It was a great moment nonetheless. It reflected our crusade to tap both Hunter’s talent and Rolling Stone itself to set a sweeping agenda, and for the magazine to make a lot of things happen. Of course, the new political dynamic of Watergate soon made all that moot.
SANDY BERGER
I still have the tire iron.
PAT CADDELL
Elko put Hunter off politics for a long time. For almost two years he didn’t get involved, and then when Teddy Kennedy was going to run, Hunter reappeared as a Carter fan and beat me into supporting Carter—then blamed me later for supporting Carter. That was a fucking scene you wouldn’t believe.
He was also very serious about running for the Senate in ’74, when Gary Hart was going to run. I was helping Gary at the time. He hadn’t decided to run yet; he was still exploring it. And then Hunter called me one day and he said, “I’m going to run against this Gordon Allott asshole out here in Colorado. Don’t you think we should organize a campaign?” This was in ’73. And then Gary was going to get in the ring, so Hunter said, “Okay, that’s fine. I’m going to run as an independent. I’ll help Gary.”
It was serious enough at one point that Gary told me that he knew Hunter really well too, and it was clear this wasn’t going to work. My point to Gary was “Let’s let Hunter figure this out himself.” The thing was not to say to Hunter, “You can’t do it.” That would be, uh . . . a real bummer. So Hunter and I had these conversations about what the campaign would be like. We would talk about how he wanted to hunt Allott down and harass him. He was going to run his ass into the ground. It wasn’t a joke. He wasn’t the dilettante that people sometimes make him out to be. That would be his defense when it didn’t go well, but I’m telling you, in his heart he really was serious, and that’s what Hunter was not given credit for.
But once Hunter realized that Gary was serious and was nominated and might win, he dropped out. Hunter liked Gary. He also understood his complications and contradictions, and when Gary was being a horse’s ass.
RICHARD GOODWIN was a speechwriter and adviser to John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.
I saw Hunter all the time in Washington, and then he came up to Ethel Kennedy’s house, Hickory Hill, when I was staying there around ’74. There’s no doubt Hunter liked the Kennedys. Later I brought him up to Jackie’s apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York because he’d said he wanted to meet her. He was very quiet and polite and courteous, but I figured one meeting with Hunter was probably enough for her, so that was it. But at Hickory Hill, I’d wake up and look out the window, and there would be Hunter in the swimming pool. I found out later that Ethel was a little worried about Hunter’s presence around the kids—but mostly he just swam.
JANN WENNER
He was letting his energies and his talent dissipate. Take his assignment for the Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle.” He should have just written an 8,000- or 10,000-word description of it and been done with it. There were all the characters, and the craziness that was going on in Zaire at that time. It was one of the best sports stories of a decade, and Muhammad Ali was one of his idols. He was from Louisville, and Hunter always said he was some sort of distant relative.
RALPH STEADMAN
Hunter and I were in Zaire for about two weeks. Bill Cardoso was there from the first, and at one point the fight was postponed and we were all given the option to go or to stay, and Cardoso decided to stay. He became an absolute wreck drinking and smoking and developed a vicious cough. I made a drawing of him and I called him Mr. Mandeliman. I’ve got all the drawings from the trip, and I never used them again because Hunter never filed a single word about the fight, or about Zaire, or about anything.
I couldn’t even go to the fight—Hunter had sold our tickets on the day of the fight itself, maybe ten minutes before we were supposed to be there. I watched it on television.
NORMAN MAILER, the novelist.
Zaire was fascinating. There were a great many of us writers there who loved prizefights and were absolutely, completely attached to the idea of the fight. It was a very exciting fight, and we’d covered it for weeks. Then Hunter came in, and it was so typical of Hunter: Here was the convocation of experts, and his experience throughout most of his life was that convocations of experts were concentrations of bullshit. He figured he was going to ace the whole goddamn thing. He had a basic knowledge that he wasn’t going to learn more about prizefights in a week or two than the rest of us had already known for years, and so he had to make an end run around us. And what he decided to do was to see the fight with Mobutu, who was the dictator of Zaire. He made a real effort to get together with Mobutu—and failed.
