Peggy Maley: “What’re you rebelling against, Johnny?”
Marlon Brando: “Whaddya got?”
—From The Wild One, 1953
He was wired different. Look at his brother: same basic genetic material, same schools, even the same bedroom. Just two years apart, yet they were opposites, like Elvis Presley and Shirley Temple.
Davison Thompson became a respectable insurance man, a civic leader, a dignified gentleman in suburban Cleveland. And his brother became Hunter Thompson, outlaw journalist and celebrated literary bomb thrower. They shared a home, but it’s not hard to guess which one painted the “gates to hell” on their bedroom floor during high school.
Hunter was an enigma all his life. He puzzled his mother, who often wondered why he did the things he did. But she understood that her eldest son had magnetism. After he’d become famous, she was fond of saying that his charisma was there all along, although he was difficult from the moment of his birth. Life as Hunter Thompson’s mother was no weenie roast.
He was a pain in the ass. He was fearless. He was cruel, but also capable of great kindness. He was a loyal friend. Near the end, he was frequently sentimental. Sometimes brusque and rude, he could also be a courtly Southern gentleman. Virginia Thompson had worked overtime to raise sons with good manners.
“Hunter came out of the womb different, and somewhat angry,” said Sandra Conklin, who became his first wife. “From talking to his mother, he was always different. He always had that charisma. Kids would come in front of his house and wait for him to come out.”
Hunter was a lightning rod for trouble. He was the scourge of the block, the kid the neighborhood parents feared, the criminal in training. Many forbade their sons from associating with him, and most would have disowned their daughters for the petty crime of smiling at him. Even as a child, he worked a room. When Hunter was around, the chemistry changed; you felt his presence before you saw him. In that seen-and-not-heard generation, Hunter struck even grown-ups mute with his powerful personality. His childhood friend Gerald Tyrrell said there was never any doubt where the neighborhood boys would gather to hatch their daily plans. It was always Hunter’s house—and not because Jack Thompson, oldest father in the neighborhood, was a mostly mute presence in the porch chair, shrouded in cigarette smoke and the murmur of baseball radio. And it wasn’t because Virginia Thompson was unconventional and sometimes drank too much and was more lenient than other mothers. It was simply because of the force of Hunter’s personality. “He was the most charismatic leader I’ve ever known,” Tyrrell said.
Hunter Thompson followed the great flood of 1937 into Louisville. In January, persistent rain swelled the Ohio River, and it rose thirty feet above flood level, leaving 70 percent of the city underwater. Ninety people died, 175,000 were evacuated, and the city was devastated. Six months later, the city was still in recovery when Hunter Stockton Thompson was born on July 18, 1937. Jack and Virginia’s friends dubbed him “fat baby” (he was eleven pounds), but Virginia marveled over her first child. Her husband was not as easily impressed.
Jack Thompson was already on his second life. He’d been married, fathered a son (Jack Jr.) and widowed, all before meeting Virginia Ray. Jack had spent thin years in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, trying to sell life insurance to coal miners and Appalachian farmers—poor prospects for major-medical policies. After his first wife’s death, he deposited his little boy with relatives and moved to Louisville to work for First Kentucky Fire Insurance. More than a decade after the death of his first wife, he met Virginia Ray.
Virginia was the daughter of a Louisville businessman and from a background of small-scale prosperity. The Rays manufactured carriages until cars drove them out of business and Virginia’s father, Presley Ray, went into insurance. The family did well enough to send Virginia to the University of Michigan for two years, but not well enough to support her through graduation. When Virginia Ray met Jack Thompson in 1934, the nation was crawling out of the Great Depression. Jack courted Virginia for a year, and then they married; Virginia was twenty-seven and Jack forty-two.
Within two years, they had a son: Hunter Stockton Thompson (named for Virginia’s parents, Lucille Cochran Hunter and Presley Stockton Ray). Parenthood was a new and mystical experience for Virginia, but Jack had been there before. Being older, he was less patient with a crying infant at three in the morning. Virginia was a single parent from the start.
Some children are a challenge; these are often the ones parents love the most: sons incapable of avoiding trouble, who torment their little brothers, who never stop moving and cannot keep quiet, who rarely sleep, but when they do, sleep the sleep of angels. Hunter was a difficult child. He was also charming, extraordinarily handsome, and self-assured. His three-year-old studio portrait shows a cocky kid, mustering as much swagger as he could from a sitting position. He was confident and betrayed no jealousy when brother Davison was born when Hunter was two.
By the mid-1940s, if Jack Thompson wasn’t living the American Dream, at least he was in the neighborhood. He and Virginia shuffled their sons through rental homes until the winter of 1943, when Jack finally had a down payment for the two-story stucco bungalow at 2437 Ransdell Avenue. It cost $4,100 and was in the heart of the Highlands, Louisville’s first suburb.
The Highlands was part of the Cherokee Triangle, a collection of wooded streets bound by Cave Hill Cemetery at the north, Cherokee Park to the east, and Bardstown Road on the west, the main thoroughfare in those pre-Interstate days for country folk going into the city.
