Gonzo

by Corey Seymour

  By the end of a year, I knew Juan and I had to leave again. I had no idea how we would live, and so I decided to go to travel agency school in L.A for a week. I mentioned this to Hunter several weeks beforehand but then didn’t mention it again. I’m sure at this point he knew it was really over. He was angry and, I think, absolutely terrified. On the day of my flight, several hours before I was to leave, Hunter realized what I was doing and, for the last time, became very physically violent with me in the kitchen. He totally lost control.

  I took the flight anyway, and when I was in L.A., I was also seeing men. Hunter called one night at three a.m., and I wasn’t there. I knew that he would be angrier than angry, and when I came home a week later, Hunter had had a very bad time. Juan was distraught. I just held him and held him, and then I started moving out. When Hunter came down, I called the police because I was afraid of what might happen. When I had left the year before, Hunter had thrown my clothes out onto the driveway and set fire to them.

  JUAN THOMPSON

  This was just the world I grew up in. I wasn’t conscious of it. It was sometimes scary and a little unstable, but for the most part it was okay. But what would I have compared it to? It was only when I got to college that I started to examine my relationship with my dad, and it was only then that I realized it really was quite different from what most people experience.

  BOB BRAUDIS

  Sandy was moving out and taking what she thought was her property by agreement, and she was taking the stereo. Hunter threatened to kill her or something, and she called the cops. I didn’t go, but all the deputies who responded put on flak jackets. This was before Kevlar body armor. We had a locker filled with World War II–surplus flak jackets—the kind of thing you’d wear while flying over Berlin. So all of a sudden the whole shift is heading down to the Owl Farm wearing flak jackets because they’re afraid when they show up to protect the stereo that Hunter’s going to open fire. He had an arsenal, and everyone knew it.

  SANDY THOMPSON

  With Hunter, there was never a hint of a mature relationship. It was two people who couldn’t really be honest with each other, who couldn’t really communicate with each other, who weren’t working out differences, working out problems, making compromises—nothing like that. Hunter was the king, and I was the slave. I was the happy slave—until I was neither happy nor a slave.

  I had no life. I lost contact with my aunts and uncles and cousins, and mostly my brother. My whole world revolved around Hunter. I didn’t have friends because I couldn’t just bring them into the house, with the chaos and violence and bad tempers—you couldn’t subject your friends to that. I didn’t have time to do that, even if I would have been able, because I was taking care of him and taking care of the house. I was feeding him. I was writing whatever needed to be written. I was his executive secretary. I was his bookkeeper. I was his accountant. I was everything. I was living for Hunter and his work—for this great person, this great writer, who was so disciplined—and then when he couldn’t write anymore, what was I doing? It was sad to see. I was taking care of a drug addict—who loved me and who was also terrifying me.

  I had asked Hunter once, when he was in a rare calm mood, “Do you know when you’re about to change? Are you aware of it?” Hunter said, “Sandy, do you know what it’s like? I’m just standing here, and I have a sense that something is about to happen. And then I start to turn my head, and it’s here. The monster’s here.”

  JUAN THOMPSON

  When Sandy and Hunter separated, I sided with my mom. It just seemed like the thing to do as a child. Hunter and I had remained distant. I didn’t think he was a very nice guy.

  He didn’t take jokes very well. He was better dishing it out than taking it. I had some serious confrontations with him a couple of times, and he was not receptive to that. It was always clear that there was no point in trying to alter his habits. “That would be foolishness,” as Hunter would say. It wasn’t like he was an alcoholic who would go on a binge and then be all remorseful and say, “I won’t do it again.” No—he was totally unapologetic and unrepentant. And he was consistent. So what are you going to do?

  What I had growing up was really more a fear of discipline rather than any discipline itself. I think Hunter’s anger is well known. His anger was something that as a child I had no desire to experience. He had quite a temper, so there were some scary, scary times, especially for a child. Different people have different ways of coping with that, but my way was to try to mediate and calmly, rationally resolve things. That didn’t work well at all. It took me a long time to realize that was not what they were looking for.

