I think it was Oscar Wilde that said you destroy the thing
that you love. It’s the other way around—
what you love destroys you.
—George Plimpton, 1996
Cheryl Frymire came from a family farm in Pennsylvania, not far from Jersey Shore, where Hunter had spent a miserable month as a reporter in 1957. She grew up in a close-knit family, but decided to search for adventure in Aspen, where she worked in a travel agency and then in a four-star restaurant, waiting on Kennedys and movie stars. But she wanted something less snooty and switched jobs, landing at Hunter’s favorite restaurant, the Woody Creek Tavern, in 1986. She wore a prairie skirt and a high-necked sweater her first day, and Hunter, who ate at the tavern most days, was immediately suspicious, thinking she might be an undercover narcotics agent. For her part, she didn’t have a clue who he was. He was just that weird guy who sat at the table in the corner, underneath the mounted buffalo head.
“When they introduced me to him, I thought he had gotten struck by lightning because of the way he talked,” she said.
The Woody Creek Tavern was a small restaurant and post office in a trailer park, made from logs and with a Coca-Cola sign on the roof. Inside, the walls were festooned with pictures, bumper stickers, newspaper clippings, and funky local art. The tavern served salads, burgers, ribs, chicken, Mexican food, and other typical bar fare.
“He’d come in every day after getting his mail at the post office next door,” Frymire recalled, “and sort through his mail at his table in the corner, under the buffalo. People told me he was a little bit difficult, and sometimes he would just want to be alone, and sometimes you just had to learn to be able to cope with the mood swings. You could tell if he was in a good mood and if he wanted to chat.”
Though Frymire’s conservative churchgoing ways didn’t seem to gibe with Hunter’s up-against-the-wall rebellion, they became friends. “He had a pretty tender spot for me, and I for him,” she said. “I had to earn his respect.”
Over their twenty years of friendship, Hunter frequently hosted Frymire at Owl Farm and asked her to sit with him at the restaurant while he went through his mail. “Look here, Cheryl,” he’d say, looking over a page in a lingerie catalog. “Let me buy you a few things.” The other servers shied away from him because of his elaborate, complex orders and his constant demand for a variety of condiments.
Even his appetites were theatrical. “He would come in and get a tall whiskey and a malted beer. He liked drinking these shots that we made with Bailey’s Irish Cream and Jameson’s Whiskey called a ‘Biff.’ He would want an extra spicy bloody mary, and in the summer he wanted gin and lemonade too and wanted all these things on the table at the same time.”
He never told Frymire about his miserable experience in Jersey Shore, but he often asked about her life back on the farm and her father. Though they never met, they passed greetings through Cheryl. “How’s the doctor?” her father asked on the phone. Hunter responded by sending off autographed books to Pennsylvania. “Cheryl’s father is Amish,” he’d say, if there was an audience in the tavern. He wasn’t, but it was Hunter’s little joke.
“He knew that I had a conservative side to me, and he appreciated that,” she said. “He honored the fact that I was a Christian.” Now and then, he asked her to read the Bible to him, especially passages from the Book of Revelation. “I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language,” Hunter wrote. “I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.”
Frymire was pianist at the First Baptist Church in Aspen and performed hymns during services.
“I want to hear you sing,” Hunter told her. “What would they do if I came?”
“They’d probably ask you to leave because you’d be smoking,” she told him.
She also was afraid some of the holier-than-thous would shun him. One parishioner had told her, “How can you tolerate him? He is despicable.” Frymire responded, “He is a human being who needs love, and I love him.”
Hunter realized he would create too much commotion if he showed up at church, so Frymire recorded herself singing her original songs as well as some classic hymns, including “Amazing Grace.” He snapped the cassettes into his Walkman and listened when he was alone. Frymire believed that Hunter was spiritual but masked it.
“I secretly worship God,” Hunter wrote near the end of his life. “He had the good judgment to leave me alone to write a few genuine black-on-white pages by myself.”
Hunter made a lot of promises about work. On the Songs of the Doomed dust jacket, he said his next book would be 99 Days: The Trial of Hunter S. Thompson, but after devoting the last section of Songs of the Doomed to the trial, there wasn’t a lot left to say.
He also said that his next major work would be his “long-awaited sex book.” With his usual sense of approaching apocalypse, he announced, “I am now working on my final statement—Polo Is My Life, which is a finely muted saga of sex, treachery, and violence in the nineties, which also solves the murder of John F. Kennedy.” It was eventually scheduled for publication, but delayed . . . and delayed.
There were the other lost books along the way, from Prince Jellyfish and The Rum Diary up through Guts Ball, The Silk Road, and The Night Manager. Only the fragments in Songs of the Doomed were published in his lifetime.
He did publish Screwjack in 1991, a limited edition of three hundred numbered copies signed by Hunter, produced by a Santa Barbara publisher. The book, which sold for $300, collected three short pieces in an exceedingly slim volume. Many members of Hunter’s longtime fan base whined that the cost put the book well out of reach and was an attempt to appeal to the “rich friends” Ralph Steadman had warned about, the movie stars who had begun to cuddle up to Hunter as their eccentric mascot.
