There’s another side to reporting that seldom shows up in
formal dispatches—the personal experience of the
digging, inquisitive newsman. Witness these excerpts from
Mr. Thompson’s personal letters to his editor in Washington.
—National Observer, December 31, 1962
The Wall Street Journal was always much more than its name implied. On most days, the left-hand column on the front page contained the best newspaper feature in America. Usually an expertly crafted article devoted to a social issue, the column-one stories pioneered the little-person/big-picture approach to explanatory journalism, using the traditional narrative techniques of storytelling to draw readers into a larger issue. By focusing on an individual, the writer opened a window to reporting larger, social issues. Newspapers en masse began using this technique in the sixties, and if the Journal could have copyrighted this approach, every publication in America would be in its debt. Editor Barney Kilgore decided in the early sixties that the Journal needed to better exploit that talent.
Kilgore conceived the National Observer as a Sunday edition of the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, it was published on Sundays for the first several months until circulation and distribution problems convinced the parent company, Dow Jones, that it was more feasible to make it a Monday-delivery newspaper.
Kilgore set his sights on doing something different, and his target audience was young people who hadn’t yet developed strong reading habits. It was not an entirely smooth start-up. The company wasn’t willing to commit much money to the project, which, in the beginning, was produced by a skeletal staff.
Kilgore wanted to experiment, and the Observer was his playpen. At first, he proclaimed the newspaper would not need reporters. “We don’t need more people telling us what has happened as much as we need people who can put together events and explain them,” Kilgore told the investors. The idea owed a lot to Time magazine, which, when founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden in 1923, said that it would sound as if it was “written by one person, for one person.”
“In the beginning there was a lot of reprinted stuff,” said Jerry Footlick, one of the charter staff members. “Eventually it evolved, and we started sending reporters to go out and really cover some stories. The more that happened, the more people thought that was the right thing to do. The Observer was fun, it was interesting. It was all written in the newsroom for the first year or two, with a lot of reprints.”
After a few months, Kilgore’s gamble began to pay off. The Observer was just beginning to make a splash when Hunter was in New York, preparing for passage to South America. Thinking it might be a good market, he sent a note to Clifford Ridley, who handled the Observer’s feature section, telling him where he was going and offering his services. Hunter’s portfolio was not all that impressive, but Ridley liked the braggadocio of Hunter’s letter. Before Ridley had a chance to respond, Hunter had sent his first story.
It was to be a good collaboration. Ridley showed the piece to the Observer’s top editor, Bill Giles, and he became Hunter’s biggest supporter. “Bill gave Hunter a contract for six pieces at $1,000 a piece,” Footlick recalled. “That was a lot of money in the sixties. There were some other staffers, old Wall Street Journal types, who were Bill’s top editors beside him, who thought Thompson was a total kook. Yes, a good writer, they said, but you couldn’t trust him. But Bill had great faith in Hunter from the start.”
Hunter was lucky to be working for the Observer, which was struggling to establish its voice and did not have a clearly defined style. “One complaint we heard about the Observer was that it was too dull,” Footlick said. “Well, Hunter was not dull.”
Although he’d sold articles to some major newspapers, including the New York Herald Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the Chicago Tribune, Hunter’s writing was too loose and ragged for most mainstream newspapers and not slick enough for America’s major consumer magazines.
The Observer allowed him to be methodical in his writing and build leisurely to a point, much like the Journal’s column-one features. Hunter was able to write stories that fit within the Journal’s corporate style, and yet was given enough license to stretch out and do something unusual.
First stop was Puerto Rico, where he stayed for ten days with William Kennedy and his family. Kennedy continued to be frustrated by his inability to get anywhere in the publishing world, a frustration he and Hunter shared. After rum and commiseration in Puerto Rico, Hunter began his journey, managing a ride on a boat to Colombia, paying smugglers forty dollars for passage. In Aruba, he did a conventional piece on tourism, illustrated with a self-portrait (identified as “an American tourist”) lounging on the beach, smoking, and taking notes in the sun. Neither Ridley nor any of the other Observer editors had set eyes on Hunter; they didn’t know he was modeling for his own photographs.
