One Pot of coffeeMy reputation is getting to be real expensive.
—HST, on a cocktail napkin to Tom Corcoran, 1979
In Key West, “occupation” is a fluid thing. Consider Tom Corcoran’s résumé. In 1968, the U.S. Navy sent Corcoran, a young officer, to an eight-week training program in Key West. He didn’t like his quarters, so he rented an apartment in Old Town. “And I just kind of fell into the mode,” Corcoran said. “Nobody said, ‘You should get an apartment and buy a bicycle,’ but I did.” After the Navy, Corcoran and a pal made a cross-country road trip and circled back to Fort Lauderdale. At the end of their grueling first week working construction, Corcoran and his friend pondered how to spend their paychecks. Corcoran said, “I know where I want to drink this beer,” and they drove to Key West and had a drink at Captain Tony’s.
Corcoran never looked back. In the early years, it was sometimes tough to eke out a living in that expensive paradise. “Either you worked for Southern Bell or you sold tires at Sears,” he said. Corcoran did neither, instead pedaling tacos from a three-wheel bicycle. Tennessee Williams was a regular customer. “Tennessee had an entourage that looked like the Olympic swimming team,” he said. Corcoran also got to know writers Jim Harrison (Legends of the Fall) and Thomas McGuane (Ninety-two in the Shade), taco aficionados and dispensers of writing wisdom.
Corcoran’s college girlfriend and wife-to-be, Judy, moved down from Ohio and began bartending at Captain Tony’s. After a few bartending gigs of his own, Corcoran settled in as part of the brain trust running the bar at the Chart Room. Corcoran mixed drinks in the blender and mixed songs on the sound system that conveyed the bar’s funky atmosphere. “Within two years’ time, we made the Chart Room the institution in Key West,” he said.
At that bar Corcoran served new arrival Jimmy Buffett his complimentary first beer in town, thus beginning a long friendship and collaboration. “The beer was free,” Corcoran recalled. “That’s what Jimmy really liked.”
Buffett had been chased out of Nashville by music-business types who didn’t like his songs. He found his performing identity in Key West, and Corcoran was there at the start, offering more than free beer. “I fed him,” Corcoran said. With Judy and his baby son, Sebastian, Corcoran represented family stability. “Jimmy had no money. He came home with me for spaghetti one night, and he picked up my guitar and started strumming a song he was working on. A couple nights later, I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and started strumming the guitar, playing that song. I couldn’t remember Jimmy’s words, so I made up my own.” When he shared his lyrics with Buffett, the singer said, “Damn, Corcoran, you’ve got a song.” The result, “Cuban Crime of Passion,” was on Buffett’s White Sportcoat and a Pink Crustacean, the 1973 album that became the blueprint for the Parrothead lifestyle affected by Buffett’s soon-to-be legions of fans. He also collaborated on “Fins.” (“Fins to the left, fins to the right and you’re the only girl in town,” a rallying cry for male sharks descending on a bar.) Corcoran had scratched an opening scene on some notepaper, then stuck it in a duffel bag when he went sailing with Buffett. Buffett found the scrap and asked whether he could work with it. The result, recorded in 1979, brought Corcoran decades of royalties.
When Buffett starting making big money, he bought a home in Aspen. He had created a party-boy persona through his music and, much like Hunter, was pursued by fans who confused the man with the image. His new wife, Jane, liked Aspen and felt more comfortable there. Key West was many things, but it was not a good place to raise children—too many temptations: drugs, alcohol, and in-breeding.
Buffett met Hunter, they became friends, and he offered Hunter the keys to his bachelor-era apartment in Key West. He called Corcoran and asked him to look after Hunter during his first trip down. Corcoran knew it could be hazardous duty, but he was still in the young-writer-seeking-experience stage. He was eager to meet Hunter and learn from him.
Hunter was with Sandy when Corcoran and he met. When he came back as a single man, he and Corcoran became confidants and, eventually, collaborators.
Hunter fell in love with Key West. Owl Farm would always be home, but divorce lawyers were quarreling over its disposition. Key West became Hunter’s refuge from fame, the long and brutal divorce battle, and his inability to write. Tourists clogged the thin arteries of Key West, but the locals had patented the what-the-hell attitude, which made it a safe haven for writers. Since Ernest Hemingway’s arrival in 1928, the city crawled with literary he-man types. In the seventies, these included Harrison, McGuane, Philip Caputo, Shel Silverstein, and the ghost of Papa his own bad self. The air was thick with the macho bonhomie that intoxicated men and often repulsed women. As a live-and-let-live community, it was also welcoming for homosexuals, including writers Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. The locals, known as Conchs, gave everyone a wide berth.
Painter Russell Chatham befriended Hunter in his Key West years. “In those days, it was kind of a much smaller scene,” Chatham recalled. “Hunter was there, and he and Jim Harrison and I fished. That’s how we got to know Hunter. Of course, in those days, there was an awful lot of drinking and drugs involved. That colors the experience.”
Chatham’s huge canvases and lithographs were selling for thousands, and his patrons included an army of Hollywood hipsters led by Jack Nicholson. Chatham and Harrison were close (Chatham created the moody landscape on the cover of Legends of the Fall), and he had the sort of income and fame few painters attained. Along with fishing, cooking was a highlight of Chatham’s annual trips to Key West, and Harrison routinely spent whole days preparing meals. Hunter usually just observed. “Fucking Hunter couldn’t even make himself a cup of coffee,” Chatham snorted. “He liked to eat. In those days, even though he was doing drugs and drinking, he did a lot of exercise too.”
Monty Chitty escaped Aspen for a few months in the Keys each year, and he and Hunter went fly-fishing for bonefish and tarpon. Harrison had just spent four months in Hollywood, learning how to write screenplays. He had recently sold Legends of the Fall to Hollywood, thanks to Jack Nicholson. Harrison invited Chitty and Hunter to join him, McGuane, Chatham, and their friend Guy Valedene for dinner—a complicated Chinese meal that took Harrison three days to prepare. From the moment Chitty and Hunter arrived at Harrison’s place, Hunter was in the kitchen, asking Harrison and McGuane questions about scriptwriting and agents and the nuances of film storytelling.
“Notorious most his life for living hand to mouth, always searching mail for the next check, Hunter decides then and there that the real money is in Hollywood, writing scripts,” Chitty recalled. “This will be his financial salvation.”
