Q: If you could meet any person in the world, who would you meet?
A: Hunter S. Thompson; he seemed like a pretty crazy guy.
—Interview with a college athlete, 2007
Juan thought a book dropped to the floor. When he came into the room a few minutes later, nothing looked amiss. Hunter was in the kitchen, at his perch in front of his typewriter, but slumped in the chair, as if sleeping. Hunter rarely slept. He fought sleep, sometimes staying up for days, working, making phone calls deep into the night. His friends knew there was real time, and then there was Hunter time. If he had your phone number, you were fair game.
But Juan knew Hunter was not asleep. He had expected this someday, but not today. He found the gun Hunter had fired underneath his stool. Later, deputies found the spent slug in the hood of the oven, which was splattered with blood and brain matter.
There was paper in the typewriter. Hunter had several varieties of stationery. This sheet was for the Fourth Amendment Foundation. He had typed one word in the middle of the page: “counselor.”
Juan told his wife and son. Then he called Bob Braudis, who was at a memorial service for one of his deputies.
“Something’s wrong with my dad,” Juan said.
“Like what?” Braudis asked.
“It’s really bad.”
“Have you called an ambulance?”
After hanging up with Braudis, Juan got his father’s shotgun, stepped outside into the cold, and fired three rounds into the air.
After her workout, Anita was in the health-club bathroom when her friend Robin Smith asked her, “Is Hunter OK?” Word had spread around town once news of the shooting hit the police scanner. “Oh yeah,” Anita said. “He’s been pretty stressed out lately.” But Robin’s look scared Anita. Robin insisted Anita check her messages. Her hands shook so much she could barely punch in the numbers. There was a voice mail from Juan, straight and to the point: “Anita, you have to come home now. He’s dead.”
Rick Balentine was chief of Aspen’s Fire Rescue Department. He was playing in a charity poker game downtown when he got a page from medical dispatch. “Hunter shot himself,” it said. That’s odd, Balentine thought. It’s not hunting season. Then Braudis called. Balentine got into his official car and ran code—lights and sirens—all the way to Woody Creek. He arrived the same time as Braudis.
“Juan was in the living room,” Balentine said. “The sheriff’s deputies were keeping him out of the kitchen. Anita was still at the health club.”
It was getting dark as Braudis, Balentine, and the deputies got to Owl Farm. The home became a crime scene.
Braudis thought it best to move Juan, Jennifer, and Will to the other cabin on the property, where Deborah Fuller had lived. Juan first asked a favor. He and his wife bought Hunter the silk scarf they’d found in Florence. The deputies let Juan into the kitchen, and he draped the scarf over his father’s shoulders.
Inside, Braudis found his friend: “Hunter sitting on his stool, with his head down, not a lot of visible trauma. Paramedics had the leads on him, and they’d already said he was dead when I got there. The gun was at the bottom of the stool.”
The most important thing, Braudis decided, was Juan’s family. After they were in the other cabin, he called for grief counseling and a child psychologist. “I let the pros do their thing,” he said. “We did all of our forensic shit, but I was at the other house.” He asked his girlfriend to call friends and relatives and tell them. “Incoming phone calls were melting the system down.” Balentine called Ed Bradley, one of the close friends he shared with Hunter. “He couldn’t believe it,” Balentine said. “I didn’t want him to hear about it on the news.”
After getting Juan’s message, Anita called Braudis: “She was screaming at me, ‘What’s wrong. What’s going on?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to tell you over the phone.’ ”
She made the frantic drive out to Owl Farm and pushed past deputies to get to the house. She asked Braudis if she could go in. “I don’t recommend it,” Braudis said, “but shit, I can’t stop you.” Balentine had anticipated the request.
“Anita wanted to come in and say goodbye to Hunter before they took him away in the hearse,” Balentine said. “I didn’t want her to see him or the kitchen in that state. I did what I could to sterilize it.” Anita came inside and saw her husband. “He was sitting in his chair when they brought me in,” she told a reporter. “I got to hug him and kiss him and rub his legs.” He looked as if he were sleeping. “He did not destroy his face,” Anita said. “He did it in his mouth. His face was beautiful. It was quick.”
