By Bill Croke on 9.30.03 @ 12:02AM
The undammed Yellowstone River flows through it, attracting many a famous writer.
Livingston, Montana, sits on the outside curve of the big
eastward bend of the Yellowstone River fifty miles north of
Yellowstone National Park. Those fifty miles are aptly named
Paradise Valley, where the river snakes along cottonwood-sheathed
past lush cattle ranches and the trophy log mansions of absentee
movie stars. From its headwaters in Wyoming's Teton Wilderness
south of the Park, to its confluence with the Missouri River in
western North Dakota, the Yellowstone flows 671 miles sans dams,
the last of the West's great rivers to do so.
It flows clear and blue at Livingston's Ninth St. Bridge in the
sunshine of an autumn day. Some years in spring the river is high,
brown and roily, and threatens to flood adjacent parts of town --
as it did in 1997. Not today. Today the Yellowstone makes for a
benign and bucolic foreground for Mt. Delano in the sharply defined
Absarokas to the east. In the distant northeast are the stony,
serrated peaks of the Crazy Mountains, so named for a demented and
wandering pioneer woman. Before me along the river are the bright
gold torches of the cottonwoods. Behind me is Livingston, and the
bustling, horn-tooting of a busy town, thoroughly modern, yet
retaining its ties to a rich past.
Temporarily separating from Meriwether Lewis on the eastbound
return of their historic journey, William Clark and about half of
the Corps of Discovery passed through in July, 1806, only to see
Crow Indians run off their horses. They continued on in cottonwood
dugouts to the mouth of the Yellowstone and their rendezvous with
Lewis. The region was frequented by trappers and cattlemen
throughout the 19th century. Eighteen eighty-two saw the arrival of
James J. Hill's Northern Pacific Railroad, and Livingston -- named
for a Hill business associate -- grew up around its depot. The
Murray Hotel was built directly across the street in 1910 to serve
the railroad's clientele. The four-story square brick building's
guest register has been signed by politicians and celebrities, the
likes of which include Mike Mansfield, Steve McQueen and Robert
Redford.
Due to its setting amidst stunning scenery, superb fishing and
hunting opportunities, and its inherent cowboy-bohemian atmosphere,
the Murray has always attracted the adventurous and eccentric. The
humorist Will Rogers and his friend Walter Hill (of the railroad
family) once as a prank brought a horse up to Hill's third-floor
room via the Murray's venerable Otis elevator. In his Howard
Hughes-like reclusive last years in the 1970s, the legendary
Hollywood director Sam Peckinpah lived in a top floor suite with a
pet iguana. One night in a drunken delirium, he shot holes in the
ceiling with a revolver. The bullet holes are rumored to remain,
and day I was there I asked to see the room, but was politely
refused because it was occupied. Jimmy Buffett sang and played his
guitar for tips in the bar during his early '70s salad days. But at
that time the Murray was mostly known as the center of Livingston's
literary culture. The bar was a hot spot for what the New York
Times in a 1982 Sunday magazine article identified as a New
West literary renaissance. Livingston was home to a few of the new
"Writers of the Purple Sage."
Thomas McGuane was one of these neo-settlers of Livingston when
he arrived in the late '60s fresh from Wallace Stegner's graduate
writing program at Stanford. He took a room at the Murray and
divided his time between his passion for fly fishing, and the
composition of his first novel The Sporting Club (1968).
Mr. McGuane was soon joined by friends: the writers Jim Harrison
and William Hjortsberg, the late counterculture novelist Richard
Brautigan, and the painter Russell Chatham -- all sharing a love of
their work and the outdoors life of Montana.
McGuane had Hollywood connections, and indeed had collaborated
on the screenplays for the westerns The Missouri Breaks
and Tom Horn, and had himself written, directed and shot
on location near Livingston the New West cult classic Rancho
DeLuxe. Soon the likes of Peter Fonda, Jeff Bridges, Rip Torn
and Warren Oates could be spied on the streets of Livingston. Over
the years the locals have become blasé' concerning the
presence of the Hollywood film colony.
For McGuane, it wasn't all Tinsel Town glitter under the Big
Sky. In the novels Nobody's Angel (1982), Something to
Be Desired (1984), Keep the Change (1989), and
Nothing But Blue Skies (1992), the author has created a
fictional Montana milieu based on Livingston (the "Deadrock" of the
novels is an ironic play on words for the name of the town), and
peopled with angst-ridden, existentially-obsessed New West
characters. Patrick Fitzpatrick, Joe Starling and Frank Copenhaver
indulge in drink, drugs and serial marriages (thus reflecting
certain aspects of McGuane's own life), and view the wreckage of
their lives in the foreground of the familiar Old West heading for
the horizon. These tragicomedies have earned McGuane critical
praise. Saul Bellow once admiringly called him "a language
star."
Nowadays the Livingston literati (minus the many-years-sober
McGuane) hangs out in the Owl Lounge, a small bar a block east of
the Murray. The owl motif -- in the form of pictures and
knickknacks -- is ubiquitous. There is a line of books by local
writers crowding the bottles on the backbar. The Owl is the kind of
place where cowboys and railroad workers rub elbows with writers
and painters, and everybody mostly gets along.
Tim Cahill drinks there when he's not wandering remote parts of
the globe for Outside magazine or volunteering for
Livingston's Park County Search and Rescue Unit. Peter Bowen might
fill you in about the latest adventures of his popular fictional
Montana detective Gabriel DuPre. I bumped into Bill Hjortsberg --
"Gatz" to his friends -- the afternoon I was there. We had met
before, and he inquired as to my freelancing of late. His eyes were
bright blue. His wire bifocals perched halfway done his hawk-like
nose. He wears his hair in a gray ponytail hanging halfway down his
back. "Have you had any good luck?" he asked, as he bought me a
drink. Later, the conversation at the bar turned to rodeo and its
specific events. Hjortsberg regaled us with a wild story about how
as a young man on assignment for Sports Illustrated in
1972, he was crazy enough to ride a bull at Larry Mahan's Rodeo
Cowboy School in Florida. He'd stayed on for the full eight
seconds, but afterwards retired to bed for a couple of days with
his aches and pains.
"It was worth it," he said. "It hurt like hell, but it was worth
it."
I thought he could be talking about his hard-living days among
his writer friends in Livingston. Back in the '70s time of simple
Rocky Mountain bohemia before the Yellowstone got crowded with the
drift boats of upscale fly fishermen, and the second wave of
Hollywood glitterati drove up real estate prices. Life in
Livingston when she was good.
And I thought old Gatz was a lucky man.
topics:
Business, Sports, Books, Hollywood, Oil