There was no television, so mothers and fathers sat on porches in the evening, smoking, reading the Louisville Times, watching children play, and gossiping with neighbors. People said hello to strangers. In season, street vendors went door-to-door, selling strawberries. Mothers read to children on porch swings. Fathers played catch with sons in front yards. In the morning, fathers rode to downtown jobs on city buses, and nearly all of them wore hats.
Cherokee Park was the designated municipal wilderness for children of the Highlands. Hunter called it “beautifully wild and uncivilized: no buildings, no taxis, no traffic lights—just a sprawling and lonely woods.” The park was designed in the 1890s by Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of New York’s Central Park, and was one of the last projects Olmsted completed before being confined to a mental institution.
Louisville was rich with history and tradition, including athletic clubs, literary societies, and a whirl of debutante balls and cotillions. Though just across the Ohio River from Yankeeland, Louisville’s feet were deeply rooted in the South, with a veneer of gentility laid upon a foundation of vice. The primary industries were tobacco and liquor, and gin-guzzling gamblers lined up at Churchill Downs betting windows every May to wager on the fastest two minutes in sports. Half of the world’s bourbon came from Louisville. Some said that’s where most of it was consumed. Local distilleries produced Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark, Old Crow, and Wild Turkey.
The cultural emphasis on smoking and drinking complicated growing up in Louisville. So did new wealth. As more business came to the city, executives from General Electric and Reynolds Aluminum brought their families and built lush homes out beyond the Cherokee Triangle. Those fine houses in the Highlands that men like Jack Thompson had struggled to buy became less desirable. Jack Thompson’s American Dream had simply been the safety and security of a good neighborhood for his wife and sons. But now the pursuit-of-happiness bar was raised. Suddenly, Louisville had conspicuous affluence. The city grew to the east and redrew class lines to match the geography.
“It was very much a closed community,” said Porter Bibb, a childhood friend of Hunter’s. “There were houses on the hills, and the people who lived in the east end were the people who ran the city and the people who lived in the west end were the people who did the heavy lifting. Hunter lived in the middle.” Bibb certainly didn’t do any heavy lifting. He was old money and the only friend Hunter had with a variety of lettuce named for his family. Bibb said the Thompsons were part of the city’s modest middle class. “They lived in a kind of limbo area called the Highlands,” Bibb said. “It was not affluent, but not poor.”
A few months after Jack Thompson bought the house in the Highlands, Hunter started first grade at I. N. Bloom Elementary School. It was a little white clapboard school, built in 1865, with a wood stove heating two classrooms. Pupils sat at long tables, facing a portrait of President Roosevelt smiling down benevolently from above the chalkboard.
School started after Labor Day, but it wasn’t until November that Walter Kaegi arrived at I. N. Bloom. Although his father worked in Louisville, the family had lived across the river in New Albany, Indiana, until they found a home in the city. On his first day, Walter stood nervously at the front of the class as Miss Rudell introduced him to his fellow students. First grade was hard enough, he thought, but to be a new first-grader, two months after alliances had been formed—that would be painful.
Miss Rudell told Walter to sit at the long table, in the seat next to Hunter Thompson, and then she began the day’s first lesson. After a few minutes, Hunter nodded at Kaegi and muttered an introduction. Keeping their voices low, they whispered their six-year-old résumés: what their fathers did, where they lived, what their parents were like. It didn’t take long to find common ground. Both fathers, they discovered, whipped their sons with razor straps.
“My dad likes to whip me in the snoshole,” drawled Hunter. The way he said it, and that he even said such a thing, made Walter explode. “We roared, and so we were disciplined,” Kaegi recalled. Here he was, the model of the good boy, and twenty minutes after meeting Hunter, Walter Kaegi was doing time in the cloakroom.
In addition to Walter Kaegi, Hunter made another lifelong friend in first grade: Clifford “Duke” Rice. Their first-grade year was America’s first full year at war, and Rice remembered Hunter’s fervor as he pulled weeds in the class victory garden. The motive for Hunter’s amped-up work ethic was escape from the classroom. “It got us outdoors,” Rice remembered. “Inside, it was old and dark and all of the teachers were women.” Kids also picked up on the grim tone from the adult world and were determined to help the war effort in Louisville. Hunter pulled a wagon house to house, collecting tin cans for a scrap-metal drive.
At school, the war was a fact of daily life. The windows at I. N. Bloom were fitted with black curtains for protection during air raids. Louisville’s airport turned into a training ground for pilots and an assembly point for cargo planes. Up and down the Highlands’ wooded streets, front windows displayed star banners indicating sons or husbands fighting in Europe or the Pacific.
But beyond the victory gardens and tin-can drives, the greatest disruption the war brought to the lives of six-year-old boys was the ransacking of Major League Baseball rosters. Despite not having a big-league team, Louisville was a baseball-crazy city. (It had been one of the original franchises when the National League was formed in 1876.) Most of baseball’s biggest stars were serving their country, so teams were filled with third-raters. The drop-off in quality was an outrage to Hunter and Duke, who believed that Hitler and Mussolini were evil men, primarily for ruining America’s great national pastime. Baseball loomed large in Hunter’s life; it was a rare bond he shared with his father.