But perhaps Hunter thought two of the stories were too brutal for mass consumption. “Mescalito” was simply a memoir of his first experience taking mescaline, when he was holed up in the Continental Hyatt House in Hollywood on assignment for Pageant. (It had already appeared in Songs of the Doomed.) “Death of a Poet” began as something comic wrapped around two of Hunter’s obsessions, betting on pro football games and inflatable dolls. It ended in ghastly tragedy as the central character, F. X. Leach (another favorite pseudonym of Hunter’s) committed suicide by sucking the metallic popsicle. The title story was odd and disturbing, with an undercurrent of bestiality. Though it marked a bold step outside of the usual Hunter S. Thompson fare, he kept it tethered to his persona by assigning the works (in his introduction) to Raoul Duke, signaling that the real Uncle Duke was back and that it would not be pretty. He still smarted over William F. Buckley’s review of The Great Shark Hunt, in which he had postulated that Hunter had no interest in sex. In part, Screwjack was written to refute that notion. Once, after listening to it read aloud in his kitchen, Hunter chortled at the conclusion of the story, “Let’s see what Bill Buckley thinks about that.”
Screwjack was obviously not intended for a mass audience. The stories were meant to provoke and didn’t enhance Hunter’s nearly nonexistent reputation as a writer of fiction. When it came time for real money, Hunter turned to his meal ticket. Though he’d written sporadically for Jann Wenner in the last several years, he felt indebted to him. Wenner had assigned reporter Mike Sager to write about his 1990 trial, producing two major pieces for the magazine and drawing solicitations for Hunter’s defense fund. He could not allow this great favor to go unrewarded.
In early 1992, Hunter published “Fear and Loathing in Elko” in Rolling Stone, but the story had nothing to do with the political conference. Instead, it was a long fantasy in which Hunter recalled wild nights in Endicott’s Motel with the controversial Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Thomas’s confirmation hearings dragged through the fall of 1991 with a long inquiry into Anita Hill’s charges that he sexually harassed her and tried to get her to watch pornographic films. It was a story made for Hunter’s brand of political commentary, but he chose to present it as a tall tale. When Raoul Duke (resurrected as narrator of the story) comes across Thomas in a horrific automobile accident, the judge is in the company of two prostitutes. Eventually, Hunter and the judge ended up with F. X. Leach, the doomed figure from “Death of a Poet,” but in this mutation of the story, Leach did not commit suicide.
The Elko piece was Hunter’s longest work for Rolling Stone in years and one of his most sustained attempts at fiction. A sentimental tone crept into the article and hinted he was in the mood for a full reconciliation with Wenner (he’d addressed the piece to him as a letter). It lacked the astonishing wordplay of Hunter’s earlier work and had a feeling of having been phoned in. Though he did not want to return to Rolling Stone full-time, Hunter did make himself available and, as a presidential election year neared, knew what the editor would ask.
Hunter was a political junkie, but had avoided becoming the new Theodore H. White. “I would have been locked into national politics as a way of life,” Hunter said. “There’s no way you can play that kind of Washington Wizard role from a base in Woody Creek. I’d have had to move to Washington, or at least to New York . . . and, Jesus, life is too short for that kind of volunteer agony.” Hunter could shoot guns and blow up appliances and stalk his property naked in Woody Creek. Those activities were generally frowned upon in New York or D.C.
American politics had changed since Hunter’s 1972 campaign coverage. The primaries that Hunter and Timothy Crouse had covered so doggedly were much less important by 1992. The political conventions, which had real excitement in the sixties, were reduced to overproduced coronations by 1992. After a brief frenzy of campaigning in the late winter, former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was set to be the Democratic nominee, facing incumbent President George Bush, who had gone from grandpa-like popularity in the aftermath of 1991’s Gulf War to flat-lining by the next year. A chimp could have beaten Bush in the 1992 election, and there was a chimp in the race: eccentric Texas billionaire Ross Perot. The major question of the 1992 presidential campaign was how and to what extent Perot’s third-party bid would gum up the works.
The most participation that Wenner arranged for his star reporter’s contribution to campaign coverage was a July 31 group interview with Clinton, clearly on the verge of becoming the nation’s first rock ’n’ roll president. The editor secured the back room at Doe’s Eat Place in Little Rock, and Wenner brought Hunter together with other Rolling Stone heavyweights. William Greider, one of 1972’s “boys on the bus” had become Rolling Stone’s political editor, who crafted thoughtful essays that probably shot over the head of much of the readership. Also at the table was the Rolling Stone contributor who had been filling the cultural-commentary void left by Hunter: P. J. O’Rourke, a conservative satirist who’d become famous while writing for the National Lampoon. His vicious pieces in the eighties mocked the image of the ugly American so grim thirty years before and provided a refined version of Gonzo for the Reagan years. Hunter never let politics stand in the way of friendship, and though some longtime Rolling Stone writers bitched about O’Rourke’s conservatism, but Hunter often said that O’Rourke, Tom Wolfe, and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times were the best writers in American journalism. At one point, Hunter packed up a pair of his sunglasses and sent them to Dowd, with a note that said, “You wear these—I’m no longer the star.”
At Doe’s, Hunter was the first to sit, and so he chose a chair at what he figured was the far end of the table, expecting Clinton to sit at the other end. “But no,” Hunter said. “The creepy bastard quickly sat down right next to me, about two feet away, and fixed me with a sleepy-looking stare that made me very uneasy. His eyes had narrowed to slits, and at first I thought he was dozing off.”
Greider was the serious, hard-nosed political journalist in the room, and he carried the weight of the interview. Wenner wanted his magazine to back a winner, and he fawned over the candidate. O’Rourke, as a Republican, was there for comic relief, and Hunter was a largely mute presence. He was not enamored of Clinton, because of the candidate’s cop-out response when asked about his marijuana use in the sixties. Instead of answering “of course,” as any honest member of his generation would have, Clinton said, “I didn’t inhale,” then further embarrassed himself by blaming asthma for his inability to enjoy dope. Dishonesty infuriated Hunter. Hunter also was wary because he still felt the burn from the 1976 Carter “endorsement” cover line Wenner had slapped on his article, and he could tell Wenner was giddy over Clinton.