RALPH STEADMAN
I said, “That’s it, then, isn’t it, Hunter? It’s done.” And that’s when he said, “If you think I came here to watch a couple of niggers beat the shit out of each other, you’ve got another thing coming.” That was Hunter—he was terrible. He said, “I’m not going now. I don’t want to see the fucking fight. You can go somehow, Ralph. I don’t know how, but watch it on television or something. We didn’t come here for that. We’re doing something else. I’m trying to find out where the money came from to put this fight on. Not the fight itself. That’s not important.” All Hunter was interested in was finding out where John Daly—this entrepreneur who was supposed to be the promoter of the fight—had got the money from to put the fight on.
On the night of the fight, Hunter had a big bag of marijuana, and he took a bottle of Glenfiddich I had bought him down to the pool with a bucket of ice and the bag, threw the marijuana into the pool—everyone else was off watching the fight, you know—and dived into the middle of the marijuana and then just hung by the side of the pool, smoking and drinking and loving the whole meaningless nature of it.
I did a drawing of the eighth round when Foreman went down after Ali hit him. I drew the punch. I made it up almost as though I had seen it. I had to.
NORMAN MAILER
The bet he’d made was that the fight would be a bummer, and that he could still ace us even though he’d spent his time swimming when the fight was on. Instead it was one of the great fights of all time, and he was shut out entirely from it.
I saw him on the plane home, and there he was, full of good spirit and knocking down a great many beers in a row. I remember that in terms of his immense adaptability—he’d take huge risks, and if they blew up on him, so what? There was always another risk to take, and he’d move on. But that was probably one of the least successful ventures he went on.
The first time I had met him, years earlier, I saw a totally different Hunter. He was just a young writer on the make and not very interesting—a rather conventional sort of guy. He was sort of doing some journalism and talked to me about his ambitions a little bit. Nothing out of line, nothing unpleasant, but I wasn’t that impressed. Afterward, of course, I was most impressed with him, because of his daring, but when I first met him I never would have pictured him being the guy who would break that many shibboleths one after another and take that many chances. Damned interesting—it was like he left one part of his personality behind and got into another.
SANDY THOMPSON
When Hunter was in Kinshasa, I went to see a therapist for the first time. Hunter, of course, was very anti–anything like that. It was ridiculous. He thought there was absolutely no merit to therapy, to psychiatry—none whatsoever. I had tried to get better on my own, and the reason I wanted to get better was really so that I could be better for Hunter. I could maintain for Juan—I thought, anyway, that I could maintain for Juan.
I found a Gestalt therapist, and he saw me for three hours in one session every week for twenty-five dollars—at his place. After the very first time I saw him, I walked outside, and it was a beautiful day in September, and I thought, “Maybe, maybe I’m okay. Maybe I’m okay.” I had no self-esteem, no self-worth. I mean zilch. And when I came out of that three hours, my eyes opened and I could feel the air and see the sky—and so
I continued to go to him.
Then Hunter got back. I came into the house, and he was passed out on the couch in the kitchen. He had malaria, because of course he had taken too many malaria pills, and he didn’t wake up for two days. Then he woke up and he gave us some ivory that he’d stolen and gotten through customs, and then he passed out again for a long time.
PAUL PASCARELLA
Sandy was his wife through thick and thin. One time Hunter and I had a fight about Sandy. I don’t want to say what it was exactly, but he wasn’t treating her very well. I was living out in Castle Creek and I said, “Sandy, listen—if it gets too intense, come and stay.” Hunter went crazy when he found out that I told her that. He said, “I’m going to shoot your horses.” I just said, “Fuck you, Hunter. You shoot my horses, I’ll just come over and shoot your whole fucking place up.” We got into this thing for about a day or two. It didn’t go on for too long, and it never really went into action.
JIMMY BUFFETT, the singer-songwriter, moved to Aspen in the early seventies.
I lived down-valley, and through a mutual friend, I got invited over to Hunter’s house—of course I was a huge fan—and then he came down and saw my show in Denver with a bunch of guys from Aspen, and we just immediately locked in. There was a little bit of a groupie thing for me in the beginning because Hunter was such an outrageous character.