The funeral home’s hearse showed up, and as the body was being prepared for transport, Bob Rafelson called Braudis. Rafelson was a director (of Five Easy Pieces, among many other films) who had been Hunter’s neighbor down Woody Creek Road for years. He was celebrating his birthday at home when he got the call about Hunter. He asked to come see the body.
When Rafelson arrived, Hunter was in a body bag. Juan and his wife had drifted back into the house, still in shock. Rafelson knelt down and asked the orderlies to unzip the bag so he could see Hunter’s face. He looked for a moment, then stood and turned to Juan. “You know,” he said, “property values are going to go down now.”
Balentine picked up Songs of the Doomed from the kitchen counter, where it rested near Hunter’s typewriter. “We need to do what we always do in this kitchen,” he said. “Let’s have a drink and read.”
They found a bottle of Chivas Regal, poured drinks, and held their glasses and stood around Hunter: Juan and Jennifer, Anita, Braudis, Balentine, Rafelson . . . they all took turns. “It was as much religious as anything else,” Balentine said. “That was the last time there was actually readings in the kitchen with Hunter.”
Anita later called his suicide “a gesture of strength.” Juan said, “Maybe he wanted to go out before it stopped being fun.”
They drank their Chivas and toasted the late Hunter S. Thompson.
Later, Juan told a reporter, “I’ve known for many, many years that this is how Hunter would go. It was just a question of when.” He told another interviewer, “Hunter, more than most people, lived on his own terms and he was going to do his death on his own terms too. He was going to go out when he was ready to go, the way he wanted to go. He wasn’t going to let anybody else decide that for him.” In another statement, Juan employed a Hunteresque phrase: “He stomped terra.”
“Sebastian saw it on the news,” Tom Corcoran said. “He was up and called me in tears. I was in the Keys. And he said, ‘What’s going on with Hunter?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘He shot himself.’”
Tom Corcoran had learned a lot from Hunter. When he published his first novel, The Mango Opera, Hunter, Jimmy Buffett, and Jim Harrison offered dust-jacket praise to publicize it. To Sebastian Corcoran, Hunter would always be that adopted uncle who played catch with him and used to pull up in the yard, announcing his arrival with a bullhorn.
Corcoran was at his place on Cudjoe Key, working on his next mystery novel. Calls from reporters started coming. “I was interviewed by three different newspapers. And thank goodness I was, because I was the only one who said, ‘The man is a genius.’ All of the other people said, ‘Oh, he was a great guy . . . he barfed on my shoe one time.’ ”
Back in Louisville, Hunter’s childhood friend Neville Blakemore heard the news on National Public Radio the next morning. “My first thought was ‘Ah, hell, Hunter, it can’t be that bad,’” he said, then briefly considered maybe it was a hoax. Porter Bibb, who now worked in the world of high finance, was in Shanghai. “The local papers had his photo on the front page under the headline, ‘American Literary Icon Dead,’ ” he said, marveling that his childhood friend rated mention in Asia. Paul Semonin woke up to the news at his home in Oregon. In Hawaii, Bob Bone said he was “shocked, but not surprised.” Sonny Barger was at his home in Arizona. “I wonder how he made it so long,” he said. “His whole life he was on that plunge—a suicidal trip.” Cheryl Frymire had moved back with her family in Pennsylvania two months before. She saw the news on the only television station that reached her on the farm. She called the Woody Creek Tavern to talk to friends. “The phones there were ringing off the hook that night,” she said. “No one wanted to believe it.” In Amagansett, New York, Anne Willis Noonan woke to the news that the best man at her wedding was dead. She cried. “I truly hope he is in a good place, full of peacocks, Dobermans, and it’s a dry county,” she said.
