I think Hunter always assumed he would have this stable home life, with a wife and kids and a family. In a very traditional way, he was the man leaving the homestead and bringing back the elk to feed the family. He’d come back to his stable environment, where things were nice and peaceful, and cook some food and hang out. I was right after Sandy, and in that sense, I think Hunter and I both thought we were going to create that thing again.
JANN WENNER
He took some dumb writing assignments. The bar for him at Rolling Stone was set very high, and we both were equally aware of that and wanted it kept that way. I was unwilling to offer him or accept second-rate work, so if there was an easy-money gig or some goof-off, he’d do it elsewhere.
LAILA NABULSI
In 1980, Paul Perry, an editor at Running magazine, sent Hunter a letter asking if he’d like to do a story on the Honolulu Marathon. Hunter said he would if they gave him this, that, and the other thing and flew over Ralph. We rented these two little houses for Christmas, because the marathon was in late December. Christmas in Hawaii—that was the big lure.
The houses were right on the water, and there was a pool as well. We had this image of swimming in the ocean and everything just beautiful and peaceful. No one told us that the sea is really rough during the winter months. It was raining every day. The ocean was coming over into the pool. One night we had to evacuate because the water was coming up to the houses. We felt they had sold us this idea of Christmas in Hawaii, and it was a lie.
TOM BENTON
He wrote me a note from Hawaii that said, “Tom, I am Lono.” I said, “Lono? What the hell does he mean, he’s Lono?” So I looked it up. Lono was a kind of crazy Polynesian god that used to carry a little boy-child around. The people put him in a canoe and sent him away and never saw him again, and then Captain Cook arrived, and they thought Captain Cook was Lono returned. The people had a lot of guilt about it, and then they had to shoot Captain Cook. They had to kill him, so they’d done Lono in twice. So when Hunter wrote to me and said, “I am Lono. I feel at home here and I know I am Lono,” I called him up and said, “For God’s sake, don’t tell anybody over there that you’re Lono. This would be too much for them to take.”
LAILA NABULSI
Fireworks were legal in Hawaii, so we bought red Chinese firecrackers that come in a long strip. You’re supposed to uncoil them and hang them on a tree or something. They came wrapped up in a tightly wound cake, and we found that if we just lit the end of the fuse of the cake, the whole thing would blow up like a bomb.
The first person we bombed was Captain Steve, who was this old guy Hunter had found who had a little shack on the Big Island, and a big boat, a humdinger. Hunter’s whole mission out there was to catch a fish—a marlin—and Captain Steve was an obvious fan and slightly in love with Hunter.
They would go out deep-sea fishing all day, and Hunter just couldn’t catch a fish. Hunter would berate Captain Steve endlessly: “You don’t know how to get marlins. . . . There’s no fucking marlin. . . . You don’t know what you’re doing.” Poor Captain Steve was practically having a breakdown by the end of it. I would say to Hunter, “He’s a shell of a man. You’ve ruined him.”
RALPH STEADMAN
Hawaii was a hell of a trip, though we didn’t catch a fucking thing. Hunter went back later because he couldn’t stand the shame of not catching a marlin. It was a hopeless task. If we went south, we should have gone north. And the engine stuck. I felt worse than ever because I hate fucking boats. I was doing it because I thought, “This is the story, and we have to do a story.” Everything was urgent. Everything had to be done.
We’d show up at these places and start hanging out and see what turned up. Really. He didn’t know what the story was either. He just had these odd sayings. “There are no fish. Why did they lie to us?” Or another: “Fuck you, I’m rich.”
LAILA NABULSI
Captain Steve had this tiny little place that was about the size of a hotel bathroom with a little porch, and we went over there in the dead of night. We were giddy like teenagers. We took the cake of firecrackers and put it on the porch, and Hunter lit it.
RALPH STEADMAN
Hunter said it sounded “like God’s own drumroll.” Isn’t that nice?
LAILA NABULSI
We turned around after we got far enough away and drove by to see what was happening. Hunter turned the headlights off as we got close, and there was Captain Steve, naked, with a hose. The house was on fire.
