I have no idea of whether you think you’re making a film
about Duke or Thompson. I haven’t thought about it until
now and I’m filling with hate and rage, just thinking about it.
I’m never sure which one people expect me to be.
Often, they conflict.
—HST to BBC television crew, 1977
The idea was to get some rest and make another run at fiction, some writing that wouldn’t require him to catch planes, thrash in distant hotel beds, or march in lockstep with the weasels of the establishment press. But the mind-numbing schedule of 1972 hadn’t been a waste; sitting on all those airliners gave him an idea for a short novel set on a coast-to-coast flight.
He wrote Silberman at Random House, suggesting that it was time to deal with the American Dream project and admit that it was dead. What’s next, Hunter asked his editor. Do we write it off, or do I have to pay you back? Hoping that Silberman would forgive the American Dream advance, Hunter offered him Guts Ball, his newly conceived “short Vegas-like novel” set on a transcontinental flight. He sent him an audiocassette filled with excited ranting—which, he said, is “about as close as I plan to come to anything resembling a Real Outline.”
Though he faced the reality of being in Random House’s debt, he also was proud and could not resist gloating a little bit about his newfound status to Silberman. His campaign coverage made him a celebrity, even if it didn’t make him rich. In the years since Hell’s Angels, Hunter had questioned his sanity, and no doubt Silberman and the Random House executives had as well. Maybe everything would pay off after all.
“I plan to force a readjustment in my long-time status (or role)—from RH’s House Freak & Subsidized Looney to the role of an actual, profit-churning Writer,” Hunter wrote. “It’s been fun all around—no argument about that—but I get the feeling it’s about time we tried to establish a serious relationship. (Which is not to say that I plan to start taking myself seriously; all I’m talking about here is my work, as it were. . . . )”
The early spring was a good taking-stock time and also afforded Hunter his first rest and relaxation in three years. “I look forward to as many months as possible of sloth & unemployment,” he wrote his mother. “My next project is a weird novel for Random House, [due] around 1975 or so, but between now & then, I have no plans at all—except maybe to run for the U.S. Senate from Colorado, but at the moment, that’s only a threat.”
But the realities of day-to-day living forced Hunter to again set aside writing a novel. He battled with Wenner over the editor’s refusal to remove his name (and Raoul Duke’s name) from the Rolling Stone masthead. He told Wenner to cut him off, but the $1,000 per month retainers continued arriving. When Hunter figured he had violated the failure-to-produce-anything-in-ninety-days clause of his contract, he insisted the money stop.
Thompson/Duke needed a rest. The fans might have been surprised that he was sunning himself like a bleached lizard on his back porch, recovering. In the public mind, there was no slash between Hunter Thompson the human and Duke the character. They were one.
Sure, Hunter took drugs. He drank a lot—probably enough during a twenty-four-hour span to render a minor-league infield unconscious. But he could hold his liquor. Longtime friends could remember only seeing him truly out-of-control drunk two or maybe three times during the course of a forty-year friendship. His fans knew the character, not the man, and when they approached him, they often felt the need to affect being high if they weren’t already. They had assumed Hunter would want them that way. But he hated sloppy, inarticulate drunks. He breakfasted on bloody marys and beer and drank Wild Turkey and Chivas by the tumbler, but he was rarely shit-faced.
As he began to put together freelance assignments to provide the income he needed to make it through 1973, he went to other markets. As he wrote his old friend William Kennedy, “I’m trying to finish my annual reject/effort for Playboy.” Despite Playboy’s earlier vow that he would never again write for the magazine, that banned-for-life policy came before Hunter Thompson grew famous as the Raoul Duke madman character and developed a fan base of stoned freaks, policy wonks, and third-rank journalists, all of whom admired the brass balls of the Duke character.
So of course the Playboy editors swallowed their pride. Now that the election was over, what situation could they put him in that was comparable? The editors sent him in April on a deep-sea fishing expedition, a titanic struggle perfectly suited to a mad-dog journalist: Old Gonzo and the Sea.
And despite Hunter’s feeling that his Playboy performance anxiety would render him unable to produce, he did finish the article, though it took over a year to write and eighteen months to appear in the magazine. The piece started out as a report on a fishing tournament requiring a trip to Cozumel, which to Hunter sounded more like R&R than work. It would also allow him to get in touch with his Inner Hemingway and test his testosterone.
He needed a companion. For the Cozumel trip, Hunter brought along Michael Solheim, the Aspen bar owner/real-estate broker/campaign manager who’d first introduced Hunter and Acosta. As “Yail Bloor,” Solheim made a good foil for the Duke character, perfect for bouncing back outrageous comments at the protagonist. (“Bloor” was one of Hunter’s favorite names from his telephone-prank days, along with “Squane.” He had even quoted “Bloor” during his campaign coverage.)
The story again became the struggle to get the story. “I’m damned if I can remember anything as insanely fucking dull as that Third Annual Cozumel Fishing Tournament,” Hunter wrote. “Deep-sea fishing is not one of your king-hell spectator sports.”
But getting fucked up and running amuck was a great spectator sport for Hunter Thompson fans. Moreover, after returning from Cozumel, he was forty pages into the Playboy article when all political hell broke loose back in Washington, and he was forced to set aside the fish story.
The break-in at Democratic National Headquarters in June 1972 had turned out to be more than a minor burglary. Treated as a police story by the two Washington Post reporters who covered it—Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward—a trail soon appeared, leading from the Watergate headquarters of the Democrats, to the burglars’ point of origin at the White House. Bernstein and Woodward pieced together much of the story before election day 1972, but the majority of the press was too distracted by the campaign horse race to pay heed. The Washington Post was pretty much alone on the story, out on a limb that the White House resolutely tried to saw off.
The president’s staff had kept the story contained through the election; it was only the following spring, after the burglars had been tried and were awaiting sentencing, that one of the burglars, James McCord, wrote to Judge John Sirica, the man in charge of the Watergate burglary case, saying it was more than a simple burglary. In essence, he said, all that stuff you’ve been reading in the Washington Post is true.
The Post had been in a vulnerable spot, shat upon not only by the executive branch but by the establishment press. If Watergate is such a big story, the press wizards reasoned, then who the fuck are Woodward and Bernstein?
They certainly weren’t any of the boys on the bus. Bernstein had been on the verge of getting fired before the Watergate break-in came along, and Woodward was relatively new, by way of Yale, the U.S. Navy, and a small Maryland paper. As nonpolitical reporters, they didn’t look for sources in the usual places. They talked to secretaries, office workers, and others political-reporter types disdained. They shared unconventional work methods with Hunter Thompson.
Their stories painted a picture of a corrupt White House full of con men and shysters, presided over by the Felon in Chief. When McCord’s letter to Judge Sirica became public, the Columbia University trustees looked over the recommendations for that year’s Pulitzer Prizes, which were days away from being awarded. The Washington Post was not on the list. Knowing that the Pulitzers would look ridiculous by not honoring the biggest political story of the year (if not the decade or the century), the trustees called Post editor Ben Bradlee and said, more or less, Which one do you want? After a moment’s thought, Bradlee said, Public service. The public-service Pulitzer wouldn’t go to Bernstein and Woodward; it would go to the newspaper. When the reporters heard about this, they showered and shaved and put on their best clothes and went to Bradlee to ask why. Boys, Bradlee said. No one will ever forget you. But this paper had its cock on the chopping block. The paper needs the award.
Hunter would have appreciated the appropriateness of the award. What better example of public service than getting rid of Richard Nixon? Hunter had regarded most journalists, especially those who trailed politicians around the country, as imbeciles. He seethed with contempt for almost any representative of the establishment press, and especially for the editors and publishers who kept the charade going. “There was no room in their complacent world for a man who despised mediocrity—who would let nothing stand in the way of the truth,” he wrote. “The great American press was a babbling joke—an empire built on gossip and clichés, a final resting place for rumor-mongers and pompous boobs.”