Jack Thompson was older than most fathers of small boys. He didn’t have the stamina to be an active father to Hunter and Davison. Up and down Ransdell, fathers played catch with sons in front yards. Jack Thompson watched from the porch, smoking Chesterfields, and listening to the St. Louis Cardinals on KMOX. “He was passive,” Tyrrell recalled. “He just sort of sat there on the porch and watched us.”
Inside the house, alone with his family, Jack was more animated, listening intently to the news and sports. He’d hear the war news, then curse “those sneaky Japs,” take a slug from his jigger of whiskey, and slap the arm of his chair. Hunter remembered those moments all of his life: sitting with his father, occasionally taking a sip from his dad’s glass. “I soon became addicted to those moments,” he recalled. “There was a certain wildness to it, a queer adrenaline rush of guilt and mystery and vaguely secret joy.”
The city was their playground. “Louisville was our town,” Gerald Tyrrell recalled. “We went anywhere. We were pretty fearless. It was a great way to grow up.”
“We went all over,” said Debby Kasdan, who shared classes with Hunter from first grade through freshman year in high school. “We’d get on the bus and go to movies downtown. We’d see a double feature, then cross the street to another theater and watch another double feature.”
Hunter and his friends rode the bus over to Parkway Field to see a doubleheader with the Louisville Colonels, the minor-league farm team for the Boston Red Sox. Hunter and the boys would be gone all day, but parents didn’t worry.
Hunter, Walter Kaegi, Duke Rice, and Debby Kasdan went through I. N. Bloom Elementary School together, and Gerald Tyrrell and Neville Blakemore were one grade behind. Hunter was chairman of the board for the neighborhood boys, and the Thompsons’ front yard was the executive suite. “We’d go to his house and figure out whether we were going to play in Cherokee Park or if we were going to play basketball or whether we were going to play baseball or some football,” Tyrrell said. “Sometimes we’d walk over to Bardstown Road and get downtown on the bus. Hunter had the imagination to make the suggestions of what we were going to do.”
Hunter provided consistency for his friends. When Tyrrell’s diplomat father was assigned to China for a year, he took his family along. The next year, the day after returning to Louisville, Tyrrell got up early, dressed in his jeans and T-shirt, and showed up at Hunter’s house. It was as if he’d never been gone. The most he got was a where-you-been from a couple of the kids and a new Hunter-bestowed nickname to mark his year in China: Ching.
The Civil War was still being fought. Hunter wore a Confederate cavalry cap and challenged new kids in the neighborhood with their affiliation: Are you a Yank or a Reb? Hunter started fistfights if he got the wrong answer. The neighborhood boys were well-versed in the Second World War, but Hunter’s interests went well beyond recent history. While still in elementary school, he read Thucydides’ accounts of the Peloponnesian wars. This impressed Walter Kaegi, who had the same interest. He grew up to earn a degree at Harvard and become professor of Byzantine history at the University of Chicago.
Playing war took all day, and some of the battles raged long past dusk. Sometimes the war games were life-size. Hunter and his friends wore Army surplus helmet liners and staged bare-chested battles in the woods around their neighborhood, throwing rocks, bloodying foreheads, and irritating parents. As provocateur, Hunter was the flash point for anger; parents warned their sons to stay away from him. He was dangerous.
“Hunter was a sweat to be around,” Neville Blakemore recalled. “I got increasingly uneasy with being around him because I knew he would eventually think of something to do to me.”
Even in elementary school, Hunter had issues with authority, but what made him the bane of his teachers made him a folk hero to classmates. The other kids grew to like him, even if he scared them. He was funny without telling jokes, popular without being arrogant, smart without barking out correct answers like a trained seal.
Hunter’s mischief began to reach beyond his circle of friends. He began to think in a larger scale, in pranks that might alarm or amuse the neighborhood. He became a meticulous planner of creative vandalism.
Each fall, home owners raked leaves into gutters to be burned. Hunter decided to accelerate the process, making clothespins into small spring-loaded bombs. Using a match, he rode his bike between the piles, snaking from one side of the street to the other, flicking his match-stick bombs into the piles as he coasted by. The leaves caught and slowly smoldered until twenty minutes after Hunter left, they burst into flame. Fire trucks were called and the police went door to door, trying to find the clothespin arsonist.
But even as a child, Hunter was fairly complex. He wasn’t just a juvenile delinquent; he was also a budding scholar. Gerald Tyrrell said leaving aside the year living in China, his childhood was fairly typical for a Depression-era baby, except for one of the Hunter-inspired group activities.
