Gonzo

by Corey Seymour

  CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY

  Gail Palmer-Slater hung out flirting and partying. Various friends who had been hanging out started to leave because she was so boring, and then Hunter said, “I’m going into the Water Room,” and said to her, “You need to leave.” She started begging and whimpering and saying “No, no . . . the fun’s just started; I can’t leave yet.”

  She started getting in Hunter’s space and leaning in toward him and begging him and whining and touching him. He picked up the phone to call a cab, and she hung it up. He didn’t like that, and he pushed her away, knocking over a glass gallon jug of cranberry juice, which broke. She slipped on it and fell on her ass and was weeping hysterically. There was lots of yelling and weeping, and then I called a cab and waited outside with her for the cab to come. She was still weeping and saying, “Why won’t he talk to me? I’ll stay, I’ll be good. . . . What did I do?” And then she left.

  A couple days later, Hunter called me at the cabin and told me to come over and make him breakfast because he had to go down to the police station. There was a warning of some sort prior to him going down, but while he was down there, six cops showed up and handed me a search warrant.

  HAL HADDON

  Gail Palmer-Slater claimed that at some point she was offered cocaine, and that Hunter then lured her to his hot tub and viciously twisted her breast, attempted to assault her sexually, and then threw her out in the snow and called a cab for her. The last part of it is true. He did throw her out in the snow and call a cab. He claimed she was obnoxious and disruptive. But there was a search warrant executed.

  BOB BRAUDIS

  That case came into my office early in the morning by way of her husband, who was an optometrist from Minneapolis. He dropped the dime on Hunter, and my guys launched the investigation, and they were waiting for me at eight in the morning when I came in. They gave me a briefing, and I said, “I’m handing this over to an outside agency.” Hunter got really pissed at me for giving it to the DA, but that’s when I said, “I can be your friend or your sheriff, but not both.”

  The DA was looking to bust Hunter for anything. I told the deputy DA, Chip McCrory, that there were several witnesses at this get-together who hadn’t been interviewed, and that the search warrant was perhaps prematurely applied for and signed by the judge. The DA’s investigator, Mike Kelly, agreed with me, but the deputy DA said, “No. We want to toss his house, and I’d like a couple of deputies to help us.” I had no involvement with it other than to lend two deputies to the DA to conduct the search. They didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but they helped.

  GEORGE STRANAHAN

  Actually, the sheriff called me. We knew that somebody was trying to get a search warrant. None of the local judges would sign one, but in any case, Braudis, of course, would know whether or not there was a search warrant. Finally they got one about five days after the event, and Braudis gave a call and said, “You should get our friend out of the house and clean it up.” Which was the code that there was going to be a search. I had about an hour. We got bags of shit out on the lawn, we looked under the couch, and we brought a big grocery bag of crap out of there and up to my house to hide.

  SEMMES LUCKETT

  We hid everything we could find—and the thing Hunter got busted for was the shit he couldn’t find! He just couldn’t believe they found some acid he’d be looking for for years.

  GEORGE STRANAHAN

  I was down at Owl Farm fourteen hours altogether while they searched it. They literally took every book out, one at a time, thinking that there had to be something in there. The event had happened between the kitchen and the garage, and presumably the search warrant was to be the location of the crime, but they went down into the wardrobe, where they discovered a shotgun that was approximately twelve inches long. And they’re on the phone about it—is it exactly twelve, or twelve and under? They took apart the dryers, thinking that he had something hidden up in the little holes. Eventually they slammed the refrigerator door and something toppled out behind the refrigerator, and they found a mason jar of pot—and when Hunter found out about this, he said, “Oh, I lost that twelve years ago.”

  In his bedroom they found a Bic pen with the works taken out. Maybe there was a little white powder in it. They took that, and they found a film canister with a blue pill.

  They also went through a filing cabinet and found a little file called “Juan.” And they realized that in this file were letters to a young person. So they asked me, “Do you know this person? Do you know what their age is?” And I said, “Fucking assholes! You’re trying to interpret letters to his own son as child pornography?!”