By four in the morning, dinner deep into digestion, Harrison finally took Chitty aside and begged him to take Hunter home. His relentless questions were driving Harrison and McGuane insane.
As Chatham got to know Hunter, he observed how different he could be from his public image. He learned that Hunter took his work seriously, if not himself, and that he was extraordinarily well-read. “He was a much deeper, more serious person than the public I think even now suspects,” Chatham said. “I think anybody who knew him, who actually took the trouble to know him, knows that. But as far as the general public is concerned, I think their view is that he was some sort of loose cannon, did a lot of drinking, took a lot of drugs. That was true, but fundamentally, he was a very serious person.”
Key West formed a subculture unto itself. It was originally called Cayo Hueso (“island of bones”) when it was a Spanish city, because the first white settlers found it littered with bones from a battle or perhaps from a Calusa Indian burial ground. It was eventually anglicized into Key West, presumably because it is the westernmost island in the Florida Keys. Yet, for a brief period in its history, it had another name. When Commodore Matthew Perry sailed to the island and claimed it for the United States in 1822, he renamed it in honor of the secretary of the Navy: Thompson’s Island.
For a man with a Hemingway fixation, Key West was a great place to chase that dream. His borrowed home had a narrow stretch of beach and was just a couple of blocks from Hemingway’s estate on Whitehead Street. Just as Hemingway set the agenda for those who followed in his wake, Hunter was Alpha Dog for his generation of writers. His old friend Ralph Steadman said that Hunter’s time in Key West allowed him to indulge in the fantasy of “being Hemingway.”
His friend Tom Corcoran shared Hunter’s talent of putting the right combinations of people together for friendships to grow. In addition to Corcoran, Hunter hung out with his duplex-mate, Chris Robinson. Robinson and Buffett had been good friends, and when the singer had married in Aspen in 1976, Robinson made the trip and got to know Hunter on his home turf first. “Here comes this guy in a suit, with wing-tipped shoes, semi-bald and short hair, the straightest-looking guy in the world,” Robinson recalled. “And he was handing out acid to anyone who wanted some.” Another Florida friend at the wedding, Dan Mallard, said Hunter had not officially been invited, because he inspired fear among friends. No one knew what sort of widescreen epic prank he might plan. Even without an invitation he showed up, and in addition to providing the acid, he enlivened the reception by bringing a dog that had been sprayed by a skunk. “He kept the dog under the table,” Mallard said. “No one saw the dog, but they sure as hell smelled him.”
Hunter and Robinson had prime real estate on the tiny two-by-four island. “We lived right next door to Louie’s Backyard, a real-fine four-star restaurant,” Robinson said. “Their exhaust fan used to come up right next to the upstairs window of Buffett’s place, and I guess the kitchen burned something one time and all of this smell was coming over and so Hunter had this tape of all these S&M sounds . . . erotic orgasm sounds. And Jimmy had these big speakers—100-and-some amp JBL speakers. And Hunter put on the tape and cranked that thing up and aimed the speakers over at the restaurant: ‘Oh! Oh! Oooh! Oh my God! Jesus!’ We were just howling, and all those poor people next door were trying to dine.”
Day-to-day life as Hunter’s housemate wasn’t challenging. He was not the outrageous character that Garry Trudeau portrayed. “Hunter would rant and rave up there, but I learned not to try to out-Gonzo Mr. Gonzo,” Robinson said. “He would get up in the morning—well, not the morning—he’d get up in the afternoon and watch all of the different stations and read all the newspapers. Then we’d go down to the water and sit there and smoke a doobie together and have a nice conversation. The only time Hunter would get bizarre is when someone would try to out-bizarre him.”
Like many Conchs, Robinson held a variety of jobs, eventually becoming a successful fishing guide. Also like many Conchs, he spent time in the drug trade. After getting pinched by the Coast Guard for smuggling a small amount of marijuana (“They did drop the charges,” he pointed out), Robinson amused himself in a local woodshop trying to figure out some way to keep Coast Guard wives happy while their husbands were out busting dealers. He studied how the woodshop’s antique jigsaw worked. It had a steady up-and-down motion that reminded Robinson of vigorous, pile-driving intercourse. With the jigsaw as inspiration, he used scrap parts from bicycles and lamps and constructed something about the size of a clothes dryer, and attached an old metal tractor seat covered in heavy vinyl. He then affixed a latex appendage rising from the center, a dildo with settings for two-, four-, and six-inch strokes. As a decoration on the front of the machine, Robinson carved a mahogany mushroom-shaped penis head. “It kind of looked like that thing in Clockwork Orange,” Robinson recalled. “It was kind of a sculpture. I called it ‘fucktional art.’ ”
The machine was operated with a handle that allowed the rider to control the speed of the insertion of the dildo. “It came up on a ten-speed sprocket and man, that worked better than we could,” Robinson said.
Hunter wasn’t known for doing much with his hands other than writing and shooting guns. He was fascinated by Robinson’s craftsmanship and admired the assembled apparatus in the woodshop. A few nights later, he came downstairs and pounded on Robinson’s door. “Chris! Chris!” he yelled. “I’ve got this woman upstairs and she’s asleep in the bedroom. I want her to find your machine in the living room when she wakes up.”
Hunter and Robinson carried the machine from the woodshop and up the narrow covered stairway to Hunter’s apartment. When the woman awoke, the presence of the fucking machine achieved its intended effect. It became Hunter’s new favorite toy, and he kept it in his apartment for months, inviting over friends in the evenings to watch young women ride it.
“The two-inch stroke was the better stroke,” Robinson remembered. “You had good penetration and although it was a shorter stroke, you could put the seat down so it went up farther. It just had enough play in it and had enough noise that the rhythm of the sound got them excited. It was kind of like a freight train: ‘Choo Choo!’ We had girls breaking into the house to ride this thing.”
Hunter was not always a randy bachelor when he visited Key West. Although he was still suffering the agonies of divorcing Sandy, Key West was where he began one of the most important relationships in his life.
Laila Nabulsi was a beautiful young woman working on the hottest show on television, Saturday Night Live. From its debut on October 11, 1975, SNL had defined the weekend for young Americans. It was the epitome of appointment television; people went out of their way to watch the show. Part of the attraction was its cast of Not Ready for Prime Time Players, including Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, and the unpredictable John Belushi. The show quickly earned a place in public consciousness, lobbing catch phrases into popular culture almost weekly.