“We’d pack up and get our bikes and ride to the Highland branch library,” Tyrrell said. “There’d be a lot of camaraderie and loud talk, until we’d get to the steps of the library. Then we’d get quiet, go in, and get a book, and sit down and read. We’d leave in about two hours and get noisy again. It wasn’t until much later that I realized it wasn’t the normal stuff for a gang of boys to do.” They graduated from conventional boys fare to more sophisticated material. “In the earlier days we read sports books and war books,” Tyrrell recalled. “Later on, we matriculated to history and people like Napoleon and Churchill.”
Boys don’t generally start newspapers, either. In fourth grade, Walter Kaegi got hold of a mimeograph machine and started a neighborhood newspaper called the Southern Star. Kaegi was editor, and the staff included Hunter, Duke Rice, Debby Kasdan, and another Bloom classmate, John Bruton. Kaegi was the driving force behind the newspaper, but Hunter wrote much of the largely incestuous copy. The lead story in the first issue, from Columbus Day 1947, was about a fight Hunter and Duke Rice provoked with new neighbors who gave the wrong answer to the Civil War question. Another story offered a detailed account of Kaegi’s dog vomiting. The dog, Robert E. Lee, also appeared in the second issue, when his foot was run over by a neighbor’s car. Recognizing a trend, Kaegi had the standing head “Dog News” in the third issue of the Star.
Visiting relatives, dead snakes, and neighborhood baseball games provided the Southern Star with its news, allowing it to live up to its cumbersome motto, “Amazing Neighborhood Activities Come to Light on the Front Page of the Star.” But the Star reached beyond its circulation area for news. Whatever interested the staff made the paper. When a trained gorilla died in the Cincinnati Zoo, Kaegi put it on the front page, because he liked gorillas.
The paper earned a small spotlight feature in the Courier-Journal, which was impressed that Kaegi paid his staff between one and three cents a story. Hunter earned his first byline at age eleven, in a sports story featuring himself and his heroics as forward on his basketball team.
Even though the Southern Star was Walter Kaegi’s project, staff meetings were held at Hunter’s house. Debby Kasdan, the only girl on the staff, dreaded those meetings. “He scared me,” she said. “Even then, as a child, he had this deep, rumbling voice, almost like a growl. I remember his mother as very genteel. She was such a Southern lady. She always served us lemonade, which seemed to annoy Hunter. The two of them seemed incongruous to me. I remember he’d say something and she’d say, ‘Oh, Hunter! Oh, Hunter!’ It was this shrill, teasing kind of voice. She was the sort of woman who wouldn’t go out of the house without a hat and gloves. And her son was the opposite.”
Kaegi agreed. Virginia Thompson was “a very caring mother.”
Hunter was a planner and invested years in plotting his move into Louisville’s adolescent social strata. Of the clubs and social organizations in Louisville, Hunter had his eyes set on the most prestigious: the Castlewood Athletic Club and the century-old Athenaeum Literary Association. He couldn’t join either until he was a teenager and was invited. Hunter wanted in both; Castlewood was a feeder for the Athenaeum, and so he decided he must first get the attention of the Castlewood brain trust and make himself into an attractive prospect. He led a push to start an athletic club for I. N. Bloom Elementary students. Along with Duke Rice and Gerald Tyrrell, Hunter founded the Hawks Athletic Club and began organizing competitions with other clubs and neighborhood teams. Eventually, it did earn him an invitation to Castlewood.
“Hunter was the first one of our immediate age group to get into Castlewood,” Gerald Tyrrell said. “I don’t think he was in the sixth grade yet when he got in. It wasn’t until the end of football season in the eighth grade that I got in.”
Hunter played baseball in a church-sponsored league, like many of his friends. Hunter met Porter Bibb when they were eight. “Hunter was an extremely good athlete,” he remembered. “He was one of the best baseball players of that age I’d ever seen.” Bibb was never on a team with Hunter but often played against him. When Hunter was in the on-deck circle, Bibb said the word would spread up and down the bench: “Uh-oh—here comes Thompson up to bat.”As he grew older, however, a physical anomaly—one leg was longer than the other—was exacerbated, and Hunter was not as fast as his friends on the bases. Dreams of Major League Baseball died on the vine. The shorter leg gave him a distinctive walk—more of a lope, actually—that afforded him a lifetime of memorable and dramatic entrances.
With his prematurely deep voice and his furrowed brow, Hunter often sounded and looked angry, even when he wasn’t. When he was impatient or questioned a teacher’s authority, the voice-and-brow combo made him appear menacing. Teachers recoiled when he barked questions in class. When Hunter was elected to head the student safety patrol in elementary school, the principal protested, calling him “Little Hitler.” “I wasn’t sure what that meant,” Hunter recalled, “but I think it meant that I had a natural sway over many students and that I should probably be lobotomized for the good of society.” Walter Kaegi remembered Hunter getting antsy in the school cafeteria line, annoyed at being bumped by the students behind him. “You sweaty swine,” he snarled, and the students flinched. When Hunter yelled, classmates jumped.