I know that Captain Steve knew it was Hunter—who else could it be? We drove home laughing hysterically, but we also felt like kids who’d gone too far. The terrible thing was that we didn’t know that Captain Steve’s eighty-year-old father had come to visit and was in the house when we bombed it.
RALPH STEADMAN
As an Englishman, a Welshman, I don’t think I could ever feel wholly comfortable in that situation. I was there as an interloper. I was there because this was the story, and I was asked to go and do it.
LAILA NABULSI
Somehow, all of this turned into the idea of a book. We had so much fun material from all of it, and Ralph was doing all these drawings. The book was also really just a way to keep going back to Hawaii. Hunter would say, “I can’t remember what it’s like—what it smells like. We’ve got to go back.” But every time we left Hawaii, I thought, “We can never come back again. We’ve burned every bridge.”
ALAN RINZLER, the former head of Rolling Stone’s book division, edited Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.
Hunter wanted to do a whole book about their experiences in Hawaii, and that eventually became The Curse of Lono. There are some wonderful things in that book, but it was also the beginning of the end—at least of my tenure with Hunter.
When we got to work on Lono, things began to deteriorate. Hunter was having so much trouble writing. The effects of alcohol and drugs didn’t paint a pretty picture. It was ugly, and it was debilitating, and it made it very hard for him to work. I was now a director of Bantam Books, and we gave Ralph and Hunter a lot of money, and we signed a contract—and nothing happened. Finally I flew out to Woody Creek and moved in at Owl Farm for several days, and we started to hammer out the book.
He began to evolve this concept of the original voyage of James Cook, the English explorer, who was mistaken for the Hawaiian god Lono and worshipped—and then killed—by the Hawaiian natives. Meanwhile, he wanted to write about how he had gone deep-sea fishing and caught this huge marlin—which he actually, finally did, just like Hemingway. The fishing story got sort of grafted together with the Lono story until Hunter truly convinced himself that he was the reincarnation of Lono and that everybody was out to kill him.
LAILA NABULSI
It was a nightmare. I had a huge stack of pages that sort of ran in order, and Alan and I stood at the kitchen table every day and went through it. Hunter would get up at four or five, and he was supposed to write an outline or maybe some transitions, some things that would make it work. I’d have to go through all the pages and changes with him, because Alan would have left by now, so I’d have to tell Hunter about the whole day and then get him to write.
Hunter would say, “Okay. Okay. I’ll write the transition.” And then he’d write something completely different—which was fantastic but had nothing to do with what you actually needed. Sometimes he just wouldn’t do it—he’d go off on something else. He’d be up all night, and then the next day Alan would be back. It was a nightmare, and it was endless.
ALAN RINZLER
The first time I visited Owl Farm we nailed the concept, and I went home to New York. And nothing happened again, so I had to go back. Hunter wasn’t returning my calls, didn’t even want me to come, and when I got out there, didn’t want to let me in the house. He was really hostile, and he didn’t have anything, and he didn’t want to work, but I hung in there and stayed and stayed. He did anything to distract me, and himself, from the work that had to be done: We’d drive in his convertible
at high speeds with the top down into Aspen for these expensive meals that we couldn’t eat; he’d lock us in some concrete bunker and set off long strings of firecrackers that left us stinking of cordite and deaf for hours—anything to avoid actual work.
LAILA NABULSI
Hunter agonized over everything. Then Alan had to come out and torture both of us. Hunter hated the book. That was the other thing: You’d be working so hard, and then Hunter would give up and say, “It’s shit. It’s horrible. It’s terrible. It’s not worth it. Fuck this.”
ALAN RINZLER
One night Hunter fell asleep, or passed out, and I went all over the house and down to the basement and gathered up every single manuscript page or notebook I could find that was about this project, including—literally—brown shopping bags with notes scrawled all over them. I made a big pile of them, wrapped them up, and flew back to New York. I copied everything and sent the originals back to him with a note that said, “Thanks, Hunter. You’re done.” I put The Curse of Lono together in the basic form that it came out in, which is why it’s a little incoherent. There are a lot of disparate elements. It was a patchwork, a cut-and-paste job. It doesn’t quite make sense, but the language is really good. That was basically the end of our relationship.
