ANJELICA HUSTON
Laila’s a sensible girl. She protected Hunter a lot and nursed him a lot and cared for him, and I think it became evident to her that she just could not go on doing that. I don’t think I ever questioned Laila’s decision, and I don’t think it ever really merited an explanation. I got it. Being in a relationship like that, when you realize the person is outside your sphere of influence, you realize there really is no other thing you can do other than lick your wounds and find a quiet place.
LAILA NABULSI
John’s death had more of an effect on me than on Hunter. He didn’t act like John, but there were similar amounts of drugs around, so I started to freak out that he could die. It was a conversation I had with his doctor that set me straight about what addiction was, and what alcoholism was; that Hunter really was addicted and really was an alcoholic; that this was something that had been going on for a while, and that my life was going to be this unless he did something drastic about it. I didn’t realize then that I couldn’t make him do it.
I think he felt judged, which is not what I wanted to do. I just thought, “If you love me, you’ll do this.” There were only a couple of people who really understood what was going on: Jann and a few others. Basically, the rest of his friends had the attitude of, “He’s Hunter Thompson—what are you worried about?” There was no support system.
JANN WENNER
Laila asked me to try to get Hunter to get into AA or some program. So at her urging—beyond urging, really; it was pleading and desperation—I sat down with Hunter one night at my apartment in New York and had a conversation about it. He admitted that he screwed up his career. “Well, why don’t you do something about it? It would be great for you, and for all your friends.” I explained the benefits in terms of his writing and his ability to be productive again.
Hunter was extremely gracious. “I know you’re sincere. I know you mean well, and I appreciate you having the courage to say this to me, because most people won’t; but this is just never going to happen.” He didn’t deny anything at all. He had said to me often throughout his life, beginning much earlier than this, “I’m a dope addict. A classic, old-fashioned, opium-smoking-type dope addict. I admit that freely. That’s who I am.” And he was also an alcoholic, and that slowly destroyed his talent and finally his life.
LAILA NABULSI
I threatened to leave if he didn’t go to rehab. He finally said he’d do it, but making it happen and finding the right place was like pulling teeth. He insisted that it be someplace near the water, so we found a place near the water in Florida. The deal was he would stay there for thirty days and then I’d stay with him at Owl Farm.
He lasted a week. He had a drug dealer who lived in Florida bail him out of rehab and pick him up. That fucking guy called me and said he was going to pick Hunter up and take him to a plane, and I said, “Don’t! Let him stay there.” And he said, “Hey—it’s Hunter Thompson, man . . .” That’s when I realized that there would always be that guy who Hunter could get to go along with whatever he was doing. And there were more of them than there were of me. His counselor down there told me, “He’s not ready. He did it for you, but he didn’t do it for himself.”
His fear was that he wouldn’t be able to write—and that was the most important thing, ultimately. He had created such an edifice around him that it was hard for him to break out of it without thinking that he would be publicly humiliated. He didn’t know how to backtrack. He said he’d made a “career decision.”
That was the beginning of the end. Around September, I told Hunter that I was going to go to New York for a couple of weeks to work on this book with Judy. It was just a way to get out of there and away from everything for a minute. I took a toothbrush with me, and I never really went back.
It got to a point where I just didn’t want to be responsible. Life was getting bigger on his end, in all sorts of ways. I didn’t want to be the secretary all the time and do all the work, but it was required because who else was going to do it? Money was tight then. It wasn’t like we could have just easily hired somebody. But mostly it was because he didn’t like it. He was so private about his life at home that to him, it was weird to have somebody coming in to do the books. But I was tired and I didn’t want that job, which is what my life with Hunter was becoming.
TERRY MCDONELL was the managing editor of Rolling Stone in 1982.
When the Roxanne Pulitzer story broke, it occurred to me that this was just too perfect. Guy de la Valdene, who was a great friend of friends of mine in Montana—along with Buffett, Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison—was living in Palm Beach and was a friend of Roxanne’s, so I knew a little bit more about the story than what was appearing in the tabloids, which was sensational enough.
