Famous people should be tall and pretty. They should be
painters or musicians, or perhaps business moguls. Above
all they should
not be bisexual, gap-toothed drug
peddlers who refuse to wash their bathrobes. But Robert
Pitchlynn, one of Portland's most infamous decadents, made
a life out of being the exception.
A notorious storyteller, buffoon and patron of the arts,
Pitchlynn died at his Northeast Portland home in the early
hours of New Year's Day. He was 57. Fame blurred Pitchlynn's
identity with the fictional Bob Pigeon, the cocaine-fueled
Falstaff of Gus Van Sant's 1991 film My Own Private
Idaho. Pitchlynn, who described himself to Monk
magazine as "the most famous unknown person in America,"
became a local legend for his eccentricities and reputed
connections to pop-culture stars.
According Van Sant, he met Pitchlynn through local businessman
Tim Kerr, of T/K Records, in 1984. Van Sant says he later
combined Pitchlynn's personality with Shakespeare's Falstaff
to create the Bob Pigeon character in Idaho. "He
was Portland's Falstaff," says Van Sant, "always drinking
and wenching."
William Richert played Pigeon as a grotesquely lovable
saint, a patriarch leading a family of street hustlers
and wayward scions through the deserted ruins of the Governor
Hotel. Pitchlynn himself appears briefly at the start
of the film, fellating River Phoenix's character.
During the filming of Idaho's Portland scenes,
Pitchlynn's home served as a creative headquarters for
Phoenix, Keanu Reeves and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea,
who mingled with Pitchlynn's extended family of runaway
boys.
In the end, life imitated art. Bob Pigeon of Idaho
died of both a melancholic heart and a cocaine overdose.
Last week, the county medical examiner's office reported
that Pitchlynn died of coronary artery disease, his long-term
cocaine use being a contributing factor.
Yet those who knew Pitchlynn before his Idaho
days remember a different man, a fiery young Catholic
eager to devote himself to social justice. Pitchlynn was
born and raised in Portland, cared for first by his mother,
then by his grandmother and foster homes after his parents'
divorce in 1951. At Parkrose High School, he served as
president of the Thespian Club. Local restaurateur Anne
Hughes met Pitchlynn at a leftist Catholic potluck in
the late 1950s and remembers the teenage radical as "very
attractive, extremely smart and very witty."
Pitchlynn enrolled at the Mount Angel Seminary near Woodburn,
planning to join the diocese. He might have succeeded,
were it not for the '60s.
In 1964, Pitchlynn left the seminary and traveled to
Mississippi to help the Congress of Racial Equality organize
and register black voters. In his Monk interview,
Pitchlynn traced his drug habit back to the era when young
activists organized protests to change the world and took
hallucinogens to escape it.
Returning to Portland, Pitchlynn worked stints as a janitor
and a waiter and carved ski trails into the virgin timber
of Mount Hood. Robin Hoffmeister, a friend, recalls the
Pitchlynn of these years as "thin, attractive and devilish...a
wild, extreme rascal." Pitchlynn bought a home in Goose
Hollow and later moved to the corner of North Failing
Street and Missouri Avenue, which he liked to call Failing
and Misery.
A surprise inheritance, reportedly from his father, helped
support Pitchlynn as he filled his shelves with antiques,
his floors with stray kittens and his couches with a mélange
of street youth and local artists. Velvet Underground
collaborator Nico, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Ramones
made appearances in his den after playing local clubs,
and Pitchlynn's coterie snowballed with bona fide stars
and hangers-on. Soon, the lifestyle began to take its
toll. "He was always so powerful because he was so smart,"
Hughes said, "but he was a terrible drug addict. In a
way, he chose to do what he did. I don't remember him
fighting it."
Like Andy Warhol, Pitchlynn ascended from dressing department-store
windows to hosting his city's most diversely corrupt salon.
But while Warhol contrived himself as a dashingly enigmatic
Manhattan icon, Pitchlynn was a recluse who spoke in a
raspy mumble and rarely left his home. "If he walked a
block he'd be out of breath," Van Sant recalls. "He was
really a strong man, but too much partying hurt his health."
"He had no sense of his own mortality," says Conrad 'Bud'
Montgomery, Pitchlynn's friend and roommate. "He played
but he didn't want to pay. And in the end he had to pay."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published January 26,
2000
