CHAPTER EIGHT

Wreckage in the Fast Lane

Hunter was working on Songs of the Doomed and got in a fight with his editor over some insanely minor point. He went ballistic in the middle of the night and destroyed a typewriter—just beat it to death with a phone. There was metal Selectric shrapnel flying all over the kitchen.

LAILA NABULSI

Every year at Saturday Night Live they had a Seder. Being Palestinian, I never went. But one year Paul Schaffer made me go, and Bill Murray came running up to me and said, “Oh, my God—you’re alive! I talked to Hunter last night, and he said he heard you were dead. He’s staying at the Coconut Grove Hotel in Miami.” I started laughing and said, “Well, thanks. Now I know where he is. I guess that’s what he wanted me to know.”

Billy realized he’d been totally set up. But of course I called Hunter—he was on his way to Jimmy Buffett’s place in Key West—and then Judy Belushi and I went down to visit him. I bought a white bikini and a gold bracelet and didn’t really think about it until we got down there, and then I realized, “Wait a minute—what have I done?”

Judy went back to New York the next day, and I stayed for two weeks. Hunter was working a lot with a writer named Tom Corcoran on this screenplay that Jann had commissioned them to do called “Cigarette Key.” It was a story about dope smugglers in Key West, and Tom was ghostwriting it for Hunter. Hunter kind of enlisted him. That’s when Hunter and I formally fell in love.

JANN WENNER

I got a development deal with Paramount Pictures at a time when the top three films in the country were National Lampoon’s Animal House, Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke, and Midnight Express. Drugs and magazines! That’s the ticket! I had met and lined up both Michael Mann and Oliver Stone as potential directors for a script by Hunter. I was trying to get the sort of sunny Jimmy Buffett version of the marijuana-smuggling trade, but Hunter wanted to go darker. Ultimately, of course, I couldn’t bring him to deliver a script—but he was having a great time living down there on Paramount’s money. It got nowhere, but we had a great time hatching the plan for the screenplay, having dinners, and drinking.

JIMMY BUFFETT

I was probably responsible for his Key West years. I must have been high on something when I offered to let him use my apartment down there in those days. I was on the road, and he immediately turned my apartment into some kind of sex palace. He was trying to work on some kind of a movie for Jann, and of course he didn’t have much written. He’d talk to Jann on the phone for a long time and bullshit him to the nth degree. I’ll never forget him lying on the floor, pushing and pulling the plug in and out of the outlet for the fax machine, and then getting up and going, “Goddamn fuckin’ Jann, this piece of shit you sent me!!” He’d do that routine for forty-five minutes—putting that cord in just so it would work a little bit, and then taking it out to create a totally fake problem to buy himself a few more days. That was a pretty good Hunter trick.

LAILA NABULSI

He could hang out and really just be in those days—listen to music, look at the sunset, and relax. He’d have breakfast with a notebook next to him. And he’d be writing and talking—there was always something going on, whether it was the movie [Where the Buffalo Roam] that was coming up, or this script. But at that time, he was a great romantic. He liked the peacefulness.

JIMMY BUFFETT

Hunter loved Key West because in those days there was such a crazy end-of-the-world mentality down there. There were still cockfights right down the road, and the navy was there, and there were tourists and a whole drug culture.

There were times when Hunter was way out of control, and I’d stay away from him, and I would tell him so. I always tried to position myself so that I could leave and never get put in charge of Hunter. I had enough crazy characters in my band.

I did have to have a conversation with him once. I said, “You know, I got to live in this apartment. You guys have got to kind of take it easy here. You can stay here, but you’ve got to watch the rules.”

About two months later, I was on the road and got a call from my accountants in California about a $10,000 or $12,000 phone bill. I don’t know how a phone bill like that was even possible, but Hunter made it happen. I can’t remember whether I ever got that money back.

I introduced him to the Amazing Rhythm Aces, which was one of this favorite bands, and to Jim Harrison, and I know I introduced him to my brother-in-law, Thomas McGuane—and when those two were running together, when they were both fueled up, it was quite a thing to see.

ANJELICA HUSTON

I remember the first night I met Laila. Hunter had brought her over to Jack’s house in Aspen at Maroon Creek, and Jack was having a Jacuzzi. She had just come back from a trip to Florida with him. Hunter went downstairs to talk with Jack, and I stayed to talk with Laila. I think they must have left around four o’clock in the morning. She and I had a lot to say to each other, and we became instant friends and have been best friends ever since.

LAILA NABULSI

Later that year, Hunter and I went to San Francisco, and then we visited Billy Murray in L.A. and stayed with him. He was starting to shoot Where the Buffalo Roam. Hunter loved Billy, and he was happy about Billy being in the movie, but I don’t think he was too happy about the script, and he got less fond of the director, Art Linson, as time went on. We didn’t go to the set that much.

Later we came back for the filming of the ending—they thought it didn’t work very well, and they wanted Hunter to write a voiceover. We stayed at the L’Ermitage. Hunter wrote a beautiful voiceover about Oscar: “Gone but not forgotten. Forgotten but not gone. I won’t believe it until I can gnaw on his skull with my very own teeth”—that kind of thing. In the end, Hunter and Linson did not get along very well at all. Hunter thought his choices were cheap and silly, and the movie didn’t have the weight or the aesthetic that he would have wanted.

MITCH GLAZER was a twenty-two-year-old writer for Crawdaddy when he met Hunter through John Belushi.

Hunter’s presence is so strong that it fucks actors up. When they do him, an interesting thing happens. I was around Billy a lot right after he did Where the Buffalo Roam. I’d see him do sketches on Saturday Night Live and not be able to shake Hunter. People were coming and talking to him about it. And then when we did Scrooged, years later, there were still scenes where I’d see Billy doing Hunter.

The difference between Murray and Belushi or Hunter is that Billy would take no for an answer. They wouldn’t. Hunter and John both shared a sense of possibility, and they seemed to have no limits. There was no governor on the night. It was like being around Huck and Tom, going off on adventures. Everything was possible, and they had total access, and so you found yourself in really exciting, really strange places, from sitting with Louis Malle and Candace Bergen overlooking Central Park South to some weird drug dealer’s place in a sweaty back room on Avenue A at five in the morning.

LAILA NABULSI

I went back to Saturday Night Live in the fall of 1979 and then back out to Aspen on Thanksgiving, and that’s when Hunter sort of proposed. I moved in the day before New Year’s Eve, which was my twenty-fifth birthday. Bill Murray and his girlfriend were staying with us.

A lot of the local wackos were used to coming over at any time of the day or night, but I decided that that couldn’t go on all the time, and I had to kick a few people out. So things changed a little bit. I settled into getting up, reading the paper, making breakfast, opening the mail.

Hunter used to get up around four in the afternoon. There were usually calls to make and things going on and requests for this or that. There was the running of Owl Farm. I would pick up supplies and peacock food from the co-op. We built a cage on the porch so you could observe them at night from inside the house. They had a pecking order, and you’d get to know them. There was one named Hannibal; there was an Oscar. We had a cat that just showed up one day and stayed, Jones. Ralph Steadman did a book all about Jones. He was a great character. He tolerated us, basically. Later he had that other cat, Screwjack, which showed up in a snowstorm.

ANJELICA HUSTON

Laila always seemed to be easy and pragmatic and normal in terms of her day-to-day behavior, and very careful with Hunter. She provided him with a sort of social legitimacy. She cushioned him. It was almost as though she could explain him. She interpreted him and understood him in a nonjudgmental way, and enjoyed him, whereas I’m a bit more catlike. I don’t like public disruption, wild trajectories—and that was always the atmosphere around Hunter: Anything Can Happen. Her acceptance of occasional—well, much more than occasional—lunacy was in fact a comforting thing. She was very brave.

LAILA NABULSI

I felt I could talk to him about anything. I mean, it wasn’t just a romantic thing. Hunter understood me in ways nobody ever had. When it came to relationships, Hunter was very conventional. We were engaged, and there was a formality on some level which makes you feel very comfortable. I always knew I was loved, and he knew he was loved.

We did a lot of family stuff, actually. My mom came out and stayed with us, and we went and visited Hunter’s mom, and we went to his brother Davison’s for Christmas, and we invited them out. We also had Juan on and off. He was about fifteen at the time. Hunter was a really good dad in a lot of ways—he was very consistent and had a good moral sense of what was right and wrong. He didn’t make Juan behave in a certain way; it was more just about manners in general. Juan might get away with being a little weird, but he would never get away with treating me badly.

I think Hunter always assumed he would have this stable home life, with a wife and kids and a family. In a very traditional way, he was the man leaving the homestead and bringing back the elk to feed the family. He’d come back to his stable environment, where things were nice and peaceful, and cook some food and hang out. I was right after Sandy, and in that sense, I think Hunter and I both thought we were going to create that thing again.

JANN WENNER

He took some dumb writing assignments. The bar for him at Rolling Stone was set very high, and we both were equally aware of that and wanted it kept that way. I was unwilling to offer him or accept second-rate work, so if there was an easy-money gig or some goof-off, he’d do it elsewhere.

LAILA NABULSI

In 1980, Paul Perry, an editor at Running magazine, sent Hunter a letter asking if he’d like to do a story on the Honolulu Marathon. Hunter said he would if they gave him this, that, and the other thing and flew over Ralph. We rented these two little houses for Christmas, because the marathon was in late December. Christmas in Hawaii—that was the big lure.

The houses were right on the water, and there was a pool as well. We had this image of swimming in the ocean and everything just beautiful and peaceful. No one told us that the sea is really rough during the winter months. It was raining every day. The ocean was coming over into the pool. One night we had to evacuate because the water was coming up to the houses. We felt they had sold us this idea of Christmas in Hawaii, and it was a lie.

TOM BENTON

He wrote me a note from Hawaii that said, “Tom, I am Lono.” I said, “Lono? What the hell does he mean, he’s Lono?” So I looked it up. Lono was a kind of crazy Polynesian god that used to carry a little boy-child around. The people put him in a canoe and sent him away and never saw him again, and then Captain Cook arrived, and they thought Captain Cook was Lono returned. The people had a lot of guilt about it, and then they had to shoot Captain Cook. They had to kill him, so they’d done Lono in twice. So when Hunter wrote to me and said, “I am Lono. I feel at home here and I know I am Lono,” I called him up and said, “For God’s sake, don’t tell anybody over there that you’re Lono. This would be too much for them to take.”

