The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

by Marc Weingarten

  As it turned out, the Rogue sale, while providing a much-needed morale boost, did not unleash the floodgates for Thompson; constant rejection and poverty still gnawed at him. He returned to New York in January 1962 and struggled to finish The Rum Diary while relying on the kindness of friends and patrons to pay his bills.

  Finding little success cracking the freelance market in New York, he decided to try his luck in South America, a region where the socio-economic discrepancies and roiling political landscape, stoked by the United States’ meddling political and economic policies, would no doubt provide him with lots of material for stories. “I am going to write massive tomes from South America,” he said in a letter to his friend Paul Semonin. “I can hardly wait to get my teeth into it…. It is almost too big to deal with.”

  In Puerto Rico, Thompson hitched a ride to Aruba on a fishing boat, then jumped onto a smuggler’s boat headed for Puerto Estrella, Colombia. He had sent some clips to Clifford Ridley, the editor of the Dow Jones newsmagazine National Observer, and Ridley was open to the possibility of Thompson contributing to the magazine. His first piece, “A Footloose American in a Smuggler’s Den,” described his journey from Aruba to Puerto Estrella, and his experiences with the Guajiro Indians, mostly drinking smuggled scotch:

  As it turned out, three things made my visit a success. One was my size and drinking capacity (it was fear—a man traveling alone among reportedly savage Indians dares not get drunk); another was the fact that I never turned down a request for a family portrait (fear, again); and the third was my “lifelong acquaintance” with Jacqueline Kennedy, whom they regard as some sort of goddess.

  The early stirrings of Thompson’s mordant wit can be found in the Observer pieces, which are among the era’s most incisive dispatches from South America. Just as he had done at Elgin, Thompson familiarized himself with the power structure of the places he found himself in—in South America, particularly the embassy circuit and the religious orders—in order to dig deeper than the intellectually torpid American reporters he found there. “There were a lot of reporters doing show pieces about the leadership in these countries, but they didn’t talk to the people,” said Thompson. “Some of the writers had their own drivers, for Christ sakes. There was an embedded structure, but there was room for those who weren’t working strictly by the book.”

  Endearing himself to the locals (“I used to hang out with the Jesuit priests in the mountains. The best scotch in any country was always available in the monasteries”) was Thompson’s MO, whether he was sniffing out the roots of anti-American sentiment in Cali, Colombia, describing the ways in which Peru’s dictatorial tradition blotted out democratic reforms, or chronicling the benign neglect of the disenfranchised native Indians in Cuzco.

  After a year and a half as the Observer’s de facto South American correspondent (he was still freelancing), Thompson found himself in familiar territory—broke and desperate for work. Shortly after marrying recent Goucher College graduate Sandy Conklin in Louisville in May 1963, Thompson moved to San Francisco, where he scrounged for magazine work. When Thompson pitched the Observer a story about the emerging Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, Ridley refused, and Thompson, following a now-familiar career script, stopped pitching stories to the Observer.

  Thompson, fed up with the penurious grind of freelance journalism, made an effort to finish The Rum Diary. “I tried driving a cab in San Francisco, I tried every kind of thing,” Thompson told Playboy. “I used to go down … and line up with the winos on Mission Street, looking for work handing out grocery-store circulars and shit like that.”

  But circumstances had changed; now that Thompson had been writing regularly for a national magazine, the doors to national outlets creaked open a bit. Carey McWilliams, legendary editor of the liberal political weekly The Nation, was impressed by Thompson’s South American coverage and wanted him to contribute to his publication.

  In December 1964 McWilliams wrote Thompson a letter soliciting the writer’s interest for a story on the insurgent band of motorcycle outlaws called Hell’s Angels. It was a great time to assign a piece on the Angels: California attorney general Thomas C. Lynch had recently polled law enforcement agents around the state and distilled the information he received into a fifteen-page document called “The Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Clubs,” which listed eighteen major crimes and countless other infractions in clinical detail. A reporter for the New York Times wrote a story on the report, followed in short order by Time and Newsweek, and soon the Hell’s Angels were a full-blown national menace. McWilliams, who had obtained a copy of the Lynch Report, suspected that Thompson, with his keen talent for sniffing out stories that fell beneath the radar of more conventional journalists, might be an ideal candidate to get the real dirt on the motorcycle club, to tell the story from the Angels’ point of view rather than Lynch’s.

