Jubilee Hitchhiker (127 page)

The galleys for
Sombrero Fallout
arrived in Pine Creek around the Fourth of July, shortly after Brautigan returned from Japan. A day or so later, Richard was working hard on the final revisions in spite of recurring insomnia aggravated by jet lag. Keith Abbott came out to Montana for a month or so to help Brautigan with much-needed ranch work. He observed, “being such a perfectionist, [Richard] was usually a basket case after reading proofs.”

When the bound page proofs for
Sombrero Fallout
arrived near the end of July, along with the dust jacket copy, Richard enlisted Keith's help in rewriting his publisher's clumsy work. Abbott remembered Brautigan as being “scornful” of what Simon & Schuster sent to him. According to Keith, Richard tried to find “a way of talking about his work that avoided the 1960 hippie buzz words.” Brautigan called this “the dewhimsicalizing of his literary reputation.” He was not altogether successful. The flap copy he rewrote contained such observations as: “The lover dreams cat purr dreams of her dead father while the hero agonizes over tuna fish sandwiches and the possibilities of a simple seven-digit phone call.”

Simon & Schuster published
Sombrero Fallout
in September 1976, releasing a first printing of thirty-five thousand copies. The dust jacket featured a striking painting by John Ansado of a beautiful reclining Japanese woman staring with candor at the reader. A photograph of Brautigan
seated outdoors on a boulder in his high-crowned black hat (one of a batch John Fryer took for
Hawkline
two years earlier) filled the back cover.

Away in Japan all spring, Richard hadn't had time before his deadline to arrange for new photographs to be taken. John Fryer dreamed Brautigan's novel was titled “That Bat You Took.” Richard was greatly amused and convinced Fryer his dream title remained a serious contender. John wrote Jonathan Dolger at S&S in July requesting a $175 photo payment. He got his money, but the publisher printed his name incorrectly as “John Freyer” on the copyright byline.

A Japanese edition, translated by Kazuko Fujimoto, was published simultaneously by Shobun-sha in Tokyo. Richard felt proud of the international popularity this mutual venture celebrated, although the reviews for
Sombrero Fallout
were mixed. Barbara A. Bannon in
Publishers Weekly
called the book “an amusing trifle for Brautigan fans,” while a writer in the
Bookletter
said, “
Sombrero Fallout
may be the best novel Richard Brautigan has written [. . .]” Robert Christgau, writing in the
New York Times Book Review
, claimed, “One senses yet another artist who feels defeated by his audience and longs for simpler times,” but Charles Casey, in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, stated, “it's [
sic
] touchingly funny moments and it's [
sic
] interesting experimentation make it one of Brautigan's best.”

A letter from Philip Whalen, sent from the Zen Mountain Center in the Carmel Valley and dated “7:IX:76,” offset any residual bad feeling occasioned by the negative reviews. Whalen “enjoyed SOMBRERO FALLOUT. The tone & colors are exactly Japanese [. . .] the mixture of hysteria, violence, sentimental feeling and hair get it down exactly.” Phil had also read
Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork
and said the poems “maintain your unique sound. I can think of only two other poets whose work is inimitable—Gregory Corso and Robert Creeley—I am swamped with jealousy and shame.”

By the time the first reviews of
Sombrero Fallout
appeared, Brautigan was close to putting the finishing touches on the fourth of his five-year-plan genre novels. Early in 1976, Richard began jotting ideas on a series of four-by-six note cards. “Dreaming of Babylon,” he wrote on one, along with “A Private eye novel 1942–1976.” Below that, enclosed in a penciled circle, he added, “1924–1946–1951–1967–1976.” Whatever the other dates meant at the time, Brautigan decided to set his new book in 1942. He planned to write a detective story. Along with his title, he had already worked most of it out in his imagination.

Richard hired Loie Weber to research the project. He had been paying her $5 per hour to work for him, but agreed to raise her salary “retroactively.” Having narrowed the time period to “a couple weeks in 1942,” Brautigan needed a day-by-day compilation of long-gone San Francisco events and weather. Knowing his subplot involved the Babylonian daydreams of his dim-witted gumshoe hero, he also asked Loie to research ancient Babylon. For planned scenes in the morgue, Richard demanded what he called “specific information.” Loie Weber spent a couple weeks at the Civic Center library looking “at all the newspapers during that particular time period.” She took careful notes in a Velvatone notebook.

