The Brown Buffalo ate LSD-25 with a relish that bordered on worship. When his brain felt bogged down in the mundane nuts and bolts horrors of the Law or some dead-end manuscript, he would simply take off in his hotrod Mustang for a week on the road and a few days of what he called “walking with the King.”
Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach—but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at thirty-three—just like Jesus Christ—you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Specially if the bastard is already thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile-vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can’t handle any more raw tequila.
JANN WENNER
Ralph [Steadman] was always crazier than Hunter. I knew it and Hunter knew it. Ralph really was a mad genius, and he really did act on what he believed in, whereas Hunter knew how to modulate. Hunter and I could be businesslike and think about what was realistic to do and what was better not to do. Ralph, once he got on a crusade—well, that was the end of it. He wouldn’t compromise. He was pure, and Hunter saw that.
RALPH STEADMAN
One thing he was fond of saying was “We are not like the others, Ralph.”
JAMES SILBERMAN
The Vegas book didn’t sell fabulously well in hardcover, at least not with the first printing. It became a big bestseller in paperback. Jann would agree that it was a big success in Rolling Stone.
I thought it was really going to take off, and printed a lot of copies of the book. There were 20,000 copies—out of a printing of 60,000 or 80,000—left over in our warehouse, and when Hunter was notified about this, he said, “How much are they?” He made an offer to buy all 20,000. His plan was to keep them—“Let them age,” as he put it—and then little by little let out some autographed copies as he needed money.
JANN WENNER
Hunter did in fact tell me that we should get all the remainders and buy them for a dime a copy or something like that—I think there were 7,000 available. We tried. Hunter was always looking for a scheme or a business adventure for us to get involved in, and it was always fun to do anything with him—despite the fact that most of these ideas were overwhelmingly complicated, with little reward, but lots of fun in the scheming. I wrote to his publisher and said we’d like to buy them. But for whatever reason it never came to pass.
Later on, though, he decided somehow that I had bought them. I don’t think he really believed it, but it sounded good and it was getting traction as a story: that I had buried them and was going to sell them after his death and make a fortune off him. It really was too funny to deny, and a lot of people believed it.
JAMES SILBERMAN
Somehow the books got lost. The last time I was with Hunter and Jann together, Hunter was still complaining to Jann that he thought that the books had been put in the Rolling Stone warehouse and that Jann had lost them, that Jann owed him whatever these books were worth. Some first editions of Vegas turned up in the antiquarian catalogs for a hundred dollars, a hundred and a quarter—so he would have had a good return on his investment.
JANN WENNER
The summer after Vegas was published, my wife, Jane, and I drove from San Francisco to Woody Creek and spent a week in the cabin next door to Hunter. It was sunny, green, the Rockies at their best, with Hunter, Sandy, and Juan in a golden moment. Hunter had two exceptional books under his belt and a stable gig at Rolling Stone. We were all enjoying the moment immensely. I was trying to figure out what Hunter would do next. What was the best and biggest story? We agreed that he was going to go to Vietnam.
Maybe a month after that, I had hesitations and thought it would be better if Hunter covered the 1972 presidential election. I was fearful he would be angry that I pulled the Vietnam assignment, but he loved the idea of the campaign trail and agreed to it immediately.
He saw it better than I had in terms of how much he could devote himself to it. We would have full-time coverage of a presidential election in our rock & roll–and–drug magazine. What we thought of right from the beginning—we were trying to make some kind of splash—was that he’d move to Washington. Well, that may or may not have been the smartest idea, but it got him there. We put him on payroll with a salary of $17,000 a year, which was big for us then.
TIM FERRIS
There was the great Rolling Stone editors’ confab at Big Sur—a weekend at a motel and in the Big Sur hot springs. It was 1971. There was a kind of tension between the lifestyle that most of us were living individually and the requirements of actually sitting through long meetings in a corporate setting. On the very first full day of the conference, there were people there that could barely hold their eyes open because they’d been up all night with Hunter or with one another.
I mainly remember testy declamations involving stylebook matters and Charlie Perry being irritated that someone would put a comma inside a parenthesis or something, which I mention just because although many of us would seem today to be taking advantage of the fact that we were living in the sixties, there was a unanimous, universal dedication to quality of craft among a very fine group of writers and editors. There was a certain amount of playing around going on, but everyone, Hunter included, was very serious about trying to do their best work and to expand what they could do.
That first night at Big Sur, Hunter drove his car up onto the sidewalk in front of his room at the motel and then climbed over the hood of the car to get into his room and lock the door—the idea was to discourage anyone from banging on the door to try to wake him for the morning session.
JANN WENNER
By the time of the Big Sur editorial conference, Hunter and I had already made the agreements and written the contracts for his book on the campaign. The Big Sur confab was a weekend-long gathering of all the editors from San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and London at a motel near Esalen. At night everyone would hit the hot springs, pretty loaded. That great series of pictures of Hunter taking a highway patrol sobriety test came from that weekend.
