Jubilee Hitchhiker (97 page)

Beverly replied, “Do you know who
I
am?” When Brautigan learned she was a professional model, he immediately offered her a job posing for the cover of his forthcoming book of poetry,
Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt.

Beverly thought the title “singularly unattractive,” but agreed to participate. Brautigan explained to her that all the covers of his books featured photographs of women, “his wife, or later, his girlfriends, who were significant in his life at the time.” With a new book of poetry due out soon, “he had no wife or girlfriend whose photo he could use.” Neither of Richard's wives ever appeared on his book covers, but it was widely assumed that Mickey Blake-Grand was whom Brautigan referred to as “my woman” and “the woman who travels with me” in
Trout Fishing in America
.

Richard and Beverly set a date for the cover shoot in mid-January 1970, the day before she was scheduled to fly back to Italy. The week of New Year's Eve, Brautigan phoned her with an invitation to dinner at his place on Geary Street. He would show her some of the poems from the book. Feeling like a “glamorous model by day and lonely little furball by night,” Beverly didn't hesitate. Richard cooked his famous spaghetti. Only one burner on his ancient stove actually worked.

Once, when Brautigan scrambled some eggs for Lawrence Hammond, the musician asked, “Richard, how long has it been like that?”

“Ever since I've been here,” Brautigan replied. “I've become good at one-burner cooking.”

It was a cold night. Richard's kitchen window fogged with steam from the boiling water when Beverly arrived bearing “a bottle of wine and a painted papier-mâché Mexican doll.” Brautigan gave her a tour of the museum. “At first glance, the apartment seemed cluttered because there was so much stuff,” she later wrote, “but then I noticed how incredibly orderly it all was. We sat in the kitchen and ate spaghetti and drank wine and told each other about our lives.”

Once they started talking, any thought of the
Rommel
poems fell by the wayside. Beverly told Richard about her childhood in Oakland, where she was born to Swedish immigrant parents and attended public schools. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in music, married an older professor, and moved to Greece. Richard in turn wove a tale of his impoverished youth in the Northwest.

“He could spin a yarn,” she recalled.

Beverly enjoyed Richard's stories, but what really impressed her was how intently he listened to what she had to say. Years later, she wrote, “I can still feel how it felt to have Richard listen to me.” Cheered by the wine, they laughed and played records. Brautigan stacked sides on the
changer, “and every now and then said listen to this about a song that came on.” One of his LPs was Bob Dylan's recent
Nashville Skyline
album. Her brief memoir provided a tantalizing hint about what might have happened next. “It never occurred to me to bother how many women Richard might have played that for, or how many times a young woman warm with wine and his radiant attention, having noted the big brass bed in his bedroom, would have simply followed the song's instructions.”

When Beverly Allen left the Geary Street apartment for her family home in Oakland later that night, she gave Brautigan the painted Mexican doll (her “taliswoman”) as a keepsake. A few days later, she dashed off a semipoetic handwritten note on Saks Fifth Avenue stationery, wishing Richard a happy new year. “If I could write poems I would write about a man I met the other night [. . .] And we, like the birds, can embrace the illusion of dream, the illusion of reality, the illusion of illusion.” When asked what she remembered of meeting Richard, Beverly always replied, “His gentleness.”

Two weeks later, on a grim cold wet day, after staying up late the night before packing for Italy, Beverly drove her mother's De Soto across the Bay Bridge and over to Geary Street. Richard and Edmund Shea waited for her at the Museum. Richard had asked Beverly to wear something that evoked “some kind of Nazi stereotype.” She was dressed in tall black boots, a yellow miniskirt she'd picked up in Berkeley, a T-shirt, and a long black vinyl raincoat from Saks. The original plan had been to go out to the beach, but rain and mist foreclosed on that notion. They headed instead to the children's playground in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, “where Richard knew there was a sandbox.”

