abbie’s autobiography, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, which he wrote on the run, ends on November 8, 1979. And in a way it is true that the ten years he lived after that date were a sort of afterlife. He was productive, he was effective politically, and at the same time he was fighting a losing battle with himself. His life was a shipwreck, with many beautiful things in it, but with the sea running through it, battering it from all sides. His dependencies were a huge handicap, especially his deepening dependency on a wide variety of drugs for a ghastly configuration of physical and emotional pain. In 1988, everything from broken bones that wouldn’t heal to respiratory problems—heightened to a monstrous degree by his manic-depressive illness—led him, at his worst moments, to believe that there was no hope for him.
Although he had long since identified his illness, he didn’t always connect it as he should have to the specific complaints that haunted him. He felt frustration in his relationship with Johanna, and feared that she might be planning to leave since she didn’t want to marry him. He felt anger toward his children and his first wife Sheila, whom he sometimes felt were concerned only with what they could get from him and not with his well-being. And when he tried to look into his own future, he saw darkness. These perceptions acted as heavy weights on him. He thought he saw them more or less objectively, when in fact these depressing thoughts were, at least in part, the expression of the emotional lows of his mood swings.
I mention these things in part because it is only by understanding that the monkey on his back—as he himself experienced it—was an animal as big as a house that you can begin to recognize what strength he had to muster every morning just to get out of bed. And yet, not only did he get out of bed, he was writing, he was speaking on dozens of college campuses, organizing people around environmental issues, showing up at demonstrations in response to a continuous flow of requests, and doing it all with great enthusiasm.
I used to wonder how he could stand on the podium at campuses across the country, look out at the expectant faces, and say things like “the future is yours”—with energy and conviction—when I knew there was so little hope in his heart. But the truth is that the improbability of some of his enthusiasms—that, for example, a new student movement was dawning in America—was no greater than the improbability of Abbie’s whole life up until now, of his still struggling for what he believed, fighting battles to replace the status quo with a new age of enlightenment, twenty years after he’d lost the war.
What enabled him to keep blasting away, defying everyone and everything, was his incredible energy, a kind of blessed madness deeply ingrained in his personality that existed according to its own laws and that, by now, was also inseparable from the symptoms of his mental illness. His mania was something Abbie was born with, and it was something he didn’t want to lose, couldn’t imagine living without, and was unable and perhaps unwilling to control.
I do not know whether objectively Johanna was or was not planning to leave him. I do not know whether in fact his kids were ungrateful, although I suspect most kids are, just as we were when we were kids. But Abbie’s future still held much promise, and many of his physical ailments might have been transient. I think it is entirely possible that both Johanna and his kids loved him more than they had words to express, and that the narrowing and darkening he felt were the result of his growing disease, too little controlled medication, and too much uncontrolled self-medication.
In January 1988, Abbie was shopping around a book on the coming presidential election that he hoped to write with Jonathan Silvers, the same young writer with whom he’d written Steal This Urine Test. He was spending most of his time “on the farm,” as he called his converted turkey coop apartment in New Hope. He was feeling his age. He was barely able to make enough money for basic necessities, and unable to send money regularly to either Sheila or Anita for his kids.
On February 6, 1988, Abbie addressed the first-ever National Student Convention, organized by National Student Action at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Taking the long view back on the last quarter century of student activism and imagining its continuation and expansion in the years to come, he found himself able to disregard his own deteriorating health and finances for that hour. The opportunity to address a national gathering of activist students under the aegis of an entirely new umbrella organization brought out his energy reserve. He found he had something new and important that he needed to say.
The speech itself was relatively brief, ironic in places, and heart-wrenching in others. “My vision of America is not as cheery and optimistic as it might be,” he joked. “I agree with Charles Dickens, ‘These are the worst of times, these are the worst of times.’” But then, in deadly earnest, he called on any true believers who might be out there:
Look at the institutions around us. Financial institutions, bankrupt; religious institutions, immoral; communications institutions don’t communicate; educational institutions don’t educate. . . . There are people that say to a gathering such as this—students taking their proper role in the front lines of social change in America, fighting for peace and justice—that this is not the time. This is not the time? You could never have had a better time in history than right now. . . .
