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

by Marc Weingarten

  There were other projects to keep him busy, not the least of which was another book, which he had held off for close to three years. After floating a number of ideas past Jim Silberman at Random House, the two agreed that Thompson would chronicle the death of the American dream, the rogue reporter casting his jaundiced eye on the dry rot of contemporary culture, as he had done in the Kentucky Derby piece. But the idea was so broad and abstract that Thompson had trouble getting his mind around it. What, exactly, was the death of the American dream, and where was his entry point? “I wish I could explain the delay,” Thompson wrote to Silberman in January 1970. “In a nut, my total inability to deal with the small success of the H.A. book has resulted—after three years of useless, half-amusing rural fuckaround—in just about nothing except three wasted years.”

  There was plenty of material to work with, mostly research for abandoned articles about gun control and the oil industry, but Thompson couldn’t organize it all in a way that would cohere as a book. He suggested other approaches to Silberman—perhaps an anthology of pieces like Tom Wolfe’s The Pump House Gang or Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, the latter a book that had been a formative influence on the young Thompson.

  Thompson was thinking about a new composite form that would combine reporting and fiction in ways that blurred distinctions between the two: “a very contemporary novel with straight, factual journalism as a background.” Thompson had been groping toward this style with the Kentucky Derby story—ratcheting up the clamor of the South’s ignoble savages to a fever pitch—but now he wanted to delve into an invented persona and tinker with form. In doing so, he could get away with just about anything and become a man of action with no restrictions. He would call his alter ego Raoul Duke: “semi-fictional,” he wrote to Silberman, “but just hazy enough so I can let him say and do things that wouldn’t work in first person.”

  For months, Thompson grappled with the death of the American dream and Raoul Duke, but nothing came of it. In order to stave off the anguish of writer’s block, Thompson turned his energies to extracurricular activities—shooting his .44 Magnum into the gloaming on his Woody Creek property near Aspen, Colorado, a ranch house he called Owl Farm; dropping mescaline and blasting the Jefferson Airplane and Dylan at ear-wrenching volume.

  Politics became another diversion; it appealed to Thompson’s desire to change the order of things. He marshaled his creative energies into the mayoral campaign of Joe Edwards, a twenty-nine-year-old Colorado lawyer and biker who was running in a three-way race against Leonard Oates, the hand-picked successor of Aspen’s outgoing Republican mayor, Dr. Robert “Buggsy” Bernard, and local small business owner Eve Homeyer. Thompson viewed the race as a crucial battle for the agrarian soul of Aspen, which he felt was being destroyed by the rapacious greed of big real estate interests. The liberal Edwards would mobilize the “freak vote” in Aspen, the under-thirty hippies and heads who would put a stop to the unchecked growth and plant the seeds of reform.

  Thompson devoted all of his energy to the race, which, unlike writing books, offered the promise of a quick and unambiguous resolution. Then he received a cold call from Jann Wenner, the editor in chief and owner of Rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco. Wenner had obtained a copy of Hell’s Angels in galley form while working at Ramparts as an apprentice editor and consumed it in two days. “It knocked me out,” said Wenner. “It was such a vivid piece of writing. I was so impressed with the fact that he had the balls to hang out with Angels. It seems tame now, but then it was the height of adventure and courage.”

  Now Wenner wanted Thompson to work for him. Thompson’s style—irreverent, angry, anything but detached—would fit in perfectly with Wenner’s young magazine, the only mainstream periodical that bothered to cover youth culture with rigor, taste and intelligence.

  A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Wenner had scraped together $7,500, some of it from his future wife’s parents, to start the magazine, relying on the sage counsel of his mentor, Ralph J. Gleason, the jazz columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, to steer a steady editorial course. In three years, Rolling Stone had not only become the definitive magazine for rock music coverage—due in no small part to critics such as Jon Landau, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus—but also long investigative pieces on the Altamont killings and the Manson Family, the antiwar movement and the battle for environmental preservation.

  Wenner was a native of Marin County. His father, Ed, was an engineer who had served in the Army Air Corps, a resourceful and avuncular man who tended to defer to his wife, Sim, when it came to taking disciplinary action against his three children. Sim was headstrong, a former Navy lieutenant junior grade during World War II who became the owner of a successful baby food business shortly after her discharge.

