He was connecting with Sean Penn and Jude Law and James Carville; some of the actors and actresses would come around him and read some of his works in his hotel suite. He didn’t do well on the set, though. One time they were filming and Hunter screamed in the middle of a take. But Sean kept a real attentive eye on him, and at night when he was done shooting he would go visit him.
JEFF KASS
My last conversation with him was about a month before he killed himself. I called him to talk about Lisl, and Anita said, “He’s in New Orleans. He’s staying at the Ritz-Carlton, but I’m sure he’d like to hear from you. He originally checked in under ‘Richard Nixon,’ but now you can reach him just as ‘Hunter Thompson’.”
DOUG BRINKLEY
When he was alone at the hotel, I would let myself in and he would be sitting by himself, and you could see that he had been crying. But when a crowd would come, he would try to put on a happy face. People wanted to see the legendary Hunter Thompson, and he tried hard to be upbeat and be Hunter, but he only had so much energy. When those people would leave, the real him emerged.
He said, “You know, I don’t think I can take it anymore. I’m making a fool out of myself.” I’d try to be booster-like, as anybody would: “Hunter, you’re doing great. So what if you don’t write this thing? Don’t be so hard on yourself.” And he said, “What kind of friend are you? Don’t do that. Don’t start telling me how great things are. Let’s be honest. My whole body is gone. I’m in great pain. Don’t cheapen our friendship by telling me how rosy things are.”
He was starting to lose interest in sports, even, which was pretty much his last thing. What he was interested in in New Orleans was his catalogue of works and hearing people read some of them out loud. It was like he was hearing the music of his own prose for the last time.
SEAN PENN
Warren Beatty once said about Jack Nicholson that he was “a man who goes to great lengths to get into a good mood.” Hunter would do that. Out of nowhere, he could go on a genius riff. And there were several nights of the genius riff, but something was very troubling; he was going inside himself, and you could feel it. That period was unlike the rest of the time that I knew him, where he was all the colors of the rainbow. It was all forward motion, and now I felt that the forward motion had stopped.
JUAN THOMPSON
I think he realized that his physical condition was not something he was going to recover from. And I think that realization was a big part of his decision to kill himself. New Orleans really brought it home to him that he was very dependent on people for almost everything, and that this was a situation that was not likely to change.
SEAN PENN
The last morning I saw him, Brinkley and I were heading off to Atlanta. Hunter and Anita were flying back to Woody Creek, so we’d said our good-byes the night before. Then Brinkley and I went to a Wendy’s on the way to the airport, and as I walked in I saw Anita there. They were on their way to this other airport in New Orleans, so we walked out to the car, and Hunter was sitting there—again visibly emotional but very tender and very kind.
DOUG BRINKLEY
We thought we’d surprise Hunter. Sean and I ran over to his car, and he was sitting in the front seat crying.
ED BRADLEY
He was an incredibly talented, smart, caring man, and I don’t think he could live with what he had become. I don’t think that he could live with the deterioration of his physical self and the continuing deterioration of his creative self. Most of what Hunter was doing in his last years, except for the ESPN column, was old work. His letters books, The Gonzo Papers—that’s stuff that was written years ago, and yes there was some writing involved in putting it together, but it didn’t come from the same wellspring of creativity. I think he recognized that.
DOUG BRINKLEY
Once he got back to Colorado, I talked to him nightly. His spirits stayed down, but in the last week of his life, he developed a kind of businesslike clarity that frightened me. Instead of our usual meandering conversations about things, he was coldly efficient, telling me things like, “Always remember that the basement room in the house is called Johnny’s Room,” or “You have to make sure that Owl Farm is always preserved, because developers are going to try to bulldoze it, and I’m counting on you to make sure it’s a historic place.”
WILLIAM KENNEDY
About two weeks before he died, he called and said he wanted to find a way to hang out and talk. He liked my introduction to The Proud Highway and said he’d just reread it for the eighty-fifth time. I think he was saying good-bye, calling people when he was on the way out.
LAILA NABULSI
Hunter started saying good-bye to people differently when they’d visit him or when he talked to them on the phone. I talked to Hunter a week before he died. There was definitely a good-bye about it.
Hunter was never one to look back, and now he was talking about what happened with us and asking me why, and what did I feel. I was really honest with him, and I said, “It was because I loved you so much that I was so worried, because of John. And I didn’t understand.” There were so many things that went with that, but he apologized: “I’m sorry I put you through that.”
BEN FEE
One night in mid-February, Hunter and I were going to go down to the tavern. He just couldn’t get motivated, and then finally he came out of his bedroom ready to go—with no pants or underwear on. He’d forgotten to put them on. Then something snapped, and he was back to being Hunter, and he laughed and said, “Oh, Jesus Christ,” and turned heel and put on some pants and we drove like madmen down to the tavern. We threw back some shots and had dinner.
