JANN WENNER
I guess if you look at any writer of his stature, with that kind of talent, they go through periods when their stuff is genius and periods when their stuff is weak. We tried to put him on another campaign in ’76—he had been down in Georgia a couple of years earlier with Ted Kennedy and saw Carter give a speech that apparently blew his mind—but he didn’t really engage with the Carter campaign.
JIMMY CARTER is the thirty-ninth president of the United States.
In 1975, Hunter spent a few days in our home because I was contemplating a presidential campaign. He interviewed me for many hours, tape-recording extensive conversations about every conceivable subject, some of which were quite discomforting. Later I learned, with some relief, that he had lost all the tapes.
He tried for another session of interviews after I became a prominent candidate, and my staff tried to schedule certain times for him to fit in with other journalists, but Hunter felt that he should be given top priority in order to replace the lost tapes. He threatened my press secretary, Jody Powell, if he didn’t gain immediate access—one night he even built a fire in front of Jody’s hotel room door in an attempt to smoke him out.
BILL DIXON
Hunter’s intuition and instincts were better than most of the hundreds of members of the national press corps that I’ve dealt with in the last thirty-four years. Somehow he managed to smell out the truth while others got bogged down in the facts. When no one had ever heard of Jimmy Carter, Hunter went down to cover Carter’s Law Day speech in ’74 and came back with the only recording of the speech in existence and said, “Listen to this. This guy is the real thing.”
JIMMY CARTER
Much later, while my family was skiing at Aspen, Hunter would join us to talk about old times and other places, telling me that he still had my Law Day speech in his automobile and still made everyone listen to it.
JACK GERMOND
In ’76, we were covering the Florida primary and staying at a hotel off lower Biscayne called the Four Ambassadors. Hunter was there and called me on the phone one day and said, “Can you come to my room? I’ve got a problem, and maybe you can help me.” So I went to his room, and as it turns out he’d been having a sort of writer’s block about Jimmy Carter. He’d heard Carter give this Law Day speech, and it impressed the hell out of him, but he couldn’t get started on the piece. I walked into the living room of his suite, and he’s sitting there in his underwear with a big iron tub full of ice and Heineken and a bottle of gin and a bunch of grapefruit and a typewriter set up on this table, and all around the room were thirty or forty wadded-up sheets of paper. He’d start a lede for his piece, decide it wasn’t any good, and rip it out and ball it up and throw it away. He thought I could help because I knew Carter so well—I knew Carter earlier and better than most people at that time—so we tried to walk through it. I said, “What are you trying to say in this piece?” He said, “I’m trying to say essentially that Carter is a very different kind of cat.” I said, “Why don’t we start there? ‘Jimmy Carter is a very different kind of cat.’ What’s wrong with that?” And all he could say was “Nah—that isn’t quite what I mean!”
He told me that he didn’t feel comfortable with the fact that he liked and admired Carter because of that speech. He said it made him feel odd.
DAVID FELTON
I don’t think there was an editor at Rolling Stone that worked with Hunter after “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” that didn’t at one point break down in tears. I did myself.
The problem was, when he was on cocaine, from my perspective, he really had a hard time concentrating on his writing. It would be very frustrating to him. He couldn’t write more than one sentence that was about the same thing as the previous sentence. He’d be coked up, plus he’d be on uppers and all this other stuff, and he would mojo you, wire you three or four paragraphs, and then you would have to spend the next few hours trying to make the sentences deal with each other by adding some transition words or something like that. He’d be up for three or four straight days struggling with a piece, and you’d have to stay up for that length of time to take the morsels as they came in and work on it, so you didn’t have any sleep either. Then he’d crash for a day or two, and you still had to stay up during that time and keep working on what he’d sent you. So basically, during a weeklong stretch you’d gotten no sleep, he’d gotten some, and you were just frayed. The copy department and the art department and the printer would all be waiting for the story, and they’d start getting disgruntled and angry. Right around this time, Hunter would pull some sort of bullshit—he’d make some sort of serious threat or something, and you couldn’t take it—and boom: breakdown.
