He had taught me how to pack up his carry-on briefcase with his coke in it—in two double-sealed Ziploc bags. I’d dump two room service jars of peanuts all over the inside of his briefcase and then squeeze lemons over everything, then seal it tight, and then give it to him. He’d have his plastic grinder in his sock for the flight.
When we got to the airport he handed me his wallet and told me to check him in and headed straight for the bar. I’ve never seen anyone more completely blasé about the prospect of missing their flight. He just sat down on a bar stool and casually ordered us up a couple Heinekens. And he handed me a $100 bill and said, “You did a good job. Oh, and if anyone asks you if you saw me do drugs, tell them no. For that matter, you didn’t even see me drinking—okay?” Then he ordered another round.
BOB BRAUDIS
Hunter called me one night and said that Nicole was unconscious on the kitchen floor and unresponsive. I called Hunter’s next-door neighbor and told him to grab another neighbor and go down to Hunter’s to help. On the way to the hospital she stopped breathing, but they got her to the hospital, they treated her, and then she moved into my guesthouse and got healthy. Hunter was not insensitive to her medical condition, but he had that rule—Never Call 911. He called me instead. Nine-one-one wasn’t necessary. There weren’t people bleeding with gunshot wounds.
Hunter was real pissed at me that I was housing his gal—who refused to communicate with him—but I said, “Hey, Hunter, don’t give me any attitude. She wants to be here. She’s a friend too.” Eventually she packed up and went back to Cincinnati or wherever she came from.
JAMES CARVILLE was chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992.
We used to drink a lot. He hung out at the Capitol Hotel in Little Rock, where I lived, and we always hit it off. I mean, we weren’t that far apart in age—he was seven years older than me. He grew up in Louisville; I grew up in Louisiana. And Hunter did something that none of us had the guts to do—he led the kind of life that secretly all of us would like to have had the guts to lead. To hell with the whole thing, just stay drunk and high and smoke and hang out and write outrageous things. He’d never lived his life on anybody else’s terms.
He had a way of describing Clinton attacking a plate of french fries that was just the funniest thing ever. We all couldn’t stop laughing. His powers of observation were only exceeded by his powers of exaggeration. I remember that he had this crazed story in his head with about 5 percent of truth to it about how I stole his jacket. And what Hunter would do is find something with the slightest grain of something to it and make it into this hilarious thing. He had this whole thing he’d written about this kind of death struggle that we were in and so forth. We were mightily entertained by this kind of story, and in the midst of being entertained there were a bunch of insights.
JANN WENNER
It was Hunter’s idea that the political wizards of Rolling Stone should go down to Little Rock as a group to meet this new person that had just become the Democratic nominee—actually, by that point it was pretty clear that he was going to be the next president. So Bill Greider, P. J. O’Rourke, Hunter, and I flew down on my plane. Mark Seliger, our photographer, was also with us. Hunter brought along some high-end super–video camera to record the encounter—the assembled wisdom of Rolling Stone on the road. It was quite a team, and Hunter was at the center of it.
WILLIAM GREIDER was the national-affairs editor at Rolling Stone in 1992.
My knee went out just as we were getting on the airplane at Teterboro, and Hunter helped me onto the plane. He was quite solicitous and so forth. Usually when that happened with my knee, the pain would come back in a hour or so and then go away, but this time it didn’t. We got off the plane in Little Rock and I was in serious agony—although we’d had a lot to drink by that time. But I got into a wheelchair, and we went to this famous Little Rock political hotel. Hunter wheeled me into this lobby crowded with people, shouting, “I want the best sports doctor in Little Rock—immediately!”
Everybody else in our party headed off to the bar or to their rooms, but Hunter took care to get me up to my hotel room, and I was lying on the bed while he literally called every hospital in Little Rock demanding that they send over an orthopedist or a sports doctor immediately, and he couldn’t understand why these hospitals wouldn’t comply. Finally he called the Clinton campaign and got hold of Carville or somebody. I remember Hunter saying, “What?! I wanna know the doctor, the candidate’s doctor. Get him over here.” Finally I said, “Hunter, I really appreciate it . . . but why are you doing this?” He said, “I can’t stand to be around pain.”
