What Didion witnessed was a far cry from the pie-eyed exuberance of the Merry Pranksters that Tom Wolfe had chronicled so gleefully in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Instead, these were runaways living on handouts and day labor, organizing their lives around acid trips, selling the acid they didn’t ingest, scurrying around in search of some identity that would stick.
Debbie is buffing her fingernails with the belt to her suede jacket. She is annoyed because she chipped a nail and because I do not have any polish remover in the car. I promise to get her to a friend’s apartment so that she can redo her manicure, but something has been bothering me and as I fiddle with the ignition I finally ask it. I ask them to think back to when they were children, to tell me what they had wanted to be when they were grown up, how they had seen the future then.
Jeff throws a Coca-Cola bottle out the car window. “I can’t remember I ever thought about it,” he says.
“I remember I wanted to be a veterinarian once,” Debbie says. “But now I’m more or less working in the vein of being an artist or a model or a cosmetologist. Or something.”
Ken Kesey’s dream to “move beyond acid” never took hold in the Haight; drugs just became an end in themselves, permeating everything like toxic fallout. Didion paints a bleak picture of a would-be utopia curdling into a dystopian nightmare, and not even the very young are immune. The conclusion of the piece, which Didion called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (from the Yeats poem with the line “things fall apart; the center cannot hold”), is an image of a five-year-old girl named Susan
wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick.
“Five years old,” Otto says. “On acid.”
Wolfe’s words seemed to tumble out in a logorrheic rush, but Didion’s prose was spare, honed to a fine edge. She strove for directness, a clear and uninflected rhythm, just like her literary hero Hemingway. She credited her Vogue apprenticeship with teaching her how to sculpt sentences down to the bone. “Every day I would go into [Allene Talmey]’s office with eight lines of copy or a caption or something,” she recalled. “She would sit there and mark it up with a pencil and get very angry about extra words, about verbs not working.”
Didion did place herself into some of her reported pieces, but only as a dispassionate observer; she never recorded her own impressions in Maileresque fashion, leaving that for her personal essays. If anything, Didion followed the tenets of Lillian Ross, framing stories in scenes and relying on her moral instincts to provide the undercurrent of tragedy that pervaded so much of her sixties output.
Didion’s profile of John Wayne, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1965, was a close cousin of Ross’s Picture. In it, Didion hung around the set of director Henry Hathaway’s The Sons of Katie Elder outside Mexico City and carefully observed the interaction between the veteran cast and crew, which included Dean Martin and Earl Holliman. Wayne had been Didion’s embodiment of the frontier man of action, the hero of her young dream life. Now Wayne was ill with cancer but still possessed that same stolid vigor of legend; he still had something of the cowboy’s maverick code in his creaky carriage.
Hathaway removed the cigar from his mouth and looked across the table. “Some guy just tried to kill me he wouldn’t end up in jail. How about you, Duke?”
Very slowly, the object of Hathaway’s query wiped his mouth, pushed back his chair, and stood up. It was the real thing, the authentic article, the move which had climaxed a thousand scenes on 165 flickering frontiers and phantasmagoric battlefields before, and it was about to climax this one, in the commissary at Estudio Churubusco outside Mexico City. “Right,” John Wayne drawled. “I’d kill him.”
Because Didion’s main outlet at the time was the Saturday Evening Post, a general-interest magazine not particularly known for its creative nonfiction during this era and headed toward its dissolution in 1969, her work didn’t receive the kind of notice that Wolfe and Gay Talese garnered with their Esquire stories. But when Henry Robbins—Wolfe’s editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux—compiled the San Francisco and John Wayne pieces, as well as a handful of other essays from Esquire, the American Scholar, and Holiday, in a book called Slouching Towards Bethlehem in the summer of 1968 (summer traditionally being a downtime for high-profile books), it was immediately hailed as the work of an exciting new voice in American letters. So unrecognized was Didion as a major talent that Dan Wakefield felt compelled to preface his New York Times review of the book with the qualifier that “Joan Didion is one of the least celebrated and most talented writers of my own generation.” Wakefield continued: “Now that Truman Capote has pronounced that such work may achieve the stature of ‘art,’ perhaps it is possible for this collection to be recognized as it should be: not as a better or worse example of what some people call ‘mere journalism,’ but as a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.”
MADRAS OUTLAW
In 1971, on the verge of becoming the most infamous journalist in America, Hunter S. Thompson unloaded a fusillade of playful vitriol in an essay that was meant to distinguish Thompson’s balls-out approach from that of his closest rival, Tom Wolfe. “Wolfe’s problem,” Thompson wrote, “is that he’s too crusty to participate in his stories. The people he feels comfortable with are dull as stale dogshit, and the people who seem to fascinate him as a writer are so weird that they make him nervous. The only thing new and unusual about Wolfe’s journalism is that he’s an abnormally good reporter; he has a fine sense of echo and at least a peripheral understanding of what John Keats was talking about when he said that thing about Truth & Beauty.”