Former Senator Gary Hart was in Australia. “I was afraid that somehow it had not been a rational act, that he, in a fit of whatever—drugs, hallucination, or something—he’d done something he really wouldn’t have done if he’d been more sober or sane,” he said. “I didn’t understand quite how or why you would do that with your son and his family there.” In Montana, Russell Chatham was deeply saddened, but on reflection thought perhaps it should not have been surprising “given the medical problems and the vile political climate.”
Ralph Steadman was asleep when he got a transatlantic call from Joe Petro, the printmaker with whom he’d collaborated on Gonzo art. “Take your phone off the hook,” Petro told Steadman. “Hunter just shot himself.” But Ralph took a call from the Independent and wrote a reminiscence for the paper, and was quoted in wire stories saying, “About bloody time. He’s been threatening to do it for years.” Eventually, Ralph wrote a troubling and touching memoir of their friendship, The Joke’s Over. “I keep wishing he would have just shot himself in the balls and left that brain intact,” he mused after the book was published. “I wish he’d left his mind to function and work on something greater.”
Putting Hunter in context was tough. The press reported the death of that crazy dude who took all those drugs and was played in the movies by Johnny Depp and Bill Murray. The madman public image that overshadowed him in life also stalked him in death.
As a historian and Hunter’s literary executor, Douglas Brinkley was the leading authority on him and his work. Jann Wenner and the Rolling Stone staff, led by editor Corey Seymour, assembled a monumental memorial issue, working against the usual deadline odds, compounded by severe emotional ones. Finally, Hunter’s name was moved from the masthead, as he had requested in 1972. It appeared in a place of honor at the bottom of the list of names, alongside Ralph Gleason’s. “He was such a big part of my life and I loved him deeply,” Wenner wrote in the memorial issue. As soon as the issue was done, he and Seymour began expanding the issue into a book-length treatment called Gonzo. When that was finished, Wenner began assembling an anthology of all of Hunter’s stories for the magazine. He mused about how their intense partnership in the seventies had cooled. He wondered what Hunter might have achieved “had he not become an alcoholic and a cocaine addict.” “I always saw him as an Ambrose Bierce–Mark Twain kind of guy,” Wenner mused. “He had that wit and that acid tongue and that gift of hyperbolic language. He could have continued in that direction. He was deeply involved in what America could be and should be. Our love of that was one of the many parts of our bond.”
Essayists, friends, and admirers began filling print and cyberspace with postdeath tributes. Some wrote about his large role in chronicling the madness of his times, citing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as the epitaph for the sixties and its broken hopes. He had always wanted to be known for his fiction, but his journalism nevertheless became his literature. In the end, his epic life became his novel.
Hunter’s obsession was the American Dream, something he struggled to write about and never fully defined. “If life is a dream, as some suggest, sometimes beautiful sometimes desperate, then Hunter’s work is the terrible saga of the ending of time for the American Dream,” Ron Whitehead said. In his heart, Hunter’s interpretation might have been close to Sonny Barger’s vision: “There ain’t an American Dream today like there was fifty years ago. Ten or fifteen years ago, when I lived in Oakland, we would take a trip to San Jose and it was like fifty miles away, and it was an all-day trip down East Fourteenth Street. Things were a lot slower then. It’s a much, much faster world now. Because of 9/11, we’ve lost so many of our freedoms, and started becoming basically a police state. So much of our freedom has been taken away. The American Dream of fifty years ago is totally gone.”
Gary Hart said of Hunter, “If he was searching for the American Dream, he was searching for it way out on the margin, not where most people live.”
“He could have made a pretty good president,” Ralph Steadman said. “People would laugh at that, but he was serious about all of that. I think he was one of the best patriots we’ve ever had.” Hunter was furious with those who confused dissent with disloyalty. “I’m as patriotic as anybody,” he said. “I have a long history of writing about this country and I do care what happens to it.”
