The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  George got his clothes from Brooks Brothers, and wore the same tie every day until he lost it. Hunter didn’t own a tie. Hunter talked about money all the time. George never did, even when supporting the Paris Review for fifty years had finally eaten away his trusts. Early on, when George was writing for SI, he never kept receipts or filed expenses, making his editors wonder if he was breaking even on assignments. Hunter said if he were rich—a relative term for him—he’d wander around like King Farouk, telling editors he was going to write something for them and then probably not doing it. George shrugged when Hunter told him this and agreed that writing was difficult.

  They did not talk about other writers, some of the most famous of which were always dismissing each other’s work and sniping at whatever George and Hunter were turning out as well. Hunter was lazy; George was a dilettante. Not everyone was like that, but someone at the New Yorker said George wasn’t serious about his writing; and there was that Los Angeles Times political correspondent who worked himself up talking about how Hunter wasn’t serious and couldn’t write worth a shit anyway. Norman Mailer told George that Hunter’s writing was like “playing tennis without a net.” Neither George nor Hunter ever rose to that kind of bait, although they were both aware of who was writing what and who was writing well. They had other things on their minds—women mostly, although they never discussed their mutual interest in some of the same women we all knew. They were both good at those kinds of secrets.

  That their many ex-girlfriends never talked about them reflected, I think, the old-world courtliness they both had. What the women they cared most about did not love was the drinking and, in Hunter’s case, all the drugs. But it was mostly the drinking. Over the years, a lot of people—various editors, friends in Woody Creek—asked Hunter to cut back, to take it easy for the sake of the work. Hunter ignored them as far as I know except once, when he was with Maria Khan, a beautiful woman with black hair and gray-blue eyes, who was his live-in, sleep-in administrative assistant at Owl Farm in the mid-eighties.

  Hunter called me on a visit to New York to say that he and Maria had a confidential matter to discuss. We met at Juanita’s, a Tex-Mex hangout for writers on the Upper East Side. It was early and the place was empty. Hunter had three margaritas and some beers lined up in front of him at a table in the back. Maria explained that Hunter had decided to get healthier. She had found a place near Phoenix, where she was from, and he had agreed to check in for a week. I looked at Hunter, who was unnervingly calm. He was crazy about Maria.

  “Would you?” Hunter asked me. “You know, uh, check in?”

  “I’d try it,” I said.

  “Judas,” Hunter mumbled, but he seemed resigned. It was shocking that he might actually go through with it. I don’t know if he did, but we never spoke about it again. Not long after, Maria was gone from Owl Farm, back to Phoenix to return to school.

  I never knew of anyone having that kind of talk with George until Sarah Plimpton organized an intervention, six months before he died. George quit drinking for a month, and was resentful that he had been made to try. I never saw George drunk, ever, but he drank every day.

  Drinking was part of everything we all did. By all, I mean most of the people I worked with, and Pete Axthelm had an acronym for our solidarity: SOFA, Society of Functioning Alcoholics. George thought SOFA was hilarious. Hunter wrote about Axthelm in his “Year of the Wolf” column in Esquire when Pete died of liver failure, ending the piece with He got out just in time.

  —

  I CAN STILL SEE HUNTER stepping out of his tall command chair in his kitchen, and stretching to his full height with a gracious, often hearty handshake or a delicate kiss on the cheek of a new guest, depending on gender. George had a way of bowing his head slightly when he shook hands that was subtly flattering. Both moves looked effortless but underscored who was in charge as they drew you in.

  I was always surprised by how many people felt possessive of their friendships with George and Hunter. When they were both gone, I wondered about my own. I never told anyone, certainly neither of them, but in some kind of magical thinking I thought of them as my best friends—truer of my relationship with George; Hunter was more a crazy, dangerous uncle. I was always aware of the gift George had to make people feel like they were great friends when they weren’t very close at all. Hunter had that too, and could put anyone at ease when he felt like it. This happened more often than his reputation suggests, and it always struck me as kind. Although his friendships could be situational, or transactional even, he was sentimental about them. One Christmas he sent me an expensive pocket knife with “The Long Hunt” engraved on the blade.