Laila was a segment producer and a good friend of Belushi and his wife, Judy Jacklin. She often got drafted into Belushi projects, including the skit that he and Aykroyd had created, the Blues Brothers. There were a lot of continuing skits on SNL, from the cheeseburger-cheeseburger diner to the killer bees and the samurai desk clerk. The Blues Brothers had also been conceived as a one-off skit, but when Aykroyd and Belushi announced they were taking the act on the road during the TV show’s hiatus, Laila became road manager. It wasn’t a vanity project for hotshot TV stars. Guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Duck Dunn, two of the greatest musicians in rock ’n’ roll history, signed on to be sidemen.
Laila was friendly enough with Belushi that he felt comfortable enough to ask her for favors. One Saturday night in 1977, a couple of years into the show’s run, he called to ask her to drop by his apartment and pick up a jacket from his front closet. When she brought it by his dressing room, it was the usual crazed preshow scene. “There was this guy lying on the couch,” Laila recalled. “I had no idea who he was. I just remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh.’ I had this feeling as if a bomb had dropped. I kind of knew from the second I saw him that I would either love him or hate him.”
Belushi and Aykroyd had made a cross-country road trip the summer before and invited themselves to Owl Farm. They’d befriended Hunter and even talked of making a film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Aykroyd as Raoul Duke and Belushi as Dr. Gonzo. Nothing came of it, but a friendship began. Hunter once said that Belushi was “more fun in 20 minutes than most people are in 20 years.” Now, a year later, Hunter had come to watch a taping of the show. But after meeting Laila, he decided to linger backstage.
“I knew right away that he was the most original person I had ever met,” Laila said. “Plus, he had quite a physical presence—tall, very good-looking. He was hysterically funny, but it took me a moment to get his humor. In that first hour that I hung out with him, I remember that he went into the small bathroom in John’s dressing room. When he came out I asked if he was okay. I’m not sure why. He said, ‘I was weeping,’ and I thought he was serious. I really wondered why he would cry and I was intrigued, to say the least. I finally ‘got’ his sense of humor during the first night I was in his hotel room at the Gramercy Park Hotel. I was sitting in the bedroom and we were talking, and then he would abruptly go into the living room of the suite and start making these awful wailing noises. Then he would come back into the bedroom and continue talking normally. This terrified me—I thought he was really crazy, and sat there trying to appear calm and figure a way out of the hotel room. He did this again, and by the third time he did it I was so scared I yelled, ‘Stop that!’ He came back into the bedroom, chuckling, and said, ‘I’m just looking for my lighter.’ I got the whole thing in that moment.”
Belushi was also from the broken-mold school of humanity and was one of Laila’s close friends, but knowing him and his eccentricities still did not prepare her for the Hunter Thompson Experience. “I had never met anyone who looked like that or acted like that,” she said. “He would answer the phone screaming, ‘What?’ I had never met anyone who did things like that. He was such a wordsmith, and he had a lot of fun with words.”
Hunter and Laila spent most of two weeks at Hunter’s hotel, the Gramercy Park, and once when she heard him speaking on the phone, there was something in his voice that puzzled her. When he hung up, Laila asked who he’d been talking to. “My wife,” he said.
Laila was horrified. She hadn’t known who Hunter was when they met, much less known anything about his private life. There had been no mention of a wife for the two weeks they were together, and he certainly didn’t act like a married man.
“That was the end of it,” Laila said.
A year later, one of her Saturday Night Live friends invited her to a party. As she stood in the lobby of the building waiting for an elevator, the door opened and Hunter Thompson fell out. Later, alone together in a bar, he told her that he was in the middle of a divorce. And not long after that, they were at Buffett’s place in Key West.
“We were very happy in Key West,” Laila remembered. “That’s when Hunter and I really started.”
Hunter filed for divorce on February 9, 1979.
Laila was his compass, but Hunter could not avoid the complications of a divorce. Sandy wanted to sell Owl Farm and split the profits. Hunter was aghast; he was Owl Farm. To argue in court that it was a part of his being, he even used Doonesbury strips as examples: Uncle Duke was portrayed at Owl Farm. How could she separate him from his womb? Hunter was still making payments on the farm to neighbor George Stranahan, and the place had a $450,000 market value. Hunter felt entitled to keep it.
They also squabbled over his gun collection, Sandy’s lawyers suggesting that it be sold and that she get half the profits. He had a lot of electronic equipment and other personal effects. Sandy wanted to sell everything. Hunter wanted his life to go on as it had, just without Sandy. In the middle was Juan, then fifteen. He lived with his mother, and though his father had been a phantom presence in his early life (Juan was awake and silent when Hunter was asleep, and Juan slept while Hunter worked), they were nonetheless close; Hunter loved his son, and Juan fiercely admired his father.
Sandy felt a rightful claim to a good portion of Hunter’s assets. She had been functioning as his editorial assistant/typist/research assistant/caretaker for nearly twenty years. Hunter’s income for the last full year of their marriage (1978) was over $100,000, but that was inflated by his movie-contract windfall. He lived mostly hand-to-mouth. Even when he was at his peak of fame in the early and mid seventies, he was constantly badgering editors to be paid for stories and reimbursed for expenses. Since the end of his Watergate coverage, however, he had written only five major articles, including the Acosta eulogy, the two-page dispatch from Saigon, the Jimmy Carter article, “The Great Shark Hunt” for Playboy, and a two-part profile of Muhammad Ali that ran in Rolling Stone in 1978. It had taken something special to get him back in the magazines. Despite all of the horrors he’d had in dealing with Rolling Stone, he accepted Wenner’s assignment to write about Muhammad Ali. The resulting two-part “Last Tango in Vegas,” allowed Hunter to deemphasize his Duke persona. He had to. Next to a larger-than-life figure such as Ali, all other personalities were subservient. Hunter’s ego obtruded, but did not dominate the article, which was a meditation on the nature of supercelebrity and the moat Ali erected around himself. Hunter had spent no face time with Ali in Zaire. In the “Last Tango” articles, he crossed the moat and even did the unthinkable in front of the Champ, smoking and drinking. Ali was amused by the court jester, and the result was one of the most memorable profiles ever written about Ali.
“Last Tango in Vegas” appeared in late spring 1978, and Hunter shoehorned the Ali pieces in at the end of the substantial collection he was preparing for publication. Jim Silberman had left Random House for Simon and Schuster and had his own imprint there, Summit Books. The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter’s long-delayed anthology, finally appeared in early 1979. Hunter felt he was at last on the crest of a cash wave with his new hernia-inducing book (more than six hundred pages).
