When I first met Hunter S. Thompson in 1971, I didn’t know what to expect. I was
familiar with his work, of course, and had read the wonderful account of his campaign to
become sheriff of Pitkin County (Aspen), Colorado, in the pages of Rolling Stone.
He had been in Los Angeles working on a piece about the murder of newspaperman Ruben
Salazar. There had been talk — very vague talk — about his writing something about Las
Vegas. Then, one fine spring day, he appeared in Rolling Stone’s San Francisco
office. For me, and the magazine, nothing would ever be quite the same.
If you were a progressively minded college student in the 1960s, certain books were
required reading: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, A Confederate
General from Big Sur and Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, The Kandy-
Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by
Tom Wolfe, and Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson.
As an undergraduate majoring in journalism, I was drawn to the writing of Wolfe and a
few others who were practicing what was not yet being called the “New Journalism.” It’s
funny, but even at an überliberal school like San Francisco State, there was a schism—what
was known in the day as a “generation gap” — between faculty and students over this new
kind of writing. Our professors considered Wolfe and his ilk poseurs, inspiring some kind
of journalistic vaudeville by applying fictional techniques to reporting. We thought our
instructors intended to mold us into drones, destined to carve out careers at small-town
dailies.
I guess it was my junior year when I pulled a copy of The Nation from the
student lounge magazine rack and had my first encounter with the writing of Hunter
Thompson. It was the first of his two-part report on traveling with the Hells Angels. The
outlaw motorcycle club’s Oakland chapter was a fixture in the Bay Area. Encountering a
group of Angels was not uncommon, especially after they embraced LSD and began hanging out
at dance-rock concerts in places like the Fillmore Auditorium and Winterland. Big Brother
and the Holding Company became their “official” band. The rule of thumb was simple if you
were nearby: keep your distance and try not to make eye contact. Even in their brief,
acid-drenched benign phase, the Angels were downright scary, clearly capable of
unpredictable violence.
So it was a revelation to me that there was a writer who could figure out a way to win
their trust and run with these characters. Hunter Thompson clearly had the smarts and the
courage to do so. Or he was a hell of a salesman and a little bit crazy. Whatever. That
early installment in The Nation convinced me he was the real deal. Later that day,
I wondered aloud to my fellow campus newspaper staffers what our faculty advisers would
make of him.
Rolling Stone in the early 1970s was an exciting place to be. Social, cultural,
and political unrest was in the air and we tried to cover that turbulence in ways that
newspapers and newsweeklies did not. I was the managing editor for many of those years and
was fortunate to work with some of the finest journalists in the land, including several
on the magazine’s masthead. My colleagues were a gifted bunch of renegades who had served
apprenticeships in places like the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, the
Detroit Free Press, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Wall Street
Journal. Two of our most talented staffers came from the creative writing programs of
San Francisco State and Stanford. Our first copy chief, who kept the place from coming
unglued every two-week publishing cycle, was a Middle East scholar who had once roomed
with Owsley Stanley III. We all shared a disdain for traditional, mainstream journalism
and a penchant for hard work.
When Hunter entered our ranks he quickly became, in many ways, our team leader. He had
already established his credentials as an outlaw journalist, and the Salazar piece would
demonstrate his investigative zeal.
You had to like the guy. I think some of it came from his innate Southern charm and the
contradictory fact that he was, well, a little shy. He was in town that spring to work on
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Part I,” and had set up shop in the basement of Jann
Wenner’s house. His visits to the office, a converted downtown warehouse with lots of
exposed brick and wooden beams, were infrequent, but always memorable. Hunter was a big,
hulking but graceful guy who clearly had charisma, and we responded to it.
Standing about six-foot-two, usually clad in khaki shorts, hightopped sneakers, a
baseball cap, and either a parka or a safari jacket, he’d amble into the office with a
bowlegged quickstep, making the zigzagging, seriocomic, dramatic entrance we had come to
expect. There was a big, round oak table in the middle of the editorial department, a sort
of central gathering spot, where he’d plop down his leather rucksack, open it, and
wordlessly proceed to remove the contents, which varied, but usually included something
edible, like a grapefruit, a carton of Dunhills, a large police flashlight, a bottle of
Wild Turkey, and a can of liquid Mace.
Next, he’d open his mouth and speak. I called it “Hunter-ese.” His delivery was
something akin to a lawn sprinkler or a Gatling gun, a rapid-fire baritone mumble that was
hard to understand at first. But once you caught on to the rhythms, you realized he was
spitting out perfect sentences.
Late one morning, Hunter came in and handed some manuscript pages to a couple of
editors and me, then turned and motored out with nary a word. He had given us copies of
the first section of “Vegas,” and by late afternoon most of the staff had read and
digested them. We were flat knocked out. Between fits of laughter we ran our favorite
lines back and forth to one another: “One toke? You poor fool. Wait until you see those
goddamned bats!” Delivered in Hunter-ese, of course.
Between bouts of serious writing there was the usual goofing off and troublemaking.