John Bruton said Hunter was “the pole around which trouble would occur.” Kaegi said classmates wanted to be friends with Hunter, mostly because they feared him and saw friendship as insulation from a possible beating. “Some had an apprehension that he could get them in trouble,” Kaegi said, “and he did get people in trouble.”
Tyrrell and Hunter lived a block apart. Neville Blakemore, who had moved in and out of the neighborhood (and even lived in Washington during the war), stayed at his grandmother’s house, one block from Hunter. It was a short bike ride to the Castlewood neighborhood, where Walter Kaegi and Debby Kasdan lived.
Walter Kaegi’s house backed up to Beargrass Creek. “It was just a drainage area,” Debby Kasdan said. “You could watch the frogs or gather watercress. We called it the Swamp. It wasn’t a true swamp, but to us, at that age, it was mysterious and dark.”
The creek wasn’t just a geographic boundary. When Hunter led the boys down to the creek to throw stones, they found black boys on the other bank. Hunter sometimes took his BB gun down to the creek and urged his friends to provoke the black kids. And so they would do that—even though they sometimes were chased back across the creek and had to hide in Kaegi’s house until the black kids went away. But when Hunter suggested it, they would do it again.
“He had not just charisma,” Kaegi said. “He almost had demonic power—in a positive sense, not a negative. It was also in his eyes and the expression on his face. His eyes were very, very captivating. When you’ve seen them, you’ll always remember them.”
In seventh grade, Hunter decided he wanted to ride his bike out into the country. He ended up leading a dozen friends on a twenty-mile ride; pretty heavy duty for eleven- and twelve-year-old boys. When Hunter fell in love with bullwhips after watching too many Lash La Rue movies, he insisted his friends share that love. He even acted out street theater with his gang, pretending to whip a boy on the sidewalk and have his friend burst into a store, feigning agony. It scared the customers, and Hunter liked that.
Hunter read about epilepsy during one of his afternoons at the Highland branch library and taught his friend Henry Eichelberger to mimic a grand-mal seizure. Hunter watched from the sidewalk as his protégé writhed on the floor of Nopper’s Pharmacy and customers screamed. He began to use the fake seizures and other sidewalk dramas as hazing rituals for the Hawks and later for Castlewood. He also would shoplift while the store’s manager was distracted by the seizing confederate.
As Hunter exercised power over his friends, his parents had a new distraction. Jack and Virginia were surprised with a third son in 1949, when James Garnett Thompson was born. Virginia was forty-one and Jack was an ancient fifty-three. Hunter was twelve and to him, this little brother was a generation removed.
Hunter’s pranks had gone mostly unnoticed and largely unpunished until he was nine and the FBI came knocking.
The summer after his third-grade year, two federal agents stood in the foyer of the home on Ransdell and told Virginia Thompson that Hunter was the prime suspect in the destruction of a mailbox, a federal crime that came with a five-year prison term.
“Not prison!” Virginia Thompson screamed at the agents. “That’s insane. He’s only a child. How could he have known?”
One of the agents pointed out that Hunter was old enough to read the warning on the mailbox about the penalty for vandalism. Before anyone else could speak, Jack Thompson chimed in: “How do you know he’s not blind, or a moron?”
Hunter picked up the moron argument, despite the fact that the agents’ surprise visit had caught him reading the sports section of the Courier-Journal. Of course, Hunter had destroyed the mailbox, using an elaborate set of pulleys and ropes that turned it over and pulled it into the path of a bus driven by one of Hunter’s adult enemies.
The agents told him that his accomplices had confessed, but Hunter knew that his pals were loyal and would never rat on him. He remained silent, playing the moron. The agents continued presenting their evidence in the Thompson living room. “A nice kid like you shouldn’t have to go to federal prison,” one of the agents said. All they wanted, they said, was a confession.
His father looked to him, resigned: “Don’t lie to these men. They have witnesses.”
Hunter turned to the agents. “What witnesses?” he asked.
There was a long silence. Jack Thompson looked at his son a moment, and then turned to the agents. “I think my son has a point,” he said. “Just exactly who have you talked to?”
Hunter ticked off the names of friends who could be the finks who ratted on him, but who had firm alibis. His father cut him off. “Shut up,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Be quiet and let me handle this, you fool.”
And that was all it took to end Hunter’s first major run-in with the law. The FBI agents could not bully him into a confession, and Jack stood up for him. Most children would have been frightened or scared straight. For Hunter Thompson, the experience empowered him and gave him an operating principle that served him well the rest of his life. It made him think: Maybe I can get away with it.
“The mailbox incident was a confidence-builder,” Hunter said late in life.
It came on slowly. Jack Thompson was often tired and his muscles ached. It got harder to see and his eyelids drooped slightly. Chewing was painful and swallowing was torture. Jack was a quiet man, not fond of long conversation. It wasn’t like him to complain and draw attention. He was used to being in the background, and so Jack Thompson suffered in silence.
Finally, the pain was too much. Jack was admitted to Louisville Veterans Hospital for treatment. Three months later, he died at fifty-seven, just before the Fourth of July holiday in 1952. He had been suffering from myasthenia gravis, a rare disease that attacked the immune system.