Woodward and Bernstein, two fringe characters in their own newsroom, built the story through simple hard work. Hunter admired that.
The Watergate story grew more complex every day, and Hunter watched, fascinated, glued to his television. As the parade of president’s men marched before the Senate Select Committee on Watergate, Hunter felt his political stomach rumbling. The televised hearings were more interesting than all of the Super Bowls combined.
Soon he decided to end his Woody Creek exile and return to politics. “I’ve about decided to make the big move to the Washington Hilton and start fucking around with the Watergate story,” he wrote Frank Mankiewicz. “Watergate is about the only thing that interests me right now.” Mankiewicz ended up playing frequent host to Hunter when he wanted to do a Washington story. He preferred the company of friends to a hotel, and Mankiewicz always knew when Hunter was on the way. “He never called to ask if he could stay,” Mankiewicz said, “but his mail started arriving. When we started getting forwarded mail, we knew Hunter was on the way.”
Hunter didn’t need to go to Washington to write his first Watergate piece. It came from his soul and the odd mixture of joy and revulsion he felt watching the televised hearings. The first piece appeared under the Raoul Duke byline, though much of the scrambled article (“Memo from the Sports Desk & Rude Notes from a Decompression Chamber in Miami”) was attributed to the Hunter persona. It was a bear awakening from hibernation and finding that the president of the United States is packed in a deep barrel of shit. After blasting the dolts in the campaign press corps as lazy and ignorant bastards, he applauded the Bernstein-Woodward legwork that brought the Watergate story front and center. “I take a certain pride in knowing that I kicked Nixon before he went down,” he wrote.
The “Rude Notes” piece was almost entirely focused on building the Duke/Thompson persona. He wrote with fury of being left off the list of enemies maintained by the Nixon White House, one of the early disclosures of the Watergate hearings. Hunter certainly considered himself significant enough to make the list: “How can I show my face in the Jerome Bar, when word finally reaches Aspen that I wasn’t on it?” He had, after all, been the only accredited member of the campaign press corps to compare Nixon to Adolf Hitler in writing.
He also added to the Duke/Thompson legend by reporting that “Dr. Thompson” was being held in a decompression chamber, recovering from both the 1972 election and a scuba-diving incident. There was some truth to the scuba-diving accident—he’d been treated for a serious case of the bends in Miami during a Florida vacation. But the locked-in-the-chamber metaphor allowed him to explain his absence. The months he’d been silent seemed like years to his fans. He even prepared his readers for what he believed could turn into a massive failure. Speaking of himself in the third person as Dr. Thompson, he wrote, “Whether or not he will write anything coherent is a moot point, I think, because whatever he writes—if anything—will necessarily be long and out of date by the time it appears in print.”
The “Rude Notes” piece was mere treading water for Hunter, but for Wenner, it was gold. He could ignore Hunter’s resignation; the meal ticket was back, and the Duke/Thompson monster was aroused from its slumber by the spectacle in the Senate hearing room. No need to remove those names from the masthead.
By the time Hunter hit D.C. in mid-July, much of the key testimony was over. But his arrival was news. For the first time, he was face-to-face with huge celebrity. When he entered the hearing room, heads turned, his name was whispered. He often made noisy arrivals, but this was more than he had planned for. Reporters were asking for his autograph, the gutless hacks. It was great once again to be sniffing history being made, but it was alarming, even depressing, that he was drawing so much interest away from the grave constitutional proceedings. He retreated to the Capitol Hill Hotel’s bar and the homes of friends and watched the hearings on TV, convincing himself that the testimony was much more interesting on the box than in person. In “Fear and Loathing at the Watergate,” his first major Rolling Stone article since the campaign, he made no mention of his frightening new celebrity status and merely told readers, “There was not a hell of a lot of room for a Gonzo journalist to operate in that high-tuned atmosphere.” Though he had White House press credentials, he’d never found them of much use. He didn’t long to spend time among the clueless. “When you’re covering the White House with a head full of acid, they don’t know anything’s wrong,” he said. “They just think you’re a little bit nervous.”
Much of the reporting was done poolside at the Washington Hilton, with Sandy and Ralph and Anna Steadman for company. Wenner had flown the Steadmans first to San Francisco for meetings and then to Washington for the coverage. The editor wanted the Gonzo lightning to strike again. Though their time in the hearing room was brief, Hunter still behaved like the consummate journalist. “He was a tireless round-the-clock worker,” Ralph recalled. “No lead was too small to follow up, drunk or sober.”
But it wasn’t Hunter’s kind of story. He was not central to the drama, and there was no real struggle to get the story. The story took care of itself, and was unfolding through hours and hours of dry testimony. What he could offer to Rolling Stone readers was his view on the whole affair; when published in September 1973, “Fear and Loathing at the Watergate” was an extended variation on the theme of Richard Nixon as the dark underbelly of the American Dream. Hunter knew how to kick a man when he was down.
“He will go down with Grant and Harding as one of democracy’s classic mutations,” Hunter wrote, then offered as much feeling as he could muster for the evil man who had inspired some of his best writing: “I have to admit that I feel a touch of irrational sympathy for the bastard. Not as The President: a broken little bully who would sacrifice us all to save himself—if he still had the choice—but the same kind of sympathy I might feel, momentarily, for a vicious cheap-shot linebacker whose long career comes to a sudden end one Sunday afternoon when some rookie flanker shatters both his knees with a savage crackback block.”
Hunter was laying odds that Nixon would resign by Christmas.
He knew what his audience wanted—some of the Duke madness. He made much of his conversations with friends, his struggles with deadline, his use of psychedelic mushrooms and the beer du jour (Carlsberg, mentioned so often you smell brewery kickbacks), and fake editor’s notes, generous selections drawn directly from his notebooks, and even a fantasized conversation between presidential aides. It was what readers had been waiting for: Watergate getting the 10,000-word Gonzo treatment.
The social highlight of Hunter’s Washington visit was a first-anniversary reunion of the McGovern campaign staff, a dinner party at George and Eleanor McGovern’s house one year to the day after he had accepted the party’s nomination. There were 150 people there, some speeches, and much wine, and finally George and Eleanor bade everyone a sentimental goodbye at the door.
Then a self-selected group, including Hunter, Gary Hart (in from Denver, where he was planning his U.S. Senate campaign), pollster Pat Caddell, and actor/filmmaker Warren Beatty, spun off into Hunter’s rented Cadillac. With a politician’s careful memory, Hart recalled, “We started on complicated nightly rounds of Washington, and we closed down several bars. It was kind of a movable feast that night and a lot of alcohol was consumed, and I think—I can’t testify to it personally—some drugs were probably consumed as well. It was typical Hunter. Why we didn’t get stopped by the police, I don’t know.”
It is a mystery. As Caddell remembered the night, Hunter drove with a bottle of Wild Turkey braced between his thighs, barreling over medians and at one point running a patrol car off the road. “Hunter, that was a cop,” Caddell yelled. Hunter tossed the bottle from the window and cut a swath through suburbia and interstate construction before finally losing the cop. Caddell remembered looking over at Beatty, pale with fear.
Hart lived to become U.S. Senator from Colorado, and Beatty also survived to fulfill his destiny of making films. But for Hunter’s deft hand at the wheel, they could have all ended up as concrete toast on Interstate 95. Hunter’s precision driving skills were grafted to the Duke persona.
Though capable of monumental generosity in public, Wenner could be a pernicious penny-pincher with his writers, even legitimate stars. Hunter had always held himself to a high professional standard, at least up to that point in his career, and he wanted the same in all of his dealings. He especially wanted it from Wenner, since his editorial instincts were sharp and because he owned Rolling Stone, the best venue for Hunter’s writing.