  Now, to be honest, Hunter would sometimes take Polaroids of the sorts of things he did with women, and he would pull these pictures out sometimes and show his friends. But now they decided that they were going to go after him for child porn.

  HAL HADDON

  Bob Braudis and I videotaped the search. They went through every inch of that house, searching for “evidence,” and they found two tabs of LSD in an old suitcase that said Juan Thompson on the outside—the LSD was probably twenty years old—and they found traces of cocaine on a dish—not usable traces—and some dynamite in Hunter’s garage.

  They charged him with sexual assault, possession of explosives—a felony, unless you have a legitimate agricultural business—and possession of a trace of cocaine, along with the LSD. That was essentially the case.

  TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE

  I’m at Princeton trying to get some kind of clue as to what the fuck just happened, reading the front-page story in the New York Times that my fiancée is wanted for assaulting a porn star—and that a search of his home revealed a machine gun, child pornography, and a pound of magic mushrooms. And I can’t reach him.

  By the time I got out there, he was having such a violent reaction to everything that I figured probably more of it was true than wasn’t. He wouldn’t even let my sister talk to me. Cat stayed in the guesthouse, and he would literally give her the “Cross the threshold of the front door and you die” order. My only role was to never be forgiven for not having been there. He’d say, “You weren’t here, goddamn it. If you had been here, I wouldn’t have been in this bad crazy mood, and none of this would have happened. And if you weren’t trying to do this loveless, passionless long-distance relationship I wouldn’t be in this situation.” If I had been there he wouldn’t be depending on a twenty-one-year-old material witness—my younger sister—who might hate him. He seemed to think that he’d been really, really wronged.

  CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY

  He went straight into anger and then paranoia. Hunter became convinced that Bobby Braudis wanted to arrest him and had planted the whole thing to get him into rehab, and Bobby was in for two years of pure hell.

  I was not prepared for Hunter’s many definitions of truth. I kept feeling that the actual truth was going to clear everything, and I kept being told that it wasn’t about that—it was about loyalty. All of a sudden, everything about Hunter seemed to be more about loyalty than about truth.

  HAL HADDON

  In the courtroom, Hunter sat in the middle of the defendant’s table with lawyers on both sides of him, and a bunch of water glasses in front of him. He had one glass that was all tequila. We had a visiting judge from Glenwood Springs who presided over the whole thing. He had a very good time.

  The way the courtroom was set up, the witness box was no more than six feet from where the defense table was. So here’s Hunter, drinking his tequila, and he’s being braced by his lawyers to pull him down if something weird should happen, because he had a tendency to try to stand up. He did that a couple of times. Gail Palmer-Slater testified, and because the witness box and the defense table were so close, it was almost as if she and Hunter could have a dialogue if they wanted. She’s sitting there, a huge woman—six-two, six-three—and just after she’s sworn in as a witness, she looks over at him and says, “Hi, Hunter.” She was making e
yes at him during the whole hearing.

  GERRY GOLDSTEIN is a criminal-defense attorney who was a longtime friend of Hunter’s.

  At first when Hunter ranted and raved, you always had a tendency to write off about 20 percent of it, but damned if he wasn’t always right. It was part of the way he hooked you, and he liked that. It not only made him look better in the long run, but it made you a true believer. This woman was out to get him, she was up to no good, and the authorities played right into her hands, and ultimately right into his. Hollywood couldn’t have sent you a better prosecution witness. She was made to order—a treacherous heat-seeking missile who was focused and determined to get her prey. It became so obvious that Hunter was the victim here.

  HAL HADDON

  Hunter’s defense on the LSD charge, which he was quite proud of, was to say that you can’t get good acid anymore—if he’d known it was there, he would have eaten it a long time ago.

