Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson

by Hunter S. Thompson

  But we are not talking about dentists here. We are talking about a dashing millionaire sportsman from Palm Beach, the town’s most eligible bachelor—a wealthy jade of sorts who married an ex-cheerleader from the outskirts of Buffalo and took her to live sex shows and gave her jars of cocaine for Christmas.

  In a nut, Herbert “Pete” Pulitzer rented the Best Piece of Ass in Palm Beach for six and a half years at a net cost of about $1,000 a month in alimony, and when it was over, he got the house and the children, along with everything else.

  Roxanne was awarded about 10 percent of this, to be paid out over two years or until she remarries. The judge gave her two weeks to get out of the house where she’d been living for seven years, and Herbert took physical custody of the twins immediately.

  Judge Harper had run the whole show with an evil glint in his eye, enduring a shitrain of perjury from both sides and day after day of relentless haggling and posturing by teams of Palm Beach lawyers and a circus parade of rich fools, dumb hustlers, and dope fiends who were all getting famous just for being in his courtroom—where smoking was not allowed, except for the judge, who smoked constantly.

  That should have been the tip-off, but we missed it. The judge had made up his mind early on, and the rest was all show business, a blizzard of strange publicity that amused half the English-speaking world for a few months and in the end meant nothing at all.

  Let the Trials Begin

  Toward the end of the trial, it rained almost constantly. Logistics got difficult, and my suite overlooking the beach at the Ocean Hotel was lashed by wild squalls every night. It was a fine place to sleep, wild storms on the edge of the sea—warm blankets, good whiskey, color TV, roast beef hash and poached eggs in the morning . . .

  Fat City, a hard place to wake up at six o’clock and drive across the long, wet bridge to the courthouse in West Palm—just to get your name on a list so that you could spend the rest of the day locked into the bowels of some sleazy divorce trial.

  But it had to be done. The trial was big news on the Gold Coast, and even the common folk were concerned.

  One morning, when I got there too late to make the list for a courtroom seat and too early to think straight, I found myself drifting aimlessly in a dimly lit bar on the fringes of the courthouse district—the kind of place where lawyers and bailiffs eat lunch and where the bartender has a machine pistol and the waitresses are all on probation, or maybe parole, for one reason or another . . .

  The bartender was trying to find limes for a Bloody Mary when I asked him what he thought about the Pulitzer divorce case.

  He stiffened, then leaned quickly across the bar to seize my bicep, wrapping his long, gray fingers around my arm like tentacles, and he said to me: “You know what I think? You know what it makes me feel like?”

  “Well . . .” I said, “not really. I only came in here to have a drink and read the newspaper until my trial breaks for lunch and—”

  “Never mind your goddamn trial!” he shouted, still squeezing my arm and staring intently into my eyes—not blinking, no humor.

  I jerked out of his grasp, unsettled by the frenzy.

  “It’s not the goddamned Pulitzers!” he shouted. “It’s nothing personal, but I know how those people behave, and I know how it makes me feel.”

  “Fuck off!” I snapped. “Who cares how you feel?”

  “Like a goddamn animal!” he screamed. “Like a beast. I look at this scum and I look at the way they live and I see those shit-eating grins on their faces, and I feel like a dog took my place.”

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s a term of art,” he replied, shooting his cuffs as he turned to deal with the cash register.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “You are now a Doctor of Torts.”

  He stiffened again and backed off.

  “Torts?” he said. “What do you mean, torts?”

  I leaned over the bar and smacked him hard on the side of his head.

  “That’s a tort,” I said. Then I tossed him a handful of bills and asked for a cold beer to go. The man was slumped back on his rack of cheap bottles, breathing heavily. “You whoreface bastard,” he said. “I’ll kill you.”

  I reached over and grabbed him by the flesh on his cheek.

  “Where is your dog, swinesucker? I want to see the dog that did this thing to you. I want to kill that dog.” I snapped him away from me, and he fell back on the duckboards.

