Try to imagine Hunter Thompson fighting for every last
breath in a hospital bed, hooked up to all sorts of tubes.
That’s just not him.
—Juan Thompson, 2006
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas turned twenty-five and was welcomed into hallowed literary ground. A Modern Library hardcover edition was published. As a young reader, Hunter cut his teeth on the Modern Library. Now he was part of that club. He pointed out that he fell between Thackeray and Thoreau in the alphabetical listing of its authors.
The original Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas hardcover was a rarity. The book didn’t take off until the paperback publication, so a first edition fetched thousands from collectors. (For years, Jann Wenner battled a false rumor that he hoarded seven thousand first editions in a warehouse to be sold on Hunter’s death.) This new hardcover featured a picture of Hunter at Caesar’s Palace on the front cover. Oscar Acosta, seated next to him, was cropped out.
Titled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories, the collection made it a primer on Gonzo journalism, including Hunter’s companion piece, “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” which he had written simultaneously with Fear and Loathing. An essay about the creation of the book, originally intended as jacket copy (but ten thousand words too long), also was included, offering insight into Hunter’s thought process and his feeling that since he revised and rewrote the manuscript, Fear and Loathing was “a failed experiment” in Gonzo journalism. By definition, true Gonzo went directly from the reporter’s brain to the reader’s brain without editing. “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” completed the collection.
The anniversary and the Modern Library publication gave Jann Wenner another chance to celebrate Hunter, and he invited him to New York. When Hunter showed up at the Rolling Stone office, he greeted Wenner warmly by blasting him with a fire extinguisher.
Hunter arrived in a blizzard of publicity. He was interviewed on CNN and made appearances in the tabloids, on the arms of movie stars, including Johnny Depp, who was at his side, cataloging Hunter’s moves. Tom Wolfe hosted a reception at the Lotos literary club, for which Wenner footed the bill. While Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” blasted through the tony club, the guests—including Mick Jagger, George Plimpton, and P. J. O’Rourke—feted Hunter.
Hunter removed his safari cap, wrapped his necktie around his head, used his walking cane to tickle patrons, and whooped and screeched like one of his peacocks. Chain-smoking, swilling Chivas, he lived up to Dr. Johnson’s motto and made an entertaining beast of himself, wallowing in the attention.
O’Rourke offered a toast: “We’re here tonight to do something we’ve never done and that is to take Hunter seriously, which he richly deserves, despite his behavior and his mode of dress and his headwear this evening. Hunter actually is a serious artist, very possibly the best one that’s alive right now in his field, which doesn’t really speak very well of the rest of us. But nonetheless, it is a distinction of utmost importance and tonight we are here to celebrate that.” He raised his glass: “Here is to Hunter, as the artist, the genius . . . as a man of his time, as someone who PhD’s will be written about, as soon as all of us who actually knew him are dead.”
But Hunter didn’t want to be enshrined or embalmed as a writer whose best work was twenty-five years ago. Douglas Brinkley didn’t want that either. During his visits to Owl Farm, Hunter had shown Brinkley his crates of correspondence, carbon copies of the letters he’d saved since high school. He asked Brinkley to go through them and put together a collection of letters, something Hunter planned to call “The Education of a Journalist.” Hunter had been wanting to do something with the letters for years, but was overwhelmed by the task. Then Brinkley had showed up in his bus. As Hunter wrote his publisher: “The solution to this problem has emerged . . . in the goy / heroic form of the eminent biographer and literary historian, Dr. Douglas Brinkley of New Orleans . . . who has agreed to be my / our editor on this book. . . .” The crates of material might have overwhelmed a lesser man, but the young professor was up to the task. Here was a valuable cultural resource, Brinkley figured. It wasn’t just a collection of correspondence; it was a personal history of America. As a young writer, Hunter had the vision and confidence to make copies of his letters, assuming they would make interesting reading someday. They did.
Brinkley’s literary and historical instincts made him intent on doing something with the mammoth volume of Hunter’s correspondence. “I’ve always thought of Hunter as a great American writer and his most superb art form being correspondence,” Brinkley said. “He was a genius at it.”
Brinkley found approximately twenty thousand letters stored in boxes at Owl Farm. Hunter admitted making the carbons not just for his files but with an eye toward eventual publication. “These were the pre-Xerox days,” he told Brinkley. “I was anal retentive in my desire to save everything.” His old friend Porter Bibb said that even as a child “Hunter always knew” he would become famous.
Brinkley was unabashedly a fan: “At his best, he’s right up there with Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.” Once he latched onto the idea of collecting Hunter’s letters and getting Random House on board about the letters, he faced his largest task: motivating Hunter. “The key to being an editor of Hunter was staying on him, being persistent, giving him a big advance, letting him spend a lot of money and getting it out of him because Hunter would have a tendency to not deliver the copy and [you] had to ride him and ride him and ride him.”
Brinkley and Hunter combed the files, eliminating five letters for every one included. While in New York to celebrate the Fear and Loathing anniversary, Hunter met with Random House editor David Rosenthal, who had offered a contract for the book in 1995. “We realized there was a genius in our midst,” Brinkley recalled. “These letters were so good and so smart and so critically acclaimed that people started recognizing, ‘My Gosh, it’s not just the books. This guy can write and has a mind like you can’t believe.’”
