Helen Bransford Brings Home the Bacon
Her next book is a collaboration with Jimmy Buffett about a cosmopolitan swine (of the four-legged kind)
 Abbey Faulhaber
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By Russell Drumm
(05/23/2007) Helen Bransford is small, fine-featured, and pretty, a most unlikely swineherd. And she wouldn’t touch a pork chop with a 10-foot pole. She has a thing for pigs, however. “Root around in there and find the tea you want,” she told a visitor on Friday, her words soft and shaped by Nashville, where she was raised.
“I’m a vegan now. That’s a creepy term. I like ‘plant-based diet’ better.” Forky, a 12-year-old Vietnamese potbellied pig, slumbered on the living room couch wearing a shawl. Pinky, a youngster — “the manly pig” — clippity-clopped across the kitchen floor wearing a red harness and complaining about something in a high-pitched squeal. Ms. Bransford said that when people hear him in the background they often mistake him for a parrot. (But more about parrots later.)
“I once had an English bull terrier. People said, Is that a pig? I guess I’ve been moving toward pigs for a long time.”
A very long time. Seems that down on the family farm her two older brothers called her “Moonbeam” or “Mac,” after Moonbeam McSwine, the character from Al Capp’s “L’il Abner” cartoon who preferred the company of pigs to men.
It wasn’t until early 1995 that the porcine preference took the form of a pet pig. Ms. Bransford was living at the time in the heart of Manhattan, where barnyard animals are strictly verbotten. Guile and the winking cooperation of a friendly doorman made it possible. The apartment complex in which she lived with five cats, her twins, Jay McInerney (her former husband, the author of
“Bright Lights, Big City”), and Forky backed onto the Carlisle Hotel. The trip to the city in an R.V. with family and menagerie “is a book in itself,” Ms. Bransford said.
As an infant, Forky went in and out of the building in a purse. Her droppings were deposited in a park down the street so they couldn’t be traced. A screenwriter friend who lived on the top floor met Forky at the freight elevator to let Forky stretch her legs, loins, and fat back. Even her name was a ruse. It was chosen to prevent the twins from mistakenly blowing the pig’s cover in the elevator by saying something like “ ‘Porky ate my socks.’ If they knew they would have confiscated her.” Pork-Qua was another name under consideration.
All the swine-related subterfuge inevitably led to “Swine Not,” a book illustrated by Ms. Bransford and written in collaboration with her friend Jimmy Buffett, the original Parrot Head. Now that the imaginative author and her cloven-hoofed friends dwell in pig-friendly East Hampton, it’s safe for Little, Brown to publish it come fall.
Ms. Bransford lived in London for a time. In her youth she worked as the head waitress at the city’s Hard Rock Cafe, when it first opened. It was in London that she began designing jewelry, apprenticing there before making a go of it later on 48th Street in New York City. She has continued making jewelry, some of which begin as Christmas tree decorations. And she has written before, unabashedly.
“Welcome to Your Face Lift” (Doubleday) came about through personal experience as a guide for people who were considering plastic surgery. “At the time it was a forbidden subject. You couldn’t say, ‘Hey, tell me what it’s like to have a face lift.’ It was before Botox. I kept a journal. I was having dinner with Liz Smith and she said, ‘That’s a book.’ ” The book sold well.
“Swine Not” follows the adventures of Rumpy the pig and friends, including the pigeolantes (pigeon vigilantes) who “watch the airspace in the city, to prevent animals from falling out windows.” Like Forky, Rumpy is forced to live undercover in an apartment, only venturing outside when well disguised as a dog or when wearing her favorite pink wig.
“I was staying at Jane and Jimmy’s,” she said, referring to Mr. Buffett and his wife. “Jimmy said, ‘Let me read it, and took it on his sailboat overnight.’ The next day he told me he wanted to edit it and add layers. He got into it. Took it to a fantastic level. He likes animals.” She said it was originally meant to be a children’s book, and probably still was, although it was one that should appeal to easily amused adults.
During Friday’s visit, Pinky continued to squeal. It was raining outside, which was where he wanted to be, his owner said. Forky, on the other hand, seemed content on the couch. She grunted middream only occasionally, the white shawl covering her shoulders in a grandmotherly way. Alas, she was fixed and has no piglets.
“They’re as smart as dolphins, and adore people,” Ms. Bransford said. “And they can smell things six feet underground.” She predicted that the olfactory sense that’s put pigs to work finding truffles might some day help diagnose disease in humans by way of their breath even better than dogs, whose trained noses were able to detect cancer, she said.
At the same time, they are not everyone’s idea of a pet, Ms. Bransford allowed.
These lines from the book were the fruit of firsthand experience with Forky:
A home that’s occupied by pigs
Is nothing like the normal digs
Its system must incorporate
A crazed-with-hunger vertebrate
A thing routinely left intact
Might well become a piggy snack.
Forky, just for instance, loves alcohol. “If she finds a can of beer, she can crush it with her jaws and then lick it up. There are concessions you’ve got to make.” A special hole in a closet door was made for kitchen scraps, normal garbage cans being easy prey for Pinky and Forky. “I hate to say it, but they’d eat a crispy piece of bacon if you gave it to them.”
“They’re large and unwieldy, more of a commitment than a dog or a cat. They don’t like their heads petted, would rather get their stomachs rubbed,” she continued. “And as they get older they’re not like a trophy wife. When they’re abandoned, it breaks their heart.”
Ms. Bransford said she hoped “Swine Not” would be a success for two reasons: to give Forky her due as she nears the end of her life, and “just to keep pigs out there.”