Listen, do me a favor. Ask him the one question that is on
everyone’s mind: How does he do it? How does he continue
to live the way we did back then and survive?
—Shopkeeper to journalist prior to meeting HST, 1991
In the early eighties, Hunter’s life began to catch up with him. Part of it was simply aging, the natural process of a boy wonder moving into his midforties. But part of it was the regimen of drink and drugs that was as much a part of his daily life as grapefruit and eggs. Hunter was a genetic miracle, able to withstand all manner of self-inflicted abuse without losing a step. “I never thought I’d make it past 27,” he said. “Every day I’m just as astounded as everyone else to realize I’m still alive.”
As his old friend Porter Bibb said, “He not only created Gonzo writing; he created Gonzo living.” The still-young vigorous Hunter at the end of the seventies gave way to the world-weary, sunken-eyed, and puffier Hunter of the eighties. “I saw myself in the mirror as a grizzled veteran of many wars,” he wrote.
He fancied himself an athlete. He still felt young; he’d played football with Sebastian Corcoran in Key West and run his boat through the mangrove at breakneck speed. But as he surveyed his post-Lono, post-Laila world, he saw he was closer to fifty than to forty, his body ached more than it used to, and he was living alone in his fortified compound in the Rockies. He didn’t do alone well.
Occasionally, stories drew him from hiding. At the urging of managing editor Terry McDonnell, he returned to Rolling Stone for the first time in five years to cover the 1983 Palm Beach divorce trial of newspaper heir Herbert “Pete” Pulitzer and his much younger wife, Roxanne. The Pulitzer divorce trial was the sort of story that erased the line between traditional journalism and the sleazy tabloid writing that was becoming more mainstream in post-Watergate journalism. But the sex-and-drugs angle was irresistible. When on the first day of the trial, the fawning judge, Carl Harper, stood up and said, “I’m so honored to meet you, Mr. Thompson,” Hunter writhed in discomfort.
In his commentary on the Pulitzer divorce, “A Dog Took My Place,” Hunter claimed he would amp up his evil side to match the new decade’s attitude of nastiness. Wenner was happy to have him back. “It had beautiful stuff in it,” he said of the Pulitzer piece. “It was brilliant.” Hunter swept down on the epic degeneracy of Palm Beach society like a moral Valkyrie, shrieking of impending apocalypse and Judgment Day.
As he wrote of young Mrs. Pulitzer,
She was an incorrigible coke slut, [Pete Pulitzer] said, and a totally unfit mother. She stayed up all night at discos and slept openly with her dope pusher, among others. There was a house painter, a real estate agent, a race car driver and a French baker—and on top of all that, she was a lesbian, or at least some kind of pansexual troilist. In six and a half years of marriage, she had humped almost everything she could get her hands on. . . .
Roxanne Pulitzer is not a beautiful woman. There is nothing especially striking about her body or facial bone structure, and at age thirty-one, she looks more like a jaded senior stewardess from Pan Am than an international sex symbol. Ten years on the Palm Beach Express have taken their toll, and she would have to do more than just sweat off ten pounds to compete for naked space in the men’s magazines. Her legs are too thin, her hips are too wide, and her skin is a bit too loose for modeling work. But she has a definite physical presence. There is no mistaking the aura of good-humored out-front sexuality. This is clearly a woman who likes to sleep late in the morning.
More out of outrage than admiration, Hunter delivered a soliloquy on the staggering cocaine use in the Pulitzer house. The coke bill approached nearly half a million dollars per annum. As the product of a modest background, Hunter also couldn’t resist the temptation to view the vain and selfish Pulitzers from the point of view of their servants, and even from that of a bartender, who was clearly a fabrication. “I know how those people behave,” the bartender wailed to Hunter, “and I know how it makes me feel!” Hunter had the man utter the line that gave the piece its title: “I see those shit-eating grins on their faces and I feel like a dog took my place.” This was a giveaway that the barkeep was fiction; Hunter had already used “A Dog Took My Place” as a section heading in The Curse of Lono. Hunter knew he was competing with his former self and fretted over this, his first major piece in years. Writing to Jim Silberman, he admitted, “I’m getting too old for this. . . . The Pulitzer thing is a monster. . . . God only knows what will come of it. The NY Times will probably call for my death & strangers might shoot at me on the streets. Fuck them.”
In his review of The Great Shark Hunt, William F. Buckley had said that after 600-plus pages of Hunter Thompson, he concluded Hunter had no interest in sex because it was not in the book. Hunter’s story on the Pulitzer trial was brutal not only in its take-no-prisoners assessment of the major players in the trial but also in that it showed him revealing for the first time his own sexual appetites. At the end of the article, he portrayed himself with two nude women in his convertible, cutting through a brisk and sunny Palm Beach morning on his way to an orgy.
Roxanne Pulitzer was aware of Hunter, but never met him until he was seated next to her at a dinner party just before the trial began. She was startled to look up in court the next day and see her Bermuda-shorts-clad dinner companion in the first row of the press section, where he remained for the trial’s duration. She’d read some of his work and knew the hurt he could cause. When “A Dog Took My Place” appeared, she followed a friend’s advice and did not read the article. For eight years after the trial, Hunter called to apologize for his brutal assessment of her (“the best piece of ass in Palm Beach”). After years of pleading, Pulitzer gave in and allowed Hunter to throw a party for her during a ski vacation in Aspen. The result of the trial was that Pulitzer lost custody of her two young sons. As Hunter showed her a picture of her he kept tacked up on his wall of fame in his home, he said, “I never thought you would lose your boys.” She was touched by his remorse, and they talked about their children and the fact that because of his nasty divorce, he didn’t see Juan as much as he wanted. Ultimately, his charm and sympathy got through to her. “He really understood family,” Pulitzer said. “I really grew to love him.”
When Hunter showed up in the press lounge in August 1984 at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, he wore Rolling Stone credentials. All the reporters’ heads turned to acknowledge his entrance. Visibly agitated, he fooled with the volume on the television, politely and quickly acknowledged his groupies, then tried to find a quiet place to hide and drink a beer.
Bill Greider, the Washington Post reporter who’d gone on to be Rolling Stone’s political editor in the eighties, hooked up with his old friend during that convention. “We were walking down the street toward the convention hall in San Francisco, and these young kids came up and started talking to him on the sidewalk,” Greider remembered. “And Hunter started rocking and rolling, grunting and saying funny things. I thought at first that these kids knew him. He was acting as though they knew him. And then I realized, these were just fans and they adored him. They wanted to touch him. Hunter never got credit for this. Whatever else his brutish moments were like, he responded very generously. I realized in that moment that this was a man who absolutely resonated in the culture and was known in such a way that people could approach him familiarly, as though he was a friend. He would give them that. It takes energy to do that. I find that very appealing. ”
He did not write anything for Rolling Stone about the convention. The San Francisco excursion was Hunter’s last attempt at campaign coverage for a while. He could not be talked into covering the 1988 campaign. “Jann was trying to get him out on the campaign trail, knowing it would be good stuff,” Greider said. “I was faxing him these handwritten memos from the Washington bureau, telling him to get out there and rip Bush’s lungs out. Something in the Hunter spirit. But he never went out.”
Hunter began to deal more frankly with sex and sexual issues than with politics. True, he hadn’t written much about sex until the few wink-wink moments in The Curse of Lono and in the Pulitzer story. Russell Chatham believed that Hunter’s gentlemanliness would not permit him to write about sex while married to Sandy. Once single, he was free.
Chatham and Hunter partied and fished together in Key West, but they became close friends in San Francisco in the early eighties, when both realized they were sex junkies and they discovered nirvana: the O’Farrell Theater, which Hunter once called “the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America.” It began its life in the late sixties as a strip club in one of San Francisco’s seedier neighborhoods. Brothers Jim and Artie Mitchell started the business and eventually branched into pornographic films, in 1972 producing Behind the Green Door starring Marilyn Chambers. It became one of the first hardcore films to break out of sticky-floor theaters and play in mainstream metroplexes. By the eighties, the O’Farrell was as Hunter had described it: the number-one venue for the sex industry, with expensive sofas on which lap dancers writhed with customers. The dancers did just about anything, masturbating for an audience, masturbating clients, or fellating them. The O’Farrell was a sexual theme park.