It seemed like a good idea at the time to discuss where the magazine was going and gather some story ideas. But Hunter had a fantasy that everybody else on the staff should come to an agreement that he should go to Washington. He wanted to take the temperature of the room and have some kind of consensus. He didn’t want to do it if he was going to be considered some foreign organism to the editorial body, if everybody else thought that Rolling Stone really shouldn’t cover politics—of course, knowing all the time that we were going to do it anyway. But it was a useful conceit that both gave him spirit and energized the staff for the year ahead.
Hunter didn’t actually make some of those meetings. They’d go on for four or five hours. When he did show up, he’d bring noisemakers and toys and prank gadgets; other times he sat quietly. The Big Sur conference turned out to be a one-of-a-kind event in our little universe.
CHARLES PERRY
We’d be trying to tackle all these serious issues, and Hunter would pull out all this weird stuff that he bought by mail order from Police Chief magazine. I remember there was a stick-on flashing red light like the ones you see on cop cars. Hunter would slap it on top of a table in the middle of a meeting.
JANN WENNER
He had a flashing red police light that you could mount by suction cup, and there was an air-raid siren, and later on a toy hammer that made a shattering-glass sound. He loved to get people going, and knowing how much pleasure he got out of this, part of our routine became that he would pull some prank and then I’d overreact to make it more fun for him. Late
r he gave one of the hammers to my kids as a Christmas present so they could use it on me.
JANE WENNER is Jann Wenner’s wife.
Max Palevsky had a computer company with some other people that he sold to Xerox for a billion dollars, which, in the sixties, was an enormous amount. Max was also a very active Democrat and either had invested or was going to invest in Rolling Stone. So he had invited us all down for a weekend at his home—Jann and me, his secretary, a few editors, a couple of the business people, and Hunter.
Max had an ultramodern, very large ranch-style house in Palm Springs with a wonderful staff and a butler dressed in a white jacket with a black bow tie. The staff had been cooking all day and was getting ready for dinner—it was getting near cocktail time—and Hunter came over to me and said, “Jane, I want to tell you something.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “Listen, you can’t tell anybody, but I just have this one tab of acid left.” He said he’d already taken one, and now I went through that little “Shall I? Shall I not? Shall I?” I took it.
Everybody was called to dinner, and we all sat around the table, and this butler came out carrying this huge silver platter with a thirty-pound slab of roast beef, blood dripping down, and the roast beef was moving. I looked around the table, and this seemed to be happening to everybody. Hunter had said the same thing to each person in the room separately and dosed everyone—and then we all started laughing. Nobody ate anything.
It was classic Hunter—with the twinkle in his eye and the devilish grin. Somehow he always made everybody feel special, that it was going to be your moment. He’d make you want to be naughty because he made everything sound so good. He had a way of getting you to go along with him on any ride.
JANN WENNER
When we realized that Hunter had dosed everybody, it turned into this wonderful all-night party in hot tubs and Jacuzzis. That was Hunter in action.
Everybody there was drug-friendly. Hunter really didn’t fuck them over—he just had fun with them. There was a confrontational Hunter who could be very abusive, especially to people that worked for him, but he was never out to hurt anybody. He would never give anybody drugs they couldn’t handle.
So he moved to Washington and got a house there with Sandy and Juan. Sandy was pregnant at the time. They’d had a miscarriage and an infant death already, so they were full of hope about this. And then she miscarried again.
SANDY THOMPSON
The last baby that I had, at Johns Hopkins in Washington, D.C., in ’72—he was taken at seven and a half months. We thought he was going to be fine. And he developed hyaline membrane disease, which is what John Kennedy’s baby died of—which is also now curable.
JANN WENNER
It was a very sad moment. It had been a time of such big hope and change: They were moving from Woody Creek to Washington, and Hunter had his first full-time job in years as the national affairs correspondent of Rolling Stone. He’d put his son in school, and they had a nice suburban home. But it didn’t slow Hunter down. He wanted to get on the road.
CHAPTER SIX
A New Voice on the Campaign Trail
Hunter worked his ass off. He knew he didn’t know about politics, so he insisted that you explain every detail. That’s why he was so much better informed than most of the political reporters traveling on the campaign, because they were covering it by the book—and Hunter didn’t have the book. He was making one up.
SANDY THOMPSON
We lived in D.C., right on the edge of Maryland, in Rock Creek Park. It was just sort of a regular brick house that Rolling Stone paid for, but across the street was a park, and it was at the end of a cul-de-sac, and we had the Dobermans there, and Juan went to this weird so-called school. It was really alternative. He’d started off in a regular public school because I couldn’t find anything else for him in D.C., and he was completely bored. He was so much further ahead than everybody else. I had taught him to read when he was four. There were maybe eight kids. They tore up telephone books, and I don’t know what else they did.