JAMES CARVILLE
I was in the middle of a presidential campaign, so the last thing I was doing was staying out drinking at night, but I remember that we were all having dinner, and the Rolling Stone people would disappear for five minutes and come back kind of refreshed. I said, “Gee, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen people do that.”
WILLIAM GREIDER
When we did the Clinton interview, Hunter, as he often did, had constructed a sort of dramatic arc to this event that he was living out and that we were all invited to live with him. The narrative for that event was that Jann and P.J. and Hunter and I were all flying down to Little Rock to “deliver the Rolling Stone vote” to Clinton for that election. That was kind of his running gag. On another level, he really did seem to think that there was something momentous happening in this event. He had packed up a photograph, which he entitled “Politics Is a Dirty Business,” which was a picture of him in Woody Creek, sitting on his haunches with a rifle he had just fired at a big drum of gasoline. This huge burst of flame was flying toward him. It’s quite dramatic. Hunter had a three-by-four-foot framed blowup of this photo shipped down from Colorado to give to Clinton. Hunter brought it to the interview at Doe’s Eat Place, and we were all pretty primed. We were also all hung over.
JANN WENNER
Everyone on our team had their own agenda. P.J.’s was to throw these very arcane intellectual curveball questions at Clinton. He was going to trap him in some dilemma based on some idea from a conservative think tank that he had come up with. But while he was quizzing Clinton, P.J. was also trying to eat a tamale. He was trying to cut it with a knife and fork without unwrapping it and was about to eat the paper. Clinton calmly leaned toward P.J. and said, “Here’s how you eat that.” That sort of took the wind out of P.J.’s sails.
Hunter wanted to ask about the Fourth Amendment and drug searches. He leaned back and did one of these long windup Hunter kind of things where everybody is supposed to be amused by it all, and Clinton wasn’t going to have any of it. Hunter was pouring sweat at this point, and his question was way off the point of what we needed to talk about with the soon-to-be president. Search and seizure was not really an issue in the campaign, but it gave Clinton an opening to talk about drugs, and he whacked Hunter. I’m pretty sure that Stephanopoulos set him up. He was trying to insulate Clinton from being too associated with someone like Hunter, and I think Stephanopoulos had warned Clinton about what to expect. Clinton came back with this really tough, aggressive answer involving his brother Roger’s cocaine problem and how he had seen the horrors and destruction of drugs.
We were all unprepared for the intensity of his response, and Hunter was especially taken aback. The interview then went back and forth between Greider and myself and Clinton. Hunter essentially withdrew. There was no “ho-ho” component, which Hunter had hoped to establish. Carville understood Hunter and appreciated him, but George was way too serious an operator to let his need to protect Clinton every second be overrun by Hunter’s charm and fun, or as a little favor to Hunter. Forget it. George was cold.
WILLIAM GREIDER
Hunter wilted. It was almost poignant because as much as he wanted us to think he was running a gag, he was also quite sincere about the Fourth Amendment. He had a kind of little-boy’s innocence sometimes, and then Clinton, for his own purposes, just smacked h
im down verbally.
I think that innocence is what kept Hunter going for so long. I feel like that’s the core of who he was, and also why he was such a great writer—so expressive and so real and all the other things he was. That innocence and sweetness were driving him. He knew the world was big and bad and ugly, and he would take it on the way a little boy takes on a demon. And sometimes he’d get smacked.
Hunter got up from the table right after Clinton’s response. He just stopped asking questions. He wandered back after a while with a drink in his hand and sat down, and I suppose he said a few other things, but it was like the dream had been smashed, and what was the point of going on with this? I think after you saw that sort of thing about Hunter up close, you felt a sort of protectiveness and forgivingness toward him.