LAILA NABULSI

Fireworks were legal in Hawaii, so we bought red Chinese firecrackers that come in a long strip. You’re supposed to uncoil them and hang them on a tree or something. They came wrapped up in a tightly wound cake, and we found that if we just lit the end of the fuse of the cake, the whole thing would blow up like a bomb.

The first person we bombed was Captain Steve, who was this old guy Hunter had found who had a little shack on the Big Island, and a big boat, a humdinger. Hunter’s whole mission out there was to catch a fish—a marlin—and Captain Steve was an obvious fan and slightly in love with Hunter.

They would go out deep-sea fishing all day, and Hunter just couldn’t catch a fish. Hunter would berate Captain Steve endlessly: “You don’t know how to get marlins. . . . There’s no fucking marlin. . . . You don’t know what you’re doing.” Poor Captain Steve was practically having a breakdown by the end of it. I would say to Hunter, “He’s a shell of a man. You’ve ruined him.”

RALPH STEADMAN

Hawaii was a hell of a trip, though we didn’t catch a fucking thing. Hunter went back later because he couldn’t stand the shame of not catching a marlin. It was a hopeless task. If we went south, we should have gone north. And the engine stuck. I felt worse than ever because I hate fucking boats. I was doing it because I thought, “This is the story, and we have to do a story.” Everything was urgent. Everything had to be done.

We’d show up at these places and start hanging out and see what turned up. Really. He didn’t know what the story was either. He just had these odd sayings. “There are no fish. Why did they lie to us?” Or another: “Fuck you, I’m rich.”

LAILA NABULSI

Captain Steve had this tiny little place that was about the size of a hotel bathroom with a little porch, and we went over there in the dead of night. We were giddy like teenagers. We took the cake of firecrackers and put it on the porch, and Hunter lit it.

RALPH STEADMAN

Hunter said it sounded “like God’s own drumroll.” Isn’t that nice?

LAILA NABULSI

We turned around after we got far enough away and drove by to see what was happening. Hunter turned the headlights off as we got close, and there was Captain Steve, naked, with a hose. The house was on fire.

I know that Captain Steve knew it was Hunter—who else could it be? We drove home laughing hysterically, but we also felt like kids who’d gone too far. The terrible thing was that we didn’t know that Captain Steve’s eighty-year-old father had come to visit and was in the house when we bombed it.

RALPH STEADMAN

As an Englishman, a Welshman, I don’t think I could ever feel wholly comfortable in that situation. I was there as an interloper. I was there because this was the story, and I was asked to go and do it.

LAILA NABULSI

Somehow, all of this turned into the idea of a book. We had so much fun material from all of it, and Ralph was doing all these drawings. The book was also really just a way to keep going back to Hawaii. Hunter would say, “I can’t remember what it’s like—what it smells like. We’ve got to go back.” But every time we left Hawaii, I thought, “We can never come back again. We’ve burned every bridge.”

ALAN RINZLER, the former head of Rolling Stone’s book division, edited Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

Hunter wanted to do a whole book about their experiences in Hawaii, and that eventually became The Curse of Lono. There are some wonderful things in that book, but it was also the beginning of the end—at least of my tenure with Hunter.

When we got to work on Lono, things began to deteriorate. Hunter was having so much trouble writing. The effects of alcohol and drugs didn’t paint a pretty picture. It was ugly, and it was debilitating, and it made it very hard for him to work. I was now a director of Bantam Books, and we gave Ralph and Hunter a lot of money, and we signed a contract—and nothing happened. Finally I flew out to Woody Creek and moved in at Owl Farm for several days, and we started to hammer out the book.

He began to evolve this concept of the original voyage of James Cook, the English explorer, who was mistaken for the Hawaiian god Lono and worshipped—and then killed—by the Hawaiian natives. Meanwhile, he wanted to write about how he had gone deep-sea fishing and caught this huge marlin—which he actually, finally did, just like Hemingway. The fishing story got sort of grafted together with the Lono story until Hunter truly convinced himself that he was the reincarnation of Lono and that everybody was out to kill him.

LAILA NABULSI

It was a nightmare. I had a huge stack of pages that sort of ran in order, and Alan and I stood at the kitchen table every day and went through it. Hunter would get up at four or five, and he was supposed to write an outline or maybe some transitions, some things that would make it work. I’d have to go through all the pages and changes with him, because Alan would have left by now, so I’d have to tell Hunter about the whole day and then get him to write.

Hunter would say, “Okay. Okay. I’ll write the transition.” And then he’d write something completely different—which was fantastic but had nothing to do with what you actually needed. Sometimes he just wouldn’t do it—he’d go off on something else. He’d be up all night, and then the next day Alan would be back. It was a nightmare, and it was endless.

ALAN RINZLER

The first time I visited Owl Farm we nailed the concept, and I went home to New York. And nothing happened again, so I had to go back. Hunter wasn’t returning my calls, didn’t even want me to come, and when I got out there, didn’t want to let me in the house. He was really hostile, and he didn’t have anything, and he didn’t want to work, but I hung in there and stayed and stayed. He did anything to distract me, and himself, from the work that had to be done: We’d drive in his convertible at high speeds with the top down into Aspen for these expensive meals that we couldn’t eat; he’d lock us in some concrete bunker and set off long strings of firecrackers that left us stinking of cordite and deaf for hours—anything to avoid actual work.

LAILA NABULSI

Hunter agonized over everything. Then Alan had to come out and torture both of us. Hunter hated the book. That was the other thing: You’d be working so hard, and then Hunter would give up and say, “It’s shit. It’s horrible. It’s terrible. It’s not worth it. Fuck this.”

ALAN RINZLER

One night Hunter fell asleep, or passed out, and I went all over the house and down to the basement and gathered up every single manuscript page or notebook I could find that was about this project, including—literally—brown shopping bags with notes scrawled all over them. I made a big pile of them, wrapped them up, and flew back to New York. I copied everything and sent the originals back to him with a note that said, “Thanks, Hunter. You’re done.” I put The Curse of Lono together in the basic form that it came out in, which is why it’s a little incoherent. There are a lot of disparate elements. It was a patchwork, a cut-and-paste job. It doesn’t quite make sense, but the language is really good. That was basically the end of our relationship.

JANN WENNER

To me, he was just spinning his wheels. I don’t know where Lono fit into what he was supposed to be doing. I never read it. It just seemed like an indulgence, a chance to live the easy life and sport-fish in Hawaii for not too much work But even easy work was hard for Hunter.

MIRIAM GOOD and her husband, Lloyd, own Sugarloaf Lodge on Sugarloaf Key in Florida.

Hunter stayed here quite often starting in 1980. He was in Key West, and then he came out here. I don’t think he planned to stay that long, but the Mariel boatlift started. Castro let 130,000 Cubans leave the country, and Miami Cubans came down here with their boats to pick up their relatives. When you looked at the highway, it was a stream of boats being towed. There was no food left in Key West because they took everything with them on their way down here. Then Castro opened up the jails and the asylums and said, basically, that if these people wanted to take their relatives, they had to take the rest of these people. It was a wild time down here.

Hunter was staying at the lodge when all of this was going on, and he convinced Esquire magazine to fund him to write this story. I don’t think he ever wrote it. He pretty much watched it all happen from the TV in the bar. Whether or not he was writing at the time, I don’t know, but he was doing something all night long, and then he’d sleep for a couple hours and then so on.

LAILA NABULSI

Hunter said he wanted to write a book called The Silk Road. He wrote a long memo to his agent: “A story about people who got caught in the fast and violent undercurrents and, finally, the core of the action of the great Cuba–to–Key West Freedom Flotilla in the spring of 1980—a bizarre and massively illegal ‘sea lift’ which involved literally thousands of small private boats that brought more than 100,000 very volatile Cuban refugees to this country in less than three months. . . .” He was going to do it next, but he never did.

MIRIAM GOOD

I have no idea how he found out about our lodge. There was a group of people having dinner in the bar one night, and somebody recognized Hunter, and he and Laila checked in the next day and stayed for a few months. They settled into his routine, and we all got used to that. Soon he had a relationship with everybody in the family. He and my husband, Lloyd, had some kind of sports bet going on every day. Hunter had breakfast in the bar, usually around noon, with his drinks lined up, and everybody got used to that. It was quiet, and people didn’t harass him. It just seemed to suit him, and he went out and about doing what he did. There were times when he had his boat here and he went out, but whether or not he fished or what he did, I don’t know.

We were only a party to the alcohol part, but the rest went on too, and of course in those days in the Keys that was not a problem. Bill Murray and several other friends came down, and they all had a wonderful time. He had just done the Hunter part in the Where the Buffalo Roam movie, and he had Hunter down. It was almost scary—he had the walk and all the rest of it.

We have two sons, and we had a dolphin in those days, and Hunter was very involved with all of that.

LAILA NABULSI

They had a one-eyed dolphin called Sugar. You had to go get the fish to feed the dolphin from the kitchen, and then you had certain tricks that you made Sugar perform, like jumping and singing, by doing the right hand movements. One night Hunter jumped in the pool with her, with his snorkel and everything. He just said, “I’m going to talk to Sugar,” and Sugar came up and stood straight on her tail in front of him and yapped at him for fifteen minutes. And Hunter talked back to her. They had a whole relationship.

MIRIAM GOOD

He was very accessible and very friendly to everyone. Then one day they left early in the morning, and they left a copy of The Great Shark Hunt, and Hunter wrote in the front of it:

Dear Lloyd and Miriam,

You have too many dependents for me to list all their names on this page. Fuck the doomed. Indeed—but you ran a decent hideout. It was a good place to hide from the movie. I’ll call you about my boat—we need to get it back to Boog’s.

And thanks for running a good inn, which is better than a bad book.

Then I guess he decided he’d been too nice—on the next page it says:

Nevermind—I caught some weird disease in this place, and I will damn well see you in court.

LAILA NABULSI

John Belushi came up to stay with us at Owl Farm in September ’81, and he was not in great shape. Hunter was trying to distance himself because Judy was there with John. John kept getting in these situations—he stole somebody’s truck and went to town, or he’d hitchhike into Aspen, probably to buy drugs, and then come back hours later. Hunter didn’t want to be perceived as the one who was making John fall off the wagon, so Hunter kept saying things like, “I’m going to the Holiday Inn to watch the football games,” and try to get away from all of that. Hunter wasn’t mad at him. He was basically in “It’s not my fault” mode. He didn’t want to be blamed.