Hunter could be a literary prick tease for Wenner. It could happen, he wrote his editor, I could write regularly for you again . . . but I need evidence of a regular pattern of professional behavior. Treating Hunter and other writers like serfs to a feudal lord was not the way to build trusting editorial relationships. Ralph Steadman felt himself screwed by Wenner as well, and he complained to Hunter, who passed on Ralph’s insight in a scolding rebuke to Wenner. “Ralph put his finger on it very nicely, I think, when he said: ‘Jann doesn’t seem to realize that every dime he screws somebody out of today might cost him a dollar tomorrow.’” Hunter didn’t want to worry whether he would be reimbursed for all of his legitimate expenses. “The haggling is getting pretty goddamn old,” Hunter wrote Wenner, “and the most depressing aspect of it all is that we never seem to make any progress.”
Two Watergate pieces done for Rolling Stone, Hunter spent the fall trying to get his Playboy article on the Cozumel fishing tournament whipped into shape. He realized that the style he had found and propagated was so distinct that it polarized his audience. Some loved it and, like junkies, wanted more of the Duke-and-Gonzo bad craziness. Others found it self-indulgent and left the room when Hunter’s byline showed up. Yes, he admitted to David Butler, his editor at Playboy, he had once been a more conventional and coherent writer. But for good or ill, what he was sending the magazine now, in bursts, was his style. The editors weren’t used to the stop-and-start multifax, insert here/insert there approach Rolling Stone had gotten used to.
Playboy invested a lot in the piece and even provided two secretaries to make transcripts of Hunter’s tapes of his fishing-boat yammering. He’d sent fifty pages to Butler, who’d responded that Hunter needed to rein himself in and try conventional storytelling.
“I’m pretty well hooked on my own style—for good or ill—and the chances of changing it now are pretty dim,” Hunter shot back. “A journalist into Gonzo is like a junkie or an egg-sucking dog; there is no known cure.”
He toiled on the fishing article and generally resided at the bottom of the emotional abyss. All was mundane at Woody Creek, and he sent off a short piece to a friend, calling it “Fear and Loathing in the Doldrums.” After a couple of high-octane years, the sudden absence of the itinerary had left a hole in his life that even “the imminent demise of Nixon” could not fill.
He had never really lusted after fame. Wanting to be a writer and wanting to be famous were two distinctly different ambitions, but now, at thirty-four, he found they were wound together, like one of the grapevines on his ranch.
People kept asking things from him. Every request for a dust-jacket blurb for a book set him off. He sweated over the things, spent much time and energy on them. He was beset by a mob, “a goddamn torrent of people who not only want to come out here and move into my house, but also into my head & my crotch.”
Where was the payoff for this bullshit? “I find myself getting ‘famous,’” he wrote his mother, “but no richer than I was before people starting recognizing & harassing me almost everywhere I go.”
The fame left him empty and angry, mostly. It also rendered him intransigent, nearly mute at Woody Creek. Sandy taught at the Community School, Juan was a great kid, living in a boys’ paradise at Owl Farm, but something was wrong with Dad.
Famous . . . but still poor, still writing letters to editors, accusing them of welshing on his expenses or his fees. When would it end? When would he ever be ahead?
By all accounts, Hunter had never done cocaine before 1973, but when Rolling Stone sent him a new edition of Freud’s Cocaine Papers to review, Hunter felt the need to try it. He’d avoided it before as a rich boy’s plaything and classified it as a “jive drug.” But after a few snorts, he discovered that he liked it. It amped up his energy. Always nocturnal, with the right number of perfectly timed snorts, he now could stay up for three days at a stretch.
When Hunter was writing, life hummed along smartly on Owl Farm. When he was blocked (that’s what he called them, Sandy said, his blocks), then life was hell.
“This is when the cocaine hit,” Sandy said. “There was a lot of it being consumed at the Jerome Bar. He would drink there until three or four o’clock in the morning. And he sometimes didn’t get up until six p.m. It was just getting later and later.”
Looking back, Douglas Brinkley could clearly see when productive-and-prolific Hunter stopped and cocaine-snorting Hunter took over. He went from twenty flawless pages a day to twenty flawless pages a month, if he was lucky. “I think his greatest frustration was when cocaine hit his life,” Brinkley said. “He no longer had the ability to produce as he had.”
Sandy continued her studies in alcohol, downing by her recollection a half bottle of bourbon a day or a bottle of wine and change. For the first time, she began to suspect that Hunter was unfaithful. While he was in Mexico for Playboy, she sorted through his mail. She never opened the personal stuff, but a bulky package caught her eye. She opened it and a tape fell out, along with a note from one of Hunter’s friends saying it might be best “if Sandy didn’t hear this.” Of course she played it. It was nothing dirty, no “smoking gun” in the parlance of the time, but Sandy could tell from the sound of intimate familiarity in a woman’s voice on the tape (saying something innocent and wholly expected, such as “Shall I get you some Wild Turkey?”) that she and Hunter were together. “I immediately knew,” Sandy said. She began to quietly question Hunter’s friends, looking for details, but most of them played dumb. She needed something incriminating. Her drinking grew in intensity, and when Hunter returned, he saw that she was reliant on booze for everyday living. He warned her to “get it together.” They remained at a marital stalemate for the next few years. The lost children in their marriage depressed Sandy, turning her to drink. Hunter was devastated too, but didn’t know how to communicate his despair to Sandy or show her how the deaths had gripped his heart. As an old-school southern gentleman, he didn’t think it was right for a man to show such vulnerability to a woman. He too began drinking more and began using drugs to dull pain, not to feed his imagination. And he did indulge in other women. He and Sandy had begun the marital drift.
By year’s end, Hunter got Wenner to fund an all-powers conference of Democratic Party heavyweights to discuss the nation at midpassage of the Watergate hearings. The idea was to plan for that joyous day when Richard Nixon would leave the White House by police escort.
The concept was inspired by political organizer Adam Walinsky, who visited Hunter early in the summer to talk about a Thompson-for-U.S.-Senate campaign, an idea Hunter dismissed when Gary Hart announced his intention. Still, Walinsky opened Hunter’s eyes to all of the political roadblocks, not just in the next few years, but looking decades out. Politicians were terrible at devising coherent philosophies. That was what Hunter wanted to do: get the best and the brightest minds of his generation, put them in a room and see what they could come up with.
In fact, Hunter thought the project could turn into a book. He’d gotten stalled on his cross-country flight novella, and after almost a year in a mental wilderness, he was excited about something again. The brain power in the room could throw out lots of ideas, and, once the tape of the meeting was transcribed by a battery of minimum wagers, a book manuscript would result. The book would jump-start real political reform in America. That was Hunter’s wish.
Wenner was just happy to see Hunter enthusiastic again. “I was serious about getting into national politics,” Hunter said. “I’d met a lot of people on the campaign. . . . I knew all the players. . . . I figured if we could get the best people in the party together we could begin to create a national political machine.”
Hunter began organizing the event, hoping to hell it would not turn into Thompson’s Folly. He got the political couple of the moment, Richard Goodwin and Doris Kearns, to commit to the conference. Goodwin was gold, a former speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, with Camelot credentials and years of respect as a Washington insider. Kearns was a historian and former White House Fellow for Lyndon Johnson, who’d gone to stay with him at his ranch after his presidency, ghostwriting Johnson’s memoir, The Vantage Point. The guts of the McGovern staff was coming too—Patrick Caddell, Rick Stearns, Sandy Berger. Some Kennedy people were coming as well, most notably David Burke, later CBS News president. There also was a place at the table for the founder of the feast, Jann Wenner.
Though he was looking to the possibilities of a hopeful political future, Hunter’s general outlook was grim—too grim, it turned out, for many readers of the New York Times. As the hot political reporting commodity of the moment, he was asked to contribute a New Year’s Day column for its op-ed page. It was the first official day on the job for the new op-ed page editor, Charlotte Curtis, and so she turned over almost a whole page of the best newspaper on Earth to a madman.
