CHAPTER NINE

Circling the Wagons at Owl Farm

Hunter’s defense on the LSD charge, which he was quite proud of, was to say that you can’t get good acid anymore—if he’d known it was there, he would have eaten it a long time ago.

HAL HADDON is a former McGovern staffer, now a prominent criminal-defense attorney in Denver.

The Roaring Fork Valley consists of three somewhat-defined communities: There’s Aspen, which is considered ultraliberal in terms of the toleration of lifestyle issues and people have lots of money; there’s Basalt, which has changed a lot, sort of in the middle of the valley at the head of the Frying Pan River; and then there’s Glenwood Springs—all part of the same judicial district. Glenwood Springs, at least at that time, was predominantly rural, very conservative.

The city district attorney for the whole judicial district was from Glenwood Springs, and he was active in the war on drugs—a very conservative, hard-right guy. Hunter was a beacon of what he viewed as an intolerable kind of lifestyle—a bad example—so they set out to get him.

I had known Hunter for about fourteen years, and he hired me as his lawyer. Hunter had a great need for lawyers. He was committing felonies every day. He needed to appreciate criminal defense, and he would not infrequently get busted in small ways. His writing is replete with a lot of the problems he had earlier in San Francisco. It was all small stuff—DUIs, disorderly conduct. Gerry Goldstein and Michael Stepanian, his San Francisco lawyer, were constantly on retainer, and Hunter would always plead to something. But this one was really serious.

Gail Palmer-Slater was a producer of pornographic movies. She was living in Michigan and kept sending Hunter letters saying she wanted to meet him, and suggesting she wanted to talk to him about taking one of his books and turning it into a high-art porn movie. At some point she sent him a card, and the front of it read, “Sex is a dirty business,” and the inside read, “But somebody has to do it.” And she enclosed a note saying she was going to be in Aspen on such-and-such date.

Hunter never responded, but he kept the card—because he kept everything; he was a pack rat—along with a sample of one of her porn movies. And she showed up at his house in 1990 to talk to Hunter about letting her do one of his books. It was a typical raucous night.

CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY

Gail Palmer-Slater hung out flirting and partying. Various friends who had been hanging out started to leave because she was so boring, and then Hunter said, “I’m going into the Water Room,” and said to her, “You need to leave.” She started begging and whimpering and saying “No, no . . . the fun’s just started; I can’t leave yet.”

She started getting in Hunter’s space and leaning in toward him and begging him and whining and touching him. He picked up the phone to call a cab, and she hung it up. He didn’t like that, and he pushed her away, knocking over a glass gallon jug of cranberry juice, which broke. She slipped on it and fell on her ass and was weeping hysterically. There was lots of yelling and weeping, and then I called a cab and waited outside with her for the cab to come. She was still weeping and saying, “Why won’t he talk to me? I’ll stay, I’ll be good. . . . What did I do?” And then she left.

A couple days later, Hunter called me at the cabin and told me to come over and make him breakfast because he had to go down to the police station. There was a warning of some sort prior to him going down, but while he was down there, six cops showed up and handed me a search warrant.

HAL HADDON

Gail Palmer-Slater claimed that at some point she was offered cocaine, and that Hunter then lured her to his hot tub and viciously twisted her breast, attempted to assault her sexually, and then threw her out in the snow and called a cab for her. The last part of it is true. He did throw her out in the snow and call a cab. He claimed she was obnoxious and disruptive. But there was a search warrant executed.

BOB BRAUDIS

That case came into my office early in the morning by way of her husband, who was an optometrist from Minneapolis. He dropped the dime on Hunter, and my guys launched the investigation, and they were waiting for me at eight in the morning when I came in. They gave me a briefing, and I said, “I’m handing this over to an outside agency.” Hunter got really pissed at me for giving it to the DA, but that’s when I said, “I can be your friend or your sheriff, but not both.”