Rosenthal was convinced that a Hunter Thompson revival was in the making. “This is the book that launches the reassessment of Hunter Thompson as an important literary-slash-journalist figure,” Rosenthal said. “And at the same time, it’s a big, commercial book.” Rosenthal wanted to title the book Speed Kills, to cash in on Hunter’s image, but the author and Brinkley were reaching for something more literary and less comic.
Rosenthal showed Hunter a print proof of the proposed dust jacket, a photo of young hitchhiking Hunter in suitcase and shades, a picture taken by his friend Paul Semonin nearly forty years before. Hunter shook his head, admiring his handsome younger self. “I should be dead,” he said.
“We’d sell a lot more copies,” Rosenthal said.
The Proud Highwaywas published to phenomenal reviews in 1997, and was announced as the first in a series of three books that Brinkley would cull from the letters. It was, as Rosenthal had predicted, the vanguard of the Hunter Thompson renaissance.
The Modern Library and Proud Highway publications energized Hunter. “His self-esteem started going up,” Brinkley said. “He saw that he was not a failure. He saw that he did have a role in American literature, and that it was one that was sustainable. People were taking Hunter Thompson seriously, and he loved it.”
When Hunter appeared at his book signings, fans mobbed him. He didn’t actually sign books, but buyers were given a presigned bookplate. They were allowed to shake his hand and grovel before him and accept his good-natured abuse.
The book was the closest Hunter would come to writing an autobiography. It also was a history of half a century of America, seen through the eyes of the nation’s leading outlaw journalist. Hunter had been honored before (the New York Public Library named him a Literary Lion in 1989), but The Proud Highway made him into a literal and figurative man of letters, an H. L. Mencken–like sage. Clearly, he hadn’t lost it. Though it was a collection of things written thirty and forty years before, the point was made: Hunter deserved to be considered among the top rank of American writers of his generation. The recognition Hunter had long sought was finally coming. On the thirtieth anniversary of its original publication, the Modern Library edition of Hell’s Angels appeared. The Library of America also selected a piece from Hunter’s 1972 coverage of an anti-war demonstration at the Republican Convention for an anthology of writing on Vietnam.
In the meantime, Laila Nabulsi had finally done the impossible: get a film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas into production. She had gotten Johnny Depp as Duke and Benicio del Toro as Dr. Gonzo. She picked Alex Cox to direct and to write the screenplay with partner Tod Davies. Cox had independent-film credibility as writer-director of the cult films Repo Man and Sid and Nancy. But a disastrous January 1997 script meeting with Cox and Davies in Woody Creek nearly scuttled the project.
Cox and Davies sent Hunter the script, but it was clear in their meeting—filmed by Wayne Ewing, Hunter’s Boswell—that Hunter hadn’t read it. They discussed a plot point requiring Duke to fly from Vegas to Los Angeles, only to be brought back on an animated tidal wave. Hunter’s jaw dropped. “This is a nasty shock to me,” he said. He tried to get it straight: that wonderful speech he wrote (“the high-water mark”), the speech about the idealism of the sixties and the broken hopes . . . they wanted to make that into a cartoon? The more he discussed the script, the more furious he became. “That’s one of my best fucking things I’ve ever written and to turn it into some stupid cartoon show . . . I don’t like, no,” he told Cox and Davies emphatically.
Cox saw the Ralph Steadman illustrations as the model for the film’s visual style, and Hunter objected so strongly that Cox and Davies stormed from the house. “Write your own fucking movie, write your own story,” Hunter screamed at Davies. “You’re a smart girl. Go ahead and do it. Just don’t fuck with mine and make it into a cartoon.”
Hunter called Laila, blaming her for the concept of turning “Ralph’s goddam drawings” into the film representation of Hunter’s greatest work. “This is going to be a nasty fucking war,” he warned her.
After a couple of months, Laila calmed Hunter down and signed Terry Gilliam as director. Gilliam, who had been a member of Britain’s Monty Python comedy troupe, made well-reviewed films such as Brazil, which eventually achieved cult status. Gilliam and Tony Grisoni wrote a new screenplay that Hunter approved, and after several delays and an agreement from Johnny Depp to rearrange his movie schedule, the film finally began shooting. Depp had already spent a lot of time with Hunter, but the delay gave him more time to absorb his manners and characteristics by moving into the basement of Owl Farm.
Depp had two brushes with death while living with Hunter. He was bitten by a brown recluse spider while sleeping. Craig Vetter told Hunter, “If that’s all that happens after living for a month in your basement, he got off easy.” On another night, Depp lay in bed, smoking, looking through the rough draft of Fear and Loathing, and reading discarded passages. He set down his cigarette into an ashtray on top of the end table. He took a closer look and realized it wasn’t an end table. He ran upstairs and asked Hunter to come down and look at the thing by his bed. “Oh, God, that’s where it is,” Hunter said when he saw it. “I’ve always wondered what happened to it.” The night stand was a gunpowder keg.
Depp went everywhere with Hunter: into Aspen, into the Woody Creek Tavern, driving the back roads. “He looked like he was a kid up to some trick,” Hunter said. “He would be right next to me in the convertible, lighting the cigarette the same way, and it got very peculiar, particularly for my friends around here who didn’t know what to make of it. But he was getting into his role.”