As they sat around the table, Hunter picked up a strange, distant attitude from Clinton. Clinton clearly wanted nothing to do with Hunter. “He treated me like a roach from the get-go,” Hunter said later.
“He is utterly unswervingly sincere and genuine,” Greider said of Hunter. “He went down there [to Arkansas] believing that we were making the transaction to deliver the Rolling Stone vote to Bill Clinton in exchange for certain things. He was crushed when Clinton dissed him, as he did, quite deliberately. Clinton had come prepared to make it very clear that he was not with Hunter Thompson on drugs and police. Hunter knew that and was really hurt.”
Clinton was the cover boy of Rolling Stone’s special college issue in September 1992, and, like a mini-Rashoman, Greider, O’Rourke, and Hunter all gave their versions of dining at Doe’s with Clinton. Wenner published a full-page appeal to readers, urging them to vote for the first presidential candidate of their generation now that the “rare possibility of real change has arrived.” Greider’s piece was the serious political analysis, O’Rourke was the lovable opposition, and Hunter was world-weary and ever wary, punctuating a number of sentences with “bubba,” a nod to the good-old-boyness of the candidate.
Hunter was not a fan of the Democratic candidate. “He thought Bill Clinton was a whore-hopper,” Douglas Brinkley said. A man serious about his presidential candidacy should behave better. But despite these reservations about Clinton, Hunter did not refrain from announcing that he intended to vote for him:
Let’s face it, Bubba. The main reason I’ll vote for Clinton is George Bush, and it has been that way from the start. . . . There is no way around it (for me) and no reason to apologize for it. George Bush is a dangerously failed president and half-bright top-level nerd, who has spent the last four years avoiding grocery stores and gas stations while he tried to keep tabs on the disastrous fallout from the orgy and greed and short-selling that was the “Reagan Revolution.”
Biographers descended on Hunter in 1992. I published my book on his work in 1991. In the following year, three publishers invested in books on Hunter aimed at a mass audience. E. Jean Carroll was a former Indiana University cheerleader who became a contributing editor at Esquire and sex-advice columnist for Elle. She also published several books, including Female Difficulties, A Dog in Heat Is a Hot Dog, and Mr. Right, Right Now: How a Smart Woman Can Land Her Dream Man in Six Weeks. Carroll’s book Hunter was an adventurous romp through his life, presented tongue-in-cheek as the dissertation of her alter ego, Laetitia Snap, a scientist supposedly studying Owl Farm peacocks. In Carroll’s fanciful episodes, Hunter imprisoned Tishy Snap, who ended up bearing his child. Even the chapters that alternated with the Tishy Snap episodes were unorthodox: huge chunks of interviews with no narration of his life. She drew, however, several terrific stories from Hunter’s old friends.
Paul Perry’s Fear and Loathing and Peter Whitmer’s When the Going Gets Weird were more conventional biographies, though each had major gaps in Hunter history. Both writers had Hunter connections; Perry had assigned the 1980 Honolulu marathon story, while editing Running magazine, and Whitmer profiled Hunter in 1984 for Saturday Review.
Hunter was horrified by this sort of attention, which he considered an invasion of privacy. He asked friends not to speak to Carroll, and many did not. Several of those who did came to regret it.
Laila Nabulsi said she and Hunter regarded Perry’s Fear and Loathing as “a real betrayal. It’s kind of the understanding that what happens in the kitchen stays in the kitchen. You don’t come in unless you say, ‘I’m going to write about this’ and then we never would have let him stay in the house.”
Whitmer’s book came last. Although it was the most detailed, chronicling several generations of Hunter’s ancestors, it got the least attention. Much of it concentrated on alcohol and drug stories.
“He hated all those unauthorized biographies,” Laila said, and he resented his friends who cooperated with the writers, no matter how unwittingly. Perry even managed to get a cover illustration out of the much-too-kind Ralph Steadman, since Perry had worked with both of them on what became The Curse of Lono. “You have caused me a lot of trouble,” Hunter wrote Ralph. He was furious about “these cheap, soon-to-be-buried gossip books.”
Carroll’s book dwelled on Hunter’s personal life and sexual history and shined a light into areas he’d have rather kept in the dark or saved until he felt like writing about them. For a man whose work rose directly from his life, it wasn’t just that he felt the biographers invaded his privacy; they also co-opted his best material.
The harmonic convergence of publicity made Hunter withdraw, and he became almost gun-shy with interviewers.
Ralph tried to get back into Hunter’s good graces by arranging for him to write about the royal family for the Observer. After much negotiation, Ralph lured Hunter and his new girlfriend, Nicole Meyer, to London in September 1992. But the trip was miserable. Hunter suffered back pain, and the resulting article, which appeared just in time for the new year, had to be coaxed from him and read as if it had been dictated and linked with paragraphs from the editor. There was no face-to-face encounter with the royal family, instead, as expected, a lot of struggling to do the assignment and get the story. He believed that the British were out to snatch him, flog him, and throw him into a dungeon. A long sidebar by Ralph attempted to explain Hunter to English readers. Though he had devout English fans, Hunter’s pure American humor did not always travel well.