The Great Shark Hunt drew a lot of attention and sold rapidly to his built-in audience: all of those fans who had been waiting for something new from Hunter for most of the seventies. Finally, there was a book, though much of it was old. Many of the pieces came from his National Observer days, and others were drawn from Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the Campaign Trail book. A few uncollected dispatches—the Kentucky Derby article, the Jean-Claude Killy piece, the Acosta eulogy, and the Ali profile—made the book essential for fans.
The book had apparently been edited by a shovel. It was difficult to figure out the organization, though the seminal Gonzo pieces were in the first section and most of the Observer dispatches were in the third section. However, some of his best Observer pieces, including his hitchhiking story, were not collected. The fourth section was a mishmash, and the second section appeared to have a political theme. He also threw in a couple of press releases from his Air Force days.
David Felton, his former editor at Rolling Stone, called it “probably the worst-edited and most self-indulgent work since the Bible. There doesn’t seem to be any order.” The early writing, Felton said, was “flat and uninspired.” Hunter, who said he used Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself as his blueprint, didn’t seem to mind the criticism; in fact, he appeared to agree with it. “I thought it would be pretty fun to see the development from the Air Force to the Ali piece. It seems like I’ve been writing the same thing, really, since I was eighteen years old. . . . I’ll stand by this,” he shrugged. “It’s messy. It’s fucked up.”
Still, Shark Hunt drew several strong reviews, with most critics taking the chance to assess the first twenty years of Hunter’s published writing. The New Republic compared him to Mencken and admired him for writing about moving targets. The Nation suggested that Hunter’s view of modern America was truer than that of more conventional journalists. And conservative William F. Buckley said Hunter elicited “the same admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria’s funeral.”
The Great Shark Hunt meant money, and Hunter needed it desperately. His paychecks were few and far between, and when Sandy’s lawyers asked for their share of the Shark Hunt advance, Hunter’s attorneys said the money had already been spent. He began a sabbatical from publishing, figuring that anything he wrote while still married would be considered joint property, to half of which Sandy would be entitled.
There was always money from speaking engagements. Hunter was absent in print, but ubiquitous on campus stages, despite the skirmishes he sometimes had there. He drew unusual fans. Many in the audience hung on every word, but had never read one of his books. He was admired for his presumed lifestyle, for the way it was exaggerated and portrayed in his own work and in the Doonesbury comic strip. A lot of people might say, “Hunter Thompson is my favorite writer,” without having read any of his writing.
He became the preferred Halloween costume of college sophomores. The character of Hunter Thompson had superseded the man and the writer. Hunter was not unaware of this. In the introduction to The Great Shark Hunt, he confessed to standing at a crossroads, pondering whether to make a swan dive into the fountain outside the window of his publishers’ office, where he was writing his author’s note:
I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live—(13 years longer, in fact)—and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different thing, a gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning.
So if I decide to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear—I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don’t I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending.
He was at the continental divide of his life. Suicide was all around. In place of an author photo on the back, there was a Ralph Steadman illustration of Hunter with a gun to his head. The introduction was a suicide note for the First Him, the one who had failed to chronicle the death of the American Dream, the one who had been so suffocated by his own celebrity that he could no longer do his work, the one who was seen as a pied piper for drugs and debauchery. He wanted to get rid of that Him.
So it was no surprise that he found his release on the island that once bore his name. He could spend time in Key West, among his new friends, and not have to perform or become the Beast for audiences who demanded it. In Key West, he and Laila could stroll the streets unmolested. He could drink at the Full Moon. With friends like Chris Robinson and Tom Corcoran, he could do what he could not do when he was on display as Hunter Thompson: he could relax.
Corcoran and his wife, Judy, were both expert at cobbling together livelihoods from of a variety of functions and income sources. Both had been in the Jimmy Buffett orbit and had no trouble circling Planet Hunter. He used his immense charm to lure Judy into working as his de facto secretary, even though she had a job at a rental company. Though he wasn’t on a magazine deadline, it was still a lot of work to be him, and he made lists for Judy in the way that he used to plot out Sandy’s duties: “Judy: Miami Herald, bank, Visa, booze, screwdriver.” On another day: “Beer, Kaopectate, garbage bags, eggs, milk, lighter fluid, Kleenex, toilet paper. Yell at me. Say we have to go.” Tom was often doing a number of jobs, and that meant that sometimes they needed someone to look after Sebastian, their ten-year-old.
Enter Uncle Hunter. When it was time for Tom to head off for his job du jour and Judy wasn’t home from the office, Hunter often pulled up in the Corcoran’s postage-stamp yard in his rented cream-colored Buick. Hunter’s new toy was a bullhorn. “Sebastian!” he would announce, feedback echoing down the quiet streets. “I have arrived! Turn on the network news!” The Corcorans had no problem with Hunter watching Sebastian at either their house or his place on Waddell, once the sex machine was removed. On one occasion, Tom asked Hunter to put away a pistol, and Hunter was embarrassed about his oversight. Being around Sebastian reminded him of his own son and his shredded marriage.
“Hunter was always ‘Doc’ to the kids,” Corcoran said. “Sebastian felt that Hunter was a guide of sorts, the voice of some kind of weird rationale to have a good life.”
Chris Robinson remembered the fun Hunter had with his bullhorn. From the small beach on the property, it was hard to look up into Hunter’s apartment because sea grape trees obscured the view. Occasionally, trespassers waded through the shallows and used the private beach. “So this family came over and they were just making noise and they had their kids and their Kentucky Fried Chicken and they were just all talking,” Robinson recalled. “So Hunter gets on the bullhorn, and it sounded like such authority: ‘Get off the beach or I’ll cut your fucking throats!’ And those people were looking around, wondering what’s going on. And then a little while later, out of the trees: ‘Get off the beach or I’ll cut your fucking throats!’ After about three times, they left. He just loved that megaphone because of the sound of authority.”
Laila was close to Hunter for more than twenty-five years and said he might have been at his happiest when he was on the island. “We had lots of quiet times,” she said. “Hunter wasn’t always performing. We’d listen to music and just be with each other.”
Still, being Hunter meant occasionally being noisy. He drove his Buick convertible through Key West’s quiet streets well above the speed limit. “He didn’t care if people were crossing the street,” Chris Robinson said. “He’d be clenching that cigarette holder and he’d be screaming, ‘Get out of the way, you bastards!’ You know how slow it is in Key West and everyone’s just slowly crossing the street and he’s just plowing down the street when he was going somewhere.”
