Bohemian tale of food, family and big sur
By Romney Steele
BOHEMIAN NEPENTHE Big Sur in the 1950s and ’60s was what Caryl Hill, then a waitress and onetime girlfriend of author Henry Miller, called “the golden years” with “star customers.” For artists, writers, and other counterculture types, Nepenthe became a mecca, a refuge for travelers and seekers, the famous and not so famous, and a way station for those passing through, out of which grew the myth and legend of Nepenthe.
With a newly minted highway and recovering economy, and Henry’s emerging fame after the ban on his Tropic books lifted, people flocked to Big Sur and hence to Nepenthe. Some created their own utopia there, like Henry, who valued the freedom to go about his work and life free of government input. He used Nepenthe like his private club, Caryl remembered, driving down in an old black Cadillac and carrying on “intellectual discussions” with my grandfather at the bar.
The beat poets followed, and the restaurant became their favorite haunt outside of San Francisco. Jack Kerouac came and ate “heaven burgers,” drank Manhattans, and rallied his cohorts along for the ride. Writer Richard Brautigan “honkey-tonked” at Nepenthe for a couple of days on his way out of town. In a fit of desperation, he once pleaded with Caryl, “You’ve got to take me home with you, [because] I’ve got Scorpio rising.”
Nepenthe became a gathering place for many distinguished artists, painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, and architects who lived in Big Sur, an extended living room away from home. For years the bar exuded a lively, if not literary, presence. Author and wildman Dennis Murphy was said to have gotten into a fight with a sculptor friend at the bar that sent Dennis to the hospital with stab wounds. “Every night was like Halloween night, almost out of control,” remembered Clovis Harrod, who arrived in 1959 and worked there through the early ’80s.
Employees called the far side of the bar “Dirty Corner” because it was where Henry hung out and told his bawdy tales and where the poet Eric Barker recited his dirty limericks, sometimes while standing on top of the bar. Anthropologist Giles Healey captivated guests with stories about the Mayans and other tales; when prompted, sculptor and sometime-bartender Harry Dick Ross recited lines from his wife’s song, “South Coast: The Ballad of Big Sur,” about a man who wins his wife in a card game, a Kingston Trio hit also made famous by American folk master Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. Ruth Sawyer, known as Madam Ruth, a former madam and informal keeper of Nepenthe until she died in 1977, on one occasion danced the striptease with actress Kim Novak, who lived in the area and often hung out there.
My grandfather reveled in Nepenthe’s reputation and celebrated guest list. “I was tending bar one night, and I looked up and there was Henry Miller, Man Ray, and Anaïs Nin,” he used to say. On any given occasion he added people to the list, like Salvador Dalí. He loved to carry on about Henry, especially one evening when he beat him in Ping-Pong. He relayed it at my grandmother’s memorial in 1986:
“One night at 2:00 a.m., I heard a knock on the cabin door and it was Henry in his bathrobe. He always used to wander around in his bathrobe. He said he had a dream in which his astrologer had told him he could beat me. So I took him down- stairs, gave him a swig of Courvoisier, and then proceeded to beat the hell out of him. Lolly suggested he get a new astrologer.”
Poet Dylan Thomas came in with his wife, too drunk to make conversation so he drew all over the napkins. “I should have kept those things,” my grandfather lamented in an interview. “I never had a discussion with him. He just stared at me, drunk as hell.” Dylan had been to a literary tea and someone told him to go to Nepenthe, the “nearest bar to Paris.” Dylan looked like hell and died three months later, he added.
Actor Steve McQueen dropped in many times, once “zooming to the restaurant on his motorcycle with his wife on the back, and they only had enough money to split a hamburger,” my grandfather marveled. The late William Claxton, a jazz photographer, captured a contemplative McQueen sitting in front of a blazing outdoor fire on the terrace in 1964.
My grandfather liked to say how this young, fresh-faced kid just out of the army stopped in on his way south, hoping to make it big in Hollywood. He poured him a drink, bid him good luck, and sent him on his way. That was Clint Eastwood. He starred in Rawhide soon after, and later bought the Carmel Mission Ranch where my grandfather rented a cabin. They occasionally played tennis at the beach club.
From My Nepenthe: Bohemian Tales of Food, Family, and Big Sur by Romney Steele/Andrews McMeel Publishing
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