  Jann caught Sim’s entrepreneurial spirit early. In third grade he published a gossip sheet called the Bugle, printing all the dirt on his classmates, but the Bugle had to fold when a few too many kids threatened to shut Wenner’s operation down with a bloody nose. When Jann was fourteen, he was sent to Chadwick, a boarding school outside of Los Angeles; his parents divorced shortly thereafter.

  At Chadwick, Wenner threw himself into his own endeavors with brio and determination. He sang in the glee club, ran for office, acted in school productions (he was the lead in Dr. Faustus) and started up a newspaper called the Sardine. Wenner was a model student, if not exactly a typical boarding-school do-gooder. He wore his hair long and developed a taste for European art films and editorial insurrection, publishing critical articles about the school administration that resulted in stern warnings and expulsion threats.

  In 1964, Wenner enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, just as the school administration was about to come under siege by a clutch of student firebrands led by a brilliant twenty-one-year-old philosophy student named Mario Savio. Wenner, who was working as a stringer for NBC radio in between classes, was enthralled by Savio and the Free Speech Movement, volunteering his services for a “countercatalog” that rated college courses according to their political and sociological criteria. But Wenner had little use for political cant and the internecine battles between Berkeley’s numerous leftist organizations. While he abided by their principles, he was not going to immerse himself in radical protest. Exactly what he was going to do with his life was not entirely clear to him, at least until he saw the Beatles’ movie A Hard Day’s Night.

  It was an epiphany, the night Wenner found his life’s purpose. The visceral energy of the Beatles’ music sent a charge through him, conquered him head, body, and soul. From that point on, nothing would be as important to Wenner as rock and roll. It was more potent a cultural force than Savio or the FSM, more vibrant and alive—the thrilling sound of an emergent generation giving voice to itself.

  Emboldened, Wenner ventured out beyond Berkeley to La Honda, where he experienced his first acid trip under the auspices of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. In San Francisco, where an alternative culture rooted in rock and roll was simmering, Wenner attended concerts at places such as the Fillmore and Longshoreman’s Hall, reviewing the shows for the Daily Californian using the byline Mr. Jones—an homage to Wenner’s musical hero, Bob Dylan. He met Ralph Gleason at one such show and proceeded to pump him for information about the publishing business.

  Despite the generational differences—Wenner was nineteen, Gleason forty-eight—Gleason recognized in Wenner the same passion for music that had seized him upon attending his first Bunny Berigan concert in New York’s Apollo Theater in 1945. Gleason, a soft-spoken man of somewhat patrician bearing who wore sport coats with elbow patches and smoked a briarwood pipe, was a jazz critic first and foremost, but he found merit in any musical genre that had integrity and soul. He was an early champion of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, devoting extensive column inches in the Chronicle to both bands and other rock artists.

  Gleason would be a crucial ally for Wenner when the Berkeley student dropped out of
college during his junior year to try his hand in the publishing world. Taking the recommendation of Gleason, a contributing editor for Ramparts, Warren Hinckle hired Wenner to be the entertainment editor for a new Sunday edition of the magazine, but Hinckle had no empathy for the counterculture. In a cover story for Ramparts, he savagely decried the leaders of the movement, calling acid guru Timothy Leary “Aimee Semple McPherson in drag” and Ken Kesey a “hippie has-been.” That attitude made no sense to Wenner, but the final straw came when editor Sol Stern took a trowel to Wenner’s introduction to his Timothy Leary interview, making excessive changes to his text. Wenner tried to do an end run around Stern, inserting his original text into the edited version, and was caught. Hinckle reluctantly kept him on, but when the Sunday Ramparts folded, Wenner was gone.

  He tried freelancing, writing a two-thousand-word review of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for High Fidelity magazine that never ran. But the freelance life was too unpredictable. The days of toiling for editors, of being beholden to the capricious judgment of others, was over for him. It was as good a time as any to start his own magazine. Gleason would give him the credibility; the rest would be up to him.