In the late sixties we were so fed up we wanted to destroy it all. That’s when we changed the name of America and stuck in the “k.” The mood today is different, and the language that will respond to today’s mood will be different. Things are so deteriorated in this society, that it’s not up to you to destroy America, it’s up to you to go out and save America.1
It was the same thing he’d been saying for a quarter century, and yet the words and the emotion were different from before. They had a special urgency to them. There was a note of sadness along with the power in his urging and admonishment, a note of finality.
Abbie and Jonathan Silvers signed a deal with Penguin Books for the election book to be titled The Faking of the Presidency: Politics in the Age of Illusion. With the upcoming February New Hampshire primary only weeks away, they began work immediately. As they dug in, questions kept pointing back to serious improprieties allegedly committed during the 1980 contest between Carter and Reagan, when the Republican stranglehold on the White House had begun. They decided to write a personal letter to Jimmy Carter, asking his opinion on whether Reagan had stolen the 1980 election. To Abbie and Jonathan’s surprise, Carter, who would have heard about Abbie from his activist daughter Amy, responded immediately with a detailed and thoughtful response.
We have had reports since late summer 1980 about Reagan campaign officials dealing with Iranians concerning delayed release of the American hostages. I chose to ignore the reports. Later, as you know, former Iranian president BaniSadr [gave] several interviews stating that such an agreement was made involving Bud McFarlane, George Bush and perhaps Bill Casey. By this time, the elections were over and the results could not be changed. I have never tried to obtain any evidence about these allegations but have trusted that investigations and historical records would someday let the truth be known.2
Carter’s suggestion that there was a story there to be unearthed stoked the fire of Abbie and Jonathan’s curiosity. The care with which Carter responded spurred their enthusiasm. They pitched it to Playboy, and got a go-ahead for a feature article to appear in the October issue—an October surprise payback on the eighth anniversary of the first October surprise. They got right on the trail of Iran-Contra, and while they weren’t the first writers to follow this story, they would be the first to present its full dimensions in a widely read national magazine—and during the month prior to the national election.
Abbie had committed his support to Dukakis, but he was unenthusiastic about the Massachusetts governor. And in any case, his main battle was with his own apathy. More than once Jonathan called me from New Hampshire to complain that Abbie was distracted and unable to work on the book. With Dukakis the favorite at that time and Bush way behind in the polls, Abbie seemed incredibly pessimistic, and what was worse, unconcerned, almost as if he were unaware of what was at stake, unaware of how much a Bush victory in November would hurt all the causes he believed in, from the fight to save the Nicaraguan revolution to the environmental war being waged at home.
We argued and argued; the combination of his apathy and his willful ignorance surprised and shocked me. I would try and convince him why Dukakis had a good shot at winning. Abbie thought Dukakis was just another establishment liberal who was going to lose, just like McCarthy in 1968, McGovern in 1972, and Mondale in 1984. I countered that with Reagan gone, the economy troubled, and Bush unpopular, things might go differently. Dukakis could pull it off.
“He’s Greek, his wife is Jewish, and he’s going to win?” Abbie countered. “He won’t even get out of the primaries a winner.”
“He’s going to win the primaries in Texas, and Florida,” I replied.
Abbie had to think hard about that one. A candidate that could take those two key states in the primaries did have a shot at coming into the general elections with the wind at his back. After a minute’s reflection he said, “Maybe Florida”—the only state where having a Jewish wife could play in Dukakis’s favor.
“He’s going to win Texas,” I insisted.
“He doesn’t have a rat’s ass’s chance in the Texas primary,” Abbie assured me.
I offered to bet on it, and even gave Abbie two-to-one odds.
“Oh, is this going to be another one of your winning bets? Your record isn’t so good there, Jack”—Abbie’s reminder of our losing bet with Sammie, our bookmaker, on McGovern in 1972.
But Abbie took the bet anyway. I hadn’t told him that Dukakis spoke Spanish, a key factor in my thinking on Texas. And when Dukakis won Texas handily, and after Abbie had seen Dukakis campaigning in Texas speaking in Spanish, he called me.
“You didn’t tell me he could speak Spanish,” Abbie said accusingly.
“You didn’t ask.”
“You cheated,” he argued.
“A bet’s a bet,” I countered.
In the end, Abbie had to admit I’d played the angle pretty well and didn’t mind that he’d lost.
In March or April Abbie flew to Paris to interview former Iranian President Bani-Sadr for the Playboy article, and came back almost euphoric about how the story was developing. He felt there was a smoking gun and that he was the guy to find it. He would call me up and the first words out of his mouth would be, “We got Bush, we got Bush. And we can determine who the next president of the United States will be.”