His death came as a shock, but maybe it shouldn’t have. He’d been writing suicide notes his whole life. College students mourned. Book sales soared. Fans erected tribute websites. Essayists both praised and denounced his exit. Warren Ellis, the graphic artist whose Transmetropolitan books were about a shadow life for Hunter, wrote about Hunter’s great influence, then said that the numbness he felt “comes from now finding that he was the kind of man that’d let his family find him like that. I have a personal loathing for suicide. It’s stupid and selfish and ugly and cowardly and reeks of weakness.”
Hunter’s friends faced their grief, replayed their last moments with him, and vented their anger. “I had no signals, no indication that he was contemplating it,” Bob Braudis said. The Wednesday before, he was entertaining some out-of-town visitors at a restaurant when Hunter called. When Hunter learned that the visitors were his fans, he asked Braudis to bring them by the farm. For two hours, he gave the guests enough Hunter Thompson stories for a lifetime. “He was on his game,” Braudis said. “That was the last time I saw him alive.”
After Hunter’s death, Braudis had to hold things together personally and professionally. “I was the oak tree for the close friends and family,” he said. “Then I got fucking pissed. I got really angry.” He had to go to California for a funeral. Afterward, he went to Napa Valley. “I got up in the wine country, got fucked up, then I got copacetic with it.” Eventually, the anger passed and sadness took over. “I miss him. When shit pops up, like when Deep Throat was outed, I thought, ‘What would Hunter say?’ ”
Numbness, shock, thingsleft undone and unsaid. Juan and Anita wrestled with the churning emotions of sudden loss, and the devastating survivor pain of suicide. Anita received thousands of letters from Hunter’s devoted fans. “A lot of kids want to be rebels, but a lot of them don’t want to be smart rebels, and do it right,” she said. But the majority of the letters came from bright kids who seemed to understand Hunter and the need for intelligent dissent, not emotional rant. Hunter had little patience with the dewy-eyed or the uninformed. “When he was gone, it was very hard,” Anita said. “He had so much to offer. He was so well versed. He could talk about anything. He could bring humor to any dark situation. He was valuable, in so many different ways, to his friends. He was always there for his friends and we certainly have a vacuum.” She paused, considering the void left in her life. “At this point,” she said, “I would just settle for a three-minute phone call from wherever he is.”
Without time to get their wind back, Anita and Juan were both forced to ponder Hunter’s legacy, literary and otherwise. The immediate concern was what to do with Hunter’s stuff. He had a lot of stuff. As a lifelong pack rat, he left behind eight hundred boxes of letters and photographs.
A moving truck backed up to the door of Hunter’s home and carted the boxes off to the Denver law firm of Haddon, Morgan and Foreman. Hal Haddon, one of Hunter’s close friends, offered the space to the family for the massive task of sifting through Hunter’s life in words. Universities began lining up like suitors on prom night, hoping to take the Thompson papers home to their library archives.
As Juan sat on a stool in the middle of the hundreds of boxes, he meticulously indexed the contents. “It’s very interesting, now that he’s dead, to still be learning about our relationship,” Juan said. “What’s sad is I can’t talk to him about it now. That makes me sad, but I’m very glad that I have this chance to learn more about him.” Hunter saved everything. “Something that may look like nothing in a box, like a scribbled-on cocktail napkin from Las Vegas, is sort of an interesting artifact,” Douglas Brinkley said. “Things like that were key elements of Hunter’s work process.”
Juan began writing a memoir of life with his father. Anita collected some of Hunter’s wit and wisdom for a slim volume called The Gonzo Way, and promised Hunter’s readers that death would not silence him. The important thing was to develop a publishing strategy, not to dump Hunter’s previously unpublished work onto the market. “We’re not in a hurry,” Anita said. “We don’t want to flood bookstores with Hunter’s work. That’s not the way to do it. And we have to think about these things. There have been some writers, as soon as they died, their estate started pumping out their work. I don’t think that’s a great tribute, actually.”