  MICHAEL SOLHEIM

  Hunter and I had meeting after meeting after meeting up at my office at the Jerome about how to deal with the divorce. I’d been divorced once before, and I explained to him how it’s done. We’d try to talk about Juan, and about money, and he’d say, “I’m not giving her anything, that miserable bitch!” But mainly what had to be done was to talk him down. His energy level was too high. He was violent, in a sense. He wasn’t being violent, but he was on the verge of it, and it was something that had to be addressed. I had to tell him, “Don’t go crazy and get the cops involved.” He had a lot of anger.

  SANDY THOMPSON

  After Juan and I left, people knew that Hunter was in a lot of pain, that he was hurting. It was pretty obvious—he boarded up the front door of Owl Farm and didn’t want to talk to anybody, didn’t want to deal with anybody. He had a friend of his, who was a friend of Jimmy Buffett’s, find the saddest love songs—songs of loss—that he could think of and put them all on tapes. The friend said, “Oh my God, Hunter—I can’t do that to you. You can’t handle that.” Hunter said, “I have to. So make them.” And he made them. There’s a lot of Dolly Parton, and some just tragic, tragic love songs he listened to.

  SEMMES LUCKETT

  He wouldn’t open the door—I mean, he nailed his door shut. There was a big brouhaha among all his friends, so I called him. This was before caller ID, so we had coded rings. At that time the code was one ring, hang up, and then call back—then he would know it was a friend—and I said, “Now, Hunter, are you okay? Because this is showbiz, you know what I mean?” And he would say, “I’m okay, yeah—it’s still showbiz.”

  DEBORAH FULLER

  I first moved to Aspen in the summer of ’79, which is when I met Sandy. I was looking for an alternative school for my daughter, and somebody said, “Sandy Thompson and her husband send their son, Juan, to the Community School right up the hill from their house.” We became friends, and while Sandy and Juan were looking for a house, they lived with my daughter, Kristine, and me. Loren Jenkins and his wife, Nancy, lived in the house next door, and when it was time to deal with the divorce and Hunter wanted to see his son and talk with Sandy, he would go visit Loren and Nancy and then walk across the alley to my house.

  That’s how I met Hunter. He liked good weed, and I always had some around in those days. During the divorce negotiations, their lawyer suggested that Hunter and Sandy each have one person with them when they met, so Tom Benton and I would accompany them, but then we would leave Sandy and Hunter to themselves.

  GEORGE STRANAHAN

  Hunter’s only asset as far as the divorce was concerned was the land Owl Farm was on, which he hadn’t really paid for, and Sandy said, “Well, I own half of the land, and I don’t want it because I would have to be next to that asshole Hunter.” She basically said, “Will you trade me a little piece of land here?” and I said “Okay,” and I did the same deal with Sandy—if in the future you ever sell this land, I have right of first refusal. And you can’t sell for twelve years. And sure enough, eighteen months later, she said, “George, I’ve got a new boyfriend from New Zealand, and I’m going to sail around the world and open a coffee shop in Turkey. Will you buy my land back?” I said, “But I gave you the land. Now I have to buy it back?” And I did.

  JUAN THOMPSON

  She spent about ten yea
rs just traveling. She bought a boat and sailed on that for fifteen years or so. She did a lot of things. She’d been completely devoted to Hunter and focused on his life and concerns for sixteen years or something, and then once they were divorced, she decided to go explore other stuff. She traveled for—God, I don’t know. A long time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Wreckage in the Fast Lane

  Hunter was working on Songs of the Doomed and got in a fight with his editor over some insanely minor point. He went ballistic in the middle of the night and destroyed a typewriter—just beat it to death with a phone. There was metal Selectric shrapnel flying all over the kitchen.

  LAILA NABULSI

  Every year at Saturday Night Live they had a Seder. Being Palestinian, I never went. But one year Paul Schaffer made me go, and Bill Murray came running up to me and said, “Oh, my God—you’re alive! I talked to Hunter last night, and he said he heard you were dead. He’s staying at the Coconut Grove Hotel in Miami.” I started laughing and said, “Well, thanks. Now I know where he is. I guess that’s what he wanted me to know.”