JANN WENNER
To me, he was just spinning his wheels. I don’t know where Lono fit into what he was supposed to be doing. I never read it. It just seemed like an indulgence, a chance to live the easy life and sport-fish in Hawaii for not too much work But even easy work was hard for Hunter.
MIRIAM GOOD and her husband, Lloyd, own Sugarloaf Lodge on Sugarloaf Key in Florida.
Hunter stayed here quite often starting in 1980. He was in Key West, and then he came out here. I don’t think he planned to stay that long, but the Mariel boatlift started. Castro let 130,000 Cubans leave the country, and Miami Cubans came down here with their boats to pick up their relatives. When you looked at the highway, it was a stream of boats being towed. There was no food left in Key West because they took everything with them on their way down here. Then Castro opened up the jails and the asylums and said, basically, that if these people wanted to take their relatives, they had to take the rest of these people. It was a wild time down here.
Hunter was staying at the lodge when all of this was going on, and he convinced Esquire magazine to fund him to write this story. I don’t think he ever wrote it. He pretty much watched it all happen from the TV in the bar. Whether or not he was writing at the time, I don’t know, but he was doing something all night long, and then he’d sleep for a couple hours and then so on.
LAILA NABULSI
Hunter said he wanted to write a book called The Silk Road. He wrote a long memo to his agent: “A story about people who got caught in the fast and violent undercurrents and, finally, the core of the action of the great Cuba–to–Key West Freedom Flotilla in the spring of 1980—a bizarre and massively illegal ‘sea lift’ which involved literally thousands of small private boats that brought more than 100,000 very volatile Cuban refugees to this country in less than three months. . . .” He was going to do it next, but he never did.
MIRIAM GOOD
I have no idea how he found out about our lodge. There was a group of people having dinner in the bar one night, and somebody recognized Hunter, and he and Laila checked in the next day and stayed for a few months. They settled into his routine, and we all got used to that. Soon he had a relationship with everybody in the family. He and my husband, Lloyd, had some kind of sports bet going on every day. Hunter had breakfast in the bar, usually around noon, with his drinks lined up, and everybody got used to that. It was quiet, and people didn’t harass him. It just seemed to suit him, and he went out and about doing what he did. There were times when he had his boat here and he went out, but whether or not he fished or what he did, I don’t know.
We were only a party to the alcohol part, but the rest went on too, and of course in those days in the Keys that was not a problem. Bill Murray and several other friends came down, and they all had a wonderful time. He had just done the Hunter part in the Where the Buffalo Roam movie, and he had Hunter down. It was almost scary—he had the walk and all the rest of it.
We have two sons, and we had a dolphin in those days, and Hunter was very involved with all of that.
LAILA NABULSI
They had a one-eyed dolphin called Sugar. You had to go get the fish to feed the dolphin from the kitchen, and then you had certain tricks that you made Sugar perform, like jumping and singing, by doing the right hand movements. One night Hunter jumped in the pool with her, with his snorkel and everything. He just said, “I’m going to talk to Sugar,” and Sugar came up and stood straight on her tail in front of him and yapped at him for fifteen minutes. And Hunter talked back to her. They had a whole relationship.
MIRIAM GOOD
He was very accessible and very friendly to everyone. Then one day they left early in the morning, and they left a copy of The Great Shark Hunt, and Hunter wrote in the front of it:
Dear Lloyd and Miriam,
You have too many dependents for me to list all their names on this page. Fuck the doomed. Indeed—but you ran a decent hideout. It was a good place to hide from the movie. I’ll call you about my boat—we need to get it back to Boog’s.
And thanks for running a good inn, which is better than a bad book.
Then I guess he decided he’d been too nice—on the next page it says:
Nevermind—I caught some weird disease in this place, and I will damn well see you in court.
