Charles bukowski wife

(b. 16 August 1920 in Andernach, Germany; d. 9 March 1994 in San Pedro, California), hard-drinking novelist, poet, and short-story writer best known for his autobiographical screenplay Barfly (1987).

Christened Henry Charles Bukowski, Jr., in the Roman Catholic faith, Bukowski was the only child of Henry Charles Bukowski, an American sergeant stationed in occupied Germany, and his wife, Katherine Fett, a German seamstress. The family left for the United States in April 1923, living briefly in Baltimore, Maryland and Pasadena, California, before settling permanently in Los Angeles, where Bukowski, Sr., found work as a milkman.

Bukowski’s childhood was a living nightmare. His father beat him regularly with a razor strop and he was teased and bullied by his classmates at the Virginia Road Elementary School and later at Mount Vernon Junior High. In 1936 Bukowski entered Los Angeles High School, where he continued to feel unpopular and out of place. Living under constant stress, he developed one of the worst cases of acne vulgaris his doctors had ever seen. As a teenager Bukowski discovered two remedies for his pain: alcohol and literature. Along with playing the horses and classical music, they were to remain lifelong comforts.

In 1939 Bukowski enrolled in Los Angeles City College, but he took little interest in his studies and in 1941 dropped out to pursue a writing career. Exempted from military service for psychological reasons, he spent the war years writing and traveling, supporting himself at a variety of menial jobs including stock boy, dishwasher, elevator operator, and Red Cross orderly.

Writing under his middle name, Charles, Bukowski had some early success. “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip” appeared in the March-April issue of Story in 1944, and “20 Tanks from Kasseldown” was published in Caresse Crosby’s Portfolio III (1946), alongside work by Henry Miller, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jean Genet, and Jean-Paul Sartre. A steady stream of rejection slips discouraged Bukowski, however, causing him to abandon the pen in favor of the bottle. For the next ten years he devoted himself to boozing and barroom brawling.

Back in Los Angeles in 1946, Bukowski met Jane Cooney Baker in the Glenview Bar. The tempestuous love affair that followed was dramatized in the Barbet Schroeder film Barfly (1987), with Faye Dunaway playing Wanda Wilcox (Baker’s role) and Mickey Rourke starring as Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s literary doppelganger. Their constant drinking and carousing proved too much for Bukowski, who in the spring of 1955 awoke one morning in the charity ward of Los Angeles County Hospital, having narrowly escaped death from a bleeding ulcer.

Upon his release from the hospital, Bukowski began writing poetry. After breaking up with Baker, he met Barbara Frye, the editor of Harlequin, who had accepted some of his poems. They married in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 29 October 1955. Following a brief visit with Frye’s relatives in Wheeler, Texas, they returned to Los Angeles, where they published a special issue of Harlequin containing eight Bukowski poems. Temperamentally unsuited for each other, they divorced on 18 March 1958 and had no children. Bukowski found an apartment at 1623 North Mariposa Avenue and began seeing Jane Baker off and on again. Baker’s death on 22 January 1962 inspired his moving poem “For Jane, with all the love I had, which was not enough.”

With the exception of Jane’s death, the 1960s were good to Bukowski. A $15,000 inheritance and a steady, if stultifying, job sorting mail with the U.S. Postal Service gave him financial security. His first collection of poems, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, appeared in 1960. In 1963 the Loujon Press edition of It Catches My Heart in Its Hands received high praise from Kenneth Rexroth in the New York Times Book (Review. It was John Martin, however, the founder of Black Sparrow Press, who was to change Bukowski’s life forever. After publishing several books by Bukowski, Martin agreed to give him a stipend of $100 a month if he would leave the post office and devote himself to writing full-time. About to be fired anyway, Bukowski gratefully accepted the offer.

The 1970s and 1980s were Bukowski’s most productive years. In February 1971 Black Sparrow published Post Office, Bukowski’s novel based on eleven grueling years with the postal service. A critical and financial success, it sold 75,000 copies in the United States and more than half a million copies abroad. It was followed by three autobiographical novels in the same vein: Factotum (1975), Women (1978), and Ham On Rye (1982). In 1978, Bukowski read to packed auditoriums in Germany and was lionized by the European media. With the release of the film Barfly in 1987, he became famous at home.

Success changed Bukowski’s lifestyle dramatically. By 1984 he was earning more than $100,000 a year. He bought a BMW 320i and an $80,000 house in San Pedro. He was able to drink expensive wines and spend afternoons at the racetrack in the company of movie stars like Sean Penn and Madonna. On 18 August 1985, he married Linda Lee Beighle at the Church of the People in Los Feliz, California. Beighle, a health-store owner he first met in 1976, proved to be a stabilizing influence on Bukowski, encouraging him to lose weight and drink more moderately. Bukowski’s novel Hollywood (1989) captures the essence of his life at this time.

In the winter of 1987 Bukowski contracted tuberculosis. The disease took its toll on him physically but he continued to work on Hollywood as well as The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946–1966 (1988). These were followed by Septuagenarian Stew (1990), an anthology of new as well as previously published stories and poems, and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). Bukowski’s health continued to deteriorate. He had cataract surgery in the summer of 1992 and was diagnosed with leukemia in the spring of 1993. During a brief remission, he finished Pulp (1994), his tongue-in-cheek detective novel. He died in San Pedro Peninsula Hospital on 9 March 1994, attended by his wife and his daughter, Marina, the child he fathered with Frances (”FrancEye”) Smith, a fan whom he lived with from 1963 to 1965. He was buried at the Green Hills cemetery in San Pedro on 14 March 1994, following a Buddhist service. The epitaph on his gravestone reads, “DON’T TRY.”

In spite of his reputation as a drunken brawler, a womanizer, and a gambler, Bukowski was a prolific writer, producing six novels, five collections of short stories, and thirty-two volumes of poetry, most of which were written after his fortieth birthday. At the time of his death two million copies of his books were in print. Bukowski’s detractors charged him with being crude, vulgar and sexist; his fans praised him for his wit, candor, and hard-edged realism. Because his work focused on the lower strata of society, drunks, whores, and manual laborers, the media tended to dismiss Bukowski as the “poet laureate of Los Angeles low life” or “bard of the barroom and the brothel.” Widely translated, Bukowski has received serious scholarly attention abroad but in the United States he remains “the dirty old man of American letters,” a cult figure renowned more for his raucous lifestyle than for his art.

Libraries containing manuscripts and papers relating to Bukowski include the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of Southern California; the University of California, Long Beach; Temple University; and the University of Arizona, Tucson. Seamus Cooney has edited four volumes of correspondence: The Bukowski/Purdy Letters (1983), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Utters 1960–1970 (1993), Living On Luck: Selected Letters 1960s-1970s (1995), and Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978–1994 (1999). There are two major biographies: Howard Sounes, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (1998), and Neeli Cherkovski, Bukowski: A Life (1997), actually a revised edition of his earlier book Hank; The Life of Charles Bukouiski (1991). Both are sympathetic portraits, with Cherkovski having both the advantage and disadvantage of having known Bukowski personally. A profile by Paul Ciotti is in the Los Angeles Times Magazine (22 March 1977). Special issues of journals devoted to Bukowski include The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Fall 1983) and the memorial issue of Beat Scene 20 (1994). Obituaries are in the Los Angeles Times (10 Mar. 1994) and the New York Times (11 Mar. 1994). Audio recordings include Charles Bukowski Reads His Poetry (1980), Hostage (1994), and Bukowski at Bellevue (1998). Barbet Schroeder’s Charles Bukpwskj Tapes is a four-hour video of interviews and readings shot during the filming of Barfly.

William M. Gargan