The trip with the smugglers helped Hunter find the meat of his first major Observer piece, “A Footloose American in a Smuggler’s Den.” Like most of his writing, the story featured Hunter Thompson as its central character. After three paragraphs of Hemingwayesque introduction, the story turned into a comic misadventure. Upon arriving in a tiny village as “the first tourist in history,” he is greeted by the entire population “staring grimly and without much obvious hospitality.” In this village, he learned, men of the village wore neckties knotted just below the navel—and nothing else. “That sort of information can make a man feel uneasy,” he wrote, “and as I climbed the steep path, staggering under the weight of my luggage, I decided that at the first sign of unpleasantness, I would begin handing out neckties like Santa Claus—three fine paisleys to the most menacing of the bunch, then start ripping up shirts.”
Throughout the summer and fall of 1962, Hunter traveled through Aruba, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, and, finally, Brazil, where he would stay until May 1963. Bob Bone, Hunter’s friend from the Middletown Record and Puerto Rico, was working for a financial magazine in Rio and that became Hunter’s home base.
“Hunter showed up on Copacabana Beach,” Bone recalled. “I spotted him while riding in a convertible with a friend, and we stopped to let him in the car. He had a drunk monkey in his jacket pocket. His explanation was that he met someone in a bar who would buy him a drink only if he could buy the monkey a drink at the same time. The monkey eventually committed suicide, leaping into the air from the balcony of my tenth-floor apartment—we presumed a victim of the DTs.”
For the year that he traveled through South America, Hunter continued to dwell in the uncertain world of the freelance writer. He had a steady market with the Observer, but he lived paycheck to paycheck and constantly battled over expenses. The cost of living was lower in South America, but all of the travel quickly ate through the Memo inheritance. His dreams of churning out variations on the same theme, feature articles slightly modified for different newspaper travel sections, did not come through on the scale he had imagined. But once he had the Observer platform, the multiple placement of articles wasn’t that important anymore. He did occasionally publish a few pieces, such as “Beer Boat Blues” in his hometown Courier-Journal.
The difference between his new world and the old hand-to-mouth features existence was that the Observer editors loved his work and that he was building an audience with the newspaper’s readers. Each dispatch sent to Ridley came with a typically wild and profane Hunter letter. The stories were for the mass audience; the letters to Ridley were adults-only. Ridley recognized the wonderfully incisive and insane quality of the letters, and eventually he stitched together several excerpts from the correspondence and turned it into a feature called “Chatty Letters During a Journey from Aruba to Rio.”
In these letters to Ridley, Hunter’s Gonzo style began to rear its head. One of the characteristics of the style Hunter developed was his preoccupation with getting the story. In fact, getting the story became the story. His writing could be classified as metajournalism, journalism about the process of journalism.
In one of the letters from the Hunter-Ridley correspondence printed in the Observer, he adopted the conspiratorial just-between-the-two-of-us tone he came to use so often. Writing about Ecuador, he said, “I could toss in a few hair-raising stories about what happens to poor Yanquis who eat cheap food, or the fact that I caught a bad cold in Bogota, because my hotel didn’t have hot water, but that would only depress us both. As it is, I am traveling half on gall.” (In his political reporting in 1972, he used that sort of technique—“I could run that story out right here, but the nuts-and-bolts people are screaming for my copy”—another attempt to bring the audience into the process of journalism on deadline.)
The casual tone of his correspondence worked well in the Observer and empowered him to adopt that voice in his journalism. From a note written in Guayaquil, Ecuador: “Things are not going well here, my man.” Later, in a letter from Lima, he sounded as if he were on the verge of a Gonzo-journalism breakthrough: “Some **** has been throwing rocks at my window all night and if I hadn’t sold my pistol I’d whip up the blinds and crank off a few rounds at his feet.”