In short, Wolfe was a very artful stenographer, always keeping a discreet distance and never sullying his suit. Thompson, on the other hand, was a man willing to throw himself into the breach and risk his well-being, if necessary, to get the story. As much as Thompson admired The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and was willing to stand by his opinion of the book at the expense of his own livelihood, he regarded it as a brilliant exercise in simulacrum. It was Thompson, after all, who had been present during the Hell’s Angels gang rape at La Honda, providing Wolfe with audiotapes that captured the scene for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. No story was worthy for Thompson unless he could immerse himself, body and soul, and come out on the other side with a piece of writing tinctured with his own blood and sweat.
Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 18, 1937, the eldest son of Jack Robert Thompson and Virginia Davidson Ray. Jack was an insurance engineer for First Kentucky Fire Insurance Co. The marriage was Jack Thompson’s second; his first wife, Garnett Sowards, had died of pneumonia in 1923. A stern disciplinarian and a veteran of World War I, Jack was fifty-four years old when his son Hunter was born. That age gap militated against any significant bond between father and son, and so Hunter gravitated to his mother, who nurtured his love of literature, the ripping picaresques to be found in the books of Mark Twain and Jack London.
Thus at a very early age Hunter was cultivating an image that was equal parts aesthete and roughneck. It was as if the warring impulses of the South’s two great traditions—its regional pride forged in blood and its literary heritage—merged to make an uneasy alliance in Thompson’s psyche. “I’ve always felt like a Southerner,” said Thompson. “And I always felt like I was born in defeat. And I may have written everything I’ve written just to win back a victory. My life may be pure revenge.”
As a teenager, Thompson cultivated his taste for adrenaline kicks—verbally provoking his schoolmates into fistfights, knocking over mailboxes, or engaging in war games with BB guns by the creek near his house, using animal life—and other kids—for target practice. “I had a keen appetite for adventure, which soon led me into a maze of complex behavioral experiments that my parents found hard to explain,” Thompson wrote in his 2002 memoir Kingdom of Fear. “I was a p
opular boy, with acceptable grades & a vaguely promising future, but I was cursed with a dark sense of humor that made many adults afraid of me, for reasons they couldn’t quite put their fingers on.”
He lived to get under people’s skin, to be unpredictable and hair-trigger dangerous, but he was also rakishly charming, and too smart to ignore. As a student in Louisville Male High School, his scabrous essays impressed English teacher Harold Tague enough for him to recommend Thompson to the Athenaeum Literary Association, an exclusive student organization at “Male” whose members contributed pieces to the association’s annual yearbook, The Spectator. Thompson’s contributions revealed a taste for playful polemics. “Security,” one of his Spectator essays, laid out Thompson’s philosophy of choosing a life of excitement over dull complacency:
Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed…. It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must be laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death.
In June 1956, right before he was to graduate, Thompson, along with two schoolmates, was arrested for violently harrassing a couple in their car for cigarettes and was sentenced to six months in Jefferson County Jail. By enrolling in the electronics program at Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Illinois, Thompson was able to reduce his sentence to only thirty days. After his graduation from the program, Thompson was assigned to Eglin Air Force Base in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, where he finagled a job as the sports editor of the Command Courier, the base’s newspaper. “In short,” he wrote to his old high school friend Gerald Tyrrell, “we both know that I’m no more qualified for a post like this than I am for the presidency of a theological seminary,” but as was often the case, Thompson’s chutzpah compensated for his inexperience.
Thompson’s tenure as the Courier’s sports editor was backbreaking and exhilarating. A virtual one-man staff, he not only wrote and edited all the stories and his weekly column, “The Spectator,” but also was responsible for copyediting, page layout, and paste-up. Often working around the clock to whip the section into shape, Thompson consumed twenty or more cups of coffee and ran through four packs of cigarettes a day, a habit he eventually curtailed when he switched to a pipe. When he wasn’t working on the paper, Thompson was taking speech and psychology classes at nearby Florida State University, leaving precious little time for the kind of drinking and carousing he had grown fond of in high school.
Nonetheless, Thompson made time, forming a large network of on-and off-base contacts that would help him make a smooth transition to citizen-writer when the time came—including the debutante daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Campbell. “I met all kinds of people in Fort Walton, which has the most beautiful beaches in all of Florida,” said Thompson. “I became part of Café Society, hung out with Bart Starr and Max McGee, guys like that. It was a rush. Looking back on it now, I don’t see how I could have done all those things and done them successfully.”
But the life of a professional journalist was pure liberation; for the first time, he wrote to his half-brother Jack, “no one is hanging over me saying, ‘my oh my Hunter, just see what you can do when you apply yourself.’” There was no question in his mind: he would make journalism his life’s work.
And he was hungry for more. In January 1957 he sold his first story—a two-hundred-word piece on the base’s wrestling team, to the Playground News, Fort Walton Beach’s civilian newspaper. Not long after it was published, the paper offered Thompson the job of sports editor. Despite Air Force regulations that forbade Command Courier staffers from taking civilian jobs, Thompson accepted, using the pseudonyms Thorne Stockton and Cuubley Cohn to keep the Air Force off his trail. “The whole thing,” he wrote to his childhood friend Porter Bibb at the time, “tends to make my eyes water with wonder at my sudden eruption of ambition.”
