Bill Husted, who charmed and inflamed Denver’s elite as a columnist for both The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, died at his Denver home in hospice care on Saturday at age 76.
He died from complications related to cancer, according to his wife, Polly Kruse.
The thousands of articles Husted wrote from the early 1980s through 2010s leave an archive of Denver culture that’s nearly unmatched in its detail and nuance, friends and colleagues said, from the foibles of the ultra-rich (some of whom he enraged with his writing) to tender moments at society galas.
“People always got that feeling reading his work that he was our guy, one of us,” said Joe Rassenfoss, who hired Husted away from a server job at Boccalino to write his first column for the Rocky Mountain News in 1983 — for $50 per week. “He wasn’t above us. He was our eyes and ears.”
Readers of The Denver Post were familiar with Bill Husted’s column.
That included literary quips on society culture and gossip, withering humor and, perhaps most importantly, fierce competitiveness in a town where more people knew each other than they do now.
Time was, Denver was smaller, newspapers were bigger, and Husted was revered and feared as the primary chronicler of the city’s cultural scene, said Sen. John Hickenlooper.
“He was a real Herb Caen figure — a man about town,” Hickenlooper said, referencing the influential San Francisco gossip writer and journalist. “He wrote one of the first articles about the Wynkoop Brewery. He also named one of our events, where we walked pigs down the alley to the Oxford Hotel on 17th and back. He called it The Running of the Pigs, or Pamplona on the Platte, which I’ll always think is an amazing turn of phrase.”
Husted and Hickenlooper stayed friends through Hickenlooper’s political ascension to mayor, governor, and Senator — in part, Hickenlooper thinks, because of Husted’s incredible love of listening to and telling stories, and the bonding that promoted.
“There was no one who did it like he did,” said Kim Christiansen, a 9News anchor who worked with Husted when he appeared on TV to share his work. “Every time he saw you he asked about someone in your world, which is a gift. He remembered people’s lives, which is not always the case in superficial relationships. I think he got a lot of scoops that way.”
The news media ecosystem then supported more than one of those jobs in town at the time.
“We always had a friendly little friendly competition going,” said Joanne Davidson, The Post’s former society writer. “Our goal every day was to make the other choke on their Cheerios, because inevitably one of us would have something really juicy that the other didn’t have.”
“Bill debuted as the society writer in October of 1986 with the … High Profile story on (of course) the Carousel Ball, the biggest, baddest bash in Denver in those days, put on by Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara,” Rassenfoss writes via email. “Because Marvin owned 20th Century Fox, he got stars to come and mingle … ranging from Gary Coleman to Henry Kissinger.” (One of his best story ledes, Rassenfoss added, was the 1992 phrase “Geraldo Rivera wants to punch me in the nose.”)
Husted was a familiar presence at those events, but also restaurants and bars, holding his beloved cigar and martini, friends said. His car usually stood out in the parking lot, given his license plate TELL ME. All of that ran parallel to a silliness he was also unafraid to showcase.
“He always made me laugh with these stupid things,” said Nancy Sagar, who was married to Husted for two years in the early 1990s and stayed good friends with him after their divorce. “He would go into the bathroom and come out intentionally with toilet paper hanging off the back of his pants and his shoes. And he would walk through the restaurant like that.”
Husted was born on Aug. 13, 1948, on the Upper East Side of New York City. At 10 years old, he “was riding subways and cabs, sneaking into clubs, (and) soaking up New York’s last golden age,” according to a 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 away from the Rocky in 1996, Husted wrote, where he was the paper’s featured city columnist through 2011.
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“He had no journalistic training, but was urbane, well-educated and had such a natural, conversational way of writing that you were immediately engaged,” wrote former Post editor and columnist Suzanne Brown, one of Husted’s first editors, via email.
“Amused, intrigued, you were right there with him as he made his rounds to clubs, parties and hot restaurants,” she wrote. “As an editor, I just had to correct his many misspellings of names and places, as he didn’t let such minor things get in the way of meeting a deadline. He would rarely admit this was the case and thank me for saving his bacon!”
Services are still being planned, according to Kruse.