  Thompson dug into the Hell’s Angels story enthusiastically. After querying a few functionaries in the attorney general’s office, he determined that no one working for Lynch had ever made any contact with any Hell’s Angels member. Thus the real story had yet to be written, and Thompson had grand plans for it. “To my mind,” he wrote in a letter to McWilliams, “the Hell’s Angels are a very natural product of our society. Just like SNCC or the Peace Corps … But different people. That’s what I’d like to find out: who are they? What kind of man becomes a Hell’s Angel? And why? And how? The mechanics.”

  McWilliams was willing to pay $100 for the story, a tiny fee even by 1964 standards, but enough to cover Thompson’s rent on his apartment in the Haight: “I would have speared sharks in San Francisco Bay for rent.” He arranged a meeting with the Angels’ Oakland chapter president and club leader, Ralph “Sonny” Barger, and a few other members through Birney Jarvis, a police reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and a Harley-Davidson enthusiast who was an honorary lifetime member of the club.

  Thompson showed up at the bar of the DePau Hotel in San Francisco’s waterfront industrial district, where the Angels were having a meeting. In his madras jacket, wing-tip shoes, button-down shirt, and a tie, Thompson was every inch the geek. “I didn’t have any other clothes, nor did I have a bike at the time,” Thompson said. “I told them I was a writer, not a biker, and that I wanted to take a few notes—what else could I do? The fact that I had no bike didn’t seem like too big a thing.”

  The Angels regarded the writer like a 4H Club member. Thompson felt he was in imminent danger—until they all started drinking, that is. “After a few dozen beers, things started to loosen up a bit,” said Thompson. “We found common ground through the consumption of alcohol.”

  At the 2 A.M. closing time, Thompson invited five of the Angels, including Ping-Pong, Filthy Phil, and Frenchy, back to his apartment on 318 Parnassus Avenue, armed with a case of beer and a cheap box of red wine, much to the consternation of his wife, Sandy, who was “quietly hysterical for five hours.” He cued up The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan on the stereo and proceeded to make merry with the Angels until morning broke through the windows. A bond, however tenuous, had been established.

  The next day, Thompson met the Angels at their de facto clubhouse across from the DePau, a transmission repair garage owned by Frenchy called the Box Shop, but now the air in the room wasn’t so stifling. He developed a tenuous rapport with Barger, who thought the tall, lanky reporter from Louisville was some kind of overeducated hayseed. “He was a typical Kentuckian,” said Barger. “Not an Okie, you know, but straight from the hills.” Once Barger understood Thompson’s intentions—to provide an accurate portrait of the Hell’s Angels, without the smokescreen of media hype and moralizing—Barger opened up to him. “Sonny was a very powerful leader, charismatic in a quiet way,” Thompson said. “We weren’t friends, but there was a mutual respect that he acknowledged. We made our peace with each other.”

  Thompson’s original intention for the Nation story was to provide an unvarnished look at the Angels from an eye-lev
el perspective, but the resulting story, which was called “The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders,” was in fact a meticulous debunking of the Lynch Report, with tantalizing allusions to Thompson’s initial meetings with Hell’s Angels members used for corroboration. Thompson couldn’t resist a few digs at the mainstream press: “The difference between the Hell’s Angels in the papers and the Hell’s Angels for real is enough to make a man wonder what newsprint is for.” But the story doesn’t really deliver on its insider’s promise, offering only teasing glimpses of the Angels’ culture. The overall tone of the piece is measured and expository, as if Thompson had reluctantly tethered himself to the magazine’s house style.

  Still, “The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders” was the most accurate portrait of Hell’s Angels yet to appear in a mainstream publication, and Thompson had the distinct advantage of conducting his research firsthand, which didn’t go unnoticed. “We liked the article, because it was pro-us,” said Sonny Barger. “We always thought any press was good press, but that article in The Nation was well written.”

  Shortly after the May 17, 1965, publication of the story, Thompson was inundated with offers from publishers to expand the article into a book. He finally accepted a $6,000 advance from Bernard Shir-Cliff, an editor at paperback publishing house Ballantine Books. “The moral here,” he wrote his friend William Kennedy, “is never knock The Nation just because they paid $100. All that stuff I wrote for the Observer apparently died on the vine, but this one job for The Nation paid off in real gold.”