There were evenings of drug-fueled adventures that left more than a few staffers dazed and
worn out. There were interesting characters who were part of his—and subsequently our—
orbit, including Oscar Zeta Acosta, who was the model for the “three-hundred-pound Samoan
attorney” in “Vegas,” and his sometimes sidekick, a fellow named Savage Henry.
Early on we became familiar with Hunter’s penchant for fright wigs, bizarre recordings
of animals in their death throes that would somehow find their way onto the office public
address system, and novelty store pranks. One evening Jann invited a few of us over to his
place on some pretext or other. We walked in and saw Hunter standing there in a torn tie-
dyed T-shirt covered in red splotches. Brandishing what looked like a giant horse syringe,
he announced that he was going to inject 151 proof rum directly into his navel. He then
jammed the “needle” into his belly and doubled over as he let out a series of wails and
groans. One of my companions almost fainted.
But the fun and games — for Hunter and for the rest of us — always took second position
to the work. We loved what we were doing, and none more than he. Once, reflecting on the
scrambling years of his early career, he stated that he had “no taste for either poverty
or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.” His tongue, of course, was
firmly in his cheek. He was serious about his craft and was an ongoing student of correct
grammar and syntax, and enjoyed sharing that knowledge. One of our staff writers was quite
talented but often taunted for the sloppiness of his copy. I stood by one day as Hunter
patiently lectured him on the necessity of producing a clean manuscript and how it would
complement his writing skills (Hunter was right). In fact, he went out of his way to be
friendly and helpful, even solicitous, about our work. Hunter would somehow get wind of
what I was assigning and often I’d find on my desk a note in his distinctive scrawl
suggesting a source or a contact. The notes were always signed: OK/HST. He had a gift to
inspire, and he lifted everybody’s game.
He could have played the star, but the really good ones never do. Hells Angels
brought notoriety, and his Kentucky Derby piece for Scanlan’s as well as the early
Rolling Stone appearances received attention. He chose to be a friend and
colleague, and we responded in kind. When the sloppy manuscript guy heard that Hunter used
swimming as a way to relax, he escorted Hunter to a scuba school a couple of blocks away
where he could do laps when the pool was free.
When he was in town, Hunter became a low-key regular at Jerry’s Inn, the staff watering
hole across the street. He was very much at home there at the bar, and would love to
engage us, one-on-one, in everything from his heroes, Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph Conrad;
to classic sportswriters such as Jimmy Cannon or Red Smith; to the fortunes of the Oakland
Raiders, the scruffy, mean-spirited pro football team on which he had a few friends. He
also loved to talk shop, about articles we would read in Esquire and elsewhere,
which I like to think validated a few of the hours we spent in Jerry’s instead of in the
office.
When Hunter embarked on the 1972 campaign trail, it signaled the end of one chapter and
the beginning of another for both him and the magazine. At first there was no real
blueprint other than establishing a presence with an office in Washington, D.C. But he
quickly found himself reinventing the mission statement almost issue by issue, and pretty
soon the assignment had become an endless road trip. He was always writing against extreme
deadline and filing copy at the last possible minute, which became a crucible for both him
and the magazine. I was mercifully out of the direct line of fire, with too many other
things on my plate. But I was close enough to feel the terrible weight borne by Jann,
associate editor David Felton, copy editor Charles Perry, and a heroic production staff.
The now legendary Mojo Wire sat just a few feet from my office door. Night after night, in
the midst of deadline frenzy, that infernal thing would be beeping away, signaling
Hunter’s presence at the other end, while Jann or Felton stood by, waiting for the copy to
be slowly ejected. It was as if he was always in our midst. And in the final accounting,
those articles solidified Rolling Stone’s commitment to political coverage, made
Hunter a true celebrity (for good and ill), and eventually resulted in a great book. It
was a miracle of journalism under pressure, and only Hunter could have pulled it off.
A few months after the election we were sitting in Jerry’s. Hunter looked like hell and
was clearly not in great spirits. For reasons that will ever elude me, I decided to give
him a helpful lecture. Retire your alter ego Raoul Duke, I said. Or send him on a long
vacation. Go back to being the journalist who wrote Hells Angels. Cut back a little
on the drugs and the booze. He turned toward me as he reached into the pocket of his
safari jacket. He gave me a look; nothing nasty, just a look. He extracted a tab of
Mr. Natural blotter acid from the pocket, stared me in the eye, and swallowed it. I got
the message. Our conversation resumed.
The last time I worked with Hunter was on his “interdicted dispatch” from a rapidly
falling Saigon in 1975. We pretty much lost contact after that, although I’d occasionally
run into him in New York. The last time I spoke to him was at a 1996 celebration of the
twenty-fifth anniversary of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the simultaneous
publication of a Modern Library edition, an acknowledgment of his work by the literary
establishment of which he was justly proud. It was a splendid evening. A lot of Rolling
Stone alumni were there, and among the guests was Johnny Depp, Hunter’s great friend
who would portray Raoul Duke, Doctor of Journalism, in the movie version of Vegas
in 1998.
