There was part of him that was always slightly embarrassed by his extremist behavior. So this was the dichotomy that he, as a human being, had to deal with within himself. And those of us who knew about him and cared for him had to deal with that too. Of course, there were times when he would go into ranting and rages, but for the many, many, many years that we were together, it just bounced off of me. I knew this was a part of Hunter, and I accepted his behavior.
I think every writer writes out of some schism in their personality, and I do think Hunter was underneath quite lonely, and the drugs and the alcohol helped mask that. Hunter is also the one writer I know of where everything he wrote would be more or less true but he would pretend it wasn’t, whereas others would try to say it was true when it wasn’t. He threw caution to the winds early on, and that became part of his persona, and he thought he had to keep doing it. He had to live out who he was.
JOHNNY DEPP
About a week before it happened, he left me a message that once again promised to be one of those long, drawn-out Hunter experiences. I listened to about half of it, and then the clock was ticking and I had to run. The part of it I did hear was so sweet, and up, and light. I saved the message and went on to do my stuff, and by the time I got the news that Hunter had made his exit, that message was gone—it just evaporated. I never heard the end, and that will fuck with me forever.
JANN WENNER
I got back from Christmas break in mid-January and picked up a New Year’s Eve message from Hunter on the machine. It was not the typical crazed ramble or rant—this was just to say he was thinking of me, and all our times together, how good they had been, how much they meant to him . . . and it was just going through his mind and he wanted me to know. It was out of the blue. He had said this to me before, in person and in letters. But this time it was a little more personal, a little more tender . . .
PORTER BIBB
In retrospect, his bitterness at being hung out to dry when he was in jail in high school stayed with him for a long, long time—forty or fifty years. Up until a month or two before he died, he started calling me again, after years of not having any regular communication, every night at two, three, four o’clock in the morning. He kept talking about Louisville and how mean-spirited it was. One night, in one of these conversations, I said, “Well, why the fuck didn’t you give somebody a call?” He could have called me or called Paul Semonin; either one of us could have sprung him from jail in a second. But he wouldn’t answer.
Hunter’s youngest brother, Jim, who was gay, died of AIDS a few years ago. And Davison, his other brother, is just rock solid—he looks like Mr. Normal Guy out of Normalville, Illinois. I saw him at a memorial service after Hunter died, and he told me, “I don’t know where Hunter came from.” The whole thing didn’t compute to him. Then he asked me, “Why do you think he hated Louisville so much?” I told him I didn’t know, except that maybe all these years he resented the fact that nobody had helped him.
MICHAEL STEPANIAN
Keep in mind that he had my American Express card. He didn’t have enough credit to get one himself, so he said, “Look—do this for me for a couple of months.” And it turned out to be twenty years. The last bill, when he died, was for thirteen thousand bucks, and I picked that up. I didn’t mind doing it because he always paid his bills on time. Plane tickets, obscene movies, condoms . . . I mean, I had shit on that card that was unbelievable. It was such a wonderful experience getting those bills every month.
I represented him. I loved him. We loved each other. We both came from the same generation, and we were basically righteous. We don’t suffer from schmucks.
He was a great, great man with an amazing sense of the now. He followed the Buddha; he followed the way. He had great wah.
DON JOHNSON
Hunter was incredibly knowledgeable about Buddhism, and I had read pretty much every book ever written on the subject and was meditating three times a day—walking the walk. We were talking and joking around one night, and I said, “Hunter, what is the sound of one hand clapping?” And he reached up and slapped me upside the head.
TOM BENTON
People talk about “closure.” I do not want closure. I cannot have closure with this man because for almost forty years, he was my stability. I told that to someone, and he said, “What do you mean? Hunter Thompson couldn’t be anybody’s stability.” But he was my stability. He was the Rock of Gibraltar for me. And his death leaves a hole. I don’t want closure—fuck no—I want to curse him and laugh with him.