  The idea, as he had discussed it with Gleason, would be to combine the professionalism of Time and the hipness of the underground press with stories that would run as long as The New Yorker’s. But first he needed money, so he hit up everyone he knew. Gleason chipped in $1,500. Wenner’s stepmother was in for $500. Sim Wenner contributed $2,000. The rest of the money came from the parents of Wenner’s new girlfriend, Jane Schindelheim, whom he had met while working at Ramparts.

  He used part of that money to rent an office on 625 Third Street in the warehouse district. He called the magazine Rolling Stone, which had a triple echo effect—it was the name of one of blues musician Muddy Waters’s greatest songs, a name that had been appropriated by Wenner’s favorite British band. His hero Bob Dylan had also kick-started his electric phase with a song called “Like a Rolling Stone.”

  Like Harold Hayes at Esquire and Clay Felker at New York, Wenner valued great writing more than political dogma; Rolling Stone was unapologetic about presenting itself as a “rock and roll newspaper” that framed its music coverage within the proper cultural context. Rock would never stray too far away from the foreground.

  “We were off the map as far as mainstream magazines were concerned,” said writer Timothy Ferris, who was Rolling Stone’s first New York bureau chief. “We had this high-minded notion that we wouldn’t take any cigarette, alcohol, or car ads, but no one wanted to buy any, so it was beside the point. But we knew we were publishing innovative stuff, pieces that people just had to read because they were so good.” Within three years of Rolling Stone’s first issue in November 1967, circulation jumped to a hundred thousand—a huge number for a magazine running on a shoestring budget.

  Wenner was most interested in fresh voices—writers who were inexperienced and hungry, outcast freaks and former dope dealers with a flair for story structure, news veterans who had been beaten down by endless eight-hundred-word dispatches for late-edition deadlines. Recruiting Hunter S. Thompson would be a feather in his cap; here was an established author with a best-selling book under his belt, a master of the long-form story who had lost a crucial outlet with the demise of Scanlan’s and was eager to fill the void quickly. “I wanted Hunter to write for Rolling Stone from the beginning,” said Wenner.

  Now Wenner had an assignment for Thompson: the obituary of Hell’s Angel Freewheeling Frank. Alas, Thompson was too busy to do it, immersed as he was with the Aspen sheriff’s campaign. Thompson had vowed that he would run for the office if Joe Edwards won his mayoral campaign. Edwards wound up losing by six votes, a margin that made the writer think he just might have a chance if he ran. Wenner told him to write about that.

  “The Battle of Aspen” ran in the October 1, 1970, Rolling Stone and was a discursive and riotous account of the two Aspen campaigns. There was no question that Thompson had found a perfect vehicle for his turbocharged prose; even though he studiously avoided writing about rock explicitly, his flair for the gleefully subversive made him a natural ally of Wenner’s publication. “It wasn’t too difficult editing Hunter on that story,” recalled Wenner. “He was far more resilient and easier to deal with in those days. I remember it being a fairly spontaneous affair.”

  The other staffers at Rolling Stone weren’t so sure about Thompson. “None of us really knew what to think of Hunter at first,” said former Rolling Stone copy editor Charles Perry. “I remember the first time I saw him in person. He was coming into the office to work with [editor] John Lombardi on a story, and he had this big box of hats and wigs with him. He would just keep changing into these wigs and hats every few minutes. John found this puzzling and somewhat disturbing. He quit a few weeks later.” Fortunately for Rolling Stone, Wenner knew how to handle the writer. “Hunter needed an apocalypse going on all the time,” he said. “But the writing was absolutely electric, and it was tremendous fun working and hanging around with him. I was resilient enough to handle him, but a lot of people were brutalized by him.”

  Thompson’s next story for Rolling Stone would come from an old drinking buddy, a civil rights lawyer he had met through a mutual friend, Ketchum, Ohio, bar owner Mike Solheim. Like Thompson, Oscar Zeta Acosta was an Air Force veteran. After being honorably discharged, Acosta attended Modesto Junior College, near his hometown of Riverbank, a small, rural central California town that would eventually be gerrymandered into Modesto. The objective for Acosta was to distance himself from the minimum-wage drudgery that his father, Manuel, had endured for so long as a janitor, but just what that entailed, Acosta wasn’t quite sure. At least a proper education would give him a leg up. He had literary aspirations, but despite a ferocious commitment to writing, including an unpublished novel, Acosta was unable to sell anything.