The DA was looking to bust Hunter for anything. I told the deputy DA, Chip McCrory, that there were several witnesses at this get-together who hadn’t been interviewed, and that the search warrant was perhaps prematurely applied for and signed by the judge. The DA’s investigator, Mike Kelly, agreed with me, but the deputy DA said, “No. We want to toss his house, and I’d like a couple of deputies to help us.” I had no involvement with it other than to lend two deputies to the DA to conduct the search. They didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but they helped.

GEORGE STRANAHAN

Actually, the sheriff called me. We knew that somebody was trying to get a search warrant. None of the local judges would sign one, but in any case, Braudis, of course, would know whether or not there was a search warrant. Finally they got one about five days after the event, and Braudis gave a call and said, “You should get our friend out of the house and clean it up.” Which was the code that there was going to be a search. I had about an hour. We got bags of shit out on the lawn, we looked under the couch, and we brought a big grocery bag of crap out of there and up to my house to hide.

SEMMES LUCKETT

We hid everything we could find—and the thing Hunter got busted for was the shit he couldn’t find! He just couldn’t believe they found some acid he’d be looking for for years.

GEORGE STRANAHAN

I was down at Owl Farm fourteen hours altogether while they searched it. They literally took every book out, one at a time, thinking that there had to be something in there. The event had happened between the kitchen and the garage, and presumably the search warrant was to be the location of the crime, but they went down into the wardrobe, where they discovered a shotgun that was approximately twelve inches long. And they’re on the phone about it—is it exactly twelve, or twelve and under? They took apart the dryers, thinking that he had something hidden up in the little holes. Eventually they slammed the refrigerator door and something toppled out behind the refrigerator, and they found a mason jar of pot—and when Hunter found out about this, he said, “Oh, I lost that twelve years ago.”

In his bedroom they found a Bic pen with the works taken out. Maybe there was a little white powder in it. They took that, and they found a film canister with a blue pill.

They also went through a filing cabinet and found a little file called “Juan.” And they realized that in this file were letters to a young person. So they asked me, “Do you know this person? Do you know what their age is?” And I said, “Fucking assholes! You’re trying to interpret letters to his own son as child pornography?!”

Now, to be honest, Hunter would sometimes take Polaroids of the sorts of things he did with women, and he would pull these pictures out sometimes and show his friends. But now they decided that they were going to go after him for child porn.

HAL HADDON

Bob Braudis and I videotaped the search. They went through every inch of that house, searching for “evidence,” and they found two tabs of LSD in an old suitcase that said Juan Thompson on the outside—the LSD was probably twenty years old—and they found traces of cocaine on a dish—not usable traces—and some dynamite in Hunter’s garage.

They charged him with sexual assault, possession of explosives—a felony, unless you have a legitimate agricultural business—and possession of a trace of cocaine, along with the LSD. That was essentially the case.

TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE

I’m at Princeton trying to get some kind of clue as to what the fuck just happened, reading the front-page story in the New York Times that my fiancée is wanted for assaulting a porn star—and that a search of his home revealed a machine gun, child pornography, and a pound of magic mushrooms. And I can’t reach him.

By the time I got out there, he was having such a violent reaction to everything that I figured probably more of it was true than wasn’t. He wouldn’t even let my sister talk to me. Cat stayed in the guesthouse, and he would literally give her the “Cross the threshold of the front door and you die” order. My only role was to never be forgiven for not having been there. He’d say, “You weren’t here, goddamn it. If you had been here, I wouldn’t have been in this bad crazy mood, and none of this would have happened. And if you weren’t trying to do this loveless, passionless long-distance relationship I wouldn’t be in this situation.” If I had been there he wouldn’t be depending on a twenty-one-year-old material witness—my younger sister—who might hate him. He seemed to think that he’d been really, really wronged.

CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY

He went straight into anger and then paranoia. Hunter became convinced that Bobby Braudis wanted to arrest him and had planted the whole thing to get him into rehab, and Bobby was in for two years of pure hell.

I was not prepared for Hunter’s many definitions of truth. I kept feeling that the actual truth was going to clear everything, and I kept being told that it wasn’t about that—it was about loyalty. All of a sudden, everything about Hunter seemed to be more about loyalty than about truth.

