Gonzo

by Corey Seymour

  JANN WENNER

  Hunter always told me that without the drugs, he would have had the mind of an accountant.

  JUAN THOMPSON

  For Anita and Deborah both, once they got home, things were far more difficult because there was no nurse, no one else on duty. It was just the two of them, and I’m sure it was a real shock, especially since Anita was a young woman, thirty-one at the time.

  At first, the physical therapist would come out to Owl Farm and work with him there; later he’d go into town to do it. I think he actually enjoyed it; he got a sense of accomplishment from it, and it was very important for him to recover from this and to be mobile again, so he could go where he wanted to go when he wanted to go and not depend on someone to get him there. He had a lot of motivation to do it.

  DEBORAH FULLER

  I did a great deal facilitating Hunter’s life the best I could for twenty-five years, and then in the fall of 2003, it was time for me to take a break and have my own time. I never saw Hunter after I left. We spoke often, but we never got together again.

  DOUG BRINKLEY

  Hunter cared about Deborah dearly. She is one of the four or five most important people to ever be in his life. He considered her family—but of course, families have disputes too. Deborah had a saintly tolerance for Hunter’s indiscretions and went through a lot with him, but then Hunter met Anita and fell head-over-heels in love with her. He did not want Deborah to go, but it was a question of whether he could get Anita and Deborah to work together so there was some kind of harmony at Owl Farm. It’s very hard when you have a bride and another woman in the same house. That’s not an easy prescription. Hunter cared deeply and dearly about Deborah right up to the very end, but he thought he needed a time-out to get his marriage jump-started properly for a few years, to get a new high-octane rhythm going in a new direction.

  Marriage was a big deal for Hunter. He had a lot of different girlfriends, but after Sandy he never went as far as to get married. This was a big move that said, “I want to make this marriage work. I really want to do this.” He bought Anita a huge diamond ring in New Orleans. That was hard not just on Deborah but on some of Hunter’s previous girlfriends, who would sometimes come and visit him for a week.

  Suddenly he was a married man. He was trying to get a good rhythm going with Anita and get working with her on the ESPN column, and they had an incredible groove going—romantically, professionally. Anita magically transformed him into a boy again. But then Hunter’s health started going sideways on him, and what he thought was going to be a decade of fun with Anita started looking more like two years.

  BOB BRAUDIS

  For years, Deborah was the Girl Friday—if the phone rang at three in the morning and it was someone that wanted to see Hunter, she knew whether this person should see Hunter or not. And that historical knowledge disappeared when she disappeared.

  Hunter needed Deborah, and Hunter’s theory was that Anita ran Deborah off. Deborah was the most loyal, hardworking, qualified assistant that anyone could have, and when she moved out, Hunter told me that his production, his literary factory, had ground to a halt. Anita tried very hard to fill that role as well as all the others, and she was exhausted herself. My sympathy for Anita is sincere and intense. She was working five jobs: wife, cook, cleaning woman, editorial assistant, groundskeeper. She was running the whole farm.

  JOHN WILBUR, a former guard for the Washington Redskins, had been a friend of Hunter’s since 1972.

  The Honolulu Marathon organizers considered Hunter a director of some sort because of The Curse of Lono. He had put their marathon on the map. He went to the dinner, and people would come to see him at the Kahala Mandarin. He was kind of an offbeat mascot. The directors invited him back year after year—he didn’t come in 2004 because he had caused so much trouble in 2003 that they needed a year off. But they invited him back for the 2005 race, and that was when he broke his leg.

  The night it happened we’d had a nice dinner—Michael Stepanian and Brooke Hart, Anita and Hunter. I left their suite at eleven-thirty or twelve and got a call from Anita about four-thirty. He had been heating up some saimin soup, spilled some on this very slick marble floor, slipped on it, and broke his left tibia and fibula. He was in the hospital getting the leg set, and it was very, very painful,

  We couldn’t get him on a regular airplane because his leg was immobile. A physician friend of mine told me about a flying ambulance service, but the cheapest one was thirty thousand, and Hunter didn’t have that kind of money.