Depp did not want an impersonation; everyone did those, even college sophomores on Halloween mimicked the guttural voice and the loping walk they’d observed on the David Letterman and Charlie Rose shows. Depp wanted to get at Hunter from the inside. “The man should be sainted for putting up with my continual scratching away at the layers of his life,” Depp said. “He stuck it out like a champion and couldn’t have been a better friend.”
So many celebrities came to the Woody Creek Tavern that even a heartthrob movie star didn’t startle the regulars. Most gawkers came for Hunter anyway. Depp became a regular, but fawning fans on the barstools were there to see Hunter. “People just watched him from a distance,” Cheryl Frymire said. “No one I think really wanted to upset Hunter. They would just go, ‘Is that Hunter Thompson over there?’ and just observe him. He treated the tavern as an extension of his domain.”
Filming eventually began, but Hunter stayed away, lest he cause a disruption. He showed up one day to film a brief flashback scene in which he played himself at San Francisco’s Matrix nightclub. Depp as the young Hunter did a double take when he found the older Hunter sitting at a table.
Back at Woody Creek, the kitchen had always been crowded, but now the clerisy of the young and hip writers, editors, actors, and musicians made a pilgrimage. Brinkley tried to make the case for its being a literary salon. “He was like the Dalai Lama of writers,” his artist friend Joe Petro said. Other close friends said the literary pretensions were a little over the top, that frequently the so-called salon was more often filled with Hunter and his betting buddies. “Emerson used to say, ‘If you are really great, people will come to you,’” Brinkley said. “Hunter doesn’t have to go traveling around the world anymore. Everybody comes through his kitchen. You can be meeting Jimmy Carter or George McGovern there or Johnny Depp or John Cusack or Ed Bradley or Jimmy Buffett. Everybody kind of crosses through Hunter’s kitchen.” Porter Bibb said, “He’s Mohammad and he’s the mountain all in one. You have to come sit at his feet.” The salon idea worked in reverse. “With two phone calls, he could virtually hook up with anyone in the country,” Braudis said, “and I’m talking about the heavyweights.” Hunter became friends with Jim Irsay, who shared his love of pro football and literature. Irsay owned the Indianapolis Colts and also the newsprint scroll on which Jack Kerouac had written On the Road (he paid $2.5 million for it). In tribute to his kindred spirit, Hunter proclaimed the Colts his favorite pro team.
Hunter did not disappoint visitors to his kitchen. The true friends got the real Hunter, but the acquaintances got Duke. I’m never sure which one people expect me to be. Often, they conflict. So he shot his guns, blew up gas tanks, drove his car 110 miles an hour without lights after midnight with his snow cone (Chivas over packed ice) between his legs, screamed, yelled, screeched, squawked. He could amuse by playing the character he professed to hate. But to his close friends, he was still the Southern Gentleman. “He was kind of a beacon for dissent throughout his whole life,” said actor John Cusack. “He was a place people could turn to, to get a moral argument from a moral outlaw. . . . Hunter was deeply serious and kind of a deeply moral person who liked orgies.”
“No one could ever live up to the image of Hunter S. Thompson, not even Hunter Thompson,” Braudis said. “The image of the constantly fucked-up writer was not really the substance of the guy.” Braudis amused himself by watching how Hunter drank. “In a three-hour period, I might drink more than Hunter,” he said. “But Hunter would drink 24/7. But I never saw him dick-in-the-dirt drunk. He didn’t want that to be part of his image. He didn’t suffer drunks . . . or people who talked too much . . . or people who interrupted.”
Nickole Brown worked for Hunter in 1997, trying to help him assemble Polo Is My Life. She met him during the Louisville homecoming, and her former professor Ron Whitehead recommended her as an editorial assistant. When she arrived in Woody Creek, Brown saw that the “book” was a series of boxes, one for each chapter, filled with manuscript pages, peacock feathers, and other things to get him started.
“He always needed a visual stimulus to inspire him,” Deborah Fuller said. “He used storyboards marked off with colored tape.”
Brown plunged in, doing her best to help Hunter. He offered her drugs; she refused and he never offered again. Once, while driving around, he pulled the car to the side of the road and asked if he could kiss her. No, she said. Hunter grumbled, looked out at the mountains, turned to her and said, “Well, fuck it, then.” He took her back to the cabin, and they never spoke about the incident. When her term ended, he sent her off with a glowing reference for graduate school.
Back home in Louisville, there were rumors about Hunter’s behavior. Someone said Hunter had held a gun to Brown’s head. A Courier-Journal reporter called to get the real story. Brown said Hunter was a difficult man to work for—most great artists are, she said—but he was always the perfect gentleman. He had not held a gun to her head or mistreated her in any way, she told the reporter.
A few days after the story appeared, Brown was awakened by the phone in the middle of the night. “What the hell are you trying to do?” Hunter growled. “You’ll ruin my reputation.”