Jack Thompson’s death overwhelmed the family. Virginia had to go to work—she got a job at the public library—and her widowed mother moved in to manage day-to-day family life and the three boys, aged fourteen, twelve, and four. Lucille Cochran Ray was Memo (Mee-Mo) to her grandsons. Hunter adored her. Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Lee also helped with the Thompson boys. But Hunter resented his mother for going to work and knew that his unvarnished love for Memo and his aunts had the added attraction of irritating Virginia.
Hunter’s friends didn’t remember Jack Thompson speaking much, but inside the house, he exerted authority over his eldest son. “His dad was a nice and quiet man who kept him on the straight and narrow as best he could,” Duke Rice said. “When he died, there was no one to do that. His life got turned upside down from that point on.” Hunter was already wild, but now he’d lose even this tempering influence. He was off to a good start on being bad.
Life changed in the Thompson home. Left alone to support her family, Virginia Thompson came home from work and uncorked a bottle. Some nights were worse than others, and Memo kept her apart from the boys. “Your mother’s sick again,” she told them, and then she’d escort her daughter to bed.
Hunter grew to hate his mother’s behavior. He once screamed at her, and she ran for the phone on the landing to call for help. He got there first and ripped it out of the wall. Jim, who was four then, remembered that and other epic battles, with Memo serving as referee. “Hunter had a real short fuse with all of this stuff,” he said. “He was intolerant and mean.”
Hunter no longer invited friends over when Virginia was home. He had gone to Sunday school regularly at the insistence of his mother, but with her drinking and without his father standing behind her, she lost authority and Hunter refused to go. (He had been active enough in his church to be selected as representative for a Presbyterian youth camp in North Carolina.)
Hunter dated several girls, including Judy Stellings, who went to the Louisville Collegiate Girls School, near the Thompson house. She met him at a party when they were both fourteen, and they dated through high school. She had the honor of being the first girl he drove on a date.
“He was a cute, jolly, fun kid and he made me laugh,” she said. “I had a crush on him. Hunter was hard to dislike. I was fourteen and not as precocious as a fourteen-year-old is today. I was somewhat sheltered and naïve. He’d had his sixteenth birthday and came out [to the Stellings home in Anchorage] to pick me up in his mother’s car. It was a total surprise. We went out and played mini-golf.”
Hunter had his charms and could win over parents, but not when thievery was involved.
“My mother was going to have a bridge party,” Stellings recalled. “In our house, you walked in on the second floor. Hunter came through the house, walked downstairs and Mother had bourbon and what-all set out in the bar for her party the next day, and he picked up the bourbon and walked out the back door. When my father discovered the missing liquor, he called the house and his mother answered the phone and she said, ‘He’s still asleep. I can’t wake him up.’ But she got him up, and Dad told Hunter in no uncertain terms that the bourbon must be on the counter by noon.”
Her father forgave Hunter and allowed him to continue seeing his daughter. “In high school, everybody dated,” she said. “Of course, ‘dating’ had a different meaning then than it does now. We would go to parties, we would go to Athenaeum Hill, we would go to dances. On Sunday afternoons, Hunter would come out to visit. He loved Bing Crosby. He’d come out, and we’d sit by the fire and listen to Bing Crosby. ‘Galway Bay’ was one of his favorite songs. Later, when he was in the Air Force, he wrote me letters about those lazy Sunday afternoons and how much they meant to him.”
Not all parents were as forgiving as Judy Stellings’s folks. Hunter met Susan Haselden in junior high, but once her parents got a few whiffs of Hunter’s personality and dangerous habits, they forbade their daughter to see him. Hunter and Susan kept their relationship secret for years, and she remained one of his steady correspondents well into adulthood. She was a country club girl—her parents were members at Owl Creek—and Haselden was clandestinely escorted to club dances by the reprobate.
He became a night crawler. As soon as he got his driver’s license, he was gone. He’d made a contraption with four wheels and a washing-machine motor on it, more motorbike than car, and “dangerous as hell,” as Tyrrell remembered. Virginia couldn’t let her son ride around in that thing, so she gave Hunter the car keys. She’d wait up until dawn for his return.
He found trouble, beer, and friends like Sam Stallings. Hunter learned how to get alcohol. He walked into liquor stores and frightened clerks into giving him a bottle to get rid of him. He bribed black waiters at debutante balls. Sometimes he stole it. Whiskey became his partner.
“The first time I got high,” Gerald Tyrrell remembered, “there were four of us. We were thirteen. We bought a half pint of gin from a waiter down at the Kentucky Hotel who bootlegged it. We bought a bottle of ginger ale and just had a great time, giggling and carrying on. And I got into trouble then with Hunter. All the trouble I got into in my life, it was always with him.”