But Hunter did not travel well himself, at least not on the campaign trail. He covered the 1992 campaign mostly by watching television. Now that CNN had been loosed upon the world, Hunter felt plugged in; the all-news network negated any need to be on the bus, or jogging after the candidates. Someone else could do that. Thanks to the fax machine, the successor to his Mojo Wire, Hunter could reach out and touch almost anyone, especially CNN vice president Ed Turner, as well as James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, the brain trust running the Clinton campaign. Between CNN and the fax, Hunter burrowed deeper into the role of reactor rather than reporter. He was unenthusiastic about the campaign and the candidate. “It’s almost embarrassing to talk about Clinton as if he were important,” Hunter wrote. “I’d almost prefer Nixon. I’d say Clinton is every bit as corrupt as Nixon, but a lot smoother.”
Aside from the trip to the United Kingdom, Hunter made one other major trip in the fall—home to Louisville, to see his mother and to speak at a literacy festival. He threatened to move to Paraguay if George Bush was reelected. “It’s been 12 years of the most oppressive, red neck, stupid . . . greedhead politicians in this country,” he told the audience.
Although he announced his intention to vote for Clinton, Hunter did not sound like much of a fan. “He is the Willy Loman of Generation X, a traveling salesman from Arkansas who has the loyalty of a lizard with its tail broken off and the midnight taste of a man who’s double date with the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart.”
On March 25, 1993, Hunter’s youngest brother, Jim, died of complications from AIDS.
Hunter and Jim had been distant for years. Because of the twelve-year age difference, they had never really been close, though Hunter had written Jim frequently as Jim played the roulette game of being draft fodder during the Vietnam War. He’d brought Jim out to Owl Farm, hoping to turn him into a Hunter clone, but it didn’t take. Even after Jim wrote his heart-wrenching letter to his big brother confessing his sexual preference, there had been no talk about it. Because he was so much younger than Hunter and Davison, Jim had been left to care for their mother, whose alcoholism incapacitated her and forced him to be her caregiver. The obligation put a strain on his schooling, and he was in and out of the University of Kentucky. Eventually, Virginia went to the Episcopal Church Home on the outskirts of Louisville, a relatively spectacular hotel-like institution. Hunter and brother Davison footed the bill.
Jim drifted to California, where he could live openly as a gay man, residing at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco, where his famous brother had witnessed the madness and majesty of the midsixties. He held a number of jobs, and friends said he was at his happiest while working as a clerk in a health-food store.
He shared leftist politics but little else with Hunter and came to believe that his brother avoided him because of his sexuality. As Hunter grew more famous and made money off of his lifestyle and image, through Where the Buffalo Roam and countless film options on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Jim’s resentment mounted. He eventually criticized Hunter for betraying the liberal ideal of tolerance. Hunter, he said, couldn’t even tolerate his own brother’s sexual identity. After Jim’s death, however, Hunter would occasionally list the government’s lack of support for AIDS research as part of the litany of failures by the Reagan and Bush administrations.
Douglas Brinkley earned his doctorate in American diplomatic history at Georgetown University and settled into a comfortable academic career, establishing himself as a respected history professor as a very young man, with his biography of former secretary of state Dean Acheson and a variety of interests that squeezed eclectic until it screamed for mercy. Brinkley became an extremely popular professor at Hofstra University, around an hour’s drive from New York City, and created a class called “An American Odyssey” that he took on the road in 1993. He loaded up twenty-seven college students on two buses and took them from the Long Island campus all the way to the West Coast, criss-crossing the country, meeting writers in their natural habitats, and gorging on American popular culture. It fit with his belief that history was best experienced outside the classroom. He wasn’t one to publish his work in monographs, merely to impress other scholars. He was emphatic about reaching a mainstream audience.
Woody Creek was on the itinerary. Brinkley had not met Hunter before, but he’d written and asked whether the class could visit. Hunter said he would gladly entertain the young professor and his twenty-seven charges. He instructed Brinkley to park the buses at the Woody Creek Tavern and order some cheeseburgers. He’d be down.
Hunter made an entrance for the students, driving up in a jeep and carrying in a ice-rattling tumbler of Chivas Regal. He took measure of the audience, seizing on one student whose hair was dyed blue. “You’d better be good,” Hunter said. “Otherwise you come off as a rank asshole with blue hair.” The student was momentarily taken aback, then said, “I’m good.” Hunter grabbed him by the neck and said, “We’ll see about that, Sonny Boy.”
Later, in private, Hunter gave Brinkley some classroom management advice: “Slap the little bastards around. Take no crap.” Brinkley, who thought of Hunter as a counterculture peace-love-understanding god, was taken aback. Still, he took up Hunter’s invitation to bring all the students up to Owl Farm for “refreshments.” The highlight of the visit came when Hunter ordered the students to line up with their copies of his books. One by one, on his order, they leaned their books against a tree as he “autographed” them with a .45-caliber slug. In assembly-line fashion, the students were treated to Hunter’s unusual show of affection.
Late that night, before the bus pulled out of Woody Creek, Hunter again took Brinkley aside. Obviously, he liked the young man, who wasn’t pretentious and stuffy. He asked Brinkley to help him on his next book, the big book about the 1992 campaign that was turning into the diary of Hunter’s love-hate relationship with American politics. Brinkley agreed.
Brinkley and his busload of students drove away, but the visit sparked a creative relationship that was to result in the resuscitation of Hunter’s literary career.
Unfortunately, that resuscitation had to wait until after the completion of Hunter’s political book, Better Than Sex. Although most of the book was about the 1992 campaign, it was not under the deadline gun of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Hunter did not put the extra time to good use. Brinkley, coming in midway through the book, couldn’t help either. Even friends realized it was a lesser work. Since The Curse of Lono, his books had become pastiches of previously published material. “The books changed from original prose to reedited columns and letters,” Braudis said. “People began to accuse him of not being able to write anything longer than a column.”