  We called Jeanette at Tosca in San Francisco, and Sean Penn was there and volunteered to put his credit card down to take care of the flight. And for that, he got the option for The Curse of Lono for a certain time. They tried to boot Hunter off the plane in L.A. because he was so disruptive, but somehow he made it all the way to the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic in Vail, and after a week or so he was able to go home.

  BOB BRAUDIS

  Anita had been up for five nights, and she checked into a lodge. Juan was there, but he had a day job. I said, “I’ll sit here until he’s stabilized, and I’ll get him home. It was a Sunday. There was a TV in the lobby of the hospital, and I was watching football games, and finally it was time to take Hunter home. We got him into a van. His cast went from his balls to his ankle, and it was heavy, and it had a bend in it. I called a deputy of mine, Joey DiSalva, and told him to go up to the hospital and borrow a wheelchair. Joey met us at Owl Farm, and the driver, Anita, Michael Cleverly, and I lifted Hunter by the ass, put him in the wheelchair, and carried him up the stairs and into the kitchen. The Denver Broncos were playing on Sunday Night Football. Hunter said, “Hot damn, the Broncos are playing—you wanna bet?”

  Joey and I bet him twenty bucks. He didn’t even remember it. I stayed there for five days and nights and gave Anita a break, and I saw him go through the worst psychosis I’ve ever seen. He was really pissed that he was once again infirm, but I kept saying, “It’s just a broken leg, Hunter. We have three or four of them every day on the mountain. It’s just a broken leg. Get over it.”

  STACEY HADASH

  The last time that I spent real time with Hunter was when I think he knew he was going to kill himself. He called up and said he had broken his leg in Hawaii, and Anita had about had it, and he had fired every nurse that came near him. He said, “I’m really desperate—please come out and help me.” It was right after Christmas. He had hired some kid, somebody’s relative from down the road, to come at noon and wake him up and help him with things.

  BEN FEE started work as an assistant at Owl Farm in January 2004.

  My mom was looking after some of Hunter’s animals when he was away, and she mentioned that Hunter might be looking for someone to document the behind-the-scenes preparations for the movie version of The Rum Diary, so I talked to Anita, and she set up a meeting later that night with Hunter. She warned me—“Hunter doesn’t really take well to males.” Hunter told me that they were planning on going into production with the movie but that the script sucked and they couldn’t do anything until they got a good script, and he didn’t know when he was going to approve one. We hung out and talked, and he asked me to stay up and help him work on the ESPN column. I was there until about six a.m., and then he said, “Can you come back tomorrow?” Eventually he and Anita hired me full-time and I moved into the cabin. I had my video camera and my still camera, and whenever anything picked up, I’d document the experience. Hunter was really excited about having a camera looming around in the background. It was another way for him to be immortalized.

  STACEY HADASH

  That time was the most fun that I ever had with Hunter. We would stay up late talking politics and all sorts of things in the kitchen. We’d always tried to make weekends like that happen, because a lot of Hunter’s assistant-girlfriends would get jealous. They’d kind of get over it when they’d figure out that I was just a friend who’d been around for a long time who was not going to become—and had not been—his girlf
riend.

  On one of my final nights there he left a note for me when I woke up that said, “Fuck everybody—lock up the gates. These are the final nights that we’ll ever get to spend time together. We’ll build a big fire in the kitchen—no guests, nobody coming over for football. I’m firing Tobia. I’m firing Juan as my son.” But during my final day there he became so ugly—he started screaming at me, for hours, because he didn’t have some medication. He was getting incredibly vicious. I couldn’t figure it out, but finally Anita told me, after Hunter was dead, “You know what? He was mad at you because you were leaving. He didn’t want you to go.”

  Part of the problem was that he had no mobility at all, and he would not be able to bathe for days. Carl Bernstein was coming by the house and called from the bottom of the hill, and I’m like, “Jesus God Almighty! I need to help him get dressed!” He smelled like a homeless person. I was going to help him take a bath, but he just never really got there.

