Gonzo

by Corey Seymour

  I had asked him about his unpublished work and his letters, and he told me that he’d kept his correspondence from way back. Eventually he said, “Look—I don’t like people in my papers, but I will trust you. Come on out, and you can spend a week in my basement going through the boxes. See if there’s something we can do with all that.” I went down there and I was stunned. There were hundreds of boxes of stuff. He saved any article he did as a journalist, and he saved the scraps—whether it was the rent-a-car bill or the hotel receipt or the program from a show he saw. There was the manuscript of The Rum Diary and reams of correspondence that had never been published. Hunter had included a couple of letters in Songs of the Doomed or Generation of Swine, but I had thought that was just filler, and now I realized that those couple of letters were only the tip of the iceberg.

  Hunter was very much influenced by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. He picked up the idea of the cigarette holder from FDR, who used to do his radio addresses with a cigarette holder in his mouth. He loved Churchill’s history of the Second World War and he started envisioning The Gonzo Papers, which he wanted to be like a warped multivolume Churchill work, maybe six volumes of material on Hunter’s life. He didn’t have it in him anymore to write those six volumes, but through correspondence and other selected writings, he started seeing that he was going to have a great body of work.

  My relationship with Hunter was mostly on a scholarly basis. I didn’t really party with him. The last thing he wanted was somebody drunk or stoned or in a stupor dealing with his sacred archive. He was very conservative in that way. He used to say that alcoholics or junkies were untrustworthy because their addiction was always put far ahead of their sound judgment.

  He was looking for clear judgment. He was the junkie. He was the alcoholic. He was the bad boy. He didn’t need another bad boy. He did that schtick with Oscar Acosta or others in his writing, but in real life he did not want outlaw competition. He was the number one gunslinger. He was Billy the Kid with a brilliant mind and an incredible intuitive genius. He was a criminal by nature who essentially cased every room he walked into and saw things that nobody else saw. If you went to get gas with Hunter and you were buying a soda at the counter, when you got back in the car he would have an elaborate story about what was occurring in there. “Did you notice that the man working was from El Salvador and that his girlfriend was standing in the back? That kid pumping the air into the tires—why do you think he was in such a hurry?” His observations about the behavior of people were stunning. Sometimes he would freeze-frame something on CNN and say, “Look at that face. You can tell that he’s lying.”

  Another amazing quality of Hunter’s—largely unheralded—was the keen, accurate advice he could give you. He was a total disaster on himself, but his ability, if you were in a bind, to solve problems for you was amazing. His advice was always so good—which sounds nutty because he seems like the last person you’d want to take advice from.

  Hunter didn’t hide from much of his past when we were choosing letters for the first book. His big concern was how his first wife, Sandy, would be perceived. He didn’t want her to be embarrassed or humiliated, so of the great writing that did not make The Proud Highway, the majority of it pertained to Sandy—letters to her when he was traveling, letters he would write at night at the typewriter when they were fighting about their marriage, or letters alluding to the fact that they had struggled with some miscarriages and what that entailed.

  Secondly, old girlfriends—if it was something that was a little risqué, or he knew that this woman was now married and had a family, he didn’t want to embarrass her by publishing some old love letter. When he excised material, it was usually to protect the women in his life, or who used to be in his life.

  I pushed very hard to publish his letters from the Louisville jail to his mother, but Hunter completely nixed it. There was a box full of them—handwritten, extraordinarily heartfelt—but he said, “No way.”

  CURTIS ROBINSON is a former editor of the Aspen Daily News.

  For those of us who worked with him, it was essentially a really abusive relationship. I’d walk away from Hunter’s place telling my wife, “God, I’m never doing this again. If I ever bring up doing this again, just shoot me.” And you’d be back the next day.

  TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE

  If you were having an argument with Hunter about something else—not about writing, but about something more substantive—if either one of you said something that was a particularly lovely turn of phrase, it would immediately be the end of the argument. He would just stop to admire it: “God damn—that was a good insult!” It was regardless of what you had said to him, and it didn’t matter if it had been you or him. Everything stopped.