PATTI STRANAHAN
The last two weeks before Hunter died, he couldn’t really walk on his own anymore, and one of his assistants came up with him almost every night. He was in good spirits. We would sit in the kitchen at about five o’clock in the morning, and he would raid my refrigerator. I think he knew he was getting ready to go, but he wasn’t sad. He’d just peel a grapefruit and sit. At his Super Bowl party, he told me a million things. I was just laughing at him and slapping him and stuff, but he hugged me. I know now that he was saying good-bye.
TEX WEAVER
“Chance favors the prepared mind” was one of Hunter’s favorite quotes for the last couple of years. Looking back, he was getting everything lined up. Anita kept saying to me, “I’m worried that Hunter is going to shoot himself.” I pooh-poohed it at the Super Bowl party with her—“What are you talking about? He’s not going to do this.”
SARAH MURRAY
Hunter’s Super Bowl party was a wonderful gathering. Hunter wanted me next to him the entire night. My husband was so understanding and so impressed by that. Hunter and I had a wonderful conversation that night. He actually called the next day because he was concerned that maybe he had freaked me out or was too weird, but I reassured him that it just made me feel good. We were alone. I decided to spend the night in the cabin, and Hunter had Ben help him over to the cabin. We were in a room together and it was just very, very touching and very, very soulful and sweet. I know I was truly loved by him.
BEN FEE
Hunter was in a jovial mood—there was a big bonfire in the backyard, and the night seemed to go on forever. One of his friends had brought a random large-busted girl by, and girls always brought out a side of Hunter that a man couldn’t. He loved entertaining women, and he pulled out a tube of lipstick and had a lipstick-pressing contest to see who had the best lips. We took turns passing Screwjack and Kingdom of Fear around and reading different passages.
Anita retired early that night, but everyone else was up super-late. I went to bed around seven a.m. Hunter really took to Sarah that night, and she had imbibed quite a bit and was staying in the other bedroom of the guest cabin, and Hunter kept wanting to go over to visit her.
At four or five in the morning, he asked me if I wanted to take a ride, but he just drove us back and forth from his garage to the guesthouse, wh
ich is maybe a hundred feet. He was kind of fucked up—not kind of fucked up, he was really fucked up—health-wise, plus he had eaten some brownies. He kept saying that he heard people breaking into his house, and that’s one of the reasons he wanted to go visit Sarah—he wanted to make sure she was okay—so we drove over. He couldn’t walk on his own, so I gave him a hand, and then he peed on the door of the cabin. I think he just realized that he had to go, and he always liked doing whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, so he just went. Once he was inside, he used everything to put his weight onto.
He was sort of speaking in tongues. He did that a couple nights I was there; this was one of them, and February 19 was the other night.
BEN FEE
That week, Hunter had finished an ESPN column, which was his first in a long time. We had started to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a kind of celebration—he wanted to hear the book again—and we probably got about three-quarters of the way through it.
Juan and Jennifer and Will showed up early on Saturday, and Hunter asked to be alone with Juan, so I let them have their family day and just hung out here and there. There was a basketball game on, and Hunter was teaching Will how to gamble. I think he was five or six.
Things were tense between Hunter and Anita. I only saw her once, and then she went out.
JUAN THOMPSON
He told me to take some family mementos—some silver julep cups that are traditional in Kentucky, engraved with his name and some names of his family members; a clock that had belonged to his mother. He also pointed to the medallion that Oscar Acosta had given him and told me, “When I die, I want you to have this.”
He was wearing the emerald pendant that he wore pretty much all the time, and he told me that when he died, if he and Anita were on good terms he wanted her to have the emerald.
BEN FEE
I went over to the cabin for a while, and then Juan came over with Will—really late, around two-thirty a.m. Juan said Anita was back, and there’d been a terrible fight. Hunter had pulled out a gun and was waving it around, and Anita freaked out.
JUAN THOMPSON
Hunter was sitting at his typewriter goofing around and showing off with a pellet gun he kept around, and he wanted to shoot a gong that was across into the next room, the living room. He was in a good mood; he might have been stoned, but he just wanted to show off and shoot the gong. The pellet would have had to pass within a foot or so of where Anita was sitting, which would have been a little scary, but he wasn’t in a malicious mood.
Anita was very upset, and they got into a big fight.
BEN FEE
While Juan and I were talking in the cabin, my phone rang, and it was Hunter, saying that Anita was trying to kill him and kick him out of his house. He said he wanted help and a witness. Juan and I went over, and we calmed Anita down and separated them. They were throwing shit. Hunter was yelling. He was saying he was sick of people, that he was scared that his life was going to be taken away, that she was going to go tell the cops that he was pointing guns, and then he wouldn’t be able to have any guns and he’d get thrown in jail and she’d get everything he owned. He said that there was no point being in this place if he couldn’t live how he wanted.
Anita was in hysterics. She was probably still in shock from having a gun pointed at her. She finally went downstairs into Johnny’s room and stayed there, and we read a little bit from Kingdom of Fear, and that soothed him for a while, and then it got into talking about guns and he got ranting again, so we put on the original Cape Fear in black and white and watched that. Hunter felt like shit. Closer to five-thirty or six a.m., he was sort of speaking, mumbling, still sitting in his chair, and we helped him into his room. He had another temper tantrum about his remote control, saying that the cleaning lady fucked up and was out to get him, but he found the remote and then asked Juan and me, “Do you mind just waiting until I’m asleep, just to make sure I’m okay?”