  He had this portable toilet, and one day he said, “All right, you have no choice, you have to join the club.” I’m like, “What club is that?” and he said, “I’ve got to shit, and you’ve just got to help me. Bring that thing over here.” He had no control over his bodily functions at all.

  During that December we talked a lot about his relationship with Anita, and he said that he wrote a lot about it and that there were always letters in his kitchen drawer right underneath his typewriter. There are things he kept very, very private, and there’s a lot more of that in terms of the letters that he didn’t want seen. But these notes to Anita—obviously she must have read them; they were sitting right in his drawer.

  He completely loved her—he really did—and he said she was a lover but a fighter, and that it was an incredibly volatile mix—it was like a tinderbox. There was an enormous amount of passion, but an enormous amount of fire.

  SARI TUSCHMAN began working as an assistant to Hunter in June 2004.

  Anita was trying to get out of harping on Hunter to write. She wanted to be more of a wife, so I ended up working with him until January of the next year.

  His ESPN column was due every Tuesday, and at first I’d just come down on Monday night and help him put together the column—oftentimes it was just writing down things he said. Sometimes he just wanted someone to come down and read. We’d read some of his unpublished work; sometimes we’d read old stuff from Campaign Trail ’72. Sometimes I’d be down there three nights a week; other times I wouldn’t go at all.

  Sometimes he’d be in a funk, and hearing his stories read aloud would cheer him up. I think he just wanted to be reminded of how much he’d done and how brilliant so much of it was. At times, it was impossible to get him to write, and he’d get really upset with himself. Whenever he wasn’t producing, he’d get angry and yell and get upset about ridiculous things. He’d throw things; he’d scream; he’d give up. He went through a stage where if I spoke I got yelled at—I couldn’t breathe without getting yelled at. And I just had to weather it. He knew how to shut you up and put you in your place and make you feel very small. I saw him do that to pretty much everybody. On the other hand, sometimes he was really fatherly and downright sweet. When I arrived on one Friday night, Hunter said, “Sari, the sheriff just called, and Fear and Loathing’s on TV.” And we watched Fear and Loathing together, and he told me how every single thing in the movie actually happened, and how if anything Hollywood downplayed it.

  We watched his A&E biography with his arm around me—it was one of those days he was being fatherly and adorable, and he told me these unbelievable stories. He loved talking about how incredible his life had been and where he’d come from. He had so much to tell—and I don’t think enough people were asking anymore.

  SHELBY SADLER

  The last piece that Hunter and I worked on together was Rolling Stone’s John Kerry story. Hunter asked me, “How can we get Nixon into this piece? I want this to be about Nixon. Find me a quote from Nixon that will explain this election.” I finally came up with one from Nixon’s book Real Peace. Hunter had originally wanted a very negative quote, and I said, “I’m not doing that. We’re going to make Nixon look smart here, because you know that’s what you really think.” In the end, when he read the quote, he said, “Okay, go for it. Write a paragraph to go with it and you can say it. You can say Nixon was the last liberal president.” And he let me do it. In retrospect, I think he meant it as his parting gift to me.

  JANN WENNER

  In the summer of 2004, Hunter wanted to cover the John Kerry presidential campaign. He couldn’t go on the road anymore, so he was set up to ride with Kerry in his car when he came to Aspen for a fund-raiser and spend the day following him and hanging out. He had wanted to do a big story, and I told him that we’d set up phone interviews with some key players, and that he should get at least one scene, even if he couldn’t attend the convention, and write about the TV coverage. We’d make it as easy as possible.

  Hunter wanted very much to again be a part of the national political story—to maybe return to that time and era in his life—especially with the war, when the stakes were very high. He’d want to do the piece, but he kept failing at it. He failed to take the first step, or the second step; he didn’t make that phone call. By that time it was too late, or there were too many drugs or too many people in the house.