  “Get out!” he screamed. “You’re the one who should be on trial in this town! These Pulitzers are nothing compared to monsters like you.”

  “I’ll be back,” I said, lifting a small can of Mace out of my pocket and squirting it at him. “You’d better find a dog to take your place before you see me again—because I’m going to come back here and rip your nuts right off your ugly goddamn body.”

  The man was still screaming as I got in my car and drove off. People in the street stopped to stare—but when he begged them for help, they laughed at him.

  He was a Doctor of Torts, but in the end it didn’t matter. A dog had taken his place anyway.

  Why Would They Testify Against Me?

  Roxanne is a star now. She was on the cover of People and a featured celebrity guest on network TV shows like Good Morning America. The Best Piece of Ass in Palm Beach is a curious case these days: from the ashes of scandal and defeat, she has emerged as a cult figure of sorts, a kind of National Bitch for the Eighties.

  The courts have yet to make themselves or even the law comfortably clear with regard to Roxanne’s status as a public figure in terms of libel law, so I think we should watch this aspect of the story with a keen eye. Remember Mary Alice Firestone. But my own working guess is that the courts will continue to kick the shit out of Roxanne at every opportunity. Her own lawyer made her a public figure when he deposed Herbert and got all that buzzword-headline talk about cocaine and lesbians and trumpets, which he then leaked to the Miami Herald.

  “Ten pounds,” she said. “That’s how much I would have to take off.” We were talking about the possibility of her doing a nude spread for one of the men’s magazines, something on the order of a Rita Jenrette appearance in Playboy, with a little less leg. Dark humor, and it was out of the question, of course, until the trial was over. What would that horny old bastard of a judge say if she suddenly turned up in a naked centerfold in some skin magazine on sale in the courthouse newsstand?

  What indeed? There is much in the evidence to suggest, in fact, that the judge would not even have blinked. He had seen all he needed to see of Roxanne Pulitzer at that point, and a handful of naked pictures wasn’t going to make much difference either way. She had already made her personal impression on the court, and it was not one that she and her lawyers had hoped for.

  The language of Harper’s final judgment in the now infamous Palm Beach divorce case of Pulitzer v. Pulitzer left little doubt that he had taken one long look at Roxanne and concluded that she was a raging slut, a homosexual adulteress so addicted to drugs and drink as to pose a direct threat to the welfare of her own children, who were removed at once from her custody.

  The decision stripped Roxanne Pulitzer naked in a way that no Playboy or Penthouse photographer would want to put on film. The message was clear: let this be a lesson to all gold diggers.

  The Death of Rock & Roll

  Long after the Pulitzer divorce case was finally over—after the verdict was in and there were no more headlines, and the honor of Palm Beach had been salvaged by running Roxanne out of town; after all the lawyers had been paid off and the disloyal servants had been punished and reporters who covered the trial were finally coming down from the long-running high that the story had been for so long that some of them suffered withdrawal symptoms when it ended ... Long after this, I was still brooding darkly on the case, still trying to make a higher kind of sense of it.

  I have a fatal compulsion to find a higher kind of sense in things that make no sense at all. We are talking about hubris, delusi
ons of wisdom and prowess that can only lead to trouble.

  Or maybe we are talking about cocaine. That thought occurred to me more than once in the course of the Pulitzer divorce trial. Cocaine is the closest thing to instant hubris on the market these days, and there is plenty of it around. Any fool with an extra $100-bill in his pocket can whip a gram of cocaine into his head and make sense of just about anything.

  Ah, yes. Wonderful. Thank you very much. I see it all very clearly now. These bastards have been lying to me all along. I should never have trusted them in the first place. Stand aside. Let the big dog eat.

  Take my word for it, folks. I know how these things work.