Better Than Sex was Hunter’s most inconsistent book; much of it was made up of faxes and photocopies. Though amusing, it was also the least substantial work he produced, reading like an unedited diary. His comments were punctuated too often with ho-ho’s and Bubbas. His fans didn’t seem to mind; they lined up butt-to-bellybutton to buy the thing.
The story of the 1992 campaign and President Clinton’s first year in office was bookended with a short political memoir at the beginning and his obituary for Richard Nixon at the end, one of the best things he ever wrote. The Nixon piece saved Better Than Sex from mediocrity.
Nixon had been Hunter’s muse during his greatest days as a political reporter, and the old man’s death on April 22, 1994, came as Hunter was wrapping up the book. Once again, Nixon came through for him, providing the perfect ending for his book on politics. “Hunter hated Nixon so much that he loved him,” Brinkley said.
Hunter and Ed Bradley had come to New Orleans for the Jazz and Heritage Festival (Hunter had a book signing; Bradley was just there for music). They hooked up with Brinkley, who had just moved to the University of New Orleans as the heir apparent to historian and writer Stephen Ambrose’s throne as head of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies. The four of them went on a bar ramble. Hunter stuck his head into the St. Charles Tavern and yelled, “Nixon died! Anyone want acid?” Ambrose, whose life had been haunted by Nixon as well, had written a three-volume biography of the man. Hunter and Ambrose got noisily drunk, but Hunter worried that he would not be able to rise to the occasion. “I have to out-Mencken Mencken,” Hunter told Brinkley.
Hunter had always respected H. L. Mencken, especially Mencken’s obituary for William Jennings Bryan in 1925. Mencken had been with Bryan (and Clarence Darrow) in Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of schoolteacher John Scopes, charged with teaching evolution. Darrow defended Scopes’s right of free speech, and Bryan defended the law requiring the teaching of biblical truth. Mencken had overtly mocked Bryan while he was alive and so when Bryan keeled over a couple of days after the trial ended, he was not going to turn hypocrite and praise in death a man he thought was a fool in life. As he wrote in the American Mercury, “There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, and that death found him there. The man felt at home in such scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet.” Mencken, long a forceful critic of the South (and most other places; he once said that anyone not living in his hometown of Baltimore was “camping out”), later was revered by generations of Southerners who appreciated his kick in the ass to their intellectual movement in the mid-twentieth century.
Hunter called the Mencken obituary “one of the most hideous things ever written about a dead man in the history of American letters.” Reading it the first time was shocking for Hunter. “I had learned in school that Bryan was a genuine hero of history, but after reading Mencken’s brutal obit, I knew in my heart that he was, in truth, a scoundrel.”
Nixon’s death provided Hunter with his “moment.” While even Nixon’s old opponents and political antonyms praised him, Hunter could not restrain himself. If you could not kick the man when he was down, when could you kick him? He wanted to stand over his grave until he was sure he was dead.
Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing—a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. . . .
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw on his pants every morning. . . .
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
But Hunter was not thinking only about Nixon’s death.
The about-the-author bio on the dust jacket of Better Than Sex ended with this line: “He will be gone by the year 2000.”
The girlfriends and the assistants came and went. The assistants were always young and beautiful, and Hunter expected that they would eventually become girlfriends. If it didn’t happen, he’d shrug and go on.
Deborah ran his life: paid the bills, kept Hunter on point, bought the groceries, made phone calls, cooked the dinner, kept the assistants fed and housed.
He never stopped writing. A typical evening might start around nine o’clock, but he wouldn’t actually start writing until four or five in the morning. He filled the time in between by amusing the gaggle of friends in his living room, by driving around in his convertible, playing pranks on friends, waking up other friends with long-distance phone calls, and listening to music—his fuel—at loud volume. At the end of the “play” portion of the evening, usually after his audience of friends had gone home, he would drive to a friend’s house, quietly let himself in, and take a long, luxurious swim in his indoor swimming pool while the owner slept. Relaxed, Hunter would get into his bathrobe, drive back to Owl Farm, sit behind the typewriter in the kitchen, and then write. It was not a schedule for a man deep into the cliffs of middle age. But Hunter would never admit that he was aging. He still lived as if he were twenty-two.
He traveled. He spoke on campuses and, occasionally, at semiserious symposiums. His “next book,” Polo Is My Life, was overdue to Random House. He published tantalizing snatches of it in Rolling Stone, but it lingered unfinished. “He had a crush on an exotic woman in the Aspen polo crowd who was married to a very rich man and Hunter thought he could seduce her and they would run away and ‘live their lives like dolphins,’” Wayne Ewing said. “But, alas the babe wasn’t going to wear the Gonzo brand and instead said, ‘Hunter, I can’t run off with you. Who would take care of my ponies? Polo is my life.’ I always tried to get Hunter to write that story—the autobiographical one about his infatuation with a beautiful woman, and a sport that symbolized wealth and power. It was the Gatsby in him. But he never would go there, except to tell the story of the brush off line that became a great title.”
He contributed more for Rolling Stone (book reviews, the Nixon obit, a denunciation of Timothy Leary) in the early nineties than he had in all of the years since his 1976 campaign piece. Other than the Nixon obit and “Fear and Loathing in Elko,” most of it was seen as lower-level self-imitation. He was, indeed, repeating himself.
“It got to be pretty formulaic,” Greider said of Hunter’s work. “He would cover different ground, but it would end up with similar rhythms or similar shticks. He was not quite as convincing. It became less compelling.”
It had never been easy, but Hunter had the gift of making his work appear so. His legions of stoned admirers probably really thought he took a hundred hits of acid before sitting down to write. But the craftsmanship those close to him saw as he agonized over his words spoke to how much went into making it look like a breeze.