  I give credit to Anita. Hunter turned some stuff in, and it was okay. A few pages were nice. I sat down with one of my editors and said, “This works, this doesn’t work . . . Write a memo to Hunter explaining what we need. Put it in writing and send it off to him.” I would encourage him and encourage him, and then nothing would happen. We’d talk on the phone. I’d say, “Let’s set a deadline for Monday for you to turn in at least a section on this,” and nothing would happen. He’d written a few more pages. He had about half of a short piece. I had to cut all the Nazi stuff out of it, because at this point it was too old-fashioned, and it didn’t work anymore. But he had some nice snappy paragraphs in there. Anita finally called me—I didn’t really know her at this point—and said, “He really needs your help. Please, please call him and encourage him. You’ve got to do this.” It was that appeal that got me back into it.

  I guess it was just enough to push Hunter to write a small but righteous piece that we’d publish with his byline on the cover. He was thrilled. He was so proud to be back in the game.

  Of course, then there was some haggling over the price, just for old time’s sake; and of course he got top dollar. He was happy. But it was the end of the road.

  DOUG BRINKLEY

  Hunter got very motivated that Kerry could beat Bush. He thought, “You know what? Maybe I shouldn’t throw in the towel. Maybe with Kerry—a guy that I knew back in the seventies—maybe we can roll these bastards back.” He got very animated about the Kerry campaign going into September ’04, and even in October and November he really thought that Bush was going to be tossed out and that there would be a president in the White House whom he could probably get on the phone when he needed to. He was feeling really up—and then he was devastated by Bush’s win. He felt that the election was fixed, that democracy truly had become a sham, that two elections in a row were rigged.

  All the things that he had championed in the cultural wars of the sixties were now not just being pushed back—they were being destroyed by the radical right. Team Hunter was losing, and it was heartbreaking to him. He thought Reagan was the worst of it, and now Reagan was like a genial way station in the conservative movement. Hunter was very hard on his generation; he thought a lot of them had just sold out. He felt the press corps was being bitch-slapped by the Rove White House, that the media were losing their nerve.

  RICH COHEN is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.

  I went to Owl Farm in October 2004 to interview Hunter. Jann had commissioned me to write a profile of him for Rolling Stone. Anita wasn’t there. She would call me from her mother’s to make sure that I was going to be there.

  F
rom the first moment I saw Hunter, he was losing it. He entered the room cursing and kicking a chair, and then he sat down and opened a drawer full of pills and took some pills and started drinking. After that you could talk to him for a while, and then as the night went on, he started smoking pot and drinking more, and suddenly he actually became more and more normal. Most people start out on the first floor and take drugs to take them to the second floor. He started out in the basement and took drugs to take him back up to the first floor.

  He was frail. He would line up his movements like a pool shot—I’m going to go from this doorway to that stool—and if anything was in his path, something you’d just normally step around, it might pose a real problem, and when he came in contact with it, he would have a fucking shit fit. He’d toss shit and scream.

  Hunter was really paranoid, and we got in a couple of arguments because he was saying things that I thought were crazy. At the time, it seemed like Bush might not win the election, which was in a week or two, and Hunter said, “Oh, they’ll find a way for him to win. He’ll win.” His theory was that if it looked at the very end like Dubya wasn’t going to win, suddenly we’d see that George Bush the elder would die, and that would swing the election to the son. I said, “How’s that gonna happen?” He said, “They’d just tell him, ‘Look, old-timer. You’ve had your shot; your time is up. You’ll have to do this for your son.’”

  He wanted me to stay longer and do a lot of shit for him. I thought I was going there as a reporter to write a story, and he wanted me to become an assistant. At one point I was there all night and got back to my hotel at seven in the morning, and there was a message from him—he wanted me to come back to Owl Farm. He had a story about John Kerry due for Rolling Stone, and every night I was there he got a call at two in the morning from their national affairs editor, Eric Bates, and every night he would blow it off. All Hunter had to do was write a couple of sentences; the story was basically done. But he couldn’t do it. He wanted me to do it. He wanted me to come back, type up the whole story, write his additional sentences, read him the whole thing, and then fax it back, because he couldn’t work the fax machine. I pretended I didn’t get the message.