LAILA NABULSI
John Belushi came up to stay with us at Owl Farm in September ’81, and he was not in great shape. Hunter was trying to distance himself because Judy was there with John. John kept getting in these situations—he stole somebody’s truck and went to town, or he’d hitchhike into Aspen, probably to buy drugs, and then come back hours later. Hunter didn’t want to be perceived as the one who was making John fall off the wagon, so Hunter kept saying things like, “I’m going to the Holiday Inn to watch the football games,” and try to get away from all of that. Hunter wasn’t mad at him. He was basically in “It’s not my fault” mode. He didn’t want to be blamed.
After John died in March of ’82, Hunter and I went to New York for the memorial, and then he went home and I stayed to look out for Judy. But then Hunter decided that he and I were going to go back to Hawaii, and there was no question—I was going back to Hawaii. I was going to be with Hunter. I was with Hunter. I just had a short break because of the John stuff.
But this time, a certain amount of the fun seemed to have gone out of our lives. I wanted to move into another phase, and I know that’s what Hunter and I had planned, but I guess I had assumed that everything would go differently than the way things were going now. And when it didn’t or it couldn’t, it became harder to deal with all the other stuff.
After John died, things changed, because then I was more worried about Hunter. It got harder. I was tired. I wanted things to be more normal again, and they were starting to get less normal. More stuff was going on, and it was just getting a little crazy. John dying was really part of it.
BOB BRAUDIS
Hunter and I were friends way before I became sheriff. And over almost thirty years I don’t believe I’ve lost any friends because I put on a badge and strapped on a six-shooter. The relationship with Hunter has been puzzling to a lot of people. I don’t believe that drug use is a crime of moral turpitude. We had a simpatico philosophy regarding drug use, and I didn’t see a lot of craziness in Hunter’s drug use. The guy could drink twenty-four hours a day and never get stupid. With Hunter’s peccadilloes, or some of Hunter’s behavior that I didn’t approve of, I treated it as a challenge to help him. So I accepted the fact that Hunter was a recreational user or an addicted user of several substances, most of them legal. My main relationship with Hunter in the criminal realm was that he did commit some crimes, and he wrote about them, and he was prosecuted and worke
d out plea bargains most of the time. Hunter was very discreet in protecting my reputation, and I accepted his lifestyle.
One thing that always defined our relationship was the fact that I think he was a little afraid of me—and I wanted to keep it that way. He would admit it. When I’d give him the stink-eye, I could tell he was listening. He was pretty fearless, but when I told him, “Hey, you don’t do this shit,” he’d listen.
GEORGE STRANAHAN
A lot of us who knew him well were concerned about the excess and the self-destructive behavior. As a friend, I felt that I at least had to talk to him about it—if not for his sake, at least for my sake, so that I could say I tried. So I’d say a few words like, “Hunter, I’m worried about you.” Many people did that. 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.” That kind of thing. And it was so logical that you’d say, “Okay, I’m not going to revisit that conversation.”
ED BRADLEY
It was Hunter’s life. He had been doing it most of his life, and I didn’t feel that I was going to be the one to change him, because I don’t think he wanted to change. I think he enjoyed that life, and he would have been miserable living any other way. Hunter was an alcoholic, a serious alcoholic. Hunter got up and drank for breakfast, he drank all day, he drank all night. And he was a drug addict—he started with drugs in the morning, he used drugs all day, he used drugs all night, and sometimes he’d stay up for two or three days on drugs. He was a serious addict.
Once I said, “You know, man, I’m really worried about you. How can you continue like this? What kind of shape are you in?” And he said, “Well, you’re right, Ed. . . . I could stand to lose ten pounds.”
JANN WENNER
Hunter was a drug addict. He loved drugs. He took massive amounts of them. And if you were with him, you took them. I’m sure some people didn’t—I suppose—but for most everyone, it was almost impossible not to. He enjoyed drugs, all kinds of them, day and night, really with no break for years on end. At a certain point I don’t think he enjoyed it anymore, but by that time he was hopelessly addicted.
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