He also had a funny kind of vulnerability. He was convinced the other reporters were dissing him—that they weren’t treating him with the respect that his experience as an established journalist and author entitled him to. “Listen,” he told me, “we’re going to get these bastards—or you are. Here’s what you do: Keep a notebook and watch them, and any time they screw up, any time some guy forgets to wipe his nose or anything—write it down.” Within a week, Hunter’s rancor had evaporated, and I’d become fascinated by the people I was observing.
After New Hampshire, I went to Washington, D.C., where Hunter and Sandy were living in a modest suburban house with their son, Juan, a well-mannered Doberman named Benjie, and a mynah bird named Edgar who was trained to say, “Fuck Humphrey.” For me, that house was a kind of Neverland. Sandy was sweet and endlessly patient, devoted to fostering what she saw as Hunter’s genius.
The first day I was there, Hunter came down to a sunporch off the living room, and Sandy took me aside and whispered, “Now, at this point he isn’t to be disturbed.” Then she came out from the kitchen with a breakfast tray—grapefruit, scrambled eggs, toast, coffee, juice, and his newspapers and mail carefully laid out. It was rather like Phineas Fogg being served by Passepartout. That was his quiet time, when he marshaled his resources.
After that, he got down to work. He was very open with me about his process as a writer. I was with him in the room upstairs where he had his IBM Selectric set up on a card table. He would sit with his elbows out to the sides, his back very straight, and he would get this sort of electric jolt and blast out a sentence. Then he’d wait again with his arms out, and he’d get another jolt and type another sentence.
Watching him, I began to realize that he was trying to bypass learned attitudes, received ideas, clichés of every kind, and tap into something that had more to do with his unconscious, his intuitive take on things. He wanted to get the sentence out before any preconception could corrupt it.
One of Hunter’s methods of composition was to write a bunch of ledes and then somehow fit them together. By lede, I mean the opening portion of a story, which is ordinarily designed to pack more of a virtuosic wallop than the sections that follow. Early on, I remember, Hunter showed me a stack of ledes he’d accumulated, as if he were fanning a whole deck of aces. On a tight deadline, my job would sometimes be to stitch together the lede-like chunks that Hunter had generated. Ideally, the story would function like an internal-combustion engine, with a constant flow of explosions of more or less equal intensity all the way through.
When we got to Milwaukee, the Wisconsin primary, Hunter’s assignment was to cover Humphrey and Muskie, who were the front-runners. My assignment was to cover the poor underdog, George McGovern. Lo and behold, McGovern pulled off this upset and won. So the little story I had became the big story. Hunter immediately fell into the role that I’d played for him. I was sitting at the typewriter, having been up for two days straight, and he was pouring coffee into me and rubbing my shoulders and giving me pep talks and feeding my copy to the mojo wire and dealing with Jann. Just to keep things from getting too sweet, he kept saying, “Jann’s going to fire you for this for sure. This is the end of you and Rolling Stone.”
GEORGE MCGOVERN
I thought it was interesting that the two people who covered me the closest during that period worked for Rolling Stone, but I got to know Hunter quite well. I was intrigued with him, as I think he was with me. We had entirely different personalities, but we hit it off right after I started the campaign. He used to tell me I was an honest man—and I don’t think he delivered that judgment on very many people. He also said, “You’re the best of the lousy lot,” but I always took that as a compliment.
He used to take my wife and me out to dinner when he’d come to Washington. We went into a nice restaurant, and this young woman said, “Can I take your drink order?” Hunter said, “Bring me four margaritas and four bottles of beer.” And this young woman said, “Well, sir, there are only three of you.” He said, “I don’t care if there are thirty-three. Bring me four margaritas and four bottles of beer.” I think she assumed that Eleanor and I would get part of that, but I knew better, so I said, “Get us a couple of vodkas on the rocks.” You felt a little self-conscious sitting in an upscale restaurant with a guy with four margaritas and four bottles of beer, all just freshly opened, sitting in front of him.
TIM CROUSE
I was with Hunter for the better part of a year. Sometimes he was ragged with fatigue, but his natural tact and generosity never quit. It was a wonderful time, and there was never a cross word between us, except once. I was busy interviewing people at one of the conventions, and Hunter asked me to get him a certain statistic. I’d seen him invent stuff in his stories—including things about me—and I thought, “What the hell,” and just made a number up. He said fine, and I went about my business and forgot about the whole thing. All of a sudden, I got this phone call from him, and he was livid. He’d somehow found out that the statistic wasn’t right. “How could you do this?! How could you do this?!” It wasn’t a performance, as so much of his indignation was, but real shock—one way I could tell was that when Hunter was truly stung, the bad language tended to drop out of his vocabulary. From then on, I was quite scrupulous about facts.
Hunter set a high standard for himself at the beginning, and he felt he needed to rise to that standard or surpass it with every piece that followed. That put a considerable strain even on someone with his exceptional stamina and skill. But he was fearless. With Hunter there was this constant demonstration that if you wanted to make something happen, you just had to plow ahead and do it on your own terms, and not let anything stop you.
