DEBORAH FULLER
A woman named Anita Bejmuk was hanging out with Don Dixon, a friend of Hunter’s, and one night Don brought her out to the house for a football game. Hunter often told his friends, “You can’t come out unless you bring two beautiful women.” Sometimes he’d demand that because he was bored, and sometimes he was looking for assistants. Something clicked, and she stayed later and later on some other nights, and then Hunter said, “Oh—I need someone to type some things.” He always could run his number on women. He was quite good at it, and it was a great thing to watch—he was a master.
I don’t think it took too long. He was in need of an assistant.
MICHAEL CLEVERLY
Don Dixon was a big mover and a major player. He was in Hunter’s circle, and then he brought Anita up to see the great man, and next thing you know, Hunter stole Dixon’s girlfriend. That’s not reputable behavior in a lot of circles, but Dixon told me that he was willing to let bygones be bygones.
JUAN THOMPSON
Hunter was a huge flirt. He loved women—beautiful women, intelligent women, preferably both at once. That was just a basic part of his nature. I’m sure he was that way from whenever he first realized there was such a thing as girls. With guys he was often a charmer, but with women there was always a sexual overtone, and he was totally unapologetic about it. I don’t think there was one second that he felt guilty about flirting. I think he looked at it as, “Hey—it’s a woman’s choice. If she’s interested, I’m interested, and if her guy has a problem with it, well, too bad.” Though he would have been a fearsome adversary.
SHELBY SADLER
Hunter enjoyed romancing women whom he shouldn’t have. He used to make a point of being friendly with certain women in front of their husbands or boyfriends just for laughs. One time when he was at my apartment, my boyfriend Tom was present, and Hunter made a great show of grabbing me and necking with me in front of Tom, who handled it beautifully.
Hunter treated romance as a job—not as a conquest, but as a process. The reason that every woman who ever met him fell in love with him—and I’ve never met one who didn’t—is because he put so much effort into it. Any woman who came to Owl Farm would be wined and dined. Hunter would prepare elaborate meals with oysters, chocolate, strawberries, champagne—drugs, if that’s what they were into. He had a magical ability to make a woman feel as though she was the only one who ever existed—he actually used to laugh at other men because he knew how good he was. I think he was prouder of that than anything—his ability to sway any female he met not with his writing, not with his brilliance, but with his ability to focus on whoever “her” was at the moment. You would get phone calls, presents, elaborately thought out gifts, love letters. He would make himself the sun, the moon, and the stars. And in most cases, it never turned tragic.
JUAN THOMPSON
After Hunter and Sandy got divorced, there were a lot of women in Hunter’s life. There were the major women like Laila, Maria, Nicole, Terry—those were the big ones—and there were countless other women in between them that I never met, or met briefly. So for me, meeting Anita was “All right—here’s the next woman. Let’s see what she’s like.” I took a cautious attitude and got to know her a bit. She struck me as sort of nervous, obviously intelligent, and as with so many women, it was like “Let’s see if she’s here next time.” Because you didn’t know.
As with all of Hunter’s women, it was very dramatic. That’s how Hunter did his relationships—there was lots of drama: big fights, arguments, and then reconciliation, romance, all sort of alternating. It was very intense, and that seemed to be the pattern.
DOUG BRINKLEY
One night when he was down in New Orleans staying at the Pontchartrain, he turned the bathwater on but then fell asleep. We were going to go to Jazz Fest together to see Jimmy Buffett perform and then do something with Buffett afterwards, and I walked into the Pontchartrain in the morning with coffee in my hand, just waking up. This SWAT team was in the building, and I heard them say, “Water keeps pouring down from the top floor.” They were having some sort of negotiation at the front desk about how to go knock the door down, because they had been banging on it, but there wasn’t an answer.
I immediately thought, “Oh God—Hunter’s room.” Lord knows what he had lying around, and these guys were going to come bust in on him. I got up to his floor and started kicking the door and pounding and screaming, “Hunter! Get up!” I thought maybe something had happened. Maybe he had a heart attack or a stroke. The whole floor was squishy.