“He really worked hard,” Brinkley said of Hunter’s work in the sixties and early seventies. “It’s unbelievable, the amount of work he did, the thinking and trying to make each sentence count. He wasn’t eating acid then. He was eating speed—that was his drug of choice, to keep him writing all night. He was not as much fun as he painted himself to be. He was a work beast, and it shows in the quality of anything he wrote in that period.”
But then came fame, and cocaine, and the suffocating persona he had created. In the eighties and nineties, it became even harder to write. “Part of his self-loathing was that his drinking and drugging and embracing fame cost him the ability to lose that gift.”
None of this mattered to his ever-multiplying fans, millions of whom were still unborn when Fear and Loathing Las Vegas was written. Tattoos of the Gonzo double-thumbed fist showed up on college-student calves; his books were on reading lists; new fans as well as old salivated over those rare morsels thrown their way. Known for his antics and style as much as for his writing, he was still a Halloween costume favorite. Finally, he had attained some wealth and could live comfortably. He had close friendships with his neighbors, including Ed Bradley and actors Jack Nicholson and Don Johnson. He was a friend of and influence on a generation of musicians and writers, including Jimmy Buffett, Warren Zevon, and Carl Hiaasen, who was writing what could be called Gonzo fiction, with his outrageous plots and grand bacchanal punishments handed down to greedheads and land rapers. Then there was the college-age generation of actors who embraced Hunter and became his disciples—Sean Penn, John Cusack, Matt Dillon, and others, many of whom pipe-dreamed of somehow translating his work to the screen. “Aspen had this reverse celebrity worship,” Bob Braudis said. “That’s one of the reasons the Hollywood celebrities elected to come here. And Hunter, being a celebrity in the journalistic and literary world, was a magnet to them.”
Hunter busied himself by designing, with Ralph Steadman, now forgiven, the label for the Flying Dog series of microbrews produced by his neighbor George Stranahan. With another neighbor, actor Don Johnson, he dreamed up the concept of what eventually became Johnson’s CBS television series, Nash Bridges. He remained a dedicated correspondent, though his letters mostly came beeping through the phone wires as faxes. He never fully embraced computers or the world of electronic mail. In fact, as he readily admitted in interviews, he was surprised to still be alive.
“I set out from a young age to live as short as I possibly could,” he had told Australian actor Jack Thompson (no relation) in a 1989 interview in Studio for Men. Jack Thompson accused Hunter of being more a romantic than a cynic. “I think you went straight to the point there,” Hunter said. “To be a romantic and, you know what people say . . . only the good die young. Well, where does that leave me?”
Brinkley, who came to know Hunter extremely well, observed him at work and play and knew that Hunter had produced a wonderful literary creation—the Hunter Figure, he called it—that was at odds with the real man. Most intelligent readers knew that drug-gobbling Raoul Duke was a fictional creation . . . didn’t they? Brinkley reiterated that Hunter hated sloppy drunks and those people who felt they needed to be inebriated to approach him. “You don’t live into your sixties doing as much heavy drug and alcohol lifestyle as Hunter’s had and still be around if you don’t know that there’s a limit somewhere,” Brinkley said. “Hunter doesn’t go over the cliff. He races a hundred miles an hour to the cliff, slams on the brakes and stops with the wheels dangling over, but he doesn’t go off.”
Still, as Hunter entered his later years, he was uncomfortable being enshrined as some kind of totem, even for the counterculture. Hunter in the midnineties was adrift, believing that his writing had been of the first rank but was not as respected as it should be. “We’re just a very small band of brothers,” he told Jack Thompson, ticking off Conrad, Twain, Coleridge, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. “I like Hemingway, but I kind of worry about being identified with him.”
Hunter’s career and reputation were about to be brought back to life by three new acquaintances: a poet, an actor, and a historian.
Ron Whitehead was a poet and professor at the University of Louisville who had organized a series of insomniacathons (performances of music and poetry) all around the country. Deeply influenced by Allen Ginsberg and the other Beat poets, he was invited to New York University in June 1995 to be part of the Jack Kerouac Conference. Tall and lean with more than a touch of the lunatic poet, Whitehead had always taken pride in his counterculture credentials. In the late sixties, he’d worked in one of the few headshops in Lexington, and certainly the only place in Kentucky then where Rolling Stone was kept in stock and where ingesting hallucinogens was part of the job description. He’d always been proud to be a product of the same ground that produced Hunter S. Thompson.
Hunter was also on the Kerouac panel that night, and Whitehead finally had the chance to meet him. When they stood together after the presentation, comparing notes on Kentucky, fans streamed up to Hunter to present him with pills and joints. “He pocketed the joints,” Whitehead said, “then turned his handful of pills up to his mouth, emptied them there, and washed them down with his favorite drink, Chivas. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be around him when all of those pills kicked in. I knew then that yes, by God, he was a pure-blooded and bloodied Kentucky boy.”
Hunter asked Whitehead to look in on his mother, now in her eighties. He also issued an open invitation for Whitehead and his family to come see him at Owl Farm sometime. When Whitehead returned to Kentucky, he called Virginia Thompson, who said she would enjoy the visit better if he brought along a bottle of whiskey. Though she vowed not to talk about Hunter, Hunter was practically all she talked about. “Visiting with Virginia was like visiting with Hunter,” Whitehead said. “Virginia was a tenth-degree smart ass.”
Her room was as comfortable as a fine hotel suite, and the walls were a museum of her family: a painting of Hunter and Davison as boys, with Davison holding a toy airplane and Hunter fondling a book; portraits of the Hunter-Sandy-Juan family in happier times, of Jim, and of Davison and his family in Ohio. Clearly, she was proud of her boys.