HAL HADDON

In the courtroom, Hunter sat in the middle of the defendant’s table with lawyers on both sides of him, and a bunch of water glasses in front of him. He had one glass that was all tequila. We had a visiting judge from Glenwood Springs who presided over the whole thing. He had a very good time.

The way the courtroom was set up, the witness box was no more than six feet from where the defense table was. So here’s Hunter, drinking his tequila, and he’s being braced by his lawyers to pull him down if something weird should happen, because he had a tendency to try to stand up. He did that a couple of times. Gail Palmer-Slater testified, and because the witness box and the defense table were so close, it was almost as if she and Hunter could have a dialogue if they wanted. She’s sitting there, a huge woman—six-two, six-three—and just after she’s sworn in as a witness, she looks over at him and says, “Hi, Hunter.” She was making eyes at him during the whole hearing.

GERRY GOLDSTEIN is a criminal-defense attorney who was a longtime friend of Hunter’s.

At first when Hunter ranted and raved, you always had a tendency to write off about 20 percent of it, but damned if he wasn’t always right. It was part of the way he hooked you, and he liked that. It not only made him look better in the long run, but it made you a true believer. This woman was out to get him, she was up to no good, and the authorities played right into her hands, and ultimately right into his. Hollywood couldn’t have sent you a better prosecution witness. She was made to order—a treacherous heat-seeking missile who was focused and determined to get her prey. It became so obvious that Hunter was the victim here.

HAL HADDON

Hunter’s defense on the LSD charge, which he was quite proud of, was to say that you can’t get good acid anymore—if he’d known it was there, he would have eaten it a long time ago.

In the end, the judge threw it all out, including the drug possession. He felt there wasn’t a usable quantity of cocaine. They had also charged Hunter with use—which is a felony in this state—but they didn’t prove. She claimed that this plate of cocaine got passed around, but since she didn’t take any, she didn’t know what it really was, and she claimed she really didn’t know what cocaine was anyway.

We stepped outside at about five o’clock in the afternoon on a nice summer day, and the Mitchell brothers from San Francisco had brought in eight strippers, who were all walking around the courthouse with placards saying, “Free Hunter! Save the First Amendment.” Hunter came out and saw all this, walked down the steps, gave them the victory sign, and then rolled somersaults on the grass.

We repaired to the Jerome hotel, to the J-Bar, and started drinking. Hunter went across the street to a hardware store and bought this enormous pair of bolt cutters and came back and snipped every lawyer’s tie off, and then put them on his wall later as a souvenir of due process.

After the bust, Hunter became obsessed with the Fourth Amendment and created his own Fourth Amendment Foundation as a kind of bully pulpit. He had a letterhead and put a bunch of people’s names on it, including mine and George McGovern’s, without asking. Whenever Hunter would see something that he thought was a particularly egregious violation of the Fourth Amendment, he’d send out a bunch of faxes with the letterhead. It was never a real foundation—he didn’t have any money. It was crazy.

He would always pay me something for my services, but it wouldn’t be a lot. More often, he would give me art or some sort of trinket. He gave me a painting for my work on the Gail Palmer-Slater case. Hunter and a local artist, Earl Biss, had stayed up one night and done this painting together. It was a double-breasted horse with a woman’s head, this big long thing. My partner sold it for five grand—it was probably worth fifty.

BOB BRAUDIS

My role as sheriff and my role as friend never caused me an awful lot of anguish or conflict. I was criticized by a very small minority of Pitkin County residents for associating with a self-proclaimed dope fiend. But his chemical use really didn’t contribute to anything that was a real threat to the social fabric here. In order to be discreet, I didn’t witness Hunter’s drug use. And of course there was the rule of the kitchen: What goes on in the kitchen stays in the kitchen. I knew Hunter wasn’t going to compromise me, and I was not going to do anything to compromise him or his friends in the kitchen.

TOM BENTON

For the last fourteen years, I’ve been a sheriff’s deputy in Aspen, and Bob Braudis was Hunter’s best friend and had to walk that fine line. I don’t know whether Bob learned from Hunter or what, but Bob was very, very good. He managed to use the friendship in a way that worked. A lot of people would say, “One day we’ll get that fucking Hunter.” Well, they never got him, did they?

TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE

I moved back out to Owl Farm in May, right after the court case, and lived there until January ’91. But by the time I got back, there was a real edge on everything. He wasn’t ever going to forgive me for being gone, and I wasn’t ever going to get over the fact that simply being there was something that Hunter valued more than almost anything else. It was impossible to conceive of a life with him in which I had any kind of agenda.

Hunter used to say from time to time that nothing was more fun than being in love with someone who on any given day might be smarter than you. The thing that was so incredibly attractive about him was partly that extraordinary charisma and power that he had over everybody. But if he loved you, if you were part of that very small community of two and Hunter was in a space where he just was focused on you, there was just really nothing else like it in the world. For all his effort to be savage and ridiculous, he was also an absolutely incurable romantic.

It was your job to make him feel successful enough that he could pull it all off. And I was not good at that. Something that Hunter really wanted was the same woman to love him and to manage him. I loved him enormously, but I had very limited patience for trying to be his manager or his editor.

CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY

Hunter’s interest in being a celebrity was exhausting. He was so willing to turn off things that were brilliant and interesting and likeable to be a parody of himself if he felt the people surrounding him needed to see that. And there were those that he kept on payroll who he just wanted around so he could play that side instead of working too hard or thinking too hard.

JANN WENNER

For Hunter to travel at this point was getting to be a major and problematic undertaking because of the drugs and the paraphernalia he needed. He could only work certain hours, and now the story had to come to him—he was too famous, and he couldn’t easily go on the road and report. I’d give him another and another assignment, until it finally just got too frustrating and upsetting. In the meantime, he was making some money doing college lectures.

BILL STANKEY

In addition to his college gigs, clubs had started booking him. He did a gig at the Ritz in New York and was staying at the Essex House on Central Park South. The balcony of his suite overlooked the Wollman ice-skating rink in the park, and someone saw him pointing a rifle he’d brought with him out toward the rink. The next thing you know, the cops were beating on the door, Hunter was hiding the gun, and people were running around the room because there were obviously all kinds of drugs in there—and then Hunter simply convinced the police that nothing had happened and that someone must have been seeing things.

I had a secretary named Brenda who I put in charge of watching Hunter that night, and when I came in the next morning, she was covered in Magic Marker—there were circles drawn around her eyes, and triangles on her cheek, and a lot of other stuff. I said, “What happened to you?!” and she said, “Uh, I was out with Hunter last night. . . .”

That was a fairly memorable gig.

LYNN NESBIT

He could have gotten big money, but if he didn’t show up—which he didn’t for a lot of them—that market dries up. It’s very lucrative if you just show up. Hunter could have been top dollar.

BILL STANKEY

I probably booked 100 dates for him between ’83 and ’96, and each time one of two things happened: He would show up late, or at the eleventh hour of the day that he was supposed to be leaving Aspen, I’d get a call because “something happened.” I got tired of dealing with the insanity, and we got into a verbal altercation over him not showing up and being unreliable. I was exhausted by the process. If I tried to send him on his own, he’d never make it, so I learned that I had to send somebody with him—somebody who was reasonably uncorruptible. There were times I’d realize too late, “Oh God . . . I sent the wrong guy. They’re supposed to be at the gig, and they’re snorting coke in the bathroom.”

He didn’t have a “rider” per se; he just required a bottle of Chivas and an open tab with room service and the bar—though I can remember a few instances when he was getting $5,000 for his lecture and the room service was $1,700 for one night. The top money he made was fifteen to twenty grand per gig. Had he been reliable, he could have made a million dollars a year, because he drew a huge crowd. I don’t think we ever did a gig that wasn’t sold out. As it happened, he probably made a couple hundred thousand dollars in a good year.

He was funny and always entertaining, but at the end of the day, when you’re trying to run a business built on relationships, relationships got burned. Club promoters were out thousands of dollars when Hunter didn’t show up. It would be one thing if he was calling a month in advance to cancel. He was calling four hours before the gig. “Funny” just goes away, and it becomes “Why can’t you get it together?” He was just debilitated by drugs and the alcohol.

TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE

He always had that lazy-ass way out. If he could traffic in his own name instead of actually doing something, he would. There was a BBC documentary that had been made about him some years earlier, and one night we watched it. He had this enormous fascination with watching himself—he would often say that he wanted to “Write the movie, direct the movie, and star in the movie,” but the movie he was talking about was his own life. He was constantly caught up in this tension between doing what he wanted to do and doing what he felt would make a good story. It makes me think of John le Carré in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, when he writes, “The best spies build a mythology about themselves. The worst spies come to believe it, and they have to be destroyed.” That’s exactly what Hunter did—he almost would ask himself, “What would Hunter do?” He was driven by that.

I was working at the Rocky Mountain Institute. Hunter knew I had a meeting early on every Wednesday morning, and he would always go on a total bender on Tuesday nights, and I’d be up all night. One night he went through one of his bouts of paranoia and bolted the gate shut with all these extra chains, and in the morning I was dressed for work and trying to leave, and Hunter was in his bathrobe and couldn’t find the key for the gate. He had to get the bolt cutters and was in his bathrobe trying to cut the bolts to open the gate so I could go to my respectable job, and one of our neighbors drove by and looked at us standing there and said, “Ah! Another day of domestic bliss at Owl Farm. . . .”

He absolutely despised any friends I had that weren’t his friends, any work I had that wasn’t related to him. You staked a really tiny piece of turf and said, “This is mine,” and that was not acceptable. He wanted all of it, all the time.

The problem with living with Hunter was when your primary job is padding the walls, you don’t get to bounce off of them yourself. From the time I moved back to Owl Farm in June to January of the following year, we had a sort of deteriorating dance of love and hate and anger and all sorts of other stuff. In August, we had a big fight, and Hunter lapsed into one of his long unconsciousnesses that he did from time to time. I had been trying and trying to wake him up because I was livid about something, and I couldn’t. I went into the kitchen and loaded a pistol and stood at the foot of the bed and shot the window out. When he woke, he said, “If you’re shooting for me, I’m down here.” And I said, “If I was shooting for you, I’d shoot you in the balls, and you’d live. I don’t want to be the woman who killed Hunter Thompson.”

I had been offered a job in Moscow, and in January I left him and moved there. I was in this country that was collapsing, trying to learn Russian and work and survive, and Hunter decided that it was in my best interest to make me come home. He started sending me really raunchy, obscene faxes with naked bodies and swastikas, warning me that I’d fallen in with the wrong crowd and that violent overthrow of the Soviet government was a bad idea. He sent them to the central telegraph, which was like the post office. Central telegraph would read them first, and then they’d deliver them. Then Hunter got the number of my office, which was at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and sent a fax there. I got pulled in for questioning by the KGB.

CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY

One night after I had finally left Owl Farm, Hunter called me and told me he needed my help for a speaking engagement in West Palm Beach. I laid down a few conditions before I agreed, but as soon as we got down to the Breakers, where we were staying, he was sparring with me, saying, “Oh, okay . . . you say you’re not going to do any drugs, you’re not going to put up with any of my shit. . . . How exactly are you going to pull that off?” And then he dosed me—a large dose of acid in something I was drinking. I went very far over the edge, and he started the “Ho ho—isn’t this great acid?” I was pretty pissed off—and then he passed out in the bedroom of the suite. I spent over twelve hours tripping out of my mind by myself in the hotel room, including about seven hours of crying hysterically, having wallpaper talk to me and all that, and finally calmed myself by watching palm fronds, because they sway. Someone from the hotel came around because the phones were off the hook and someone had been trying to call the room, and Hunter woke up. It was just after six p.m., and the speaking engagement was at ten, and he told me that he wouldn’t go anywhere unless he had a “Haspel cord sport coat”—he insisted it was the only thing to wear in Palm Beach—and then went right back to sleep. I was still tripping, but I called a local Brooks Brothers, which was closed, and somehow begged an elderly sales guy into essentially stealing one of these and bringing it to the hotel by cab. I tipped him $200, and Hunter got his goddamned Haspel cord sport coat.

TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE

Two weeks after my KGB interrogation in August of 1991, the coup happened in Moscow—the Committee on Emergency Situations overthrew Gorbachev and took control of the government—and I ended up in the middle of that in a barricaded building. The coup failed, and I went back to the Rocky Mountain Institute to write an account of it, and when I finished it, I went to see Hunter.

He loved the article, and we had this absolutely gorgeous long couple of days where we stayed up straight through and he told me about the riots of Chicago in ’68 and why he never wrote about them. What bothered him was that this was such a huge turning point in history, so central to his mythology about what bothered him about America and what was wrong with America. He had all these stories, but they were fragmented and very personal, and he felt that he had to write something that was big, that really told why it was important, and he couldn’t do it. He talked about some times in life when things around you are profoundly personal but too big to be about what you saw. It was one of the most amazing conversations I ever had with him. It was extraordinary to listen to a story that Hunter told where he didn’t even really try to make it about him.

And then I left Colorado. I went out maybe three times over the next couple of years, but it was already too late for poetry, as they say. The last letter I have from him is from 1994.

I think there are really only three ways, if you loved Hunter, that you could leave him, three states you could be in: homicidal, suicidal, or determined to get into rehab. He demanded such an extraordinary amount of loyalty, commitment, and energy, and although he paid back a lot of that, he just sucked people dry. And I think I left him because I was homicidal.

Bobby Braudis thanked me once for being the first woman to leave Hunter who didn’t require police action to get her extricated.

GERRY GOLDSTEIN

One night he took me out driving from Owl Farm in the convertible. The first thing we did was try to drive up the levee to the racetrack by the rock quarry, but we missed it twice. Finally we got to the top, and Hunter started gathering these smooth stones. We then drove to the house of a nice lawyer here in town, John Van Ness, who did some work for Hunter. I’ve forgotten whether Hunter was angry or happy with John, or what exactly had happened that week. First Hunter placed these defrosted elk hearts on John’s front doorstep, and then he started throwing these stones he’d collected onto the tin roof of John’s house and just listened as they rolled down. Then he shot off a couple of rounds from a 9 mm and started playing a continuous looped tape of pigs or rabbits being slaughtered—a godforsaken screeching, curdling sound. This poor little girl came to the window screaming. Apparently Van Ness was out of town and this teenage girl was house-sitting for them.

From there, he proceeded to Nicholson’s house, where he engaged in the same folly.

ANJELICA HUSTON

He had a loudspeaker on top of his truck and drove to the top of Maroon Creek and started to play these tapes of terrible dying-animal cries. Jack was in his house with two small children and the nanny. Hunter proceeds to fire off a few rounds for good measure, and the animals are screaming, and Jack is horrified and locks all the doors and takes the children down to the basement in a state of panic and calls 911 and asks to talk to the FBI and has the sheriff on the phone, and this thing is a nightmare. Animal death cries are going out all over the valley.

At which point Hunter drives down to the house, takes the frozen elk heart, and places it directly in front of Jack’s front door, where the blood seeps into the living room, and then drives back home to Owl Farm before the arrival of the police and the FBI and everybody else on the scene.

GERRY GOLDSTEIN

Apparently some of Jack’s neighbors were in the process of digging fence poles and had somehow severed the telephone lines of Jack’s place so that when all this shit happened and the security people tried to use the phone, the lines were all dead. They were convinced there was about to be another Mansonesque slaughter, so an all-points bulletin went out.

Hunter and I were back at his house when the sheriff’s deputies called him to ask where he’d been for the past two hours. I advised Hunter—as his counsel, of course—that he couldn’t answer that question.

JACK NICHOLSON

I didn’t put two and two together because I didn’t see the elk heart until the following day. But the animal noises and the screaming and the beating—I had people in the house who were petrified, and so was I.

ANJELICA HUSTON

Hunter got away with this completely scot-free.