After John died in March of ’82, Hunter and I went to New York for the memorial, and then he went home and I stayed to look out for Judy. But then Hunter decided that he and I were going to go back to Hawaii, and there was no question—I was going back to Hawaii. I was going to be with Hunter. I was with Hunter. I just had a short break because of the John stuff.

But this time, a certain amount of the fun seemed to have gone out of our lives. I wanted to move into another phase, and I know that’s what Hunter and I had planned, but I guess I had assumed that everything would go differently than the way things were going now. And when it didn’t or it couldn’t, it became harder to deal with all the other stuff.

After John died, things changed, because then I was more worried about Hunter. It got harder. I was tired. I wanted things to be more normal again, and they were starting to get less normal. More stuff was going on, and it was just getting a little crazy. John dying was really part of it.

BOB BRAUDIS

Hunter and I were friends way before I became sheriff. And over almost thirty years I don’t believe I’ve lost any friends because I put on a badge and strapped on a six-shooter. The relationship with Hunter has been puzzling to a lot of people. I don’t believe that drug use is a crime of moral turpitude. We had a simpatico philosophy regarding drug use, and I didn’t see a lot of craziness in Hunter’s drug use. The guy could drink twenty-four hours a day and never get stupid. With Hunter’s peccadilloes, or some of Hunter’s behavior that I didn’t approve of, I treated it as a challenge to help him. So I accepted the fact that Hunter was a recreational user or an addicted user of several substances, most of them legal. My main relationship with Hunter in the criminal realm was that he did commit some crimes, and he wrote about them, and he was prosecuted and worked out plea bargains most of the time. Hunter was very discreet in protecting my reputation, and I accepted his lifestyle.

One thing that always defined our relationship was the fact that I think he was a little afraid of me—and I wanted to keep it that way. He would admit it. When I’d give him the stink-eye, I could tell he was listening. He was pretty fearless, but when I told him, “Hey, you don’t do this shit,” he’d listen.

GEORGE STRANAHAN

A lot of us who knew him well were concerned about the excess and the self-destructive behavior. As a friend, I felt that I at least had to talk to him about it—if not for his sake, at least for my sake, so that I could say I tried. So I’d say a few words like, “Hunter, I’m worried about you.” Many people did that. But you usually only did it once, because Hunter always had an answer: “It’s my life, my decision . . . It’s how I make my living.” That kind of thing. And it was so logical that you’d say, “Okay, I’m not going to revisit that conversation.”

ED BRADLEY

It was Hunter’s life. He had been doing it most of his life, and I didn’t feel that I was going to be the one to change him, because I don’t think he wanted to change. I think he enjoyed that life, and he would have been miserable living any other way. Hunter was an alcoholic, a serious alcoholic. Hunter got up and drank for breakfast, he drank all day, he drank all night. And he was a drug addict—he started with drugs in the morning, he used drugs all day, he used drugs all night, and sometimes he’d stay up for two or three days on drugs. He was a serious addict.

Once I said, “You know, man, I’m really worried about you. How can you continue like this? What kind of shape are you in?” And he said, “Well, you’re right, Ed. . . . I could stand to lose ten pounds.”

JANN WENNER

Hunter was a drug addict. He loved drugs. He took massive amounts of them. And if you were with him, you took them. I’m sure some people didn’t—I suppose—but for most everyone, it was almost impossible not to. He enjoyed drugs, all kinds of them, day and night, really with no break for years on end. At a certain point I don’t think he enjoyed it anymore, but by that time he was hopelessly addicted.

ANJELICA HUSTON

Laila’s a sensible girl. She protected Hunter a lot and nursed him a lot and cared for him, and I think it became evident to her that she just could not go on doing that. I don’t think I ever questioned Laila’s decision, and I don’t think it ever really merited an explanation. I got it. Being in a relationship like that, when you realize the person is outside your sphere of influence, you realize there really is no other thing you can do other than lick your wounds and find a quiet place.

LAILA NABULSI

John’s death had more of an effect on me than on Hunter. He didn’t act like John, but there were similar amounts of drugs around, so I started to freak out that he could die. It was a conversation I had with his doctor that set me straight about what addiction was, and what alcoholism was; that Hunter really was addicted and really was an alcoholic; that this was something that had been going on for a while, and that my life was going to be this unless he did something drastic about it. I didn’t realize then that I couldn’t make him do it.

I think he felt judged, which is not what I wanted to do. I just thought, “If you love me, you’ll do this.” There were only a couple of people who really understood what was going on: Jann and a few others. Basically, the rest of his friends had the attitude of, “He’s Hunter Thompson—what are you worried about?” There was no support system.

JANN WENNER

Laila asked me to try to get Hunter to get into AA or some program. So at her urging—beyond urging, really; it was pleading and desperation—I sat down with Hunter one night at my apartment in New York and had a conversation about it. He admitted that he screwed up his career. “Well, why don’t you do something about it? It would be great for you, and for all your friends.” I explained the benefits in terms of his writing and his ability to be productive again.

Hunter was extremely gracious. “I know you’re sincere. I know you mean well, and I appreciate you having the courage to say this to me, because most people won’t; but this is just never going to happen.” He didn’t deny anything at all. He had said to me often throughout his life, beginning much earlier than this, “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.

LAILA NABULSI

I threatened to leave if he didn’t go to rehab. He finally said he’d do it, but making it happen and finding the right place was like pulling teeth. He insisted that it be someplace near the water, so we found a place near the water in Florida. The deal was he would stay there for thirty days and then I’d stay with him at Owl Farm.

He lasted a week. He had a drug dealer who lived in Florida bail him out of rehab and pick him up. That fucking guy called me and said he was going to pick Hunter up and take him to a plane, and I said, “Don’t! Let him stay there.” And he said, “Hey—it’s Hunter Thompson, man . . .” That’s when I realized that there would always be that guy who Hunter could get to go along with whatever he was doing. And there were more of them than there were of me. His counselor down there told me, “He’s not ready. He did it for you, but he didn’t do it for himself.”

His fear was that he wouldn’t be able to write—and that was the most important thing, ultimately. He had created such an edifice around him that it was hard for him to break out of it without thinking that he would be publicly humiliated. He didn’t know how to backtrack. He said he’d made a “career decision.”

That was the beginning of the end. Around September, I told Hunter that I was going to go to New York for a couple of weeks to work on this book with Judy. It was just a way to get out of there and away from everything for a minute. I took a toothbrush with me, and I never really went back.

It got to a point where I just didn’t want to be responsible. Life was getting bigger on his end, in all sorts of ways. I didn’t want to be the secretary all the time and do all the work, but it was required because who else was going to do it? Money was tight then. It wasn’t like we could have just easily hired somebody. But mostly it was because he didn’t like it. He was so private about his life at home that to him, it was weird to have somebody coming in to do the books. But I was tired and I didn’t want that job, which is what my life with Hunter was becoming.

TERRY MCDONELL was the managing editor of Rolling Stone in 1982.

When the Roxanne Pulitzer story broke, it occurred to me that this was just too perfect. Guy de la Valdene, who was a great friend of friends of mine in Montana—along with Buffett, Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison—was living in Palm Beach and was a friend of Roxanne’s, so I knew a little bit more about the story than what was appearing in the tabloids, which was sensational enough.

I thought, “Perfect. Hunter should go there.” He loved Florida. I told Jann I was going to do that, and he laughed and said, “Good luck. That’ll never happen.” And what I realized was that the two of them had determined that they were never going to do anything together again, because it was just too hard. They had pushed their particular theater too far. But I thought it would have been tragic not to go back and do it again sometime.

The relationship that Hunter had with Rolling Stone—even if it was not going to be with Jann in the same way—was important. So I proposed the story, and Hunter, of course, said no, he’d never work with that little fucker again because, of course, there were hundreds of thousands of copies of Fear and Loathing in some warehouse somewhere. I heard about it all the time, that and the canceling of the insurance in Saigon. I was immediately brought into that swamp.

But I started talking to Hunter on the phone, and I think what happened was we enjoyed it, or I filled a gap for him or something. He loved the idea that Rolling Stone wanted him to write again, because he told everyone that Jann had come crawling back on his knees. But in one of those conversations, I asked Hunter if he remembered how good it felt to really work. And that struck him, and over the next twenty years or so, he would bring that up. He had been not working much at that time. But he got that; he wanted to work, and he wanted his work to be great. I never felt adversarial with him like so many other editors have said. I felt conspiratorial.

I think that that was the little trigger that got him on the plane to Palm Beach. Of course, once he was there, the Cadillac convertibles and the wind whipping through the palm trees and the lesbians drinking champagne as they did four-wheel drifts around the corners took precedence.

ROXANNE PULITZER and Hunter were friends for more than twenty years.

Hunter and I first met in ’82 at my divorce trial in Palm Beach, Florida. He was there every day for twenty-one days, in the front row. There was Tom Brokaw, the New York Times—and there was Hunter in his Hawaiian shirt and cutoff khaki shorts and TopSiders. On the first day of the trial, when Hunter walked in and sat down, the judge said, “I’m so honored to meet you, Mr. Thompson.” He didn’t want to meet anybody else in that front row except for Hunter. I had never met him. I’d heard of Fear and Loathing, but I have to admit that at the time I was not a reader of Rolling Stone, so I didn’t know much.

The trial was a lambasting—and, I think, the first divorce trial that really stood out since the Gloria Vanderbilt custody case in terms of taking the press for that kind of ride. Maybe it was because of my husband’s name, or because I was the younger woman from the wrong side of the tracks, and now there I was in Palm Beach with two beautiful children. And we had the drugs, the sex, everything—it was the seventies, for Chrissake. I lost custody of my own children, and the only way my ex-husband could strip them away from me was to say I was a voodoo witchcraft queen and a cokehead. He had to do that to win. All of a sudden he’s saying, “She made me have a ménage à trois with her and her younger girlfriend. She introduced me to cocaine.” I was twenty-eight before I even saw the drug.

I lost everything. It was a shock—an incredible thing, a bad thing. Of course Hunter had to come to Palm Beach to cover it for Rolling Stone.

PAT CADDELL

He really had this thing for underdogs, and he really had a thirst for justice. Even if the underdogs didn’t vote with him or understand what he did, he thought they were much more genuine than the whores. Take his Roxanne Pulitzer story. Everyone was making fun of her—well, it turns out that most people are ass-backwards motherfuckers. He exposed that community for what it was—that sort of wealthy, patrician corruption—and he put it in a social context. He was deeply passionate, and he cared, and it was not his persona to pretend to care. That story is the greatest attack on the Gatsby class since Gatsby.