Thompson’s idyll didn’t last long. His snide swipes at the establishment and his broad-stroke send-ups of high-ranking military officers in the Courier didn’t sit well with the Air Force’s Information Services Office’s chief, W. S. Evans; his savage eviscerations of cultural icons such as Ted Williams and Arthur Godfrey were thought of as heretical. His “rebel and superior attitude,” Evans wrote in a letter recommending a discharge to Thompson’s personnel officer, “seems to rub off on other airmen staff members. He has little consideration for military bearing or dress and seems to dislike the service and want out as soon as possible.”
The Air Force had also found out about his Playground News gig. Thompson, chafing at the Air Force’s stiff-necked protocol, wanted out anyway. After being demoted to the Communications Squadron, Thompson was given an honorable discharge in October 1957. Finally he was free to pursue the culturally rich and remunerative career of a professional reporter. Or so he thought.
The Jersey Shore Herald covered the cities of Lock Haven, Williams-port, and Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, and did a poor job of it. A small-circulation daily where expediency trumped quality, located in a dreary urban area, it was the diametric opposite of his Command Courier experience. Thompson was miserable there. “If this path leads up,” he wrote to his friend Larry Callen, “then I’d rather go down.” He didn’t last two months in the job. Instead he took the northward migratory path of so many other journalism aspirants, such as Wolfe, Clay Felker, and Harold Hayes, and headed to New York City to try his luck. On Christmas Eve, no less.
With only $110 to his name, Thompson called on a local YMCA in the city, only to be told it was full. He then lived for a short time in a flophouse in Secaucus, New Jersey, until his old Air Force buddy Jerry Hawke, who was attending Columbia Law School, agreed to put Thompson up at his apartment at 110 Morningside Drive until the young writer found gainful employment. In early January 1958, after experiencing his fair share of “sustained fear,” Thompson, using the flimsiest of family connections, landed a plum job as a $50-a-week copy-boy for Henry Luce’s mighty Time.
The Time job was to be an invaluable experience, a ground-level peek at the inner workings of one of the largest news-gathering organizations in the world. “Shit, that was a gravy train of access and perks,” said Thompson. “What an education that was, all pumped into me in a year and a half.”
Despite Thompson’s eagerness to prove himself with Luce’s best and brightest, the inner reprobate, which had been patiently lying in wait, pounced only weeks into his tenure. One night after the magazine had closed production and everyone had gone home, he snuck into the office of Henry Grunwald, the magazine’s managing editor, and stole a case of “the best scotch money could buy.” He also had a tendency to filch books and office supplies. Incidents such as these led to a number of run-ins with editors and other Time-Life employees; at one point during a cocktail party for new executives, he called the magazine’s business manager a “fat lecher.” At his apartment at 562 West 113th Street, Thompson engaged in other mischief, throwing a garbage can down five flights of stairs and turning a fire extinguisher on a couple of unsuspecting neighbors. It was all he could do to maintain some levity at a time when he was working for meager wages and trying desperately to keep afloat financially in a city that didn’t make it easy.
He wanted to leave New York and try to make it as a freelance writer, because “Ernest Hemingway had shown me that you could be a freelancer in this country and get away with it.” Thompson was enthralled by Manhattan’s frenetic cultural currents, but they also made him miserable. When he finally found his own place, a dingy basement apartment on Perry Street in the West Village, he wrote to an old girlfriend, “Do you realize that sunlight NEVER ENTERS MY APARTMENT?”
Thompson was fired from Time after only a year, but his stint at the magazine, along with a canny bluff about extensive reportorial experience, helped him land a job with the Middletown Daily Record, a two-and-a-half-year-old newspa
per located in upstate New York with a staff consisting entirely of writers and editors under the age of thirty. It seemed a dream gig: for $70 a week, Thompson would work as a general assignment reporter, writing copy and even shooting photos for the paper when the situation called for it. But he didn’t last three months. Fired in March 1959 for sending back food in a restaurant that advertised heavily in the paper and then putting his foot through the office candy vending machine shortly thereafter, Thompson was out on the street again. “It was no free ride in those days. I worked very hard at [making a living].”
He started a novel called King Jellyfish and submitted short stories to various magazines; when Esquire’s fiction editor, Rust Hills, failed to respond fast enough to a story called “The Cotton Candy Heart,” Thompson reeled off a frustrated missive. “Goddammit, Hills, I don’t think there’s an excuse in the world for you people holding onto my manuscript this long.” After sending countless letters of inquiry, he found a job in Puerto Rico on El Sportivo, a weekly sports magazine that emphasized bowling coverage, and he freelanced for the Louisville Courier-Journal on the side. El Sportivo went out of business shortly thereafter.
Thompson decamped to Big Sur, on the northern California coast, in order to start work on another novel based on his Puerto Rico adventures, to be called The Rum Diary. More important for Thompson’s future prospects, he sold his first magazine story, a piece on Big Sur and its boho inhabitants, for $350 to Rogue, a downmarket Playboy knockoff “It was not so much the money,” he wrote to his new friend, San Juan Star editor William Kennedy, “but the feeling that I had finally cracked something, the first really valid indication that I might actually make a living at this goddamn writing.”
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 16