Still fervently a bachelor, Hunter was drawn to the fantasyland of the Mitchell brothers. “You’ve got to go where the girls are and, believe me, that’s where they are,” Chatham said. “If you were friends with the Mitchell brothers, as we were, you were back in the office with thirty naked girls.”
But Hunter did not partake. “Only a freak of passion could have resisted that kind of massive temptation,” Hunter said, “and on some nights I come close to caving into it.”
The Mitchells berated him for maintaining his observer role. “You are crazy as a goddamn loon not to fuck every one of these girls,” Artie Mitchell told him. “They all love you and want to fuck you like animals.”
Most of the girls did like Hunter, who was thick with Southern charm and charisma. Debi Sundahl, a star and producer of adult films, said most of the men who came into the O’Farrell were shy and held the women in distanced awe. Hunter radiated confidence, and women were drawn to his comfortable machismo. “He would be talking and engaging their attention,” she said, “and then he would throw his arm around them. To me, that’s flirting. I never saw him corner anyone or kiss them.”
Rob Fleder, the Playboy editor who had excerpted Lono, came back for more punishment, believing that Hunter could write a great sex article. Hunter sold him the concept for an article on feminist pornography. “Feminist porn was really just couples’ films,” Hunter said, “Sex films made for couples to which you could take a date. It was a new genre.” With the promise of a Playboy article as a feeder, Hunter then sold a proposal to Random House for a book called The Night Manager. Hunter printed business cards listing himself as the night manager of the O’Farrell and even worked taking tickets on a few occasions. He was borrowing a page from Gay Talese, whose massive book on sex in America, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, was the result of five years of research, including time Talese spent managing a Times Square massage parlor.
Talese’s book wasn’t even a decade old, but Hunter saw it as already well out of date. The Night Manager wouldn’t just be about sex; it would look at the new moral crusaders and the dangerous nonchalance toward the First Amendment he saw under President Reagan and his attorney general, Ed Meese. Meese appointed a commission to investigate pornography and sought to have the distribution of Playboy, Penthouse, and other adult magazines regulated. Despite all of the efforts at suppression, the O’Farrell and other erotic enterprises were doing well. “This is a time of growth, vigor and profit for the American sex industry,” Hunter wrote. “Business has never been better.”
As Hunter began his research, he thought the Mitchell brothers made a natural focus. “The only reason I went to see the Mitchell brothers was the chance that they might be interesting enough—for 48 hours—to sustain my interest in the feminist porno story long enough for me to crank out the necessary 6,000 or 7,000 words,” Hunter said.
He always needed the big paychecks from publishers, but to maintain cash flow, Hunter still made campus speeches. In the mideighties, he earned $200,000 a year from his every-other-week college talks. He could afford to be an unproductive writer.
During his infatuation with the O’Farrell, Hunter spoke at the College of Marin, north of San Francisco, unaware that his mother was in the audience. She was visiting Jim Thompson, finally at peace with his life and sexuality, and living in San Francisco’s Castro district, a homosexual mecca. As the campus talk began, Jim and Virginia Thompson watched Hunter stagger onstage, drink from a bottle of whiskey, and get booed by the audience when he spoke favorably of nuclear energy. It was a typical Hunter Thompson “speaking” engagement: chaotic, disorganized, comprehensible only for true believers. As Hunter left the stage, he saw his mother and brother, who had decided to surprise him at his speech and say hello. They approached him through the crowd. “He looked at me,” Jim said. “His eyes popped out of his head. Then he looked and saw Mummy, standing right next to me. At that point he went, ‘Ho! Jesus Christ!’ And just turned, waved his arms and ran with his head down. Just ran past her into the dressing room.” Virginia Thompson told Jim, “Hunter will never hurt me again.”
In the mideighties, filmmaker Wayne Ewing approached Hunter with an idea to make a television show. Ewing, a cinematographer and director with a home near Aspen, had done a lot of television. After seeing Hunter from afar for a long time, he asked whether he could travel with him to San Francisco to film him at work as the night manager of the O’Farrell. Generally affable, Hunter agreed, and eventually warmed up to Ewing. He liked the idea of a Gonzo television show. Ewing planned to pitch it to the HBO cable network. The freedom of cable would mean Hunter wouldn’t have to tone down his language or his drug use, and the idea seemed like a natural. “It took many years to gain Hunter’s trust,” Ewing said. “After many days and nights at Owl Farm, Hunter knew that I would not call 911 or steal his drugs and women. I was a relatively invisible friend with a camera.”
Preserving his life on film was important to Hunter. “He wanted me to record his life just as much as I did. Perhaps I became a surrogate for his notion of Gonzo journalism as a ‘reporter with the eye and mind of a camera.’”
Ewing followed Hunter around with a 16 mm camera and became his cinematic Boswell for the last two decades of his life. “The idea was to sell a TV series, perhaps called ‘Breakfast with Hunter’ or ‘The Gonzo Tour,’ but for whatever reasons I could never sell it,” Ewing said. “We went to Key West for a week and in a week, I was actually able to get Hunter in the presence of the camera for about two hours.”
Hunter and his new girlfriend, Maria Khan, stayed at the Sugarloaf Lodge and hooked up with Dink Bruce and other good friends. At one point, as Hunter raced his speedboat over the water, led by a school of leaping dolphins, he screamed, “I’m back! I’m back!”
“What do you mean?” Ewing asked.
“I’m Lono, the ancient Hawaiian god, and I’ve come back to my people, the dolphins.”
Ewing was a regular in Hunter’s kitchen, but he didn’t always come to work. “For every one night I filmed at Owl Farm there were a dozen where we just gambled on sports and worked on books and columns,” Ewing said. “As Hunter once told an interviewer who asked why he allowed me to film so much, ‘Wayne makes himself useful around here.’ ” (Though Ewing never made the sale to HBO or one of the commercial networks, he released a feature film called Breakfast with Hunter in 2004.)
Neither the Playboy article nor The Night Manager ever appeared, but for much of a year, Hunter spent more time in San Francisco and Sausalito than in Woody Creek. At a time when Hunter’s reputation was the equivalent of George Jones’s in country music—the man who missed more gigs than he made—he was hired in 1985 as a weekly columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, at $1,500 per column. Editor David Bergin knew Hunter from a decade before when he was sports editor of the Washington Star. Now he’d landed at the Examiner and persuaded his publisher, William Randolph Hearst III, to employ the notoriously unreliable Gonzo journalist as a columnist.
The idea seemed insane. Hunter was deadline-challenged. How could he produce a column once a week? He was so legendarily unproductive that many wondered whether he was burned out; was he silent because he had nothing to say or because the drink and drugs had turned his brain into a raisin? From Hunter’s side, there was the question of working for a Hearst. He’d once written that Hearst newspapers are “a monument to everything cheap, corrupt and vicious in the realm of journalistic possibility.”
Few were more skeptical about the concept of Hunter as a daily newspaper columnist than the Examiner staff. A betting faction in the newsroom thought Hunter would go down in flames after the first column appeared, if it ever appeared.
Yet somehow the Hearst-Thompson marriage was consummated. Bergin called it “the most intense and wild time” of his long career. During Hunter’s first year as a columnist, Bergin said he was so distracted from his day-to-day duties by Hunter that he was eventually fired. “I can’t blame him,” he said. “I loved editing his stuff. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
The column ran on Mondays, so Hunter had a Friday deadline, which he regarded more as a suggestion than as a firm date. Bergin spent most weekends jabbering with Hunter on the phone, trying to get the column. Will Hearst decided that if he wanted Hunter Thompson as a columnist, he needed to throw more resources his way.