Brinkley saw The Gun Lobby as a complete and fully realized book-length manuscript, something that could easily stand alongside Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the Campaign Trail book. “We have to think through a strategy so that in ten or twenty years, Hunter does not become a dismissed figure, like Ambrose Bierce. So we have to think long-term in publishing his remaining work.” Brinkley said that Juan and Anita were on the same page in this matter: “They want Hunter to look good, in long-term literary reputation.” Perhaps pairing the early novel Prince Jellyfish with some of Hunter’s Fitzgerald-influenced short stories from the fifties would make an entertaining volume, he said. As literary executor, Brinkley was forced to look at the work with an eye toward commercial potential and scholarly value. But he also needed distance; he too had lost a close friend.
Juan’s major concern was that his father be remembered as a writer, not as a drug-addled caricature. “People are going to write what they want to write,” he said. But he hoped to keep the focus on his father’s work and on “not the crazy stories and the crazy things he did.”
Juan did not work alone in helping to prop up Hunter’s reputation. Two days after Hunter’s death, Tom Wolfe wrote his appreciation for the Wall Street Journal, including the caveat that he and Hunter had not spent much time together and that he, thank God, was not on Hunter’s nocturnal call list. Wolfe noted that Hunter was his candidate for “the greatest comic writer of the 20th Century.” Wolfe later said that Hunter really belonged alongside nineteenth-century American humorists such as Mark Twain, Josh Billings, and Petroleum V. Nasby. “All three of them were onstage a lot, and Twain, if you look back at it, Twain was an entertainer. He was the first authentic American voice in literature in the eyes of Europeans. They had all heard about the Wild West and the gold rush and American manners and speech, which was so different. You couldn’t find that in literature. In the case of Mark Twain, you found it in the literature, and he was just a great entertainer onstage. Hunter onstage was a performer, but not in words. He always had maniac presentations—throwing things at the audience, throwing a glass of Wild Turkey through a window, and so on. I never saw him out of character in formal situations.”
Wolfe said Hunter shared another key characteristic with Twain. “As with Mark Twain, with Hunter you take for granted that it’s not all true. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he refers to his Samoan lawyer. He was actually Mexican, but Samoan is a lot funnier.” But beyond his comic style and his well-developed persona, Hunter shared a level of celebrity with Twain. “Mark Twain was the best-known American writer in history,” Wolfe said. “There will probably never be anyone as well known as he was. He was an international showman. I wonder if there is any writer right now who is better known than Hunter Thompson.” Wolfe pondered a moment, and came up with Philip Roth, John Updike, and Norman Mailer. “But outside of the ‘litt-tree’ world, these are nonpeople, whereas Hunter Thompson is all over the place.” Even people who did not read knew Hunter S. Thompson.
But those who did read, Wolfe said, were lucky to live in Hunter Thompson’s times. “He was just brilliant,” he said. “There are very few writers who could top him. I can’t think of any humorist in the whole country who could touch him.”
For a long time, Wolfe thought Hunter was a prisoner of his persona. “I said to myself, ‘He’s trapped himself in this role of having to be the manic clown.’ But as I look back on it, that’s really not true. That was his particular form of genius. It’s a hard act to keep up when you’re really not young anymore. But he did. To the bitter end, he was a wild man.”
The coroner said death had been instantaneous. Hunter was cremated the next day, and his ashes stored in a bird’s-eye maple box. But a scheduled ceremony for the following weekend was canceled (not enough time to arrange), and plans were begun for a memorial. Handling the ceremonies of Hunter’s death fell to his young widow and to his son. Many things needed doing, but Anita made certain to attend to one of Hunter’s specific wishes: she packed up Hunter’s red IBM Selectric II and sent it to Bob Dylan, in gratitude for the forty years of “fuel” his music had provided.
A few days after his father’s suicide, Juan called Cheryl Frymire in Pennsylvania and asked whether she would come back to Aspen to sing at a memorial service.