From “A Dog Took My Place”
Rolling Stone 400/401; July 21–August 4, 1983

There is a lot of wreckage in the fast lane these days. Not even the rich feel safe from it, and people are looking for reasons. The smart say they can’t understand it, and the dumb snort cocaine in rich discos and stomp to a feverish beat. Which is heard all over the country, or at least felt. The stomping of the rich is not a noise to be ignored in troubled times. It usually means they are feeling anxious or confused about something, and when the rich feel anxious and confused, they act like wild animals.

There are hideous scandals occasionally—savage lawsuits over money, bizarre orgies at the Bath and Tennis Club or some genuine outrage like a half-mad eighty-eight-year-old heiress trying to marry her teenage Cuban butler—but scandals pass like winter storms in Palm Beach, and it has been a long time since anybody got locked up for degeneracy in this town. The community is very tight, connected to the real world by only four bridges, and is as deeply mistrustful of strangers as any lost tribe in the Amazon.

Some of the first families of Palm Beach society will bear permanent scars from the Pulitzer vs. Pulitzer proceedings, a maze of wild charges and countercharges ranging from public incest and orgies to witchcraft, craziness, child abuse and hopeless cocaine addiction.

The Filthy Rich in America were depicted as genuinely filthy, a tribe of wild sots and sodomites run amok on their own private island and crazed all day and all night on cocaine. The very name Palm Beach, long synonymous with old wealth and aristocratic style, was coming to be associated with berserk sleaziness, a place where price tags mean nothing and the rich are always in heat, where pampered animals are openly worshipped in church and naked millionaires gnaw brassieres off the chests of their own daughters in public.

Big names in the mud, multiple sodomies, raw treachery, bad craziness—the Pulitzer gig had everything. It was clearly a story that a man in the right mood could have fun with.

And I was in that mood. I needed a carnival in my life: whoop it up with the rich for a while, drink gin, drive convertibles, snort cocaine and frolic with beautiful lesbians. Nevermind the story. It would take care of itself. It was ripe in every direction.

LAILA NABULSI

During that first year apart, I met up with him for Thanksgiving in Grenada when he went there to cover the “war” for Rolling Stone.

MICHAEL CLEVERLY

Loren Jenkins told me about going to Grenada with Hunter. The two of them were the only journalists that brought dates to the invasion. All the rest of the guys showed up with their bush jackets and their equipment and tons of other stuff. Hunter and Jenkins showed up in Hawaiian shirts, each with a date on his arm.

JANN WENNER

I thought it was certain we were going to get the Grenada piece, but the editor who I delegated to hand-hold that one made the mistake of letting Hunter come to New York to write, and then also went along with Hunter’s work-avoiding notion that a transcript of this interview he had had with a fucking taxi driver in Grenada was going to be the larger part of the piece. It was another broken play.

It took me a long, long time to give up. For so long it had been, “That would be perfect for Hunter. Let’s try it.” Finally I had to understand that it was not worth making the phone call. It was frustrating and upsetting. So I stopped.

LAILA NABULSI

We kept having these weird trial reunions—he’d come to New York, or I’d go out there—with the idea that maybe it would be okay this time, or that we’d try again, and then I’d be crawling out of there ten days later.

But by then I had the rights to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter and I had gone to see a stage play version in England in ’82, right before John died.

LOU STEIN directed the stage play of Vegas in London’s West End.

Ralph Steadman, who lived near me in Kent, put me in touch with Hunter. Ralph thought a Fear and Loathing play was a great idea. When I first called, Laila answered the phone, and she was fairly hostile: “Who gave you permission to do this?” and “We’re not letting you do this” et cetera, et cetera, and then said, “Hunter wants to see your work.”

By the time I finally spoke to Hunter on the phone, his only comment to me was “We’re coming out to see the play, and if we don’t like it we’re going to wreck your theater.”

He came to the opening night, and of course all of the actors wanted to meet him, so he went backstage about a half hour before curtain and basically said, “Does anybody have some hash?” Some of the actors lit up with him backstage, and he then went out and sat in the absolute back row. He was slapping his knee with his hand and saying things like “Oh man!” throughout the show. And when he first saw Dr. Gonzo—the guy playing Gonzo—he howled and said, “That’s him, that’s him—I remember that.” He didn’t see it as fiction. I saw it as a play based on his book; he saw it as meeting people from his life. I’ll never forget. At the intermission, he said, “I lived that! I lived that! That was him.’’

LAILA NABULSI

Hunter and I had a great time in London. We had all these scams going on from Time Out and some other magazines to pay for the trip. Hunter was supposed to give one of them X amount of words and somebody else some other story, but when we had to check out of our hotel, we didn’t have any money. Hunter had written pages—I don’t even remember what the hell they were about—and I had all the people who were going to pay for them waiting in the lobby of Claridge’s. I would say, “Okay, give me the check, here’s the pages; give me the check, here’s the pages; give me the check . . .” Then I had to add it all up to make sure we had enough money to pay the bill. I don’t think Hunter ever went back to Europe after that.

Because of the play, I saw how the book could work dramatically. Hunter had sold the movie rights in perpetuity to this guy who was the heir to the Jergens hand lotion fortune, for twenty-five grand, in 1972 or ’73. He had tried to make a movie at one point—and at another point Scorsese was thinking of doing the movie, and he wanted John and Danny to play Gonzo and Hunter, but some weird guy was attached as the producer, and it fell apart.

Hunter didn’t really know about any of this. He’d just taken the money. But I renegotiated so that the rights reverted back to Hunter in seven years. It ended up taking way longer.

DEBORAH FULLER

After Hunter and Laila separated, he called me and asked if I would help him. I had my own glass-blowing studio at the time, but he would call from time to time, and I would go out.

Usually I had just gone to bed, and he’d call and say, “Get over here, Goddamn it! We’ve got a deadline.” So I started working with him in ’82 or ’83, eventually helping him run his life and Owl Farm. We established an early mutual trust—he trained me to his ways—and that lasted more than twenty years.

At that time he had an assistant, Maria, and we became good friends during the three years we worked together. We’re still very good friends.

JUAN THOMPSON

There was a little testing period with Hunter’s relationships. It was just wait and see how long they were around. Laila, Maria—they were around for a long time, and I got along very well with them. Others came and went. Some of them, it was strange: I didn’t even meet them. I only heard about them.

BOB BRAUDIS

The girlfriends all blend into one. When I became sheriff, Maria Khan, a beautiful Pakistani lady from Phoenix, was his squeeze. She eventually went back to Phoenix, but Hunter lured her back to Colorado for Juan’s graduation and sort of held her prisoner. I rescued her.

DOUG CARPENTER was Hunter’s neighbor in Woody Creek.

Hunter did have a tendency to suddenly drop the guillotine and just snap, and that would be it. This time it ended with Maria moving from Hunter’s house into the house of a friend of mine. My friend called me up one day and said, “I think Hunter’s gonna shoot me.” I said, “Jesus Christ! You know you’ve taken a little risk.” Hunter was walking around with a gun in his belt. That kind of turned ugly.

DEBORAH FULLER

Hunter and I were involved at the beginning, but very briefly. You can’t work with him in the capacity that I did and do that. I loved Hunter very much, but I didn’t fall in love with him. I also wasn’t in awe of him or his work, because when I met him I hadn’t read most of what he had written. He was a very powerful man, as well as charming—that Kentucky charm.

Working on pieces with Hunter was really our fun time. He wrote, I facilitated, and then I took care of everything else—joyfully. I’m good at it, so it was easy. We cursed each other from time to time, and I would quit, and he’d fire me, though we were usually back working together within a few months.

He’d pay me when he could, and I had another job at a gallery in Aspen to support myself. When Hunter had money, he was one of the most generous people I knew, and not just to me. To many. But money was tight in those early years. He wrote, and he lectured to make extra money.

BILL STANKEY was Hunter’s lecture agent for thirteen years.

In 1983, some kid from the University of North Dakota called me because he wanted Hunter to come out and give a speech. No one could get hold of him, so I started sending Mailgrams to the Woody Creek Tavern. Months went by with no answer, and then one day my assistant said, “There’s a Dr. Thompson on the phone.” North Dakota was the first gig. He got $5,000, and in what would become a typical event, he was about an hour and a half late, insisted on drinking Chivas onstage—and drew a huge sold-out crowd.

The next gigs were UCLA and then Berkeley, back-to-back. I flew out to meet Hunter for the first time with about $200 for five days and stayed at a Travelodge. Hunter was staying in the Lauren Bacall Suite at the Westwood Marquis Hotel and had brought one of the Hells Angels, Tiny, with him as a security guard. In the front row at the show, there were ten kids who’d dyed their arms blue, and when he came out onstage, people were running up to the stage bringing him joints and little envelopes with drugs in them. After the gig, he had a party for some students in his hotel room, and after about an hour, Tiny came up to me and said, “Hunter wants you to leave. You’re making him nervous.” I went down to the bar and started ordering drinks on Hunter’s tab, and an hour and a half later, Tiny came down and gave me $500 in cash and said, “Hunter knows you don’t have any money.”

The next day we had two sold-out shows at Berkeley, and some corporate gig for a computer guy there. I was supposed to meet Hunter at ten a.m. for breakfast, but he didn’t show, and I couldn’t get hold of him all day. Finally I flew to Berkeley on my own and got to the show at eight o’clock . . . no Hunter. Twenty-five hundred kids were howling and barking at the moon, so I walked out and said, “I just got a call from Dr. Thompson, and he’ll be here momentarily”—and then walked backstage thinking, “Where is he?” A few minutes later he showed up and yelled at me. “Never lie for me, goddamn it.”

ALAN RINZLER

He got on the stage and was incoherent, just fall-down drunk. It was sort of what everyone expected—that he would show up and be so drunk, or so fucked up in some other way, that he couldn’t speak.

BILL STANKEY

For the corporate gig, Hunter showed up late, told a couple stories, and then left—$10,000.

A couple years later, he did a show at Brown University with G. Gordon Liddy. Hunter decided he was going to sit at the airport bar and drink and wait for Liddy to arrive. Liddy landed, and Hunter went wandering out onto the tarmac with a handgun, yelling, “Gordo! Gordo, it’s good to see you! We’re going to have a lotta fun tonight, Gordo!” Liddy wanted nothing to do with him.

Hunter was a wreck that night. Liddy was articulate and sober, and the comparison between the two was not in Hunter’s favor. Afterward he held some students hostage in a room, screaming and yelling at them that he needed drugs immediately and demanding that they drive him to find acid.

