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. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your
old age. Relax - This won’t hurt.” Hunter Thompson’s suicide note.
It’s a strange feeling to sit where someone has blown out his brains with a
.357 Magnum. But there I was, with the house hash pipe cradled in my hands,
trying to make sense of the life and work of Dr Hunter S Thompson, from the
perch of his high-chair command post in the kitchen of Owl Farm, his house
in Woody Creek, Colorado. I could see where the bullet had lodged. I saw the
note on the refrigerator: “Do not call 911!” Hunter, rarely given to advice,
had once offered one bit: “Call on God, but row away from the rocks.” I had
to imagine that, just before the end, the oars had broken and the line to
heaven was busy. TS Eliot had got it wrong:bang.
This was not a pretty picture. But I had a job to do: make some sense of the
life of a man who used to steer his Cadillac with his pinkie while cradling
a whiskey in one hand and a coke snorter in the other, and screaming: “Oh,
mama, can this really be the end?”
I guess there was some flaw in my character that caused me to be picked for
the job. Three people - the British producer Roy Ackerman, the BBC’s Nick
Fraser and Vanity Fair’s editor, Graydon Carter - asked me to saddle up for
the documentary version of Hunter’s favourite slogan: “Buy the ticket, take
the ride.” I agreed because I had always loved Hunter’s writing. It was
angry, funny as hell and imbued with the fundamental contradictions of the
American character: a soaring idealism weighed down by the ballast of a
brooding, violent and vengeful spirit that Hunter had called “fear and
loathing”.
On my first day on the job, I was allowed to bring my camera to the
spectacular funeral produced by Johnny Depp, where Hunter’s ashes were mixed
with the gunpowder of the fireworks that exploded over a giant two-thumbed
fist with a peyote button in its palm. Unlike the others there, I was a
stranger in a strange land: I had never met the man. So, as I asked his
oldest and closest friends about the good doctor, they all looked at me as
if I were a polite vulture asking “pretty please” before I dipped my beak on
Hunter’s bones. Said one close friend of Hunter: “We know a lot about him,
but it’s private stuff, and we’re not going to tell you.” All righty, then.
So, some months later, as undeterred as Ed Wood in the face of failure, I
found myself in Hunter’s kitchen, trying to do, as an archeologist, what I
had failed to do as a red-carpet journalist. It was a good place to start my
dig, because Hunter’s kitchen had become the repository of evidence of his
contact with the world outside: video tapes, phone messages, faxes (he loved
faxes) and snapshots.
To put a film together, I could not depend on testimony. I would have to find
his character in the archival bits and pieces of his life he had left behind
in his Woody Creek house and in the many cardboard boxes then stored in the
so-called “Denver archive”. (Calling it an archive was a bit like calling a
swap-meet a library.) The good news was that, even if there wasn’t much
organisation, there was plenty of material.
And what material it was. Hunter had lived his life as if he were making his
own movie. And maybe he was, hoarding the stuff of his legacy that would
wait, in unmarked boxes, for some poor sucker like me to come along. He kept
carbons of every letter and article. He took photographs - of Hell’s Angels,
Mexican wrestlers and always of himself. And, like a wacked-out Indiana
Jones, he brought back peculiar treasures from his field “trips”:
matchboxes, antlers and, from Las Vegas - as if to prove it was not all a
hallucination - 600 bars of Neutrogena soap. There were even 16mm films,
including outtakes from his campaign commercials when he ran for sheriff in
Pitkin County, Colorado, on a pro-drug platform. (The commercial mixed shots
of Hunter on a motorcycle, the music of Herbie Mann’s The Battle Hymn of the
Republic and unapologetically literary narration by the novelist James
Salter: “Hunter Thompson is a moralist posing as an immoralist . . . the
only thing against him is he’s a visionary. He wants too pure a world.”)
Most important of all, though, were the audio tapes.
One of my favourite photographs of Hunter shows him, in the early 1960s, on
some airport tarmac with his wife, Sandi, carrying an impossibly bulky set
of writing tools: a pipe in his belt, some kind of horsewhip (take that,
Harrison Ford), a typewriter and a bundle of satchels with wires dangling
onto the concrete like spaghetti. He loved the idea of carrying a tool kit,
as if he were a journalistic secret agent just come from the lab of a
half-crazed Q. Inside one of those satchels lurked his portable Norelco tape
recorder. It was his secret weapon.
He carried the Norelco everywhere, recording the “real life” he encountered.
Like a tripped-out Edward R Murrow, he would also use the Norelco to lay
down a running commentary on what was going on around him, from a Hell’s
Angels gangbang at Ken Kesey’s LSD hideout in La Honda to the fall of
Saigon.
Usually, a reporter turns on a recorder when he’s interviewing someone. The
essence of “gonzo journalism”, however, was that the process of Hunter
covering the story was sometimes just as important as the story itself. So,
Hunter would often simply turn on the machine, daring something to happen.
There are long tapes of Hunter in Zaïre arguing with Ralph Steadman and
baying like a wounded animal in the shower - no doubt because Steadman had
vilified him for giving away their tickets for one of the greatest fights of
all time, the Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
In reviewing these tapes, I had my own secret weapon: Don Fleming. A renowned
postpunk musician - he was the front man for the Velvet Monkeys and Gumball,
and a producer for Sonic Youth and many others - he had brought order to the
archives of Alan Lomax, the great musicologist and foremost collector of
field recordings of American folk music. When Fleming came with me on the
first trip to Owl Farm, he could barely contain himself. He pulled out his
white cotton gloves - so as not to transmit any finger oils onto the
materials - and held up box after box, like an archeologist examining the
fragmented bones of the missing link toHomo erectus.