Good news and more money arrived from Hollywood during one of his Key West visits. Art Linson came through with a check for the film version of Hunter’s eulogy for Oscar Zeta Acosta, now to become a movie called Where the Buffalo Roam. In addition to the money Hunter earned for selling the “Brown Buffalo” article to the movies, he also got a $25,000 fee as a consultant, which meant that he had to judge whether what was onscreen resembled the real man. Desperate for money in his ongoing divorce war, Hunter didn’t seem to care much about the movie, as long as he got paid.
Linson was a successful producer. By 1980, he had made only a few films, most notably the ensemble comedy Car Wash and American Hot Wax, the biography of rock ’n’ roll disk jockey Alan Freed. He went on to produce Melvin and Howard, Singles, Fight Club, and other highly regarded films, but Where the Buffalo Roam was his only start-to-finish effort as director.
John Kaye’s screenplay telescoped several events in Hunter’s life into a short period, with his relationship with the “Oscar” character as the narrative tissue. Character actor Peter Boyle was cast as Oscar Zeta Acosta, infuriating the Chicano community, which wanted the role played by a Hispanic actor. To quell the anger, the character eventually was changed to Lazslo, a Bulgarian. Boyle, who had thoroughly prepared to play Acosta, was disappointed by the change of ethnicity and by the fact that Lazslo was written as a buffoon.
Actor Bill Murray was cast as Hunter. He was part of Hunter’s crowd, since he was in the Saturday Night Live cast and close friends with Laila. Preparing for the role, Murray lived with Hunter and Laila, and at times, she said, it was like standing between mirrors. Murray was such an expert mimic that he absorbed Hunter’s personality. For nearly a year after finishing the film, Murray still carried many of Hunter’s mannerisms.
But superb performances took the film only so far. The buffoonery went beyond Lazslo; the whole script was heavy-handed comedy. Despite Murray’s and Boyle’s efforts, the film was a cheap cartoon. The deep sensitivity and hurt that Hunter had shown in his epitaph for Acosta was lost in the film version, bogged down in leaden comedy.
Even Garry Trudeau, who had used Hunter’s image in his work, was alarmed when someone sent him a draft of the script. Although he didn’t know Hunter and they had exchanged only a brief note, he sent him a reprimand: “I don’t know how much they paid you to authorize that piece of shit, but it wasn’t enough. If you must have your reputation trashed, at least have the integrity to do it yourself.” Hunter quickly responded to his nemesis: “What lame instinct prompts you to suddenly begin commenting on my material? You’ve done pretty well by skimming it the last five years. So keep your pompous whining to yourself and don’t complain. You’ll get yours.” Years later, Hunter was able to show his feelings for Trudeau when late-night television host Conan O’Brien allowed him to machine-gun poster-sized photos of the cartoonist on his program. Hunter responded with relish and obliterated Trudeau’s image.
Mocked in print by David Felton for allowing such a weak film to be made from his life, Hunter threw up his hands. “I don’t know why people are so concerned about my image,” he told Felton. “I’m an egomaniac. I should be the one concerned about my image. Why are you and Garry Trudeau so worried about this film hurting me. I’m not.”
Hunter received his check for the film while he was in Key West and began spending it as fast as he could, and having some fun as well, writing Corcoran a check for two million dollars with “cocaine” in the subject line.
Since he could not get Hunter to write for his magazine, Wenner tried to interest his star byline in doing something for the movies. Wenner was making a Rolling Stone film production deal. Hunter had written the voice-over narration for Where the Buffalo Roam, and the movies intrigued him. Escaping to screen writing allowed him to leave behind the Duke persona.
But Hunter had never written a screenplay. He’d digested what he’d learned from Harrison and McGuane and also latched on to Tom Corcoran, who was intent on writing for films. He had studied with the best: McGuane wrote and directed the film version of his Key West novel, Ninety-two in the Shade, and Paul Schrader, who’d written Taxi Driver and American Gigolo, had come to Key West to polish the Raging Bull screenplay and befriended Corcoran. Hunter realized his buddy Corcoran could help with the technical details, and he agreed to try to jump-start Wenner’s first venture into film.
Schrader gave Corcoran good advice, which he relayed to Hunter: “Writing the screenplay is easy. Writing the treatment is the way you sell it. Here’s how to do it. Don’t write any more than twenty-nine pages. When they [film producers] see thirty pages, they get scared.”
Hunter perked up. Twenty-nine pages was nothing. He and Corcoran decided to write about drug smuggling in the Keys, then a profitable, going concern. It was also the sort of film Rolling Stone might well produce. Corcoran and Monty Chitty, who was an expert fishing guide, took Hunter out on the flats, through the mangrove channels, showing him how to operate a boat like a smuggler, finding the sorts of places smugglers might use to bring in their dope and wait on the buyers. On the basis of the treatment, Wenner sold the concept to Paramount Pictures. Hunter and Corcoran called the screenplay Cigarette Key.
Hunter clipped smuggling stories from the Key West Citizen and pinned them on a huge bulletin board Chris Robinson made in his apartment. Hunter didn’t want to be dependent on Chitty and Corcoran, so Robinson also tried to teach him to drive a boat. With some of the Buffalo Roam money, Hunter bought a seventeen-foot Mako from guide Dink Bruce, whose father had been Hemingway’s fishing buddy. Robinson said Hunter knew only one speed: wide-open. Robinson advised him, “Hunter, just keep the wheel straight when the boat goes in the air.”