BOB BRAUDIS

Over the years, when he was flush, Hunter would give me nice collectibles. He was very generous. He could spend $5,000 at a truck stop when he had a pocketful. Then there were times between royalties, or when he owed the publishers a book and they wouldn’t give him any money, when he would borrow from a few of us. In my case it was very little money because I don’t have a lot, but other generous patrons like George Stranahan and a few other guys, when Hunter had an IRS bill with penalties and interest mounting, they’d bail him out.

DEBORAH FULLER

I lived at Owl Farm, in the cabin about a hundred feet from his house. Living that close was both a curse and a blessing. I was on call twenty-four hours, but it was essential. The cabin was small and very old. It had huge windows and it was a place to sit and watch the deer and elk and the occasional marmot or skunk or porcupine or bobcat or fox or coyote pass by. And the peacocks, of course. We added another cage on to the cabin, so that there was one at Hunter’s house and another at the cabin.

There were eight to fifteen [peacocks] at any time. It was really important to Hunter to be able to watch the birds, just their sheer beauty. Hunter called it “living art.” The kings always had them, he said. They were watch-birds, and we always knew when anything or anyone approached the house.

JUAN THOMPSON

I’ve always been very, very private about acknowledging that I was Hunter Thompson’s son. I wouldn’t volunteer that. But when people did find out—yes, inevitably the first questions would be “What was it like?” “Was he really that crazy?” I might tell a story about him, but I didn’t like answering those types of questions, partially because from as early as I can remember, protecting privacy was paramount. The idea of sitting down with a stranger and giving them the “inside dope” was unthinkable. That was one of Hunter’s prime directives: Maintain the privacy. It was not specific, and it was not talked about. It was implied. Every time I picked up the phone—this was before answering machines—I had to get enough information to find out who it was, but without disclosing anything, and then find out if Hunter wanted to talk to them or not. Physical privacy as well—people were not welcome to just drive up to the door and knock. It was strictly forbidden.

DEBORAH FULLER

The kitchen was the center of everything, and if Hunter didn’t know you well or didn’t trust you completely, the kitchen was just off the list. And whatever happened in the kitchen was to be kept private.

There were always notes tacked up to that effect: “What happens in the kitchen stays in the kitchen,” or “Never call 911. Ever. This means you.”

BILL DIXON

You had to be polite in the kitchen and you had to be on your best behavior—not to bow down to him, but you had to say something on point. Hunter was a lover of great conversation, and he did not dominate conversations. He was a great listener. You wouldn’t know that from his public persona.

DEBORAH FULLER

There was a certain organization to Owl Farm that had to be kept. From Hunter’s perspective sitting in his chair in the kitchen, there was the typewriter right in front of him, and to the right and left of Hunter’s typewriter were two phones that he would often talk on simultaneously. Straight across from Hunter was a big TV in the corner, and to the left of that was the piano, and on the piano there were always books that he wanted access to.

I always kept an edition of each one of his books there in case we needed to do any research, as well as any other books that he wanted to be able to see: The Reluctant Surgeon, which was about one of his ancestors, along with reference books related to the project of the moment. There was always a storyboard of the working manuscript hanging over the piano. To the right of his typewriter was a window through which he could see out to the bird feeders, or he could look out and see a car come around the circular driveway.

All the daily newspapers and the latest magazines would be to his right, and the coffeepot was on the counter behind him. Just under that window were various books of his in which he made many corrections over the years.

The living room had large windows and a door to the front porch. Hunter used to like to have his late-afternoon breakfast on the porch and sit outside in the morning before he went to bed. At the far end was a built-on birdcage. Hunter would lock the peacocks in every night, and there were lights inside the cages for heat and viewing. The birds were active at night, especially when Hunter cranked up the music.

At the far end of the living room was a large fireplace, which was going most of the time during the winter, and a window to the right of the fireplace that looked out onto the firing range and to the back and the side of the property. To the left inside the room was another storyboard—we always had two storyboards going—and there was a big round table with a marble center that had a lazy Susan on which we could lay out material when we were working. That table was in front of the chair that Hunter always wrote in before he ended up at the counter in the kitchen.

As you walked into the living room, to your left were all bookshelves—that’s also where the taxidermied owl of Owl Farm was perched, right above the master dictionary—and as you turned right to go out to the porch, there were more floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with a rack of hats hanging over them. Hunter could go straight to where he had put books thirty years ago.

Downstairs was the War Room, another place where Hunter used to write. This room had all sorts of memorabilia on the walls from as far back as when he was in South America and Puerto Rico, along with things that Ralph Steadman had done. There was another large fireplace right under the living-room fireplace. When Hunter started writing upstairs, this room turned into archival storage and is where a lot of first editions were kept, as well as collected artwork, guns and ammunition, original manuscripts and their backup materials, all communication . . . It was a large, locked, private room with everything from Hunter’s early days as a writer. And he kept everything.

I’m not sure why, but there were bullet holes through the window in the Red Room, or the mud room, upstairs, and instead of just replacing the window, Hunter chose to sandwich it in glass. It became another piece of Hunter’s art—as well as a warning to those who came to the door.

Owl Farm had rules. Various people broke those rules, and those people weren’t invited back. There were a number of people who came for an interview and then decided to just drink with Hunter; they’d think that they had become such good buddies that they would just get their story the next day. And Hunter would say, “Sorry, you had your chance.”

I dealt with a lot of “pilgrims” over the years. They wanted to pay homage, and they came from all over the world, usually bearing gifts. Many sat across the road taking pictures, and some walked up the driveway. Usually I had very little trouble with them. People liked to eat acid and come by the house. Some people would leave notes under rocks or taped to the gate. Some people would stay down at the tavern, eating and drinking for four days just in the hope of seeing him.

TEX WEAVER was a neighbor of Hunter’s in Woody Creek.

Sometimes I’d get a call from Owl Farm about somebody bothering them, so I’d go up there and try to convince whoever it was that they were lost, maybe by pulling a gun and sticking it in their face and saying, “Get the fuck out of here” or something like that. Let’s just say I shooed people away.

DEBORAH FULLER

Tex would do anything for Hunter. Hunter wrote about Tex once in a while; he would use him as a character. He was a friend and a wild boy in the neighborhood. He lived with a guy named Tom, another friend, who fixed Hunter’s cars and motorcycles. I could call on either of them in a second for any kind of help. You wanted Tex on your side—let’s put it that way. You didn’t want to fuck with Tex.

TEX WEAVER

I first met Hunter when I was visiting my sister-in-law in San Francisco in the late sixties, and I used to go out to Golden Gate Park on my motorcycle at two or three a.m. and ride through the park as fast as I could possibly fucking go. I was always watching, because if you see some headlights coming, maybe it’s the police, you know. But I see headlights coming at me and I realize it’s a motorcycle, and I realize the son of a bitch is going as fast as I am. So I go to the right, and this guy mirrors it. I go to the left; he mirrors it. All of a sudden I’m thinking, “Oh my—this is a game of chicken.” So I just aim for him and he aims for me, and we barely missed each other; I mean, we could almost smell each other’s breath as we went by each other. I got pissed and wheeled around, thinking I was going to get this son of a bitch, and I chased him down and asked him, “Who the fuck are you?” And he says, “Who the hell are you? I thought I killed you back there.” I started laughing, and he was laughing, and I took out my medicine bottle and dumped a whole bunch of it in his hand, and we ended up in a bar that evening. And that’s how we met.

I didn’t see him again until three or four years later, when I came out to Aspen and ended up on a bar stool next to him. I said, “Golden Gate Park,” and he looked at me. “Motorcycle.” He said, “Yeah.”

Both of us were kind of recluses, but we ended up spending more and more time together. We played softball. Jimmy Buffet had a softball team, which was interesting, because I think you had to be a felon to be on it or something. We called ourselves the Down-Valley Doughboys. In those days Hunter still was quite mobile.

We did all the drugs and the ether and dah-dah-dah. On ether you slobber; you’re a fucking piece of shit. One time we were driving, and I had a tank of it. We were doing acid at the time and drinking and you name it. I had a mask, so you just turn the tank on and you go. You can get that in a liquid form also. One of the things he said in Vegas was that you might as well pour it all over a towel and stick it down by the floorboards and turn the fan on so the fumes would come up. This was us.

He used to call me the Princess of Darkness because I would dress up in drag. The first time I did it with him was in San Francisco in ’84 or ’85. Hunter had driven his car down one of the main drags there and rammed into the back of a carload of colored people. I got this call from him—“Come get me out of jail. . . .” I put on an old Mexican dress like you might see in a cowboy movie—the ones you can pull down over the shoulder—and I put lipstick on and a little wig and went and bailed him out. He was just in because of a small accident or something, but Hunter’s approach to all that stuff was lots of yelling—you know, he was trying to pull off this weird demeanor—and they sent an 800-pound pacifier into the cell with him. They have guys that do things if someone is unruly.

I got him out of there, and after that he kept calling me the Princess of Darkness.

DEBORAH FULLER

When friends would come over, Hunter would make Biffs, which were a mix of Bailey’s Irish Cream and Irish whiskey, or put out shots of tequila—Hunter loved good tequila. In general, he drank Chivas and Grolsch or Molson and an occasional Bloody Mary or margarita. Later, after he’d been to Cuba, he liked mojitos.

There were always gatherings at Owl Farm for ball games and for the Kentucky Derby.

JACK NICHOLSON

He loved gambling on football. One of the times I definitely impressed him was when he came up to visit when Rafelson and I were shooting The Postman Always Rings Twice in Santa Barbara. The weekend we finished was the Super Bowl. I was a child gambler, but I don’t much care anymore. It’s one of the few vices that I’ve definitely completely defeated. But they started off trying to get me involved until eventually I’d just say, “Well, okay, what about this?” And just by manipulating the room with little tiny dollar bets and so forth—all I was doing was trimming them with the numbers and the spread and preying on their excitements and misunderstandings of the moment—I think I made out of this room with a couple hundred bucks. This was totally impressive to Hunter. He couldn’t believe that I’d hustled everybody in the room with numbers, getting them to bet both ways and back and forth.