I thought, “Perfect. Hunter should go there.” He loved Florida. I told Jann I was going to do that, and he laughed and said, “Good luck. That’ll never happen.” And what I realized was that the two of them had determined that they were never going to do anything together again, because it was just too hard. They had pushed their particular theater too far. But I thought it would have been tragic not to go back and do it again sometime.
The relationship that Hunter had with Rolling Stone—even if it was not going to be with Jann in the same way—was important. So I proposed the story, and Hunter, of course, said no, he’d never work with that little fucker again because, of course, there were hundreds of thousands of copies of Fear and Loathing in some warehouse somewhere. I heard about it all the time, that and the canceling of the insurance in Saigon. I was immediately brought into that swamp.
But I started talking to Hunter on the phone, and I think what happened was we enjoyed it, or I filled a gap for him or something. He loved the idea that Rolling Stone wanted him to write again, because he told everyone that Jann had come crawling back on his knees. But in one of those conversations, I asked Hunter if he remembered how good it felt to really work. And that struck him, and over the next twenty years or so, he would bring that up. He had been not working much at that time. But he got that; he wanted to work, and he wanted his work to be great. I never felt adversarial with him like so many other editors have said. I felt conspiratorial.
I think that that was the little trigger that got him on the plane to Palm Beach. Of course, once he was there, the Cadillac convertibles and the wind whipping through the palm trees and the lesbians drinking champagne as they did four-wheel drifts around the corners took precedence.
ROXANNE PULITZER and Hunter were friends for more than twenty years.
Hunter and I first met in ’82 at my divorce trial in Palm Beach, Florida. He was there every day for twenty-one days, in the front row. There was Tom Brokaw, the New York Times—and there was Hunter in his Hawaiian shirt and cutoff khaki shorts and TopSiders. On the first day of the trial, when Hunter walked in and sat down, the judge said, “I’m so honored to meet you, Mr. Thompson.” He didn’t want to meet anybody else in that front row except for Hunter. I had never met him. I’d heard of Fear and Loathing, but I have to admit that at the time I was not a reader of Rolling Stone, so I didn’t know much.
The trial was a lambasting—and, I think, the first divorce trial that really stood out since the Gloria Vanderbilt custody case in terms of taking the press for that kind of ride. Maybe it was because of my husband’s name, or because I was the younger woman from the wrong side of the tracks, and now there I was in Palm Beach with two beautiful children. And we had the drugs, the sex, everything—it was the seventies, for Chrissake. I lost custody of my own children, and the only way my ex-husband could strip them away from me was to say I was a voodoo witchcraft queen and a cokehead. He had to do that to win. All of a sudden he’s saying, “She made me have a ménage à trois with her and her younger girlfriend. She introduced me to cocaine.” I was twenty-eight before I even saw the drug.
I lost everything. It was a shock—an incredible thing, a bad thing. Of course Hunter had to come to Palm Beach to cover it
for Rolling Stone.
PAT CADDELL
He really had this thing for underdogs, and he really had a thirst for justice. Even if the underdogs didn’t vote with him or understand what he did, he thought they were much more genuine than the whores. Take his Roxanne Pulitzer story. Everyone was making fun of her—well, it turns out that most people are ass-backwards motherfuckers. He exposed that community for what it was—that sort of wealthy, patrician corruption—and he put it in a social context. He was deeply passionate, and he cared, and it was not his persona to pretend to care. That story is the greatest attack on the Gatsby class since Gatsby.
From “A Dog Took My Place”
Rolling Stone 400/401; July 21–August 4, 1983
There is a lot of wreckage in the fast lane these days. Not even the rich feel safe from it, and people are looking for reasons. The smart say they can’t understand it, and the dumb snort cocaine in rich discos and stomp to a feverish beat. Which is heard all over the country, or at least felt. The stomping of the rich is not a noise to be ignored in troubled times. It usually means they are feeling anxious or confused about something, and when the rich feel anxious and confused, they act like wild animals.