On March 5, a six-hour, invitation-only memorial was held at the Hotel Jerome in Aspen. Life-size cutouts of Hunter greeted the guests—Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp, Bill Murray, and Jann Wenner, among them. Wayne Ewing’s documentary, Breakfast with Hunter, played on monitors. Black thong panties with the Gonzo double-thumbed fist on the crotch were displayed on tables, alongside Kleenex and beaded necklaces. Bartenders served beer, liquor, and Jell-O shots. “Everyone there was handpicked to be Hunter’s friend,” Frymire said. Hunter’s brother Davison came from Cleveland and got to meet these people from the other end of Hunter’s life. He saw a familiar face: Porter Bibb, from the old days in Louisville. They got caught up, and at one point Davison asked, “What do you think made Hunter the way he is?” Bibb shook his head. He had no answer. “I thought it was really a strange question for the guy who grew up with him to ask. He didn’t have a clue.”
The memorial card handed to guests did not have a biblical verse. Instead, it was from Kubla Khan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Weave a circle round him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread.
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise.
Jann Wenner spoke, trying to set the record straight about the firing-on-the-way-to-Saigon story. That was all a misunderstanding. “He knew that I would never fuck him over,” Wenner later recalled. “That’s a rare thing to find in somebody, especially if you’re as nutty as Hunter. He knew I was there on every level—as a friend, as an editor, as a comrade.” Others offered testaments of love or admiration, with a few bawdy stories. Cheryl Frymire took the stage and sang, a cappella, one of the hymns she had recorded for Hunter at his request, so he could worship in the privacy of his mind:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.
The memorial at the Jerome, moving as it was, was not the end. There was Hunter’s well-documented wish to have his remains blasted from a tower. He’d laid out his specific plans, down to the height of the monument (150 feet), its design (the double-thumbed fist), and the ceremony (his ashes blasted into space through the cannon, while Bob Dylan sang “Mr. Tambourine Man”).
Making this pipe dream reality would be incredibly expensive, but Hunter, who collected friends, who put new people together to make new bouquets of friends, who thus created a tribe, had faith it would happen. “I know somewhere in his crooked mind, he knew that I was the only one loyal enough or insane enough to attempt it,” Johnny Depp said.
Depp hired Hollywood production companies to build the fist, the tower, and the landscape for the second funeral. At a cost of $2.5 million, Depp gave Hunter the send-off he wanted. Considering the materials, the labor, the man-hours to construct the monument in California and transport it to Colorado, and then to stage the event on Owl Farm, Depp got a bargain.
The blast-off ceremony was a logistical trial. Depp’s planners had to get local governmental approval, obtain the blessings of neighbors, construct the huge tower, choreograph the fireworks, and build a viewing pavilion for the invited guests. To keep the monument as secret as possible, it was covered by a red shroud during construction. There were also pyrotechnic issues. The monument was 150 feet high. The fireworks would go over 200 feet higher, so the Federal Aviation Administration had to get involved to regulate airspace. The site had been specified by Hunter—in the bowl of a valley in front of the bluffs that bounded his land. The ceremony and display were scheduled for August 20. Unfortunately, Colorado was suffering a drought, and a ban on burning was in effect.
Invitations went out late and, to control the size of the event, were limited to 150 guests. Many longtime friends were left off the list, and an article in the Aspen Free Press said that “Hollywood hijacked” Hunter’s funeral. Anita, sensitive to the issue, put an ad in the newspaper urging people to honor Hunter at the Woody Creek Tavern and an Aspen bar called the Belly Up. Invited guests would be transported to Woody Creek by chartered buses. But none of this planning stopped massive cross-country pilgrimages by Hunter’s true believers.