  In the end it was basically a cocaine trial, which it had looked to be from the start. There was no real money at stake: Peter Pulitzer ended up paying more money to lawyers, accountants, “expert witnesses,” and other trial-related bozos than Roxanne would have happily settled for if the case had never gone to court in the first place. A few of the reporters covering the trial sat around a gray Formica table in the Alibi Lounge during one of the lunch breaks and figured out that the trial had cost Pulitzer about a half-million dollars in real money and perhaps a million more down the line, for no good reason at all. Here was a man who normally earned almost $700,000 a year just by answering his phone a few hours a day and paying a secretary to open his mail—something like $60,000 a month just to mind his own store, as it were—who somehow got himself whipped into such a hellish public frenzy that he didn’t even have a bed to sleep in except on his boat for at least a year, and he was spending all his time raving crazily at his own lawyers at $150 an hour instead of taking care of business, which was naturally going to pieces, because all the people who worked for him, from his accountants and psychiatrists all the way down to his gardeners and deckhands, were going mad from fear and confusion and constant legal harassment by vicious lawyers and always worried about saying something by accident that might get them either fired or locked up for perjury, and in the midst of all that he let one of his hired dingbats come into court with a financial statement so careless and flagrant and arrogant that the simple fact of his filing it would have been cause for public outrage almost anywhere else in America except in Palm Beach County. There are a lot of people in this country who spend $1 million a year, and some of them pay no income tax at all. Nelson Rockefeller was one of them, for at least one year in the late Sixties or early Seventies, and there were two other years around that same time when he paid less than I did . . .

  Epilogue: The Song of the Gilded Swine

  It is to the poet a thing of awe to find that his story is true.

  —Isak Dinesen

  I am living the Palm Beach life now, trying to get the feel of it: royal palms and raw silk, cruising the beach at dawn in a red Chrysler convertible with George Shearing on the radio and a head full of bogus cocaine and two beautiful lesbians in the front seat beside me, telling jokes to each other in French . . .

  We are on our way to an orgy, in a mansion not far from the sea, and the girls are drinking champagne from a magnum we brought from Dunhills, the chic and famous restaurant. There is a wet parking ticket flapping under the windshield wiper in front of me, and it bores me. I am giddy from drink, and the lesbians are waving their champagne glasses at oncoming police cars, laughing gaily and smoking strong marijuana in a black pipe as we cruise along Ocean Boulevard at sunrise, living our lives like dolphins . . .

  The girls are naked now, long hair in the wind and perfumed nipples bouncing in the dull blue light of the dashboard, white legs on the red leather seats. One of them is tipping a glass of champagne to my mouth as we slow down for a curve near the ocean and very slowly and stylishly lose the rear end at seventy miles an hour and start sliding sideways with a terrible screeching of rubber past Roxanne Pulitzer’s house, barely missing the rear end of a black Porsche that protrudes from her driveway . . .

  The girls shriek crazily and spill champagne on themselves, and the radio is playing “The Ballad of Claus von Bülow,” a song I wrote last year with Jimmy Buffett and James Brown and which makes me nine cents richer every time it gets played on the radio, in Palm Beach or anywhere else.

  That is a lot of money when my people start adding it up. I am making ninety-nine cents a day out of Palm Beach alone, and ten times that much from Miami. The take from New York and L.A. is so massive that my accountant won’t even discuss the numbers with me, and my agent is embarrassed by my wealth.

  But not me, Jack. Not at all. I like being rich and crazy in Palm Beach on a pink Sunday morning in a new red Chrysler convertible on my way to an orgy with a magnum of French champagne and two gold-plated lesbian bimbos exposing themselves to traffic while my own song croaks from the radio and palm trees flap in the early morning wind and the local police call me “Doc” and ask after my general health when we speak to each other at stoplights on the boulevard . . .

  The police are no problem in Palm Beach. We own them and they know it. They work for us, like any other servant, and most of them seem to like it. When we run out of gas in this town, we call the police and they bring it, because it is boring to run out of gas.

  The rich have special problems, and running out of gas on Ocean Boulevard on the way to an orgy at six o’clock on Sunday morning is one of them. Nobody needs that. Not with naked women and huge bags of cocaine in the car. The rich love music, and we don’t want it interrupted.