  George’s bats in New Mexico and Hunter’s house on Ransdell Avenue come back to me in flashes of memory. I think everyone who knew them has similar moments, when remembering something one of them did or said illuminates them. Every place I worked, George wrote for me at least once. I think Johnny Depp has Polo Is My Life now, along with the rest of Hunter’s papers. It was an extraordinary piece, but then it was just another part of working with Hunter, like mouth-catching grapes was work with George. It was like that all the time, outrageous when I think about it now. Maybe it didn’t always make sense that the best work we did had to have a joke at the bottom of it—not ha-ha, but hilarious like that black spot Hunter sent to George.

  Treasure Island is a simple book with a clear plot: adventurous boy kidnapped by pirates; joins pirates.

  −ENDIT−

  Warren Hinckle (1,162)

  SECURITY CALLED FROM THE LOBBY of the Time & Life Building to ask if it was okay to allow a certain Warren Hinckle up to my office at Sports Illustrated. We hadn’t seen each other in several years and, finding himself in midtown, Warren had decided to drop in. He arrived pulling an old suitcase, dressed in shorts, wrinkled blazer, tuxedo shirt, formal black pumps. I offered him coffee or water. He mumbled, as if forgetting something, then remembering…

  “What would Hunter say?”

  “Hunter’s dead,” I said.

  “I’ll have a gin and tonic,” Warren said, adding that if I didn’t have a bar in my office (like I should), we could order out from Hurley’s, across Sixth Avenue, where he had just been.

  “How’s Melman?” I asked. Warren usually traveled with a dog—Bentley when I first knew him and then Melman, both huge basset hounds. They would sleep under Warren’s table at Elaine’s, and all the other bars in New York and San Francisco where Warren was such a good customer that health ordinances were ignored.

  “Melman’s taking it easier these days,” Warren said. “What about that drink?”

  A joke about Warren’s drinking went like this:

  Q. Did you hear Warren lost twenty pounds?

  A. Yeah, he quit drinking in cabs.

  But Warren never seemed drunk, just enhanced. Today, however, he looked heavier and seemed to have trouble moving, especially pulling that ratty suitcase. With his eye patch (childhood accident) and rosy cheeks, he looked like an outlaw cherub. I felt terrible for thinking that but didn’t know what to do. He was Warren Hinckle, hero to all freewheeling editors.

  —

  EDITING RAMPARTS MAGAZINE, Warren had blown the roof off the 1960s, mocking all of it. He tweaked the Black Panthers, hippie tribes and the New Left even as he championed their causes. He muckraked in the most traditional sense: Had the CIA infiltrated the student radicals? Could there be an enlightened internationalistic wing of the CIA providing clandestine money to domestic progressive causes? Yes, and yes.

  Ramparts had an office monkey, a capuchin Warren named Henry Luce, hoping, as he wrote later, to piss off the eponymous founder of Time and Life magazines. When a Time editor told him Luce had become aware of his namesake, Warren said that such were life’s little triumphs.

  Warren wrote long and short and often, for every magazine he edited, and when it came to layout and magazine makeup, he was like a field commander pushing columns around on a battle map. Weak design directors cou
ldn’t stand up to him. Strong ones loved him for his graphic imagination and riotous display copy. He also liked to tinker with magazine culture, hence “Henry Luce.” At Scanlan’s Monthly, the roller coaster of a magazine he co-founded with the trial lawyer turned journalist Sidney Zion after leaving Ramparts in 1969, the motto was “You trust your mother but you cut the cards.” Scanlan’s was where Hunter’s early gonzo work appeared, but it was equally renowned for Warren’s wild-ass muckraking and being investigated by the FBI—this was during the Nixon administration, after all.

  At City magazine, where I worked for Warren, he killed the masthead in what he called an “act of selflessness,” then brought it back with the staff listed alphabetically. Warren said he was simply eliminating the distractions of hierarchy and status, but the result was chaos, which is what he was after in the first place. No one took orders from anyone but him, except of course Francis Ford Coppola, who had bankrolled the magazine as a public service extension of his growing American Zoetrope media company.