One night, after Hunter had been out on the reef doing marine research and eating psychedelic mushrooms, he tried to return to port when his boat got loose in Murray Marina. “It went airborne,” Robinson said. “He and [a woman] had been out there on the reef and it was a full moon and it’s really hard to get in at night in that marina. So you have to be kind of straight to get the boat into the marina at night. But Hunter was a professional, and he could do all kinds of things while on drugs. So he was backing up to the dock where he was going to leave the boat and [the woman] was on the back of the boat, and he just was backing up and then kind of hit it in forward to stop the boat, but gunned it too much and she fell in the water, the boat just took off. He went over backwards, the motor hit him on the back of the head, and he fell in the water and so this boat was in the marina, loose. I guess he gave it pretty good throttle as he fell backwards—he didn’t mean to do that—and the boat, the torque of the engine, will make it turn and go in a circle. So this thing jumped the fuel dock and came back around in a circle, and he’s yelling, ‘The bastard’s trying to get me!’ And he had to go down, under water. It ran around several times, knocked consoles off of other boats, just did a massive bunch of damage, and then it got stuck on the fuel dock going, “Whaaaaaaaangggg!” And he’s screaming at [the woman] to turn it off and she’s mad at him, because she thinks he did it on purpose and finally, after everything’s settled out, he got the boat, set it in there, set the center console on it like nothing happened—’cause nobody was at the marina, since it was midnight—and left. So when folks came by in the morning, they thought some burglar had gone crazy and vandalized the place—until they saw the bow of Hunter’s boat and saw all of the chunks out of it, where it had done all this damage. The marine patrol came over that day, and we had to wake him up. We had to get him up and convince him that it was very important that he talk to the marine patrol. He had to do some kind of community service, make some speeches or something.”
Hunter and Corcoran both hunched over the typewriter in Buffett’s apartment, finishing Cigarette Key. “We made up the characters and came up with a few opening scenes and all of that other stuff,” Corcoran recalled. “The smugglers [in the story] set up navigational lights in the mangroves that they could operate. They could run through the mangroves by activating these lights. When we started writing the script, his work habits were going down the tubes and his relationship with Laila was building, fast. He was head over heels in love with her and not caring at all about work. And so the work fell to me. I started writing and okaying things with him, and not okaying things with him.”
Wenner was excited to hear that the script from Hunter might be arriving via Mojo Wire. He stayed in the office until the wee hours, as the machine slowly belched out the pages. Corcoran took his family on vacation; when he returned, Hunter offered payment for his large part in producing the treatment. “Hunter had bought a Yamaha,” Corcoran said. “That was my pay for working on the script—a Sony television and a Yamaha 650.” He also got a shared story credit on the screenplay: “By Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Corcoran.” (In the end, Hunter delivered the much less powerful Yamaha 400 to Corcoran, who good-naturedly shrugged it off. He eventually noted the short-changing twenty years later in one of his novels.)
The film was never made because Paramount killed the deal. Hollywood was beginning to feel pressure to clean up its act in the early days of the Reagan era, and a movie centered on drug smugglers was a hard sell.
Feeling indebted to Corcoran, Hunter gave him the idea for another film, which he called The Mole. “What Hunter dreamed up was an idea about a mole in the CIA who doesn’t do anything until he gets to the very top, then he starts raising hell,” Corcoran said. “I read a bunch of John le Carré novels really fast, and I wrote a treatment on the thing.” Eventually, Corcoran was able to sell that idea to Hollywood, thanks to Tom McGuane, and when he called Hunter to tell him the news, he left a message saying, “The Mole had been sold.” Hunter called back and asked, “How did you know?” Turns out he had sold a version of the story himself, to the producers of Where the Buffalo Roam, who had no intention of filming it. They wanted to keep Hunter under control, and they said if he was a loose cannon on the film set, the deal for The Mole would be dropped. Corcoran lost his chance at his first big money as a writer. (He would go on to be a successful mystery writer, with a series of novels set in Key West.)
“He was too naïve in those days to see what they were pulling on him in Hollywood,” Corcoran said.
A mass exodus from Cuba began in April 1980 after a plunge in that nation’s economy. Over the course of a few months, ten thousand Cubans fled the island, many of them criminals let go by Fidel Castro. Many landed in Key West.
When the migration began, Tom Corcoran’s journalistic instincts kicked into high gear. “I hopped on my motorbike and rode up to Garrison Bight and got in touch with a buddy of mine who was a charter captain, and I asked if he had space on the boat and I asked if I could go along,” Corcoran said. He made arrangements to photograph the boatlift for Newsweek. “I went home and packed and got on the boat, and we were pulling away, and . . . I don’t know if I have a photograph of it, or just a photo in my mind: It’s my wife and son, who was ten at the time, and Hunter and Laila standing on the pier. We were about fifty yards off the pier at Garrison Bight, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s something wrong here. Hunter should be on the boat.’ I was going off to do something outlandish, to go off and cover this Cuban boatlift, and Hunter’s standing on the pier. At that point, I think he was so in love with Laila that he didn’t want to give up an hour.”
Though he still saw himself on his self-imposed sabbatical, Hunter’s instincts required him to be part of an event, or at least feel that he was part of it. He began drafting a novel called The Silk Road. He did not finish it then, but published three scenes from it a decade later in his Songs of the Doomed collection. Still, being so close to the biggest news event of the day and not being part of it ate at him. He needed to get back in the game.
As his divorce negotiation neared its end, Hunter was eager to resume work. When he returned to Woody Creek after the divorce, he saw that Owl Farm was a different place, without Sandy’s calming presence and Juan roaming around. It was Hunter’s home, not fully Laila’s, and so it became his warren, as jovially messy as a teenager’s clubhouse.
Paul Perry, editor of Running magazine, presented Hunter with an opportunity to return to the world of magazine writing, but not with the repeat-the-past baggage he would have at Rolling Stone. Perry threw Hunter the assignment to cover the 1980 Honolulu marathon. “Think about it,” Perry wrote. “This is a good chance for a vacation.” For months, Perry cajoled Hunter by sending him Nike running shoes and eventually flew to Aspen to lobby him. At Woody Creek, Laila had comfortably slipped into Sandy’s walking-on-eggshells role while Hunter slept, and she hosted Perry while he waited for Hunter’s decision on covering the marathon. Though other editors and members of the Running staff told him he was crazy, Perry persevered. “You have something to worry about,” Ralph Steadman told him. “Hunter has been known to fall through lately. He hasn’t published a story to speak of in about eight years.”
But Hunter was ready to reemerge and finally gave in to Perry’s pleas. The marathon was over the Christmas holidays. Hunter liked the idea of treating Laila to Hawaii at Christmas. “The winter was coming in Aspen,” she recalled. “There was no money. Hunter loved those out-of-the-blue assignments. That was the answer to our problems. The marathon was incidental. It was an excuse.” It was “sort of a scam,” she admitted. “Running magazine was going to foot the bill, and we were going to have this great time.” Hunter lured Steadman and his family from England. “The time has come to kick ass, Ralph,” Hunter wrote, “even if it means coming briefly out of retirement and dealing, once again, with the public.”