At some point I’d be scolding him, saying, “It’s ridiculous. You’re just fucking over everybody, even your friends.” Then he would calm down, and everything would be okay. It was just a feeling that everybody was being victimized. It was like dealing with a child—and I’ve been a child myself as a writer, so I know it isn’t easy—but you’re treating him as delicately as you can because you don’t want to get him on a tangent where he’s raving instead of writing. At some point you end up raving because it’s so difficult.
PAT CADDELL
Hunter later blamed Carter for being a disappointment, particularly since he had believed in Carter. But that’s why it’s so important to understand what it was he saw in Carter. That Law Day speech blew me away when he played a tape of it for me. Carter was speaking from notes. It was Carter talking about justice and about how rich people have justice and poor people don’t, and how he had power, and all of them in the audience had power. It was a lot about class issues. That’s what turned Hunter on about Carter.
ED BRADLEY was a Washington correspondent for CBS when he met Hunter in January 1976 in New Hampshire.
I remember it being cold and snowy, and in some big hall at a campaign event, I saw this guy in the back of the room wearing a silver jacket with “Porsche” spelled out down the sleeves, and I knew it was Hunter. He had the cigarette and, well, Hunter was Hunter. At some point, I think we ended up in the same bathroom, and we introduced ourselves to each other. He knew me from television, and I knew him from reading Rolling Stone when I was a radio stringer in Paris and then when I’d buy it at the PX in Vietnam.
There were a lot of late nights, and on a lot of those late nights I had very long phone conversations with Hunter, exchanging ideas and opinions about the campaign and what was going on. When he went back to Woody Creek, we talked a lot at night. It didn’t make any difference where you were and how late it was—you knew that Hunter was up. The last conversation I had before I went to sleep was with Hunter.
BILL DIXON
At a certain point in his life, his notoriety, his presence, would change the room or change the story. I don’t think that happened until after he was credited—probably quite properly—with having a lot to do with Jimmy Carter winning such a closely contested election.
ED BRADLEY
That May I ended up in some place close to Denver. The campaign was on a western swing, and the Carter campaign was going home. There was going to be a four-day period where there was nothing happening. Instead of going back to Washington, I went to Woody Creek, at Hunter’s invitation, and stayed at Hunter’s house. I slept downstairs in the War Room on a bed with satin sheets.
Of course, Aspen was very different then. I think there was a chicken wire fence around the airport. You had two airlines that flew in and out, and on Rocky Mountain Airways flights—which were not cabin pressurized—there was surgical tubing hanging down from the airplane’s ceiling so you could suck oxygen on the way in and out. I stayed at Owl Farm for three days. Sandy was there; Juan was there. I have pictures of Juan walking around in the yard reading a book. He must have been eleven or twelve years old. The first night I was there, we had dinner and sat out and talked, and then Hunter crashed at something like a normal bedtime because he’d been up for two or three days, so we
started off on an even keel.
MICHAEL CLEVERLY is a writer and artist who lives in Aspen.
My first memory of hanging out with Hunter was at the end of the bar at the Jerome. He and I were just sitting there having a drink, and these two hippies—a boy and a girl—came up to us. They’d been on a pilgrimage to find Father Gonzo, and there he was! They came up and genuflected and all that stuff. The girl was really buxom and wearing something that showed her cleavage very nicely. The guy was like a little dust ball, but he whipped out this vial of cocaine and said, “Do you want a bump?” or whatever we called it back then. Hunter said sure, and he took the vial, unscrewed it, poured it out on the broad’s boobs, and shoved his face in there and started snorting. He held up the vial, and there was a tiny bit left—from a full vial—and he gave it to me. I dumped the rest of it in my hand, snorted it up, and gave the vial back to Hunter. He gave it back to the kid and then turned his back on them.