Hearst looked into his newsroom and called David McCumber into his office. It was ten in the morning, but Hearst asked McCumber if he wanted a drink. McCumber thought, Man, I’m going to get fired. Then Hearst surprised him by asking if he wanted a new project: managing Hunter Thompson full-time. McCumber agreed. He’d been a Hunter fan for years.
“At that moment,” McCumber recalled, “Hunter burst out of Will’s bathroom, where he had been listening to the conversation, fixed me a scotch and water and shoved it in my fist, and made one for himself and drank it. And then, for some reason I still don’t understand, got down and did ten push-ups in front of me, got up, and shook my hand again and that was the end of it. From that moment, things went quite well.”
There was more help, in the form of Maria Khan. She was a journalism student at the University of Arizona when Hunter spoke on campus. Afterward, they met and connected. She became his assistant and soon his girlfriend, establishing an intern-to-girlfriend pattern he followed for many years. George Plimpton visited Hunter during the early days of the Examiner column, trying to get him to sit still for a “Writers at Work” interview for the Paris Review. The interview wouldn’t happen for another fifteen years, but Plimpton recalled Maria’s adoring and protective presence. “I thought she was wonderful,” Plimpton said. “She had a notebook and wrote down Hunter’s conversation.” He remembered her often being agitated, “worried about Hunter getting his column in.” Hunter referred to her so much in the columns that the skeptics on the Examiner staff wondered whether she actually wrote them.
The Examiner column gave Hunter latitude. After years in psychic/political exile, he was revitalized by the Reagan/Bush regime. He needed someone to arouse his bile as Nixon had. The problem with Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter was that they were not loathsome. Hunter was even on record as liking Carter. Though Reagan seemed a genial dunce and therefore not worthy of Hunter’s most extreme anger, some acts committed by his administration—primarily the Iran-Contra scandal of the mideighties—were sufficient to infuriate Hunter and awaken the sleeping monster in his soul. The monster was Hunter; no Raoul Duke, Gene Skinner, or Yail Bloor was needed as a crutch. Hunter comfortably settled into the role of observer—the Sage of Woody Creek, an outraged and coked-up Mencken for the new era. Reagan’s royalist trickle-down let-them-eat-cake attitude aroused his hillbilly anger, which found voice in the Examiner columns. He no longer needed to report, as he did in the Rolling Stone–Campaign Trail days. He could just unleash his anger, and people loved to read the outrageous invectives he hurled toward Washington.
Hearst aggressively marketed his newspaper and cajoled Hunter into appearing in a television advertisement, in which they stood together at a pistol range. Hearst walked up to an armed Hunter and asked him to become media critic for the Examiner. Hunter continued firing, then turned to Hearst and said, “Why not? We’ll chase them like rats across the tundra.” The final frame of the commercial showed Hunter’s target, an obliterated bull’s eye.
Hunter’s longtime fans sought out the Examiner columns in the few publications outside of San Francisco that ran them, usually alternative-lifestyle magazines. But discovering Hunter Thompson was a shared epiphany for a lot of college-age students, much like hearing Bob Dylan for the first time. Books written or songs recorded three decades ago still articulated the majestic rage of youth. Both Hunter and Dylan were so good at congealing that time of life that their early work remained popular with young people long after the creators had ambled into middle age. The old work helped build new audiences. That audience awaited pronouncements from the aging figures. “Twenty-year-olds who never would have thought about buying the Examiner started buying it religiously every Monday because of Hunter,” McCumber said.
The Examiner columns were the closest thing that Hunter had done to real journalism in a long time. Not since his days with the National Observer had he written in a generally conventional manner for a generally conventional publication. He also went beyond his column. When the Miami Herald broke the story about presidential candidate Gary Hart’s womanizing in 1987, Hunter sprang into action on the Examiner’s behalf. He’d been Hart’s friend for years and traveled in some of the same social circles. He knew that the woman the Herald found with Hart was Donna Rice, former girlfriend of rock star Don Henley of the Eagles. Hunter let himself into Henley’s Aspen home, where a Polaroid of Donna was still tacked on the fridge. He took the picture and air-expressed it to McCumber in San Francisco. “Thanks to Hunter, we beat the world on a photo of Donna Rice,” McCumber said.
Hunter was also masterful at pulling punches. Although not the sort of family paper you might find in Peoria or Dayton (it was San Francisco, after all) the Examiner was intended for a mainstream audience. Hunter cleaned up his act. In that he resembled comedian Richard Pryor: known for his profane and brilliant social commentary, Pryor was an artist with ten- and twelve-letter words, which he used as often as he took breath. On network television, Pryor did his foul nightclub routines but stopped with precision before uttering obscenities, a masterpiece of control. Hunter’s columns for the Examiner were like that: classic Hunter Thompson yammering, but with drugs and obscenity absent. It proved that those celebrated elements of his work weren’t really necessary for him to make his points.
“You just never knew from one moment to the next what was going to happen,” McCumber said. “That’s what made the column work so well. One week a straight political analysis, very well sourced with politics, or a completely wacky story.” The columns traveled with him. When he spent the spring fishing at Ramrod Key with Monty Chitty, he filed columns from Florida. When in Arizona to visit Maria’s family, he wrote about Phoenix politics. When he got into a dispute with his neighbors, that also fed his columns. Readers were tuning in for Hunter, whose outrageous-celebrity-persona made his columns read more like the trials and tribulations of one man against the system. The simplest event could become an epic in his hands. Douglas Brinkley admired the spectacle Hunter could construct from nothing: “ ‘Hunter goes to Wal-Mart’—you know there’s drama there,” he said.
Hunter still had in his belly the political fire that burned during his Campaign Trail book. As he surveyed the political scene in the midpoint of Reagan’s second term, he offered this view of Republican history: “Nixon was genetically criminal. Agnew was born wrong. Ford was so utterly corrupt that he made millions by pardoning Nixon, and Reagan is beginning to take on the distinctly Spanish physical characteristics of the Somoza family, formerly of Nicaragua.” As Hunter wrote of the Iran-Contra revelations, “When this one finally unravels, it will make Watergate look like a teen-age prank, and Richard Nixon will seem like just another small-time politician who got wiggy on greed and cheap gin.”
McCumber was the perfect babysitter for Hunter. Though dedicated to his newspaper career, McCumber eventually wrote several books, including X-Rated (about the Mitchell brothers) and The Cowboy Way. He said he worked well with Hunter because they had similar interests and liked the same sort of fun. “One night, at about two in the morning, we had been talking about a column,” McCumber recalled. “I had a ’63 Chrysler 300 convertible at the time. We headed across the Golden Gate Bridge, drove around a little bit. He wanted me to push it a bit. As I did, he opened the passenger door while I drove over the bridge, and knocked over the cones on the side of the bridge. He looked over and grinned at me with this incredible six-year-old-boy grin. I just burst out laughing. It was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen.”
One of Hunter’s friends from the 1972 campaign, Curtis Wilkie, came to Woody Creek in late 1987 as Hunter was battling a deadline. Wilkie had gone on to become a star political correspondent for the Boston Globe, and he took the big-time daily newspaper reporter’s amusement in watching Hunter struggle with his deadline.
Hunter was overdue on a column. “Hearst called at some point in the middle of the night, and Hunter quickly turned the phone over to me,” Wilkie recalled. Hearst told Wilkie to tell Hunter that his ass would be grass if the column wasn’t in Hearst’s hands in three hours. “Hunter came back in the room, and I told him what Hearst had said. Hunter said, ‘I had a couple of thoughts, but don’t like them.’ He fished in the trash can and brought out some crumpled-up pages. I looked at them and they were relatively coherent, but they were on different subjects. I said, ‘Hunter, we can make this work. Use one as a lead, do a bridge, and then use the other one as the end.’ He said, ‘Fuck it.’ So I ended up writing the 200-word bridge to connect them. We smoothed out the crumpled paper and sent those pages to San Francisco. Somewhere in all of the anthologies of the complete Hunter Thompson, there are 200 words of mine.”