Most of the time I would counter with, “No, you don’t have Bush, and no, you won’t make the next president.” But then I started to believe him. And considering that he had seemed apathetic so much of the time recently, I was glad to see him enthusiastic again.
While Jonathan was doing most of the actual writing of the article, Abbie was trying to put together a plan to get the story quietly to Dukakis and Cuomo so that they would know that they owed any Democratic Party victory to Abbie Hoffman. I contacted people I knew I could trust within the Dukakis campaign and floated the idea of an early release of the information in the story, or the story itself, before the July Democratic convention.
I met in a Worcester diner with a Dukakis representative, and the seriousness of what Abbie and I were proposing came home to me when I realized that the guy sitting across from me was scared. A week later I heard back. In the meantime, Dukakis’s people had contacted Carter and others for confirmation of the story. They were concerned, my contact, informed me, about Israel’s involvement.
I took that to mean that if the story were released and it led to revelations that reflected badly on Israel, then there would be the risk of losing the Jewish vote. As it turned out, of course, Israel was heavily involved in Iran-Contra. My contact requested another meeting that would include others from the Dukakis campaign. I agreed, and was told they would contact me, but they never called. I guess the decision was made within the campaign not to pursue the revelations further.
Throughout the month of April, Abbie stayed in close touch with me—to the point where he might call two or three times a day. He wanted me involved in any and all bookings he took on, and he had his assistant, Kathy Devlin, refer calls to my office in Worcester. Abbie and I would talk over each offer, and then he would make his decision. Abbie said I was the only one he trusted. He wanted me to manage him again. This came at a time when my closeout business was erratic and I didn’t always earn enough to meet my mortgage payments, so Abbie was helping me at a critical time. I couldn’t tell whether he was doing it for my sake or his. Maybe he suddenly realized how much we both needed each other.
With increasing frequency, Abbie ended our conversations by complaining about Johanna. In many ways she remained the loyal, practical, and devoted partner who always packed condoms for him in his luggage when he traveled to make sure he didn’t bring any diseases home. But he was afraid that their love might not last. It made him feel aged and hopeless to have to consider even the possibility of facing the future alone. He wondered aloud whether the divorce from Anita had been the right thing. He began to wonder if she had been his true soulmate after all, since she had been his companion during the most exciting years of his life, and someone whose thoughts and feelings resonated most powerfully with his own. In his mind, Anita came to represent what might have been, the life he could have had, the life he had glimpsed briefly in the early years after america was born.
At times he would threaten that if Johanna wouldn’t come and live with him on “the farm,” he would find someone else who would. Then he would say how much he still loved Johanna, how he still wanted to marry her despite any problems they might have. He seemed to be in an emotional tug-of-war with himself over Johanna, unable to stand being in doubt of her affections. And she seemed willing to keep him in suspense, refusing steadfastly to marry or move in with him, and yet, with equal steadfastness, remaining committed to their relationship.
When he wasn’t going on about Johanna, he complained to me about his kids: “Money, money, money,” he would begin, “That’s all they want. Ilya wants money, Andrew wants the boat, and if he can’t have the boat he wants money. And they don’t give a fuck about me, and I’m dying.” Abbie was moaning and coughing from a bout of the flu as he spoke. He sounded bad.
On April 29, Abbie arrived in Boston for a speaking engagement at Holy Cross the following evening. Earlier that morning, Joan had called her physician, Dr. Epstein, and he had agreed to see Abbie right away. (This was the same Dr. Epstein whose leukemia patient Abbie had helped out in 1968.) Joan now drove into Boston to pick up Abbie at the airport and bring him straight to the doctor’s office in Framingham. From the minute he got in the car, looking tired and ragged, his eyes red and swollen, wheezing with each breath, Abbie talked nonstop: He’d had a fight with Sheila on the phone the night before; he and Johanna had gone to a marriage counselor; he was so perplexed, so unhappy, he didn’t know what the hell to do, he didn’t know what the hell Johanna wanted. Although Joan was usually Abbie’s most patient listener, the details of Abbie’s misery were unbearable even to her after a while. She asked him to stop. He apologized, but within a few minutes he had started up again as if nothing had happened.
Dr. Epstein diagnosed severe bronchial pneumonia and wanted Abbie hospitalized. Abbie refused because of the Holy Cross booking. And he didn’t want to stay at our home either out of consideration for the children, since he thought he might be contagious.