  Using his initial $1,500 payment, Thompson purchased a BSA 650 Lightning, “the fastest goddamn bike on the road,” so he could endear himself to the Angels and, he hoped, ride along with them. Jim Silberman, the Random House editor who bought the hardcover rights to Hell’s Angels on Shir-Cliff’s recommendation, remembers meeting Thompson at a café in the North Beach district of San Francisco, trying to wrest the writer’s attention away from his parked bike. “I don’t want anyone to steal it,” he told Silberman. When Thompson offered Silberman a ride, the editor politely declined. “I told him that [author] Richard Fariña had been killed on a motorcycle just weeks before,” said Silberman. “So Hunter said, ‘Okay, you take a cab and I’ll race you to my place.’” Thompson won.

  Thompson thought his Lightning would give him the street cred he felt he needed, but Barger and his fellow Angels scoffed at his fancy machine. “It was an insult to them for someone to just come along with a bike and expect to ride with them,” Thompson said. For one thing, it wasn’t the requisite Harley-Davidson, and the fact that it could outrun their hogs only made matters worse. “That was just a stock BSA,” said Barger. “You could tie it to two Harleys back to back with chains on them, and it would rip that bike apart.”

  “They wanted to sell me a hot bike for $400,” said Thompson. “I wasn’t comfortable with that.” Thompson reluctantly agreed to strip the bike down to the chrome, and he even removed the mufflers to give it that Harley growl. He compensated for his bike faux pas with his balls-out driving technique. “They thought I was a crazier driver than any of them,” he said. “I fit in, oddly enough.”

  Thompson thought he might hang out with the Angels on their own turf, get a feel for the milieu. The earliest meetings took place at El Adobe, a dive that the Angels had made their official watering hole, as well as the Box Shop. The Angels remember Thompson as fidgety, conservative in dress and manner, and eager to test his constitution for heavy drinking if it meant getting the access he needed. “I remember these yellow-and-white striped button-down shirts,” said Oakland chapter member Marvin Gilbert (Mouldy Marvin). “The first time I met him, he walked in with a couple of cases of beer, which was a good move. I liked him, but he was a little scatterbrained. But I didn’t like the fact that he was writing a book about us. I didn’t feel we needed something like that.”

  There was a difference in kind between the Hell’s Angels two northern California chapters. The San Francisco Angels embraced the counterculture, or at least that aspect of the scene that reveled in psychoactive drugs, free love, and psychedelic rock. The Oakland chapter hated the hippies across the bay and were wholly committed to their bikes, to the exclusion of everything else. Thompson gravitated to the San Francisco Angels, if only because they shared an affinity for the same music and were more accessible as interview subjects. A few of the Angels, such as Frenchy and Terry the Tramp from the bohemian North Sacramento chapter, became frequent guests at Thompson’s apartment and primary sources for his research. “I only invited the ones I thought I could control,” said Thompson. “Very few of them took to the rock and roll life.” Terry the Tramp “got along with Hunter very well, better than any of us,” said Barger. “Hunter’s apartment became a place for him to get free drinks and stay overnight.”

  Parties in Thompson’s apartment became commonplace. They were boisterous affairs stoked by stolen cases of beer and Benzedrine, revels that usually didn’t end until early the next day. “My wife was very pretty and very vulnerable when the Angels came over,” said Thompson. “Things went well for the most part, but I recognized that they could go next door and kill somebody.” The Angels didn’t take half measures when it came to their partying; it was an all-or-nothing proposition, a bacchanal.

  “We would party right down to the ground, take a few reds, blister our minds,” said Gilbert. “Hunter liked to drink but couldn’t keep up with us. If he got too loaded, he would just sneak off somewhere.” Thompson didn’t want to come off like another square reporter, so his small gun collection was frequently pulled out and demonstrated. “For reasons that were never made clear,” Thompson wrote in Hell’s Angels, “I blew out my back windows with five blasts of a 12-gauge shotgun, followed moments later by six rounds from a .44 magnum. It was a prolonged outburst of heavy firing, drunken laughter and crashing glass.” The Angels found little humor in Thompson’s reckless firearms displays, frequently absconding with his guns and hiding them from him. “He was trying to convince us he was a big, bad motherfucker,” said Barger. “He tried to intimidate people into thinking he was a tough guy, then he’d turn to me later and ask me if I could get his gun back.”