Brautigan had discussed the imagery he wanted with Shea beforehand, and they brought along a five-and-ten-cent store kid's tin pail and shovel. With these props and Beverly decked out in her shiny black raincoat, they set to work. A sense of silliness and fun informed the entire shoot. Richard was the director, instructing Beverly to play the part of a “spy-woman.” She obliged by acting “at being some kind of Veruschka,” her hair loosely pulled back into a single braid. “It was fun. It was a tremendous amount of fun. It was absolutely playful.” As the day progressed, it grew colder and colder. Years later, Beverly wrote, “I remember sitting on the damp sand in that sandbox, feeling cold, growing weary of being there.”

Toward the end, it started raining in earnest, and they broke out a big umbrella. Edmund took his final shots of Beverly crouching beneath it, her damp hair unbound and flowing, and of Richard on the slide and holding the umbrella protectively above her. (Later that year, when
Confederate General
was published in England, Jonathan Cape Ltd. used the picture of the two of them under the umbrella on the front cover of the book.) They were all “freezing cold” at this point. Edmund snapped one last picture of the lithographed tin pail and a crumbling cone of molded sand, and they hurried out of the rain.

After a “giddy” stop at a donut shop for hot chocolate, they returned to Geary Street, where the general mood of hilarity and jovial bonhomie continued. At some point in their animated conversation, they ended up lying on the kitchen floor with their heads resting on each other's bellies. Their combined laughter reverberated through their bodies with manic circularity. At that moment, Edmund Shea fell in love with Beverly Allen.

Edmund left shortly after cupid's arrow pierced his heart. He kept his unrequited secret passion locked away in a private mental drawer for the next twenty years, while she went on to become a
tenured full professor of Italian, French, and comparative literature at Syracuse University. After Edmund's departure, it was time for Beverly to leave. Her mother was preparing a farewell dinner, and she had to get back to Oakland. Richard walked her through the rain to where she had parked on Geary, but she'd left the headlights on and the battery was dead. A call to AAA delivered a jump start, and Beverly took off into the rush hour traffic. Her last glimpse of Richard was in the rearview as he stood on the sidewalk in the steady drizzle, waving goodbye. They never saw each other again.

Dell had enjoyed a tremendous success with four of Richard Brautigan's books, but a contractual dispute resulted in a change of publishers. In August 1970,
The Abortion
and
Revenge of the Lawn
moved to Simon & Schuster. As before, Brautigan retained the right of approval over book design, advertising copy, typography, layout, and dust jacket art. He began discussions with Edmund Shea about his plans for the cover of
The Abortion
before the switch to S&S. Erik and Loie Weber returned from India that April. Richard saw them in New York City in May, where Erik photographed him visiting his new agent's office. Richard said nothing about Erik doing the covers for the forthcoming books. Erik's
Trout Fishing
photo was becoming world famous, yet Richard decided to stick with Edmund Shea's work. Richard later told Edmund he was the best photographer of women.

Richard knew exactly what he wanted for the cover of
The Abortion
. He talked everything over with Edmund. “He'd tell me what he had in mind generally,” Shea said. “I never read any of the books before I did the pictures.” A good part of the novel was set in a library, so Richard decided to make the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library the background for his photo shoot. Brautigan used the real address, 3150 Sacramento Street, for his fictional library in the book. “The library was between his house and my house,” Shea observed, “so we obviously walked by there on occasion.”

With the location selected, Richard found the perfect woman. Victoria, a local folk/pop singer, used only her first name professionally, not altogether unwise as her last name was Domagalski. Petite, with high cheekbones and straight black hair hanging to the middle of her back, Victoria was a lovely woman who closely resembled Richard's description of Vida, the heroine of
The Abortion
. She lived with her manager in a huge Victorian apartment. In Brautigan's estimation she was “a fantastic cook.” He'd had dinner at her place “three or four times.” Once, Victoria served him lamb; another time it was paella; later she made “something Italian.”

On the night of the “incredible Italian meal,” Richard brought Sherry Vetter, a twenty-one-year-old Catholic girls' school teacher he had recently started dating. Sherry remembered Victoria as “a beautiful girl, beautiful body, beautiful face, long shiny hair, meticulous housekeeper.” Victoria served “ravioli and all this stuff” that Richard loved. Throughout the meal, he kept praising her cooking. Finally, Victoria had enough. She smashed her plate down on the table. “Richard, I can't take these compliments,” she said. “All I did was stop at the Italian deli on the way home.”

