” The sight of it made Richard feel like he was some rube from the hills who only ate trout. All through the meal, the talk focused on the genius of
Trout Fishing
. After dinner, the producer offered Richard $250 for an option on the book. The experience made Brautigan leery of movie executives. G. was dispatched to Montana “to find and deliver the script.”

G. brought along her two boys, and they stayed once again in a cabin at the Pine Creek Lodge. As soon as they settled in, she walked over with Eric and Bret to pay a call on Richard. Brautigan announced that he was going to take the kids fishing. G. felt disappointed when their destination turned out to look like a trout farm. It was Armstrong's Spring Creek, which also supported a fish hatchery. Richard took pains to set the boys up and show them what to do. “He was very, very emphatic about the kids catching fish,” G. recalled.

All of them caught fish. Richard invited the Hallers back to his place that evening for a trout dinner. Ianthe was spending the summer with her father and helped him prepare the meal, assisted by Tony Dingman, who had come to help with the chores and drive Brautigan around. Siew-Hwa Beh, Brautigan's new girlfriend, rounded out the party.

Born in Penang, Malaysia, of Chinese ancestry, Siew-Hwa first came to the United States in 1963 at age eighteen on an American Field Service scholarship. She returned to the States two years later with $100 in her pocket, two suitcases, and another grant. She was one of the first women to attend the UCLA film school. The writer-director Paul Schrader was among her classmates. Frustrated by the subordinate position of female students expected to make coffee instead of movies, Siew-Hwa scraped together $600 in 1969 with her roommate and created
Women & Film
, the world's first feminist film magazine.

In the late fall of '74, Siew-Hwa dated a Chinese journalist named Min who wrote for several local papers and was a friend of Brautigan's. Min brought her to a bar in North Beach, where Richard spotted Siew-Hwa through the boisterous crowd. “There was a lot of dancing,” she said, “and I had no idea that he was so smitten.”

Five feet, one inch tall and extremely thin, Beh wore tight pants and no bra under a sleeveless, collarless bib. Brautigan described her a few years later in a short story (“A San Francisco Snake Story”): “She was very intelligent and also had an excellent figure whose primary focus was her breasts. They were large and well shaped. They gardened and harvested much attention wherever she went.”

When Richard approached Siew-Hwa to make his introductions, she asked him what he did for a living.

“I write,” Brautigan said. “I wrote
Trout Fishing in America
.”

“Well,” Siew-Hwa replied, “I really am not into fishing.”

That she didn't know Richard was a writer “turned him on,” Siew-Hwa later recalled, “because he had never met anybody who was educated who'd never heard of him. He was thrilled that I didn't know him.”

Brautigan wheedled Beh's phone number from Min and called her a couple days later. “He called me only when he was drunk,” she said. “I guess he was too nervous.” Their first conversation was a lengthy recounting of an argument he'd recently had with his ex-wife, Ginny, about Ianthe's dental problems. Virginia wanted to have the bad teeth removed and Richard thought she should save them. “You've got to have your own teeth to chew your own food,” he told Siew-Hwa.

“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.