Hunter decided that it was time to leave Rio and that he was going to continue on in South America and write more articles for the National Observer and that I would go back to the States.
CLIFFORD RIDLEY was Hunter’s editor at the National Observer.
There wasn’t anything in his background that said that he was going to be good—his only credentials that I remember were from the Middletown paper—but we knew that he was good when we got his first piece. We were a national newsweekly, a broadsheet owned by Dow Jones that had just started up. Hunter probably wrote a piece a month when he was in Latin America, and a lot of them ended up running on the front page. We were fairly flexible about length—if something was good and it was long, we had the space—but he probably averaged in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred words, for which we paid him a hundred fifty, or two hundred dollars if it was a helluva job. With rare exceptions, he didn’t mind the editing, though in fairness to him, he was three thousand miles away and wasn’t seeing his stories for six weeks or so after they came out.
We didn’t have a problem with him injecting himself into his stories. We were going in the direction of personal journalism at that point, experimenting with allowing more personality in our pieces. Given today’s journalistic climate, though, we might be a lot more skeptical about some of his details; the rich British man hitting golf balls from his penthouse terrace over the downtown slums of Cali, Colombia, in-between sips of his gin and tonic is a little too perfect. He may have embellished just a tad . . . but there was no arguing over the quality of his writing. He was extraordinary for us, and for journalism at that time.
I found him quite easy to deal with, aside from his letters and cables perpetually bitching about money, and subsequently about being sick. The needing-money part we basically accepted as true. We didn’t pay a lot, and as far as we knew he wasn’t writing for anybody else. The other stuff about his health—well, obviously hyperbole was Hunter’s stock-in-trade, and we understood that. Did we literally believe every account of his health, when he’s saying that he’s so hobbled that he was using a leg of his camera tripod as a cane to help him walk at the rate of a hundred yards an hour? No. I would read excerpts from Hunter’s letters to me to the other editors nearby, and eventually one of us said, “Maybe we oughta run some of this stuff.” So I pulled a piece together out of the best parts.
His ambition, from the moment that he and I started dealing with each other, was to be a novelist. He’d refer to The Rum Diary, which he carried around with him, and his idols were the literary heavyweights. It was clear to me that his aspiration was to one day have his name among them.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
For Hunter it was a career and lifestyle breakthrough. His life was professionally itinerant after he went to South America for the National Observer. He went anyplace and wrote whatever moved him in his own way—up to a point. It was heavily edited, and there were limitations on what he could say. But it established his name, modestly, and he managed to distinguish himself through subject matter and attitude. He had an editor he respected. But after a few years and a couple of rejections he soured on the paper—which was rather straitlaced, with a centrist Republican attitude. He called it a “dead man’s train.” And eventually he moved on.
He was having no success with The Rum Diary, which he thought was his best work up to that point. He was finding success with everything journalistically, but he still wanted to become a novelist.
After I got a couple of rejections of my novel as being too downbeat, I advised him to write an upbeat novel. But he didn’t, and neither did I. We exchanged stories of grief and rejection and he sent word if he got some money. Once he won sixty dollars on a quiz show.
What we didn’t know was how you got published. After Hunter left San Juan, there was a lot of correspondence back and forth about agents and publishing. I got an agent who had an A-list of writers, and I sent Hunter over to him, but he said he didn’t want to represent anything like what Hunter was doing. Hunter eventually found someone to represent Prince Jellyfish and later another agent to represent The Rum Diary before it was finished.
We were very honest about one another’s work. He wrote me after I published The Ink Truck in ’68 and said, “I haven’t read The Ink Truck. Sandy read it, and she didn’t like it through the first half and then the second half she sort of liked it. But if I do read it, I’m not going to admit it.” I presume this was in retaliation for my negative input on The Rum Diary. I was rooting for him to publish, but not that work as it was; and I was hardly alone in this view. The book was full of digressions and wisdom—his essays on the state of the world, the nation, journalism, Puerto Rico.