Suddenly I heard this weird moaning wail on the other side of the door, and I yelled, “Hunter! It’s Doug. You’re flooded in there.” I could hear him say, “Oh my God!” He opened the door and I walked in, and there was water maybe four inches deep, and it was leaking down to the other rooms. I said, “Hunter, there’s a fire department SWAT team down there. They’re coming up for you right now. Now. We’ve got to get you out of here.” We walked down a stairwell to a different floor and got down to the lobby to the breakfast room and got him a seat and some coffee. Only after the fact did I realize that he had cut his whole hand up and needed stitches. He had slipped on the bath tiles when he got up to shut the water off in the middle of the night, and his whole hand was like a huge, bloody slab of meat. The fire guys saw him, and the owner of the hotel knew who Hunter was and explained what had happened, and everybody was apologetic. They got him a new suite on a dry floor, but all day they had to deal with what happened. They had to kick people out of rooms because of the water problems that Hunter had created. But around Hunter they just wanted to know, “Are you okay, Dr. Thompson? Is your hand okay?”
DEBORAH FULLER
He liked to always have a tube of bright red lipstick, for the shock factor. He’d pull it out and put it on when people weren’t looking, all nonchalant, just to freak people out.
JUAN THOMPSON
He was very conscious of how he appeared. He would choose things to project a certain image, even if that image was “I don’t care what you think.” There was a quote he kept pinned up on the lamp in the kitchen next to his typewriter: “What is the desired effect?”
He was an exhibitionist; he liked to shock people. And sometimes he liked to wear lipstick. Whether it was to shock me or my girlfriend or my son—he just liked to get a reaction. It was a social thing. I think there’s some truth in one of his favorite descriptions of himself as “the soul of a teenage girl trapped in the body of an aging dope fiend.”
ED BRADLEY
Once at Owl Farm he was trying to get some stuff out of the refrigerator, and a bunch of things fell out. Hunter just sat down on the floor like a little boy and started banging on the floor and screaming. I said, “What the fuck is wrong with you, man? Pick it up.” He looked at me and said, “I pay them a lot of money.” Sure enough, his assistants came running in to take care of it all. “Oh God, Hunter, what did you do? Hunter, let us pick it up, just stay there.”
DOUG BRINKLEY
When it came to national politics, his basic feeling was that politicians were whores. He didn’t like them unless he befriended them—and then he would stand by them. He would exaggerate the qualities of the few people that he decided were good; George McGovern and Jimmy Carter were possessed of a Gandhi-like saintly nature in his mind. They were pulling for the underdogs of the world. There were others—Gary Hart and John Kerry were friends of his, and he would go to the mat for them. He believed that they were statespersons, and there was a small handful of others, but beyond that, whether it was Reagan or Bush or Clinton, he was bipartisan in his disdain for presidential power.
He was a libertarian. He preferred to vote for a third-party candidate as a throwaway vote—he voted for Dick Gregory in ’68 and Ralph Nader in 2000. He felt that the politics of both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party were worthless. He formed a friendship late in his life with Jesse Ventura when he was running for governor of Minnesota, and he liked the idea of
Kinky Friedman running for governor of Texas. He would always be behind outsider candidates.
When it came to understanding grand geopolitical strategy, Hunter was no good. He did not understand why we had to go fight in Afghanistan or why we needed to put pressure on the Soviet Union. He was much more about the town that he lived in—whether an airport gets expanded or a smoking ordinance introduced—than he was able to grapple with big cold war issues.