When Hunter and Sandy were fighting like crazy, Hunter called me and said, “I gotta get Juan outta here.” I said, “Well, have him come stay with me.” He came out and was kind of our cabin boy. I took Juan sailing for a summer on the boat. Things were so crazed in the domestic scene, but there was always a soft side of Hunter that people didn’t see. All that other stuff, to me, was a front that Hunter put up because he loved whipping people into shape, but under there was a pretty interesting guy.
MARGOT KIDDER
I got to know two Hunters—and I expect there were about twenty of them. But women got to know a side of Hunter that men didn’t, because of that Ernest Hemingway nature of feeling very competitive with other men. They feel a great need to keep their macho up in the presence of other guys. But there was a side to Hunter that I think almost all women who got to know him saw—God knows I saw it—which was a very sad, sweet, lost little boy who was very eager to please.
Hunter and my husband would be strutting around trying to out-peacock and out-drug each other. I used to scream at him, “Don’t kill my husband!” After spending these nights having tried to snort as many drugs with Tom as possible, Hunter would come over the following day and just talk to me, being very contrite and very concerned about my baby, and talking a lot about his son, Juan, and how much he loved him. He’d bought Juan a blowgun, which seemed an odd gift for a five-year-old.
SANDY THOMPSON
When Hunter finally realized I was seeing a therapist, he was very angry. Obviously, for him, if I got well, I would leave him—which is exactly what happened. But on the nights before my appointments, Hunter would try to keep me awake. I’d go downstairs to the basement. He’d follow me. If I’d start to fall asleep, he’d poke me with his elbow to wake me up.
I saw the therapist for six months. Maybe the second or third time, I decided, “I’m not going to do any more acid. I’m not going to do any more coke. I’m not going to do any more . . .” And he said, “Now, calm down, calm down. Just take it easy. I don’t want you to go off everything right away.” But gradually, I got rid of everything. Alcohol was the last thing to go, and it was the hardest for me.
That was the beginning of my coming out. And after a period of time, I began to get very angry with Hunter. It was so hard for him, because this woman who had adored him, who would have given her life for him, was now looking at him with these eyes that were angry. Where had the love gone? Where had that little girl gone?
I said to him, “When you’ve held someone’s head under water for eighteen years, do you think that when they come up out of the water the first thing they are going to say to you is ‘Hi’?” I mean, he understood. At least on some level. It was always hard for me to know—really hard. What was at the core? The bad guy or the good guy?
MICHAEL SOLHEIM
I always liked Sandy. When Hunter and I were in Cozumel when he was working on a story called “The Great Shark Hunt,” we got into talking about her. He went so far as to quiz me about whether I was having an affair with her. That really surprised me. Sandy and I were friends, and I’d hold her when she was in tears over stuff that was going on, but I would never do that.
JANN WENNER
I never fully understood how she could absorb all the abuse. We used to work very closely on deadlines—she was typing up clean pages, faxing them to me, keeping Hunter awake, putting him to sleep, everything. You’d always hear him in the background of phone calls, screaming violently—“Goddamn it, Sandy, you fucking dingbat, I am going to tear your fucking throat out . . . ,” and so forth, and you’d chuckle a bit and just keep working. You got used to it. Juan stayed with us in the summers, and he was an adorable but submissive kid. Sandy was, bottom line, a very old-fashioned stand-by-your-man gal, despite the hippie-and-drug trappings. We’d have dinner often after they split, and she was still devoted to Hunter—but alive and happy.
SEMMES LUCKETT managed a restaurant in Aspen in 1974.
I’m from Mississippi, and I could see that underneath all of that bluster of Hunter’s was really a southern man who appreciated manners. He was formal in a weird way. He stood up when women walked into the room.
My mama came to Owl Farm, and he was the perfect gentleman. He would send her copies of Rolling Stone whenever he had a piece in it. One day years later, Mother was in a car with my aunt, and I had to drive them to Oxford, Mississippi, to hear William Buckley speak, and my mama was reading Hunter’s latest story—which was kind of weird. But then we were in a horrible wreck, a terrible wreck, and my mama was grievously hurt and just bled all over the issue. When she came home from the hospital a couple of weeks later, she had me tell Hunter that she had laid her life on his lines. Hunter sent her a letter, written with silver and gold felt pens. He wrote, “Dear Celeste, Don’t worry—we will be in charge in heaven, and we will wallow in fun while settling many scores. Love, Hunter.”