It had been fifteen years since Wilkie worked side by side with Hunter covering the 1972 campaign, and he believed that Hunter’s reputation . . . or myth . . . overshadowed the diligence he brought to his work. “He was not completely irresponsible,” Wilkie said. “He was aware of deadlines. When he was cranking it out, he was terrific. He was certainly not a nine-to-five journalist—well, maybe a nine p.m. to five a.m. journalist. He was certainly unconventional. Journalism professors would not hold him up as a paradigm, but Jesus, he was great at what he did.” Wilkie was not alone in admiring Hunter’s work; the Examiner columns were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. Though Hunter didn’t win, that sort of acceptance was gratifying for him—as was being named a non-fiction judge for the National Book Awards.
Bob Braudis had been elected sheriff and become close enough to Hunter to have 24-hour-a-day drop-in privileges. “I don’t want to be the sheriff,” Hunter often said. “I just want to know the sheriff.” The friendship sometimes put Braudis in an odd position, but he frequently reminded Hunter, “I can be your sheriff or I can be your friend, but I can’t be both.” Hunter chose to keep the friendship.
During the eighties, Braudis’s dropping-in privileges might mean helping Hunter talk his way through writing a column. He used his conversations with Braudis to come up with ideas and sometimes asked him to answer the phone when Hunter sensed it was Will Hearst on the other end. “I was always making up excuses for Hearst,” Braudis said. “I’d say, ‘Hunter’s got diarrhea, he’s sick.’ ” Braudis, a tall and imposing man, could protect Hunter from the outside world both on the phone and in person.
The column kept Hunter too busy to pursue other projects, though he got tingly over an idea Paul Perry sent. He called Perry one day to thank him for the Honolulu marathon assignment, which had led to a book. That was something he hadn’t been able to do in a while, he admitted, then asked Perry, “Do you have any other ideas?”
Actually, Perry did. He knew Hunter was secretly concerned about his health, and he admired what Hunter had written about the die-hard humorless troops in the marathon. How about a book on fitness freaks? He even had a title: The Rise of the Body Nazis. Hunter loved it. “Any book with ‘Nazi’ in the title is my kind of book,” he told Perry. Perry planned to put Hunter through a fitness regimen and keep track of his progress. Hunter disliked the smugness he saw in the body Nazis. “You don’t ever see runners smiling, do you?” he asked Perry. He asked Perry to outline the project, attach his name, and send it to the New York publishing world and watch editors fight over it like junkyard dogs after a scrap of raw meat. “They’ll pay me a quarter of a million for that,” he said. Hunter’s only request was that Jim Silberman not hear about the proposal.
Perry pitched the Body Nazis to an editor at Simon and Schuster, who loved the idea and shared it with the editorial board. It was shot down by board member Silberman, Hunter’s editor since Hell’s Angels. Silberman had advanced Hunter $125,000 on an earlier book. He predicted to the board that Simon and Schuster would never see the Body Nazis manuscript.
Perry tried to persuade Silberman to accept the Body Nazis to satisfy Hunter’s obligation. “I don’t want this book,” Silberman shouted. “I think this is an irresponsible thing for you to do. Don’t you know you could kill a person like Hunter?” And so The Rise of the Body Nazis never happened. Silberman told Perry to relay a message to Hunter: “If he writes this book, I’ll go to the courts and take his ranch away. I’m dead serious.”
In the end, the Examiner columns were collected in a book that Silberman published with his Summit imprint: Generation of Swine. With McCumber’s help, Hunter had assembled a sharp anthology, mostly focused on the me-first politics of the Reagan era. The book did not retire Hunter’s obligation to Silberman, but it did become a best-seller and was greeted as a comeback. In the New York Times, critic Herbert Mitgang said, “He’s a little more strident this time out, but if you happen to share his enemies, Mr. Thompson’s your man.” Mitgang tried to draw some comparisons with the yellow journalism of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, in whose newspaper his columns appeared. But even those old war lords could not compare with Hunter. “Nearly everything he writes makes yellow journalism pale,” Mitgang wrote.
Drawn together, the columns made an impressive case that Hunter had not lost his touch. He quoted himself a good deal, mimicking the “We were somewhere near Barstow on the edge of the desert” opening of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in several columns (“We were somewhere on the freeway near the San Diego Zoo . . .”) and taking a dead lift from the last line of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms (“Then I walked back to the hotel in the rain”). Self-references and hat tips to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and his other favorites were all over the place.
Hunter had never stopped writing, but Generation of Swine was greeted as a comeback by fans. Hunter was a faithful letter writer (and, eventually, fax sender) all of his life. But the weekly deadline for the Examiner forced him into the long-promised second phase of his career, the post–Raoul Duke era he’d been promising since the introduction to The Great Shark Hunt. Journalism, in whatever form it took when it came out of Hunter Thompson, was seductive to him. As he wrote in the introduction to Generation of Swine,
I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it—a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures. A group photo of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness. It is not a trade that attracts a lot of slick people; none of the Calvin Klein crowd or international jet set types. The sun will set in a blazing sky to the east of Casablanca before a journalist appears on the cover of People magazine.
Hunter had not really been in the political arena for more than a decade. Since the Examiner columns didn’t circulate widely outside of San Francisco, his long-term fans were heartened, when the collection appeared, to see that he still had a sense of outrage about mean-spirited, royalist politics. “We think of him as a libertine outlaw, but he’s actually a moralist,” Carl Bernstein said of Hunter’s political writing. After years of watching, he never lost the passion or the indignation provoked by the abuses of power, such as he saw in the Iran-Contra stories. “He suffered no falsehood,” his friend Gerry Goldstein said.
Generation of Swine earned much better reviews than The Curse of Lono, and since his subject was mostly politics and popular culture, it was much more reader-friendly than his venture into island mysticism. Curtis Wilkie reviewed his friend’s book for the Boston Globe and said Hunter’s political writing “has regained the intensity of his work in Rolling Stone magazine nearly 20 years ago. . . . He is back in command of his career.”
Maria left in 1988. No hard feelings, but she needed to get on with her life. She eventually graduated from the University of Arizona law school and became a well-known political figure in Arizona. McCumber went on to another job. Hunter kept writing for the Examiner but was bunkered down even more in his Woody Creek compound. “He became more of a hermit the last thirty years,” Douglas Brinkley said. “He was one of the hottest writers in the country, then the comic strip [Doonesbury] came along, and that humiliated him. He would have been a different guy without that comic strip. He used to go out dining with friends, but when that comic came along, he retreated into a compound mentality.” Unable to travel with the anonymity of a real journalist, he kept working from the kitchen in his home, now with a bank of televisions. In the sixties, he’d struggled along with one station, a CBS affiliate out of Grand Junction, the only thing he could pick up with his antenna. Now, thanks to satellite, he had all-news all-sports all the time at his home. He became more of a reactor than a reporter, sort of a high-tech mind-altered Walter Lippmann. Reporters gathered information and reported it; columnists read what the reporters wrote, sat back, thought about it for a couple of days, then told readers what it all meant.
The Ronald Reagan presidency had brought with it a banal just-say-no-to-drugs ethos and a scourge on any sexually oriented material. For Hunter, along with his crushing celebrity, his feeling that he did not fit in to his country anymore contributed to a sense of isolation at his Woody Creek home. People were cleaning up their acts, getting haircuts, flying off to the Betty Ford Center to dry out. Rehab was fashionable. As he wrote in 1989, “No once-wild ‘party’ in Hollywood or Aspen or even Greenwich Village is complete, these days, without the overweening presence of superwealthy, hard-hitting ex-addicts ‘recovering alcoholics,’ and beady-eyed fat women who never let you forget that they ‘used to hang out’ with doomed friends and dead monsters like Janis, Jim Morrison, The Stones, or John Belushi, or even me.” Hunter mourned the fact that people had given up on fun (at least, his sort of fun) and that they had lost all interest in politics. Was there still room for Hunter Thompson? One of his new mottos, part of the collection of catch phrases he randomly threw into his work to please his fans, summarized his feelings: Death to the Weird.
