The Bunker Spreckels Fantasy: Reckless Pleasure-Seeking and Eternal Life
When I was in my early 20s, my friends and I became enthralled with Bunker Spreckels, the legendary surfer, stepson of Clark Gable, and heir to the Spreckels Sugar fortune. Bunker wasn’t initially in line to inherent the fortune. He was seemingly content living a vagrant lifestyle, selling surfboards and eating fruit in Hawaii. But on his 21st birthday, he ended up with the whole thing—tens of millions of dollars dumped on his head. He didn’t just adjust his lifestyle by, you know, buying a house on the beach and hiring a financial advisor—something a normal person might do. Rather, he set out to spend every penny in the most lavish way imaginable.
He developed an expensive drug habit. He surrounded himself with beautiful women, once having sex with 64 women in a week. He traveled the world, surfing the tallest waves. He partied like the world was ending tomorrow. He filmed and photographed himself at all times, leaning directly into the deepest narcissistic and hedonistic void ever opened by the human psyche.
Best fucking life ever! Holy shit. Madness! —Then he died of a drug overdose. Age 27.
But still…glorious! Right?
I saw Bunker Spreckels’ life as a story about the arbitrariness of fame and fortune. It was a story about not giving a fuck. About being reckless—ambitious, too, but for self-destructive ends. It was about the wonder and hilarity of being alive and having a good time. It was a story of the male fantasy with a moral that’s easy to shrug off.
I could go on and on. The point being: I saw a lot of shit in Bunker Spreckels and it appealed to my young self to the level of minor obsession.
One day I was telling my friend Carlos about the story of Bunker Spreckels. All of my friends were a little bit crazy at the time (we were artists, after all), but Carlos was crazy to the point of earning (and wearing proudly) the nickname Crazy Carlos. So I was a little shocked that Carlos was irritated by the Bunker Spreckels story. The more I talked, the less he seemed to care.
Finally he said, “I don’t get it. He just sounds like an asshole.”
That really hit me. I mean, of course he was an asshole. Wasn’t that the point? But he was a cool asshole, you know? Just check out this photograph of him in dark shades with a gun…or with a blonde babe next to a sports car…or standing on a tiger pelt under a palm tree… Cool!
Bunker died in 1977, but there are plenty of Bunker-like characters still out there in the culture. And I don’t entirely know what to think about any of them. It’s easier to hate them and ignore them now, no longer being single and broke in my early 20s. I no longer need that fantasy. But the question remains…does anyone need that fantasy created by the self-destructive hedonist? Or is it just a plague on humanity that anyone would ever act like that?
There’s one thing I keep coming back to for an answer. People love the Bunker type. Everyone does. Books, movies, and TV are full of these characters, to the extent that consuming any type of media basically amounts to spending time in the company of society’s most narcissistic, psychopathic, adrenaline-junky, (evil?) characters.
Take Shakespeare, to keep it high-brow. If you’ve read any Shakespeare, chances are you remember Falstaff. Falstaff, who appears in three plays, is a conceited buffoon who lives off stolen and borrowed money. He’s described in The New York Times as a “whiskery swag-bellied omnivorous cornucopia of appetites,” a “whoremonger,” and a “life-affirming liar whose truth is never to be a counterfeit.” As Harold Bloom notes in Shakespeare: The Invention of Humanity, Shakespeare reserved his best lines for Falstaff. Even Shakespeare had a special place in his heart for society’s narcissistic hedonist!
Milton gives us the line: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.” Why is this so memorable unless we all enjoy letting the idea resonate—at least for a moment—in the context of our own lives?
We can follow this down even further with a Dennis Johnson quote: “The most evil things we’ve done in this life are the most important things because they are the things we absolutely had to do.”
Almost every celebrity, whether they’re considered “wholesome” or otherwise, has gotten to their place in society by having a bloated ego and following their narcissistic impulses. In many cases, celebrities will brand their entire persona around a vice. Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson lean into their pot-smoking habits. Sean Penn still smokes cigarettes during interviews. Even though it’s no longer cool to smoke cigarettes, it’s his brand.
I do think there’s a point where this goes too far. Many people obsess over Charles Manson as a cultural figure. He inspired a great Tarantino film, sure, but I’m happy to have him discarded from culture’s cool table, simply for the act of causing the death of a pregnant mother. I don’t think you can cause that sort of harm to a person and still keep your cool credentials.
But Bunker isn’t Manson. He’s much more Falstaff. And it’s okay to love Falstaff.
As Howard Bloom notes, while Shakespeare allows many of his best characters to die upon stage, Falstaff is not among them. Indeed: “We do not want Sir John Falstaff to die. And of course he does not. He is life itself.”