  In the end, the judge threw it all out, including the drug possession. He felt there wasn’t a usable quantity of cocaine. They had also charged Hunter with use—which is a felony in this state—but they didn’t prove. She claimed that this plate of cocaine got passed around, but since she didn’t take any, she didn’t know what it really was, and she claimed she really didn’t know what cocaine was anyway.

  We stepped outside at about five o’clock in the afternoon on a nice summer day, and the Mitchell brothers from San Francisco had brought in eight strippers, who were all walking around the courthouse with placards saying, “Free Hunter! Save the First Amendment.” Hunter came out and saw all this, walked down the steps, gave them the victory sign, and then rolled somersaults on the grass.

  We repaired to the Jerome hotel, to the J-Bar, and started drinking. Hunter went across the street to a hardware store and bought this enormous pair of bolt cutters and came back and snipped every lawyer’s tie off, and then put them on his wall later as a souvenir of due process.

  After the bust, Hunter became obsessed with the Fourth Amendment and created his own Fourth Amendment Foundation as a kind of bully pulpit. He had a letterhead and put a bunch of people’s names on it, including mine and George McGovern’s, without asking. Whenever Hunter would see something that he thought was a particularly egregious violation of the Fourth Amendment, he’d send out a bunch of faxes with the letterhead. It was never a real foundation—he didn’t have any money. It was crazy.

  He would always pay me something for my services, but it wouldn’t be a lot. More often, he would give me art or some sort of trinket. He gave me a painting for my work on the Gail Palmer-Slater case. Hunter and a local artist, Earl Biss, had stayed up one night and done this painting together. It was a double-breasted horse with a woman’s head, this big long thing. My partner sold it for five grand—it was probably worth fifty.

  BOB BRAUDIS

  My role as sheriff and my role as friend never caused me an awful lot of anguish or conflict. I was criticized by a very small minority of Pitkin County residents for associating with a self-proclaimed dope fiend. But his chemical use really didn’t contribute to anything that was a real threat to the social fabric here. In order to be discreet, I didn’t witness Hunter’s drug use. And of course there was the rule of the kitchen: What goes on in the kitchen stays in the kitchen. I knew Hunter wasn’t going to compromise me, and I was not going to do anything to compromise him or his friends in the kitchen.

  TOM BENTON

  For the last fourteen years, I’ve been a sheriff’s deputy in Aspen, and Bob Braudis was Hunter’s best friend and had to walk that fine line. I don’t know whether Bob learned from Hunter or what, but Bob was very, very good. He managed to use the friendship in a way that worked. A lot of people would say, “One day we’ll get that fucking Hunter.” Well, they never got him, did they?

  TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE

  I moved back out to Owl Farm in May, right after the court case, and lived there until January ’91. But by the time I got back, there was a real edge on everything. He wasn’t ever going to forgive me for being gone, and I wasn’t ever going to get over the fact that simply being there was something that Hunter valued more than almost anything else. It was impossible to conceive of a life with him in which I had any kind of agenda.

  Hunter used to say from time to time that nothing was more fun than being in love with someone who on any given day might be smarter than you. The thing that was so incredibly attractive about him was partly that extraordinary charisma and power that he had over everybody. But if he loved you, if you were part of that very small community of two and Hunter was in a space where he just was focused on you, there was just really nothing else like it in the world. For all his effort to be savage and ridiculous, he was also an absolutely incurable romantic.

  It was your job to make him feel successful enough that he could pull it all off. And I was not good at that. Something that Hunter really wanted was the same woman to love him and to manage him. I loved him enormously, but I had very limited patience for trying to be his manager or his editor.

  CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY

  Hunter’s interest in being a celebrity was exhausting. He was so willing to turn off things that were brilliant and interesting and likeable to be a parody of himself if he felt the people surrounding him needed to see that. And there were those that he kept on payroll who he just wanted around so he could play that side instead of working too hard or thinking too hard.