With Sandy long gone and Laila on her way to becoming a film producer and now Maria hitting the resume button on her life, Hunter became even more dependent on the small support system that kept his life “humming along smartly” at Owl Farm.
Unlike other writers, who needed monklike solitude to work, Hunter preferred an audience. “He never liked to be alone,” Braudis said. “He liked to be surrounded with people.” Writing was performance for him, and if he wrote a choice morsel, he didn’t tack it up on the bulletin board and read it through binoculars, as Gay Talese did. Hunter liked to hear it. He’d read it aloud. Sandy, then Laila, then Maria used to read it aloud. House guests often were handed manuscripts with their welcome handshakes and told to read. It was part of the Owl Farm initiation. If Hunter was on speaking terms with his muse, he could write on the median in the middle of rush-hour traffic or in a busy dentist’s office during oral surgery. The rhythm of the world would become part of the rhythm in his writing. “He loved people to read his writing in progress,” Braudis recalled. “He’d sit there and listen to it as if it was music. He’d say, Faster . . . quieter . . . louder. ‘Slower’ was his big thing.”
Again, unlike a lot of writers, Hunter could not stand to be alone. He needed company; sometimes, he put companions on his payroll.
Hunter had met Deborah Fuller during the gut-twisting process of divorce. Deborah was an artist and was Sandy’s friend. For a brief period the women had lived together, and Deborah’s apartment was a safe haven for Sandy and Juan after the escape from Owl Farm. As the divorce negotiations raged, the judge urged Hunter and Sandy never to be alone with each other, and to bring a companion for face-to-face discussions. Hunter brought his artist friend, Tom Benton, and Sandy brought Deborah. “It was very disturbing for both of us,” Deborah said. But Hunter grew fond of Deborah and never regarded her as an enemy.
While Hunter was with Laila, he had a superb companion and editorial assistant. When she left, and before he met Maria, he began working with Deborah. One night, Hunter asked Deborah to help him. “I hadn’t been a personal secretary for anyone before,” she said. “It was all a matter of chemistry for Hunter. One night he said, ‘I’m on a deadline. I need some help.’”
Hunter loved having Deborah around and they had a brief relationship. When that ended, Deborah continued working with Hunter—often, and for long periods, without getting paid—and became the most important person in running his day-to-day life for twenty-three years. She saw Hunter as a serious writer, intent on every word, working tirelessly and all night while on deadline, cursing and fuming over the political idiocy du jour. She also saw him turn on the Duke personality when it was expected.
For the first several years that Deborah worked for Hunter she lived around Aspen, but by the end of the eighties, she moved into the smaller cabin at Owl Farm, across the drive from Hunter’s place. It was the place where Billy and Anne Noonan had lived. For a while during the seventies, when Hunter was traveling a bit, writer Jay Cowan lived in the cabin, understudying Hunter and serving as caretaker for Owl Farm, looking out for Sandy and Juan. When Deborah moved into the cabin, she was able to live rent-free, but was also on call twenty-four hours a day. “It was a godsend on one hand and a curse on the other to be that many yards away,” she said. “I was called on a lot in the middle of the night. We were best friends, and he liked to talk through a lot of things with me. I was there and he trusted me. He cursed me severely because I wouldn’t always agree with him, but that’s what good friends are for.”
Hunter called Deborah his majordomo, and her job duties were difficult to specify. She did whatever it took to allow Hunter to be Hunter. When the kitchen became his command post, she made sure that he had everything he needed in reach of his perch. Reference books were to his right, under the window. She made sure the collected works of Hunter Thompson were within reach. Two phones by the typewriter. His newspapers, folded and ready. The TV was never turned off but the remote had to be handy. He was meticulous with files, but when Deborah began working for him, she took meticulous to a higher level. She organized all of his papers into fireproof cabinets and even cataloged his old clothes (Johnny Depp would eventually wear Hunter’s quarter-century-old shirts when he played him on film.) She organized files boxes kept on the stove behind Hunter, and here Deborah kept folders of all of the works in progress—articles, columns, fragments. The organization was superb, but also important for Deborah’s well-being. She needed rest occasionally and having everything that he needed at his side might keep Hunter from raging in the middle of the night. A common refrain: “Where the fuck is my folder?”
Beyond controlling the geography of the kitchen, Deborah also helped Hunter with the mental preparation to write. She helped protect him from all of the needy strangers and fans. Sometimes she found pilgrims at the Owl Farm gates. One wacked-out fan even made it to the front door, where she found him shivering after spending a night out in the cold. “There were weirdos who would eat acid and come hang on the fence,” Deborah said. “I was the watchdog. I tried to treat people in a nice way, but people were so in awe of him. I’d say, ‘He’s not up. Would you like to leave him a note?’ and that took care of most of it.”
Although Deborah said Hunter was a procrastinator, she also knew that Hunter had certain rituals before writing—from his use of musical fuel (Dylan was a lifelong favorite), his dietary demands (big breakfasts, egg salads, fruit salads, grapefruit by the score), his need to scream at newspapers and television, his methodical nocturnal swimming, and his beloved conversations with friends. “He liked conversations and ballgames,” she said. The friends he invited over to watch games with him would help him shape his ideas. He did not insist on being center stage. “He was an incredible storyteller and an incredible political analyst. A lot of people used to come to Hunter for advice. He preferred one-on-one. He also knew something about practically everything.” Cowan, who also did time in Hunter’s cabin-across-the-drive, was also impressed with the depth of Hunter’s knowledge. “He was, if not the smartest man I ever knew, the smartest man I knew well,” Cowan said.
Deborah had to do a lot of juggling as part of her job, and that sometimes meant keeping the long hours. Sometimes Hunter would stay up for days. “If he was on a writing roll, he would stay up, because he was having fun,” Deborah said. “He would also stay up when he was distraught or having problems with a woman. Every relationship was intense, and they were usually with younger women who were working with him. As he put it, ‘I need someone young with the energy to stay up with me.’”
Deborah presided over Owl Farm and often that meant also taking care of his young assistants/girlfriends. The assistants helped Hunter with whatever project was in the works, and Deborah did everything else. “I took care of running the house, running all of the finances,” she said. “He was very private. Nobody else paid the bills. He didn’t want anyone looking at what his life was. I took care of all of the workers and the cleaning people and preparing his breakfast and preparing food and setting up all the interviews.”
If there was no coherent job description for Deborah Fuller, Semmes Luckett’s role was also difficult to nail down. The scion of a prominent Mississippi family, Semmes had come to Aspen in the seventies after dropping out of law school. Semmes was Hunter’s man Friday. He was always around for pleasure or for work. He stayed on the Thompson payroll to run errands, driving Hunter where he needed to be, picking up liquor or groceries when Hunter didn’t have time. Semmes was a great companion, always there and unimpressed by celebrity. He was an extraordinary old-fashioned southern storyteller and he and Hunter provided mutual amusement.
Because the assistants and girlfriends were a revolving door, Deborah and Semmes provided Hunter’s continuity in life.
Hunter was tethered as if by an umbilical cord to Owl Farm (he called it his “psychic anchor”). In 1989, Hunter entered into a range war with neighbor Floyd Watkins, and he used the bully pulpit of his Examiner column to make his case for Watkins as the Antichrist. Painting the battle as a Kentucky-mountain Hatfield-and-McCoy feud, Hunter lashed out at the multimillionaire who made his money running collection agencies before retiring to Woody Creek at forty-two. Watkins began building an estate, but nothing like the funky mountain scrub farms his neighbors had. He poured concrete for a sweeping driveway and dammed the creek to construct trout ponds, all part of his master plan to build a fish camp. Hunter referred to Watkins’s estate as “a hideous eyesore that only a madman or a werewolf would live in.” Not long after work started on the Watkins development, the threats began: late-night phone calls, graffiti on his boundary fence (“Fat Floyd’s Fish Farm”) and occasional gunfire. Watkins figured Hunter was the culprit, but he didn’t have the evidence. It was the Louisville mailbox all over again, and Hunter asked the question he had asked when he was nine: What witnesses?