DEBORAH FULLER

He didn’t like going to big gatherings or big dinners. He preferred one-on-one or small groups. If one of his good friends had a birthday party, it was still a big thing to get Hunter to go. He was notorious for accepting dinner invitations and not going, or showing up late. He’d pop in and out, eat oysters and drink and talk and smoke, but it was hard for him to just sit and eat. There were a few places that he would go regularly: to the Goldsteins’, the Rafelsons’, dinner at Ed Bradley’s over the holidays, and to Jack’s—small gatherings. And he’d throw a few of his own parties: for the Derby, or the Super Bowl, or the Fourth of July; for the lawyers in town for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers conference or the NORML conference.

People would often ask Hunter if they could bring a friend, or a few friends, with them when they came out. Once in a while Hunter would say okay to this, but sometimes people would just show up with other people, and that was unacceptable. Eventually he put a sign on his fridge that said, “Guests of Guests Are Not Allowed to Invite Guests.”

BOB BRAUDIS

Those of us in town recognized that the weeks before and after Christmas we wouldn’t see Hunter much. That was the celebrity period, when all of the high rollers, the Jack Nicholsons, et cetera, would come to Aspen for the Christmas holidays, and Hunter was hanging with them, not with us. But as soon as the Rose Bowl was over, he was back to his local crowd.

JACK NICHOLSON

He always liked reading things that he thought might be shocking to me—and almost everything he brought to me was shocking, really. He was always socially pyrotechnical when he talked about things, and he could turn on a dime. I remember a line he gave me, a fragment of something he’d written that ended with the character contemplating how this dry French kiss that he was getting from his cat was making him feel. The image stuck with me as much as anything he ever wrote. It was spectacular—just three or four words could suddenly stun you.

He always came over like he was carrying stolen goods when he had these things. There was a lot of paper fumbling, and he was always saying things like, “I don’t know if you’re ready for this.”

He told me about how this girl had sent him some of her poetry—which I read, and we both agreed that this girl, who was very young, had shocking talent. Apparently this group of young people had taken to breaking into morgues somewhere in Colorado and having parties with dead bodies, and this girl wrote poetry about it. What delighted Hunter in some way was that they called the body of the night “the bride,” for instance.

Before that he had turned me on to a book called The Hellfire Club, by Daniel Mannix, which was about this secret club that existed when Benjamin Franklin was in England. This one guy, Sir Francis Dashwood, had gone through a lot of different kinds of religious conversion and was apparently a very brilliant man, and at one point he swung back and forth from extreme piety to being insane—things such as this always appealed to Hunter, this kind of behavior. One night Dashwood was fallen upon by demons in the form of two cats fucking that fell through the skylight and this four-eyed glaring monster hurling around his bed. He wound up forming this thing called the Hellfire Club. Sir Francis was the [club’s] pope, and he commissioned a lot of pornographic statues. The members would sail down the Thames wrapped in robes, and the people would line the shoreline to see them going up to this crazy place where they just debauched beyond belief. You kind of get the picture.

Those kinds of literary evenings were always pretty much just him and me up at my house, and we’d have a ball. I kept what he liked to drink in the shed, and we’d sit there and tune up for the night. I’d ask him things I wouldn’t know about—what’s happening here or there politically—and he was always very informed about that. His contacts were very impressive.

DEBORAH FULLER

One reason he lived as long as he did was that he held the least amount of anger inside himself that he could. He vented at anyone around him. He could be quite cruel, and you had to learn how to stand up to him and know how much of it you would take, and let him know. One thing that was very important was that you held no grudges. There wasn’t time for that; we had way too much to do. We might be yelling at one moment, and then I’d say, “All right, do you need another drink? Let’s get back to the page you’re writing.” But he would get into his dark moods. You didn’t always know where they came from; any number of things could cause them.

The world definitely revolved around him—that’s just the way it was. He had to make those choices, and so did I, and I was able to do it longer than a lot of people. But yes, it took its toll. There’s not much that he didn’t say to you if he felt like it.

It was my life. You either did it full-bore or you didn’t, and I accepted that. Any assistant knew that you didn’t have time for another life. I helped train the new ones the best I could and helped them get through some of the rough times. Hunter would have them call me and talk to me about the reality of what the job entailed. Just honest stuff, really: Yes, it really does mean working nights, and some days. It’s a lot of intense work. Are you nervous driving fast in a car? Do you like birds? Can you type? All of the assistants were extremely bright, and they were all women, basically. He wanted a woman to flirt with while working, and he liked younger women to be there because they had the energy to keep up with him. It was a very difficult job to walk into cold. They either had the spirit and the fortitude, or they left.

TIM FERRIS

Hunter would travel sometimes with assistants, and often it never came up whether they were girlfriends or not. It was this endless parade. They all tended to be good conversationalists.

JACK NICHOLSON

Those migrations from assistant to girlfriend—it was pretty consistent behavior, but I never quite really knew when the transition had occurred. It would just eventually become apparent.

DEBORAH FULLER

He would find them in different ways. He would meet people at the tavern or at a lecture. He had Rolling Stone put something in the magazine saying that he was looking for an assistant, or he would have people connected to the literary world looking for him; people would write offering to work for him.

DOUG BRINKLEY

The ones that were successful knew when to back away from Hunter—when the going gets weird, get the hell out of there—but a wayward personality could get psychologically trapped in the spiderweb of Owl Farm. In your twenties, you’re vulnerable to things. In that way, Hunter had a very unfair advantage in those relationships. On the other hand, you have to be responsible for your own life—to know whether to get away from Hunter or not. Hunter was going to be Hunter. If you’re the moth coming into the flame, and you get burned by the flame, and then you complain, “Oh my God, I got burned”—well, what did you expect? He’s an inferno. Did you think you were special?

A dynamic got created, and it usually crashed because it wasn’t a dynamic based on deep love—it was based on a kind of convenience and expediency, on loneliness and friendship. He had some bad crackups in those regards.

DEBORAH FULLER

All assistants were taught to shoot. Most seemed to enjoy it. I certainly did, and became a good shot. Hunter was a good teacher. He had a shooting range, and there would be things like old water heaters he’d have placed around for targets. He’d teach you to shoot in different ways—up close and at a distance, as well as with different kinds of guns—handguns, rifles, shotguns. We used to put out beer kegs he had found behind the tavern. Hunter felt there was a reward in hearing each shot hit the target, so the metal targets were perfect. He liked using exploding targets attached to small propane canisters, like the ones used for camping stoves. Now, those were fun for everyone—a big bang.

MARY HARRIS was a neighbor of Hunter’s in Woody Creek.

I used to live just up from Owl Farm in a little cabin, and I woke up a couple of times at three in the morning with a machine gun going off so loud that it sounded like it was under my window. I’d fly out of bed screaming, but then I’d remember that I lived next door to Hunter.

PATTI STRANAHAN is George Stranahan’s wife.

Every now and then some windows would get blasted out when George and Hunter were making bombs. That was always a big occasion: “Oh boy, let’s get together and blow something up.”

GEORGE STRANAHAN

We did some pretty good bombs. I was always the supplier. Hunter would go buy the gunpowder, but I always got the gel, the dynamite. It was easy. And I’m no expert on this stuff, but that’s the way it was, from the seventies on up until 9/11. Out of politeness we would call the sheriff if we were going to do something, and tell him that if somebody calls in with a report of an explosion in Woody Creek, you don’t need to send a deputy. The sheriff understood.

BOB BRAUDIS

Most of Hunter’s dynamite came from George Stranahan, who actually was raising cattle and had ditches and stumps. George and Hunter liked to blow up shit as a recreation. They blew up an old Jeep Wagoneer. The hood was blasted three hundred feet up in the air. Hunter told me they used a half a case of Dupont 80 percent, twenty-five pounds of black powder, and five gallons of gasoline. Often they would blow stuff up before George would go in for surgery. He had an awful lot of spinal surgery, and he was warned that he might come out of one of them in a wheelchair forever. So it boosted his spirits to blow something up beforehand.

GEORGE STRANAHAN

Hunter felt that there was ceremony around the bomb, and that it was important. I guess he knew that I was a rancher and enjoyed dynamite—I mean, I’d like a “boom” right now!—and because I had the shit, I could.

PAUL PASCARELLA

He appreciated sheer firepower—explosions, huge weapons.

GEORGE STRANAHAN

Soldier of Fortune, of course, was fascinated with Hunter and with guns and explosives in general, so some of their staffers came out to Owl Farm with a .50-caliber single-shot assassination rifle. Now with .50 caliber, you could be three miles away and with a good sight still kill a guy. The cops aren’t going to get you; you’ll make your escape. So the magazine called Hunter and said, “We want to get a picture of you shooting this thing at dusk, and we need to have an explosion where the bullet hits so that we can get a picture of you and the muzzle blast, and then whatever you’re hitting exploding.” And these assholes came out, and I was called in as the munitions expert, and we got everything all set up with this big rifle and the explosion waiting to happen.

We put a car up the hill, and I put a whole bunch of dynamite in the cylinder block, figuring that if they hit it, it would be enough impact, as well as enough flames. But I also thought that we might have trouble actually hitting the dynamite precisely—it was Hunter shooting, after all. Hunter was in the kitchen drinking while we were doing all of this stuff, and so I put a can of gasoline in the front seat and a fuse leading from the dynamite to the can of gasoline, with the idea that in the worst case, we miss the dynamite and we’ll hit the gas can with a tracer, the gas will burst into flames, it will light the fuse, the fuse will go, and we’ll get an explosion and we’ll get good pictures. Finally they got Hunter to come out, and he was pretty drunk. Soldier of Fortune snapped him as he pulled the trigger, and we saw the tracer go fifty feet above the goddamn car. Not even close.

JEANETTE ETHERIDGE is the owner of Tosca, a bar in San Francisco.

I met Hunter in San Francisco in the late sixties, but we got to be good friends when he was working as the night manager of the O’Farrell Theater—which was run by the Mitchell brothers, who had made the classic porno film Behind the Green Door. Hunter was also writing a weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner, and became a regular at my bar in North Beach.

JEFF ARMSTRONG is a manager of the O’Farrell Theatre.

In 1984, he accepted an assignment from Playboy for a story he called “The Night Manager.” Which led to The Night Manager by Ralph Steadman, which we have on our wall. It shows all these naked, writhing women at the bottom, and in the middle of it all, Hunter sitting on what looks like a lifeguard chair. He’s looking down at all these women writhing about underneath him, nude and screaming. Hugh Hefner paid for it and he gave it to us.

We had yellow business cards made: “The O’Farrell Theatre—Night Manager, Hunter S. Thompson,” which I thought was kind of cute. He would pass those out and tell people, “Come down and see us. I’ll be down there. I’m workin’.” He actually did some sort of work; he talked to the DJ and he made recommendations. He didn’t sweep up or anything, or count money.