SANDY THOMPSON
I worked for my mother’s travel agency for a couple of months, and then one weekend I decided to go up to Louisville to see Hunter’s mom. While I was up there, we got a phone call or a letter or a telegram saying that Hunter was on his way home. In fact, I think he was in Florida, and he was going to take the train, or the bus.
I remember Virginia saying to me that whenever she knew that Hunter was coming home to Louisville she was scared. She knew there would be tension.
That same day, some friends of Hunter’s came over. They were being very gracious and asked if I’d like to come out and ride with them. I loved to ride horses, so we went out. I did not realize that this was a polo pony—not only a polo pony, but a green polo pony. I wasn’t on this horse five minutes when he threw me and I landed on my shoulder. I just went back to Virginia’s, and that night I couldn’t sleep, so we went to the ER. It was a dislocated shoulder.
The next day Hunter was home, and there I was in the hospital. I knew that wasn’t going to go over well. The hospital told me that I was free to leave, but I was in this wheelchair with my arm in a sling when Hunter came in. We hadn’t seen each other in months. Hunter said, “Well, that’s the end of that.” And I’m thinking, “The end of what?”
I found out later he had had great plans to come home and sweep me off my feet and get married. We went home to his mother’s—she was at work in the library—and with my arm in a sling we broke her bed making love. She was under the illusion that we were each sleeping in separate rooms, even though we had been living together for three years, and she came back, and she was just wild from this terrible, terrible thing having happened in her home.
The next afternoon I was upstairs, and Hunter and his two brothers, Jim and Davison, were downstairs, and Hunter called up and said, “Sandy, come on down.” I came downstairs, and we got into the car with the two brothers. Hunter and I were in the back, Davison was driving, and I said, “Where are we going?” Hunter said, “Indiana.” I said, “What for?” Hunter replied, “To get married.” That was my proposal. I said, “Oh.”
GERALD TYRRELL
Hunter’s mother persuaded Hunter to get married, so he got married across the river from Louisville in Jeffersonville, Indiana, in a marriage parlor.
SANDY THOMPSON
So we went to this town in Indiana. The first thing we had to do was get our blood test, and then we had to wait overnight for the results. We went to this cabin on a property that was owned by one of Hunter’s wealthy friends, and it was all lovey-dovey, and we were lying—once again—on a mattress on the floor, naked and half-asleep, and all of a sudden there was this banging on the screen door. Hunter got up, pulled on his drawers, and went to the door. It was the owner of the property, the father of his friend, this Scotsman wearing a kilt, and he yelled, “Who is cohabitating in my house? You will get out of here. You will be out of here within an hour, or I am calling the law.” Hunter had already been in jail, and this wouldn’t help. So we got out of there (I don’t remember where we stayed) and made it to the justice of the peace the next day.
I’ve got my arm in a sling and I’m wearing Hunter’s big sweater, and the justice of the peace starts reading this thing—you know, sacred stuff—and he looked over at me and said, “What happened to
your arm?” I said, “I fell off a horse.” He said, “You fell off a house?” I said, “No, a horse.” “Oh. Okay, you’re married.” That was May 20, 1963.
GERALD TYRRELL
Jimmy Noonan had an impromptu party afterward, and that’s the only time I met Sandy. Hunter had been down in South America doing some kind of drugs, and he was strung out. He was having trouble talking; his whole manner of speech had changed. He was speaking in this guttural, staccato way, where he’d spit things out quickly and you’d have trouble understanding him. He seemed to be having a hard time finishing sentences.
SANDY THOMPSON
From Indiana, we went down to my mother’s in Florida and spent a little time there. My mother adored Hunter. But my father thought otherwise. Anything he had ever heard about him was terrible.
My father was a serious Republican, and straight—really straight—and my mother was soulful, passionate, and an alcoholic. Virginia told her, when we got married, “I’m worried for Sandy. You know Hunter. He’s a lot to handle. Trust me: He can be really . . .” She probably wouldn’t have said “violent.” She might have. And my mother said, which I’ve never forgotten, “Don’t worry about Sandy. She’ll take care of herself.”