The comfortable tone of the “Chatty Letters” anticipated the writer-reader bond he worked into his Gonzo journalism. He was much more himself in the letters than in his articles, in which he was still trying to write something “professional,” something that could conceivably be published in the New York Times. “During the Rio days,” Bob Bone recalled, “Hunter talked a wild game, but he was writing pretty straight copy. He had to get published by The National Observer to pay the rent. But he discovered his success later, when he began to write just like he talked.”
His Observer story about a Rio nightclub shooting was reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s dispatches from the Spanish civil war. Like Hemingway, Hunter referred to himself in the third person and also emphasized his closeness to the action.
Here is part of a Hemingway account:
They say you never hear the one that hits you. That’s true of bullets, because if you hear them, they are already past. But your correspondent heard the last shell that hit this hotel. He heard it start from the battery, then come with a whistling incoming roar like a subway train to crash against the cornice and shower the room with broken glass and plaster.
Here is another Hemingway dispatch from Spain that presented his cavalier attitude toward violence:
In the morning, before your call comes from the desk, the roaring burst of a high explosive shell wakes you and you go to the window and look out to see a man, his head down, his coat collar up, sprinting desperately across the paved square. There is the acrid smell of high explosive you hoped you’d never smell again, and, in a bathrobe and bedroom slippers, you hurry down the marble stairs and almost into a middle-aged woman, wounded in the abdomen, who is being helped into the hotel entrance by two men in blue workmen’s smocks. She has her two hands crossed below her big, old-style Spanish bosom, and from between her fingers, her blood spurting in a thin stream. . . .
A policeman covers the top of the trunk from which the head is missing; they send for someone to repair the gas main and you go into breakfast. A charwoman, her eyes red, is scrubbing the blood off the marble floor of the corridor. The dead man wasn’t you nor anyone you know and everyone is very hungry in the morning after a cold night and a long day the day before up at the Guadalajara front.
Hunter was not writing about war in Rio, yet his dispassionate description of the aftermath of violence at the Domino Club strongly evoked Hemingway’s reporting from a quarter century before. He referred to himself as an “American journalist” awakened by a 4:30 a.m. call from a friend, telling of the Brazilian army going wild in the streets in the city’s nightclub district:
Ten minutes later, the half-dressed journalist jumped out of a cab a block away from the action. He walked quickly, but very casually, toward the Domino Club, with his camera and flashgun cradled in one arm like a football. In a Latin American country nervous with talk of revolution, a man with good sense runs headlong into a shooting party, because he is likely to get stitched across the chest with Czech machine gun slugs.
But at 4:45 the Domino Club was quiet. It is—or was—a well-known clip joint, catering mainly to American tourists and wealthy Brazilians. The lure was girls—some young and pretty, others slightly piggy and painted after long years of service.
Now the Domino is a shell, a dark room full of broken glass and bullet holes. The doorman is dead; he was cut down by gunfire as he fled toward a nearby corner. The bartender is in the hospital with a bullet creased down the side of his skull, and several patrons are wounded. Most observers say another man is dead, but the bodies were taken away so quickly that nobody can be sure.
The raid by the soldiers in retaliation for the beating of one of their colleagues in the Domino a few weeks before was described in graphic detail by Hunter, with barely concealed outrage. At one point he even quoted himself, wondering what the reaction would be to a similar incident back home, were soldiers from Fort Knox to open fire in a Louisville nightclub.
Thompson’s next pieces covered Brazil’s post-election trauma, and Bolivia’s economic conditions. He also ventured into the history of the Inca, observing that wealth now was measured not in gold but in the sleeping politics of the Indians. It was a traditional piece, one that would have been at home on the opinion page of the New York Times, and marked his first major venture into political analysis.