  Francis said City was what San Francisco needed. Warren said what San Francisco needed was more laughs. For his first issue, Warren ran a cover piece about the predicament of straight women surrounded by the gay culture, under what became his most famous headline: “San Francisco, City of Sin, Why Can’t I Get Laid?”

  City was brilliant, but it incinerated cash. It was a standing joke that Warren was the only person in town who could spend money faster than Francis could make it. That spring, Francis had told Time magazine that City was “my Viet Nam.” Warren found this ironic, since Francis was spending all his time in the editing room trying to finish his wildly over budget masterpiece, Apocalypse Now.

  Among Francis’s ideas for saving the magazine was to present its weekly closing as theater (in a theater) open to the public, where “editors would do their work onstage, with galley proofs flashing on a screen behind them, and the audience offering comments.” It was too bad this never happened. Warren would have been great as a game-show host.

  —

  WE DIDN’T ORDER FROM HURLEY’S, but I found a gift bottle of Scotch and we talked about starting a new magazine, something bold. We worked on some language. “A Journal of Significance that Hunter could have written for with dignity,” Warren said.

  I didn’t know it then but he was starting to put together a new book, Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson? When I saw the dummy, a decade later, the subtitle announced it as An Inquiry into the Life & Death of the Master of Gonzo (with Candid Memories & Appreciations by Many of His Best Friends & Co-Conspirators). The cover further noted: Edited & with a Humongous Introduction (a Book in Itself!) by Warren Hinckle.

  That introduction was not something Warren had planned to exceed a few thousand words but it got away from him and went over a hundred thousand. It was called “The Crazy Never Die.” In the lede, Warren wrote about Hunter showing up at his Ramparts office on North Beach’s topless strip and engaging the capuchin Henry Luce in one-sided conversation while he poured whiskey. When they went to have dinner, the monkey riffled Hunter’s knapsack, found some bottles of pills and gobbled the contents…

  When we returned a few drinks later the poor thing had gone bananas, running at ferocious speeds along the railing atop the office cubicles with his leash clanging dementedly against the frosted glass. Lovable Henry had turned into Cujo. No one could pacify him. It took a day and a half for him to slow down. “Goddam monkey stole my pills,” Hunter said….This was in 1967 and Ramparts was where the action was, and where the action was, was Hunter.

  Hunter always said editors should be more like Warren, who had teamed him with Ralph Steadman on that Kentucky Derby piece for Scanlan’s when Hunter was still inventing himself. That article was the first piece of gonzo any of us saw, and Ralph’s illustrations branded Hunter from then on. Jann Wenner was working part-time in the Ramparts library then, going to school at Berkeley and thinking about starting his own magazine—or, as Hunter put it, “Jann was a copy boy or something…”

  −ENDIT−

  Jann (2,327)

  IN THE EARLY ’90S, when I was editing Esquire, Jann and I saw a lot of each other in Amagansett during the summers. That I was no longer working for him allowed us to become friends, and our interests came together in our sons. Our wives were friends, too, and we went to the last two shows of U2’s Zooropa tour in Dublin on his new plane. We also took trips with just our sons. He was back with Jane then, although it was clearly a little bumpy. One story was that one of the times he was leaving, Jane shouted after him that she “never even liked the Grateful Dead.” That makes them look silly, which they could be, but they were sophisticated and prepossessing, something that people who worked for Jann seldom saw. He didn’t let them. Why should he? They worked for him.

  One summer Jann chartered the Mariner III, a 122-foot yacht built in 1926 that Ralph Lauren used in ads. We cruised the Cape and Martha’s Vineyard, stopping one afternoon for lunch with Jackie Onassis and touring her compound and the separate house she was building for Caroline and John. I have a photo of Jann posing on that beautiful lawn with Jackie and Jane and their sons, in white sailor suits, and I remember thinking when I took it that I had never seen him so buoyant and pleased with himself.