Loie spent forty-two hours on research, not including a quick “follow-up” to the California Historical Society for copies of period restaurant menus. She spent $45 on supplies, saving all the receipts, as Brautigan was a stickler for such details. Loie also took a trip to the San Francisco morgue, where she interviewed the coroner, who showed her around the autopsy room and gave
her an odd souvenir, a coroner's office toe tag used to ID the corpses. She passed it on to Richard. Loie recorded her observations in clinical detail.

Brautigan “didn't use this information at all,” Loie recalled. She never typed up her notes, giving Richard her legible and meticulously rewritten notebook. He selected the items of interest to him and ignored the rest. Brautigan wanted to know everything in advance, all the details in place, so there would be no surprises. Asked why Richard avoided taking literary risks, Loie replied, “That's not the way his mind worked.”

A curious coincidence occurred while Loie Weber worked on
Dreaming of Babylon
. She was an avid gardener and did some indoor cultivation for a woman whose live-in lover happened to be a private detective. Loie found this interesting. They started chatting. Loie told him she was researching a detective novel for Richard Brautigan. The detective was David Fechheimer. He pretended he didn't know Brautigan but said he really admired his writing.

“So, he's sort of picking my brains,” Weber recalled. The canny Fechheimer played his part to perfection, feigning ignorance and eliciting tidbits of information about his pal Richard. The hapless C. Card, Brautigan's fictional shamus, lacked the savvy intelligence to pull off such a stunt. If Richard had wanted to create a clever detective, he would have interviewed David about trade secrets. Instead, he never said a word to Fechheimer about his book until it was done.

In spite of consistently strong sales figures for the four Brautigan titles they had published, Simon & Schuster treated their contractual obligations to the author with cavalier indifference. In April, S&S failed to run a full-page ad in the book/movie section of the
New York Times
upon the publication of
Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork
as stipulated in clause 27 of Brautigan's contract. A half-page ad advertising
Sombrero Fallout
appeared in the June 28 issue of
Publishers Weekly
, sandwiched between full-page ads for new novels by Rona Jaffe and Lois Gould and sharing its space with a book called
The International Book of Wood
. Simon & Schuster had always announced Brautigan novels with full-page ads in
PW
. This time, the publisher failed to show Richard the ad copy first, another contractual breach.

Helen Brann knew Richard, away in Japan, would react with “complete dismay” upon seeing the ad. She wrote Jonathan Dolger to complain, “If someone at Simon & Schuster had intentionally set out to wound and upset a major American author, he or she could not have done a better job.” On the phone with Brann that same morning, Dolger (whom Brann believed had “done a thoughtful and excellent job for Richard over the past few years”) told her, “we feel Brautigan is so well-known that he doesn't need a full-page ad.” This attitude elicited a “wave of shock” in Richard's agent.

The shockwave's reverberations resonated deep within Helen Brann's negotiating strategy for
Dreaming of Babylon
. In November, she flew out to San Francisco to meet with Brautigan and several other clients who lived in the Bay Area. Helen found Richard in an “up” mood but thought “he was drinking too much.” Brann “had this gang of writers sitting around” in her suite at the Stanford Court Hotel, among them Keith Abbott, whom she signed up a month earlier on Brautigan's recommendation. Keith thought Richard seemed much the same as he had in Montana in the summer, “drunk, morose and harried [. . .] that night he looked like a corpse.” Helen and a friend “had to sort of bundle [Richard] up and get him home somehow. Get him into a cab.” Richard managed to give his agent a manuscript copy of
Dreaming of Babylon
,
which Brann promptly read. She “loved” the novel and brought it back with her to New York.

Knowing Seymour Lawrence had been patiently waiting in the wings for the return of an author he referred to as “the prodigal son” in Dell Publishing internal memos, Helen Brann submitted a bid to Simon & Schuster more than doubling Brautigan's previous advances. S&S countered with an offer of $100,000, twice what they'd paid before. Helen immediately rejected it. When Simon & Schuster held firm, she wasted no time getting back in touch with Sam Lawrence.