JUAN THOMPSON
The next morning, Hunter was up pretty early—before noon, which was unusual.
Anita went into town to her health club. The argument from the previous night was not resolved, and it was tense between them. After she left, Hunter and I talked further, for three or four hours, about some business matters that he wanted my help with, acting as a messenger for him to some people. It was about how he wanted to move forward and that he wanted me to convey some information to his lawyer. He was pretty calm, which is why what happened came as a surprise, because he was talking about this business, and how he wanted to deal with it, and what he wanted to do depending on the outcome. There wouldn’t have been a reason to discuss this stuff if he wasn’t going to be around.
He very deliberately did not have a final good-bye. He didn’t want to let on. It was a really nice afternoon. He was reading the paper, and me and Jen were reading, and I was taking a picture of something for Jen, and I think he just decided that that was the moment. I think he’d been hanging in there for a long time and just got tired of it.
I was in the back office when he pulled the trigger. Jennifer and Will were in the living room. I ran into the living room to get Jennifer, and we left Will in the living room. We were trying to find the sheriff’s phone number. It was terrifying.
BOB BRAUDIS
Afterward I asked Juan, “What did you think happened?” He said, “It sounded like a book falling from the counter and slamming onto the floor.”
Everyone was wondering why the hell Juan and Jennifer were summoned that weekend. Why did he do it while they were there? What if Anita had gotten pissed with him and taken off for the weekend to Fort Collins? I believe he wanted to be found quickly by people that he knew loved him.
JUAN THOMPSON
I knew immediately what had happened, but I couldn’t quite believe it. I don’t think it even occurred to us to call 911. I called the sheriff.
I went outside and loaded a gun—what Hunter called his “working gun,” the twelve-gauge Winchester Marine—with five or six shells, and then fired them up in the air as a tribute. It just seemed really important to mark that moment. A deputy pulled up, and he was a little freaked out when he heard a shotgun blast.
BOB BRAUDIS
I got a phone call from Juan saying, “You gotta get down here right away.” I didn’t know what was wrong, but I called 911. The ambulance got there before I did, and they had connected the leads to the EKG, the heart monitor, but there were no vital signs. I had to comfort Juan, Jennifer, and Will, and find Anita. She was at the Aspen Club. I spent about an hour in the cabin and called in a child psychologist to talk to Will. I finally got Anita on the phone and said, “I’m going to send a police car to get you.” I explained to her what happened. She was hysterical.
After Hunter died, Anita found a page from this spiral notebook where Hunter used to start his writing. This was titled “Football season is over.” It read, “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax—This won’t hurt.”
It was dated the last night I was with him, four nights prior.
DR. STEVE AYERS
Hunter’s body was still sitting in the chair. The .45 was on the floor. There was blood and stuff around from the gunshot wound. The sheriff’s guys had already done most of their photography, and we got some extra photographs and looked closer at the position of the hand and the gun and the gun case. This is all pretty much done before you disturb anything. We checked things like body temperature and the degree of rigor mortis to see if the time of death was consistent with what we’d been told or when the gunshot went off, and everything was kosher. As far as the position of the gun, it looked like after he fired it, it just fell down to the floor.
Normally, for a suicide with a gunshot wound, I don’t get an autopsy. You don’t need one. You know what killed him. If it was a celebrity, I usuall
y do get a full autopsy because of the questions that come up, but in Hunter’s case, he had had so many medical things and CAT scans and MRIs that we knew what his insides—his heart and liver and everything—were like.
The bullet went basically right in the back of the throat, the palate, and right out the lower part of the head—right through the brain stem, which is instant death. He couldn’t have placed it better.
I made the decision as coroner when I worked that night that I wasn’t going to do a drug screen on him. I knew his health status enough to know that it probably didn’t have any acute influence on his decision. The cause of death was gunshot wound. The manner of death was suicide.
JUAN THOMPSON
CNN was on, as it almost always was, in the kitchen, and a few hours later I remember seeing the ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen: “Author Hunter S. Thompson is dead at 67.”
LYNN NESBIT
I think he was quite a good father, in his own bizarre way. And Juan loved him. I think Hunter was embarrassed when he felt too much. I think he was almost embarrassed about how much he cared about Juan. His whole life was making show-business out of everything, and when you got down to real feelings for people close to him, he was awkward. If only he hadn’t been as awkward, I feel that would’ve helped him get his life more under control as he matured—or grew older. Because at the end . . . well, at some point or other, the irregular lifestyle was going to catch up with him.
I remember Hunter saying he didn’t expect to live past forty. I’m surprised he never had a heart attack. He must have had the heart and liver and kidneys of a master race. Who could survive what he put his body through for as many years as he lived? What’s interesting is that the physical structure of his body is what broke down, but it was the organs that were really getting the abuse.
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