For me, he’s as big as Hemingway. I said to him once, “You know, you really are pretty good.” And he said, “You know what? Sometimes I can be the best.”
LAILA NABULSI
He had a great sense of knowing when somebody needed attention; he had this unerring instinct to reach out at times and make sure you were okay. I met him when I was twenty-two, and for almost thirty years he was always there. Even as I grew older, he was the person who got me. Even if it had to change form, the love never ended, and the connection never ended.
GEORGE STRANAHAN
I will say one thing about the man: It was always clear in my mind that if I got in a situation where I was down at the cop shop and had one phone call, it was absolutely clear to me that that call would be to Hunter.
CURTIS ROBINSON
Spending time with “Hunter people” is like being with other addicts. If there’s three of us at a party, we’re going to go stand by ourselves and tell Hunter stories. For a long time after being with Hunter, for weeks afterward, it was like that scene from Trainspotting where a heroin addict says to another addict, “The problem with being off is you know you’ve had your best day.” For weeks after being in the trenches with Hunter, I would wonder, “Will it ever be that kind of fun again?”
JACK NICHOLSON
He was a very, very gentle guy with a lot of problems, and I guess he never found the right way to share them. He kept his own counsel, and when he did say things, it was often to provoke. To many people, he was the Good Doctor in this area, and as long as Hunter was around, somebody was watching certain things that the rest of us might be too complacent to start jerking the alarm bell on.
DEBORAH FULLER
Hunter shooting himself did not surprise me. I always felt that he was in charge of his life and knew that he would be in charge of his death if and when he chose that path. He would say so, and I believe he was preparing me for the possibility that he would go out that way. So I accepted it from the beginning—you had to, if you were his true friend. I am honored that I was an important part of his life.
I guess I was always an action junkie, but I didn’t know the true meaning of that until I met Hunter.
RICHARD GOODWIN
He was as close to being a truly liberated intellectual and individual in today’s society as anyone I’ve ever known. It might have taken strange forms, but what did I care about that? He had an inner integrity that was distinct from anything else he did in literature.
DOUG BRINKLEY
He did not commit suicide in a burst of irrational anger or because he was having a bad day or because his karma was off-kilter or just because he was in chronic pain or because he was feuding with family. This was an intellectual, pragmatic decision that he had contemplated for all of his life, that was becoming his favorite focal point of conversation and thought in his last six months of life. This was an act of no regret.
SANDY THOMPSON
I’ve thought a lot since Hunter’s death about his ability to seduce. It’s an energy—and yeah, you use people here and there. It’s not all bad, and it’s not all good. I just think people like him were born with something, and then they worked on it a little bit, honed it a little bit finer.
For so many people—and for me for years, even though I had this angst, and I was scared—being around Hunter was exciting. It was exciting and it was very dramatic. I was madly in love with this person, and I was terrified always that he would l
eave me. I came to find out years later that Hunter was also terrified that I would leave him. But he was a scary guy. Even some of his best friends, who were big, substantial, successful people, could feel that.
I think that underneath all of that bravado and violence and anger and fear, though, was an understanding that he was not living the right life—that he was hurting people. He knew he could get what he wanted and that he could make people feel really, really scared and make them tremble. It was like being in a cult. He knew all of this, I believe, at the very core, and that was unbearable for him. I understand now, as of course I did not when we were together, that someone who suffers truly unmanageable energies and such dark mood swings will inevitably attack his external world in a desperate attempt to relieve his internal world. Hunter—Hunter’s life—was tragic.
Hunter was not a man to reveal his true self. He was not a man to reveal his fears. It was the opposite. It was about the power and the magic and the charisma and the wisdom—and the intelligence and the creativity and the imagination. But all of us have fears, and Hunter had great fears. Hence the life that he lived.
When I asked him once, long after our divorce, if things had turned out like he had wanted, he said, “Well, of course not”—and he paused and then gave me that look—“but it’s been glamorous.”