Hunter started at Atherton High School but transferred to Male High after the football team beat up Hunter when he criticized the players’ performance. That was the excuse Hunter needed. He wanted to be at Male anyway. Male sent its graduates off to the Ivy League, and some of its faculty members chose jobs at Male over positions at the Ivies. Male was also where the Athenaeum Literary Association was started in 1824 and where most of the members still came from. The Athenaeum had a grand history in Louisville; Robert Penn Warren was just one of the literary figures who had been a member of the high school club. Some of Hunter’s old friends were already in the society—Jimmy Noonan, Porter Bibb, and Ralston Steenrod. He met Paul Semonin, son of Louisville’s leading realtor, at the Athenaeum’s Saturday night meetings, and they became close friends. Like most of the members, Semonin came from wealth. Hunter didn’t have that, but the bad-boy background made him popular as a club mascot.
“The Athenaeum was kind of a combination of cultural interests and social status,” Semonin said. “It was a product of Louisville society. It was a way of plugging into something traditional. Of course, it was a tradition that was not ‘working class’ or anything like that. It was something that had to do with being a part of the upper class. And it had to do with having an interest in literary things—although I have to say that was mixed heavily with socializing and partying and things like that. Being in the Athenaeum was sort of like an initiation into the world of drinking under age. I once saw it described as sort of a purely cultural society, as if it were people who were just interested in literature and writing, kind of highfalutin stuff. Of course, that wasn’t it at all. I think the type of camaraderie that developed had much to do with going out to Cherokee Park and drinking on the hill or partying together as it did with the actual literature we were interested in or produced.”
The Athenaeum was at the top of “a very unusual social structure,” according to Porter Bibb. “It was the most amazing contradiction to being a teen in that it required its members to elect people, like a secret society—like Skull and Bones at Yale,” Bibb remembered. “From all over the city, there were about fifteen people each year brought into the Athenaeum and it was for three years—sophomore, junior, and senior year of high school. Every Saturday night you had to put a suit on, a white shirt, and a dark tie. We would sit there for two or three hours, and each Saturday evening, selected members were required to produce something of ‘literary quality,’ and read their work in front of the whole group and be critiqued. And then we would break and go out and raise hell. We would go to parties, and take the suits off, and be normal teenagers. It was a rather extraordinary thing, for forty-five testosterone-packed teenagers to sit there for three hours or more every Saturday night, reading the poems, the short stories, and the essays that they had written, and being critiqued by their peers. The result of all this every year was a literary magazine. That was where Hunter first was published.”
The Spectator, the Athenaeum yearbook, featured poems, drawings, stories, and essays. Hunter’s first member photograph shows him still with candy-cheek chubbiness, and his pieces are sometimes heavy-handed, but still impressive considering they were the work of a fourteen-year-old.
His Spectator essay titled “Security” even laid out a coherent Hunter Thompson philosophy. After an attack on conformity, Hunter concluded, “Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?” Hunter’s models for rebellion included Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, whose contempt for society oozed from theater screens. He assimilated their simmering resentment. (In the Spectator’s list of members, Hunter was listed under the alias Marlon and was wanted for “you name it.”) Other elements of the Hunter ethos were already in place. “Even back then, he was always kind of a champion of the underdog,” Judy Stellings said.
Semonin recalled reading and discussing Ayn Rand, George Bernard Shaw, and H. L. Mencken with Hunter, whose early attempts at satire in the Spectator (“An Open Letter to the Youth of Our Nation” by John J. Righteous-Hypocrite) showed him trying too hard. But the literary dialogue with Semonin and Bibb and the others continued, usually with the accompaniment of cold beer or locally distilled whiskey.
The weekly association with the Athenaeum and stepping inside that grander social circle meant that Hunter’s games and pranks took on more scope. “We shared an interest in shock value,” Semonin said. “We liked the playfulness, the humor, and the wildness. It was all street theater, acts of defiance.”
Hunter’s most successful street theater was a staged kidnapping in front of patrons waiting in line to get into the Bard Theater in downtown Louisville. While moviegoers watched, a Hunter confederate was dragged from the line and into a car, which sped away. That prank made the newspapers, and Hunter reveled in the anonymous publicity.
Hunter ended up in jail, not for the fake kidnapping, but for other minor pranks. After he trashed a filling station on Bardstown Road, police came to Male High and led him from the classroom in handcuffs. Hunter, Tyrrell, and a couple of other friends were busted for buying underage booze at Abe’s Liquor Store. All the boys were let go, except for Hunter. Because of his petty criminal record, he was made into an example. When schools, gas stations, or pool halls were trashed, the cops knocked on his door first. Once, he even robbed a collection box at a neighborhood church.
Jim Thompson, twelve years younger, remembered his older brother as a wild man who terrorized them. Playing with a gun up in his room, Hunter fired a shot through the floor and into the family china cabinet. He also painted an elaborate tableau of the gates of hell on his bedroom floor. He kept a rug over it, but required little prompting to reveal it to visitors.