One of my favorite memories of Hunter goes back to the spring of 1973, and it’s
actually on video tape. He had been sequestered at the Seal Rock Inn, on the western edge
of San Francisco, finishing the final edits on Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail
’72. A group of video journalists who had been assigned to do a documentary on
Rolling Stone for public television had taped him at the hotel as he was preparing
to leave, and he obliged them with a few minutes of classic Hunter S. Thompson gibberish
and shtick.
But when he got to the office to say his good-byes before heading home to Colorado, the
video crew had preceded him and closed in, peppering him with stupid questions. Hunter and
I tried to ignore them by poring over his fan mail, which in itself was something to
behold. Finally, Hunter gave up. He started moving down the hallway, looking back over his
shoulder at me, saying, “I have to meet a guy across the street!” By the time he reached
the exit, he was shouting, “I HAVE TO MEET A GUY ACROSS THE STREET !” Across the street
was Jerry’s, naturally. The guy was me.
Hunter was a terrific writer whose unique talent and enthusiasm helped propel
Rolling Stone forward at some crucial points in its early history. He was a swell
drinking companion, a hell of a salesman, and yes, a little bit crazy. Crazy like a fox.
It’s been forty years since Hunter Thompson embarked on the presidential campaign trail
and almost seven years since he passed away, but somehow he still manages to consume many
of us to this day. When I began work on this book, I figured his total output for
Rolling Stone exceeded four hundred fifty thousand words. The main text, after some
pretty serious editing, is still about two hundred ten thousand words.
The selection process was easy: practically everything. Only four articles were
omitted; they simply weren’t up to par with the other material. But this meant that
cutting would be that much more difficult.
The campaign trail material was the least difficult to work with. It was specifically
geared to the moment, and much of it had simply ceased being topical. But there were
plenty of vignettes and colorful incidents, and the overall reporting has held up
remarkably well.
A characteristic of Hunter’s writing is the long digression, or the shorter but
carefully designed tangent. If a digression got in the way of the main narrative, out it
came. The best example is “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl.” Almost half the article
was a world-class digression on the Oakland Raiders, which had nothing to do with the
contest itself. Of course if a digression or tangent was outrageously funny, it had to
stay in. It would have been a crime to cut Hunter’s adventures riding the Vincent Black
Shadow motorcycle. Such is also the case with “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” The
excerpt presented here is a stand-alone section from Part II in which Duke and his
attorney have their way with a hapless delegate to the district attorneys’ conference.
Curiously, the hardest article to cut was Hunter’s first piece for the magazine, “The
Battle of Aspen,” which details his efforts to unseat the sheriff of Pitkin County,
Colorado, through the use of “Freak Power.” I made a moderate initial cut, but the second
time around I struggled and finally gave up. The damn thing was too intricate and dense.
The arc of Hunter’s relationship with Rolling Stone is pretty clear looking at
the table of contents. His output from 1970 through 1972 was amazing, and Watergate and
all things Nixon kept him involved through 1974. But when he was dispatched to the Ali-
Foreman heavyweight championship fight in Zaire that year, he returned empty-handed. His
trip to Saigon as the Vietnam War wound down yielded an abbreviated, unfinished piece. A
later excursion to Grenada yielded nothing. In the meantime, he had become—and would
continue to be—a popular speaker on college campuses. The money was good and the
appearances were plentiful. The writing just wasn’t there, for long periods.
When he would reappear in the pages of Rolling Stone, the results were often
first-rate. In 1977, “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat” was a paean to his friend and
sometimes nemesis Oscar Acosta, who had apparently perished in a drug deal gone bad. His
two-part profile and interview with Muhammad Ali the following year was insightful and
hilarious. Who else would leap into Ali’s hotel room wearing an African fright mask,
sending the Champ into gales of laughter?
Another five-year absence ended with Hunter’s last great piece of reporting when he was
sent to cover the sensational Roxanne Pulitzer divorce trial. “A Dog Took My Place”
features Hunter at his best, exploring the sex-and-drugs culture of well-heeled Palm Beach
denizens in wide-eyed amazement and disdain.
The 1990s would produce two late masterpieces. “Fear and Loathing in Elko” is a
sustained fantasia of nightmare imagery featuring Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas
and a cast of weirdos. It is mordantly funny and dark — in fact much darker than “Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas.” “Polo Is My Life” would prove to be his last great piece of
lyrical, expansive writing, involving his observations on a sport for the wealthy, the
lost world of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and sex dolls. It should be noted that these two
articles, like his first for Rolling Stone, were extremely difficult to cut.
The correspondence between Hunter and Jann starts with their very first exchange in
1969. There are backstage looks at the writer as he works, how “Vegas” came to be, the
evolution of the 1972 campaign coverage, story ideas (mostly discarded), and the push-me,
pull-you faxes required to produce Hunter’s later work. Taken as a whole, the letters and
memos are a kind of additional biography of the writer who did his signature work for
Rolling Stone.