Watkins called the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Department, but when no action was taken against Hunter, Watkins lashed out at Braudis, charging him with taking sides against him. Braudis, who described his relationship with Hunter as brotherly, was stung by the criticism.
The war escalated. Watkins claimed it was Hunter who fired automatic weapons through his property at four in the morning and who poured a chemical in his ponds that killed $40,000 worth of stocked trout. Hunter barely avoided felony charges for firing the weapons, but continued his battle.
It wasn’t just about concrete and trout. Hunter saw the feud with Watkins as part of the ongoing struggle to salvage what was left of the American Dream of authenticity and originality. Hunter confronted Watkins at a public forum held at the Woody Creek Tavern. “No one is oppressing you,” Hunter told Watkins. “We all live in this valley; this is a one-road community. We don’t want to see the life of this valley poisoned—that is as bad as poisoning fish.” Hunter did not have the energy he once had for conflict. “The greedheads work eight days a week,” he wrote. “The trouble is that the greedheads, the real estate developers and the people who want to buy and sell quick and move on work harder than I do. I’m a writer. I’m a lazy person.”
The reaction to Hunter’s war on Floyd Watkins was a sign of changing times. Hunter faced the possibility that he might be forced to change his ways. “I’ve told Hunter he can’t be out shooting on the road as he used to,” Braudis said. “His neighbors are complaining more and more about his peacocks screeching and the gunshots in the night. What is happening now is that the billionaires are pushing out the millionaires. The truth is that Woody Creek has become urbanized in the last twenty years.”
The dispute simmered through that fall, and Hunter tried to arouse public sympathy in his favor with his Examiner column, but the San Francisco paper wasn’t widely circulated in Woody Creek.
Some of the locals began to think that maybe Hunter was getting out of control.
Hunter had a new girlfriend. Terry Sabonis-Chafee was an associate at the Aspen Institute and working on a graduate degree at Princeton. When Hunter mentioned that he needed an assistant, Terry didn’t take the job, but suggested that Hunter hire her younger sister, Catherine, then a journalism student at the University of Florida. To Hunter, it seemed like the perfect match. Catherine could even earn internship credit while working for him.
Cat, as she was known, was home with her family in Connecticut for the 1989 Christmas holidays when Hunter called to talk to Terry, then asked Cat to get on the phone. “I’m going to send you plane tickets,” he said. “Get out here and see if you can handle it.” She went for a long weekend during the holiday break and met Deborah Fuller, in whose cabin she would stay, and Semmes Luckett and David McCumber, who’d flown in for the weekend to work with Hunter. As Cat saw it, Deborah and Semmes were there because they “were sort of the people that could kind of keep him in line and do his bidding, but also that he could be fueling himself with. And he could bully them or not bully them, and they were not going to go anywhere. They would still come back. He needs a lot of handling. It takes a lot to maintain Hunter, and so everybody sort of had a role towards that end.”
Jim Silberman was still snorting for a promised manuscript. McCumber was there as a coach. Hunter sat at his perch in his command post/kitchen and bickered with McCumber. Cat was lying down on the couch, on the other side of the kitchen counter, and for three sleepless days took notes on the negotiations. Hunter wanted to cobble something together out of his archive, the mammoth files in the basement, and fulfill his obligation to Silberman. McCumber wanted Hunter to try harder. It worried him to see Hunter not care.
Three days of no sleep and taking notes. “There was a lot of yelling back and forth,” Cat recalled. “I started nodding off. It had been forty hours with no sleep. Hunter started getting angry that I was nodding off and he bashed his typewriter, and it came over the counter at me. I was cocky, so I didn’t move and didn’t react, and he laughed and said, ‘I don’t really have a choice, do I? You’re hired.’”
The long weekend was a preview of coming attractions. McCumber was being paid by Hunter, not Silberman, and his primary purpose in the spring of 1990 was to motivate Hunter to produce another book. In February 1990, after writing about being run down by a tractor toting a bush-hog, Hunter stopped writing the column. He was tired of the weekly deadline, and without that pressure he stalled.
“McCumber would beg and plead,” Cat said, “and Hunter just turned into a child and became indolent and refused to do a thing.” McCumber came for the weekend (taking time away from his day job as editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press in California), and sometimes he and Hunter didn’t even talk to each other. Finally, McCumber returned to California. Cat stayed at Deborah’s cabin and was there, talking to McCumber on the phone, when Hunter walked over to see what was going on. When she said she was giving McCumber a “progress report” on what Hunter had been doing since his last visit, Hunter flew into a rage. “I don’t want to be sensational, although living with Hunter was always sensational,” Cat said. “He went back to the house and came back with an ax and hacked through the power lines at Deborah’s house.”
Other college interns probably didn’t see their employers approaching them with an ax. Figuring it was a little out of the ordinary, Cat and Deborah packed up quickly and went to stay with one of Deborah’s friends in Aspen. Eventually, Hunter coaxed both of them back to work. He never explicitly apologized but said, “I was making high drama out of nothing. Come back and let’s get some real work done.” They did. That they would return a week after he approached them with an ax spoke well for his charisma.
Hunter and McCumber struggled over what his book was to be. Even now, Hunter wanted to write fiction. Occasionally, Hunter thought of dusting off The Rum Diary or Prince Jellyfish. There were scattered short stories he’d written in the Big Sur era. He had a fan base now, and most anything with his name on it would sell to the loyal legions.
His following was such that publishers were beginning to think someone might want a book about Hunter Thompson. When a publisher approached me in 1989 to do such a book, I wrote to tell Hunter what I was up to. He was game to cooperate, on the condition that it wouldn’t mean more work for him. He got my phone number, and we exchanged messages and faxes throughout the spring of 1990, as I peppered him with questions about his life and career. There really wasn’t an accurate chronology of his life available, so a lot of my questions were of the what-did-you-do-then variety. Turns out those questions helped him get started. “I used your questions to develop a timeline and framework,” Cat said. “The book was a combination of questions you asked as a framework, mixed with his original pieces.” With McCumber’s help poring through the archives, Hunter began to construct the first of his autobiographical collages. It would be a fairly easy book to assemble, since he could use manuscripts he’d been storing in the basement for twenty or thirty years.
But it threatened to add to his literary-identity problem. By now, he was fully a prisoner of his persona. The character he created had taken over, and he couldn’t lay it all at the feet of Garry Trudeau. In fact, his attorney and friend Gerry Goldstein said he got to the point where he began to appreciate Uncle Duke. “To some extent he was flattered by Trudeau,” Goldstein said. “He once told me, ‘He hasn’t said anything about me in a week—let’s sue the bastard.’” Suing Trudeau for defamation would be fruitless, Goldstein told Hunter. “Besides, how could you defame Hunter?”
Fans knew the outlines of his life, so Hunter thought it would be easy—for the purpose of his pending book—to revisit scenes of his former triumphs. He could dust off some things that were unpublished, and he could connect the dots by pulling a few things out of a southerly orifice. The autobiographical collage became a working model for several of his books that followed, making it official: Hunter was repeating himself. “Gonzo,” he once sighed to a reporter. “I wish I’d never heard the word.”
Always pressed for a definition of his style, he came up with this one in the last year of his life: “What it’s all about, really, is what you can get away with. If you’re a writer, that means writing about what you want to write about.”