AL EISELE was a Washington correspondent for the Knight Ridder papers.
The first time I met him was at a bar on Capitol Hill. He pulled out of his pocket a handful of red and blue pills and said, “You want some?”
He was viewed with a combination of love and fear by the other reporters. I think they were all mystified by him at first—he was such a different animal than you usually see in the press corps—but most of them quickly came to appreciate the fact that he was a pretty good writer. He wasn’t just there for show. Even the big mainstream writers from the New York Times and the Washington Post—R. W. Apple and that crowd—grudgingly learned to appreciate and respect him. The younger reporters, of course, loved him.
JACK GERMOND
There were some stiff-necks who resented Thompson’s presence on the campaign, who thought you had to have certain credentials to be covering it, but most of us liked him.
He was odd, obviously. Before the California primary, we were all staying at the Hyatt House on Wilshire Boulevard. Hunter would arrive at the pool at about noon every day with a tray of room service following him on which he’d have his usual six Heinekens—he loved Heineken—several grapefruit, and a bottle of gin. That was breakfast, and he’d do it day in and day out. How in the world he managed to function we never knew.
JANN WENNER
The Washington wizards and the gentlemen journalists never saw anything like Hunter. He could hold his own with them, and what he was publishing was funny and original and more right than they ever were . . . and on their own turf. He had access to everything, and it was fun for me to tag along. Somebody from McGovern’s campaign said, “There’s only two things we read to find out what’s going on: the New York Times and Rolling Stone.” A few years later, William Safire called Rolling Stone “the house organ of the Democratic party.”
From “Fear & Loathing in the Eye of the Hurricane” Rolling Stone 113; July 20, 1972
Sick dialogue comes easy after five months on the campaign trail. A sense of humor is not considered mandatory for those who want to get heavy into presidential politics. Junkies don’t laugh much; their gig is too serious—and the political junkie is not much different on that score than a smack junkie.
The high is very real in both worlds, for those who are int
o it—but anybody who has ever tried to live with a smack junkie will tell you it can’t be done without coming to grips with the spike and shooting up, yourself.
Politics is no different. There is a fantastic adrenalin high that comes with total involvement in almost any kind of fast-moving political campaign—especially when you’re running against big odds and starting to feel like a winner.
As far as I know, I am the only journalist covering the ’72 presidential campaign who has done any time on the other side of that gap—both as a candidate and a backroom pol, on the local level—and despite all the obvious differences between running on the Freak Power ticket for Sheriff of Aspen and running as a well-behaved Democrat for President of the United States, the roots are surprisingly similar . . . and whatever real differences exist are hardly worth talking about, compared to the massive, unbridgeable gap between the cranked-up reality of living day after day in the vortex of a rolling campaign—and the fiendish ratbastard tedium of covering that same campaign as a jour-nalist, from the outside looking in.
For the same reason that nobody who has never come to grips with the spike can ever understand how far away it really is across that gap to the place where the smack junkie lives . . . there is no way for even the best and most talented journalist to know what is really going on inside a political campaign unless he has been there himself.
Very few of the press people assigned to the McGovern campaign, for instance, have anything more than a surface understanding of what is really going on, in the vortex . . . or if they do, they don’t mention it, in print or on the air: And after spending half a year following this goddamn zoo around the country and watching the machinery at work I’d be willing to bet pretty heavily that not even the most privileged ranking insiders among the campaign press corps are telling much less than they know.
FRANK MANKIEWICZ was George McGovern’s campaign director.
What impressed me—and indeed continued to impress me—was how opposite he was from the general public’s notion. I always thought he was much cleaner than what people thought. He was carefully groomed—clean shirt, clean shaven, short hair, coherent. This was this wild druggie? Not on your life. I’m still not sure. . . . I mean, I’ve seen enough testimony for the contrary, but I’ve never quite believed that he was as off the rails as everyone says. I only got that from his writings. He came across as straight, very straight. Sometimes nasty straight, but never wild, never rude.
He had better access to our campaign than any other reporter. He was around, and he was friendly. It was partly a case of no one else treating us seriously at the beginning. But in addition to that, I thought he was the smartest. Someone like Johnny Apple could fill the New York Times with good stuff. Johnny understood the mathematics of what was happening, but I thought Hunter better understood what was really happening. There wasn’t anything that was going to hurt us, because we were outside the pale—and if anything did come up, I would say to Hunter, “Hey, listen—lay off that for a couple of weeks at least.”
PAT CADDELL was the pollster for the McGovern campaign.
Hunter was very hands-on; he was doing great stuff. But he was also covering the whole campaign, so he would be down in Florida with Muskie—where the famous incident with the Boohoo happened.
Hunter had met this guy who borrowed his press pass. The next morning, Hunter was supposed to be on the Muskie train in Florida, but he overslept—he blamed the Muskie people for not waking him up—and this guy, who Hunter referred to as “the Boohoo,” got on the train with Hunter’s credentials and started attacking everyone on the train and taunting Muskie at every stop. Hunter was still asleep back in Palm Beach.