  Following a short stint at San Francisco State University, Acosta enrolled in San Francisco Law School and struggled mightily to pass the bar, succeeding on his second attempt in 1966. But providing expensive counsel for corporate fat cats was anathema to Acosta. It was highly unlikely that any white-shoe law firm would hire him anyway; Acosta was a heavy user of LSD and other psychoactive drugs, which he felt were gateways to self-realization. “I think psychedelic drugs have been important to the development of my consciousness,” Acosta wrote in an unpublished essay. “They’ve put me into a level of awareness where I can see myself and see what I’m really doing.” As a Chicano growing up near the San Joaquin Valley, that vast agricultural expanse in central California in which most of America’s produce is harvested, Acosta was well aware of the exploitation of immigrant laborers by white landowners, the brazen injustices imposed on illiterate workers who had no legal recourse. He would make it his business to help the disenfranchised among his people.

  After a short stint working as a lawyer for the East Oakland Legal Aid Society, Acosta moved to Los Angeles in 1968, where the Chicano civil rights movement, known as El Movimiento, was gaining momentum. His brother Bob tipped him off to a large Brown Berets protest in L.A., and Acosta was intrigued by this Latino analogue to the Black Panthers. He was worn down by the workload and the menial pay of his Legal Aid job. His ambitions were too outsized for a civil service job, anyway. Armed with a bar license, Acosta wanted nothing more than to help foment a Chicano revolution. “Whenever he set out to do something, he went at it with full force,” said Acosta’s son Marco. “But he was never satisfied with any one thing.”

  During the next six years in L.A., Acosta was the legal point man for virtually every significant civil rights case regarding Chicano activists. In late 1968 he defended thirteen protesters who were indicted for conspiracy to disrupt the public school system after a teacher walkout. In 1969 he defended the Biltmore Seven, a clutch of radicals who were arrested for trying to firebomb the Biltmore Hotel while Governor Ronald Reagan was giving a speech inside. To Acosta, guilt or inn
ocence was beside the point; due process should be accorded to anyone who had to defend him- or herself in a court of law. He became the Latino equivalent of white civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who had defended the Chicago Seven in the wake of the violent clashes between cops and protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention.

  Acosta first encountered Thompson just prior to his Los Angeles move, during a 1967 trip to Aspen. Beset by a chronic ulcer and distraught over the death of his secretary, Acosta was tipped off by his client John Tibeau to a cure located somewhere in Aspen, and hoped to relocate there and restore himself to health. But that didn’t deter him from drinking. When he came into town, Mike Solheim arranged a meeting between Acosta and Thompson at the Daisy Duke bar. Dressed in chino shorts and an L. L. Bean sailor’s cap with a bowie knife holstered to his waist, Thompson struck Acosta as a willful eccentric with a nasty contrarian streak. Thompson, for his part, didn’t know what to make of Acosta either, but indifference certainly wasn’t an option. As the booze flowed, Acosta became more animated and energized, loudly enumerating the ways in which he was going to redress America’s racial inequities and bring down the gabachos who had oppressed his people (Charles Perry said that Acosta “talked much the same way Hunter wrote”). Thompson couldn’t follow everything that Acosta was telling him—the latter’s speech came in rapid-fire bursts—but he was certain he had found a kindred spirit. The fact that Tibeau had broken his leg while riding on Hunter’s BSA motorcycle was broached and quickly forgotten.

  “I recognized in Oscar [someone] who would push things one more notch toward the limit,” said Thompson. “You never knew with Oscar what was going to happen next.” They became brothers in arms, fellow troublemakers with a mutual disregard for propriety and authority. One night Thompson and Acosta dropped acid and went to the Whiskey a Go-Go in Hollywood, the hottest club on the Sunset Strip. As the music droned on and drug-induced psychosis began to set in, Thompson persuaded Acosta that the singer on stage was a lip-syncing fraud. At first incredulous, Acosta slowly began to buy into Thompson’s bogus claim, until he finally stormed the stage and demanded that the band stop the sham at once. When they refused, Acosta reared back and punched the lead singer in the jaw.