  CURTIS ROBINSON

  You might come up with the idea of saying that someone had “the loyalty of a snake,” but Hunter would come back with “the loyalty of a rented snake.” Sometimes we’d have a four-hour search for a word that’s like posh but not posh.

  SHELBY SADLER

  Hunter loved the Mark Twain quote “The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” He knew that better than anyone I’ve ever met. I think that’s what he appreciated so much about Coleridge. I remember the first time I explained to Hunter the literary term scansion and how to figure out prosody and feet and meter. I taught him Coleridge’s little doggerel about it—“Iambics march from short to long; / With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng”—and Hunter became obsessed with anapests for about two weeks. He would say, “Now tell me again: When I want to speed it up, I use an anapest, and it’s got that dot.”

  He was so appreciative of learning all the little technical details. He knew how to write beautifully, but he didn’t know why it was beautiful. He liked being taught the names of things—that this is an anapest, this is a spondee, this is a dactyl trisyllable. We worked on dactyl trisyllables for a week so he could learn what he was doing in his sentences to make them faster or slower, to put the poetry in and know what it was. He was almost childlike when I’d teach him something. That was when the innocence came out, and the sweetness.

  CURTIS ROBINSON

  When he would get cranked up, he would get that look and start laughing while he was writing. “Hot damn—I have it now!” Sometimes he’d take hundred-dollar bills and put them around the typewriter because he just liked to have money around. He’d get into it, and you’d see the look of a small child on his face. It was euphoric. He looked like the Dalai Lama when he was like that. Then the phone could ring, or a GM commercial would come on and he’d just start talking about ’66 Chevy Impalas. You’d be thinking, “You were so close. So close.”

  DOUG BRINKLEY

  When the first volume of letters, The Proud Highway, came out in 1997, it got rave reviews. And whatever we published, both then and later, in the second volume of letters, Fear and Loathing in America, was just a hint of Hunter’s total correspondence.

  Those books, plus the Modern Library publishing the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a classic, would bring Hunter into the category where he wanted to be—a serious American writer. At the same time, Johnny Depp was coming into the picture. Laila Nabulsi had been working for a long while to get Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas made into a movie, and Hunter wanted to determine who the actor was who was going to play him, and he was looking in particular at Depp and Matt Dillon. But once Hunter met Depp, the deal was done. Johnny was from Kentucky, which meant a lot to Hunter, and Johnny came from humble roots like Hunter. Johnny was very much into Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet, Breton, Artaud, and a perverse sort of French literature which Hunter always admired. They had a real and immediate bond.

  JOHNNY DEPP

  It wasn’t until 1996, when I was almost done with Donnie Brasco in New York, that I got this phone call from Hunter asking me if I would be intereste
d in playing him in the film of the Vegas book. He always referred to Fear and Loathing as “the Vegas book.” I said, “Of course I would.” We talked that night over the phone, and that was the last I heard of it for quite a long while.

  LAILA NABULSI

  It was basically thanks to Johnny that the movie got made at all. In Johnny, I finally had somebody who matched my passion. I knew he’d stay the course even though he shouldn’t. It wasn’t like everybody in his camp was jumping up and down saying, “Make this movie!” His agent and lawyers didn’t want him to do it.

  JOHNNY DEPP

  I was in New York, I think for the twenty-fifth-anniversary party for Fear and Loathing, and I cornered Hunter and asked him if he really wanted me, if he really felt I was the guy to do that, because I knew he had other friends who were actors, and I would have been more than happy to back out. It was Hunter’s book, and if it was going to be me, I needed to have his blessing. And he said, “No, of course you’re wanted. You have my blessing.” I said, “If I do a remotely decent job of portraying you, you know there’s a very good chance you’ll hate me for the rest of your life,” and he said, “Well then, let’s hope for your sake that I don’t, ho, ho.”