  Billy realized he’d been totally set up. But of course I called Hunter—he was on his way to Jimmy Buffett’s place in Key West—and then Judy Belushi and I went down to visit him. I bought a white bikini and a gold bracelet and didn’t really think about it until we got down there, and then I realized, “Wait a minute—what have I done?”

  Judy went back to New York the next day, and I stayed for two weeks. Hunter was working a lot with a writer named Tom Corcoran on this screenplay that Jann had commissioned them to do called “Cigarette Key.” It was a story about dope smugglers in Key West, and Tom was ghostwriting it for Hunter. Hunter kind of enlisted him. That’s when Hunter and I formally fell in love.

  JANN WENNER

  I got a development deal with Paramount Pictures at a time when the top three films in the country were National Lampoon’s Animal House, Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke, and Midnight Express. Drugs and magazines! That’s the ticket! I had met and lined up both Michael Mann and Oliver Stone as potential directors for a script by Hunter. I was trying to get the sort of sunny Jimmy Buffett version of the marijuana-smuggling trade, but Hunter wanted to go darker. Ultimately, of course, I couldn’t bring him to deliver a script—but he was having a great time living down there on Paramount’s money. It got nowhere, but we had a great time hatching the plan for the screenplay, having dinners, and drinking.

  JIMMY BUFFETT

  I was probably responsible for his Key West years. I must have been high on something when I offered to let him use my apartment down there in those days. I was on the road, and he immediately turned my apartment into some kind of sex palace. He was trying to work on some kind of a movie for Jann, and of course he didn’t have much written. He’d talk to Jann on the phone for a long time and bullshit him to the nth degree. I’ll never forget him lying on the floor, pushing and pulling the plug in and out of the outlet for the fax machine, and then getting up and going, “Goddamn fuckin’ Jann, this piece of shit you sent me!!” He’d do that routine for forty-five minutes—putting that cord in just so it would work a little bit, and then taking it out to create a totally fake problem to buy himself a few more days. That was a pretty good Hunter trick.

  LAILA NABULSI

  He could hang out and really just be in those days—listen to music, look at the sunset, and relax. He’d have breakfast with a notebook next to him. And he’d be writing and talking—there was always something going on, whether it was the movie [Where the Buffalo Roam] that was coming up, or this script. But at that time, he was a great romantic. He liked the peacefulness.

  JIMMY BUFFETT

  Hunter loved Key West because in those days there was such a crazy end-of-the-world mentality down there. There were still cockfights right down the road, and the navy was there, and there were tourists and a whole drug culture.

  There were times when Hunter was way out of control, and I’d stay away from him, and I would tell him so. I always tried to position myself so that I could leave and never get put in charge of Hunter. I had enough crazy characters in my band.

  I did have to have a conversation with him once. I said, “You know, I got to live in this apartment. You guys have got to kind of take it easy here. You can stay here, but you’ve got to watch the rules.”

  About two months later, I was on the road and got a call from my accountants in California about a $10,000 or $12,000 phone bill. I don’t know how a phone bill like that was even possible, but Hunter made it happen. I can’t remember whether I ever got that money back.

  I introduced him to the Amazing Rhythm Aces, which was one of this favorite bands, and to Jim Harrison, and I know I introduced him to my brother-in-law, Thomas McGuane—and when those two were running together, when they were both fueled up, it was quite a thing to see.

  ANJELICA HUSTON

  I remember the first night I met Laila. Hunter had brought her over to Jack’s house in Aspen at Maroon Creek, and Jack was having a Jacuzzi. She had just come back from a trip to Florida with him. Hunter went downstairs to talk with Jack, and I stayed to talk with Laila. I think they must have left around four o’clock in the morning. She and I had a lot to say to each other, and we became instant friends and have been best friends ever since.