With The Proud Highway, Hunter became a hot property again. When David Rosenthal moved from Random House to Simon and Schuster as publisher, he took Hunter along. Looking into the past had paid off, and Hunter thought it might be time to resurrect one of his novels. After the publication of Hell’s Angels in 1967, Jim Silberman was going to publish The Rum Diary with Random House’s Pantheon division. Hunter wanted to do another rewrite, but Silberman seemed intent on going ahead with it, so Hunter had the manuscript stolen. Thirty years later, he finally was ready to work on it. With his new editor at Simon and Schuster, MarySue Rucci, he reworked the forty-year-old story and cut six hundred pages from the thousand-page manuscript. Though there were passages that made Hunter cringe and that he cut, he was generally pleased with what his earlier self had written. It was finally published in 1998. Though critics sharpened their knives, figuring there had to be a good reason why a novel by a best-selling author couldn’t get published for forty years, the book came as a pleasant surprise. The Rum Diary was a revelation, evidence of both Hunter’s promise and his seriousness as a young man. The Philadelphia Inquirer said the book showed “a young Hunter Thompson brimming with talent.” Some wondered how much fiction there really was in the novel. “Even writing fiction, he was still writing about himself,” Ralph Steadman said. “It was him again, doing an assignment in Puerto Rico, doing small-time journalism.”
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas hit theaters on one of the first big weekends of the 1998 summer season. It clearly wasn’t a Star Wars blockbuster and the release was poorly timed, coming during the kiddie-frenzy time of year. Hunter flew to New York to attend the premiere and asked George Plimpton to accompany him to the theater. As he fidgeted nervously in the back of the limo, the patrician Plimpton read his mind and tried to put him at ease. “Hunter, it’s not your medium,” he said. “You didn’t write it, you didn’t do it, you’re not in it.” In short: if it sucks, you’re not to blame. Still, Hunter muttered, it was profoundly strange to think about his life on the screen.
After the premiere screening, Hunter stood with Depp and del Toro for the paparazzi and bashed them with bags of popcorn, in classic Raoul Duke style.
When they had a private moment, Depp asked him, “Do you hate me?”
“Oh no,” Hunter said slowly. “It was like an eerie trumpet call over a lost battlefield.”
Depp said his performance was “less of a job than it was a love letter.”
Laila Nabulsi was probably more nervous about the premiere than Hunter. He had entrusted his greatest achievement to her. “Producing Fear and Loathing was a crusade, a cross to bear, a cross that I carried for more than ten years,” she said. Hunter loved the film.
Audiences and critics did not. The film puzzled Johnny Depp’s crazed teen fans who gasped when he removed his hat to show his shaved head. Critic Roger Ebert was rough with the film, which he called “a horrible mess of a movie, without shape, trajectory or purpose.”
The film was a financial flop on its initial release. Like all of Terry Gilliam’s films, however, it did achieve cult status, and eventually warranted a two-disc special edition for home viewing.
Brinkley continued sorting through Hunter’s letters and writing his own books (including a biography of Jimmy Carter). He needed someone to go through the letters with Hunter for the second volume. Hunter had met Anita Bejmuk in 1997, when they were introduced by a mutual friend. Anita had said she wanted to learn about football, and the friend suggested Hunter as the perfect teacher. Anita was twenty-four, had grown up in Fort Collins, Colorado, and attended UCLA but was on an extended break from school, spending a couple of years skiing. Anita volunteered to work on Hunter’s second volume of correspondence. She didn’t know much about Hunter, other than as the courtly friend of a friend. She had read only one thing he’d written, his 1992 Rolling Stone article about Bill Clinton.
“I never had background in publishing or editing, but we just started working on that,” Anita said. “Late nights. It was a lot of fun. We just read his letters for a couple months, just every night. That’s probably how I fell in love with him, reading his history and seeing what kind of man he was.” Brinkley had done the first pass through the boxes of letters, marking those he wanted photocopied. Anita and other assistants were charged with making copies and sending them to Brinkley’s university office in New Orleans. There he assembled a rough version of the book and sent it back to Hunter. Anita then read the letters aloud to Hunter. “He would ask what I thought of certain letters,” she said. “Sometimes he would say, ‘Damn, that’s good,’ and sometimes he’d laugh and tell a story about what was surrounding that letter. If you misread a word, he would correct it. It was like a parlor trick. People were fascinated: ‘How can you remember something from thirty years ago?’ It’s just that he had such a unique style, he knew that he would not use a word like that.”
Soon, Anita’s sabbatical from college was about to end. “I was headed back to school and he said, ‘Maybe you could stay a few more months,’” she said. “Within a few hours of working with him one-on-one, I fell totally in love with him. He was really a good man and an inspiration to me.” They moved in together in 1999.
He took her along for his moonlight swims, and once they were stranded in only boots and robes when their Jeep was stuck in a snowbank on the way back from the pool. He had back pain and sent her off to get help, giving her his robe to stay warm. He stayed in the Jeep, naked, until she returned. They freed the car, then went home for omelets and tequila. He wrote her a short story about that night and presented it to her. He called it “The Polish Girl.”
“Leaving the house at all was a major production,” Anita said. “He would pack a cooler to go to the gym. Swimming was a big production because he needed towels and snacks and flashlights and Gatorade. We didn’t just swim in a regular swimming pool. It was a gorgeous indoor heated pool with glass walls and a glass ceiling and a mosaic. We would swim in ninety-degree water with the lights off, and so we had candles. It was an almost meditative experience, and so there were so many supplies. There was a half-hour preparation to get out of the door and he always had separation anxiety. That would take up half an evening—just to go swimming.”
