by Robin Green
Hunter not only talked the talk, he walked the walk, hanging out with a motorcycle gang to write about them until they finally beat the shit out of him—hey, they felt used. What did Joan Didion mean when she said writers were always selling somebody out?
Growing up in Louisville, Hunter had been the genuine article—a bona fide juvenile delinquent, although, with a widowed librarian for a mother, he was a literate JD, albeit one who didn’t graduate from high school because he’d spent time in jail for robbery and assault. After a stint in the air force, he spent his peripatetic twenties writing for newspapers and magazines. He wanted to be a Fitzgerald or a Hemingway, but getting into bar fights in Greenwich Village was as close as he got.
He’d been sent to Las Vegas by Sports Illustrated to cover a motorcycle race, and when that magazine “aggressively,” according to Hunter, rejected the pages that resulted, he brought them to Rolling Stone. David Felton and Jann went nuts. They told him to keep going, to let it rip, which he did for pages and pages that resulted in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” published in two parts in November—the first part as Hunter had written it, the second derived largely from taped hours of Hunter’s and Oscar Acosta’s muttering and raving, tapes that landed on the desk of newly hired Sarah Lazin to be transcribed. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she said to Paul. “Just do the best you can,” he told her. And with foot pedal and headphones, she painstakingly typed their almost-unintelligible banter, a screeching argument with a waitress…all of it later to make up much of part 2.
It was terrific, that, all of it. Brilliant. Hunter’s litany of drug talk in part 1, sure—
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.…The only thing that really worried me was the ether…
Hilarious. And, as I would discover firsthand, no exaggeration. But there was more than drug-addled braggadocio to his writing; there was actual thought and insight into what he saw as the failure of the 1960s counterculture.
He wrote of the sixties as a hopeful time, hope now “burned out and long gone,” sunk “in this foul year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-one…Tim Leary a prisoner of Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, Bob Dylan clipping coupons in Greenwich Village, both Kennedys murdered by mutants, Owsley folding napkins on Terminal Island, and finally Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off his pedestal by a human hamburger, a man on the verge of death. Joe Frazier, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand—at least not out loud.”
His writing seemed like a new form, as close to rock itself as writing gets, unrestrained and unrepressed, wild and reckless and high as a fucking kite. Nobody was saying it better. He was thirty-four, and it all came together for him; he had found his voice and, in Rolling Stone, the perfect venue—a rag that came out every two weeks, neither a glossy magazine with a two-month lead time nor a newspaper with its limited space and linguistic leeway. Stories never had a chance to get stale. They could be alive and in the moment, like Hunter’s writing.
Hunter in person was a different story. As with the editorial assistants, I didn’t know very much about him then, his misspent youth, his aspirations, his shenanigans in Greenwich Village. I knew only what I saw when I happened to be at the office when he showed up. He was strange. Guarded to the extreme. Jumpy. He didn’t make eye contact and he muttered. I couldn’t understand a word he said when he stopped to mutter something at Felton, by whose side I always stayed while at the office. It looked like a big put-on, Hunter’s act. To protect himself, I supposed, so he wouldn’t have to actually talk to anyone. Or maybe it was the drugs.
I did see him act normal once. It was in 1973, and I had gone to live with Felton in Chicago, where he was in a program for journalists similar to Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. Coincidentally, Hunter was slated to give an undergraduate lecture at the university, and for the fun of it, Annie flew in to stay with us on her way to or from an assignment.
She and David cooked up the idea that we would go to the lecture dressed as Hunter’s hallucinations, so we went downtown and rented costumes—a giant gorilla head for me, a frog outfit for David, and for Annie a bird whose beak lifted to allow her eye access to her camera.
We filed into the auditorium and took our seats among the students just as Hunter was walking to the podium. He saw us, gave a slight nod, and mumbled something that Felton said later was “Will you look at that,” before going on to deliver a completely incomprehensible rant that seemed to entertain the students, though it was hard to see much of what was going on through the eye slits of my suffocating and ridiculous gorilla head.
Hunter had social obligations at the university that night, but in the morning, we three picked him up at his hotel to take him downtown for a radio interview with Studs Terkel. Hunter muttered and ranted the whole way—bugs were crawling up his leg, this drug, that drug. We got to the radio station, and Hunter sweat and muttered to himself and paced the hall—that is, until Studs Terkel came out to greet him.
Terkel in person was just like his voice on the radio and in his writing: warm, engaging, sincere. An amused twinkle in his eye, he seemed genuinely tickled to meet Hunter. As for Hunter, I saw him instantly transform into someone else. Gone were the evasive eyes, the muttering, and the jumpiness, and in their place, someone polite and respectful. He shook Studs Terkel’s hand.
“I’m glad to meet you too,” Hunter said. “Honored.”