It was easy for him to slip into that character and play the Gonzo role. “He would retreat into it,” Cat said. “He was always at his best when he wasn’t doing that. The constant nonwriting that went around him—I think it was kind of helpful as a way of being able to pull him off track and organically remind him of places he had been. If you could catch him as being his most himself, if you could capture that, he could return to it and produce good stuff out of it. But he fell away from that and got caught up on what he was supposed to be and what he was expected to say.”
He needed to be pressed, and it was difficult for Deborah or Cat or even McCumber to do that. He would walk over them. “One thing about Hunter,” Cat said, “is that he had a different persona for different people. He was at his most lovely, most lucid, most brilliant, with the people for whom he had the most professional respect, like Tom Corcoran, David Halberstam, Ed Bradley, and many others. When he was really spinning out of control on us, we would hope against hope that someone for whom he had to prove himself would call or come by.”
McCumber helped Hunter go through the archives, finding clean copies of Hunter’s early stories and putting them together in chronological order. After the initial growling and snarling, Hunter and McCumber quickly began assembling the book that became Songs of the Doomed. “That was so much fun, that project,” McCumber said. “Just the idea of pulling work together from five decades and figuring out how to make it hang together as a book—that was a pleasure.”
Once he seized on the approach to the book and learned that it would satisfy Jim Silberman, Hunter couldn’t stop working. McCumber remembered Hunter working nine days without sleep. “We were in the war room, finding manuscripts, when we found the original of The Rum Diary,” McCumber recalled. “It was an honor to be entrusted to the history of his writing.”
Cat was charged with helping Hunter create the new material for the book, most of which would tie together the disparate excerpts from long-lost works. “A lot of it was dictated,” she said. “A lot of that older stuff in the book—it was the first time he’d looked at it since he’d written it. He handed me The Rum Diary and said, ‘Mark everything in it that you think can stand alone.’ So I sat there with Post-It’s, marking sections to be pulled out. He hadn’t read the book in years.”
Since the book was taking the form of tiptoeing through his history as a writer, Hunter also saw it as an opportunity to retire that other debt to Silberman: the ill-fated American Dream book from the sixties. For a time, “American Dream” was the working title of Songs of the Doomed, but eventually he bade farewell to the project with Doomed’s subtitle, More Notes on the Death of the American Dream.
Hunter pushed himself and those around him. “Weeks would go by on this reverse sleep schedule where he would stay up for days and then sleep for anywhere from twenty to twenty-six hours, and then he would stay up for another two or three nights,” Cat remembered. “And he would expect you to be on the same schedule. Of course, it was substance supported. At some point coffee ain’t going to cut it, and I never would have considered doing any kind of drugs for recreation under any circumstances. But I had to do it in order to keep up. It didn’t have any recreational quality to it.”
Unfortunately, just as Hunter was making great progress on the book, he suffered a setback: a ninety-nine-day disruption.
Gail Palmer became famous as an actress and director in pornographic films. Her path never crossed Hunter’s during his days as a regular at the O’Farrell. When Hunter was spending his term as night manager, she was marrying a wealthy physician in Michigan and settling down to a more normal life. She wanted to be a writer but didn’t know any other writers. When her husband scheduled a ski trip to Aspen, she saw her chance to meet the writer she most admired.
She began peppering Hunter with letters and announced she would visit. Deborah penciled the promised date of Palmer’s arrival on Hunter’s kitchen calendar. The day arrived, and Hunter was wrapped up in watching college basketball on TV with Semmes and a friend named Tim, and with Cat also in the mix. Hunter had read Palmer’s letter and seen her visit only as an impending annoyance. She wanted to talk to him about her days in the sex business and how Hunter didn’t understand feminist pornography. Hunter could not give a rat’s ass what Gail Palmer thought.
But she was in town, and there was a vague understanding that they would meet. To him, she was just another person who wanted to come by and kiss the Gonzo ring. It happened that Semmes was agitated about the sorry state of the women in Aspen, so Hunter thought he came up with the solution to kill a couple of birds: he would invite Palmer to his house and therefore meet this perceived social obligation (he was a gentleman, and did not want to be rude) and also find a suitable dancing and drinking partner for sad-sack Semmes. When Palmer called, Hunter had him handle the negotiations. Since she claimed she wanted to interview Hunter, Semmes was able to finesse things and get Palmer’s husband to stay back at their condo. She would come alone by taxi.
When she arrived, Hunter was immediately repulsed by her loud and abrasive manner. She had to be the center of attention, and Hunter knew that there could only be one of those at a time. And all Hunter cared about that evening was the Georgetown game. “I wanted to clear the house and unwind for a night,” he said. Semmes and Tim had been lobbying to watch the Grammys, since Jimmy Buffett was scheduled to perform. “I didn’t want to watch the fucking Grammys,” Hunter said. Cat didn’t care.
But now there was an irritant in the room, and she refused to shut up. “Be quiet,” Hunter told her repeatedly. She didn’t respond. He told Semmes, “She has to be quiet here.” Still her shrill voice disrupted Hunter’s peace. Semmes and Tim had won the battle of the television and were watching the awards show, waiting for Buffett. Palmer continued to babble, asking Hunter about his sex life. “All right,” he said. “Here’s a story I just wrote.”
He handed Palmer the manuscript for “Screwjack,” a story from deep in the groin, filled with carnivorous lust. After a few pages, she put it down and told Hunter he was a pervert. He forced her to keep reading, but the brutality of the story wounded her and had its intended effect: she quieted.
Hunter was disturbed that she kept leaving the room to call her husband. He thought she might be a cop or had some police connection, but Gentleman Hunter continued to play host. After he ran out of margarita mix, he made blenders full of a cranberry juice and tequila concoction. They were well into the fourth pitcher when the trouble began. She had become that thing that Hunter most hated: the sloppy drunk.
Palmer began to pester Cat. “Who are you to Hunter?” she asked. She told Cat to leave, that she was in the way. Tim left, and although Hunter begged him to take Palmer, he refused. His wife would not understand, he said. Semmes also left, without his presumed dance partner. But Palmer stayed.
Hunter tried to call her a cab from the kitchen phone, but she pulled it from his hand. He tried again and actually reached the cab company, but she grabbed the phone again before Hunter could give the address. And then a third time. Finally, she came at him in the kitchen, and he shoved her back, screaming, “Get the fuck away!” She hit her hip on the kitchen counter. He was especially angry that she was in his sanctuary, his kitchen, where he sat at his perch and pounded away at his IBM Selectric and orchestrated his house full of guests. How dare she?
Palmer was furious that he had shoved her and so came at him again, and again he shoved her, hitting her on her shoulders with the palms of his hands. She was propelled back and fell to the floor. She pulled herself up and sat against the refrigerator. The duel was over.
“I want you out of here,” Hunter said. To Hunter, she was “one more groupie who was unusually determined.” Later, he was able to summarize what about her had enraged him so much. “She had a hideous penchant for coming in my area, hassling me, and she was very stupid,” he said.
She went to the porch and waited for a cab. Fifteen minutes later, she was gone.
It was over, or so Hunter believed. But later in the week, he was in his kitchen when a neighbor appeared at his window, croaking warnings. “They’re going to come search your house,” the neighbor said. “They’re gonna come get you with a search warrant.”
In a preemptive strike, Hunter and his support system of Deborah, Cat, Semmes, and David McCumber (making another pep-talk visit) sprang into action, trying to rid the house of anything incriminating. “It was daunting to clean the place,” McCumber said. “We missed some things, as the world knows now. We missed some pot that Hunter thinks fell behind the fridge sometime in the seventies. But it was a heroic effort.”
Palmer’s husband was furious when his wife returned from Hunter’s in the wee hours, with tales of shoving and screaming and obvious drug use. She claimed Hunter had roughly twisted her left breast and nearly forced her into his hot tub. Palmer may have fertilized her tale a bit, but her husband went to the sheriff’s office to file a complaint. Since Braudis had been criticized for his handling of Hunter’s dispute with Floyd Watkins, he turned the case over to the district attorney’s office to avoid any further conflict-of-interest claims. On February 26, five days after Gail Palmer’s visit, six investigators conducted an eleven-hour search of Hunter’s home, finding small quantities of substances suspected of being cocaine and marijuana. Pending lab tests, the DA’s office didn’t file drug charges, but did charge Hunter with sexually assaulting Palmer. He posted $2,500 bail and was free to go home and fume.
