“I do not advocate the use of dangerous drugs, wild amounts of alcohol, violence and weirdness—but they’ve always worked for me.”
—HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Toward the end of the 1960s, times, as Bob Dylan sang, were a-changing. To cover these new and exciting times, a new breed of journalist emerged. These new journalists included figures who often loomed as large as the subjects they covered—both in real life and in their nonfiction.
Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and others launched a full-frontal assault on the staid profession of journalism in the pages of Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s. They injected themselves into their stories, blurring the line between fact and fiction, writer and subject. And why not? The Western world was changing at a faster pace than ever before. There was a man on the moon! The world was on the brink of nuclear destruction! Mass hysteria! As Ken Kesey said, “To hell with facts! We need stories!”
Before Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) became one of the most recognizable writers of the twentieth century thanks to his signature costume (sunglasses and a cigarette holder, essentially), he was a wayward youth from Louisville, Kentucky, one of three sons being raised by a widowed librarian in relative poverty. During adolescence, Thompson had frequent run-ins with law enforcement, culminating in an arrest for underage drinking during his senior year of high school. When he should have been walking for his high school graduation, he was instead sitting in a Kentucky jail cell. It was not his first, or last, brush with the law.
Thompson learned to write by typing The Great Gatsby over and over. “Hunter identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald more than any other writer,” his biographer and editor, Douglas Brinkley, said. “The difference was, Fitzgerald would look in on the storefronts of the rich; Hunter wanted to smash the windows.”
After he was released from his jail stint for underage drinking, Thompson entered the U.S. Air Force. He got his first taste of publication writing for the base newspaper. He didn’t need a high school diploma; all he needed was a typewriter and the words in his own head. After he left the service, he wrote for magazines such as Rolling Stone and Harper’s, infamously riding with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang for a year and a half for a story that was expanded into a book. “In a nation of frightened dullards, there’s always a shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome,” he wrote. Although he was talking about the Hell’s Angels, he could very well have been talking about himself.
Although Thompson aspired to be a “great writer” (i.e., a novelist), he felt that if Hemingway could write journalism to pay the bills, so could he. His Fear and Loathing books, including Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, were ostensibly works of nonfiction that read like novels. Or were they novels that Thompson passed off as works of nonfiction? Any other writer would have been crucified for such flagrant abuse of the very concept of “journalism.” Thompson not only got away with it, but was celebrated for it by critics, peers, and his legions of fans.
Blurring the line between fact and fiction was only one of the many transgressions Thompson got away with. He became almost as infamous for his outrageous drug use as for his writing. “A bird flies, a fish swims, I drink,” he once said. The drugs he allegedly loaded into his convertible for one weekend in Vegas included “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyl nitrates.”
Thompson loved guns almost as much as he loved drugs: handguns, shotguns, machine guns—any gun would do. It seems only natural that he sought out a job that would allow him to carry a gun. In 1969 he ran for sheriff of his adopted hometown, Aspen, Colorado, on the Freak Party Power Ticket. The self-proclaimed “freak” may never have had a real chance, but his campaign was more about spreading his countercultural message, he explained in Rolling Stone. His opponent, who feared an influx of hippies would destroy Aspen, pulled out all the stops to beat the drug-using, gun-toting writer. Thompson came closer to winning than his skeptics expected, but lost nonetheless. “I unfortunately proved what I set out to prove. It was more a political point than a local election. The American dream is really fucked,” he said to an assemblage of reporters.
Thompson’s high-profile stunts (running for sheriff, raucous appearances on college campuses) captured the attention of even nonreading Americans. “In today’s culture, the writer is not on a lot of people’s radars,” film critic Leonard Maltin said. “Thompson built a reputation so that people who didn’t necessarily read him knew about him.”
Thompson considered himself a throwback to an earlier era, a romance junkie addicted to love and adventure like Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Samuel Coleridge. “I wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer,” he said toward the end of his life, referring to his place in the twentieth-century literary canon. “But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey. I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.”
His rabid fans made pilgrimages to Aspen to see him. Writer and artist Michael Cleverly recalled hanging out with Thompson at the Jerome bar in Aspen and being approached by two hippies, a boy and a girl. “The guy whipped out this vial of cocaine and said, ‘Do you want a bump?’ Hunter said sure, and he took the vial, unscrewed it, poured it out on the broad’s boobs, and shoved his face in there and started snorting,” he said. “He gave the vial back to the kid and then turned his back on them.”