The trip turned out to be mostly a soggy nightmare, and the subject of the story did not amuse either man much. Running had become the new sport of the ritualistic liberal. Hunter and Ralph observed the crowded field of eight thousand runners and didn’t see many of their kind left. These were the humorless remnants of those they’d walked alongside two decades before. These people were different:
The same people who burned their draft cards in the Sixties and got lost in the Seventies are now into running. When politics failed and personal relationships proved unmanageable; after McGovern went down and Nixon exploded right in front of our eyes . . . after Ted Kennedy got Stassenized and Jimmy Carter put the fork to everybody who ever believed anything he said about anything at all, and after the nation turned en masse to the atavistic wisdom of Ronald Reagan.
Well, these are, after all, the Eighties and the time has finally come to see who has teeth, and who doesn’t. . . . Which may or may not account for the odd spectacle of two generations of political activists and social anarchists finally turning—twenty years later—into runners.
Hunter and Ralph planned to start the race, hop in a cab and ride to a friend’s house near the end of the course and join the race just in time to sprint to the finish, and win by cheating. But they discarded that plan and ended up heckling the runners who ran by as they sat on the flatbed of the radio press in front of the leaders, sipping their booze:
“You’re doomed, man, you’ll never make it.”
“Hey, fat boy, how about a beer?”
“Run, you silly bastard.”
After the race, Hunter and Ralph retreated to side-by-side cabins on the storm-ravaged big island of Hawaii to complete the project. “Hawaii was horrible,” Laila recalled. “Bad weather, waves washing onto the porch. . . .” And familiarity bred contempt. Ralph and his wife and young daughter had trouble living next door to Hunter’s love nest. Any semblance of a normal family life was lost. Steadman had also injured himself while diving and was in no mood for the usual tomfoolery.
Eventually, Ralph left Hunter in Hawaii and returned to England. They were able to weld together their chronicle of the race for Running (“Charge of the Weird Brigade,” April 1981), Hunter’s first work of original journalism in almost three years. It also was done in a little over two months, not bad, by Hunter standards. But Hunter and Perry had struggled over the manuscript. The copy editors had removed several fucks from Hunter’s story, and the staff objected to Hunter’s use of nigger. Perry allowed all of the fucks to be reinstated, but tried to persuade Hunter to remove the racist language.
“Why the fuck would I do that?” Hunter asked Perry. “I am a bigot. I’m what they called a ‘multibigot.’ . . . A unibigot is a racist. A multibigot is just a prick.”
The magazine’s readers were split when the piece appeared. Some threatened to cancel their subscriptions, though Perry doubted that any of them did. Some were also outraged that a notorious drug abuser was given space in a magazine devoted to the purity of running.
One of the most interested readers was Jann Wenner, who was “jealous beyond belief,” according to Laila, that Perry had gotten a coherent article out of Hunter. Other magazine editors began writing Perry, asking whether he would use his magic to get Hunter to write for them.
But the Running article wasn’t the end of the Hawaii experience. While the Weird Brigade idea was still gestating, Hunter got a letter from Alan Rinzler, the former head of Straight Arrow Books. Now at Bantam Books, Rinzler wanted Hunter to write something for him. An aborted book on Ronald Reagan in 1980 had died on the vine, but not until Hunter had run up a huge expense account in Washington. But Rinzler was a forgiving soul, and this time Hunter pitched a Bantam paperback drawn from the adventures with Ralph in Hawaii. This might be another chance to deal again with the American Dream. It didn’t matter to Hunter whether the covers were soft or hard. “We will skulk off the plane in Honolulu with the hopes & dreams of a whole generation in our hands,” he wrote Rinzler. “I am already entered in the Marathon & I plan to enter Ralph in the Pipeline Masters surfing competition . . . we will not win these weird events, but we didn’t win the Kentucky Derby either.”
With deadline met for Running, Hunter and Ralph set to work on fleshing out what they had done into a book-length manuscript. But it took two years before The Curse of Lono appeared. It was a curse. After a while, Hunter began to think of it as “a Ralph book” and resented everything about the project.
Hunter said he couldn’t write without Ralph’s drawings. A second trip to Hawaii . . . then a third. Hunter couldn’t get started. Ralph had to come to Colorado, making daily pilgrimages to Hunter’s cabin to pin his new drawings up on the wall, hoping to inspire Hunter to write. No luck. Hunter finagled an all-expenses-paid fact-finding trip to Washington for Ralph and himself, since he felt the work had developed themes about the American tradition of lies and deceit, and what better place to chase that thread of plot. After weeks and thousands of dollars, nothing came of it.
It’s not that Hunter was inert; he was partying at Woody Creek. John Belushi came to visit, and even he, with his monumental substance-abuse issues, couldn’t keep up with Hunter. He played tapes of punk bands for Hunter, further distracting him from writing. It got so serious that Bantam sent editor Ian Ballantine to Woody Creek four times, trying to coax the book from its author. Ballantine wore a suit to convey that he was all-business and promised to pack up and stop sending money if one grain of cocaine was displayed in his presence.
Despite all of this attention, the book was out of control. The marathon was long forgotten, to end up as a mere subplot. Now Hunter was into fishing and Hawaiian lore and the ancient Hawaiian god Lono.
As Hunter worked on the manuscript, he ranged over wider and wider terrain, and yet the book remained slim and insubstantial. He needed the companion his style demanded, and since Ralph had run back home and no Acosta was around, Hunter invented someone. (He kept Laila largely in the background, using her name only occasionally and now and then making reference to “my fiancée.”)
Hunter had introduced Gene Skinner as an apparently real character in “Dance of the Doomed,” his fall-of-Saigon article. Skinner was presented as a former agent for the Central Intelligence Agency working for Air America in the last days of the Vietnam War. In Lono, he showed up as a shady character on Oahu, a man whose name strikes fear whenever it is muttered. Skinner, clearly a fictional creation, also appears in the abandoned Silk Road novel.
Hunter admitted that Skinner was made up. He would be the new Thompson alter ego, but not nearly as nice as Duke and with a different attitude. Hunter described Skinner as “anti-humanist,” adding, “What I’m trying to do is to create a character to fit the times.” The Skinner character allowed Hunter to take his interior monologues outside. In The Curse of Lono, when Hunter arrives in Hawaii, he is met by Skinner at the airport. “I thought you quit this business,” Skinner says. “I did, but I got bored,” Hunter answers. It was like reading a writer’s diary.