Hunter was never an egalitarian. He believed that the people who are good at what they do in any profession would rise to the top, that that was the natural order of selection. He would say, “There are people who are snow leopards, and there are people who aren’t.” Snow leopards are the rarest animals, the species wandering around at the top of the mountain in all their beauty. They were the animal he loved the most. If Hunter was talking about the CEO of a company or a county sheriff or the head of a political party or a top Hollywood actor or a big rock & roll star, he would say that they were a snow leopard. And it wasn’t just famous people—so was the man who ran the biggest construction company in Colorado, so was the best trial attorney in the Texas Hill Country, so was the owner of an NFL club. Even though he didn’t like some of the snow leopards, Hunter thought that the art of achieving put them into a society above the rest. It was a kind of elitist, Darwinian way of looking at success, and he held to it very firmly—though sometimes he would parody Hemingway and say, “Don’t forget—the scum also rises.”
BOB BRAUDIS
There was a bully component to his personality. He was rational most of the time—he wanted to create humor; he liked to have fun with a capital F. He’d get that boyish grin, and you knew that he was going to put on a show for you. But if someone was annoying him, he could turn on them like a pit bull and literally cripple them. He did that to some very close friends of his. Hunter always had an explanation, and it was usually a chickenshit reason: “He was too loud during the football game. I wanted to watch the game, not listen to him.” Or “He drank too much.”
Most of the people Hunter kicked out of his kitchen were just thrown out temporarily, but some of them were long-term eighty-sixed. Some of them asked me to broker reconciliations, and I would agree and make a phone call: “Hunter, so-and-so just called and is really suffering because of you shunning him. Are you ready to talk?” “No, not yet. Maybe someday.” Or, “Sure, why don’t you bring them down?” It depended on his assessment of the situation, his mood at the time, and the person.
TOM WOLFE
George Plimpton threw a party for Hunter in New York at his apartment on East 72nd Street. Before I came to the party, I had watched Hunter interviewed by Charlie Rose, who had to ask the questions and answer them because Hunter couldn’t. He would start to speak and just slur. It’s possible he could have been nervous because there was no way he was going to be as funny in person as he was on the page. You read Hunter and you think, “Well, boy! This stuff is just pouring out of his head as fast as he can write it down!”—as if he were Jack Kerouac, who was supposedly doing automatic writing. But he worked at it. Those funny lines were not instantaneous, and in a way, somebody that funny shouldn’t even expose himself on camera.
He was pretty far gone when he got to Plimpton’s. He was doing a mock stagger up the stairs—but it was only partly mock. He wasn’t so stoned that he was going to fall down—he was just staggering around. We had a little conversation in Hunterese, and that’s actually the last time I saw him.
DOUG BRINKLEY
Hunter thought that things were going to go haywire starting in the year 2000. He was extremely paranoid about Y2K. He had decided that this was the year the fun stopped—no more good times, good-bye Strawberry Fields forever. Part of this was natural aging and looking back at his life and realizing that being in San Francisco in the sixties was not an experience to be replicated. It was the holy apex. He would look back at that era with such longing—riding his motorcycle across the Golden Gate Bridge, being ensconsed at La Honda with Kesey, getting to know Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, killing wild boar in Big Sur, living in the Haight. Hunter lived right there in the middle of all of it.
With his health deteriorating, the things in his life that meant a lot to him were Anita; his son, Juan; and his grandson, Will. Hunter kind of got in a groove when he met Anita; he thought that he maybe had this gonzo elder-statesman-like thing to look forward to, but his body just didn’t cooperate. His mind was ready to go on to be a hundred, but his body wasn’t.
JOHN WALSH
In 2000, I asked Hunter to write a sports column for the ESPN Web site I was overseeing. He loved the idea of doing it—he thought it would be a great arc for his career, because he had started off doing sports, and he loved sports, and we got along well. He really had no concept of the Internet or what it was.
At this point, Hunter was in pretty good decline physically and intellectually. Not spiritually or emotionally—he had a great relationship with Anita—but you could see the decline in so many ways, and it was sad. It was clear that he didn’t have his A game, and especially on a weekly basis, he couldn’t focus enough to pay enough attention. We would give him stories and tips and clues, but it rarely registered. He would frequently be distracted and go in another direction—a direction that sometimes led to not such a good place. The story didn’t hang together. There wasn’t enough there to make a piece out of it. Sometimes it would take days.