  WAYNE EWING

  One January Sunday during the play-offs, Hunter called me up and said, “You’ve got to come up with your camera. The writer-director of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is coming up to have a script conference, and we’ll watch football and talk about the movie.” Hunter was in a great mood. He was really looking forward to meeting Alex Cox and his partner. He put a naked blow-up doll out in the snow as a signpost for them to know they were at Owl Farm.

  He cooked them sausages—I had never seen him cook breakfast for anybody before—but unfortunately, they were vegetarians. It was my first clue that things were going to go a bit awry. We all began to watch the football game, but they weren’t into gambling, which I could see was perhaps another problem, but Hunter was hanging in there. I spent a couple of hours trying to copy the only copy of the script they had brought with them so there could be a decent script conference after the game was over. Immediately, Hunter—who had been saying repeatedly throughout the afternoon that he had not read the script—asked the most pertinent question of all. It was about a structural problem that had always existed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, because it’s a combination of two trips that he actually took: the first one to cover the Mint 400 and the second one for the DAs’ drug conference. They were totally separated in time, and Hunter’s question was, essentially, about how you put those two trips together in one film.

  They said, “Well, you get swept back to Vegas on this tidal wave.” Hunter said, “Tidal wave? What do you mean, tidal wave?” They replied, “You know, like what you wrote about in the book.” The “wave speech” is one of the highlights of the book: He talks about how, in 1970 or ’71, you could go outside of Las Vegas, and with the right kind of eyes, look up at the mountains and see this high-water mark, this place where this wave that represented the energy of the 1960s broke and rolled back. Alex and his partner had come up with this idea to have him surf this wave back to Las Vegas.

  Hunter asked, “It’s a wave? How are you going to show that? Some kind of animation?” They said, “Yes, animation!” Hunter began to refer to that as a “cartoon.” They wouldn’t back down on the idea, and this went on for about two hours. It was excruciating to watch. Alex and his partner thought that they were fulfilling “the Steadman vision,” as they referred to it, and then Alex made the mistake of saying, “What people remember about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, most notably, are the drawings of Ralph Steadman.”

  I really thought he was going to get hurt. Alex then said something to the effect of, “You probably didn’t even like cartoons as a child,” and Hunter’s response was, “Do I look like I suffered for it? You’ve had one and you’re already at two. You don’t want to get to three or you’re out of here.” They threw their coats on and ran out of the kitchen, and that was the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for them.

  JOHNNY DEPP

  So Alex Cox split, and we got Terry Gilliam to direct.

  DOUG BRINKLEY

  Around this time I organized—with Ron Whitehead, a Louisville poet—a retrospective on Hunter in Louisville. And we called Jann Wenner about throwing Hunter a party, and Jann, without hesitation, said yes, he’d throw Hunter a huge party for the anniversary of Vegas. I was MC of the event in Louisville, and we got all of Hunter’s childhood friends together, and Virginia, his mother, came and sat in the front row. We pulled together this great event, and Hunter’s son, Juan, wrote a beautiful tribute to his dad’s outlaw legacy.

  JOHNNY DEPP

  When we did Hunter S. Thompson Day in Louisville—he was very proud of this—at the end of the night it was Hunter and me onstage taking questions from the audience. I was the interpreter. His mother, Virginia, was right there in the front row, and it was wonderful.

  Hunter decided that since we were both brothers from “the dark and bloody ground,” as Kentucky is known, there were several fish to fry in Louisville. We were going back there to clear his name—they were going to celebrate him, and his mother was going to be there, and she would be proud. He said he wanted to make me a Kentucky Colonel—which almost anyone can be. There’s a society of Kentucky Colonels. Hunter was one and he made me one. You don’t need to do anything—you just write in and ask for it, and they give it to you. From then on, he always referred to me as the Colonel.