  LAILA NABULSI

  Later that year, Hunter and I went to San Francisco, and then we visited Billy Murray in L.A. and stayed with him. He was starting to shoot Where the Buffalo Roam. Hunter loved Billy, and he was happy about Billy being in the movie, but I don’t think he was too happy about the script, and he got less fond of the director, Art Linson, as time went on. We didn’t go to the set that much.

  Later we came back for the filming of the ending—they thought it didn’t work very well, and they wanted Hunter to write a voiceover. We stayed at the L’Ermitage. Hunter wrote a beautiful voiceover about Oscar: “Gone but not forgotten. Forgotten but not gone. I won’t believe it until I can gnaw on his skull with my very own teeth”—that kind of thing. In the end, Hunter and Linson did not get along very well at all. Hunter thought his choices were cheap and silly, and the movie didn’t have the weight or the aesthetic that he would have wanted.

  MITCH GLAZER was a twenty-two-year-old writer for Crawdaddy when he met Hunter through John Belushi.

  Hunter’s presence is so strong that it fucks actors up. When they do him, an interesting thing happens. I was around Billy a lot right after he did Where the Buffalo Roam. I’d see him do sketches on Saturday Night Live and not be able to shake Hunter. People were coming and talking to him about it. And then when we did Scrooged, years later, there were still scenes where I’d see Billy doing Hunter.

  The difference between Murray and Belushi or Hunter is that Billy would take no for an answer. They wouldn’t. Hunter and John both shared a sense of possibility, and they seemed to have no limits. There was no governor on the night. It was like being around Huck and Tom, going off on adventures. Everything was possible, and they had total access, and so you found yourself in really exciting, really strange places, from sitting with Louis Malle and Candace Bergen overlooking Central Park South to some weird drug dealer’s place in a sweaty back room on Avenue A at five in the morning.

  LAILA NABULSI

  I went back to Saturday Night Live in the fall of 1979 and then back out to Aspen on Thanksgiving, and that’s when Hunter sort of proposed. I moved in the day before New Year’s Eve, which was my twenty-fifth birthday. Bill Murray and his girlfriend were staying with us.

  A lot of the local wackos were used to coming over at any time of the day or night, but I decided that that couldn’t go on all the time, and I had to kick a few people out. So things changed a little bit. I settled into getting up, reading the paper, making breakfast, opening the mail.

  Hunter used to get up around four in the afternoon. There were usually calls to make and things going on and requests for this or that. There was the running of Owl Farm. I would pick up
supplies and peacock food from the co-op. We built a cage on the porch so you could observe them at night from inside the house. They had a pecking order, and you’d get to know them. There was one named Hannibal; there was an Oscar. We had a cat that just showed up one day and stayed, Jones. Ralph Steadman did a book all about Jones. He was a great character. He tolerated us, basically. Later he had that other cat, Screwjack, which showed up in a snowstorm.

  ANJELICA HUSTON

  Laila always seemed to be easy and pragmatic and normal in terms of her day-to-day behavior, and very careful with Hunter. She provided him with a sort of social legitimacy. She cushioned him. It was almost as though she could explain him. She interpreted him and understood him in a nonjudgmental way, and enjoyed him, whereas I’m a bit more catlike. I don’t like public disruption, wild trajectories—and that was always the atmosphere around Hunter: Anything Can Happen. Her acceptance of occasional—well, much more than occasional—lunacy was in fact a comforting thing. She was very brave.

  LAILA NABULSI

  I felt I could talk to him about anything. I mean, it wasn’t just a romantic thing. Hunter understood me in ways nobody ever had. When it came to relationships, Hunter was very conventional. We were engaged, and there was a formality on some level which makes you feel very comfortable. I always knew I was loved, and he knew he was loved.

  We did a lot of family stuff, actually. My mom came out and stayed with us, and we went and visited Hunter’s mom, and we went to his brother Davison’s for Christmas, and we invited them out. We also had Juan on and off. He was about fifteen at the time. Hunter was a really good dad in a lot of ways—he was very consistent and had a good moral sense of what was right and wrong. He didn’t make Juan behave in a certain way; it was more just about manners in general. Juan might get away with being a little weird, but he would never get away with treating me badly.