Fear and Loathing in America, the second book of letters, covered a grim period (1968–76: civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate), but years that were great for Hunter’s career. He published Hell’s Angels and produced Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and his monumental Rolling Stone coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign. There he was, revolutionizing nonfiction writing and reporting, and yet a lot of the letters were pleas for money from agents, editors, and others.
But there was no whining in the letters. He routinely offered to rip the throats out of editors who welshed on contracts or who were too slow in reimbursing him for expenses. When American Express cut him off after the spending spree that produced Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter viciously tore into the underling who thwarted him. “After three expensive efforts (to reach you), I got tired of talking to people who could barely speak English—much less understand what I was saying. How would you feel if you kept calling my house for prolonged conversations with my seven-year-old son? He deals with any calls I don’t feel like taking.”
Friends were used to this treatment. CBS correspondent Hughes Rudd stood up Hunter for a drink when Rudd was hospitalized. Hunter showed concern in his usual way: “Dear Hughes: Fuck off with your excuses about why you didn’t show up at Miller’s Pub on Thursday night. So you had a fucking heart attack . . . so what? Are you some kind of pansy? Hell, you should have just had the ambulance take you from the Amphitheatre to the Pub, not the hospital. The next time I plan to meet you anywhere for a drink I’ll know what to expect.”
The book provided insight to all the craft behind making his work look so easy. He shared his early draft of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Tom Wolfe. He and Wolfe (whom he called “a thieving pile of albino warts”) spent little time together, but corresponded frequently. Wolfe got some of Hunter’s best full-force affectionate abuse when he wrote Hunter from Italy, where he was lecturing about the New Journalism in 1971. Hunter wrote back,
Dear Tom . . .
You worthless scum-sucking bastard. . . . Here you are running around fucking Italy in that filthy white suit at a thousand bucks a day laying all kinds of stone gibberish & honky bullshit on those poor wops who can’t tell the difference . . . while I’m out here in the middle of these goddamn frozen mountains in a death-battle with the taxman & nursing cheap wine while my dogs go hungry & my cars explode and a legion of nazi lawyers makes my life a goddamn Wobbly nightmare. . . .
You decadent pig. Where the fuck do you get the nerve to go around telling those wops that I’m crazy? You worthless cocksucker. My Italian tour is already arranged for next spring & I’m going to do the whole goddamn trip wearing a bright red field marshal’s uniform & accompanied by six speed-freak bodyguards bristling with Mace bombs & when I start talking about American writers & the name Tom Wolfe comes up, by god, you’re going to wish you were born a fucking iguana! . . .
[T]he hammer of justice looms, and your filthy white suit will become a flaming shroud!
Hunter’s continuing struggle with the death of the American Dream was documented in the letters. He tried to wrestle his whole world into this book, and part of the concept eventually led to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And yet that still was not what his publisher wanted. Perhaps, three decades later, Fear and Loathing in America became that book. He’d been writing his testament all along, but it was hiding in plain sight next to his typewriter.
Anita followed the assistant-to-girlfriend path and moved to Owl Farm, providing him with stability. “I knew Anita would be responsive to the spiritual side—the loving, giving, gracious side,” Cheryl Frymire said. “I think it was definitely a high point when they met.”
In May 2000, Hunter had accidentally wounded his longtime assistant and full-time caregiver, Deborah Fuller, in a shooting accident. Bob Braudis got a call from Hunter, who explained that he’d seen a bear outside of Deborah’s cabin. He tried to call her, but she didn’t answer. So he got his rifle and planned to use his “bounce shot”—hitting the ground near the bear, scaring him enough to move but not enough to wound him. At the moment Hunter fired, Deborah opened the door and was struck in the arm.
“Will you come out here?” Hunter asked Braudis on the phone. He was obviously worried about an investigation.
“Have you called an ambulance?” Braudis asked. “Where’s Deborah?”
“She’s at the hospital,” Hunter said.
“Fuck you,” Braudis told him. “I’m going to the hospital.”
Deborah was fine and more concerned about Hunter’s agitated state than about her health. She recovered, but the incident disturbed Hunter. He always prided himself on being a good shot, and now this. Was he losing it?
Within three years, Deborah left, after more than twenty years with him. She claimed that the shooting did not affect her decision. “I think she just put her time in,” Frymire said. “She cared for him. Working for him was definitely a labor of love. I think these women loved him deeply. They had to love him to work for him as long as they did.”
Hunter was often depressed. Friends who dropped in sometimes found him alone, crying. What tortured him, Sandy said, was that he never achieved his potential. Sometimes he took out his anger on women, slapping them. “Hunter had a really dark side to him,” Braudis said. “He was self-destructive his whole life.” His reckless appetite for women destroyed long-term friendships. If he wanted a woman who was married to a friend, Hunter’s needs trumped years of loyalty.