  WAYNE EWING

  All Hunter’s childhood friends were at the event. It was a sold-out crowd, and as it came to a close, there were people all over the stage. It ended with David Amram leading Johnny Depp and a lot of good local musicians in “My Old Kentucky Home.” Just as it was ending, Hunter beckoned me over and said, “You’ve got to help me get out of here. That man is after me”—and he pointed to someone backstage.

  BOB BRAUDIS

  I had a walkie-talkie, and Hunter was yelling at me through it to grab his bag, run out the back door, and dive into the stretch limo because fans were attacking him. All of a sudden flames were flying. Some rednecks set fire to the backstage of the theater. This is the kind of shit you worry about. If Hunter had come back in, who knows? He might have started throwing punches and gotten the shit kicked out of him.

  WAYNE EWING

  Later, when we looked at the footage, Hunter showed me who the guy was—it was one of his boyhood friends who had been arrested with him when he went to jail when he was seventeen. I can’t say that the person was a threat or not. It’s probably more likely that Hunter just didn’t want to have to see him, but he built it up, as Hunter would, into a huge drama.

  BOB BRAUDIS

  The day after the event in Louisville, Juan wanted Hunter to go see his mother, who I think was eighty-nine. They didn’t have any time together the previous night—she got to the show late and left. But Hunter was waffling on it, and we had this stripper hanging out with us that we had picked up—a cute little thing wearing a micro-miniskirt—and I said to Hunter, “Here’s the deal. I will drive you and Juan out to the nursing home. I’ll kill an hour with whatever her name is—Bambi—at a bar and then come pick you up. Hunter said, “You promise? An hour? No longer?” I said, “Yeah.” So I dropped Juan and Hunter off at this nursing home out in the boondocks, and Bambi and I took off looking for a bar. When we got back to the nursing home, there were Hunter and Virginia and about eight relatives. Virginia wanted all of her relatives to see her son, the famous writer. Everybody was smoking and drinking, and the nurses were very upset.

  The next day we were taking off out of Louisville on a forty-five-degree climb toward the sun, and the seatbelt sign was still on. We were in the first row of first class, and Hunter claws himself into the bathroom. We leveled off, and the next thing I knew there was a long line in front of the door, and he’d been in there for forty-five minutes. The flight attendant came to me and said, “Exactly what
is your friend doing in the restroom?” I said, “He’s had hideous diarrhea for the last twelve hours.” She said, “Oh, okay. Thank you. No problem.” So Hunter finally came out and sat down, and I said, “What the fuck were you doing in there?” He said, “I took a bath, I shaved my head, I brushed my teeth, I meditated.” Then he reached into his carry-on and pulled out a liter of fucking Chivas and started chugging. The flight attendant said, “Hey, we’ll give you all of that you want for free, but you’re breaking the law.” Hunter said, “Well, bring it.”

  That’s when I decided it was easier for me to decline invitations to travel with him.

  WAYNE EWING

  Any time with Hunter on the road was like dog years. It was always a production, and it got to be more and more of one as time went on. He was not an easy guy to travel with by any means. It wasn’t just the traveling, but checking into the hotel, getting the right suite. That could be two hours of excruciating agony—just getting the right suite. The climate had to just be right. The view had to be right. The furniture had to be just the way he liked it. And very often the finest hotel you could imagine—the Four Seasons in New York or the Brown Palace in Denver—would never have a suite that was good enough for him. He could always find something wrong with a suite, although there were a couple he liked at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood—either suite 59 or 69, one on top of the other. Those had been road tested.

  Before I left Hunter’s room at night, I would say, “Hunter, whatever you do—do not double-lock the door, because I can’t get back in. I’ve got a key, but if you double-lock it, the key doesn’t work anymore, and you can’t hear me banging on the door. He would say, “Yes, yes, I understand, I understand.” More than once I had to get security to take the door off its hinges because he would double-lock the door. He was dead asleep, and of course he’d have some twelve o’clock appointment he’d made with a film executive who was already waiting in the lobby.