  Jann was attracted to celebrities, and he and Jane made friends and cultivated many interesting people far beyond the music business. Everyone they liked liked them back—often not the case among the boldfaced names in their circles. Jane had style and charm, and made strong friendships (with Hunter, for one) that lifted Jann. “Who would you rather fuck?” was the way Fran Lebowitz put it once at a dinner at their Amagansett house on Further Lane. And Jane’s unbendable loyalty to Jann remained, even through the unbearable (her many friends thought) times she went through with him later when he came out of the closet and left her for good. But the depth of that loyalty was another thing most of their friends didn’t see—even after they chose sides, usually Jane’s. And it flattered both of them that they remained as close as they did.

  —

  IN THE MID-’90S, I returned to Wenner Media to edit Men’s Journal and then Us Weekly. By this time, Jann’s confidence was reflected in his lifestyle. He took summers off and left New York for months at a time to ski. He bought more and more art, adding a large Diego Rivera painting of Frida Kahlo and other pieces to a collection he had started with Warhols. His motorcycles filled a garage, and he rode often, including a cross-country trip to promote Men’s Journal. He owned a five-story Upper West Side duplex with nine fireplaces and five bathrooms outfitted with Art Deco fixtures from the London Savoy Hotel, a Ward Bennett beach house in Amagansett, a ranch in Idaho and a Gulfstream V jet. From a distance, he looked like he had everything. All of which made him the most interesting closeted player in New York’s whispered-about velvet mafia. He also had three young sons.

  The summer before Jann came out, we made a river trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon in Idaho with families we knew from the beach. Jann and I hired the outfitter and came with our sons but not our wives. Three days into the trip, for my fiftieth birthday, I planned to surprise my sons by leaping from a fifty-foot cliff into the river as they kayaked around the last bend before we made camp for the night.

  Jann knew all about this, his fiftieth on a short horizon, too. I had been talking about making our milestones memorable, and told him the story I had heard from Plimpton about Bill Styron waking his daughter Alex and sitting her on the fireplace mantel to watch him open a bottle of champagne on the night he finished Sophie’s Choice. Not that turning fifty was like finishing such a book, but Jann and I joked about being satirized by our mortality and we were both into a kind of goofy showmanship about it.

  As the kayaks came into view and I prepared to jump, Jann appeared on a slightly higher cliff, waved and leaped into the river ahead of me.

  —

  BY THE FOURTH OF JULY the next year, Jann was living with Matt Nye, who was relentlessly and pejoratively described in
the tabloids as a former Calvin Klein model—which you knew was unfair to Matt even before you met him. It had to be difficult for both of them. My sons and I flew with Matt, Jann and his boys to Sun Valley for the rodeo in Hailey, the small town near where Jann owned the Broadford Ranch, on the Little Wood River—a beautiful old cattle outfit he had restored with his usual taste and efficiency. The trip wasn’t awkward, exactly, but it was clearly the beginning of a transition mined with difficult conversations. Our sons, both his and mine, who were usually all over us, mostly kept to themselves.

  The night of the rodeo, I took all the boys into town early to get good seats at the top of the grandstand, but we found better places at the fence next to the bucking chutes. Hailey’s Fourth of July Sawtooth Rangers Rodeo is small but serious and held in an old wooden arena, like few left in the West. It could get a little rowdy with beer and the high testosterone that rides along at small-town rodeos, where local hands go up against pros from the NRA circuit for prize money. In the summer dusk, when the arena lights come on in a glow, even the most burned-out swamper from the bars on Main Street had to know how special it was, and the kids, wide-eyed, noticed for sure. The night was charged.

  Just before the opening ceremony, with the mounted color guard galloping the arena, I went back up to the top of the grandstand searching for Jann and Matt where we had agreed to meet. Not finding them, I looked over the back of the stands and down on what was a kind of sawdust midway full of cowboys in undershot boots and bright shirts, drinking and smoking, horsing around and flirting with shy ranch girls and pretty barrel racers. Clusters of older ranchers in expensive hats looked on.

  Jann and Matt were at the far edge of the crowd, almost strutting toward the entrance in matching white T-shirts, white Levi’s and flip-flops. The T-shirts were tight-fitting and they both looked good, Jann maybe better than he’d ever looked in a T-shirt, and proud. I could see the cowboys taking note of him and Matt, who seemed younger than his thirty years, and making way for them. When they got a little closer, Matt glanced up at the grandstand and I waved.