Brann sent Lawrence manuscript copies of Brautigan's new novel along with
June 30th, June 30th
, a book of poems written in Japan earlier that year. She offered Sam the hardcover, quality paperback, and mass-market paperback rights for the United States and Canada, asking for an advance of $200,000 for
Babylon
and an additional $50,000 for the poetry. She wanted a straight 15 percent royalty on both trade editions with an increase to 17 percent after twenty-five thousand copies were sold.

This generated a flurry of interoffice memoranda at Dell, examining Richard's prior sales figures and the details of the S&S offer. Lawrence expressed his enthusiasm without any equivocation. “This is an opportunity to restore a genuine and original talent to our list,” he wrote to the top Dell executives on New Year's Day 1977. “It's a moment I've been waiting for.”

Two weeks later, Helen and Sam hammered out a deal. Lawrence would pay Brautigan an advance of $125,000 for
Dreaming of Babylon
and an additional $25,000 in advance for
June 30th, June 30th
. These amounts were for the hardback and quality paperback editions only. The mass-market paperback rights were reserved for the author, along with “all the usual subsidiary rights,” dramatic, first serial, subsidiary, and translation. Unlike Brautigan's previous Simon & Schuster deals, the royalty for the trade edition started at 12 percent, rising to 15 percent only after sales totaled fifteen thousand copies. Helen gave Sam an option on “Richard's next full-length work,” insisting on Brautigan's right to final design approval of all dust jacket and advertising art and copy.

Simon & Schuster had a contractual right to top any offer from another publishing house by 10 percent. If they exercised this clause, Brautigan would remain an S&S author. They had previously offered an advance of a hundred grand, but Simon & Schuster bean counters refused to cough up an additional thirty-seven-five, and the deal with Dell went through. In mid-February 1977, Helen Brann delivered signed contracts for
Dreaming of Babylon
and
June 30th, June 30th
to Sam Lawrence. After an absence of seven years, the prodigal had returned.

Richard contacted Erik Weber and arranged for a dust jacket photographic session at his Bolinas house. Brautigan bought a new hat for the occasion, a wide-brimmed tan fedora with a two-inch silk band to evoke the sort of headgear a hard-boiled shamus might wear. Weber shot three rolls of film, mostly of Richard wearing the hat, either talking on the phone or staring sternly at the camera. There were shots of Brautigan writing in his notebook and the fedora alone, perched on a chair and sitting on a dresser. Another dozen showed the hat sitting on Richard's bed in obvious defiance of the old superstition.

Much later, a friend looked at Erik Weber's contact sheets and said, “Do you know it's bad luck to have your hat on the bed?” Erik immediately thought, “Richard must have known that. He knew stuff like that.” Eight years later, Brautigan died standing in front of this same bed in Bolinas. He never wore the fedora again after the afternoon photo session with Weber.

In the end, Richard decided to have no photograph on the
Babylon
dust jacket. He approved one of Erik's pictures (a straightforward portrait of Brautigan wearing the unfortunate hat) for use in the advertising campaign. Richard felt one of the reasons the eastern critics had been so unkind to him had a lot to do with the “overuse” of his image on earlier book covers. Sam Lawrence objected to not having an author photo on the novel (“I for one am always curious to see what an author looks like”) but relented in the end. “If Richard is adamant and wants no photograph at all, so be it.”

Brautigan wrote his own flap copy in the past, but this time around he enlisted the help of Don Carpenter in early February 1977, asking him to take on the task. Don agreed and composed every word of the wry dust jacket notes. Sam Lawrence, thinking they were by Richard, pronounced them “beautiful.”

It was Carpenter's contention that Brautigan wrote all of his “genre” novels as “attempts at movies. Richard, without ever admitting it to anybody, wanted very badly to make movies, very, very badly. He was extremely interested in the movie business, and he was all over me about movies and about getting movies made.” Carpenter was Brautigan's conduit to the film industry, a friend who had actually written and produced a movie. “He loved, and I loved, to talk movie lingo,” Don said, “because as a linguistic phenomena I love it, and he loves linguistic phenomena, and so we would talk movie language.”