JANN WENNER
Monte Chitti, who was a friend of Hunter’s, was the Boohoo. Hunter was not about to run amok on the train himself. He was too much part of the press corps and knew that he had to maintain that access. He was dead serious about his mission.
It was also totally up Hunter’s alley to let some live mice out or give his press pass to some drug crazy and see what would happen and then later say, “Gee, I don’t know how he got my pass. It was lying around, and he must have stolen it.” Of course, people would always believe Hunter, but you knew. Why would you believe Hunter? Of course he gave Chitti that credential.
PAT CADDELL
For the first couple of primaries he was all over the place because nobody thought that we were going to win; even though Rolling Stone was basically for McGovern, we were seen as a somewhat hopeless cause. But when we emerged, Hunter really became full-time, and that’s when he became really immersed, when he wasn’t making the famous California trips to Humphrey’s campaign.
Hunter didn’t act like a maniac, unless you hung out with him off the record. Maybe it showed up in his writing, but in terms of politics, Hunter worked his ass off to understand what was going on. He saw things that nobody else was seeing. He came to it with an eye and an understanding that this was a historical moment, that something was happening, and there was a war, and this was somehow the crucible of what was going on. He knew he didn’t know about politics, so he insisted that you explain every detail, and he would pick it up like that. 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.
JANN WENNER
Hunter quickly became a guiding spirit of the magazine during the course of the ’72 campaign trail, but that came with a price. In virtually every issue where something of his would appear, the deadline would be totally butchered. Everything and everybody was focused on these biweekly three- or four-day sieges. I was galvanized. My God, that smell, that acrid odor of the stylus on that treated paper coming out of the mojo wire just outside my office door . . .
All of this was punishing on the staff. I didn’t give it a lot of attention, really, until the production department put together a nasty memo insisting that I try to get Hunter’s copy in on time. I forwarded it, and his reply was basically “Sorry, but fuck you people if you can’t tough it out.” Some of them were working twenty-four to thirty-six hours straight on the final closing, so their humor was stretched a little thin.
Hunter loved having a place that was devoted to him from the top to the bottom. The whole operation that we had at Rolling Stone was in great part crafted toward receiving his material, getting it in shape, and publishing it on his schedule. He had his own private newsletter with a readership of a million.
SARAH LAZIN was an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone in 1971.
I was trying to fact-check Hunter’s stories from the campaign. They’d usually start coming in on Saturday night around seven, and I’d be there until early in the morning standing over the mojo machine. We all decided that in order for this to be taken seriously as real journalism—and to get the humor, and the irony, and the exaggeration of it—it had to be fact-checked thoroughly. If you got someone’s age wrong and someone else’s quote all wrong, the whole thing could be perceived as fiction, which it wasn’t. It was as honest and as true as anything anybody had ever said about Nixon or any of the candidates.
Problem was, his copy came in so late that it was really, really, really hard to check it. I had discussions again and again with the editors and with Jann about “How do we fact-check Hunter Thompson?” He had one piece where he wrote that Ed Muskie was addicted to Ibogaine. How do we check that?
Fear & Loathing: CORRECTIONS, RETRACTIONS,
APOLOGIES, COP-OUTS, ETC.
Unpublished memo from Hunter to Jann; 1972
For various reasons that probably don’t mean shit to anybody but me, I want to get straight—for the record, as it were—with regard to some of the most serious of the typographical errors that have marred the general style, tone & wisdom of “Fear & Loathing.”
I have tried to blame various individuals in the San Francisco office for these things, but each time we trace one of the
goddamn things back to its root, it turns out to have been my fault. This is mainly because I never seem to get my gibberish in to El Ropo [Charlie Perry, aka “Smokestack El Ropo”], who has to cope with it, until the crack of dawn on deadline day—at which time I have to get him out of bed and keep him awake by means of ruses, shocks and warnings while I feed my freshly typed pages into the Mojo Wire, which zaps them across the nation to El Ropo at the rate of one page every four minutes.
This is a fantastic machine, and I carry it with me at all times. All I need is the Mojo wire and a working telephone to send perfect Xerox copies of anything I’ve written to anybody else with a Mojo Wire receiver . . . and anybody with $50 a month can lease one of these things. Incredible. What will they think of next?
The only real problem with the Mojo wire is that it tends to miss or skip a line every once in a while, especially when we get one of those spotty phone connections. If you’re playing New Speedway Boogie in the same room, for instance, the Mojo machine will pick up the noise and garble a name like “Jackson” so badly that El Ropo will get it as “Johnson” . . . or “Jackalong” . . . or maybe just a fuzzy grey blank.
Which would not be a problem if we had time to check back & forth on a different phone line—but by the time El Ropo can assemble my gibberish & read it I am usually checked out and driving like a bastard for the nearest airport.
So he has to read the whole thing several times, try to get a grip on the context, and then decide what I really meant to say in that line that came across garbled.
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