JUAN THOMPSON
I’m not sure if it was even really a school by most standards. Our “class” would be things like driving to New York City and back stuffed behind the backseat of VW bus. The “classroom” was this old, really run-down second-floor apartment in a pretty bad part of Washington. Some days in between field trips we’d just do something weird like kick a big hole in the wall. Academically it was a wasted year. But it was fun. We were six years old and running around Washington, D.C., without supervision. We’d all walk a few blocks by ourselves just to get lunch.
JANN WENNER
Sandy was not only his wife but also his full-time assistant. She was the one typing the manuscripts, filing, and doing all the administrative work, and she was also the recipient of Hunter’s abusive behavior and unrelenting late-night irritability. When Hunter was in a rage, Sandy would just take it, though in retrospect everything was milder then. At that time we all kind of laughed at it—the stakes weren’t so high, and he wasn’t so crazy.
JUAN THOMPSON
I knew my dad worked at a newspaper, and I knew Nixon was bad. Very bad. That’s all I knew. Hunter didn’t sit down and talk to us—this was more from overhearing conversations.
JANN WENNER
Max Palevsky was also one of the principal funders of the McGovern campaign, and through Max, I was able to meet Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s campaign manager; he’d been Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary. One Sunday morning Hunter and I went to see Frank at his home—a large colonial house in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Hunter and I had smoked this rather serious joint before heading over there. In the car we developed an extreme case of the giggles. We were cackling hysterically while we were walking up to his door and wondering if we were going to make it through. We tried not to look at each other, but we’d sneak a look and start giggling all over again. This was our first major move in big-time politics.
The door opened, and we suddenly went very serious. Frank laid out his whole theory of the campaign—how and what they would do, state by state, what candidacies would fall apart—and lo and behold it all came true as Frank predicted. He had a clear and accurate vision of it, and he told it to Hunter, which was a big part of why Hunter was able to call the campaign so accurately and understand it so well.
It took Hunter a while to find the right voice on the campaign trail, for him to feel the whole story out. He started developing the style and seeing how far he could push it, to see how gonzo he could really go while in the middle of this heavy-duty mainstream story. Hunter was on the road all the time. The press corps noticed almost immediately that he was doing something new, and we both soon discovered that his stuff was being read by everybody in the McGovern campaign and practically every member of the national press corps. This put both Hunter and Rolling Stone on the map in a way we hadn’t been.
GEORGE MCGOVERN, the South Dakota senator, ran for president in 1972.
The first time I met him, in ’71, he was in a phone booth in Madison, Wisconsin. Somebody said to me, “That guy with his back to you in the next booth is Hunter Thompson,” so I turned around and said, “How ya doing, Sheriff?” He sort of glowered at me and said, “What do you mean by that?” So I repeated it. “Things going okay, Sheriff?” I knew that he’d run for sheriff, but he couldn’t seem to believe that I knew that. He didn’t seem to mind being greeted that way by somebody running for president.
I announced for president in 1971, almost two years ahead of the ’72 election. That had never been done before in American history. Most people thought it was crazy, but not Hunter. He said to me, “If a guy wants to run for president, let him say so, for Chrissakes.” He then attached himself to my campaign and followed me night and day. Sometimes it would just be the two of us on a little putt-putt airplane going somewhere. But he was filing stories with Rolling Stone regularly during that period, along with Tim Crouse.
TIM CROUSE was a writer for Rolling Stone in 1972.
I was fairly new to the magazine and had no experience at all as a political reporter. But I had gotten up my gumption and insisted that I be sent to cover the New Hampshire primary. Jann finally said okay, on the condition that I work as Hunter’s assistant. I was a little grumpy about this at first, but it didn’t take me long to figure out what a good deal I’d stumbled into.
There was a sprawling lodgelike hotel called the Wayfarer in the woods outside Manchester, New Hampshire, where all the politicians and reporters stayed during the primary. We had rooms close by each other. My first job was to get Hunter up in the morning. I knocked on his door, and there was a long, loud eruption of curses. I realized within about three seconds that this wasn’t directed at me. It was just the life force announcing itself through Hunter’s early-morning self.
JACK GERMOND was covering national politics for the Gannett papers in 1972.
Hunter always had so much foreign matter in his body, he would sometimes go crazy. I remember him walking into the entrance of the Wayfarer Inn. Outside they had a little covered place where cars pulled up, and the roof was propped up by two-by-fours. Hunter got out of the car with Tim and walked into one of these pillars, and he thought someone had come out and hit him with a two-by-four. He went bananas until Tim calmed him down and convinced him that nobody could have hit him, that it was just an accident.
TIM CROUSE
From the beginning, Hunter treated me as part of a team. At the end of the day, we would get together, order room service, and sit on the floor, eat our club sandwiches, and process the events of the day. Hunter was what you could call a creative listener—responsive, shrewd about the subtexts of any conversation, constantly putting you on your mettle. He was quick to seize on anything that you might know that could be of use to him and to offer anything he might know that would be of use to you.
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