Billionaire hotelier and investor John Pritzker  In a dark blazer and crisp white shirt, sitting at one of San Francisco’s power lunch spots, John Pritzker does not look like a former hippy Dead Head who took time off between high school and college to be part in the emerging counterculture. Pritzker, age 54 and an heir to the Hyatt Hotels Corp. fortune, is married with kids and runs a San Francisco private equity firm that has bet on a very different hotel chain from the one his father and grandfather built. Yet he has clearly carried his memories of the early 1970s San Francisco music scene with him.  I met Pritzker for lunch last month at Americano, the buzzing restaurant inside San Francisco’s Hotel Vitale — part of the Joie de Vivre boutique chain of hotels that Pritzker’s Geolo Partners private equity firm took control of last year. The main aim of our get-together was to discuss why he put money behind a documentary film on a counter-culture clown named Wavy Gravy. But it turned out that Pritzker, a witty conversationalist with a wry sense of humor, had plenty of other amusing stories to tell. Forbes ran one in the March 28 issue of the magazine about what brought him to San Francisco and how growing a pony tail led his grandfather to stop talking to him. (See here to find out how the story ended.) Another one I liked: how when staff at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, which Pritzker was overseeing in the late 1980s, threatened to strike –he ordered coffee for the strikers and himself, and they worked out the labor issues in a civilized manner. Strike averted. (That time, at least.)  But how did Pritzker, who had never financed a film before, choose to back Saint Misbehavin‘, the story of activist Wavy Gravy? Turns out he had met Wavy during his youthful San Francisco days (when Pritzker was supporting himself in a union job pulling cables at a San Bruno, Calif. apartment complex). “I remember for some reason I got backstage at a [Grateful Dead] concert and Wavy was in a room with all the kids of the musicians. He was dressed like a clown; basically he was the nanny for all the musicians’ kids when they were out playing,” Pritzker recalled.  “My son went to Wavy Gravy’s summer camp, Camp Winnarainbow. We sent him too young; he got really homesick. He said ‘Wavy used to take me on walks when I was crying and homesick’,” Pritzker went on.  But the film discussion happened because Larry Brilliant, an old friend and traveling companion of Wavy Gravy’s, the former head of Google’s nonprofit Google.org arm, and a friend of Pritzker’s, showed Pritzker a 3-minute film clip that director Michelle Esrick had put together. Pritzker was hooked: “I find Wavy to be a really compelling figure.” He says the film cost less than $1 million to make –and that he wasn’t the only backer (though he is named as the Executive Producer, so he put in more dough than anyone else).  Pritzker talked to my colleague Kym McNicholas on camera about the film:  Forbes 2011 World Billionaires’ list
The Hyatt hotel heir nods to his pony-tailed, 70s-era San Francisco halcyon days by executive producing a Wavy Gravy documentary.