Gonzo

by Corey Seymour

  You also had to know how late you could keep him up. About three days was the limit. Things would get going at a certain point, and you just had to have a feel for where he was. Had he produced eight pages? Was he on a good streak? Okay, let’s keep him up, keep him writing. At some point when the productivity started to fall and things were slowing down, you’d let him rest. But all the time you knew that in the end, like a racehorse, you were still saving strength to pull out a final twelve-hour stretch, straight through to the last word.

  SANDY THOMPSON

  What happened, of course, was more about the image. And the way it turned out was absolutely not the life he dreamed.

  JANN WENNER

  There was a divide, I thought, with people who entered his life later on. There was always this phenomenon of people who wanted to be closer to Hunter than anybody else. People would tell me how to work with Hunter, how to get him to write, the right way of handling him. I did not pay attention, but Hunter loved all that. That came with the fame and the groupies. Hunter wanted it, and everybody was getting something from the transaction, so I just smiled quietly.

  There are people, and he was one of them, who when they smile at you—Hunter had that smile—it’s as if the sun has come out, and you feel the warmth of it. A lot of charismatic people have that. Hunter invited you inside his conspiracy to have fun. Everybody felt very special, like they had some kind of moment or special understanding with him. I never begrudged anybody their time with Hunter.

  JANN WENNER

  The first time he pulled the fire extinguisher trick on me was one night in 1973 in my house in San Francisco, when we were sitting around taking acid. It was two or three in the morning; the fire was going; Joni Mitchell was on the stereo. Hunter was fussing around doing something, and I was listening to the music and quietly drifting. Hunter took this fire extinguisher sitting in the corner, aimed, and opened up on me. It’s like an explosion of chalky dust, and it’s quite unpleasant, especially if you have a head full of acid. It’s the only time I really got angry at him and told him to get the fuck out of the house. I think he was truly shocked by my reaction, but of course he loved that too, and he reveled in the story for years.

  Later that year I was at Owl Farm, and it was Sunday afternoon, and what do we do on a Sunday afternoon? Take acid and watch the football game, of course. I was never a football fan, but now I’ve got a head full of acid once again, and I’m looking at the game very intensely and listening to Hunter carrying on, and I start thinking, “Wow—these guys are like gladiators! They’re like modern-day gladiators! Like the Roman games.” I had what seemed like this wonderful, original insight, and it was “Eureka, Hunter, I’ve got the next story,” and I laid out this whole theory of the Roman empire. Well, obviously it was no new insight of any kind. But Hunter was stringing me along, knowing exactly where it was going—he being a football freak. He was on the verge of a dream assignment: writing about the NFL. He was just reeling me in.

  MARGOT KIDDER, the actress, and her then-husband Tom McGuane met Hunter in early 1974.

  Tom and I went over to meet Hunter at his hotel in Miami, where he was supposed to be writing a piece about the Super Bowl. He’d set up his mojo machine on a table, but of course he hadn’t written his article. So he said, “You—get under the table.” So we got under the table and pulled the plug in and out of this thing while Hunter fed pages that he’d just typed a bunch a random letters on, and then he got on the phone to Jann saying, “I don’t know what’s the matter with the goddamn machine you sent me—it’s not working. I’m trying to get the pages through.” And I remember thinking, “Holy mackerel—here’s a live one.”

  PAUL SCANLON

  We had a moment, which I regretted, after Hunter had finished the campaign trail book, around the time he was working on “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl.” We were sitting at Jerry’s bar, and I had the temerity to lecture Hunter, saying it was time to maybe take some time off, drop the Raoul Duke persona, lay off the drugs and the booze a little bit, and get back to being the guy who wrote Hell’s Angels. And he stared at me while he reached into his safari jacket and pulled out a tab of blotter acid. He looked me in the eye, put it in his mouth, and started chewing.

