Smash hit

In the 1960s he emerged as one of the great talents in graphic art, working mainly for Private Eye, The Times and The Sunday Times. Yet by the decade’s end he felt failure encroaching once more. Not only had be become bored by British politics as a subject, but, after 11 years, his first marriage had broken down. In August 1969, burdened with feelings of guilt towards his four children, he left the family home. That winter he met Anna. The next spring found him in Kentucky.

“Hunter, I think, was also looking for something, a new direction, and he wasn’t quite sure what it was until this strange Welshman, so innocent, so quiet, turned up. We were like chalk and cheese, but I had a sense of humour and he liked that. It was an odd experience. I was — what’s the word? — transmogrified. I was taken in and spat out.”

On their next adventure, covering (or not covering) the 1970 America’s Cup, Thompson offered him pills for his seasickness. “I put a finger of my right hand up in front of my eyes,” he writes, “and watched it, very specifically, turn from a finger into the Statue of Liberty.”

Anna must have wondered what on earth had happened to her new boyfriend when he arrived home? “I just didn’t understand what he was talking about at all,” she says. “I was very innocent, I suppose. And then he took me to San Francisco. We were there for about six weeks and we went to an editor’s house and there were these bowls of cocaine.”

Fortunately, Steadman was interested in only three drugs: alcohol, tobacco and the company of Thompson. Sadly, Anna did not share his partiality for the third. On trips to Owl Farm, Thompson’s home in Aspen, Colorado, she would escape to the deck as Thompson’s various women cooked for him and his macho male acolytes tried to out-gonzo him. His one stay with them in Kent was not a success. Anna says she treated him with tolerant caution, as she would an unknown and unfathomable dog or child. She could not even grasp his accent. “But Ralph seemed to understand everything he said. In fact, as soon as he was in his presence he began to talk like him.”

“A frightening kind of influence,” her husband admits. “I think,” she says, “I recognised that Ralph and his creative thing was something that I just had to let go. About two years after we’d been together, I started to resent Ralph getting phone calls from America and drawing at 4am. We had an argument about it and he said, ‘One thing you’ve got to realise is that there are three of us in this relationship. There’s me, there’s my work and there’s you’.”

In this ménage à trois the other woman had a name and it was Hunter. While theirs has obviously been a successful marriage — albeit one in which Anna has sacrificed her own commercial career as an artist to support him and raise their daughter — interviewing Steadman about Thompson is like talking to a bereaved widower. You obey the convention of such conversations. If the dear departed is to be criticised, the criticism must not come from your lips. But what is obvious from the book is that their friendship, initially so productive on both sides, did sour. It is plain, too, that the blame lies mainly with Thompson: he ran out of talent, Steadman did not. In mitigation, Steadman points out that for his last decade his friend was ill, crippled by the arthritis that had taken hold in his thirties. Having watched Stephen Fry’s recent documentaries on bipolar disorder, he wonders if he might not also have been clinically manic. “He didn’t show the depressed side because he was often so very high. But I wonder what Fry would have made of him. It would have been fascinating to think of Hunter as the victim of a psychological condition.”

While Thompson bounced about at the up-end of bipolarity, Steadman feels that he has spent much of his life bogged down at its other end. “People say, ‘You’re so calm, so quiet, yet your drawings are vicious, blood everywhere’. Perhaps that’s the problem: there’s been that dichotomy, there’s something different happening in one part of my brain that isn’t really absorbed in other parts.” Does he never lose his temper then? “Oh, he does,” Anna interjects. “But it’s over in a minute.”

I say what he needs to pull him out of this glumness is a new project. Funnily enough, he says, he has just thought of one: a book of gonzo yoga. The thought cheers him so much that he contemplates whether it might not also be time to do some political cartooning again. “Cameron,” he says, “looks like a marshmallow, soft and manipulable.” And there are projects nearer home to attend to, such as the errant landowner and his abandoned tractor.

“That’s what Hunter would do. He’d say, ‘Well (adopts a slurred American drawl), I’ve asked you to take it away, Robbie, and you haven’t. I warn you: it’s either gone by Monday or I’ll have to blow it up’.” He is on his feet. He grabs the funny hat, jams a cigarette in his mouth and wiggles two pairs of specs. “Yeah. That’s what Hunter would do.” I watch in awe. Hunter S. Thompson lives! Death shall have no dominion. You’d have to call it love, wouldn’t you?

The Joke’s Over, Heinemann, £20. Ralph Steadman will be appearing at the The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday. To book tickets call 01242 227979

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