“Fear and Loathing in the Bunker” was a dour look at the world. Instead of exulting over President Nixon’s demise, Hunter came across as somewhat melancholy, as if he knew that when Nixon was gone, he truly would not have the evil man to kick around anymore. It was an odd piece for Hunter, more essay than article. The lack of a central event made his writing uncharacteristically tedious, though there were flashes of his unique sense of language. As he described former White House counsel John Dean’s testimony in the Watergate hearings, he set the scene: “Here was this crafty little ferret going down the pipe right in front of our eyes, and taking the President of the United States along with him.”
As the piece ran on . . . and on . . . it became apparent to readers that they had stepped into Bizarro World, with a violently out-of-control columnist. The page was filled with Hunter’s bile and rage and also with his sad resignation that all that was left to do was to sweep up after Richard Nixon, “the main villain of my political consciousness for as long as I can remember.”
In contrast, as he plotted the liberal think-tank conference—and ever since the days of his boyhood pranks, he realized the importance of careful planning—Hunter’s first concern was keeping the meeting top-secret and invitation-only. He selected Elko, Nevada, off Interstate 80 in the northern part of the state, a location so remote and so devoid of possibilities for fun that real work would have to be done.
Finally, he had a full plate again, going from famine to feast in a matter of weeks. He had to wait a few months for the conference to convene, but the planning energized him to get back to writing. He had never lost his passion for pro football and in the fall had even asked George McGovern to intervene on his behalf with his friend Joe Robbie, owner of the Miami Dolphins. Hunter wanted to do a Campaign Trail–style book about a season in the National Football League, but didn’t want to wade through the rows of press relations people to get the access he wanted. That idea never worked out, and Hunter ended up making pilgrimages to the Bay Area in fall 1973 to stalk the sidelines of the Oakland Raiders practice field with team owner Al Davis. Alas, the Raiders didn’t make the Super Bowl.
The Dolphins did. Too bad the Dolphins book didn’t happen, because Hunter could have followed the team week by week as it marched to the Super Bowl. The team that had scored a perfect season in 1972 and pounded the Washington Redskins in the Super Bowl kept its powerhouse going with a 12–2 record in 1973. The team faced the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl VIII on January 13, 1974, in Houston. Hunter the sportswriter was back in action.
Wenner thought, Hunter is back. The stay, however, would be brief.
He was a stone junkie for pro football. More than any other sport, it embodied his fascination with the visceral aspects of the American Dream. Wenner had brought in a new managing editor whose passion for sports was equal to Hunter’s. John Walsh came to Rolling Stone from Newsday, where he had been sports editor. At first, the office staff in San Francisco didn’t know what to make of him. That he was a legally blind albino was not the issue. That he was trying to professionalize the magazine stuck in the craw of some of the old-timers. He also blasted away at the male hierarchy on the staff and put a number of women in key editorial positions. Talented and well-educated women were already on the staff, but they were secretaries and coffee fetchers. Walsh promoted several women from stenographers to department heads during his tenure.
But to Wenner, one of Walsh’s major plusses was that he could speak Hunter Thompson’s language. When his star writer wanted to talk sports, Wenner was out of his depth. It took John Walsh to explain to Wenner the meaning of a baseball double play.
In October 1973, Wenner hosted a Monday night dinner party to coincide with the Buffalo Bills–Pittsburgh Steelers game and invited Walsh to his home to meet Hunter, who was visiting. “Jann accurately predicted that Hunter and I would bond over sports,” Walsh said. “It was Jann’s last accurate prediction.” Indeed, within a few minutes Hunter and Walsh had developed an elaborate way to bet on the game, a method that involved categorizing the players by race and odd-and-even-numbered uniforms. “Sports brings out his giddiness,” Walsh said of Hunter.
Walsh was Hunter’s hand-holder for “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl.” He was able to persuade the accounting department to pay for the cocaine Hunter had purchased to get members of the Oakland Raiders to open up during interviews. Although the actual game played a minor role in “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” it was one of the most cohesive pieces he had written since the campaign, now two years gone. He folded into the piece his comments on the nexus of drugs and professional sports (hence the cocaine), the relatively new phenomenon of the free agent in football, and the impending apocalypse described in one of his favorite pieces of writing, the Book of Revelation. He used flashbacks to the previous fall to salvage his sideline chats with Raiders owner Davis. Davis, he said, looked like a pimp, adding, “The fiendish intensity of his speech and mannerisms reminded me very strongly of another Oakland badass I’d spent some time with, several years earlier—ex-Hell’s Angels president Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger.” Hunter also used the occasion to bring in his fellow NFL junkie Richard Nixon, allowing him to tie most of the major touchstones in his oeuvre: Hell’s Angels, drugs, and politics. “God, Nixon and the National Football League,” Hunter wrote: “The three had long since become inseparable in my mind.”
Hunter presented the piece as a battle against deadline. The story began with his dawn sermon on the balcony of his Hyatt House room on Super Bowl morning. He needed to finish a fire-and-brimstone speech before the leech at the bottom of his spine crawled up to the base of his brain and sucked the life from him.
“Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl” was quick work by Hunter’s standards. When the secret Elko meeting convened, the magazine had already hit the stands and Hunter’s rabid fans were ready to declare him victorious over the leech.
In between the Super Bowl and Elko, on February 6, Hunter had one of the hottest tickets in the country, catching one of the Denver shows of Bob Dylan’s monstrously successful return to performing after an eight-year self-imposed exile. Although the press accounts were ecstatic and Jann Wenner and others heaped over-the-top praise on Dylan, the show left Hunter feeling uneasy. Dylan was the master of subtlety, but these shows were as loud as locomotives and as subtle as a railroad spike to the temple.
Almost immediately after the concert, Hunter left for Elko, arriving a full week before the distinguished guests. He reserved the rooms at the Stockmen’s Hotel under the name of the Studebaker Society. The reservations desk wondered whether Hunter and the other car enthusiasts objected to sharing the conference facilities with the players in the state bridge tournament. That will be fine, Hunter said. The card players would provide the perfect cover for his top-secret talks.
It was freezing, dead of winter, middle of nowhere, and when the sessions began, Hunter at first was perturbed with his invited guests for being too contentious. After all of his prep work, he turned the session over to Wenner and ran off the first evening with the babysitter brought along to care for Richard Goodwin’s son. By Hunter’s account, he ate acid and took the girl off to a truck stop fifty miles east, in a town called Wells. In the parts store there, he bought sixteen tire checkers—iron pipes used by truckers to test tire pressure—and when he got back to the meetings the next day (after enduring angry glares from Goodwin and Doris Kearns, who would marry Goodwin the next year), he passed the clubs around the room. “Okay, you bastards,” he told them, “If you want to argue, use these.”
What Hunter wanted was agreement; he wanted an agenda to be set. “He said he was going to beat us all if we didn’t start saying something,” Patrick Caddell said.
Hunter had brought together people from the 1968 Kennedy campaign and the 1972 McGovern campaign, and helped heal the wounds between the camps. Wenner was developing a greater interest in politics, seeing it as the rock ’n’ roll of the seventies. Soon, in fact, he would sign up Richard Goodwin as political editor of Rolling Stone and throw several hundred thousand dollars his way. But as he had earlier wanted to meet the Beatles, the alliance with Goodwin allowed Wenner to achieve his goal of meeting the Kennedys. (He would even sign on the former First Daughter, Caroline Kennedy, to cover Elvis Presley’s funeral in 1977.)
Hunter told the group that the country faced “a genuinely ominous power vacuum” that he hoped the great minds in the room could fill. “We kept trying to focus on what to do with the country and politics,” Caddell said, “but nobody knew what to do at that point. The hope was we would come up with a grandiose plan, a manifesto.”
The conference was most important for the healing it brought between the political camps, and all of the participants developed a fondness for one another. Goodwin and Kearns forgave Hunter his babysitter transgressions. All that being said, Elko left Hunter with an empty feeling.
“It’s hard to understand why we didn’t come out of there with a platform,” he reflected. “I didn’t follow up on it much. My role was to make it happen, and I did.”