The Inca political piece, along with the story of the nightclub shooting and the chatty letters, showed Hunter’s versatility. He was building a strong portfolio, but the Observer’s inability to find a large audience kept his distinctive articles from reaching legions of readers. Within the world of Dow Jones and the serious news junkies, however, the Observer’s “roving South American correspondent” had made an impression.
Hunter’s tenure in South America coincided with the era of the “Ugly American” from Eugene Burdick’s novel of that name, which portrayed the negative American image in the Third World. Hunter saw much ugliness, though not just confined to his compatriots. He found his paradigm in the image of an unfeeling Briton firing golf balls from a rooftop apartment into the slums of the Colombian city below. In “Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow South of the Border,” a piece published at the end of his tenure below the equator, he began and ended his essay with that appalling image.
One of my most vivid memories of South America is that of a man with a golf club—a five iron, if memory serves—driving golf balls off a penthouse terrace in Cali, Colombia. He was a tall Britisher, and had what the British call “a stylish pot” instead of a waistline. Beside him on a small patio table was a long gin-and-tonic, which he refilled from time to time at the nearby bar.
He had a good swing, and each of his shots carried low and long out over the city. Where they fell, neither he nor I nor anyone else on the terrace that day had the vaguest idea. The penthouse, however, was in a residential section of Rio Cali, which runs through the middle of town. Somewhere below us, in the narrow streets that are lined by the white adobe blockhouses of urban peasantry, a strange hail was rattling on the roofs—golf balls, “old practice duds,” so the Britisher told me, that were “hardly worth driving away.”
Hunter’s essay had some of the flavor of Graham Greene’s novels of the era, such as Our Man in Havana or A Burnt-out Case. The piece powerfully showed the displaced American or Briton in conflict with another culture.
Down in South America, Hunter was largely unaware that he was part of a movement soon to be called New Journalism. Of all the major players in this loose-limbed movement, Hunter was the farthest removed. Most of the action was taking place in New York. “Hunter’s stories were just different,” Footlick said, “and this was the time when the so-called New Journalism was just beginning to happen. This was early, and it was just different. People just weren’t used to it.”
While Hunter chronicled the lives of drug smugglers in South America, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and others were stretching the definitions of daily journalism in New York’s major newspapers. They were all in competition, Wolfe said, to be the “best feature writer in town.” Talese, a reporter for the New York Times, began writing features for Esquire that redefined the celebrity interview. Reading Talese’s story about former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, Wolfe was awakened to the possibilities of what could happen when journalism used the techniques of the fiction writer. Talese’s account of a weekend with Joe Louis was undoubtedly true, yet it read like a short story. There was little exposition, but mostly a presentation of scene and sequel.
Wolfe was a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. Having earned a doctorate in American studies from Yale and reported for the Washington Post, he had landed in the Herald Tribune newsroom in 1962 in the middle of the great feature-writing competition in New York. All the writers were out to prove that they were the best one in town. Most of them moonlighted and tried to pitch their articles to Esquire, which was publishing some of the most innovative nonfiction writing in the country. Wolfe wangled an assignment from the Herald Tribune to do a story on a car rally in California. He sold Esquire’s editors on the idea, giving them the assignment without the expense of funding the trip. Wolfe returned to California, wrote the piece for the Herald Tribune, but had a terrible time trying to write the Esquire piece:
At first, I couldn’t even write the story. I came back to New York and just sat around worrying over the thing. I had a lot of trouble analyzing what I had on my hands. By this time, Esquire practically had a gun at my head because they had a two-page color picture for the story locked into the printing presses and no story. Finally, I told Byron Dobell, the managing editor at Esquire, that I couldn’t pull things together. O.K., he tells me, just type out my notes and send them over and he will get someone else to write it. So, about 8 o’clock that night I started typing notes out in the form of a memo that began, “Dear Byron.” I started typing away, starting right with the first time I saw any custom cars in California. I just started recording it all, and inside of a couple of hours, typing along like a mad man, I could tell something was beginning to happen. By midnight, this memo to Byron was 20 pages long and I was still typing like a maniac. About 2 a.m. or something like that, I turned on WABC, a radio station that plays rock and roll music all night long, and I got a little more manic. I wrapped up the memo about 6:15 a.m., and by this time it was 49 pages long. I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30. About 4 p.m., I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were striking out the “Dear Byron” at the top and running the rest of it in the magazine.