“Well, let’s do this, then,” Terkel said, ushering him cheerfully into the broadcast booth. And in the radio interview that followed, Hunter continued to be articulate, responsive, cogent.
His was an act that would wreck him in time, his decline and suicide well documented, showing that as he grew older, the line that distinguished his actual self from the literary persona he created became increasingly blurred. In 1978, he told an interviewer on the BBC that he sometimes felt pressured to live up to the fictional self he created, adding, “I’m never sure which one people expect me to be. Very often they conflict—most often, as a matter of fact…I’m leading a normal life and right alongside me there is this myth, and it is growing and mushrooming and getting more and more warped. When I get invited to, say, speak at universities, I’m not sure if they are inviting Duke [the name he invented for himself] or Thompson. I’m not sure who to be.”
You only have to go on YouTube and see him on the Letterman show or Conan O’Brien to see the physical toll this took on him. David Felton goes further to say that even while he concurs that Hunter’s persona ultimately killed him, or at least played a big part in his decline, Hunter lost sight of the person he actually was; he thinks his suicide in 2005 was a kind of performance. He was on the phone with his wife when he cocked the gun—she heard him do it—then he hung up, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
But this would be years from now, for these were the salad days, his and everybody’s. Hunter was a star. He brought éclat to the magazine; he electrified the place when he came in. In addition, as I’ve been told since, even with the madras shorts, the fishing hat, the aviator glasses, the bowlegged gait, the jittering and muttering, he was quite the chick magnet, cutting a swath through the office that included Harriet and even Amazonian Annie. Hard for me to think of Hunter that way—that is, before late that December 1971, which was when I saw Hunter naked in the Esalen sulfur baths on the second night of the Rolling Stone editorial conference in Big Sur.
Or I supposed he was naked, submerged as he was from the waist down. It was after one a.m., when the baths are open to the public, and many of us had taken off our clothes and climbed into the hot sulfur springwater, but it was Hunter who stood out most distinctly, gorgeous as just himself wi
thout the ironic shirt and hat, the cigarette holder, the aviator glasses, his torso as perfect and toned as that of Michelangelo’s David, or at least of the Oscar statue they give away at the Academy Awards. An amazing physique for someone who smoked and boozed and drugged as much as he did.
As we all did that night because, make no mistake, we were pretty much wasted on weed, mescaline, and bourbon. Enough so that earlier that evening, I’d climbed into the back seat of Hunter’s rented Mustang with Felton, Annie up front riding shotgun, Hunter at the wheel. We were reenacting the ride up Route 1 they’d taken the night before, and as we rode, the three of them gleefully recounted the adventure, how at midnight Hunter’s Wild Turkey had run low, leaving him, as he saw it, no choice but to drive at dangerous speeds, as we were now, up forty-five minutes of treacherous road north to Carmel to buy more, how the California Highway Patrol had pulled them over, made Hunter get out, walk a straight line with eyes closed, and touch his nose, which he’d failed to do, how Annie had caught the whole thing on camera, including the moment he snapped his head back, causing his sunglasses to fly off, and how he caught them behind his back with one hand.
“See that?” Hunter said, shaking the shades at the cops. “That’s got to count for something.” And the cops had suddenly let them go, saying to Annie, “Get him out of here.”
And now here he was again at midnight, purely for fun speeding north on Route 1 with the headlights off, squealing around curves and taking hairpin turns on two wheels, swigging off the fifth of Wild Turkey he held between his legs, all of us stoned on the little blue mescaline pills in a baggie perched on the console within Hunter’s reach. He ate them like candy.
I wasn’t afraid. I was laughing. Screeching with pleasure. We all were. What was there to be afraid of? We were on the inside lane, hugging the cliff, although Hunter did take each curve with a swing into the outside lane, letting up on the gas and then gunning around the bend, and we knew that any misstep—an animal in the road, say, or an oncoming car with its lights also off—could send us sailing over the guardrail-less edge and rolling to our deaths on the rocks below.
It occurred to me that I seemed not to care. I felt alive. Immortal. Lucky to be in that car, living on the literal edge. This, I realized, was the point of Hunter. He didn’t just write this stuff; he lived it. And if we went crashing down that cliff into the Pacific Ocean, so be it. What better way to die?
* * *
Chapter Seven
Big Sur
We didn’t die that night. We returned to Big Sur after one a.m., parked in the Esalen Institute lot, made our way down a moonlit path to the edge of a cliff, where we descended stone steps into a passageway that smelled like sulfur, like hell is supposed to smell, and soon found ourselves in a space carved out of rock where wet, naked bodies came and went in the dim light of the steamy atmosphere, like some vision of souls in hell. Had we died? Was this hell? But if it was, why was everybody smiling? Why the shit-eating grins? And would one side of a cave of hell be open, as this place proved to be, to the clean night air and the vast and beautiful black expanse of the Pacific Ocean now spread before us, its waters sparkling tonight in the light of a full moon?