At any rate, the piece never came out.

DAVID MCCUMBER was Hunter’s editor at the San Francisco Examiner.

Word came down that the owner of the Examiner, Will Hearst, had hired Hunter as a columnist. His very first column came in—“Buffalo Gores a Visitor”—and Hunter and his editor immediately got into a violent disagreement.

I got a call from Will at ten in the morning. He invited me to his office and said, “I’ve got a new job for you. How would you like to be Hunter’s control?” At that moment Hunter burst out of Will’s bathroom, where he’d been listening to the conversation, poured me a drink and handed it to me, did ten push-ups, got up, shook my hand, and said, “Hi.” We hit it off immediately and somehow rocked into this weekly motion.

We used to go to the O’Farrell together. The Mitchell brothers loved him, but he didn’t really do anything there. Hunter just liked the sort of thumb-in-your-eye approach that they took. When the mayor tried cracking down on the O’Farrell, they put his home phone number on their marquee. Things like that appealed to Hunter. He just hung out and absorbed the culture.

JEFF ARMSTRONG

People have said that he didn’t write much about sex or women, and that bothered him. People threw that in his face and said that even the few scenes when he did, like with the maid in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, were abrasive and offensive. We talked about that a couple times.

When Hunter was the night manager, he interacted freely with the women. It was very cordial and open and funny; he never looked down on them. In fact, he admired the strippers. He thought that their strength and uniqueness were laudable qualities. These girls put on skits—they dressed up like gorillas and wore dildos.

He was interested in the business of sex and fascinated by the customers. I wouldn’t say Hunter was promiscuous. He loved to flirt, and he loved the attention of women.

MARGOT KIDDER

In ’84, I arrived at the Sir Francis Drake, this big, wonderful hotel in San Francisco. Pat Caddell was already there, and these gay friends of mine had arranged for me to have this wonderful driver, this muscle-bound drag queen in heavy makeup, ferry me around in this gold fifties Cadillac. We got an emergency call from Hunter—he was at Ann Getty’s house and he had just slammed his fist through the wall and called Linda Ellerbee a fascist dyke or something, and we had to go and rescue him. We jumped in the gold Cadillac with the driver and raced over to the house and had to run in and grab Hunter from the kitchen with everybody yelling and screaming and haul him out and throw him in the back of the car and whisk him away.

JEANETTE ETHERIDGE

Everyone hung out at my bar, and it was Hunter and Ed Bradley who made that happen. Those two guys made it their headquarters. Hunter was writing a piece for Playboy about the Democratic National Convention, which was in town in July, called “While the Delegates Slept.” It was about all the shit that was going on in my bar at night. Bill Dixon and Pat Caddell were writing Gary Hart’s speeches on the pool table in the back room.

I remember wanting to hear Mario Cuomo speak, and Robin Williams offered to take care of the bar. So I called in to Robin later that night—“Everything’s fine; don’t worry about anything.” Well, he had Ron Reagan Jr. telling him to come to the back room, and he had Hunter and all the Kennedy kids mixing it up.

MARGOT KIDDER

Then Hunter started his adventures with Ron Reagan Jr. Ron was ga-ga, just starstruck with Hunter. That was also the period when Hunter fell in love with a porn queen. He’d be sobbing on my bed about her, telling me how his heart was being broken and how he couldn’t quite get the girl. This was supposed to be the Democratic convention, but I suppose Hunter was the sideshow.

DAVID MCCUMBER

Hunter and I were sitting in Will Hearst’s office about eight o’clock one night, waiting for Will to show up, and Hunter was getting increasingly agitated. He’d been traveling, and I don’t think he had his normal supply of drugs, and he was not in a good mood. He just sat there drinking scotch and really getting pissed off because Will wasn’t there.

Will’s office was on the second floor, right above Fifth Street. We heard some noise out on the street—just a couple of pressmen out on the street, horsing around. Hunter threw open the window and stuck his head out and screamed, “You pigfuckers! Shut up down there! Don’t you know we have a newspaper to put out?!” What he didn’t know was that the pressmen were in the middle of an intense labor negotiation at the time—and having some freak scream and shake his fist at them from the publisher’s window didn’t do much to help this. They started flipping him off and screaming back, and then Hunter shouted back, “You bastards!! I’ll teach you some manners,” and whirled around, picked up a wastebasket, ran into Will’s bathroom and turned the shower on full hot, and started ferrying bucketfuls of hot water and throwing them out the window onto these guys. They were screaming—and then Hunter turned around just cool as a cucumber and picked up the telephone, hit 0, and said, “Operator, this is Dr. Thompson in the publisher’s office. There seems to be some sort of riffraff down on the street. Would you get security to deal with it, please?”

It shifted his mood completely. He was feeling fine the rest of the night. Sometimes he just needed some fun, a sense of mischief, to pull himself out of the black moods.

WAYNE EWING was living next door to Hunter and working as an independent documentary filmmaker in the early eighties.

I had just produced a couple of pieces for a PBS series called Frontline and was looking for a new subject. Hunter was doing his night manager thing, and I had this notion that the reason why Hunter was interested in the O’Farrell Theatre was political. Perhaps he saw in pornography and sexual liberation the same elements that the anarchists in America at the turn of the century did—that it was just breaking that final bond with society.

He was with Maria Khan at the time. They had an apartment in Sausalito, so Deborah and I flew out to San Francisco and met him for dinner in this country club setting—the oddest place you could imagine in Marin County, right across the Golden Gate Bridge—and then retired to the O’Farrell Theatre for the weekend.

They had a big pool table, and one wall was almost completely shot away from a pellet gun that they had given Hunter, which he would use constantly. At the same time, there were naked or almost completely naked women just walking around casually, and he would supervise the proceedings from a big high chair above the New York Stage, as they called it, and would choreograph various things for the girls to do—acts.

JEANETTE ETHERIDGE

We were at the Mitchell brothers’ one night, and I got kind of excited that these girls were dancing and people were throwing money at them. I thought I could do that, so I got up on the pool table in the office upstairs and started dancing, and the next thing I knew, Hunter was shooting a pistol off into the wall between my legs. To this day I don’t know if it was live ammunition or not. There were boxes of Ivory Snow detergent all around the room because Marilyn Chambers, who the theater was associated with, was an Ivory Snow girl before she got into porn, and Hunter was using them as targets.

WAYNE EWING

Hunter and Jeff Armstrong, who was the real night manager for the Mitchell brothers, would talk about the best way to go up before a grand jury—the best frame of mind or, actually, the best chemical mix. Hunter had a glass in his hand and was leaning up against the pool table, and he would bend over so his nose was almost down on the green felt while he was listening to Jeff, and suddenly he would have something to say and would lurch back up, and the glass in his hand would stand straight up; it was an exclamation mark. He would say, “No, no, no. The way to go before a grand jury is you take acid the night before, so that when you go in and they ask you the very first question, you immediately start crying and slobbering on the stand, helpless in fear.”

It took me a number of years to really get enough trust to be able to film Hunter, all the time, and then he started to ask me to shoot things more and more. He put me through an early test. Once I got a new video camera flown up from Denver for him, and I called him up and said, “It’s at the airport—I’ll bring it out.” He was very excited, and said, “Come right on out. I might be in the bathtub, so just come on in.” I would never have gone into the kitchen without announcing myself and being invited in, and when I got out to Owl Farm, I went up on the porch and made a bunch of noise, purposefully. I thought I heard a grunt inside, so I walked in, saying the whole time, “It’s Wayne, it’s Wayne, Hunter, I’ve got the camera.” I thought I heard another grunt, so I stepped into the kitchen doorway, and there was Hunter about six feet in front of me, dripping wet in a bathrobe, with a twelve gauge shotgun in his hand and this wicked smile on his face that told me, “I could kill you right now and no court in the land would ever convict me. You are an intruder.” And damn if he didn’t raise the gun and fire from the hip and blow the door frame out that I was standing in, about six inches from my side. I had never been shot at before, and my voice went up three octaves, and I screamed, “Hunter, you motherfucker!” and ran out of the house. He was laughing his ass off, and eventually I ended up laughing too. I had to just take it as a hug from Hunter—and, I think, a test that I wouldn’t call 911.

MICHAEL SOLHEIM

Hunter and I got into a beef with two guys at the J-Bar one evening. It was New Year’s Day—I think 1985—and we’d been in there all day watching football; we were into our fourth game, and Hunter said, “There’s two guys back there by that table, and they’ve been watching us—I think they’re up to something.” He could see them in the mirror. He said, “I’ll let you know if they come over.” I said “Good idea. Then what do we do?” He said, “We’ll drop the fuckers.” I said, “That’s a great idea.” Sure enough, the two guys get out of their seats and walk over, and just when they get close, Hunter says, “Now!” and spins around in his seat and punches one of the guys. I spun around and got the other guy, and then all four of us are rolling around.

KALLEN VON RENKL

Michael and Hunter beat the absolute crap out of them and threw them out the front door. That was the first time I saw the other side of Hunter. The Jerome was crowded, and it was pretty bloody.

MICHAEL SOLHEIM

All four of us wound up having to go to the hospital for stitches, because we’d gotten little nicks in our hands—and at the hospital, one of the other guys walks over to us and says, “All we wanted was your autograph.” We felt like the biggest assholes in the world. We felt terrible, so we brought them back to the bar and bought them a bunch of drinks. It was the least we could do.

SHELBY SADLER began working as an editor and researcher for Hunter in 1986.

Hunter would come to Washington quite frequently, and we’d hole up for two or three weeks at the Embassy Row or the Ritz-Carlton and do a lot of writing. That’s when we began working on a new novel called Polo Is My Life. It’s unclear exactly how it started.

Very early in our relationship, Hunter had been flirting with a polo player from California named Paula Baxt, who rode at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. Her husband had some connection to Aspen, and she was spending time out there when Hunter met and became desperately enamored of her for a week or so. He kept asking her to run away with him and all this, and Paula is the one who said, “I can’t go with you, Hunter. Polo is my life.” When Paula said that phrase, it all came together for him. He was crazy about it. It struck him like thunder that all the elusive women in the world, in the end, would tell him essentially the same thing in different words: “Sorry, but polo is my life.” It all led into class and money and all of that. Paula Baxt was Hunter’s Daisy Buchanan.