Ralph kept sending illustrations and Hunter kept struggling to write, in Woody Creek and in Fairhope, Alabama. Tom Corcoran had retreated there from Key West, convinced that the island city was becoming too expensive and too dangerous a place to raise a child. Tom McGuane had left Key West and settled into homes in Montana and in Point Clear, Alabama. Hunter and Laila thought Fairhope sounded like a good locale to finally put the Lono manuscript to rest.
Hunter and Corcoran had a standing appointment for a late breakfast every day at Julwin’s Southern Country Barbecue Restaurant. Hunter spread out his new Lono fragments over the table and asked Corcoran to help organize what he had. Corcoran read the latest material, while Hunter consumed his standard breakfast:
One Pot of coffee
One Wild Turkey in a tumbler with only two ice cubes
Two bloody marys
Two large glasses of orange juice
Two Heinekens
Four pieces of toast
Four whole grapefruit
Six eggs
Eight sausage links
Hunter always said he liked the “highs” in his writing, the two or three paragraphs that had rhythm and music. The stuff in between just had to connect the highs. A sustained piece of writing was okay, but he preferred the occasional brilliance that was worth waiting for, something that really stood out.
The Curse of Lono was a bunch of scenes in need of connection, but Hunter couldn’t find the narrative tissue and required Laila and Tom Corcoran to help him assemble the book, which he had grown to dislike.
“I was outlining it for him,” Corcoran said of their spectacular working breakfasts. “He’d written most of these scenes, but they weren’t in any order.”
Hunter felt that Ralph’s part of Lono had been easier, which allowed him to finish his work well before Hunter. He also resented Ralph’s getting an equal byline on the book. With his apocalyptical, insane drawings, Ralph could lay claim to half of the genetic material of Gonzo, but around the time of Lono, Ralph began to feel that Hunter did not appreciate him professionally, while remaining his friend.
To give the book some needed heft, Laila helped Hunter find selections from Mark Twain and from Captain Cook’s journals that could be excerpted in Lono and, since they were works in the public domain, could be quoted for free. “I did a lot of research, like all the Mark Twain material,” Laila said, “and he took a lot of notes. Sometimes he’d write by hand, and then I’d type it up the next day. Sometimes he would be typing and stop and stare at it for a long time, trying to figure out a sentence just to get it absolutely right. He listened to music while he wrote. Music was fuel for him, and helped him get in the right mood to write.” Depending on his mood, the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan provided the perfect fuel.
Hunter and Laila returned to Owl Farm with a still unfinished manuscript. Eventually, Alan Rinzler came to Woody Creek to see whether he could rescue the overdue manuscript. “Hunter was just too tangential,” he said. “He was preoccupied with drugs, less so with writing.” Rinzler had worked closely with Hunter a decade before and was now appalled by his post-Sandy living conditions—the sloth, the stuffed critters on the wall, the “Hemingway stuff.” After three days of work, Hunter finally crashed and Rinzler made his move. “I waited for Hunter to fall asleep and I gathered up all the manuscript, including parts of it that were hand-written on shopping bags and napkins, and I put it all in a big shopping bag and I split. I left. I got on the plane and went back to New York and that was the way the book was published.” Nearly three years after Hunter and Ralph had set off for the Honolulu marathon, the book appeared, in November 1983.
The Curse of Lono didn’t wow critics. Most said it was acceptable for Gonzo fans but would probably be incomprehensible to those not already singing in Thompson’s choir. The immersion in Hawaiian lore and history might baffle his ardent admirers, who might want more Amazing Drug Tales. Yet it was the last section of the book, the head-first dive into the mysticism of the islands, that offered a rare psychic journey into parts of Hunter’s brain. As he returned to the harbor, finally with his Hemingway-caliber marlin notched on his belt, he climbed the mast and bellowed “I am Lono,” drawing a crowd and making a spectacular entrance. But to some critics, Hunter had fallen into self-parody. The New York Times Book Review said that if Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had been the experiment, then The Curse of Lono was the control, as he put his more or less “real self” through the motions of Gonzo journalism. The Curse of Lono ended up having a shelf life, and eventually a coffee-table sized version with additional artwork was marketed. Actor Sean Penn bought the rights to the book, planning to turn it into a feature film.
Rob Fleder, an editor at Playboy and a ferocious admirer of Hunter’s writing, secured rights to a book excerpt for his magazine. When he got the Lono manuscript, he was appalled at how thin it was not just in girth but in content. The marathon section was excellent, but Running magazine had already printed that. Fleder flew Hunter into Chicago, and days of partying and bloated expense accounts ensued. After protracted arguing, Fleder left with a modest and semicomprehensible bit of Lono. Fleder was dispirited by the experience, but got what Playboy wanted. Hunter’s name on the cover still sold magazines.
“After The Curse of Lono,” Ralph Steadman wrote in a memoir, “Hunter became more circumspect about my involvement in anything to do with Gonzo, as though the very presence of one of my drawings in a journalistic project of his own represented a serious threat to the domination over the world we had collectively created a decade earlier.”
Ralph believed that Hunter had trouble acknowledging the role the art played in the character of Gonzo. “It began to bug him,” he said. “He wanted to be a great novelist, but half the time he needed my drawings before he could start.” For Lono, at least, it seemed that Hunter needed to piggyback on Steadman’s vision before he could get started.
Hunter took Laila home to Louisville to visit his mother. “She showed me all his newspapers he wrote as a kid and told me stories about him.” They stayed at the Thompsons’ house in the Highlands, where Hunter had the sudden urge to get married while he was home. “He was going to call the preacher and have him come over, and he had this whole idea that we were going to get married that night. I found out that’s how he had gotten married to Sandy, so I didn’t want to do the same thing. Certain places would trigger things for him. I think Louisville was full of ghosts for him.”
Laila also tried to help Hunter maintain his family ties. She urged Hunter to invite Davison and his family down to Key West when they were staying there. “Davison lived his life a little more conventionally than Hunter,” she said. “But he has the same sense of humor and is tall, dark, and handsome.”
Eventually, Laila concluded that it was easier to love Hunter than to live with him. His moods, his drinking, his idiosyncrasies . . . eventually, she tired of the daily drama. After more than three years together, Laila left for Los Angeles. She remained friends with Hunter the rest of his life, and near the end he went to her for help. She was the tenacious producer who would finally turn Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas into a film. The subsequent women in his life could have no room for jealousy. She was always going to be part of his life. She just couldn’t live with him anymore.