To Hunter, this was the long-overdue punishment from the conservative faction in Pitkin County. He called it a “lifestyle bust,” and though he was furious, he still had a sense of humor about it. When told that the search of his home didn’t reveal much evidence of drugs or wrong-doing, Hunter smiled. “I don’t know if that helps my reputation or hurts it,” he told reporters.
For ninety-nine days, Hunter was unsure whether he would face jail time. If convicted of all charges, he could be sentenced to sixteen years in prison. On the advice of his attorney, he surrendered to authorities, allowing himself to be arrested and released. He later came to believe it was a bonehead move. Before filing the sexual-assault charges, the DA’s office hadn’t even bothered to interview the other people on the premises.
After having a few days to think about it, Palmer and her husband urged the DA to drop the charges. The district attorney decided to pursue the case anyway. At a hearing in April, Hunter was hit with five felony charges. At that point, he began to turn the tables. This wasn’t about an alleged sexual assault or a few seeds and stems left in the carpeting, he said. “This is a political trial,” Hunter declared. “I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. . . . I am looking forward to going to court.”
Hunter embraced martyrdom and actively solicited monies for defense funds. In England, his friend Ralph Steadman was sympathetic and even managed to persuade the Guardian to do a feature on Hunter’s troubles. Ralph created a drawing and sold prints to help raise money for Hunter. He advertised the defense fund in Punch, but still it wasn’t enough for Hunter, who berated his friend, “Do you think this is funny? Just another Gonzo joke? No, Ralph—this is deadly serious. They want to put me in prison.” Ralph felt his friendship tested and wrote back, offering an accounting of the five thousand pounds he had amassed on Hunter’s behalf. “Please don’t bitch at me,” he wrote. “I am a REAL friend of Hunter S. Thompson. Maybe you just need RICH friends.” Though he had worked hard to help Hunter, Ralph was embittered by the experience. “Our long twisted friendship faltered,” he recalled. “Not one word of thanks. That was never his style.”
Even as the case against him crumbled, Hunter grew more combative. “This is a Fourth Amendment case,” he wrote attorney Hal Haddon. “It is not about sex or drugs or violence. It is about police power.” The more the district attorney tried to skulk away from the case, the more apocalyptic Hunter became. His friends George Stranahan and Michael Solheim bought a full-page newspaper ad that said, “Today: the Doctor; Tomorrow: You.” (The text was by Thompson.) A carload of sex performers from the O’Farrell road-tripped from San Francisco to sashay around the Pitkin County Courthouse in bikinis, carrying signs of support.
The case of The People of the State of Colorado vs. Hunter S. Thompson was dismissed on May 30, 1990. The judge granted the request by Hunter’s attorneys to throw out the case, because of prosecutorial incompetence. The case should never have been brought, the judge said.
Outside on the courthouse steps, an exultant Hunter met the press. He was proud that he had stood up and changed the focus of the trial to Fourth Amendment issues. “We’ve grown accustomed to letting anyone with a badge walk over us,” Hunter said. “We are all, in all of our houses, a little safer than we were yesterday.”
The ugly incident provided Songs of the Doomed with its coda. Hunter was still tinkering with the manuscript, and Silberman was lathering for it. Eventually, during a rare Hunter nap, Cat took the manuscript down to Aspen and sent it off by Federal Express. Hunter was incensed, but a day later, when Silberman called and said he was sending a check, Hunter poured champagne for Cat, Semmes, and Deborah. Another deadline nightmare had ended. A few months later, he added a final author’s note: “I have changed constantly all my life, usually at top speed, and it has always been with the total, permanent finality of a thing fed into an atom smasher. My soul and my body chemistry are like that of a chameleon, a lizard with no pulse.”
The book was an assemblage of five decades of his life, interspersing fragments of his early writing with his dictated-to-Cat reminiscences. For the 1950s section, he pulled three chapters from Prince Jellyfish, sandwiched them between stories of Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, and his early days in New York. He used a portion of The Rum Diary in his sixties section, along with dictated reminiscences of Ken Kesey, the Hell’s Angels, and the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention.
He included excerpts from his best work in the seventies section, including the “high-water mark” passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that he considered some of his best writing. He used a shortened version of “Dance of the Doomed,” and threw in a memo to Jim Silberman about the ill-fated Death of the American Dream book. In the eighties section, he used letters, some Examiner columns that hadn’t made it into Generation of Swine, and his coverage of the Pulitzer divorce trial. He also used two chapters and an outline from The Silk Road, his story of lowlifes in the Florida Keys during the time of the Mariel boatlift, but his distance from that event is reflected in the text. He was not part of it, only a peripheral witness, and one constant in all of his writing was his need to be in the center of the maelstrom.
The last section of the book, called “Welcome to the Nineties,” began with one of the false editor’s notes he’d been using since his days at Eglin Air Force Base. Writing in the guise of his publisher, he explained,
Publishing Dr. Thompson has never been an easy job, but this recent episode was over the line and sent demoralizing shock waves through the whole organization, which for many years has stood behind him like a tall and solid rock. We lived in his shadow and endured his terrible excesses—clinging always to the promise that he would sooner or later make sense of his original assignment: The Death of the American Dream. . . .
So it was with a sense of shock, fear, and betrayal that we received the news that he was about to go to prison for a sudden, unexplainable outburst of cheap crimes, misdemeanors, and stupid felony loss leaders that made no sense at all. And it made people angry.
Tom Wolfe, after all, had never disgraced his publisher. . . .
Hunter dedicated the book to David McCumber (“the doctor of deadlines”) and to Catherine Sabonis-Chafee, “My Top Gun, who did most of the work and endured more real fear and loathing in ninety-nine days than most people see in a lifetime and laughed like a warrior in the constant shadow of doom, jail, and pure craziness . . . well, well, well. . . . The infamous ‘woman called Cat’ turned out to have solid gold balls.”
Cat’s internship was finished. Hunter wanted her to stay, to help on his next book. That was his usual reaction when he worked well with someone. “I just couldn’t even consider it, because there was a difference between doing what you have to do to kind of get through something, and choosing it knowing what it is, and like knowing all of it,” she said. She’d had enough, and her boyfriend’s family was building a home in the Bahamas. She needed escape from working and living with Hunter.
“For a couple of years, I was fairly traumatized by it,” she said. “It can take years and years to get to a point of any kind of reconciliation with him, because he could be a very abusive person, and yet he also had this incredible sense of people. Within minutes of being around somebody, he could bore right into their essence.
“I was just doing it and I liked doing it, and I never really considered leaving. I was just there, in some ranch somewhere in Colorado and very isolated. When I think about it, it’s pretty frightening. I never regretted going, but once I knew what it was, there was no way I was putting myself in that situation again. There was no sum of money that would have made it worthwhile.”
Cat had kept a journal, part of her internship requirements. Most of the jottings were notes from conversations, some doodles, and general things-to-do lists. “He stole it from me as I was leaving,” she said. “He said I had no right to it and that he didn’t trust my ‘loyalty’ enough for me to have it. A couple of times, in the years after, he sent me photocopies of single pages, just to remind me that it still existed.”
Sitting on a Bahamian beach that summer, she didn’t look back on the six months with Hunter as a nightmare. “I was fascinated by the chance to watch somebody this brilliant and to be able to watch him, to be right there all the time. That made it kind of worth it.”
Cat was decompressing, relaxing in a still-under-construction beach house with her boyfriend, when the phone rang. Someone was trying reach Hunter.
“He had forwarded his calls,” she said. “I was answering the phone for him in the Bahamas.”