Not long after meeting Virginia, Whitehead displayed his work at the Louisville Free Public Library, where Virginia had worked. The politically inspired exhibit provoked a death threat written on the wall of the downtown post office: RON WHITEHEAD WILL DIE ON AUGUST 21, 1995. A confluence of events, including the death threat, postexhibit exhaustion, and the recent death of his grandmother, inspired Whitehead to hit the road with his family, visiting Hunter sooner rather than later.
Hunter welcomed the Whiteheads’ midnight arrival by blaring a recording over the countryside of what Whitehead said was “a bear killing and eating what sounded like a baby.” Deborah Fuller invited the Whiteheads into the command post kitchen, where Hunter saluted them from his perch. After the usual whiskey and pleasantries, Hunter asked Whitehead to read the Nixon obituary, and smiled appreciatively as he heard his words read by a performance artist/poet. Hunter wanted to send a copy to former vice-presidential candidate Sargent Shriver, who Hunter said was the only person to comment favorably on the piece. As Hunter started to autograph a copy with a silver Sharpie, the marker jammed.
Hunter began screaming, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! What’s wrong?”
Deborah rushed over, stood behind him, and draped her arms across his chest, holding him and saying, “It’s okay, Hunter, everything’s okay.” Eventually he quieted, pulled another marker from the kitchen drawer and finished signing the work. Simple frustrations could rouse Hunter’s fury.
The visit was short but eventful. Jack Nicholson called three times, furious that Hunter had broken a window at his home and tossed in firecrackers, scaring the bejesus out of his visiting daughters. Hunter watched a basketball playoff game on which he stood to win a lot of money, as he usually did with his sports bets. (“Hunter would bet on a frog race,” Whitehead said.) They discussed firearms, and Deborah stood nearby all along, looking out for Hunter, watching for a spike in his mood.
As Whitehead pointed the car west toward San Francisco and a visit with poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, he thought about Hunter. Not only was he Kentucky’s greatest living contribution to literature; he was “one of the best damn writers of all time, bar none.”
Yet back home, it seemed that Kentucky didn’t appreciate him. With each mile, Whitehead vowed to do something about it.
By the time actor Johnny Depp came into Hunter’s life, he had carved out an unusual career playing roles in art-house films as well as blockbusters. Handsome and with teen-idol credentials, he could have easily chosen parts that played off of his good looks. But he masked his features under the heavy makeup of Edward Scissorhands or in the guise of cross-dressing filmmaker Ed Wood. Though only in his early thirties, he had already worked with Marlon Brando and Al Pacino and directors such as Tim Burton and Lasse Halstrom.
As a Kentucky boy, Depp was aware of Hunter Thompson but had not met him. He was visiting Aspen in December 1995, trying to avoid the crowds of Hollywood types who descended during the holidays for ski vacations. A friend asked Depp if he wanted to go to the Woody Creek Tavern to meet Hunter. Of course.
Hunter arrived around eleven that night, amid a cacophony of engine noises and the virtual rattling of an electronic saber. He put his cattle prod on the table and drank a few rounds with Depp. Aside from the Kentucky connection, they both had expertise as juvenile delinquents. Back at Owl Farm, Hunter and Depp set off a bomb, bonding over munitions. They became friends.
Several months later, at five-thirty one morning, Depp was in New York, preparing for his day’s shooting on Donnie Brasco, when Hunter called. “Listen,” he said, “if they were going to do a film of the Vegas book, would you be interested? Would you want to play me? Are you in?”
“Of course, I was,” Depp said. Laila Nabulsi controlled the rights to the film and, to show how well the book could be dramatized, produced an oral performance of the book for release by Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Records. With Harry Dean Stanton as narrator, director Jim Jarmusch as Duke, and Maury Chaykin as Gonzo, the production was a success, though spoken-word recordings didn’t need to sell much to be deemed successful. Laila even managed to lure Jann Wenner to play himself and Jimmy Buffett to portray a cop in the desert. The recording was not released until late 1996, when Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. By that time, Depp was deep into what he called his “soul stealing,” in preparation to play Hunter S. Thompson on the big screen.
Other scholars carped about Douglas Brinkley. Nothing infuriates an academic more than a talented and successful colleague. Brinkley was both. His chronicle of his spring semester cross-country trip with students, The Majic Bus, was in the paws of consumers before finals in the fall. That was another thing he did that irritated his peers: he produced. He was a book-writing machine and was by the midnineties under the wing of Stephen Ambrose, one of America’s most successful historians, at the University of New Orleans’ Eisenhower Center. Though Brinkley was too polite (not to mention too busy) to deal with critics, Hunter did it for him. In one of their daily phone conversations, Brinkley had told Hunter that one of his colleagues at the university—a creative writing professor he had never met—had written to National Public Radio to complain about Brinkley. Somehow Brinkley found time in his life to serve as a public-radio commentator on poetry, and this outraged the English professor, who thought a historian was unqualified. After hanging up with Brinkley, Hunter wrote—without Brinkley’s knowledge or consent—a letter to the English professor. “You are a jealous little jackass & you should be killed,” Hunter declared. “The stupid, vengeful, half-bright muttering in yr. letter to NPR is a shame & an insult to every writer or reader who ever called English their first language. . . . There are powerful people . . . who want to beat out your teeth & shit on your chest.”
Brinkley had not played a major role in Better Than Sex, but he helped Hunter attain the reputation he thought he deserved as a great and underappreciated American writer. All it would require was a trip to the Owl Farm basement and some diligent editing.