Near the end, he was particularly despondent over politics. His old Rolling Stone editor, John Walsh, was with the sports network ESPN. He offered Hunter a weekly column (“Hey Rube”) on the Web starting in 2000, and Hunter jumped into covering sports again. Those unfamiliar with his early history might have been surprised that he was now churning out regular columns on sports, but it was a return to roots and also a chance to work with Walsh again, an editor he fiercely admired. Anita said Hunter saw it as a new way of reaching his loyal audience. “He said that sports lovers are just another political bloc, another group of human beings that is not organized,” she said. “Hunter said, ‘If we help organize them and give them the hint that they are very powerful, they could get involved and take control of their environment.’ He looked through the same lens at ESPN that he did at Rolling Stone. That’s what he was doing in his writing: helping his readers gain more confidence in themselves.” But the steady gig also meant relentless deadlines. “There was screaming sometimes,” Anita said. “He would get upset when there were too many cooks in the kitchen. He worked the best with one, no more than two people around. He needed a group of people around at the beginning of the night, to help him organize But then he liked it calm, so his mind could work. We’d keep his drink filled and have a snack around him, so he wouldn’t be distracted, so he could stay at the typewriter. That was the trick. The phones would stop ringing around midnight, and that’s when he would start to get busy.”
Though the ESPN deadlines kept him active and deep into the world of professional sports that he loved, the controversial 2000 presidential election and the terrorist attacks of 2001 skewed his approach to the column. He often filled his acre of cyberspace with anti-Bush political rants. The fury-of-the-seventies Hunter returned. When a young woman in Denver named Lisl Auman was jailed for a murder she did not commit, Hunter went on a rampage, using the bully pulpit of Gonzo to speak out for her case. “Hunter was a fierce libertarian, a stalwart believer that the individual controlled his or her own destiny,” Brinkley said. Even low-profile cases, when they stank of injustice, aroused his invective. When a neighbor felt helpless in the onslaught of an encroaching condominium development, Hunter came to her aid and fought the zoning change and stopped construction.
Occasionally, he could muster his old political energy. When Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry came to Aspen for a fund-raiser, he gave Hunter a private interview in his rented Chevy Suburban from the airport to the home of the millionaire hosting the event. As Kerry took the podium, he asked the crowd, “How does this sound: Vice President Hunter S. Thompson.” The crowd cheered. “Hunter was just glowing,” Bob Braudis said.
But he no longer had the stamina for the campaign trail—or for much that required leaving his property. “Hunter privately, with his friends and at home, was a supreme southern gentleman,” Anita said. They were happy together (“Anita was his whole life,” Brinkley said), and his weekly columns were collaborations. When Deborah left, more burdens fell on Anita—taking care of the man and the writer.
He was retirement age, and his body began to quit on him. “He had a fleet of doctors who admired him, and they knew they weren’t going to change him and they worked around him,” Braudis said. “He ate a bowl of fruit a day. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to prolong his life.”
Even the ritualistic swimming, part of his work process, took on more of a therapeutic tone. “We tried to swim more, when writing was less important and health was more important,” Anita said. His infirmities also rendered him if not helpless, at least less ambulatory than he had been. His lifelong writing habits had to change to match his declining health. “When he was younger he was more mobile,” Anita said, “so he would get up and walk around more, walk up and down the stairs or go outside and shoot guns. He couldn’t do that when he was older, because of his back problems, because of his health problems.” Anita became his arms and legs. “He couldn’t sit at the typewriter for sixteen hours, like he could in the seventies,” she said. “But he believed his skills of observation; his humor and his writing were just as good, if not better. He kept growing. He thought it was very important to keep growing all of your life. That’s why he called himself ‘a teenage girl trapped in the body of an elderly dope fiend.’ He continued to learn. He was curious until the end.”
Anita became ever more a caretaker. Despite these burdens, she accepted Hunter’s marriage proposal in 2003. He was sixty-five and she was thirty-one. Proposals were nothing new; he’d had other fiancées (Laila, Maria, Terry, Nicole, Heidi) since his divorce from Sandy, but this one was different.
“He came in [the tavern] the day he got her diamond,” Frymire said. “He was so excited. I think there were maybe three people there when that happened. I gave them massages as a wedding present.”
They married on Thursday, April 24, 2003, at the Pitkin County Courthouse, with Bob Braudis and his wife as witnesses. Hunter punctuated the ceremony with shouts of “woo hoo.”
Hunter reported on his wedding for his ESPN readers: ‘‘It was done with fine style and secrecy in order to avoid the craziness and drunken violence that local lawmen feared would inevitably have followed the ceremony. . . . Our honeymoon was even simpler. We drank heavily for a few hours with Chris Goldstein and accepted fine gifts from strangers, then we drove erratically back out to Owl Farm and prepared for our own, very private celebration by building a huge fire, icing down a magnum of Crystal Champagne and turning on the Lakers-Timberwolves game until we passed out and crawled to the bedroom.’’
Things were good again. “Life is humming along smartly out here on the farm,” Hunter wrote on his wedding day. He might not have been wealthy, but he was comfortable and Anita knew what she was getting into. Since she was thirty-five years younger than her husband, in taking her marriage vows she had agreed to care for this much-older man and preside over the ceremony of his death. They understood each other and began enjoying what life they would have together.
“He was never loaded,” Anita said. “We were not rolling in dough, but we had a good lifestyle. We had to watch our budget. All the trips he went on were always paid by somebody else. We stayed in the best hotels, because of his stature. I never looked at the price tag at the grocery store. I could buy what I wanted. He drove a Jeep Cherokee; I drove a Jetta. We did have a housekeeper that came twice a week. We lived well, but it wasn’t what some people think—that he had money for private planes or the ability to travel. The trips were paid for by other people. He was rich in many other ways.”