The viewing pavilion was decorated in Hunter style, with a bar, a replica of his refrigerator (stocked with Heineken and Flying Dog), buffalo heads, a stuffed peacock, the Oxford American Dictionary open to the entry for gonzo, and comfortable furniture that could have fit in Hunter’s salon. Huge photographs decorated the room, including one of Hunter’s favorites: the picture Tom Corcoran took of him throwing the football to Sebastian in the yard in Key West. Hunter was shirtless, intent as a pro quarterback, young and handsome. He was playing with a young boy, but he looked as focused as Bart Starr or Joe Namath. In the middle of the pavilion was a round bar, serving every alcoholic refreshment known to humanity.
Deborah Fuller came back. Ron Whitehead and his family drove cross-country. Tom and Sebastian Corcoran arrived from Florida, guests of Monty Chitty. Bill Murray, Johnny Depp, Laila Nabulsi, and several other writers and actors made sure to attend. Jann Wenner, Ralph Steadman, and others from the old days at Rolling Stone were there. In death as in life, Hunter brought together writers, actors, politicians, and journalists. Bill Dixon was there with his old boss, George McGovern. McGovern’s wife, Eleanor, had suffered a heart attack that summer, a few weeks before the memorial, but she insisted her husband attend.
Bob Braudis spoke to the crowd, noting how special Hunter really was. “After all,” he said, “even the pope had only one funeral.” He tried to remind everyone that Hunter would not want sadness on this occasion. He had spoken to David Amram, who had come to perform, with Lyle Lovett and Johnny Depp. “No tears,” Braudis said. “Hunter wrote that when he died there should be a party with all of his old friends, and he wanted to hear the tinkling of ice in glasses.”
Surveying the crowd, Ralph Steadman said, “It’s like Hunter is our host for the evening, bringing us all together one more time.”
Lovett played “If I Had a Boat,” one of Hunter’s favorite songs. With Johnny Depp and Amram, they played Amram’s “Theme and Variations on My Old Kentucky Home.” John Kerry waved to the crowd. Anita Thompson read Kubla Khan. Jann Wenner described his many collaborations with Hunter, and Ed Bradley told a few of his favorite Hunter stories.
Senator McGovern, the featured speaker, focused on Hunter’s Campaign Trail book. “At the end of the book, on the last page, Hunter has a list and he says it’s ‘Ten things I wish I had done during the campaign.’ And what he said for number ten was ‘I wish I had spent a week on a deserted Caribbean island with Eleanor McGovern.’” The crowd laughed. “I didn’t think so kindly of that, but we’ve stayed in touch over all the years and everything. And when I went to the hospital yesterday to talk to Eleanor—Eleanor insisted that I come—and she said, ‘George, since you’ll be the last one to talk to Hunter before they shoot his ashes up, tell him I wished I had spent that week with him, too.’”
As the ceremony was about to begin, Juan Thompson drove his father’s convertible, the Great Red Shark, to the base of the monument and parked. It was dark now, with a strange low cloud cover and errant raindrops spitting on the spectators, who assembled outside the pavilion to view the spectacle. The drape fell from the shaft of the monument, revealing the dagger. From the top, the drapery crawled upward into the fist, as if being devoured. Finally, the red double-thumbed fist with the electric peyote button was revealed. When the six spotlights hit, several shadows of the fist showed up like a bat signal on the underside of the cloud layer. Someone yelled, “He’s here with us!”
The onlookers cheered, as Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” blared from the speakers.
When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that’s the best
Then the fireworks began, shooting two hundred feet into the air above the monument as the music echoed through the valley. Three rounds of color and smoke, and then the canister of Hunter’s ashes shot into the sky, and his remains fanned across the bluffs and the valley of Owl Farm, just as he had planned. As the smoke slowly drifted across the valley, the crowd applauded the end of the ceremony and Anita Thompson yelled, “We love you Hunter!”
Now the sound system played Hunter’s favorite song, Bob Dylan’s plea from an artist to a muse:
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.
Now the ashes drifted, as Hunter must have known they would, back toward the guests standing in front of the viewing pavilion. As the guests stood holding their glasses, the ash floated and settled into their drinks. Tom Corcoran smiled, lifted his glass, and said, “Here’s to you, Hunter.”