JANN WENNER
When it came time to publish the interview, I wanted to endorse Clinton, and I wanted each of us to write his own statement. I wrestled back and forth with Hunter. He had these deep reservations about him based on something—either that incident turned him off, or he had something intuitive he knew about a type of southerner that we just didn’t get. Ultimately Hunter came around, though somewhat tepidly.
The Clinton candidacy was frustrating for him. By that time the politics of the country had kind of passed him by—it wasn’t clear-cut good-versus-evil as Nixon seemed then to have been. Clinton was a centrist, but more than that, I think we were now dealing with what was now such a technological and complex society that decisions couldn’t really be deeply ideological anymore.
DOUG BRINKLEY
In 1993, I had done my doctorate in history at Georgetown and was teaching at Hofstra University on Long Island. I was talking with my students about Harry Truman’s Independence as different from Dwight Eisenhower’s Abilene, but without going there and seeing it for ourselves, it all seemed stilted and remote. So I created a class called “The Majic Bus” with the insight that instead of students going to Europe for a semester, they would stay in America, get on a bus, and live for a semester on the road. Our bus driver looked like Buffalo Bill, and he called his bus the Highway Hotel. We read Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and then visited Whitman’s grave in Camden, New Jersey; we read Willa Cather and then went to her home in Nebraska; we read John Steinbeck and toured his museum in Salinas.
But I also wanted to bring in living writers. My students were reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as we were coming through Colorado, and I had sent Hunter a couple of books I had just done with a note to him saying we had mutual friends in George McGovern and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Hunter’s then-assistant Nicole Meyer called and said that Hunter really liked the idea of the bus thing we were doing and would like to meet me and my students. She told me that Hunter’s hours were erratic, and that we should just show up at the Woody Creek Tavern with the bus.
I had two busloads—twenty-seven students. We pulled in to the tavern and waited, shot pool, hung around. Nicole had come down and checked me out on a reconnaissance mission, and we talked for a while, and then sure enough Hunter came rolling in with a very expensive video recorder and started taping the students instead of them taping him, or he’d grab their video recorders and film himself. He was being very playful and was in a good mood, and the students were asking good questions. He had dressed to be the Hunter Thompson that the students were looking to see, with the Tilley hat, smoking a Dunhill with the holder and eating a snow cone margarita. Then he said, “I don’t know who really wants to come up to Owl Farm, but I’ll put some food on. We’ve got some beer if you want to come up.” So one group stayed and slept in the Woody Creek Tavern parking lot, and a second group came up to Owl Farm.
Instead of autographing the students’ books, he made them queue up and then took his gun and shot a hole in each of their copies.
Hunter had asked us to report back to him about the rest of our road trip after we’d left Colorado, and on one of our phone calls he said to me, “Look, Nicole and I were wondering if you would help me pull together this book I’m working on, Better Than Sex. It’s a disaster zone. It’s a lot of writing about Clinton. You’re a political historian. You know a lot about politics. Maybe you could come out for a week and help us.” Better Than Sex, at that point, was like a deck of cards in disarray; the writing was all there, but it needed to be shuffled in some direction or repackaged, fast. Hunter was in a jam.
I ended up going up there and doing my thing, and it worked, because Hunter and I had certain things in common. We both loved politics and literature. He loved talking to me about where he was at in the pecking order of journalism and literature—about David Halberstam, Maureen Dowd, Seymour Hersh, Scotty Reston, and Walter Isaacson, and others. I think Nicole liked having me around because she didn’t want any more female assistants for Hunter. Apparently they’d had some bad experience as a couple, and I came in as a kind of straight man to help them pull it together. It was a productive week. We got a result, which always meant a lot to Hunter. We didn’t waste time.