Thus Tom Wolfe found his style, in an article titled “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Bruuuuuuummmmmmmmmm).” Wolfe’s entry into the competition signaled the beginning of the revolution in journalistic writing that would take place in the sixties. Wolfe became movement historian, citing Fielding and Dickens as major influences on the “New Journalism” (he hated the term) and making his claim that journalism would become the new art form of the era. As evidence, he noted John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which documented the lives of six bomb survivors in the days after the blast, and Truman Capote’s The Muses Are Heard, an account of an American troupe of Porgy and Bess on tour in the Soviet Union in the Cold War fifties.
Yet the New Journalism as a form can be best dated from the early sixties—with Talese, Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Terry Southern, Joan Didion, John Sack, Barbara Goldsmith, and George Plimpton in the forefront, and most of the major writers orbiting the New York Herald Tribune or the New Yorker. Eventually, Capote and Norman Mailer, both of whom were largely critical of journalists, ended up writing the nonfiction classics In Cold Blood and The Armies of the Night. There was no conspiracy . . . no club meetings . . . but everybody seemed to be up to something. Terry Southern, writing in Esquire, produced a wickedly funny piece about a baton-twirling competition at the University of Mississippi that—were the byline removed—someone could easily assume was written by the Hunter Thompson of a decade later. Like Hunter’s writing, Southern’s used the technique of making the process of getting the story into the meat of the story.
Hunter Thompson, who would become one of the major figures of New Journalism, was at a far distance from and to a large extent unaware of this new kind of nonfiction writing he was supposedly helping to define. While Wolfe, Talese, and the other big guns were flexing their muscles in Esquire, Hunter was thousands of miles away, on the front lines in South America for the National Observer.
The Observer wanted color, and it wanted dispatches from all over the world. Hunter’s far-flung stories got elegant display, often on the front page, with their exotic tales of the strange and still-wild world of South America. Readers loved his stories of tin miners, drug smugglers, and jungle bandits. Hunter was making relatively good money and having a hell of a time, but even the good times got old.
Paul Semonin was studying in Ghana and contemplated coming to South America for a visit. Hunter warned him off. Most of the places he’d seen were “a pure dull hell and full of so many nagging discomforts that [he was] tempted at times to write this continent off as a lost cause.” Semonin was a regular correspondent, and Hunter mocked him for his interest in the African people and culture, and his altruistic concern for minorities. He addressed Semonin in letters as “Nigger Boy” or “Spic.”
“I never felt in some ways he got beyond his racial prejudice,” Semonin said. “It was a gut thing with all of us, growing up in the South. We had that in our bones. He wrote me a letter when I was coming out of Africa and addressed it to me, ‘Dear Nigger Boy.’ He always chose those sorts of provocative leads on his letters. I had written him something about having met Malcolm X in Ghana and was very much interested in black national politics. But that [‘Nigger Boy’] was just something that came out in a burst, but looking back I can see, underneath it, some kind of insensitivity.”
He was moving with a faster crowd than he had in Middletown, or as a copyboy at Time. In Quito, Rio, and the other major cities, he was drawn to the visiting heavyweight correspondents from the major American and European newspapers and television networks. He drank with them and, on occasion, raised hell. While in Rio, Hunter became friends with Charles Kuralt, Latin American bureau chief for CBS News. Kuralt started out in newspapers in North Carolina and latched onto the network first as a writer and later, during the 1960 presidential campaign, as an on-air correspondent. He and Hunter remained friends and regular correspondents for the rest of their lives. “My greatest talent is in my ability to choose good friends,” Hunter said of Kuralt years later. “It’s about as important as things get.”