“He’d come in the office, and there’d be a batch of mail from his fans,” Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner said. “Every tenth letter had a joint in it or some pills or something. Hunter would open them up and usually take the stuff.”
Thompson became increasingly reclusive over the years, holing himself up at his Owl Creek home in the mountains outside Aspen. He made time for the celebrity admirers, including Jack Nicholson, Bill Murray, Sean Penn, Jimmy Buffett, Johnny Depp, and John Belushi. He wasn’t acquainted with many other authors, instead preferring the company of actors and musicians. Thompson believed Allen Ginsberg was a horrible drunk and actively avoided him for years—even when the two of them were in the same bar. About the only contemporary writer Thompson could stand was Norman Mailer. “Thank Jesus for Norman,” Thompson once said.
Being at the center of the madness was too much for Thompson’s first wife, Sandy. She was much more than a supportive spouse: she was his secretary, his bookkeeper, his accountant, his everything. “I was living for Hunter and his work—for this great person, this great writer. And then when he couldn’t write anymore, what was I doing?” Sandy said. “It was sad to see. I was taking care of a drug addict—who loved me and who was also terrifying me.” She divorced Thompson in 1980 and took their son with her.
Thompson’s output steadily declined over the years. He blew deadlines on assigned stories and was estranged from his editor and friend Jann Wenner for many years as a result.
Musician Jimmy Buffett recalled one stretch of time during the 1970s when Thompson stayed at his Key West apartment to work on a movie script. Thompson never completed the script but turned Buffett’s apartment into “some kind of sex palace,” according to Buffet. Another time, Thompson flew to Hawaii to go deep-sea fishing in a quest to emulate his hero Hemingway. The resulting book from that trip, The Curse of Lono, was a mess that his editor Corey Seymour had to stitch together from fragments. There was no denying, though, that the drugs had finally taken over Thompson’s life to the point where his work was suffering.
“He enjoyed drugs, all kinds of them, day and night, really with no break for years on end,” Wenner said. “At a certain point I don’t think he enjoyed it anymore, but by that time he was hopelessly addicted. He had said to me often throughout his life, ‘I’m a dope addict. A classic, old-fashioned, opium-smoking-type dope addict. I admit that freely. That’s who I am.’ And he was also an alcoholic, and that slowly destroyed his talent and finally his life.”
Even without consistent, quality work, Thompson’s profile continued to grow in subsequent decades, thanks to the 1980 Bill Murray comedy Where the Buffalo Roam and a pair of film adaptations starring Johnny Depp, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rum Diary. The films are disjointed, patchwork approximations of Thompson’s writing and life—fitting, perhaps, but not exactly traditional cinematic experiences. The latter two movies were passion projects for actor Johnny Depp: he and Thompson were both from Kentucky and shared a passion for poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Thompson sent a letter to his friend Depp asking him to “prevent pitching this film as a drug movie about Hunter S. Thompson in the ads. Shit, airports are hard enough for me now!”
“Hunter S. Thompson” became a costume, one that Thompson could not escape from even if he had wanted to. “I’m really in the way as a person. The myth has taken over. It would be much better if I died,” he said in a video interview in the 1980s.
Somewhere underneath Thompson’s costume, a real heart beat on. His friend Shelby Sadler recalls walking to Fitzgerald’s grave in Rockville, Maryland, with Thompson one time. The last line of The Great Gatsby is inscribed on the headstone: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” “I will never forget Hunter gently laying the white rose down across the words and peering up and being absolutely silent the whole walk back,” Sadler said.
Thompson, battling numerous but nonterminal health problems, killed himself with a handgun in 2005 at his home near Aspen. His wife was at the gym, while his adult son Juan was in the next room. “It was a sweet family moment,” Juan said without sarcasm. In Thompson’s suicide note, he wrote, “67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. . . . Relax—This won’t hurt.”
Bartender Michael Solheim recalled accompanying Thompson on a visit to the Ketchum, Idaho, house where Hemingway shot himself. “The door was open, and we could hear the caretaker snoring in the background. For Hunter it was all about going into the vestibule, the enclosed space where Hemingway had shot himself,” Solheim told Rolling Stone after Thompson had killed himself. “I hit the light switch and we stood there.”