In reviewing and cataloguing the tapes, we made some wonderful discoveries:
Hunter nudging a paramour into phone sex; the editor of Rolling Stone, Jann
Wenner, explaining to Hunter that he would need something called a press
pass to cover the 1972 presidential campaign. There was Jimmy Carter making
his “Law Day” speech - an off-the-cuff broadside on the American justice
system that was so full of righteous fury, Hunter stopped swilling his ample
glass of Wild Turkey and ran to the car to get his Norelco. We found the
audio cassette of the taco-stand chapter from Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas. What I had assumed was a piece of witty writing turned out to be a
transcript of a tape recording of Hunter and Oscar Acosta goingto a Vegas
taco stand. When Acosta tells the woman behind the counter that he and
Hunter (known as Dr Gonzo and Raoul Duke in the book) are looking for the
American dream, she assumes they are looking for an after-hours club and
proceeds to give them directions. Hearing the audio recording, however,
reveals something unavailable to readers of the transcript: in Acosta’s
patter, there is the mischievous tone of a determined seducer who evidently
found the lady taco-flipper as hot as his chorizo.
Of course, by the end, I persuaded a few people who knew Hunter well to talk
to me - his wives, his editor, a former president, among others - but the
key to the movie was always the stuff that Hunter left behind. Of that
stuff, the most important thing was his work. Thanks to the kindness of the
estate, we had access not only to his published letters - and there were so
many: when did he have time to do anything else but write? - but to some of
his unpublished manuscripts.
In the film, we included a short excerpt from a book he wrote on the NRA
(National Rifle Association) and his strange affection for the gun -
something he called “The American Way”. We persuaded Johnny Depp to read all
of Hunter’s passages, so that, unlike a conventional documentary, in which
the narrator is the “straight man”, in our film the narrator would be a
living,breathing character, as poetic and undependable as the writer
himself.
The other vital excavation was in Kent, where I made a pilgrimage to the
studio of Steadman, the man whose ink-splattered paintings and drawings have
visualised the hallucinatory world of gonzo. As Steadman pulled out image
after image, it was like watching a flip-book of an acid trip. He recalled
how Hunter had called him up one day because he had a job for him to do:
“Ralph, I want you to draw a portrait of absolute evil.” No problem, Hunter.
Steadman still had one of his cigarette holders. He explained that Hunter -
the man who bombarded his body with an inhuman overload of alcohol and
hallucinogens - was obsessed with prolonging his life by using the pitiful
plastic protective chamber of a cigarette holder to catch a bit of tar
before the carcinogenic smoke entered his lungs.
In our role as archeologists, we roamed far beyond Hunter’s “archive”. In
Australia, we found his first television appearance - he is a shy,
nose-rubbing author on a show called To Tell the Truth. And in Los Angeles,
we found the very last interview with Hunter, previously unreleased because
the good doctor was so drunk and angry that the film-makers (who had come to
talk about George McGovern) thought it was best to keep it under wraps -
until I came calling, determined to show some of the dark side of the
legend.
Both his wives confirmed that he may have had bipolar tendencies, and that a
vengeful, violent side would appear unexpectedly. “The boy and the man,”
said Sandy, his first wife, “could be absolutely vicious.”
Hunter is the poet laureate of the American character because he understood
our dark side so well. Recall his obituary of Nixon, and his disappointment
that his favourite enemy had left the stage: “It was Richard Nixon who got
me into politics, and now that he’s gone, I feel lonely . . . He had the
fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger . . . is a
beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy
and seizing it by the head with all four claws. That was Nixon’s style . . .
Badgers don’t fight fair, bubba. That’s why God made dachshunds.”
With a few exceptions, Hunter’s last years were not his best. At the London
Film Festival this year, the actor Benicio Del Toro reminded me that Hunter
had a big photo of Che in his kitchen. I couldn’t help but think of his last
years as like those of Che - wandering with his ragtag band in the Bolivian
wilderness, hoping to incite a revolution among a few hardscrabble peasants
who didn’t know Che Guevara from Henry Kissinger. But when the occasion
demanded it - the 9/11 terrorist attacks, for example – he could still bring
his best game. And, for a narcissist, he could be remarkably self-aware and
funny about his own failings.
His widow, Anita, allowed us to include a home movie she made of Hunter
working while listening to Candle in the Wind. It’s a striking scene, not
only because he is having fun, but because he keeps playing the song over
and over, clapping his hands in glee at the line “Your candle burnt out long
before”, knowing that it refers to him, too. The irony gives him a charge.
“I feel wet,” Hunter says, waving his hands above the IBM Selectric and
reaching for his scotch. Says Anita: “Uh-oh.”
I don’t think I really directed this film. I think, for better and for worse,
the hydra-headed Hunter directed me. While I never met the man in person, I
did come to know him through the materials he left behind for me to find. Of
those, the best are the tapes. And my favourite is one that never made it
into the final film.
It’s a strange blend of recordings: Hunter on the road in Miami, covering the
1972 presidential campaign, a soaring flute solo from Herbie Mann’s The
Battle Hymn of the Republic, and an early-morning commentary recorded in
Hunter’s living room in Colorado while everyone else is asleep. “It’s the
day after Christmas,” he whispers. “I’m looking out at 3ft of new snow, with
the sun coming up over the Continental Divide. It’s a good morning for
mescaline. Good morning for a big fire. Good morning to sit naked in a
leather chair.”
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson is released on Friday;
Gonzo by Hunter S Thompson, a book of photographs of and by Thompson, many
previously unseen, is now on sale at £22.95; www.ammobooks.com
There is a fine line between brilliance and madness and Hunter Thompson walked this line!
I first read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and then went on to read everything else he wrote.
He was irreverant and his offensiveness was side-splittingly funny!
Great choice to have Johnny Depp narrate!
suzy, llantwit fardre, uk