Bill Husted, who dazzled and inflamed Denver’s elite as a columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, died Saturday at age 76 at his Denver home in hospice care.
He died of cancer-related complications, according to his wife, Polly Kruse.
The thousands of articles Husted wrote from the early 1980s through the 2010s leave an archive of Denver culture that is nearly unmatched in its detail and nuance, friends and colleagues said, from the foibles of the ultra-rich (some of whom he infuriated with his writing) to tender moments at society galas.
“Reading his work, people always had the sense that he was our guy, one of our guys,” says Joe Rassenfoss, who hired Husted in 1983 to write his first column for the Rocky Mountain News, for $50 a week. “He wasn’t above us. He was our eyes and ears.”
It included literary witticisms about society culture and gossip, biting humor and, perhaps most importantly, fierce competitiveness in a city where people knew each other better than they do now.
Once upon a time, Denver was smaller, the newspapers bigger, and Husted was revered and feared as the city’s leading chronicler of the cultural scene, said Senator John Hickenlooper.
“He was a real Herb Caen figure, a man about town,” Hickenlooper said of the influential San Francisco journalist and gossip writer. “He wrote one of the first articles about the Wynkoop Brewery. He also named one of our events, where we would walk pigs down the alley to the Oxford Hotel on 17th Street and back. He called it The Running of the Pigs, or Pamplona on the Platte, which will always strike me as an amazing phrase.”
Husted and Hickenlooper remained friends throughout Hickenlooper’s political rise to mayor, governor and senator, in part, Hickenlooper thinks, because of Husted’s incredible penchant for listening and telling stories, and the bond that fostered.
“There was no one who did it like he did,” said Kim Christiansen, a 9News anchor who worked with Husted when he appeared on television to share his work. “Every time he saw you he would ask about someone in your world, which is a gift. He remembered people’s lives, which doesn’t always happen in superficial relationships. I think he got a lot of firsts that way.”
The media ecosystem then supported more than one of those jobs in the city.
“We always had a little friendly competition,” says Joanne Davidson, a former Post society editor. “Our goal every day was to make each other choke down their Cheerios, because inevitably one of us would have something really juicy that the other didn’t have.”
“Bill made his debut as society editor in October 1986 with High Profile’s feature story on (of course) the Carousel Ball, Denver’s biggest and baddest party in those days, hosted by Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara,” Rassenfoss writes via e-mail. “Since Marvin owned 20th Century Fox, he got stars to come and mingle … from Gary Coleman to Henry Kissinger.” (One of his best headlines, Rassenfoss adds, was the 1992 line “Geraldo Rivera wants to punch me in the nose.”)
Husted was a familiar presence at these events, but also in restaurants and bars, with his beloved cigar and martini in hand, friends said. His car used to stand out in the parking lot, given his TELL ME license plate. All this went hand in hand with a stupidity he was not afraid to flaunt either.
“He always made me laugh with that silliness,” says Nancy Sagar, who was married to Husted for two years in the early ’90s and remained good friends with him after their divorce. “He would go to the bathroom and intentionally come out with toilet paper hanging out of the back of his pants and his shoes. And she would walk around the restaurant like that.”
Husted was born on August 13, 1948, on New York’s Upper East Side. By age 10, he was “riding subways and cabs, sneaking into clubs, (and) soaking up New York’s late golden age,” according to the biography in his novel “Let Me Tell You About the #VeryRich.”
Husted bounced between Denver, the East Coast and overseas before returning to Denver, where he became a morning fixture for newspaper readers. The Denver Post lured him from the Rockies in 1996, Husted wrote, where he was the paper’s featured city columnist until 2011.
“He had no journalism training, but he was urbane, cultured and had such a natural, colloquial way of writing that you were immediately hooked,” Suzanne Brown, a former Post editor and columnist and one of Husted’s first editors, wrote by email.
“You were amused, you were intrigued, you were right there with him as he made his rounds of trendy clubs, parties and restaurants,” she wrote. “As an editor, I had no choice but to correct his numerous misspellings of names and places, as he would not allow such minutiae to get in the way of meeting a deadline. She rarely admitted that this was the case and thanked me for saving her bacon.”
According to Kruse, services are still being planned.
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