  A week prior to the Fourth of July weekend in 1965, Thompson asked the Angels if he could join them on their annual holiday run to Bass Lake, a camping area near Yosemite Park in the Sierra Nevadas. The Angels were wary about bringing a reporter along; the negative press about the Angels had put the cops on high alert in the area, and a large police presence was expected. Thompson’s request was granted, but he had to ride in his own car instead of on the BSA Lightning, the better to avoid getting into any legal trouble by association.

  Barger told Thompson to meet the Angels at 8 A.M. on July 3 at El Adobe, from where members of the Oakland and San Francisco chapters would ride to Bass Lake. “I overslept,” Thompson wrote, “and in the rush to get moving I forgot my camera. There was no time for breakfast but I ate a peanut-butter sandwich while loading the car … sleeping bag and beer cooler in back, tape recorder in front, and under the driver’s seat an unloaded Luger. Press cards are nice things to have, but in riot situations a pistol is the best kind of safe-conduct pass.” He missed the Angels by twenty minutes; driving over the Bay Bridge, he spotted the Gypsy Jokers, a rival motorcycle club that was also headed to Bass Lake, “grouped around a gray pickup truck with a swastika painted on the side. They seemed to materialize out of the fog, and the sight was having a bad effect on traffic.”

  Thompson joined up with some of the Hell’s Angels, and finally the posse headed out across the Central Valley toward Bass Lake, attracting local oglers all along the route. The situation was fraught from the start. Once they arrived at Bass Lake, the bikers discovered that a roadblock had been erected by the local police, preventing them from entering the lake area. A restraining order had been in effect against the Angels since 1963, when a group of bikers had invaded a vacant local church and walked out wearing vestments and priests’ frocks. W
ithout a lakeside camping area, and with limited beer supplies, the Angels were touchy and not prone to conciliation. Thompson was of two minds: he was eager to chronicle the discord, to be right in the thick of it, but careful to distinguish himself as a civilian, lest he get caught in the crossfire. “When I went on runs with them, I didn’t go dressed as an Angel,” said Thompson. “I’d wear Levi’s and boots but always a little different from theirs: a tan leather jacket instead of a black one, little things like that.”

  The Angels moved to placid Willow Lake, where they could swim in their grease-stained jeans without any trouble (though at a considerable remove from the area’s tourists). Thompson had brought a cooler of beer with him, but it was all appropriated by the Angels before the end of the first day. “When we made that [Roger Corman] film Hell’s Angels ’69, we drank the whole crew’s beer in one day,” said Sonny Barger. “To Hunter, a case or two of beer was a big deal, but we had forty people or so.” After the Angels collected a little over $130 between them, Hunter volunteered to buy more beer for the Angels at a general store near the post office in town. Once there, however, he was accosted by a loose gang of local vigilantes bearing weapons, and the situation heated up in a hurry. Getting beaten by a mob, Hunter wrote in Hell’s Angels, is “like being caught in a bad surf: there is not much you can do except try to survive.” “Hunter was a real stone coward whenever things started heating up,” said Sonny Barger. “But he always wanted to be part of the action, wherever it was. When things started heating up, Hunter jumped into his trunk.”

  The situation was neutralized when Sheriff Tiny Baxter redirected Thompson and a few Angels to a general store miles away from the main tourist site, where they encountered not vigilantes but looky-loo tourists. The beer finally secured, Barger and crew were temporarily mollified. Thompson, for his part, had crossed the Rubicon into the Angels’ antiestablishment camp; the strong-arm intimidation tactics they had encountered had stirred up his latent indignation, and now “I was so firmly identified with the Angels that I saw no point in trying to edge back to neutrality.” By nighttime, his car had become the locus of the party, stocked with beer and surrounded by a circle of Harleys. The Angels prided themselves on pulling all-nighters during the first evening of a run, but even a prodigious partier such as Thompson couldn’t hack it. Whenever he tried to steal sleep in his car, he would be awakened by the sound of prying hands reaching inside the window, trying to pop the trunk for another six-pack.