The Elko book never happened, but Rolling Stone soon tried to transform itself into a major political player, and that’s where many of the Elko ideas eventually appeared.
As for a book, Wenner soon hatched a plan for Straight Arrow to publish a Hunter Thompson anthology, a collection not only of his Rolling Stone articles but also of those hard-to-find pieces he’d done for Scanlan’s Monthly and other publications, before the advent of Gonzo journalism. As long as an advance was involved, Hunter was game.
Though inconclusive politically, the Elko conference did energize Hunter a lot, as he continued to emerge from the campaign decompression chamber and look forward to the next presidential election, in 1976. Back in Aspen and snowbound, Hunter was approached by writer Craig Vetter about doing a Playboy Interview. Considering his rocky history with the magazine and his yet-to-be-completed assignment on the Mexican fishing tournament—nearly a year over deadline—the magazine’s editors figured he would turn it down. The Playboy interview was a sign of arrival in middle-brow America. Was it too bourgeois for Hunter? Hell no, as it turned out. He’d known Vetter for a year and liked him, and he also knew how this worked. There was no fee for being the subject, but the magazine did pay all expenses. It was a golden period for the magazine, “Those were fat days at Playboy,” Vetter said. The editors didn’t balk at Hunter’s suggestion that the interview be conducted in Cozumel. But the simple process of the interview turned into a nightmare for Vetter. Hunter brought Sandy and Juan and turned it into a family vacation. Every time Vetter mentioned the word “interview,” Hunter changed the subject or found something else to do. Days passed. Sandy and Juan flew to Florida to visit Sandy’s relatives. Hunter and Vetter went fishing (“I want to see blood in the water!” Hunter yelled at the guides). Frustrated, Vetter told Hunter he was giving up. They quarreled and broke one of the hotel’s glass tables, and Hunter jumped in his rented jeep and rode off into the night. He showed up at Vetter’s room at dawn, finally ready to talk.
The interview took most of the year—months, in a variety of locations—to complete, but when it was eventually published, it became a rare, authoritative biographical source. For the first time, readers could get a good look at Hunter Thompson (three striking and moody portraits by photographer Al Satterwhite) and learn the basic facts of his life. Vetter spent months on the project, and the interview did not appear until the November issue, but when he and Hunter left Cozumel that spring, Vetter felt that he had finally broken the back of the beast.
With impeachment looming and the specter of another presidential campaign on the horizon, Hunter went back on the road and, using the Richard Goodwin connection, was able to make a swing through the South with perennial presidential hopeful Senator Ted Kennedy. Kennedy had an overnight stop in Atlanta with the governor of Georgia, then was to make the Law Day speech on May 4, at the University of Georgia in nearby Athens.
Hunter passed up the governor’s invitation for an overnight guest room in the executive mansion, staying in a nearby hotel with an ample supply of booze. But he showed up for breakfast the next morning and after some hassles with the security guard who couldn’t believe the beer-toting and scruffy man at the gate was a guest of the governor, he was greeted at the back door by Jimmy Carter. Carter was well aware of Hunter; his sons were huge fans of the “Fear and Loathing” political coverage.
Carter had six more months to go in his term and was expected to return to his quiet life as a peanut farmer downstate in Plains. Hunter had no real interest in him, but appreciated his casual blue-jeans hospitality and his willingness to have him as an overnight guest, a privilege rarely offered to a journalist.
But Hunter was there for Kennedy, and they were all headed to Athens for a luncheon ceremony honoring a former secretary of state, Dean Rusk, at which both Kennedy and Carter would speak. Two hundred guests packed the college cafeteria, most angling for a chance to see a Kennedy up close and personal. But what happened that noon was something as close to a political revelation as Hunter would experience.
The event was the usual dull fare, and Hunter shifted through a lunch and a raft of speakers, making quick and surreptitious trips to the Secret Service vehicle outside the cafeteria doors, where he stocked his iced-tea glass from his bottle of Wild Turkey.
He paid little attention to the speeches, until Carter was ten minutes deep in his talk. He had started with the usual self-deprecating remarks expected from a lame-duck governor, but then the tone shifted. Carter’s audience—judges, lawyers, the haves in the have-and-have-not equation—was trapped, and he was going to give it to them.
“It was a king hell bastard of a speech,” Hunter remembered. He sat up when Carter mentioned that Bob Dylan (“a friend of mine,” Carter said, and indeed the singer had been a guest at the mansion after his recent Atlanta concert) was one of the guiding political philosophers in his life. He cited several Dylan songs, using “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” as an example that showed the inequities in modern society. The song told the true story of black maid Hattie Carroll and how the thoughtless act of a wealthy young white landowner cost her her life. As punishment, the young man drew a six-month sentence. That so little value was placed on this woman’s life angered Dylan, and Carter. He talked about the dirty politics and the rotten judicial system in Georgia, and how the nation, suffering from Watergate, reflected a horrifying decline in values.
Hunter rarely heard a politician speak such truths in public. He was used to people like Hubert Humphrey, “this shameful electrified corpse,” or the president, “Richard Milhous Nixon, who was criminally insane and also president of the United States.” Carter, he felt, showed the sort of political courage that Hunter had only read about, usually in stories about Thomas Jefferson or James Madison.
Afterward, he asked Carter for a copy of his speech. The governor showed him one page of legal-pad scratching. The event had been taped, however, and Hunter made a copy from the version recorded by the governor’s staff. For two years, he carried the tape and played it for anyone he could persuade to listen to a talk by the former governor of Georgia. Thirty years later, Hunter still had a cassette of Carter’s talk in the glove compartment of his Jeep Cherokee.
In the meantime, Hunter agreed to write about the last gasp of the Nixon presidency for Rolling Stone, and that required doing time with his mobile National Affairs Desk in Miami, near Nixon’s Key Biscayne compound, and in Washington. Richard Goodwin was setting up Rolling Stone’s Washington bureau, to aid Wenner’s quest to meet more movers and shakers in American politics. The first bureau was the guest quarters at Robert Kennedy’s home in McLean, Virginia. The Kennedy children were thrilled when Hunter showed up to talk over impeachment coverage with Goodwin, but not all members of the family were pleased to have an admitted drug abuser hanging around. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis knew Hunter’s reputation and called to check on her children, staying at the Kennedy estate with their cousins. Goodwin sensed it was time for a more businesslike address and found suitable quarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, next to the Executive Office Building.
Hunter could have easily written “Fear and Loathing in Washington” in his Woody Creek kitchen. He didn’t need the Washington hotel room (“the National Affairs Suite”) or even a cubicle in Goodwin’s new headquarters. He didn’t cover anything in the traditional journalistic sense and, speaking of traditional journalists, used a lot of his space to attack those who were attacking him, principally the Columbia Journalism Review, which had suggested that readers take anything with a Hunter Thompson byline with a tanker full of salt.
“I’m getting goddamn tired of being screeched at by waterheads,” he wrote, and the only hope for improvement in that publication would come, he said, when “the current editor dies of brain syphilis.”
His analysis of events as the nation headed down the chute to the resolution of its constitutional crisis was cogent and illuminating. The piece gave him another opportunity to shore up his image, with its drug and alcohol references, his denunciations of opponents (“unprincipled thugs”), his over-the-top ejaculations of surprise (“Mother of babbling God!”), his flights of fancy (an escape with Josef Stalin and a quote from Yail Bloor, his fictional creation), and his focus on himself and his tortured journey to print. In this piece, however, he wrote less about the struggle to get the story and more about what the story would be. It was an advance, a preview of upcoming impeachment attractions, and what he expected to happen by the end of the summer.
“It is definitely worth watching,” he wrote, “and perhaps even being a part of, because whatever kind of judgment and harsh reality finally emerges will be an historical landmark in the calendar of civilizations. . . . The trial of Richard Nixon, if it happens, will amount to a de facto trial of the American Dream.”