He asked me to get him into a hotel in Worcester. What he desired most in the world, he said, was two days of rest and solitude. On the phone, Dr. Epstein told me he didn’t see how Abbie could give a speech in this condition. I told him I’d seen him give some of his best speeches when he was in worse condition than this. I promised I would ply him with chicken soup and make sure he rested.
I checked him into the Marriott in downtown Worcester, got him a quart of chicken soup from Weintraub’s, and tried to leave. But he wasn’t able to rest and wouldn’t let me go. As sick as he was physically, he seemed worse off emotionally.
“What are we going to do, Jack?” he kept asking me. “I don’t see myself doing this five years from now . . . .” I didn’t know what to tell him.
Finally, he calmed down and we began to run through our usual routine. Abbie always used to like to go over his speeches the day before he gave them. And Holy Cross had a special importance for him, since it was his first return engagement there since the April 1970 speech that had caused Holy Cross to so humiliate Dad. So I stayed and we talked for a couple hours more.
The thing on his mind was how much of the forthcoming Playboy article, “An Election Held Hostage,” to reveal in the speech. Abbie wanted to reveal most of the Iran-Contra story. I felt that he shouldn’t mention it at all. I knew that his coauthor Jonathan was against his making any mention of it this soon. In the end, we agreed to a compromise: He would plug the article, but not divulge its substance, telling the crowd only that the October issue of Playboy would contain an article that could change the course of the presidential election. And then I left.
The next morning I arrived at the Marriott expecting to have breakfast with Abbie quietly in his room while he recuperated, and perhaps to put the finishing touches on his speech. Instead, I found him in the lobby doing an interview with the local radio station, WTAG. Abbie was full of energy, but he looked frightening, with his hair matted and his eyes red and swollen. Of course, he didn’t care, since it was a radio interview. Even so, I asked them to cut it short and hustled him back up to his room and into bed.
I stayed with him all day. His manic state was so pronounced that he seemed not even to notice his physical symptoms—the high fever, cough, breathing difficulty, and ear infection were like balloons tied to a high-speed train. He talked in a rapid stream, and I knew he wouldn’t slow down until after the speech, when he was likely to simply collapse in the arms of whoever happened to be nearest the stage exit.
Abbie began the speech with his usual challenge to journalists in the audience. Holding up a $100 bill, he told them that it would go to any reporter whose article the next day contained fewer than three errors. Abbie used to love to say that nobody had ever won the bet. Then came another favorite joke: mentioning that one of the half dozen subjects he spoke on most frequently was student activism, he added that these days that speech took only about three minutes.
With the audience warmed up, he spoke seriously about the ’60s and jumped to contemporary politics generally and presidential politics in particular, attacking Bush without giving his support to Dukakis. He also talked about Nicaragua, environmental issues, and local issues—things we’d gleaned from the local papers that morning and the day before. The funny thing was that the only indication of his illness was the mug of tea with honey he kept beside him on the podium. No one in the audience could have guessed that he wasn’t feeling great. His voice carried, his enthusiasm and commitment carried. As he swept back and forth between asserting the grandeur of his cause in a loud, brash voice and intimately ribbing his listeners for their ignorance about current affairs, the packed audience loved it, and when he finished there were cheers and strong applause. As soon as he came down from the stage, we got him into a car, brought him back to Framingham and kept him in bed. The next day, still extremely sick, he insisted on returning home to New Hope.
A day or two later, Abbie sat down in a mood of self pity and heartrending loneliness and wrote a three-page letter to Sheila, with whom he still corresponded irregularly, mostly about money for the kids. Abbie listed his flu symptoms as well as the details of what he called “the weird world I live in,” as if these too were symptoms of an illness, including large numbers of crank calls and letters and the pain of being separated from Johanna. He said that some people’s claims to know the real Abbie only heightened his sense of isolation. He regretted his failure to secure the creature comforts that others had, but insisted that he was going to continue to make his mark even though others continued to exploit his name. He referred to himself as someone who “cut off a certain part of their pain centers in order to function.” The letter requested that they not meet that year, and was signed “X.” The letter wasn’t just bitter, it was filled to overflowing with despair and loathing.