I’ve talked to her about it since, and she finds the whole story to be hilarious, because it was just a throwaway line for her. She had no interest in Hunter. He was just a strange, crazy guy who was fun to hang out with. But Hunter took this all very seriously—he was infatuated with her, and her husband became Tom Buchanan in his mind, and it just went on from there. I don’t think he ever saw her again.

DEBORAH FULLER

The visual progress of each book was very important to him. There were two storyboards, each made of cork. Each was marked off in sections by colored tape to denote the beginning, middle, and end of the book, and beyond that by chapter. As he wrote pages, they would be tacked up, along with headlines and subheds and any pictures. If there was a character named Jilly, Jilly’s picture went up. The Polo Is My Life board had a road map, polo mallets, two belts of machine gun bullets, and a five-foot-long rusty two-handed saw with “Confessions of the Best Piece of Ass in the World” written on it.

Hunter made up a lot of his own letterheads for writing faxes on. These were mostly handwritten, often accompanied by some strange picture, and they’d often be headlined with things like “The Horrible Cokie Monster,” “Rich, Drunk Teen Seized in Shootout at Bogus Animal Shelter,” “Woman Seized by Game Wardens: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, doctor—I keep waking up naked in the woods. Do you think I’m sick?’”

SHELBY SADLER

He always intended Polo to be his story of lost love, the green light at the end of the dock—not so much in the way Fitzgerald presented it, but more from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s original use of the term “green light” in “Dejection: An Ode:”

Though I should gaze for ever

On that green light that lingers in the west:

I may not hope from outward forms to win

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

It’s the only time Hunter has ever truly written about a female character—usually they’re just throwaways, as are most of his characters other than the Hunter alter ego, which is also fractured in two in Polo: There’s Hunter and there’s Raoul Duke, and they’re two very distinctly different people in the book.

When Hunter found out that I lived a fifteen-minute walk from Fitzgerald’s grave in Rockville, Maryland, he was astonished. One time when he visited, we walked to the grave. We stopped and bought a white rose to leave on the grave, where the last line of 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.

The thing is, Polo Is My Life had nothing to do with polo—absolutely nothing. Polo is in The Great Gatsby as well, and Hunter saw it as being in Polo Is My Life to the same extent. Hunter went to the polo matches because Jann paid for it, and because he wanted to be able to watch the polo society, but with some distance. He wanted a reason to be there and meet these people so that he could get a sense of the ethos and write characters from that.

DEBORAH FULLER

Hunter worked on Polo—the novel—for twelve to fifteen years, I’d guess. His work habits stayed the same as long as I knew him. People tried to get him to use a computer, and he would get them and hate them and never use them. He often wrote notes by hand and then typed a page and then hand-corrected. He could cut and paste.

SEMMES LUCKETT

We started the Woody Creek Rod & Gun Club because Hunter and some of us thought that Colorado might pass a restrictive gun-ownership law. I was the first president, Paul Pascarella did the logo, and Joe Edwards was a counselor. That was so important to Hunter. He wrote about the club in a wonderful piece, “Turbo Must Die,” from Songs of the Doomed. In the story, Stranahan has a prize bull, Turbo, and we’re going to blow him up after selling 1,000 vials of the bull’s semen at $10,000 apiece. We got this charter from the NRA without having to deal with a lot of the normal requirements. Hunter also used me as the “spokesman” for the club, and we had everything set so that if they did pass a gun law, we’d all be able to keep our weapons.

PATTI STRANAHAN

Hunter would come over to our house for Thanksgiving dinner, and we used to let him swim in our pool every night. He was quiet, and he could do whatever he needed to. He would drive up and make sure that all the lights were out, or that everyone was asleep. He never came in when he thought he would be disruptive. He’d sneak in with a flashlight through a side door.

GEORGE STRANAHAN

He felt safe here. He trusted me and I trusted him. Absolutely. And if he had a loaded gun and was messing with it, I trusted him not to hit me.

PATTI STRANAHAN

Our kids always felt safe with him. They would go down and talk to him late at night, and he would often drop little presents off, whether it was on Christmas Eve or on any random night.

GEORGE STRANAHAN

He left a lot of presents, usually high-powered flashlights or some sort of gadgets. He’d come up for his swim, and we’d get up in the morning and say, “Wow.”

PATTI STRANAHAN

Sometimes there would be roses for me, or I’d be getting up to get the kids ready for school and he’d still be here swimming, and we’d sit and have grapefruit. That was his favorite thing. One Christmas morning we came out, and there was this taxidermied raccoon holding Hunter’s expired American Express card in his paw. There was a sign on it that said, “To Ben.”

GEORGE STRANAHAN

When our son Ben was about seven, we had a tarantula in a glass cage. One night at maybe nine o’clock, Hunter dropped in with a great big athletic bag full of toys—he had a new gun to show me, and he had his whiskey, and a bunch of other things. He dropped the bag, and we started having a political talk, when Ben woke up and came out and sat down with the guys. Talk then turned to the tarantula, and the fact that we had read that it was perfectly safe to let a tarantula walk right across your hand. We had never actually done it, but I had been drinking with Hunter, and so somehow we decided that this was the night when we would do what needed to be done, and bravely. So Wilky was brought out in his cage, and he was sitting in front of us. Hunter poured another glass of whiskey and then reached down into his big sports bag and said, “Wait a minute. We’re not ready for this yet.” And he pulled out some lipstick from his bag and said, “Lipstick is important.”

Hunter put the lipstick on himself, on me, and on Ben, and we got the tarantula out of the cage with considerable care and were letting it crawl on the palms of our hands. That was the moment when Ben’s mother came out to see what was going on, and that’s what she saw: two drunks and her son wearing lipstick and playing with a tarantula.

TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE was working at an energy policy think tank outside of Aspen in July 1989.

One night I was going out to dinner with an old friend of Hunter’s who wanted to introduce me to him. Shortly after we sat down at the Woody Creek Tavern, Hunter pulled up on a motorcycle. The three of us went up to Owl Farm and spent the evening bullshitting and drinking, and then I went off to my conference. When I got back, the secretary at work said I had five phone messages from Hunter Thompson. His writing assistant was off that week, and he asked me to come out to help him with a column. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it would have been just a hell of a lot of fun, except that I fell madly in love with him.

We were only about a month into the whole mad romance when I had to go to grad school. I was twenty-seven—old by Hunter’s standards—and I had finally gotten into Princeton and wasn’t about to blow off graduate school for this lunatic I had just met, a fact that just filled him with rage.

He took me to the Aspen airport to fly to Denver and then Princeton, and when I was in the Denver airport, I got paged. It was Hunter. In his marvelous, growly voice he said, “Goddamn it, I love you and I want to marry you—will you marry me?” and went on about how much he missed me, even though I’d only been gone two hours. I said, “I will marry you, but I’ve got to do this thing first”—which was very much not the answer that he was expecting. I didn’t realize the extent to which this was an effort to get me on the next plane back to Woody Creek, and from the time I left to the time I finally came back to stay in June, Hunter flew me back to Colorado every other weekend.

Hunter had a box of loose gemstones that he enigmatically said were from Africa and had been given to him by somebody to settle a debt. We sat down with the box, and Hunter told me to pick out whatever stone was my favorite. I picked an implausibly huge rectangular aquamarine, and he picked out a beautiful uncut green emerald, and he gave the two gemstones to a local artist friend to make jewelry for the two of us. The aquamarine was placed in a beautiful white gold setting on a ring, and the emerald was made into a necklace—that’s the one that Hunter wore for the rest of forever.

Hunter really needed someone to be an assistant, and I told him to interview my younger sister.

CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY was about to start her last semester at the University of Florida in the winter of 1990.

Hunter flew me out to Owl Farm while I was still on Christmas break. David McCumber was out working with Hunter on Songs of the Doomed, and the two of them got in a fight over some insanely minor point. He went ballistic in the middle of the night and destroyed a typewriter—just beat it to death with a phone. I was trying to stay awake on coffee, but I fell asleep on the couch just a few feet away from Hunter while these bits of typewriter were flying by my head.

DAVID MCCUMBER

There was metal Selectric shrapnel flying all over the kitchen. I said, “Goddamn it, Hunter, this shit gets old.” He picked up a piece of something and brought it back behind him and took a step toward me like he was going to hit me with it, and I grabbed a beer bottle in my hand—and then we both started laughing at the same time, and he just said, “I think it’s time we took a little break.” And then he was fine. Everything dissipated. Sometimes he would just have to shoot something or break something, and then he’d be okay.

CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY

Earlier I was taking reams of notes on everything he and McCumber were saying, and when the smoke cleared, Hunter told me that I understood him and what needed to be done, and that since I wasn’t freaked out by the flying pieces of typewriter, I was hired.

Deborah left not too long after I’d gotten there. McCumber had left, and Hunter had told me and Deborah that we shouldn’t be talking to him. For several days he had been saying that he wouldn’t have him out and would never talk to him again, and McCumber was calling to try to find out what was going on. Eventually I called him back from the cabin to tell him, and somehow Hunter found out. Since Deborah was in the cabin with me, we were both implicated. Hunter went after the cabin’s electrical box with a hatchet and cut the phone line and the power. That was when Deborah decided that enough was enough, and she and I were driving down the driveway, trying to figure out where we were going to stay, when Hunter came at the car with a very large rock and threw it at the windshield and shattered it.

We left and stayed the night with another assistant who now lived in town. She had worked for Hunter for a short time earlier and had left in fairly short order, not pleased, and concerned for her mental health—literally.

TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE

Everybody knew that Hunter was a very tough beat no matter how much you loved him. Hunter’s friend Tim Ferris had just done a documentary on the nature of genius, and he looked at me and said, “You know, there’s a kind of genius that consumes everyone around them to keep from consuming itself, and Hunter is like that. You’ll stay with it for as long as you can, and someday you will leave, and it’ll be okay.” It was such a bizarre thing to hear from someone I didn’t even know that well, but the image of that vortex consuming everything but Hunter himself resonates with me.

When Hunter failed at things, he made you feel like you had failed. He could make you feel like the world hung on making him smile, and when he did, he convinced you that the world did hang on this. It was a hillbilly laziness. He could be brilliant, or he could have these quirky ideas that he thought would make lots of money—and he liked the quirky ideas that he thought would make a lot of money.

CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY

A lot of time was wasted on this “gonzo bikini” he was trying to have made. The bikini top was women’s blow-up hands, and he wanted them very realistic-looking, with long nails, and he wanted drawings done. The bottoms would be gonzo bikini bottoms. He had a book that was overdue, and he was trying to get bikini sketches made and get me to research a prototype.