  JANN WENNER

  The continuum of Hunter’s writing was practically seamless, except perhaps for the Super Bowl. Watergate extended and continued this ongoing assignment he had covering politics, and Hunter could extend his anti-Nixon obsession that dated back at least to 1968 in an even darker and deeper way.

  Hunter expressed many times that there were similarities in our relationship and that of the cofounders of Time: I was Henry Luce, who got wealth and empire, and he was Briton Hadden, the genius who died young. He and I wanted to use Rolling Stone to get the youth vote out and to put our people in charge of the country—an extension of the sheriff’s race, in a sense. We had this common political agenda that we were working on together, and Hunter felt he was also, to some degree, advising me on how to run Rolling Stone.

  Hunter could have run the place himself. He was smarter than everybody. He had a good grasp of strategy and where people were going. He had an ability to think two or three steps ahead, or to look at the other person and their interests and their needs and what they’d want out of the situation so he could anticipate that, much like a lawyer.

  I looked to him for advice. He gave me quite a few simple but profound insights about being a leader, what the nature of that was. But I also learned never to hire a friend of Hunter’s. I tried several times. I knew all of them and I became friendly with a lot of them, but I should never have done any business with those that I did.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Failed Deadlines and a Failed Marriage

  A lot of us who knew him well were concerned about the excess and the self-destructive behavior. So I’d say a few words like, “Hunter, I’m worried about you.” But you usually only did it once, because Hunter always had an answer: “It’s my life, my decision . . . it’s how I make my living.”

  JACK NICHOLSON, the actor, is a part-time Aspen resident.

  One of the first times I met him, he pulled out a gun in the middle of a house. And me, I’m not that relaxed in that kind of situation. It was out at Monte Chitti’s house, and he was quizzing me: “Anybody who can say what this is . . . ?” He was holding a round disk that looked like a cross between a hockey puck and an alarm clock, and he was curious if anybody could guess its use. It was a pacemaker. That was when he pulled out this gun. Me and a friend of mine jumped out the window, because guns can go off—I never look at them any other way than that.

  ANJELICA HUSTON is an actress.

  Jack and I used to stay with Bob Rafelson in those first couple of years, ’73 and ’74, but by the next year or two, Jack had bought a place and we were living there. Aspen then was a place that didn’t have a lot of prejudgment. It was a kind of free-for-all—and a great free-for-all.

  The first time I met Hunter was at a New Year’s Eve party at Abatone restaurant in Aspen. There were a lot of drugs going around. I was sitting in a booth with Jack and a bunch of other people, and this guy came over and punched out the lightbulb from this hanging lamp above our table. The light and the bulb just kind of exploded and rained shards of glass down over these naked Cornish game hens on our plates. Nobody was eating them anyway. I’ve never been one to enjoy overt displays of violent behavior, but he would do these things with a smirk on his face. I don’t think he was interested in my reaction per se, but in a general reaction.

  I don’t remember a lot of discussion that night. It was pretty much him going around and punching out the lightbulbs all over the restaurant, which was not really the way for him to endear himself to somebody—or to a group at large—but everybody was very tolerant and said, “Oh, that’s Hunter.” So my first impression of him was that he was a bit of a loose cannon, a little dangerous . . . and I must say that my opinion didn’t change or alter over the years.
/>
  Jack’s known as a wild man, but actually he’s quite firmly planted, and a Taurus. He stands pretty steady on the Earth. Being around Hunter would have completely debunked that wild-man idea about Jack, because I think by comparison he was mild and very stable.

  I don’t know if I ever “wanted” to be at Owl Farm. Hunter always had a lot of work going on—the television was on; there were papers everywhere—he always had a lot of notes, data coming in. He was like someone at the controls of a master ship—you always had the idea that this had to be done, and this was urgent. There was a strategic, almost militaristic atmosphere, except that everything was very off-the-wall. It was a little bit like being down the rabbit hole with Alice.