JAMES SILBERMAN
Hunter liked people. He wasn’t a recluse; he wasn’t a misanthrope or any of those things. I think he really liked people. And once he decided you were okay, you were okay from that point on. Unless you did something.
RALPH STEADMAN
When he made an insult, the words he used were perfect. It might have been a long sentence, but it wasn’t too long. And it was deadly. It was worse than a double curse—it was a kind of contempt that no one had ever felt before or mentioned to this person to make them understand how awful they were. And the shame they would feel at hearing those words—that was something else that always came with him.
He berated most of his friends a lot, but somehow it was funny. His way of expressing love for people was to be both angry and insulting. I always thought that when he was the most rude to me was when he loved me the most. I guess if he insulted you, he really liked you. But the outrageous dressing-down that he’d give you undermined your whole sense of self-esteem. He would just tear it to bits.
SEMMES LUCKETT
Somebody once said, about my time with Hunter, that I was essentially pulling an oar in the water while Hunter was throwing matches at the wind. There were times I was furious at him. He never hollered at me, though. He was always real good about that.
Hunter had this huge satellite dish. We’d spend all afternoon calling whatever newspapers were in the town of the team we wanted to see to get somebody on the phone. I would say, “Well, look, I’m calling for Hunter S. Thompson”—and somebody there would always know about Hunter—“could you tell me what TV station is broadcasting the game today?” And they’d give me the phone number of the TV station, and then I’d call the TV station and use Hunter’s name
again, and somehow I’d be able to get to some engineer or somebody to tell me what satellite the game we wanted to watch was going to be on. But it would always be a wonderful time—fueled by massive amounts of everything.
JANN WENNER
You’d see him with drug dealers, politicians, NFL players, musicians, multi-millionaires. Hunter, like everybody else, liked the rich and famous. He liked movie stars. He charmed everybody, and people would cut him extraordinary leeway. He was so damn funny. But one of the things that hurt Hunter was that his legend started to overwhelm him; he started paying too much attention to it, and cultivating it, and brought too many people around him. He liked all the attention, and it got in his way. Fame got in his way.
I think the Uncle Duke thing in Doonesbury was bad for him. I told Hunter that he should have sued Garry Trudeau and stopped it. It was a clear appropriation of Hunter’s literary property. He used to hate Garry for it, and he used to complain, but at the same time, Hunter allowed that to happen, and in doing so he crossed a bridge that was very hard for him to come back across. In part, that’s why his political coverage fell apart: He was now too much a part of that world. His original theory was that he’d go to Washington with no concern about burning bridges. But after a while he became friends with these people, became enamored of his own reputation, and it became difficult for him to work. I don’t think he handled it all that well.
JOHN CLANCY
Hunter was always pissed off at Garry Trudeau for the Uncle Duke character. He wanted me to sue him. I told him, “You should be grateful. This guy makes you out to be friendly and nice, basically. You’re not.”
SANDY BERGER
Around 1974 and ’75, there were two convergent events. One was the emergence of Uncle Duke in Doonesbury, and the second was a long profile of Hunter done by Sally Quinn in the Washington Post. Hunter was outraged—absolutely indignant—about both Sally’s piece and the appropriation of his persona by Garry Trudeau without any kind of remuneration. Sally had, in her piece, quoted Hunter as saying something to the effect of, “I don’t know why people get so upset about my stuff—three-quarters of what I write I just make up.” He said that was defamatory and just wrong, and that he never said any such thing, and that what he wrote was the truth. At this point I was practicing law, and he wanted me to sue Garry Trudeau and Sally Quinn and the Washington Post. I listened to him go on for quite a long time and then said, “Well, I don’t think those suits would be successful, Hunter.” And he said, “Why wouldn’t they be successful? It’s self-evident!” And I said, “Well, first of all, truth is an absolute defense in defamation”—and he got so angry that he hung up. I didn’t hear from him for months.
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