BEAUTY AND THE BUNKER

Born in 1949, Bunker was heir to the Spreckels sugar fortune. He was five when his mother married Clark Gable in 1955. It’s easy to imagine little Bunker watching his stepdad on the big screen and thinking there’s not just one, but many guises and get-ups we can pawn off to the world.

Bunker learned to surf while spending time in Hawaii, where the Spreckels side of his family had a long, revered history. He was taught by the Waikiki Beachboys, who approached the ocean with a mythical, holistic ethos. Along with wave-riding, Bunker learned the intricacies of fishing and canoe-paddling. 

Clark Gable died of a heart attack at 59. Bunker’s biological father—by all accounts, a hedonist—died the following year. Bunker was 12. Having abruptly lost the two father figures in his life, he soon fell under the spell of Miki Dora, aka the Black Knight of Malibu, one of the most famous—and most irreverent—surfers of that period. 

Bunker’s childhood was rife with fancy cars and red carpets and flashbulbs and Hollywood glamour. The surf world, specifically the Hawaiian surf world to which he was drawn, was a far cry from this. Being the rich kid would’ve rendered him an outsider. How to gain acceptance? How to prove himself? Well, excel on the board, of course. 

Bunker dated Miss Teen California, became a nationally ranked archer, and was on track to become a stockbroker when, at 18, he moved to Hawaii to pour himself into surfing. He got by on his wits, possibly dealt drugs, definitely shaped surfboards, and spent much of his time in the water. He was flamboyant and expressive. On a single wave he might ride on his belly, his knees, standing up. He became intimately familiar with the tube—a cubby hole, a hiding place.

“They wanted me to be an international banker, and I wanted to go surfing instead, so that’s what I went and did,” says Bunker in BUNKER77, a documentary about his life.

The latter 1960s, when Bunker was well into his teens, marked what is known in the surf world as the “Shortboard Revolution.” The straight lines of the longboard era gave way to the up-down, up-down high-performance approach of the new shortboards. Bunker was one of the leaders of this charge. He rode super short, experimental boards. At the world-famous Pipeline, his peers went left while Bunker literally went right, pioneering the surf break today known as Backdoor. He lived in a pill box in the hills overlooking the North Shore, ate fruit off the trees, steered clear of the drugs and alcohol that had been part of his LA day to day. Life was simple, maybe close to perfect.

Then his past caught up with him. On his 21st birthday, Bunker inherited an estimated 50 million dollars.

“It was literally like, ‘Happy Birthday,’ from zero to hero,” says big-wave surf legend Laird Hamilton in BUNKER77.

Bunker started doing mountains of drugs, dressing in the vein of Keith Richards and David Bowie, and carrying himself with a swagger that’s generally frowned upon in Hawaiian. He got his ass kicked, which prompted a plunge into martial arts training. He had women throwing himself at him, sycophants who had their eye on his money. He traveled, chased great waves around the world.

In Biarritz, France, he met Ellie Conn, 19, from Florida. Bunker swiftly fell in love with her—and, after visiting Bunker in LA—vice versa.

Bunker was the proverbial player. He hired a staff of friends, took meetings with key figures in the film industry, rolled down to the offices of Surfer magazine in a limousine, shamelessly self-promoted. He brought an entourage to South Africa to ride the end-of-the-rainbow waves of Jeffreys Bay, to hunt big game, to make a Warholesque film—starring himself of course.

He surfed beautifully. Despite whatever was moving through his bloodstream during this decadent period, Bunker had a preternatural connection with the wave. It defied his silver-spoon, Hollywood beginnings. It was the feral side of him, the part of him that remained unaffected. In Paris, he told the great French choreographer Maurice Béjart, “Here I have a board made out of foam and fiberglass, and I get up there and I do a dance, to nature if you will. I do a dance, on a stage, on a surfboard, on the wave. To me it’s a very artistic thing to do.”

Bunker was high-minded, seethingly ambitious. He set up an HQ at the Sunset Tower in LA, ran wild with and mentored world-famous skateboarder Tony Alva, and carried himself in what Alva describes as “a combination of Bruce Lee and Elvis.” He aspired to be an actor. “I’d like to work with Andy Warhol, Nick Roeg, Stanley Kubrick, Kenneth Anger,” he says in BUNKER77. Anger cast Bunker as Lucifer in Lucifer Rising. Bunker cast himself in a film called The Player. He plunged into a darkness that seemed to be a combination of narcissism and drug-fuckery. “He was a dangerous man,” says 1977 world surfing champion Rabbit Bartholomew. “Mainly dangerous to himself.” 

Buddhists call it the Hungry Ghost, our insatiable appetites for stimulus, attention, validation—our never enoughness. Bunker had this in spades. He claims to have slept with 64 women in the span of a week. He flaunted his money, flashed guns. I know I’m not alone in saying that I don’t think I’d have liked Bunker. Yet he’s an exaggerated version of the yearning so many of us feel. He’s from a bygone era, but he’s very relevant to our social media age. A Cheap Trick song comes to mind: “I want you to want me. I need you to need me.”

In the winter of 1976, his friends attempted an intervention. It didn’t work. Bunker kept getting loaded. He thought he had it under control. “I have strong willpower,” he says in the film.

Bunker overdosed on what was allegedly heroin, cocaine, and vodka on January 7, 1977. He was 27 years old.

Two months before he died, he invited the artist Craig Stecyk to visit him in Hawaii for what would become a sort of “last words.” These interviews form the spine of BUNKER77.

“I was drawn to Bunker’s story because there’s a lot of misinterpretation,” said Takuji Masuda, director of BUNKER77, which celebrates its 10-year anniversary this November. Takuji threw himself into the film with a dedication akin to Bunker’s dedication to surfing. He spent 11 years making it. “It’s hard to like a wealthy guy,” Takuji continued. “People assume there’s so much advantage in being wealthy. But the same problems exist whether you have money or not, in fact even more so at the extremes. I went to boarding school, but I also had a different kind of nurturing and familial concept. People assumed I should have it all, but a lot of insecurity comes from not having a normal life. There were a lot of judgments made on Bunker, and I figured people didn’t really comprehend him. I wanted to explore this. I wanted to know what drove this guy to his demise.”

BUNKER77 is a spectacular romp that is by turns poetic, high-octane, wistful, tragic, and sexy as hell. “It’s about our gauging and scaling how we ought to live with society and societal norms, and discovering who we are, and aspiring to pursue who we are,” Masuda told me. “This film is a cautionary tale rather than a vehicle to glorify Bunker’s life of decadence. But at the core of it, I want to share the beauty and wholesomeness of what being a dedicated surfer can be.”

Towards the end of BUNKER77, Craig Stecyk asks, “Are you proud of your family heritage?” 

Bunker replies, “I am proud of it, yes. I think it’s a drawback in some sense, but I think that in the long run I’ll be able to win the game that I’m playing.”

Craig asks, “Why do you surf, what are you trying to get out of it?”

Bunker says, “Good health and pleasure. Something beautiful to look at. Something beautiful to think about in a society that’s for the most part pretty rat-fucked. Something beautiful that you can still do that’s…just beautiful.”