After dinner, they repaired to the living room, which was furnished with nothing but cushions on the floor and a grand piano. Victoria had set Richard's poem “1942,” about the death of his uncle Edward, to music, and she sang it like a song that night while her guests lounged around the piano on cushions. Sherry thought Victoria's “voice was as beautiful as Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins.” She believed Victoria could have been a big star, but her manager “really screwed
her totally.” Richard politely complimented the song, but Sherry could tell he didn't like it. Victoria wanted to publish the music “and make it something, but he was against that.”

Whether Richard and Victoria were ever lovers remains open to conjecture. Sherry Vetter believed that “she was never a girlfriend.” Victoria had an album (the eponymous
Victoria
) about to be released, with distribution by Atlantic, at the same time as the publication date for
The Abortion
. She agreed to appear on Brautigan's book cover if he wrote the liner notes for her stereo LP. On the fold-out record jacket, Victoria posed as an odalisque, sprawled across piles of oriental cushions in flowing harem pajamas like a concubine in a sultan's seraglio. She composed all of the songs on her album and recruited Herbie Hancock to handle the keyboard chores in the backup trio. In his brief essay, Richard discussed Victoria's evident skills in the kitchen and, after listening to the album tapes, concluded: “I think Victoria sings as well as she cooks.”

For
The Abortion
cover shoot, Victoria wore high snug black boots and a minilength trench coat. She had the exotic look of a mod foreign agent. “He thought she was beautiful,” Edmund Shea recalled. Victoria posed on the library's portico, perched on the iron railing, staring up at Brautigan with large skeptical eyes, her full lips set in the beginnings of a frown. Wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, and a thrift shop suit jacket, Richard leaned against a smooth stone column on her right, staring straight into the lens without his glasses, his gaze as penetrating as a raptor's. Edmund took several pictures of Brautigan inside the library next to a bookshelf. In these shots, Richard wore his wire-rimmed spectacles and exchanged the single-breasted jacket for a castoff pin-striped vest.

Michael McClure expressed disdain for the cover photograph on
The Abortion
. Edmund Shea remembered he made “some comment about Richard standing consciously very sexy in this picture.” McClure thought Brautigan deliberately posed with the cockiness of a rock star. In truth, Richard didn't choose the picture that became the book's cover. Edmund described the selection process. “We would take a lot of pictures and then Richard would pick the ones he wanted [from a contact sheet] to have them blown up in print and then winnow it down.”

Brautigan respected Shea's judgment and usually went along with his final selection. For
The Abortion
, Richard preferred another photograph to Edmund's pick. “The way I got him to pick the one I wanted was to put them both up on the wall, side by side, and I made him stand on the other side of the room and asked him which one he saw.” The obvious choice became the cover of
The Abortion
. The sexual vanity McClure ascribed to Brautigan was, in fact, Edmund Shea's astute editorial decision. Richard rewarded Edmund, using his sales clout with Simon & Schuster to dramatically increase the photographer's fee. Edmund had trouble collecting, but in the end S&S paid Shea “real money.” He received $1,500 for his work on
The Abortion
, “which I don't think they would pay me today.”

Simon & Schuster picked up the deal Dell refused. It was a two-book package, the second to be a collection of Brautigan's short stories. By the time the contracts were signed, Richard had already decided that Sherry Vetter's picture would grace the cover of
Revenge of the Lawn
. Sherry, whose actual first name was Elizabeth, hailed from Louisville, Kentucky. Following her graduation from the University of Dayton in Ohio, she spent eight months in the Peace Corps in Ivory Coast. After getting sick and returning to the States in 1970, she got a job teaching fifth grade at Notre Dame, a private Dominican girls' school in San Francisco. “I was just a straight girl,” Sherry said. “That's what drew [Richard] to me. I was probably his first straight girlfriend.”