DOUG BRINKLEY
Hunter is going to be read and read and read, and in that sense he is never going to go away. His books will be a part of people’s lives; his voice is so unique and powerful and funny. Just rip any page out of any Hunter book and read it and you will immediately know that it’s Hunter. There is nothing he did that didn’t have his own stamp on it. The hardest part of creative writing is finding your own voice—an authentic, original voice that can translate into the culture. Only a handful of writers in a generation can pull that off, and Hunter, in that regard, transcended his competition. Gonzo is now in the dictionaries. There are a lot of people who write beautiful New Yorker essays and craft elegant novels, but they don’t have an authentic voice. Hunter’s voice is going to echo the longest of any writer of his generation.
DAVID HALBERSTAM wrote the introduction to Fear and Loathing in America, Hunter’s second volume of letters.
Much more than most, the best of his work stands up and endures because there’s such a strong viewpoint. The further you are from the event, the more important the chronicler becomes—in this particular case, Hunter’s writing becomes twenty-five and thirty years later often more important that the events themselves. The events shrink, but Hunter’s performing and reinterpreting them is enhanced.
He was magical, and I think that anybody who starts pigeonholing or categorizing him is going to get his fingers burned. I think there was always going to be one more book, one more terrific piece. He really had a long span for someone so original—and one who was leading a Hunter-esque life.
The great thing about Hunter is that when he heard that voice saying, “This is the way to do it,” he listened to it.
NORMAN MAILER
Las Vegas is a helluva book. Everything he did, in a way, is a helluva book. He broke so many rules that I would get dizzy trying to evaluate him. I didn’t always approve of the rules he was breaking, since I was much more of an established writer than he was, but his daring always appealed to me. He’s one of those people who you could read a page of his work and be turned on by it, and you can’t say that about too many writers.
I found him immensely stimulating, but for that reason alone I very often didn’t read much of him—I didn’t want to get overstimulated. We’re very competitive, we writers. I felt if I read too much Hunter I was going to start saying, “What can I do that’s in a vein like Hunter Thompson?” And I didn’t want to get into that. If you’re dealing with someone who’s the absolute best at something, I wouldn’t necessarily try to ace them.
DOUG BRINKLEY
Everybody always talks about Hunter being influenced by Hemingway and Fitzgerald—and of course they loomed very large on the literary landscape of his time—but it was Norman Mailer that Hunter really gravitated toward. Advertisements for Myself was his bible. Mailer concocted a character called General Marijuana, which knocked Hunter out. He later modeled The Great Shark Hunt on that weird anthology. And it was Mailer’s book Cannibals and Christians—with the detailed reportage on the 1964 Republican Convention—which would lead to Campaign Trail ’72. Mailer is also where Hunter picked up some of his odd salutations and verbal tics like “Selah” and “Hot Damn”—“Hot Damn” came from Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?” Even as late as 2001, when Mailer was raising questions about the 9/11 attack, Hunter burst out in cheer. “Thank Jesus for Norman,” he’d say. He felt Mailer was the only contemporary writer he still had something to learn from, and he loved the fact that he took risks.
TOM WOLFE
Hunter was the only twentieth-century equivalent of Mark Twain or Josh Billings or Petroleum V. Nasby. These were all people who were part journalist and part people having fun with the truth. If you read something like Innocents Abroad, it’s a travel book, but everything is stretched to the nth degree. You’re learning things, but you’re also watching acrobatics done with the information. That’s what Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is—it’s a different mind-set from Mark Twain because Twain would take dignified things and show their idiocy with a few changes. It was very subtle compared to Hunter. Instead of saying, “Let’s put this thing up against the wall,” Hunter would say, “Let’s just go through the wall.” He was just brilliant—there are very few writers who could top him. I can’t think of any humorist in the whole century who could touch him.