One of the other things we shared were the hours we kept, which was rare for Hunter. My most productive hours are from about ten p.m. until three or four in the morning, so when he called me at two-thirty or three, I was guaranteed to be up. That window of friends for Hunter was limited. And we both had the habit of writing or working with CNN on, so if there was a news flash, we’d call each other up. That became a big part of the relationship—our schedules.
JAMES CARVILLE
He used to send these faxes on this weird letterhead that said “Forget the Shrimp Honey—I’m Coming Home with the Crabs.” He’d write me these crazy memos—at three o’clock in the morning he’d fax me, and I’d come to work in the morning and there’d be three or four faxes waiting for me. And like an idiot, I didn’t keep them, but he published them anyway in Better Than Sex.
STACEY HADASH met Hunter in 1992 when she was working in the so-called War Room of the Clinton campaign.
After the campaign was over, Hunter was working on Better Than Sex, and he called me up and said, “Why don’t you come out to Woody Creek to help with the book?” I had been helping him out with stuff over the phone—questions about who ended up where and how the whole transition was working—and now he wasn’t meeting his deadline.
First I called Carville: “Hunter’s just asked me out to his place. I like Hunter a lot, but I’ve heard all these things about him attacking women and the guns and the explosives and the drugs and the knives. Do you really think that it’s safe for me to go out there?” James said, “Oh yeah, you’ll be fine.”
Owl Farm was bizarre. The first weekend I went there, sitting at the end of the table in the kitchen was Ed Bradley, smoking a pipe and reading the paper. The next time I went out there, Don Johnson was in the kitchen with a whole bunch of people, and everybody was fooling around and putting lipstick on—you know how Hunter loved lipstick. I was taking pictures—Hunter loved pictures—and naturally, D.J. did not really want to have pictures of him with lipstick on floating around. We ended up fighting, with D.J. trying to wrestle my camera out of my hand. Hunter was watching the whole thing—people were spread out through the room, tossing the camera around; it was this whole fight scene. It was bizarre. Everything around there was bizarre.
One night we went out for a drive on McClain Flats, which was his first test for me. We were heading back to Hunter’s house, going straight toward this hairpin turn. Of course Hunter was driving the Red Shark with his Chivas on ice and his sunglasses on and stepped it up to about a hundred miles an hour, heading straight for this curve in the road. All I saw was a mountain-face wall coming at me fast. I really did think I was going to die.
Before too long, I was riding on the back of Hunter’s motorcycle at a hundred miles an hour down to Basalt for lunch and then sitting there for four hours drinking margaritas before getting back on the bike and riding home.
We talked a lot about politics. Hunter was able to get to the heart of things, to simplify thin
gs, really quickly. He’d make these weird predictions that you’d say were totally crazy, but they’d turn out to be true. Hunter was disappointed in Clinton—really disappointed. He thought that Clinton had a position of power to do a lot of things and he let the Democrats down. Hunter thought that Bill Clinton didn’t fulfill his promises, basically.
SANDY THOMPSON
Hunter’s younger brother Jim was gay. I took care of Jim in San Francisco when he was dying in 1994. I begged Hunter to come out to see him, and he finally did.
PETE PETERS was Jim Thompson’s best friend growing up in Louisville.
Jim and I met each other in the eighth grade, but the first time I ever heard anything about Hunter wasn’t until years later, in 1967, right after he’d written Hell’s Angels. He told me that Hunter was going to be on To Tell the Truth, this prime-time game show on TV.
Jim always said the hitchhiker in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was him. He had taken the train out to Colorado to visit Hunter in the very early seventies. While he was away, I got an envelope in the mail from him, and on the back of the envelope was written “cunnilingus.” The only thing he wrote was “Just wanted to see if this would make it through the mail.” A couple of days later, I got a phone call from Jim. I said, “What the hell are you doing back home so early?” He said, “Hunter would get up and start smoking hash and drinking wine, and then his buddies would come over at night and they’d just get crazy. They’d drink and do acid—the only thing I could do was go sit on the porch, because it was sheer insanity.”
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