Throughout the spring and early summer, when Abbie got to thinking about his life he often seemed to fall off a cliff into a black hole of hopelessness and bitterness. On the other hand, as the Playboy article progressed, with Jonathan doing the lion’s share of the work, Abbie’s enthusiasm for it reached new heights. He thought he had a shot at being the shining knight on the white horse who was going to dishonor Bush, end the Republican reign, restore hope and decency to the American people, and install a progressive Democrat in the White House. He felt that he could go down in history as the most important politically active Jew since Jesus Christ.
For my part, I understood his bitterness and despair, and I even understood that he had a shot at bringing down Bush and with him the dominance of the Republican Party—after all, Playboy was not The New Hope Intelligencer. But what disturbed me, other than the fact that we still didn’t have a smoking gun on Iran-Contra, was having to watch Abbie bounce back and forth between such extremes of euphoria and despair.
It is interesting to me that in the letter to Sheila he bitterly describes his having to “cut off . . . pain centers in order to function.” It was a clear and piercingly accurate reference to his self-medication, and perhaps indicated his own increasing awareness that its meager comfort might eventually entail a very high cost.
The public perception of manic depression concentrates its awareness on the depression. But it isn’t by the depression that you will understand Abbie, or any other manic-depressive. According to what Abbie described to me over and over again, it is the mania, a natural high of incredible intensity, that affects them most powerfully. The world seen through the lens of his mania was a playground in which he could do anything. Abbie used to say, “There’s no drug in the world that could take you to that level.” When he was manic, he didn’t want to come down.
In June, Abbie and Jonathan sent Playboy a rough draft of the article and a few days later Playboy requested a meeting with the authors to see the evidence they had to back up their claims. Abbie was thrilled to have the opportunity to present their case in person. On the morning of June 16, he left New Hope in his relatively new Ford Escort with a large case full of papers on the passenger seat next to him. He was to meet Jonathan at Newark Airport, then fly to Chicago for the afternoon meeting. Originally they were to fly separately and meet up in Chicago, but Abbie was intent on their flying together, “just like Woodward and Bernstein,” the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal. He was in a manic state, euphoric, wired, admitting no obstacles.
Not far from the airport, driving with one hand on the wheel and the other holding an ice cream cone, Abbie ran the Escort into the back of a trailer truck, totalling the car and sustaining very serious injuries to his ribs, feet, and hands, as well as multiple contusions. Without a thought to his injuries and impervious to the pain, Abbie grabbed his papers, walked away from the wrecked car, and hailed a taxi for the last mile to the airport.
Arriving just a few minutes before his flight, he called me and started talking in a stream as soon as I picked up the phone: “This fucking truck, this fucking truck swerved; fucking truck.” I didn’t get a chance to ask him what truck. Then, just as suddenly as he’d began, his tone changed, grew quieter and conspiratorial: “Jack, don’t believe anything you might hear on the radio or see in the newspapers tonight. Whatever it is, it’s not true.” He didn’t want me to worry if it was reported that he’d had a serious car accident. “Don’t worry about it,” he continued, “I’m fine. Gotta catch my plane.” And he was gone.
Still reeling from the accident, Abbie walked into the Playboy meeting in a manic frenzy. His mood prevented him from making the impression he had so wanted to convey. That night he left his hotel in the middle of the night and went to Northwestern Hospital for some tests but still seemed hardly to acknowledge that he might be walking around with serious injuries. After boarding the flight home, he smoked a joint in the restroom before the plane left the runway, setting off the smoke detector. He was removed from the plane and placed on another flight. Instead of quietly conceding he’d had a bad trip, Abbie decided to sue Continental Airways for what he now called the false arrest, and threatened a boycott of the airline as well. When he got home, he dashed off detailed letters on the proposed boycott to Leonard Weinglass and Jerry Lefcourt, with carbon copies to Burt Schneider and me. Abbie seemed determined to turn a small personal matter into a major political campaign. And still he had done almost nothing to look after his injuries.
Back in New Hope, Abbie’s manic phase continued unabated. On June 25, he did a marathon twelve-hour interview with writer Mark Hertsgaard, who’d been working for months on an article about him. Throughout the day, Abbie had been increasingly rude and belligerent to the journalist. And still he managed to overlook his injuries by means of the intense activity, which distracted him. Then, in the early morning of June 26, 1988, he awoke in terrific pain in his broken foot. He’d run out of painkillers and felt desperate. At 6:15 a.m., he called Hertsgaard and told him to come right away to drive him from New Hope to a hospital in Manhattan.