Hunter S. Thompson came home on December 12, 1996. Ron Whitehead organized Hunter S. Thompson Day and booked Memorial Auditorium for the event. Thrilled, Hunter asked Bob Braudis to come along to get him through his three-day visit. Braudis drove Hunter around town, to visit his mother and to see other friends. At a liquor stop, two burly rednecks (“biceps like your thighs, bib overalls”) watched Hunter go into the store and asked Braudis in perfect Kentucky slack-jaw, “Was that Hunter Thompson?” Braudis grinned and introduced them when Hunter came out. “He gave them ten great minutes of their lives,” he said. “They talked about guns. He loved the fans. If he didn’t get attention for a day or two, he’d do something stupid.”
Johnny Depp and Warren Zevon came to pay tribute, as did David Amram, the composer and Kerouac collaborator from Hunter’s days at the Cuddebackville cabin. They chatted during rehearsals, with Hunter taking occasional breaks to spray his friends with fire extinguishers. He and Amram talked about their old days, mused on the fate of the manager of the Huguenot Superette, and talked about their careers. Then Hunter leaned forward, nearly whispering. “My mother will be here,” he told Amram. “I hope she approves of my behavior. She is a librarian, as you know. She always encouraged me.”
With Virginia Thompson in the front row—eighty-eight, sitting in a wheelchair—the city of Louisville paid tribute to the man who claimed to be its Billy the Kid. With the star-power of Johnny Depp, Ron Whitehead arranged the Hunter tribute. The mayor proclaimed it Hunter S. Thompson Day, and the governor declared Hunter, Depp, Whitehead, Brinkley, Zevon, and Amram to be Kentucky Colonels. Hunter even got the key to the city.
Forty degrees and raining, yet the place was packed for the homecoming. Hunter wanted to prove Thomas Wolfe wrong. Whitehead wanted to show Hunter that he was loved.
Behind the scenes, there was chaos. Whitehead thought he had secured financial backing from the University of Louisville, but a week before the event, the university had backed out. Poetry hadn’t made Whitehead rich, and he couldn’t afford to underwrite the presentation, especially since all of the out-of-town celebrities were staying at Louisville’s finest hotels and required limousine service.
“Ron, you’re going to have to suck it up,” Brinkley said when Whitehead called him. “It’s too late to turn back. If you follow through with this, it’ll certainly be one of the biggest events in Hunter’s life. You’ve got to do this, Ron. If you do, you’ll probably prove to the world what you’re made of.”
Whitehead did suck it up, and the show went on. Singer Warren Zevon sang a couple of his songs that Hunter loved, “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and “Hula Hula Boys.” Former mayor Harvey Sloane, also a friend of forty years, paid tribute to Louisville’s native son. “It’s about time we recognized our greatest literary talent, don’t you think?” Sloane asked the crowd, drawing applause. “Finally, Louisville, we’ve done it.” Roxanne Pulitzer read from Hunter’s coverage of her divorce trial. Johnny Depp read the “high-water mark” passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, chewing gum all the while. Douglas Brinkley lectured the crowd about Hunter’s place in literary history.
Juan Thompson paced backstage, hearing the tributes to his father boom through the sound system. He was scheduled to speak, but just before he was to go on, he took Whitehead aside. He wasn’t an extrovert; speaking in public didn’t come naturally.
“I don’t think I can do this,” he said. “I’m nervous.”
Whitehead had edited the text for Juan. “Your piece will be the most precious part of the night,” Whitehead told him. “It will mean more to your dad than anything anyone else says. You’ve got to read it. You have no choice.”
Juan stood nervously at the microphone, wearing a suit and tie, looking down on his grandmother in the front row, knowing that his father lurked behind him somewhere.
“What was it like to have Hunter Thompson as your father?” he began. He’d heard the question his whole life. “What can I say? What I can tell you is what I learned from my father and what I respect and admire in him. I’ve learned that the surface truth is rarely the real truth, and as a result I’ve become cynical about the motivations of corporations, politicians and law enforcement. Above all, it makes me think and pay attention.
“He demands in everything that he does that you set aside your habits and perceptions and pay attention to what is happening right now and deal with it. That’s where the fun and excitement are, in not knowing what’s going to happen.”
Juan smiled to himself, then continued, “So what am I saying? I am proud of this man. I respect and admire his vitality, his courage, his insight, his perverse resistance to security and predictability, his deliberate disregard for propriety, his ability to make me see and think differently. Ultimately, I love and respect him because he really lives—for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, he lives his life.”
Relieved, finally through the talk, Juan smiled and turned to look over his shoulder. Out of the backstage darkness, his father approached, spraying him with CO2 from a fire extinguisher. Juan stood, spread his arms in a come-and-get-me gesture, and took the full force of the blast. Hunter set down his fire extinguisher and hugged his son, with tears in his eyes.
On the flight home, Hunter and Braudis were buckled into their seats as the plane lifted off. As it climbed, Hunter let out “a thirty-second, two-octave, head-splitting rebel yell.” He turned to Braudis and said, “Just what people like to hear during takeoff.” Then, with the plane still at a forty-five-degree angle, Hunter ripped off his seatbelt and lurched up the aisle to the men’s room. The United flight attendants watched, dumbfounded.
After Hunter bolted the lavatory door, a flight attendant approached Braudis
“Just what is your friend doing in there?” she asked.
“He’s had bad diarrhea all day,” Braudis lied.
“Oh, no problem,” she said.
A half hour later, Hunter returned, refreshed from a stand-up bath and a shave.
“Any problem?” he asked.
Braudis shook his head.