Virginia Thompson gave Hunter her car keys and all the freedom he wanted, but she didn’t abdicate the parental right to worry. Jim, then just six years old, would tiptoe downstairs in the middle of the night and find his mother sitting in a chair by the window, smoking, drinking, waiting for Hunter to come home. Despite his petty-but-growing record, Virginia Thompson always defended her son. He wasn’t really doing anything evil, she rationalized, he was just playing pranks.
Some of Hunter’s Friday night parties stretched through Monday mornings. He and Sam Stallings, his partner in nocturnal crime, spent occasional nights in jail for drunk driving. Hunter grew wilder. He, Tyrrell, and two other friends were busted when a liquor store got wise to their scam to buy alcohol underage and cops staked out the store. The other parents were furious that Hunter got their sons arrested. Tyrrell was ordered by his parents to stay away from Hunter. He rebelled by getting drunk with his friend for twenty-six nights in a row. No one could stop Hunter, bent on being Louisville’s number-one rebel.
“We stole cars and drank gin and did a lot of fast driving at night,” Hunter wrote of his adolescence. “We needed music on those nights, and it usually came on the radio—on the 50,000-watt clear-channel stations like WWL in New Orleans and WLAC in Nashville. . . . Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel.”
Delinquent, yes. Heavy drinker, yes, but also a heavy reader. Ralston Steenrod, fellow partier, went on to major in English at Princeton and later become a Louisville attorney. Off in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League and surrounded by sons of wealth and privilege, he realized that none of them could hold Hunter’s jock when it came to knowledge of literature and possession of original thought. Back in high school, after a night out, Steenrod recalled often taking Hunter home. “His bedroom was lined with books,” he said. “Where I would go home and go to sleep, Hunter would go home and read.”
Yet in the halls of Male High, Hunter could be easily tormented. As graduation neared, students announced their college plans. One Ivy League–bound snot backed up Hunter in the hallway and asked, “Where are you going next year?” “I don’t know,” Hunter said, “but I’m going somewhere.”
Ralston Steenrod and Sam Stallings were driving around in Steenrod’s car with Hunter the night they encountered two couples necking in a parked car in Cherokee Park. It was June 1955, less than two weeks before high school graduation. Steenrod parked and the three boys approached the passionate couples. Stallings leaned in the window, demanding money, but the couples refused. Then Hunter said if they didn’t give them any money, he would rape one of the girls. Terrified, the young lovers handed over cigarettes and wallets, and the three bandits drove away, later dividing the booty: eight dollars filched from the kids. Joseph Monin, driver of the other car, later said that Stallings threatened him with a gun. Steenrod subsequently dropped off Stallings and Hunter, and was picked up by police before he could get home. Monin had copied down the license number.
Cops tracked down Hunter and Stallings. Steenrod and Stallings were both sons of prominent attorneys. Steenrod got probation and Stallings got a fifty-dollar fine. Because he had threatened rape, and because of his lack of connections, Hunter was sentenced to sixty days in jail.
When Judge Joseph Jull announced Hunter’s sentence in court, a young woman in the gallery stood up to protest. She was one-fourth of the necking couples that had been robbed. In the time between the robbery and the sentencing, she and her friends had gotten to know Hunter during jail visiting hours and appeared in court to testify on his behalf, more evidence of his charismatic personality.
Virginia Thompson was there, too, pleading for her son’s future. “Please don’t send him to jail,” she begged Judge Jull.
Judge Jull was snide. “What do you want me to do? Give him a medal?”
Hunter was in tears. The judge, unmoved, recited Hunter’s record—a litany of petty offenses. “I feel I’ve done you an injustice by waiting so long to take a positive step,” Jull said.
Steenrod’s father asked the judge to release Hunter and require him to enlist in the service, “which would make a man out of him.”
Judge Jull would have none of it.
Sixty days. The judge pounded his gavel.
Judy Stellings didn’t abandon Hunter. She was one of the few people outside of his family to visit him in jail. “He got a raw deal,” she said. “Nothing happened to the people he was with. Sam was the true rotten egg, continually in trouble. He was a really unpleasant person. Ralston got off and went off to his life in Princeton. Everybody got off but Hunter. His mother did not have the influence, the money, or anything else that the others had. She didn’t know how to go about protecting him.
“I insisted on going to the jail. I shouldn’t have. It was embarrassing to him. He wrote me later that he wished I hadn’t seen him there. His mother was there and she didn’t have any money, so I gave her money to pay for her parking. She wrote me a nice note and sent me a dollar back.”
Hunter missed his high school graduation ceremony. He would soon be voted out of the Athenaeum Literary Association. As he sat in Jefferson County Jail, beginning his sentence, he knew that he would not return to the life he had known. He had proclaimed his innocence and had become a sacrifice. There would be no college; he probably would go into the service. Every day in jail, he wrote his mother letters of sadness, repentance, and anger. The whole event embarrassed him, particularly the threatened-rape charge, and he begged his mother to forgive him. He also angrily swore at the authorities. “The police lie,” he wrote his mother. “Injustice is rampant.”
“I look back on my youth with great fondness,” Hunter Thompson wrote near the end of his life, “but I would not recommend it as a working model for others.”