Wenner gave his meal ticket huge pages to fill with his text, and Hunter, still seething over his treatment by Wenner, charged a thousand dollars per printed page. Always in need of cash and feeling slighted, Hunter put aside trust and began to insist on all agreements in writing. “If I seem to be grinding down a bit hard in this area,” Hunter wrote Wenner, “I want to assure you that this is precisely what I mean to be doing, for good or ill, and not without giving adequate thought to the whole situation.” Wenner had offered to pay for a secretary to help Hunter, but he couldn’t imagine working with anyone except Sandy, so why not put her on the payroll? Still, the financial workings in the editor’s mind bothered Hunter. Wenner would pay for a secretary, but haggle over five hundred missing dollars in Hunter’s accounting of his story fees.
But Hunter couldn’t stay away from Washington, and he couldn’t stay away from Rolling Stone. Whether or not he was ever a journalist in the conventional sense, he always had the need—almost an addict’s need—to be where the news was happening.
Hunter could not keep pace with the events fast enough to make deadlines. People didn’t turn to Rolling Stone for real news anyway. Hunter’s fan base was such that his name as a cover line on any subject was a draw. Many of his fans, the stoners in the crowd, merely responded to the outrageousness in his writing. They liked the swearing, the drugs, the apocalypse around every corner. They would have read an essay on sheep farming if it had a Hunter S. Thompson byline. They just wanted to read what “the Good Doctor” had to say.
Hunter’s journalistic sense made him want to stay as topical as possible. In early August, at the moment he was preparing to file his next Rolling Stone dispatch on the impeachment summer, Nixon surprised everyone with his sudden resignation.
Immediately, Wenner told his managing editor that he wanted a special issue on Nixon. “I want Hunter to write the cover story.” Walsh knew it was foolish to think Hunter could produce something that fast. “Just do it,” Wenner spat. But Hunter could not be budged. He wrote about the resignation, but on his own time.
So the staff had to find Nixon-related quotes in all of Hunter’s past work, recruit some pieces from other staff writers, and raid the photo files. The special issue featured a deeply unflattering portrait of the fatigued president, with a David Felton cover line: “THE QUITTER.”
Hunter began pulling together his long analysis of the final days of the Nixon presidency for a later issue, but just as that was about to hit the presses, Hunter was cold-cocked again by President Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor. This time, he kept the rewritten section on the resignation and slapped several pages of a new beginning on the piece, foaming with fury over good-old-boyism at the highest level. Passionate and gloomy, “The Scum Also Rises” was the ultimate process story for Hunter. The blown deadlines were part of the story, as was how he learned of the pardon in an early morning phone call from his friend Dick Tuck. “Who votes for these treacherous scumbags!” Hunter screamed at Tuck. “You can’t even trust the dumb ones!”
Ford timed the announcement of the pardon for a Sunday morning, when heavy-hitter political reporters were out for an afternoon sail or involved in some family grope at a secluded retreat. Hunter worked the surprise attack on the press into his piece as well. He figured it was fitting that his nemesis was causing him so much trouble, even far removed from office. “I was brooding on this and cursing Nixon,” he wrote, “more out of habit than logic, for his eerie ability to make life difficult for me.”
He was still working on the Playboy interview and, with Craig Vetter’s assistance, was able to pull together a massive account of the impeachment, resignation, and pardon, and get it ready for readers’ hands within two weeks. When he wanted to, Hunter could meet deadlines.
Then came the letdown. It was a smaller version of what had happened after the campaign ended: his life had expanded to contain all of the impeachment . . . and now that was over. “I’ve got to get out of journalism,” Hunter told Vetter. “I’ve got to get out of politics. I’ve got to change.”
He would not have Nixon to kick around anymore, and he was going to miss him.
“After the Nixon campaign, his genius articles were no longer about politics,” Jann Wenner said. “Nixon was this great character. Nixon was the werewolf that came out at night on the White House lawn. That was a great character in Hunter’s whole arc.”
Hunter finally finished “The Great Shark Hunt” for Playboy, and it was set to run in the December issue, following the also long overdue Craig Vetter interview, which ran in November. The resignation caused Hunter and Vetter to reframe the nearly finished interview in order to revise his position on the Nixon presidency and put it in the proper tense. Hunter even helped Vetter write the introduction to the piece, which is why it reads like Hunter or someone trying to imitate Hunter. His desire to always find the right word impressed Vetter.
Vetter had used a description in his introduction of Hunter sitting on a seawall in Cozumel, reading a $1.25 newspaper that would have cost a more sober man 25 cents. As Vetter told writer Peter Whitmer, “Hunter saw that and said, ‘No. No . . . it is better if we make it 24 cents.’ That’s close-in craftsmanship, not something you could ever teach. Hunter, when he is on as a writer, line by line, letter by letter, is as good as you can get.”
The “Shark Hunt” piece was Hunter’s grandest epic in years. After he had spent three years in politcos’ back rooms, moving his vision outside was like going from a black-and-white tea-sipping drama to a Cinemascope cast-of-thousands spectacle.
Set up as a story about a fishing tournament, it was, of course, about Hunter Thompson being assigned to write about a fishing tournament. Much of the action has to do with beer, margaritas, drugs, and the inevitability of the blown deadline. His Celine-like companion Bloor (Solheim) speaks in apocalyptic language, just like Hunter Thompson. The cadence and the emphatic tone could make readers believe that Hunter had developed schizophrenia or found an imaginary playmate. Solheim insisted he was on the boat. The story was mostly about the struggle of being Hunter Thompson, of fighting over expenses, incompetence, and injustice, and his liberal references to his life and lifestyle (“Sandy” was used in the story without explanation) made it clear this was a members-only story for his built-in audience. For a man complaining about the agony of celebrity, he wasn’t doing anything to stop perpetuating his image as America’s premier outlaw journalist.
He also wasn’t doing any rewriting. He admitted that he hadn’t done a second draft of anything since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If readers lapped up whatever he wrote, no matter how many breakdowns and chronological shifts he threw their way, why try for polish? During the political coverage and in the Campaign Trail book, he had occasionally resorted to using his notes verbatim, and his disciples loved them, particularly when he threw in a mock editor’s note (“at this point, Dr. Thompson was confined to bed at the insistence of his physician . . .”). The device allowed him to get away with cutting corners. It also enhanced his literary mystique and permitted him to market Gonzo journalism as first-draft “free lunch, final wisdom, total coverage.” The style itself freed him from having to labor over multiple drafts.
Getting away with it. Though the Vegas book showed his capabilities when he did rewriting, Hunter saw that his readers would accept his work without sheen and polish. He also learned that they would show up to hear him speak, even when he had nothing to say.
Tom Wolfe had urged Hunter to get on the speaking circuit back in 1969. “Lecturing is easy, lucrative and a nice ego melon,” he wrote, “but I guess it is essentially a form of the worldwide Grand Jackoff.” Hunter took the latter part to heart. In the aftermath of his campaign coverage, universities were clamoring for Hunter as an on-campus speaker. It was easy and lucrative (Wolfe was right about that part), but calling what he did a “speech” was inaccurate.
Most of Hunter’s speaking engagements were question-and-answer sessions. He had no prepared text, no rant about the state of modern journalism or politics. He just walked onstage to thunderous applause and opened it to questions. For the acolytes in attendance, this was fine. But many people in the academic community had no idea what to ask. They showed up only because the campus paper said a famous writer was speaking.
The evenings Hunter spent on campus were chaotic. The young fans cheered when Hunter was asked about politics and called elected officials “communist buttfuckers.” They loved it when he said fuck or cocksucker, or when he took a gulp from his bottle of Wild Turkey. The true-believer fans asked him about Ibogaine or Oscar Acosta or other such minutiae of his work, and most of the others in the audience sat there baffled, as if they’d walked in on the middle of a lecture on quantum physics, so strange was the babble from the stage.