There are hideous scandals occasionally—savage lawsuits over money, bizarre orgies at the Bath and Tennis Club or some genuine outrage like a half-mad eighty-eight-year-old heiress trying to marry her teenage Cuban butler—but scandals pass like winter storms in Palm Beach, and it has been a long time since anybody got locked up for degeneracy in this town. The community is very tight, connected to the real world by only four bridges, and is as deeply mistrustful of strangers as any lost tribe in the Amazon.
Some of the first families of Palm Beach society will bear permanent scars from the Pulitzer vs. Pulitzer proceedings, a maze of wild charges and countercharges ranging from public incest and orgies to witchcraft, craziness, child abuse and hopeless cocaine addiction.
The Filthy Rich in America were depicted as genuinely filthy, a tribe of wild sots and sodomites run amok on their own private island and crazed all day and all night on cocaine. The very name Palm Beach, long synonymous with old wealth and aristocratic style, was coming to be associated with berserk sleaziness, a place where price tags mean nothing and the rich are always in heat, where pampered animals are openly worshipped in church and naked millionaires gnaw brassieres off the chests of their own daughters in public.
Big names in the mud, multiple sodomies, raw treachery, bad craziness—the Pulitzer gig had everything. It was clearly a story that a man in the right mood could have fun with.
And I was in that mood. I needed a carnival in my life: whoop it up with the rich for a while, drink gin, drive convertibles, snort cocaine and frolic with beautiful lesbians. Nevermind the story. It would take care of itself. It was ripe in every direction.
LAILA NABULSI
During that first year apart, I met up with him for Thanksgiving in Grenada when he went there to cover the “war” for Rolling Stone.
MICHAEL CLEVERLY
Loren Jenkins told me about going to Grenada with Hunter. The two of them were the only journalists that brought dates to the invasion. All the rest of the guys showed up with their bush jackets and their equipment and tons of other stuff. Hunter and Jenkins showed up in Hawaiian shirts, each with a date on his arm.
JANN WENNER
I thought it was certain we were going to get the Grenada piece, but the editor who I delegated to hand-hold that one made the mistake of letting Hunter come to New York to write, and then also went along with Hunter’s work-avoiding notion that a transcript of this interview he had had with a fucking taxi driver in Grenada was going to be the larger part of the piece. It was another broken play.
It took me a long, long time to give up. For so long it had been, “That would be perfect for Hunter. Let’s try it.” Finally I had to understand that it was not worth making the phone call. It was frustrating and upsetting. So I stopped.
LAILA NABULSI
We kept having these weird trial reunions—he’d come to New York, or I’d go out there—with the idea that maybe it would be okay this time, or that we’d try again, and then I’d be crawling out of there ten days later.
But by then I had the rights to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter and I had gone to see a stage play version in England in ’82, right before John died.
LOU STEIN directed the stage play of Vegas in London’s West End.
Ralph Steadman, who lived near me in Kent, put me in touch with Hunter. Ralph thought a Fear and Loathing play was a great idea. When I first called, Laila answered the phone, and she was fairly hostile: “Who gave you permission to do this?” and “We’re not letting you do this” et cetera, et cetera, and then said, “Hunter wants to see your work.”
By the time I finally spoke to Hunter on the phone, his only comment to me was “We’re coming out to see the play, and if we don’t like it we’re going to wreck your theater.”
He came to the opening night, and of course all of the actors wanted to meet him, so he went backstage about a half hour before curtain and basically said, “Does anybody have some hash?” Some of the actors lit up with him backstage, and he then went out and sat in the absolute back row. He was slapping his knee with his hand and saying things like “Oh man!” throughout the show. And when he first saw Dr. Gonzo—the guy playing Gonzo—he howled and said, “That’s him, that’s him—I remember that.” He didn’t see it as fiction. I saw it as a play based on his book; he saw it as meeting people from his life. I’ll never forget. At the intermission, he said, “I lived that! I lived that! That was him.’’