  A state trooper was recently arrested in Miami for trying to fuck a drunk woman on the highway, in exchange for dropping all charges. But that would not happen in Palm Beach. Drunk women roam free in this town, and they cause a lot of trouble—but one thing they don’t have to worry about, thank God, is the menace of getting pulled over and fondled by armed white trash wearing uniforms. We don’t pay these people much, but we pay them every week, and if they occasionally forget who really pays their salaries, we have ways of reminding them.

  The whole west coast of Florida is full of people who got fired from responsible jobs in Palm Beach, if only because they failed to understand the nature of the Social Contract.

  Which brings us back to the story, for good or ill: not everybody who failed to understand the nature of the Social Contract has been terminally banished to the west coast. Some of them still live here—for now, at least—and every once in a while they cause problems that make headlines all over the world.

  The strange and terrible case of young Roxanne Pulitzer is one of these, and that is the reason I came to Palm Beach, because I feel a bond with these people that runs deeper and stronger than mere money and orgies and drugs and witchcraft and lesbians and whiskey and red Chrysler convertibles.

  Bestiality is the key to it, I think. I have always loved animals. They are different from us, and their brains are not complex, but their hearts are pure and there is usually no fat on their bodies and they will never call the police on you or take you in front of a judge or run off and hide with your money . . .

  Animals don’t hire lawyers.

  The Taming of the Shrew

  May 30, 1991

  MEMO: FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

  TO: Jann S. Wenner

  FROM: Hunter S. Thompson

  DATE: April 15th, 1991

  SUBJECT: Nancy Reagan/Kitty Kelley Book Review

  COMMENTS: Cancel

  The Taming of the Shrew

  There are some things, Jann, that we know in our hearts are Ugly, and this book is one of them. It is old swill in a new bottle, a squalid tale from a squalid time that unfortunately seems to be ours. There is something weird about any calendar that has the Year of the Weasel happening thirteen times in a row.

  Anyway, thanx for the review copy of Kelley’s book on Nancy. It was good for a few laughs, but not many. And there is meaning in it, for sure, but not much. It is an ugly, mean little package that made me feel cheap for just reading it or even holding the thing in my hands.

  This book is a monument to everything low and m
ean in the human spirit. It is a marketing triumph for that dingbat from Simon and Schuster, but it is far too wrong and repugnant to keep around the house, and last night I had to get rid of it. My friend Semmes Luckett took it away and jammed it into a garbage compactor, along with a case of old beer bottles. He was shocked and deeply embarrassed when he opened the book to page 14 and saw the Nancy Davis Reagan family tree, which shows that both he and Nancy are descended from the same family of Lucketts that left Maryland and fled westward around the turn of the century, when the family name came under a cloud of scandal. “My mama never talked about it,” he said, “but she always left the room whenever that woman appeared on our TV set ... Good Lord, I hope she never sees this book.” He seized it off the table and stood up to leave. “Don’t worry,” he muttered. “I’ll put it where it belongs.”

  Let’s give Nancy all the credit she deserves. The Democrats have lost five out of the last six presidential elections, so maybe they can learn something from this book instead of just giggling about it. Kitty Dukakis, among others, might have put this evil handbook to good use if it had been available back in 1988. But, alas . . .

  If politics is the art of controlling your environment, Nancy is a master politician and probably a lot more fun to live and work and travel with than I ever suspected. She has been the Best That She Can Be, and she has come a Very Long Way for a Size 2 Anorexic Dwarf. Jesus! What if she’d looked like Marilyn Monroe?

  She (allegedly) had the morals of a slut on acid and behaved like a beast while the president was stoned day and night; and all that time she was talking about remodeling the White House in the style of Dolley Madison or Grandma Moses, she was acting like Linda Lovelace and Christine Keeler and Madame Defarge all at once.

  They turned the whole East Wing of the White House into a Cave of Orgies and a dope den worse than anything in Singapore ... It was horrible ... and the press never noticed. They called him John Wayne, but he was weirder than Caligula, and the weirder he got, the more the voters loved him and the more respect he got from Ted Koppel.