This is where the character of Hunter S. Thompson . . . or Duke . . . began to emerge as a notorious figure. Bill Dixon, the 1972 McGovern organizer in Wisconsin, had been the first person hired by the House Judiciary Committee for its impeachment proceedings, during the last days of Watergate. He had become great friends with Hunter, and they occasionally traveled together. Dixon was on the road with Hunter in the seventies and remembered seeing him go onstage in a campus auditorium and become the character.
“It was the first time I noticed Hunter Thompson dressed up as Hunter Thompson,” Dixon said. Something happened to his body as he stepped onstage and bathed in the applause. They were not happy gigs, Dixon recalled. Lost in the Thompson/Duke persona, Dixon said, is the fact that Hunter was at his core quite shy. He needed to be that other character in order to face the crowd and deal with his persona. On his own, he could not have easily spoken to the crowds.
“Hunter did it because he got twenty-five hundred or he got thirty-five hundred or he got four thousand, or whatever it was,” Dixon said. “I mean, he did it in the seventies because he needed the money.”
“I detested these fucking things,” Hunter said. “Since I felt I had nothing to say I refused to even pretend to make a speech. I would, however, answer any and all questions from the audience—preferably in the form of a pile of 3×5 cards submitted in advance.”
Sometimes, the drink was not just a prop. On October 22, 1974, just before he was due to travel overseas, he had a speaking engagement at Duke University. The student assistant who picked him up at the Raleigh-Durham airport greeted him with hashish and a bottle of Wild Turkey. Hunter indulged in both. When he showed up at the university auditorium, the audience had been kept waiting forty-five minutes. “I am very happy to be here at the alma matter of Richard Nixon,” Hunter said. Immediately, he opened up the floor to questions. He was asked whether he thought former governor Terry Sanford, who had run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, might make another run in 1976. Unaware that Sanford was then president of Duke, Hunter responded, “He was party to the stop-McGovern movement at the convention and he is a worthless pigfucker.”
That was it. The speakers committee sent a delegate—a small, blond girl—out to give Hunter the hook. As she escorted him from the stage, he took an ice-filled tumbler of Wild Turkey and threw it up against the velvet curtain, leaving a stain to remind Duke of his visit.
A few students followed him into the parking lot, where he stayed and talked quietly for about an hour. When the university later said it planned to withhold his speaking fee, he said he thought that the parking-lot talk satisfied the contractual agreement to “talk to Duke students.” He never got paid.
He did make news, though. The Associated Press ran a brief article on the wire about the Duke debacle, and several other schools canceled his speaking engagements.
In the aftermath of the Scanlan’s Monthly collapse, Hunter lumped the magazine’s attorney, Bob Arum, in with the crowd that “should be hung by their fucking heels & beaten with wire whips.” But four years later, Arum was the boxing promoter who persuaded Hunter to drop everything and head to Africa for the Ali-Foreman fight. Arum appealed to Hunter’s ego by noting the celebrities who had already obtained press credentials, including writers Norman Mailer and George Plimpton. Hunter’s eyebrows arched. Plimpton—now there was a man he admired. They had met several years before, during the Hell’s Angels era in San Francisco, but Hunter did not know him well. Perhaps the “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman would afford the opportunity. So Wenner sent Hunter and Ralph Steadman to Zaire to cover the event. It sounded like another can’t-miss assignment.
“Gonzo, Gonzo, Gonzo,” Ralph exhaled. “How long do you think we can keep doing this kind of Gonzo thing?”
Hunter pondered for a moment. Finally, he said, “I guess we can keep doing this kind of thing until one of us dies.” Between the lines: As long as they’ll pay us.
Ralph gave in. “OK, let’s do it again.”
They traveled separately, and Hunter shared the Frankfurt, Germany–Kinshasa, Zaire leg of his flight with Plimpton.
Hunter could be stingy with praise. He was fond of Tom Wolfe, once telling him that “with the possible and perhaps fading exception of Kesey, you’re about the only writer around that I figure I can learn from.” Though he still considered Wolfe too much of a crusty, outside-looking-in reporter to be a true role model, he liked reading his work.
But Plimpton was also a favorite, drawing rare compliments from Hunter. They shared an important characteristic: both were participants in their stories. Plimpton had been on the course to a traditional career as a Man of Letters and was the first editor in chief of the Paris Review in his expatriate days in the early 1950s. But unlike many others of the raised-pinkie tweed set, he liked sports. Working mostly for Sports Illustrated, Plimpton, the Harvard-educated stringbean, put himself into potentially terrifying athletic situations: boxing with heavyweight champ Archie Moore, pitching in a Major League Baseball game, duffing his way through eighteen holes on the PGA tour, and, most famously, leading a professional football team through a series of downs. Most of these stunts later became books, the best-known being Paper Lion, the story of his life as a last-string quarterback with the Detroit Lions during summer training camp.
Hunter liked Plimpton’s willingness to not stand aside as the detached observer, as Wolfe did. Although not directly influenced by Plimpton, Hunter could still be described as someone who had taken Plimpton’s idea and plugged it into a 220-volt outlet. That could be another working definition of Gonzo.
They sat next to each other on the long flight into Zaire, and finally began the friendship they’d been promising themselves for years. Plimpton was amused by Hunter’s love of gadgets—on that afternoon, a radio the size of a collie so powerful that it picked up news of a clothing sale in Spokane, Washington. Hunter charmed Plimpton with his comic account of the Duke University debacle, and kept him laughing all the way into Africa. The formation of the Thompson-Plimpton Mutual Admiration Society may have been the only positive thing to come from Hunter’s visit to Africa.
It was a failed assignment. First, the fight had been postponed, supposedly because George Foreman had been injured while training. Conspiracy theorists said that it was because the fix was in for Muhammad Ali and that he wasn’t ready for the fight, so Foreman’s camp came up with a ruse to buy time.
Whatever the reason, it meant that many of the journalists who showed up in September to cover the fight had six weeks to kill until the rescheduled fight at the end of October. Hunter’s friend from the Boston Globe, Bill Cardoso—coiner of “Gonzo”—was now with the short-lived New Times, and one of those left with nothing better to do than drink and smoke dope. When Hunter arrived, he immediately joined his friend in those pursuits. By the time Ralph got there, the situation was well out of control. The Intercontinental Hotel also lost Ralph’s room reservation, so he had to bunk with Hunter and had no buffer from the madness.
Since the gentlemen of the sporting press had descended on Zaire to cover a boxing match, most of them went about their business. Plimpton and Mailer, though in a separate stratosphere from the daily reporters, did their part by attending press conferences, watching sparring sessions, doing interviews. Plimpton said Hunter “scorned those single-minded reporters who talked shop and gossiped about what had happened that day in the two fighters’ camps.”
Hunter did none of that. He stayed high most of the time and amused himself. The gathering place for most of the press was the Intercontinental’s lobby, so he routinely had the front desk page him by the name of the Nazi war criminal Martin Bormann (and he even signed for room service as Bormann; it was one of his favorite games). He liked to see the looks on the hotel guests’ faces when the bellman strode through the lobby with the name of an evil Nazi on his call board.
Most of the sportswriters who stayed for the long gap between the originally scheduled bout and the actual fight were nearly crazy with drink by the time Ali and Foreman put on the gloves. Ralph witnessed Hunter scooping a handful of Nivea skin cream and shoving it into his mouth to ease his sore throat. “This filthy African humidity,” Hunter said. “Like sucking on a swamp.”
Hunter’s major concerns were staying high, avoiding arrest by the authorities, and buying elephant tusks. He assumed having these was illegal, so he pondered how he would sneak them home through his many customs stops.
As far as Plimpton could tell, Hunter had no interest in the fight, and though Ralph was busily doing sketches of the personalities—Foreman walking his dogs, Ali’s friend Bundini Brown jiving it up with fellow bar patrons—Hunter never even took notes.
When Ralph came back to the room to get Hunter the evening of the fight, he was horrified to discover that Hunter was in his bathrobe.
“What’s going on?” Ralph asked.