LAILA NABULSI
Hunter and I had a great time in London. We had all these scams going on from Time Out and some other magazines to pay for the trip. Hunter was supposed to give one of them X amount of words and somebody else some other story, but when we had to check out of our hotel, we didn’t have any money. Hunter had written pages—I don’t even remember what the hell they were about—and I had all the people who were going to pay for them waiting in the lobby of Claridge’s. I would say, “Okay, give me the check, here’s the pages; give me the check, here’s the pages; give me the check . . .” Then I had to add it all up to make sure we had enough money to pay the bill. I don’t think Hunter ever went back to Europe after that.
Because of the play, I saw how the book could work dramatically. Hunter had sold the movie rights in perpetuity to this guy who was the heir to the Jergens hand lotion fortune, for twenty-five grand, in 1972 or ’73. He had tried to make a movie at one point—and at another point Scorsese was thinking of doing the movie, and he wanted John and Danny to play Gonzo and Hunter, but some weird guy was attached as the producer, and it fell apart.
Hunter didn’t really know about any of this. He’d just taken the money. But I renegotiated so that the rights reverted back to Hunter in seven years. It ended up taking way longer.
DEBORAH FULLER
After Hunter and Laila separated, he called me and asked if I would help him. I had my own glass-blowing studio at the time, but he would call from time to time, and I would go out.
Usually I had just gone to bed, and he’d call and say, “Get over here, Goddamn it! We’ve got a deadline.” So I started working with him in ’82 or ’83, eventually helping him run his life and Owl Farm. We established an early mutual trust—he trained me to his ways—and that lasted more than twenty years.
At that time he had an assistant, Maria, and we became good friends during the three years we worked together. We’re still very good friends.
JUAN THOMPSON
There was a little testing period with Hunter’s relationships. It was just wait and see how long they were around. Laila, Maria—they were around for a long time, and I got along very well with them. Others came and went. Some of them, it was strange: I didn’t even meet them. I only heard about them.
BOB BRAUDIS
The girlfriends all blend into one. When I becam
e sheriff, Maria Khan, a beautiful Pakistani lady from Phoenix, was his squeeze. She eventually went back to Phoenix, but Hunter lured her back to Colorado for Juan’s graduation and sort of held her prisoner. I rescued her.
DOUG CARPENTER was Hunter’s neighbor in Woody Creek.
Hunter did have a tendency to suddenly drop the guillotine and just snap, and that would be it. This time it ended with Maria moving from Hunter’s house into the house of a friend of mine. My friend called me up one day and said, “I think Hunter’s gonna shoot me.” I said, “Jesus Christ! You know you’ve taken a little risk.” Hunter was walking around with a gun in his belt. That kind of turned ugly.
DEBORAH FULLER
Hunter and I were involved at the beginning, but very briefly. You can’t work with him in the capacity that I did and do that. I loved Hunter very much, but I didn’t fall in love with him. I also wasn’t in awe of him or his work, because when I met him I hadn’t read most of what he had written. He was a very powerful man, as well as charming—that Kentucky charm.
Working on pieces with Hunter was really our fun time. He wrote, I facilitated, and then I took care of everything else—joyfully. I’m good at it, so it was easy. We cursed each other from time to time, and I would quit, and he’d fire me, though we were usually back working together within a few months.
He’d pay me when he could, and I had another job at a gallery in Aspen to support myself. When Hunter had money, he was one of the most generous people I knew, and not just to me. To many. But money was tight in those early years. He wrote, and he lectured to make extra money.
BILL STANKEY was Hunter’s lecture agent for thirteen years.
In 1983, some kid from the University of North Dakota called me because he wanted Hunter to come out and give a speech. No one could get hold of him, so I started sending Mailgrams to the Woody Creek Tavern. Months went by with no answer, and then one day my assistant said, “There’s a Dr. Thompson on the phone.” North Dakota was the first gig. He got $5,000, and in what would become a typical event, he was about an hour and a half late, insisted on drinking Chivas onstage—and drew a huge sold-out crowd.
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