Hertsgaard arrived at Abbie’s apartment to find him crawling around awkwardly on all fours gathering items for the trip. He immediately began ordering Hertsgaard around, and once they got into the car, despite—or perhaps because of—his pain, Abbie talked in an almost nonstop flow all the way into Manhattan, as if the ride were just the continuation of yesterday’s interview. Getting into what he liked to call his performance mode seemed to help Abbie drown out the pain.
When they arrived at the hospital, Abbie got the attention of an orderly and commanded, “I’m Abbie Hoffman. You gotta let me in.” It worked. And as they carted him off in a wheelchair, Abbie was “laughing and wisecracking all the way.” It didn’t occur to Hertsgaard that day that Abbie might be manic-depressive, but by the time he’d finished writing his article after Abbie’s death, as he came to understand the nature of Abbie’s internal struggle, Hertsgaard became convinced that the out-of-control behavior he’d seen was darkly symptomatic of Abbie’s disease.3
Only now, ten days after his car accident, did Abbie learn in the hospital that his foot had been badly broken in several places, among other injuries. Casts were put on both his hand and his foot. But otherwise nothing he learned from his examination changed the course of treatment he’d already started. With the accident, his self-medication routine had shifted significantly in favor of painkillers, especially Percocet, a powerful narcotic. He found they killed the pain in his foot and seemed to help calm his mood. They also accounted for the slurred speech that would soon become a prominent and alarming new symptom.
In July, Abbie and Jonathan attended the Democratic National Convention to research their book on the election, and afterward Abbie tried to get back into a working routine. But the pain from his injuries was a near-constant irritant and kept him at a low ebb.
On August 22, Abbie sent a handwritten letter to Brandeis, offering the university his collected papers: “This November I will be 52, and I think it’s time I started remembering where I hid early letters, manuscripts, tapes, etc. . . . and since there’s no room in my small apartment they should be collected in Brandeis University’s library. . . .” The Brandeis Library responded with enthusiasm to Abbie’s offer. But the negotiations bogged down, and the process came to a halt without Abbie having donated his papers.
Still wearing the cast on his foot, Abbie traveled to Chicago in late August for the “’68 + 20” reunion of the 1968 Chicago protests. In a spirited interview with a Chicago Sun-Times reporter, Abbie reminded people that college kids today weren’t as different from students in the ’60s as the mythology might suggest. “You know who were the two most admired men on college campuses in 1968?” Abbie asked. “Richard Nixon and John Wayne.” Abbie was one of the most-sought-after participants of the highly publicized affair. His spirits lifted, but on his return to New Hope he fell right back into his exhausted and apathetic state.
Bookings for fall speaking engagements usually started coming in in August, but this year there were very few dates. Abbie felt the blame lay with his lecture bureau, Greater Talent. Checks from the agency had been coming weeks late, and objections were being raised to Abbie’s expenses on the road. Abbie no longer trusted Greater Talent, decided he wanted to leave the agency, and asked me to intervene. I contacted APB in Boston, the agency Bob Walker had started in the ’60s and which still represented many celebrities on the Left. We decided to switch, even though it meant probably losing or at least delaying pending payments from Greater Talent that were due us.
Earlier in the summer, completely out of the blue, Abbie had started talking about launching a new career for himself as a stand-up comedian.
“It’s what I’ve always really wanted to do, Jack,” he’d say.
“Abbs, you’re getting a little too old for this,” was my response. But I don’t think he even heard me. We talked about it again and again. I had spent almost my whole life supporting Abbie in his decisions. This time, I felt he would be making a mistake and told him so. His plan was to take the funny parts of his speeches and present them onstage by themselves. It seemed all wrong to me, a debasement of who he was and of his message that needed to be heard.
Abbie listened intently, didn’t argue with me, never said I was wrong, and only questioned me as to the particulars of my objections. But in the end, nothing I said deterred him. His debut stand-up appearance was set for Monday, August 29 in New York City. He called me the day before to ask me to be there with him.
Early Monday evening, after driving down from Massachusetts with my dog Lois in the passenger seat, I picked up Abbie and took him out to my favorite Manhattan dive, where we had hot dogs and papaya juice. Then we headed for the club, called Stand Up, on the Upper West Side. As we walked in we could hear the packed audience responding warmly to the set before Abbie’s. Among small, dimly lit tables, a hundred people—mostly Abbie fans from the ’60s—were already crowded into a space meant for half that number. In the street, there was a line, mostly thirty- to fifty-year-olds, mostly white. We went downstairs to a storeroom reserved for the artists and waited.