“Nothing, Ralph,” he said. “The tickets are gone.”
“What are you going to do?” Ralph asked, dumfounded.
“I’m going swimming,” he said.
Ralph was astonished and watched Hunter empty a pound-and-a-half bag of marijuana into the hotel pool before diving in and floating in the slick green residue.
“This is it, Ralph,” Hunter said. “Fuck the fight. If you think I came all this way to watch a couple of niggers beat the shit out of each other in a rainstorm, then you’ve got another thing coming.” Skipping the fight also gave him a good excuse not to write about it.
The next day, Plimpton dropped by Hunter’s room to see why his $200 press seat had been vacant during the fight, which Ali had won. Hunter told him about floating in the marijuana pool. The hotel was deserted, he said, except for a man who came to watch Hunter float for a long time. “Maybe he thought I was a corpse,” Hunter said. Plimpton asked whether the experience had a kick to it. “It’s not the best way to obtain a high,” he said, “but a very luxurious feeling nonetheless.”
Leaving Zaire provided more drama than the fight Hunter missed. In addition to sneaking out the tusks, he persuaded Ralph to fly with him back to the States. Because Ralph didn’t have the proper visa, they expected a snafu in New York. It worked. Hunter used Ralph to distract customs officials while he snuck the tusks into America in his athletic bag. For the rest of his life, the tusks hung above the fireplace at Owl Farm. After twenty-four hours in the no-man’s-land lounge at the airport, Ralph returned to England.
Even though Hunter missed the actual boxing match, the Ali-Foreman fight could have made a great Hunter Thompson article. As Plimpton said of Hunter’s work and tremendous fan base, “Thompson’s readers were not interested in the event at all—whether it was the Super Bowl, or politics or a championship fight in Zaire—but only in how the event affected their author. So, in fact, the only reporting Thompson had to do was about himself.” All of the problems and paranoia were good feed for a Gonzo story, Plimpton said. As Plimpton wrote in Shadow Box, “His Rolling Stone readership required very little of the event he was sent to cover, except, perhaps, that everything go wrong . . . to the degree that the original purpose of his assignment was finally submerged by personal misfortune and misadventure.”
Mailer grumbled that Hunter’s fans were too easily pleased and would accept anything from their man.
He was right. Hunter could have given his fans a story about a nightmare assignment in a horrible, uncomfortable city. He could have written about smuggling elephant tusks into Kennedy Airport or his intense paranoia about the Zairean officials and their attitudes about drug use. His fans would have accepted anything, and loved it.
But he gave them nothing.
For years, there had been talk of a film deal for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but whenever those talks turned serious, the Oscar Problem reared its hairy and unkempt head.
Although Acosta had signed off on book rights, film rights were another matter. Acosta had withheld consent, and the thought of being mired in lawsuits made most filmmakers run off like buckshot deer. “We can do it amicably—through lawyers—or hand to hand,” Acosta had written Hunter in 1973. Reexamining the book agreement, Acosta felt that he had been blackmailed. Wenner had published his book (Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo) with Straight Arrow, but Acosta said it died too quick a death because of poor promotion. Hunter wrote his mother that all of Acosta’s snorting and hollering had “managed to kill any chance of a film sale by his constant threats of a libel suit.”
Still, the threads of their friendship had managed to hold together. At the end of 1973, Acosta’s letters to Hunter had become desperate. He was backed against the wall, claiming he was living hand to mouth, cashing in food stamps, resorting to thievery. He still saw his association with Hunter as his one ticket out. “I still am looking to you as my only serious white connection for the big contract,” he wrote Hunter. What he needed, he said, was “seed money” from Hunter to get his life back on the right track.
Hunter was baffled. After all of the chaos Acosta had caused with the book and movie deals, why did he think Hunter—always cash poor—would have something to send his way? “What in the fuck would cause you to ask me for money—after all the insane bullshit you’ve put me through for the past two years?” Hunter shot back. Acosta saw himself as a man in a crown of thorns, but Hunter betrayed no sympathy. “Good luck with your grudge,” he said. “No doubt it’ll make you as many good friends in the future as it has in the past.”
In June 1974, with the country in its final Watergate agonies, Acosta had disappeared, apparently from a smuggling boat off the coast of Mazatlan, Mexico, other circumstances unknown.
Hunter didn’t learn of his disappearance until that fall, while he was in Zaire. Sandy had received a letter from Annie Acosta, worried about her brother, whom she had not heard from since April. She told Hunter there were rumors her brother had been shot on the smuggler’s boat, returning from Mexico. “I am desperate and seriously fear for his life,” she wrote. “Oscar always thought the world of you—hopefully it works both ways.” She thought a famous gringo writer might have some pull with the authorities, certainly more pull than a Chicano woman would have. Acosta’s son Marco had spoken to his father by telephone in June, just as he said he was about to board the boat for his trip back to the United States. Marco Acosta was fourteen. “I told him I hoped he knew what he was doing by going back on such a small boat,” Marco wrote. “He said he hoped I knew what I was doing with my life.”
For Hunter, who had embraced the doomed-to-die-young pose for himself, it was startling—even horrifying—that early death had come for his friend. Still, there was no body. Acosta was presumed dead, but there was no hard evidence. But Hunter couldn’t be naïvely hopeful, as Annie Acosta was. Acosta walked through a dangerous world, constantly on the edge, eating acid “with a relish that bordered on worship” and doing whatever it took to obtain the drugs he wanted to satisfy his needs.
Marco Acosta believed that he would see his father again. Over the years, there were rumored Acosta sightings in India and Mexico and a pretty solid story of him running drugs off the coast of Florida. But these tales never rose above the level of rumor.
Hunter had given up. His friend was dead.
Hunter returned home from Zaire to find that he had been turned into a cartoon character. Garry Trudeau had begun his comic strip, Doonesbury, while an undergraduate at Yale. Upon graduation, he took his lampoon of campus politics and lifestyles on a broader scale and turned Doonesbury into a syndicated comic strip with a conscience.
Hunter rarely saw the comics. His newspaper of choice was the New York Times, which had no funny pages. At first, he was unaware of the character of “Uncle Duke” that Trudeau introduced into the strip in December 1974: a balding, aviator-shade-wearing Rolling Stone writer who hallucinated that he was seeing bats.
For Hunter, it was a nightmare of celebrity coming true. The fame that suffocated him and made it impossible for him to do his work had been turned into fodder for the comics. Now, instead of people merely wanting to share joints and get autographs, he was actually heckled by people shouting his name . . . but it wasn’t his name . . . it was that other guy, that character:
“Duke! Duke! Duke!”
“It was a hot, nearly blazing day in Washington, and I was coming down the steps of the Supreme Court,” Hunter recalled. “I’d been inside the press section and then all of a sudden, I saw a crowd of people and I heard them saying, ‘Uncle Duke.’ I heard the words Duke . . . Uncle . . . It didn’t seem to make any sense. I looked around and I recognized people who were total strangers pointing at me and laughing. I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. I had gotten out of the habit of reading funnies when I started reading the Times. . . . I was sort of by myself up there on the stairs and I thought, ‘What the fuck madness is going on? Why am I being mocked by a gang of strangers and friends on the steps of the Supreme Court?’ Then I must have asked someone and they told me that Uncle Duke had appeared in the Post that morning.”
To Hunter, there was nothing funny about it. “When you’re a famous American writer, you don’t think of things like being in the comic strips,” he said. “Being a cartoon character in your own time is like having a second head.”
It started as a mere annoyance, but soon it became part of the burden of being Hunter S. Thompson. “The wild, crazy man . . . the drug addict . . . this is what people bought,” Sandy said. “This is what people wanted. This is not what Hunter wanted when he was younger. This is not who he wanted to become.”
Hunter told Ralph, “I’d feel real trapped in this life if I didn’t know I could commit suicide at any moment.” Ralph saw his friend and collaborator being engulfed by a character he created: “He became a prisoner of his own cult,” he said.