During Hunter’s stay in Rio, Hunter was arrested for shooting rats at the city dump with a .357 Magnum. In jail, he charmed the cops, who soon dropped the charges since Hunter had ditched the gun and there was no proof he had actually shot the rats. On the verge of release, Hunter leaned back in his chair and the bullets from the Magnum slipped from his pocket and clattered to the floor. It took intervention by the U.S. embassy to spring him from jail.
Empowered by Dow Jones, now that he was sitting at the grown-up correspondents table, he began parrying by mail with Washington Post publisher Philip Graham. He first ridiculed Graham for his comments on the National Observer in an article in Newsweek (which Graham also owned). Graham mocked the Observer for being a newspaper without reporters, but Hunter was quick to point out that he was the registered correspondent for the Observer in Rio and that neither the Post nor Newsweek had a correspondent there. “I’m beginning to think you’re a phony, Graham,” Hunter ended the letter. Graham took the bait, telling Hunter that he was late in coming to that “phony” conclusion, that many prominent Americans had held that belief for years. Graham asked Hunter to write and tell him about himself. Hunter rose to the occasion, and he and Graham began getting to know each other through the mail. (They never met. Graham invited Hunter to Washington when he returned to the states, but Graham was being treated in a mental hospital when Hunter finally returned. Hunter invited him to Florida, where they could meet at Sandy’s mother’s home. It remained a short, doomed correspondence. Graham killed himself in August 1963.)
Hunter settled—as much as he ever settled—in Rio, and Sandy flew down to surprise him. No woman, not even the maddeningly memorable Ann Frick, had ever had such a hold on him. He might have confronted another woman who had done something so audacious—Who invited you to this party?—but he took in Sandy, and they enjoyed the life on Copacabana Beach and now and then could delude themselves that they were merely another beautiful young American couple on vacation. She was the sort of woman his ego and single-mindedness demanded, and she was also much better than he deserved. But not long after she arrived, Hunter decided that it was time to leave.
“Rio was the end of the foreign correspondent’s road,” he said. “I found myself 25 years old, wearing a white suit, and rolling dice at the Domino Club—the foreign correspondent’s club. And here I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, what am I gonna do now?’ Then, I would roll dice more and write less and worry about it until I’d have a nervous breakdown. It makes you change whatever you’re doing.”
Feeling what he called “a frenzy of patriotism,” owing to President Kennedy, the Peace Corps, and a feeling of optimism about the country he loved, Hunter decided it was time to go home. Sandy flew to New York ahead of him, and then went on to Louisville, to meet Hunter’s mother and his two brothers.
The staff of the National Observer had never laid eyes on Hunter when he showed up at the offices in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland. In tropical shirt, aviator shades, shorts, and cigarette in a holder, he was out of place with the necktied Observer staff. Hunter said the editors met him like a visiting dignitary. “I came home as a man who’d been a star,” he said. “All the editors met me and treated me as such.”
The editors took him out for drinks at the Hay Adams, and arranged for him to speak at the National Press Club. Face-to-face, they recognized that their star writer was an oddball. Out of courtesy as much as anything else, Hunter was offered a cubicle job in the features section. “I offered to put him on the staff,” editor Bill Giles said. “He clearly had a lot of talent. He wasn’t interested. He wanted to go to San Francisco because in those days it was the place young people went.” Ridley would have welcomed Hunter in his department. But others on the Observer breathed sighs of relief when Hunter said thanks but no thanks. He could best contribute to the Observer as a writer, and wanted to return to the West. His diabolical plan was to persuade Philip Graham to add the National Observer to his stable of publications and install Hunter Thompson as his editor. He never got a chance to present his idea to the publisher.