The stage was very small; the only props were a handheld microphone and a barstool. As Abbie climbed onto the stage, still wearing the cast on his foot, I gave him the thumbs-up from where I stood on the sidelines. What struck me first was the feeling that Abbie didn’t belong here. He looked old, almost feeble, to me. The laughter echoed in my ears: I could not tell if they were laughing at his jokes or at him.
For his whole life Abbie had been moving toward a kind of respectability, and here he was being laughed at. Lenny Bruce had gotten his laughs by risking, onstage, everything he thought and felt. But Abbie was going more for humor that was lowbrow, Borscht-Belt stuff, not making use of his true brilliance at all. I decided they were laughing at him.
It took about a half hour before I realized that I had started crying. It was as if Abbie were finally conceding that he wasn’t serious after all. So many years of trying to get people to see things his way, only to end suited up the way his enemies liked to think of him, as a buffoon. Of course there were many friends in the audience, but that didn’t matter to me. What they were witnessing, I thought, was someone making a fool of himself.
I left the club, returned to my van, and sat with Lois and cried freely, remembering the talent show Abbie, Phyllis, and I put together in our basement as kids. I remembered our innocence then and realized how little we had grown up. And maybe what I felt was nothing more than the horror of growing old.
The October issue of Playboy featuring “An Election Held Hostage” hit the stands right on schedule in late September. The article was well-written, hard-hitting, and deserves credit for being the first attempt to pin the tail on the ass for all to see—to connect George Bush to Iran-Contra in a national setting as prominent as Playboy. But there was no public outcry. The article was largely ignored. It was as if even Abbie’s strong achievements of this period, like the Playboy article, had begun to have a kind of disembodied air about them. Abbie wasn’t Lenny Bruce and he wasn’t Woodward or Bernstein, either. Missing from the Playboy article is the strength of the voice that wrote it. Indeed the bulk of the actual writing had been done by Abbie’s coauthor, Jonathan Silvers.
Abbie used to turn down most film or television offers, but that September he had chosen to appear at Toronto’s Festival of Festivals for the world premier of Morley Markson’s Growing Up in America, a powerful documentary on the ’60s that featured Abbie. And now in December he was in Dallas filming Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, in which Abbie plays himself, and which Stone later dedicated to him.
Meanwhile, for most of the past year Abbie had been working on reissuing his three ’60s classics, Revolution for the Hell of It, Woodstock Nation, and Steal This Book in a new edition. It was a project that Abbie believed in passionately. They were a part of himself he was determined to see live on. “I love my books as much as I do my kids,” he’d written just a year earlier in Steal This Urine Test.4 The books had sold almost a million copies in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and currently there was a ’60s revival going on. Abbie still felt strongly that the books represented a solid and lasting contribution to the Movement and to history—that they belonged to the future. He stood by what he had written, every word. He wanted to add new introductions but not to change or revise any statement or opinion. He felt very much at peace with that period of his life. “No apologies or regrets for the sixties,” as he so often said.5 But after he’d made the rounds of all the major publishing houses, he was turned down everywhere.
In December 1988 he placed a classified advertisement in The Nation: “Serious publishers interested in reprinting 3 60s classics as 1 quality paperback immediately contact: Abbie Hoffman” with his post office box address in New Hope. A letter of interest came back from Four Walls Eight Windows, an independent publisher based in Manhattan. Abbie called them right away. Within a few weeks, Abbie had a new publisher.
But the pendulum was swinging wildly now, from extreme to extreme, from stand-up comedy to the high seriousness of “An Election Held Hostage.” His attempt to go after Bush with Iran-Contra was as bold and incisive as his new career in comedy was pitiful and desperate. Like a kid, he was still testing to see how far and how high he could go before the ropes snapped.
In conversations with Joan that fall, Abbie described his relying heavily on Ativan. In part because of her experience as a women’s health counselor, Abbie had grown used to discussing his mental illness with her. He said that he needed to monitor himself every day to see where he was, to make sure he wasn’t getting too manic, and that he controlled the mania by titrating the Ativan—taking a little more or less as the mania rose or subsided.
Looking at them now, with the benefit of hindsight, conversations like these cut both ways, and painfully. Abbie was trying hard, almost heroically, to subdue his illness. At the same time, he was attempting to do so on his own, and this in itself was a typical and powerful manifestation of the very illness he was trying to control.