There had always been that joke—the one about how he should really be dead, that his existence was an affront to all modern medical knowledge, that he was an anomaly, a genetic miracle. The joke was over.
And it wasn’t just the decline of his body that depressed him. He was losing friends. Singer Warren Zevon, the musician who made the rock ’n’ roll equivalent of Gonzo, died in 2002. They were friends, shooting buddies, and collaborators. (Hunter co-wrote Zevon’s song “You’re a Whole Different Person When You’re Scared.”) One of Hunter’s closest Woody Creek friends, Oliver Treibick, also died. “He was depressed for a long time,” Frymire said. “After Oliver died, that was really tough on him. One of the Woody Creek bartenders died too, Kenny Dimmick. Hunter was losing some close allies, and it really saddened him.”
Benicio del Toro once called him “the cherry on the cake of fun,” but Hunter began to feel that the fun had stopped. The physical pain, the infirmity, the apparatus of aging and decrepitude—none of it fit with how he saw himself.
The body started to go. Hunter had a hip replaced, but then his spine started impinging on his nerves. He needed carts at airports. Travel became even more of a burden. While visiting Hawaii, he set up a microwave in the hotel bathroom. He made ramen soup, but it was so hot when he pulled it from the microwave that it spilled onto the marble floor. He slipped, breaking his leg. “He had a cast from his balls to his toes,” Braudis said.
Actor Sean Penn chartered a plane to get Hunter back to a clinic in Colorado, and Braudis went to see him. “His mobility and his dependence on other people increased,” Braudis said. “He hated being dependent.” When he finally got back to Owl Farm, he had to deal with an army of physical therapists in his home.
“He was talking so much about ‘the wheelchair,’ ” Ralph Steadman said of their phone conversations. “He’d say, ‘I’m going to be sitting in this wheelchair, in an old people’s home, being watched by old people, do you think I can put up with that, Ralph?’ He had an image of being strapped into it, unable to move, and ‘Ralph, there’s an old lady crawling across the floor towards me, and she’s about to fondle my balls.’”
American politics depressed him as well. After four years of George Bush, he threw himself into the 2004 campaign on the side of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, and his defeat devastated Hunter. “The jokes disappeared and never came back, replaced by incessant talk of his having fulfilled his life mission,” Brinkley said. “Hunter was sharp as a tack, but he could also turn listless on a dime.”
And still, he was a prisoner of his persona. “He was trapped by a mythology he created,” Cusack said. “I think he would admit that.” He continued to enhance that image with his work, with his weekly columns and Kingdom of Fear, which had been another tossed-off autobiographical collage in the Songs of the Doomed vein. The book reprinted old stories, inserted new ones, and perpetuated the Hunter Thompson/Uncle Duke character.
Even close friends said he was repeating himself. He knew it too. He had worked hard, but too often had taken the easy way out, seeing what he could get away with.
Sandy had moved on. She’d been married twice and found peace and a new life as a yoga teacher. She was a grandmother; Juan had married and there was grandson Will.
Now middle-aged, Juan worked as a computer consultant in Denver, visiting frequently. “I think we’ve gotten closer as I’ve gotten older. He was a busy guy when I was a kid. He has unusual hours. He travels a whole lot. So I’d say it’s only been the last 15 years or so that we’ve definitely gotten closer over time.”
Because of Juan and his family, Hunter and Sandy were intertwined, even though Sandy tried living in California for a while. She eventually moved to Denver. Talking about her former husband was hard, she wrote: “I have a truly wonderful life and [telling] the Hunter story again and again interrupts the peace, as it did every day of my life when I was with him.” Yet she said she loved him and always would. Hunter wrote a note to Sandy and Juan in 2000: “May the right gods fall in love with you, like I did.” She could still recall the tender moments. “I asked him if he knew when he was about to become the Monster,” she wrote. “He said, ‘Sandy, it’s like this. I sense it first, and before I have completely turned around he is there. He is me.’”
Sandy tried to keep Hunter deep in the past, but she knew what tormented him. Friends would sometimes come upon him alone, in his salon, crying. Sandy knew why.
“He was a tortured tragic figure,” Sandy said. “I do not think that he was a great writer. I think he clearly had great potential, both as a writer and a leader. However, he fell—dramatically and a very, very long time ago. Hunter wanted to be a great writer and he had the genius, the talent, and, early on, the will and the means. He was horrified by whom he had become and ashamed—or I really should say tortured. He knew he had failed. He knew that his writing was absolutely not great. This was part of the torture. And yet, he could never climb back. The image, the power, the drugs, the alcohol, the money . . . all of it . . . he never became that great American writer he had wanted to be. Nowhere close. And he knew it.”
He began to say goodbye to all of the places he loved, to Hawaii and Key West. When friends visited, they got emotional farewells. “There was the usual hug,” John Walsh said of his last visit to Owl Farm, “accompanied by an unusual tearful goodbye.” During the holidays in 2004, he left messages for dozens of friends. Many were traveling or at parties and weren’t there to pick up the phone. “He called everybody on his list near the end,” Tom Corcoran said. “I got called Christmas Day. He’d just been to a party at [Jack] Nicholson’s and had seen Buffett. I was gone; it came through as a message. And I never called him back. I had a million things to do and I thought, ‘I’ll call him, I’ll call him.’ It was very nostalgic. He said, ‘Jimmy and I talked about doing a book about the old days in Key West.’”