SANDY THOMPSON
My whole life was completely wrapped around Hunter. I would send my father articles, but my father wouldn’t respond. My mother kept in touch with me because she wanted to make sure that I was okay. But when people in my family died, or when there was a wedding in my family, I was not there.
We headed back to New York, and then Hunter and Paul got a job delivering a somebody’s things cross-country.
LOREN JENKINS met Hunter in the fall of 1963 in Aspen.
I’d been in Africa teaching school for the Peace Corps and was about to go up to graduate school. Hunter and I had a mutual friend, a lady from Louisville, Peggy Clifford, who had a bookstore in Aspen. She said, “You two should meet. You have a lot in common.” And Hunter breezed in. He had a job driving someone’s stuff out to California and had a full truckload.
So we met, we talked, had a drink, and then he went west and I went east, and after my first year in graduate school, by process of elimination, I decided that the only hope for me was journalism, and the only person I knew at the time who’d been a journalist was Hunter. So I wrote to him and asked him, basically, “How do you break into this racket?” He wrote me back a very funny letter, a typical Hunter screed about how fucked the profession is, but then he wrote, “There are two things you should know if you’re going to get in to do this. First, all editors suck. Second, if you correct something on a manuscript when you’re typing, don’t use x’s. It doesn’t look neat. Use alternate m’s and n’s—it makes it neater.” These were his two pieces of advice.
SANDY THOMPSON
By the time I flew out to meet Hunter, Paul was living in a cabin in the Aspen mountains, and Hunter and I visited him before renting a small house on the Woody Creek Road. I remember being at Paul’s and pouring them wine. Paul had an outhouse, and I went out to the outhouse and I got sick. And I thought, “What’s this?”
I saw the doctor that week, who confirmed that I was pregnant. I don’t remember Hunter’s reaction exactly, but it definitely wasn’t bad. I was incredibly happy.
Hunter shot elk so I could eat elk liver, which is what I ate the whole time I was pregnant with Juan—after which of course I never wanted to see another piece of elk or venison ever. I had that and salad and powdered milk. Hunter was kind and thoughtful all through the pregnancy, and then we were getting ready to leave for California. We were going to stay in some fantastic cabin that Denne Petitclerc, who was a fairly successful screenwriter, had outside of Santa Rosa, outside of Glen Ellen on the top of a mountain. I was eight months pregnant, and in February it was thirty below in Colorado.
It was not exactly Hunter’s idea of the American dream—going across the country in an old Nash Rambler with almost no money and his wife eight months along. But we got there, and Hunter went to meet Denne, and I could see them talking, and Hunter looking really, really agitated, and then Hunter came back to the car and said, “He’s already rented it.”
He said that there was a place on the property, but that it wasn’t a whole lot. It was actually a shack—not a bad shack, you know, but a tin shack with a little kitchen and a big room, and then a little room off that which became Juan’s bedroom. It was great. It had electricity and running water.
At nine months, at about six o’clock in the morning, my water broke. Hunter drove me to Santa Rosa Hospital. Juan was very easy. The doctor said that I could have had this baby in a field. I was just elated, and I was very glad that it was a boy. I thought that Hunter really wanted a boy. That was March 23, 1964.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
Hunter loved Fitzgerald, and he named his son Juan Fitzgerald Thompson after Scott and also after the other Fitz—John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
SANDY THOMPSON
When we brought Juan home, he slept with us. We had a Doberman at the time, Agar, and the dog slept with us too. Agar was the first, but later we had other Dobermans: Darwin, who was the all-star, and Benjie, who had two litters of puppies. We kept one of them and called him Weird. His actual name was Speed Wizard, and he was very weird.
The mattress was on a box spring, not on the floor, so we were getting up in the world, you know? I nursed Juan, and I was in absolute heaven. Here’s Hunter and here’s my son. It was an extraordinary feeling of power, of love, of everything good.