DAVID HALBERSTAM
Certainly anybody who tries to imitate him falls on his face because he was such an American original—and in an odd way, very much in control of what he was doing on the page, and many people don’t know this. The impression is that he’s wild and out of control, but if you’re a fellow writer watching him, you’re watching someone who’s very much in control, knows how to approach things, how to turn the normal prism upside down. He was almost cold-blooded in knowing how to do the Hunter Thompson take on something. It’s a very strong, focused mechanism.
RALPH STEADMAN
I think he should be lying in state next to the Lincoln Memorial, myself. That’s how they should have done it. They should have embalmed him properly. He was a genuine son of the Kentucky pioneers.
He was a shy guy, but he overcame that by being full of bravado. He was humble, but then he’d come out with an outrage of some kind against somebody that triggered another deeper spirit within that would not show itself unless somebody provoked it. Of course he had to be a tyrant too. He had to be tireless all the way down the line. He took it seriously—being a decent human, seriously caring about the rights of man—and I’m afraid that a lot of people in the last thirty years have corroded that whole idea.
I know that inside he felt this deep outrage because people were fucking with his beloved Constitution. That was the most important thing for him. He was still fighting to the end.
I tried to become an American citizen once, and Hunter said, “I will do everything in my power, Ralph, to prevent you from becoming a member of the United States. You don’t deserve it.”
BOB BRAUDIS
From now on when the phone rings at four a.m., it’s just bad news.
CAST OF VOICES
JEFF ARMSTRONG is a manager of the O’Farrell Theatre, an adult-film house in San Francisco.
DR. STEVE AYERS is the coroner of Pitkin County, Colorado.
SONNY BARGER is a founding member of the Hells Angels.
ED BASTIAN helped manage Hunter’s campaign for sheriff and later became his neighbor in Woody Creek, Colorado.
JUDY BELUSHI is the widow of John Belushi.
TOM BENTON was an Aspen architect and artist who designed the posters for Hunter’s campaign for sheriff.
SANDY BERGER was a speechwriter for George McGovern in 1
972. Berger later became President Clinton’s national security adviser.
PORTER BIBB grew up with Hunter in Louisville, Kentucky, and became Newsweek’s White House correspondent and later served as the publisher of Rolling Stone.
NEVILLE BLAKEMORE grew up in Louisville with Hunter.
BOB BONE was a writer at the Middletown, New York, Daily Record when Hunter joined the paper’s staff in 1959.
ED BRADLEY was a correspondent for 60 Minutes. He met Hunter while covering Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign.
BOB BRAUDIS has been the sheriff of Pitkin County since 1986.
DOUG BRINKLEY, a professor of history at Tulane University, is the editor of Hunter’s letters and the literary executor of Hunter’s estate.
PAT BUCHANAN was an adviser to the Nixon campaign in 1968 and later served in that capacity in the White House.
JIMMY BUFFETT, the singer, moved to the Aspen area in the early seventies.
PAT CADDELL was the chief pollster for the McGovern campaign in 1972.
TIM CAHILL was an associate editor and writer at Rolling Stone in the seventies.
DOUG CARPENTER was a Woody Creek neighbor of Hunter’s.
JIMMY CARTER is the thirty-ninth president of the United States.
JAMES CARVILLE was the chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992.
JOHN CLANCY was a Columbia University law student and Hunter’s roommate in 1958.
MICHAEL CLEVERLY is an Aspen artist and writer.
RICH COHEN is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.
TIM CROUSE was a Rolling Stone reporter who covered the 1972 presidential campaign with Hunter. He is the author of The Boys on the Bus.
JOHNNY DEPP, the actor, portrayed Hunter in the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
BILL DIXON managed the 1972 McGovern campaign in five states.
JOE EDWARDS is an Aspen lawyer who helped manage Hunter’s sheriff’s campaign in 1970.
AL EISELE was a Washington correspondent for Knight Ridder newspapers during the 1972 campaign.
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