In January 2005, Sean Penn was filming All the King’s Men in New Orleans, Brinkley’s home turf. Hunter planned to write about the production for Playboy. “He wanted to go alone, like the old days,” Anita said, but the trip ended up depressing Hunter. While there, Hunter wanted to attend the cast-and-crew party thrown by producer and politico James Carville at Arnaud’s Restaurant. But Hunter was in a wheelchair and New Orleans was built before the Americans with Disabilities Act had ramped and elevatored the country. There was no way for him to get to the private second-floor dining room, where the party was being held. He sat in the downstairs bar, drinking. Bill Dixon, in town to see his old pal, figured the humiliation was too much for Hunter’s pride. “He couldn’t get up to the dinner unless four guys grabbed the wheelchair and he wouldn’t let them.” Sulking at the downstairs bar, Hunter turned to Brinkley and said, “My time has come to die, Dougie,” making a knife-slit motion across his throat. “He didn’t like being Hunter at that point,” Brinkley said. “It was very difficult for him and they ended up having to call me,” Anita said. “It hurt him, I think, because he realized how much harder it was to travel alone. He needed so much help. Doug and Sean were great friends, but they weren’t very good caretakers. By the time I got there, Hunter was emaciated, he hadn’t eaten in two days. It was awful, it was just awful. He felt very disappointed in himself, that he couldn’t take care of himself the way he used to.” His ailments also required prescription medication, something new in his pharmaceutical diet. “The painkillers were something unique and they did fog his mind and inhibit his writing somewhat,” Anita said. The Playboy assignment was abandoned, as were other writing projects.
His depression and his physical pain were sometimes too much for his young wife. Anita needed a break and went to visit her parents. Hunter called Laila and begged her to come. “I went out there and found him not in great shape,” Laila said. “His leg was in a cast, and he had a wheelchair to get around the house, which he hated. He was frustrated, angry, and in pain. It seemed the pain pills didn’t help much. He was not one to be patient with any physical ailment, so to be dependent, not mobile, and in pain just drove him crazy. This also made it harder to get work done, which he was complaining about a lot. I joked with him that I was the Agnes Moorhead role in Rebecca: the stern governess. I took charge of the house and him and started organizing, trying to make things nice for him. I was able to calm him down after a couple of days, and we did end up having a nice quiet night here and there, just like old times. We would be in the kitchen, talking or watching television or being quiet.
“There weren’t a lot of people coming around. There were a couple of girls who would come to do physical therapy and grocery shopping. They were lifesavers for me. I don’t know why it was so quiet, why people weren’t coming around or calling, which was unusual. We didn’t discuss it.”
Restored, Anita came back and Juan planned a weekend visit, with his wife, Jennifer, and their son, Will. Hunter was “Ace” to his grandson. He’d sent Will a note that said, “Walk tall. Kick ass. Learn to speak Arabic. Love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth-seekers, lovers and warriors.”
He wrote Anita a note, too, on February 16: “Football Season is Over. No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax—This won’t hurt.”
Juan and Jennifer were just back from a trip to Italy and brought Hunter an orange silk scarf, which he draped over his shoulders. He sat at his perch in the kitchen, surrounded by his son’s family, Anita, and friends. He picked up a gun—just a pellet gun, not his .45 caliber—and aimed it across the room, at a gong directly behind Anita’s chair. He fired—hitting the gong, but coming too close to Anita.
Anita was furious. “You’re in big trouble with me,” she screamed, and headed off to the basement guest room for the night. Hunter could hear her crying downstairs, but couldn’t walk down there to comfort her. The friends left, Jennifer and Will went to bed, but Juan stayed up, talking deep into the night with his father. Hunter began presenting his son with family heirlooms—jewelry, books, things that were part of Juan’s “inheritance.” He talked about his death; he wanted to be cremated and his remains blasted from a cannon. Juan knew the story; he’d heard it ever since he was a little boy, still living at Owl Farm.
The next day, Hunter awoke, polished his pistol and resumed the business of being Hunter S. Thompson. He apologized to Anita for coming so close to her with his shot. She accepted the apology, but the thaw had not yet set in. She said she was going to the Aspen Club and Spa. Hunter gave her a look—a “weird look,” she said later.
It was late afternoon. After Anita got to the gym and before she began her workout, she called home. When it rang, he hit the speakerphone button. “Hello,” she said. When he heard her voice, he picked up, which was rare. Everyone got the speakerphone treatment. He liked having his hands free so he could do other things while he talked. He was the king of multitasking. But he picked up. That’s sweet, she thought.
They spoke for ten minutes and twenty-two seconds. That’s what her cell phone records said. He was funny, as he was most of the time.
“Come home after you work out,” he said. “Come home and we’ll work on a column.” They never said goodbye. It sounded like he put down the phone. Anita heard a sound, something clicking, like something tapping. She listened for a while, maybe a minute, then hung up.
Then Hunter finished loading his .45 caliber pistol, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.