Everyone has their own image of the late Hunter S. Thompson. He is the father
of gonzo journalism, speeding through the desert in a Cadillac, carrying
limitless amounts of “uppers, downers, screamers and laughers” in the
opening chapter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is the gun-toting
hedonist, holed up in his fortified Colorado ranch, Owl Farm, taking drugs,
drinking Chivas Regal, and receiving celebrity buddies such as Johnny Depp
and Keith Richards. Or he is the fiery scourge of the Right and the Left,
taking savage potshots at both Clinton and Bush from within the pages of
Rolling Stone.
Few people, however, have seen Hunter S. Thompson like this - smiling benignly
in the dimly lit evening, and swaying slightly to the cosy warbling of Elton
John's Candle in the Wind, which is playing in a loop on his stereo. This,
it might be argued, is the real Thompson, the lover and the man, captured on
home video by his second wife, Anita, and featured midway through the
fascinating new documentary, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S.
Thompson.
“Most people don't associate Hunter with Candle in the Wind,” agrees
36-year-old Anita Thompson today, reflecting on a relationship that ended in
February 2005, when her famously eccentric husband sat in the Owl Farm
kitchen and shot himself in the head. “But we both worked hard to create
this conducive atmosphere, and get him in the mood to write. He was very
productive when I knew him. I used to say to him, ‘You should be writing!'
And he'd say, ‘You are right!' Then he'd pull out his typewriter and get to
work.”
Anita Thompson, like the documentary, elaborates further, describing a man of
lower-middle class Kentucky origins who suffered massive mood swings, was
often suicidal (“I have many suicide notes of his”) but nonetheless parlayed
his pain into an angry, witty and uniquely American literary voice. From
early efforts such as The Rum Diaries to later more explicitly political
works, such as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and his post-9/11
rumination Kingdom of Fear, Hunter S. Thompson emerged as a totemic American
man of letters, and a self-created renegade. With scabrous prose and
hammer-blow delivery he consistently bemoaned the death of the American
Dream, yet he did so while clutching a tumbler of Scotch, and defiantly
waving a joint of marijuana in the face of the Establishment. For this
public rebellion, for so many would-be rebels, he was adored.
For Anita Thompson, however, Hunter the Legend was largely unknown when she
met the man in 1996. Then 24 years old, and in Aspen, Colorado, on a
sabbatical from UCLA, Anita Bejmuk was introduced to Thompson, then 59, by a
friend. “I had vaguely heard the name,” she says. “I once read a short piece
he wrote in Rolling Stone, but that was all.” Their first meeting, she says,
despite the age gap, sealed the deal. “A whole feeling went through my
body,” she says. “We both noticed these feelings of connectedness and of
deep friendship.”
She adds, crucially, that it was precisely her lack of interest in the gonzo
back-catalogue that drew him to her. “He liked me because I wasn't a fan,
and because I was ignorant of his work. And I liked this man very much, this
man named Hunter, who happened to be a writer.”
Thus, undaunted by his reputation, and unafraid to prod him into writing mode,
Anita became the perfect assistant and eventual partner for Hunter S.
Thompson. She moved into Owl Farm in 2000 and describes a two-year period of
parties, drugs and cocktails that came to a halt when “I realised that I
physically couldn't continue living this lifestyle, his lifestyle. I stopped
the drinking, the smoking and the partaking in everything. And I began
drinking tea instead.”
She tried, she says, to get Hunter into a mildly healthy state - by cutting
back on butter and by exercising - but she never challenged his partying
ways. “He had an unusual constitution,” she says, describing how the
drinking might end at midnight and Hunter would then work, typing till the
small hours of the morning. “He could take substances and they would not
affect him. I only ever saw him drunk on two occasions, and that was
probably exhaustion.”
The couple were married in 2003, at Hunter's suggestion. He was facing serious
back surgery and keen that Anita would not be left destitute should he die
on the table. The surgery was a success, but the morbid theme dominated Owl
Farm. Hunter's mood blackened. He feared, with age and encroaching
infirmity, that he was becoming a burden. When George W. Bush won the 2004
election Thompson, a Bush-hater, fell into a deep depression. Anita, fearing
the worst, asked Thompson's son, Juan, for advice. “Poor Juan just said, ‘Oh
no, he's fine, he's my father!' And I said, ‘Thank God, it's just my
imagination',” she says. “But it was irresponsible of me to drop my guard
like that. I feel that I failed him. And that will haunt me for ever.”
At 5.16pm on February 20, 2005, Hunter called Anita, who was in a local car
park on the way to a yoga class. They had a warm conversation. He told her
that he loved her and that when she came home they'd work on one of his new
columns. He didn't hang up, however, but left the phone line open, and the
receiver on a nearby counter. Still on the line, Anita heard a click in the
background. She casually hung up, thinking it was just Hunter tapping on his
typewriter, whereas, in fact, he was actually cocking his gun. Why, does she
think, he left the line open? “I think he was probably terrified to do it
alone. I know he didn't want me to be in the house when he did it, and I
understand why. But you can imagine, no matter how courageous you are, if
you think it's an act of courage, you still would be terrified to do it
alone.”
Anita Thompson was profoundly shocked by her husband's death. She rejects the
glamorised notion that this suicide was inevitable and blames herself for
not anticipating it, or not being there for Thompson. “I should have seen
how serious this was,” she says choking back tears. “I should have called
the right people.”
She feels ambivalent about the infamous funeral that followed, six months
after his death (his ashes were embedded in fireworks and shot out of a
150ft cannon). Orchestrated by Depp, and attended by everyone from John
Kerry to Jack Nicholson, it honoured morbid comments that Thompson had made
in a 1976 interview, which Anita Thompson now says were in jest. “In the
same sentence he said that he'd also like to put a McDonald's out in the
back of his property. It was a joke!” She adds, however, that the funeral
hoopla helped to keep her mind off the void that had opened in her life.
She says that even now, three years later, she's still trying to adjust to a
world without Thompson. She's studying at Columbia University, New York
(majoring in American Studies). And few people there know her history. She
says that Hunter still looms large in her life, that she is painfully lonely
every night without him (“the nights are the worst”), but that it's too soon
to have another relationship. She then reveals, quietly, but with no less
impact, that she's still considering having his child. She has access, she
explains, to his frozen sperm. The couple tried “many times” to conceive
when Thompson was alive. Fearing for the health of his sperm as he started
to age, he froze some. “I don't think he planned for me to do it after his
death, it's just that the younger sperm are more effective.” She says that
nonetheless, having his baby now would be a monumental decision. “And I
haven't decided yet,” she says. “I'm concerned about raising a child without
a father.”
While the possibility of a new generation of gonzo babies sinks in, Anita
Thompson says that for now her greatest task is to concentrate on
transforming Owl Farm into a writers' retreat for serious students of Hunter
S. Thompson. It's what he would've wanted, she says, reflecting again on why
he seemed to be drawn to her in the first place. “He knew that I would stay,
work for him, and promote his legacy. He knew how much I loved him.” She
pauses, and lets the words sink in, one last time, before concluding, “And
it was mutual. He loved me, too.”
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson is out on selected release
on Friday; www.ralphsteadman.com