Aspen was not a shopping destination. It still had more of a flavor of a western town—on the Fourth of July, people would ride their horses into the Jerome Bar, and there would be horses tied up outside. There was a pub crawl called Ruggerfest, which was a three-legged race that anyone could enter. You’d have to do a shot and a beer at every one of more than a dozen bars around the core of the town. People would keep their womenfolk inside. It was the sort of wholesome antics that you would never, ever see now. And the Jerome had the most beautiful waitresses in the whole world.
KALLEN VON RENKL started working as a cocktail waitress at the Hotel Jerome in 1975.
We used to have to wear long dresses. We had to dress very elegantly at that time. You could wear short skirts if you were the day shift, but not the night shift.
JACK NICHOLSON
For a while there, I had one of those big TV screens up in the attic, so the Jerome contingent came to my house on Sundays. We were all a no-nonsense group. I would burger them up or whatever we did. It was a good way for all of us that knew one another to get together and harrumph for whatever hideous thing we’d done Saturday night. A lot of them, frankly, were dope dealers—some of them retired and some didn’t; many of them went to jail—and a lot of them were skiers. Hunter was not one of them. Skiing takes a certain amount of effort. You’ve got to peel yourself out of bed at a certain point and get a bunch of gear on.
MICHAEL CLEVERLY
If you were talking about something that you really didn’t know that much about, that was sure to get him. He did not suffer fools gladly. He did not suffer the uninformed. I don’t care who you were—if you knew what you were talking about, he would sit down and listen. The busboy could teach him something if he had something to say. But God help you if you tried to bullshit your way through it—or get between him and a pretty girl. You’d better hope she didn’t pay attention to you. He was a stallion. God, he was unscrupulous when it came to women.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
Any meeting was the occasion for an all-night party at some saloon, Elaine’s or down in the Village, or when he became affluent, in his hotel suite, which was a circus. The food and booze from room service, the vast amount of shrimp and Chivas—nobody could eat or drink that much, not even Hunter. Eight or ten people couldn’t.
He came to a party at our house in 1977 with a pocketful of LSD somebody had given him, and a lot of people around the house were suddenly doing LSD. He came in around midnight. E. L. Doctorow was here that night—he’d been reading in Albany at the university, and we gave him a party. Hunter was speaking in Saratoga, at Skidmore, I think, and one of my students went up and brought him to our place. Doctorow was leaving out the back way around midnight. Hunter walked in the front door. They missed each other by minutes. They never met.
The party went on until four o’clock the following afternoon, when I took Hunter to the train station. Some of us never went to bed. People drifted off, but some went to work and came back. Somebody came in with a hypodermic full of Adrenalin, and Hunter injected it.
LOREN JENKINS
We shared a lot of political discussions, discussions about the state of society, a lot of interesting conversations about the world, concerns about Aspen. He was always good company. But his persona, his fame got in the way. There were really two Hunters: There was the personal Hunter that you knew as a friend, who you’d really want in a pinch. Then there was the public Hunter, which was all about show and living out his legend.
Obviously a lot of Hunter got clouded by the gonzo side, but a lot of people never understood what a great political analyst he was. In another world—without drugs—he would have been Karl Rove.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
Conversation with Hunter was no longer an exchange—it became mostly a conversation about Hunter, with all those unbelievable stories. He was always a nutcase in a way, but he kept surviving these outlandish events and ingestions and going on to produce terrific work. It was wonderful to witness this, but it wasn’t conversation like the old days. It was a monologue. Nobody could match those stories, or the personality behind them.
LAILA NABULSI was a production assistant on Saturday Night Live in 1976.
John Belushi was my best friend. One night just before the show I went into John’s dressing room—it was just a little room with a couch—and someone was lying there. I could see the shorts and the long legs and the sneakers. It could have been the pot dealer. You never knew who was going to be around.