  Whether in snow or in summer, Hunter always wore shorts, always had his cigarette holder, always had some kind of fishing hat with one side up. There was that sort of bumbling thing about him. He was very large, and he would kind of lurch, so being around him always contained, for me, the promise of something monumentally scary happening. He mumbled a lot, so I understood maybe 30 percent of what he was saying for a good number of years, but as my ear became attuned, I understood quite a bit more.

  BOB BRAUDIS is the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado. He first met Hunter upon arriving in Aspen to ski in 1970.

  I had to learn how to interpret mumblese. When you were with him, it was a lot easier. Over a staticky phone line, at first it was impossible. He could speak the equivalent of a paragraph with no spacing between the words and no punctuation.

  WILLIAM KENNEDY

  God, those rambles. He would call at four in the morning and start right up, and you couldn’t even find a point where you could say, “I have to hang up. I have to sleep.” He presumed you were vitally interested in the nuances of his relationship with his agent, whom he had just had a fight with, and how much money was involved and what she did or didn’t do, and on and on. Finally I’d have to say, “Shut up, Hunter—I’ve got to tell you something!”

  Sometimes he’d call and you couldn’t even understand what he was saying. I would listen to it two or three times on the answering machine and you’d know it was Hunter, but that’s about it.

  BILL DIXON managed McGovern’s campaign in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas.

  I was the first employee of the U.S. House of Representatives assigned by Peter Rodino to work on the impeachment of Nixon, and Hunter came out to set up his headquarters in the Washington Hilton for a few months in 1974. There wasn’t much written about impeachment of the president, but I had the Library of Congress get me as many books on the subject as they could get their hands on. Hunter arrives, and I go over to meet him that night at the Hilton, and I’m real excited because I’ve read these four books on presidential impeachment. I walk into his room, and Hunter’s got eight books on presidential impeachment. Somehow, between Aspen and his arrival in Washington, he had assembled a better library on presidential impeachment than the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives had been able to assemble.

  PAT BUCHANAN

  When I was working at the White House, Hunter wanted to talk to me. I was too busy during the week, so I told him to come over one Saturday to our Watergate apartment. My wife was a little worried after all the stuff she’d read and heard about Hunter and was asking me how wise I thought it would be to let this kind of, you know, stark raving wild man into our house, but I said, “Well, I’m a pretty fit man—I think I could handle him.”

  He came over, and we talked for a long time and then we went down to the pool. Hunter was swimming in this pool like a shark, and I was telling him about all the guys from Watergate and what they were like. He wrote it all up and described me as “a half-mad Davy Crockett storming around the ramparts of Nixon’s Alamo.” Then Chuck Colson, Nixon’s special counsel, asked me, “What’s his story?” Hunter had written that Colson should be tied by his testicles behind an Olds 88 and dragged down Pennsylvania Avenue. I told Colson that Hunter tended to exaggerate.

  PAUL SCANLON

  Hunter was trying to crash a cover piece on Nixon’s resignation and only had three or four days to do it, and when I left Friday night he was sitting in Jann’s office blasting the stereo and looking out the window with his IBM Selectric humming. When I came in the next morning, he was still sitting there—the page was blank, and his cocaine vial was empty. I felt badly for him because you could almost see the drops of blood coming off his forehead.

  JOHN WALSH was the managing editor of Rolling Stone.

  Hunter and I got through the Super Bowl piece and went into the spring of ’74, but as the summer progressed and Nixon fell deeper and deeper, it was harder and harder to get articles out of Hunter. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do it—here was the biggest story for him, the Nixon resignation, and we had all the pages he needed for coverage, and he was in Washington, D.C., and all he could say was “I can’t find the drugs. I can’t do this.” This was almost the epilogue to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and it was right in front of him—and he couldn’t do it.