  JANN WENNER

  For Hunter to travel at this point was getting to be a major and problematic undertaking because of the drugs and the paraphernalia he needed. He could only work certain hours, and now the story had to come to him—he was too famous, and he couldn’t easily go on the road and report. I’d give him another and another assignment, until it finally just got too frustrating and upsetting. In the meantime, he was making some money doing college lectures.

  BILL STANKEY

  In addition to his college gigs, clubs had started booking him. He did a gig at the Ritz in New York and was staying at the Essex House on Central Park South. The balcony of his suite overlooked the Wollman ice-skating rink in the park, and someone saw him pointing a rifle he’d brought with him out toward the rink. The next thing you know, the cops were beating on the door, Hunter was hiding the gun, and people were running around the room because there were obviously all kinds of drugs in there—and then Hunter simply convinced the police that nothing had happened and that someone must have been seeing things.

  I had a secretary named Brenda who I put in charge of watching Hunter that night, and when I came in the next morning, she was covered in Magic Marker—there were circles drawn around her eyes, and triangles on her cheek, and a lot of other stuff. I said, “What happened to you?!” and she said, “Uh, I was out with Hunter last night. . . .”

  That was a fairly memorable gig.

  LYNN NESBIT

  He could have gotten big money, but if he didn’t show up—which he didn’t for a lot of them—that market dries up. It’s very lucrative if you just show up. Hunter could have been top dollar.

  BILL STANKEY

  I probably booked 100 dates for him between ’83 and ’96, and each time one of two things happened: He would show up late, or at the eleventh hour of the day that he was supposed to be leaving Aspen, I’d get a call because “something happened.” I got tired of dealing with the insanity, and we got into a verbal altercation over him not showing up and being unreliable. I was exhausted by the process. If I tried to send him on his own, he’d never make it, so I learned that I had to send somebody with him—somebody who was reasonably uncorruptible. There were times I’d realize too late, “Oh God . . . I sent the wrong guy. They’re supposed to be at the gig, and they’re snorting coke in the bathroom.”

  He didn’t have a “rider” per se; he just required a bottle of Chivas and an open tab with room service and the bar—though I can remember a few instances when he was getting $5,000 for his lecture and the room service was $1
,700 for one night. The top money he made was fifteen to twenty grand per gig. Had he been reliable, he could have made a million dollars a year, because he drew a huge crowd. I don’t think we ever did a gig that wasn’t sold out. As it happened, he probably made a couple hundred thousand dollars in a good year.

  He was funny and always entertaining, but at the end of the day, when you’re trying to run a business built on relationships, relationships got burned. Club promoters were out thousands of dollars when Hunter didn’t show up. It would be one thing if he was calling a month in advance to cancel. He was calling four hours before the gig. “Funny” just goes away, and it becomes “Why can’t you get it together?” He was just debilitated by drugs and the alcohol.

  TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE

  He always had that lazy-ass way out. If he could traffic in his own name instead of actually doing something, he would. There was a BBC documentary that had been made about him some years earlier, and one night we watched it. He had this enormous fascination with watching himself—he would often say that he wanted to “Write the movie, direct the movie, and star in the movie,” but the movie he was talking about was his own life. He was constantly caught up in this tension between doing what he wanted to do and doing what he felt would make a good story. It makes me think of John le Carré in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, when he writes, “The best spies build a mythology about themselves. The worst spies come to believe it, and they have to be destroyed.” That’s exactly what Hunter did—he almost would ask himself, “What would Hunter do?” He was driven by that.

  I was working at the Rocky Mountain Institute. Hunter knew I had a meeting early on every Wednesday morning, and he would always go on a total bender on Tuesday nights, and I’d be up all night. One night he went through one of his bouts of paranoia and bolted the gate shut with all these extra chains, and in the morning I was dressed for work and trying to leave, and Hunter was in his bathrobe and couldn’t find the key for the gate. He had to get the bolt cutters and was in his bathrobe trying to cut the bolts to open the gate so I could go to my respectable job, and one of our neighbors drove by and looked at us standing there and said, “Ah! Another day of domestic bliss at Owl Farm. . . .”