I got pregnant again a year or two later. Hunter didn’t want another child, but I definitely did. I wanted another Hunter, of all things. But I’m Rh-negative and Hunter is Rh-positive, and in those days, if that was the case, only your first child lived.
None of my other children lived after Juan. There were five. The first one was probably at two or four months, and it was a true miscarriage. And then I had a full-term baby. Well, she was born with the cord tied around her neck, and she was blue. She was Rh-positive, and Aspen Valley Hospital didn’t have blood. When the baby was born I didn’t look at her because I sensed that something was wrong.
I dealt with it initially by just going crazy, by going out into the field, in my head, next to the hospital bed, and nothing was real. There were all these flowers out there. And in my mind, I thought, “You know, if nothing is real, the baby’s not dead.” I went into this place, and Hunter looked at me, and he said, “Sandy, if you want to leave, if you need to leave and go out there for a while, then you do that. But you have to know that Juan and I need you.” It was one of the most beautiful things he ever did, and of course I came back.
Hunter and a friend buried the baby—Hunter had named her Sara—by the Roaring Fork River.
MICHAEL SOLHEIM was a bartender in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1963.
Hunter came up to Sun Valley to talk to some people who knew Ernest Hemingway for an article he was doing for the National Observer. He and a local guy walked into the little bar I had, called the Leadville Espresso House, which used to be a church and still had a steeple and a bell. It was a bar disguised as an espresso house. I had had conversations with Hemingway there.
Hunter was asking this guy questions about Hemingway and taking notes, and then he and I talked for a little, and I said to myself, “I’m going to like this guy.” It was that quick. I ended up closing down early, and we went back to my cabin and talked more, and at some point late in the night, Hunter wanted to know if we could go up to Hemingway’s house in Ketchum, so up we went. The door was open, and we could hear the caretaker snoring in the background. For Hunter it was all about going into the vestibule, the enclosed space where Hemingway had shot himself. I hit the light switch and the sconces came on and we stood there.
Hunter would come back to Sun Valley or Ketchum now and again and see my wife and me. He’d write us a lot and he’d let us know when he’d be coming through. Our time together was as simple as listening to comedy LPs and smoking weed. I’d p
ut on these albums from Beyond the Fringe and Peter Sellers; at one point I put on General Douglas MacArthur’s farewell speech, his address to the joint House session. “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”
Another time he was writing an article for Pageant about Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, and I had some stuff I’d got in the mail from some kind of a sex club lying around my place, and with it came this postcard. You could write on the back of it and check off boxes to express your interest in some of the damndest things you ever heard of in your life, and this club would promise to put you in touch with somebody in your neighborhood with similar views. It was called Club Wow. So Hunter, in his article, accused McNamara of wearing a Club Wow button on his lapel.
DR. BOB GEIGER met Hunter in Sonoma, California, in 1964.
I had just started my practice in orthopedic surgery and my then wife and my daughter, who’s Juan’s age, maybe a year old at that time, were out in the town square. My wife came home and said, “I met this gal, and she had a baby, and we started talking.” Turns out her husband’s a freelance writer, and my wife said, “I told her that, ‘Gee, my husband’s a doctor, but he writes.’ So I invited them over for dinner.”
Hunter and I hit it off, and from then on they were both around. He was about twenty-seven, and I was thirty-three. There was a series of misadventures that ended up getting Hunter and Sandy and Juan thrown out of the little house they were living in just above Sonoma. Hunter and I were doing a little target practice at four in the morning, and the landlady—it was this little cottage on some property out in the country—lived next door. There were some gophers in the lawn out in front of this place, and the obvious way to kill gophers is to shoot them. It makes sense, doesn’t it? It made sense to us. But it didn’t make sense to the landlady. So the next day, Hunter and Sandy moved in with us in Sonoma. We were house-sitting at a condo complex with a pool, and there was no one else in this complex. We had a three-bedroom place, so there was room for Hunter and Sandy. Sandy could hang around the pool with Juan, and so it worked out real well.
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