But he got paid by the piece—and we paid him a handsome price by Internet standards—and he came to rely on the income. It became his economic heroin; he had to have it. I told him, “Hunter—this is the Internet. You get paid when we publish. When you send it in, we’ll get it up in two hours. You want to write Sunday night for Monday morning? We’ll have it up Monday afternoon. If you miss it Monday, it’ll come Tuesday. But if you don’t write at all, we’re not gonna send you a paycheck.” He loved the immediacy, but the procrastination and the writer’s block and the deadline pressure and everything else were debilitating to him.
JANN WENNER
It must have been a little humiliating doing that ESPN column for the money—like the earlier work for the Examiner. But I just couldn’t get him back writing strong or sustained pieces, long or short, for Rolling Stone. He was no longer in shape. He knew it and didn’t want to try. He proposed something about health and fitness for Men’s Journal, which, although it made no sense, I agreed to publish if he wrote it.
I made several serious attempts to get him to write a 1,500-word column once a month. I offered him quite a bit of money to do it—anything to get Hunter back in the paper—even if for purely mercenary purposes on my part, just to have that byline back and some of that energy. How difficult can that have fucking been? Fifteen hundred words for $10,000. Write that once a month. Just sit there and closely consider any subject. Watch television and write about some outrage you saw. But he couldn’t do it.
WAYNE EWING
He would get an idea on Saturday night, just a thesis for a potential column, and he’d write down a sentence or two in his little spiral notebook. Then we would watch a couple of football games—the middle game and the evening game. There might be a half-dozen people around for that, and we’d gamble a lot, and money would fly around. But then as people were leaving, he’d always say, “Now, you’re going to stay, Wayne, aren’t you?” Then it would generally be me and Hunter and Anita and maybe one other assistant, and it would be time to write. I would talk out ideas with him. The other way to get him to write would be for him to listen to the things he had written before that might be similar—he just liked to hear the music of his words, and so Anita or I would read to him for a half hour or so.
It was always a matter of getting him to pull that typewriter about six inches closer to him and put a blank piece of paper in it. You could usually get that accomplished by about eleven or eleven-thirty—about an hour and a half or two hours. If we were lucky, we could get him to type out a lead by midnight. If I saw him
get down a lead on paper, or even two sentences, and if he was still typing, then I would leave, and he would generally finish with Anita by five or six in the morning. Anita was invaluable in getting the real work done in the end.
JOHN WALSH
There were some good columns, and then there were some that the editors had to try to save. There were times when the budgets were strained, and people asked, “Should we keep paying Hunter?” As the years went on to 2002 and 2003 and we kept doing it, I kept saying, “You know, Hunter, you’ve got to get these better.” He was always so proud of his work that I think it hurt him that I had to say that. But he knew it had to be said.
JANN WENNER
The columns that I saw were not very memorable. By this time his writing consisted of disjointed fragments of larger thoughts and fairly lifeless repetitions of his brilliant phrasemaking and descriptions of people and places. Hunter could still write those jagged bursts in letters—though even those were deteriorating—in which he would reuse his colorful, original outbursts, but it was the same bag of tricks you’d seen many, many times, and it made me very, very sad.
BOB BRAUDIS
The fact that most of Hunter’s recent books were letters and reprints of columns, like Hey Rube, caused a lot of people to comment that he couldn’t write anything new anymore. But that was bullshit. If he had the time and the muse visited him, and he had the assistance and the help, he could write.
He explained to me once that drugs didn’t make him creative. I asked him, “Do you write better or more when you’re fucked up, or not fucked up?” He said, “No. It all depends on the whole team working together.” He had a lot of volunteer help. His publishers would often send out editors to help him make the deadline—or the fifth deadline. They had to go to the lip with him at times, and it was hard work with no compensation other than bragging rights.
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