John says, “Laila Nabulsi, Hunter Thompson. Hunter Thompson, Laila Nabulsi.” John and Danny [Aykroyd] had gone on a road trip commissioned by Rolling Stone and had stopped by Hunter’s along the way, and when they came back, John was talking about him a lot.
My fate was sealed in that second. Here was this tall, good-looking—well, actually I couldn’t even tell if he was good-looking. I couldn’t really look at him; there was all this energy going on.
After the show we all ended up at a party. Every once in a while I’d feel this presence and look up, and Hunter would be staring at me with his cigarette holder in his mouth. At some point, John came running over to me and did this typical song and dance about “I have to go somewhere. But I’ll be back. Could you take Hunter back to my apartment? I’ll give you the limo—just make sure he gets in the house, okay? I’ll be there.” I could only imagine what he was up to, but he was doing the whole eyebrows-up thing and using his best charm. I looked at him and joked, “Okay, but I’m not gonna fuck him.”
What I didn’t know at the time was that John had already gone to Hunter and said, “I need to go somewhere. I’ll give you the car. Go back to my apartment, and I’ll meet you there in an hour. Is that okay? What do you need? Do you need anything?” And Hunter pointed at me and said, “Her.”
He was staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel, and I ended up staying there with him for about two weeks. I hadn’t quite got the hang of his humor, so it was tense—because I was scared sometimes. We were sitting in the bedroom talking, and every now and again he would go into the living room, and I’d hear these weird screams—lamenting, hideous, agony-filled screams. Then he’d come back into the bedroom and pick up right where we’d left off and act like nothing happened. I thought, “He’s insane, and I have to get out of here.” I would have to get out of the bedroom and over to the door, but I thought he would do something to me if I tried to get out. And then he went out to the living room and did it again, screaming, “Oh God! . . . Oh God!!”
The third time he went out and screamed, I flipped into anger as a defense—out of fear, I think—and I said, “Stop that! Why are you doing that?” Hunter started laughing, and he said, “I can’t find my lighter.” In that second, I got the whole thing—the humor, the drama. I saw that it was a show.
I didn’t know he was married. I found that out toward the end of the two weeks. So that put me off. Plus I was only twenty-two. When he left, I was relieved; it just seemed too much. But we had this back-and-forth that went on for a couple of years. Sometimes he’d come to
town, but it was always a little weird.
SANDY THOMPSON
Juan and I had left Owl Farm and Hunter in 1977, but we came back after Hunter literally swept me off my feet at a sidewalk café in New York City. Juan was returning from a trip to Ireland with my mother, and we met him at the airport and went out to John Belushi’s for the weekend. I remember John getting the go-ahead for Animal House on the phone and turning to his cats and telling them they’d be wearing gold collars soon.
JUDY BELUSHI was John Belushi’s wife.
The most sane time I ever spent with Hunter was the first year John and I rented a summer home on Long Island. Hunter came out there with Juan and Sandy, and it was just a lot of barbecuing and boating and maybe the Wild Turkey didn’t start until eleven o’clock in the morning. It was much more of a quiet time; we had a lot of fun and we laughed a lot. I remember Sandy saying that it reminded her of her happiest memory, which she said was sitting on her couch with Hunter sleeping on one side and their baby sleeping in her lap and her dog sleeping on the other side. I could relate to that because when you have someone in your life who is so high-energy and so dangerous, there’s a real peace when they’re sleeping.
LAILA NABULSI
John Belushi had that aura of someone who doesn’t have a lot of time—that’s why he was a little frantic about everything. I think Oscar [Acosta] had that too. They were both holding on to the end of that tornado, and somehow I think they knew it was just not gonna last.
SANDY THOMPSON
Hunter and Juan and I flew back to Owl Farm to try again. Everyone was happy to see us together at Jimmy and Jane Buffett’s wedding, and everything held together for a few months. I said, “Hunter, it’s really simple: I have to stay strong, and you have to stay good.”
Gonzo Page 22