  JANN WENNER

  You could think of all of Hunter’s political writing up to this point as one unified story—the Nixon story or the struggle over the American dream. He did a couple of pieces which were inspired, but after the campaign was over, Hunter thought, “Well, look—we’ve met all these people; we’ve made all these friends, and we can’t just let this base of knowledge and Rolling Stone’s reputation and credibility and its involvement with this audience and my knowledge of the players go to waste.” We wanted to keep the fight going, and he came up with the idea of the Elko conference—which then consumed him and me for another couple of months as we put it together. He nominated his list of people that we would bring to this small desert town of Elko, Nevada, at the Commercial Hotel, with this giant fifteen-foot-high stuffed polar bear inside the entrance and a low-rent casino for locals. Hunter picked the location.

  SANDY BERGER

  Jann wanted to convene a meeting in Elko, Nevada, in February 1974 to help define the future of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Jann thought of himself as something like the William Randolph Hearst of his generation, and he was going to gather the best talent he could and stick them out in the middle of no-place, and from that would emerge a manifesto. Hunter was the maestro of the manifesto. So we all went to Elko, which really is the end of nowhere. You go to Reno, and then you just keep going.

  JANN WENNER

  We got Dave Burke, who was Teddy Kennedy’s chief of staff; Adam Walinsky, Bobby Kennedy’s speechwriter; a few people from the McGovern campaign: Pat Caddell, the pollster; Rick Stearns, one of the great field organizers; and Carl Wagner, a strategist. I had in the meantime met Dick Goodwin, who had written speeches for John F. Kennedy. I liked him a lot and appointed him Hunter’s successor as a political correspondent. His girlfriend at the time, Doris Kearns, came as well. Sandy Berger, who later became Clinton’s national security adviser, was also there.

  I’m not sure exactly why Hunter picked Elko—maybe because he had driven through there a couple times, and it just appealed to his sense of the absurd: “Let’s bring these people to the middle of fucking nowhere, where we will put together a conspiracy that will win the next election.” We wanted to put everybody in a place where they could concentrate, negotiate the differences between the McGovern camp and the likely Kennedy campaign to come.

  Hunter’s symbolic object this time was the tire checker—a heavy two-foot-long wooden baton with a thick metal ring nailed to the end. It was used by truckers to knock the sides of the tires to check air pressure on their eighteen-wheelers, and he distributed one to everybody who attended the conference to use as a kind of personal gavel and totem. I’d conduct the meetings with it. We spent three days going back and forth in all-day sessions in a large suite. Hunter put American-flag decals up on everybody’s doors and a huge flag in the conference room. I remember going to pick up Dave Burke at the airport on a Rolling Stone charter—
a very distinguished, heavy-duty behind-the-scenes political operative, the guy who masterminded Teddy Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick response. We’d flown him in from New York City to make some heavy deal with another wing of the party, under our supervision.

  SANDY BERGER

  Hunter gathered what seemed like a rather copacetic group of people—which turned out to be quite the opposite. Instead of thinking about how we could define the future, the conversation quickly descended into a brutal attack on the McGovern campaign by the Kennedy people. Carl and I were still raw from having gone through this experience, so we lashed back, and this descended into a first-class food fight. And the last thing Hunter was able to do was lead a discussion—you would not hire him as the mediator for a major securities case—so he sank into despair and sank deeper and deeper into his chair. He was trying to get us to talk more about the future, but it just was getting worse and worse.

  He went off after the first day of this to a nearby truck stop and bought us each tire irons and then came back and said, “If you’re gonna fight, you might as well do some damage.”

  PAT CADDELL

  Elko was Hunter’s last moment, when he gave up on everybody. He was so fucking mad—at me and everybody else—because we weren’t taking this thing seriously enough about stopping Nixon and the war. He was expecting daily that we would somehow come up with the answer.

  JANN WENNER

  It was interesting stuff to talk about, but what it boiled down to was that if you want to win an election, you have to have a candidate. A platform, or a big theory, doesn’t really count for much. Hunter and I flew back to my house in San Francisco together with a shoe box full of cassettes recorded at Elko and labeled “The Half-Moon Tapes.” We listened to some of them, and we started to make plans. I was going to write something and he was going to write something, but in the end it was too much work.