We took off our clothes and hung them on hooks and joined the others in the big stone tubs, six or seven of us in each, Felton next to me, Hunter across, Annie somewhere out of sight, and Laurel Gonsalves, who ran advertising sales, beatific in the corner, steam rising around us all as hot, sulfuric mineral water met night air.
But now Jann appeared just outside the bath, naked, round, and beautiful as a cherub. We were smiling like fools.
“Hi, hey,” I said, “do you want to go for a walk?”
“Robin!” he said in an admonishing tone, knowing what I was implying even if I hadn’t, in my stoned state, quite realized it, his eyes finding his wife, Jane, in the next tub, watching him. She didn’t look happy but strangely pinched and starved, which made more sense years later when Jann came out as a gay man.
This was the second night of the editorial conference, when wives and girlfriends (and Laurel Gonsalves) had been invited to attend. The first night and day were, other than Annie to make a photographic record of the whole thing, for men only, and though I was there on the masthead with the men, I was not on staff or retainer, and therefore not invited. At least that’s what both Jann and Paul Scanlon assured me years later when I asked.
And this, of course, since I’d written like crazy that year, raises the question of why the fuck not? Which is a question everybody who’d know seems unable to answer with any certainty, myself included.
I know that I never asked to be on staff or retainer, that it never occurred to me and no one brought it up. I did for a time occupy a desk at the office—was it that year, the next?—right outside Eszterhas’s cubicle in an open area that also housed Jann’s secretary. I recall Jann bringing a lamp and making a show of placing it on the desk in welcome, though today Jann himself can’t confirm or deny this ever happened. Charlie Perry, however, says that it’s possible—writers and contributing editors often found themselves at random desks in this or that hallway in the shifting personnel and editorial tides.
Well, it’s my memory and I say I had a desk, a phone, and a lamp and that Jann seemed tickled and amused at my arrival in the office. If there was sexism, it was in what felt like his delight in the novelty of having me there, a chick writer. I further remember that he invited me to attend editorial meetings—me with all the guys. And with this memory, David Felton concurs, though neither of us can remember when exactly it was. And does it matter?
It would have been some combination of Jann, Joe Eszterhas, Felton, Paul Scanlon, Charles Perry, maybe Ben Fong-Torres and Grover Lewis. They would have chewed the fat, laughed at their own jokes, sparred for dominance, and Joe, if BBC-TV footage I’ve seen is any indication, would have emphasized the points he wished to make by driving his Buck knife into the conference table. Ashtrays would be overflowing, Joe puffing his pipe, everyone else, cigarettes. There would have been competitive jostling for space as editors pitched their ideas, what Harold Hayes would later tell me was the “blood on the walls” he’d encouraged at editorial meetings at Esquire. Jann would be simultaneously smoking, shuffling papers, jiggling a nervous knee, and talking a mile a minute, wired on either coke or speed.
This much I do remember: Jann brought up a story he wanted me to do. I lived in Berkeley and looked young enough and right enough that I could go undercover as a senior at the public high school there and then, like, write about it. I declined. I had in mind a different story about Berkeley: hippies on government dole. Felton reminds me that he pitched them the headline “Guerrilla Welfare.”
I spent weeks on the assignment, but it never ran, was in fact the only story at RS for which I got a kill fee. Many years later, Jann finally got the Southern California version of his high-school undercover story in the magazine with Cameron Crowe’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” It and the movie that came after with Sean Penn were wonderful. I’ve never felt anything other than that the right person wrote that story.
As for me, that one or those two meetings, whenever it or they were, were enough for me, my first and last editorial meeting(s), and it would be years before another female would appear at the table. But appear she would, in 1974, brought to the magazine by John Walsh, whom Jann had hired the end of the year before as managing editor, which had been Paul Scanlon’s long-held job. Scanlon elected to stay on in a lesser capacity because, as he recently put it, John Walsh looked like he wouldn’t last longer than a cup of coffee, which turned out to be pretty much true. Still, Paul said thanks but no thanks when, after Walsh departed, Jann came back around to him with the title.
Though Walsh may not have lasted long, his effect on the magazine was transformative: he hired Marianne Partridge as copyeditor and tasked her to professionalize the editorial department, which until then had been a catch-as-catch-can kind of operation.
I wa
s mostly gone by 1974, from the magazine’s masthead if not from its pages, and I didn’t really know her, but I’m told she had come up through the New York Times, Forbes, and the Saturday Evening Post, a no-nonsense broad who didn’t take shit from anybody, even Jann himself, and that she ultimately broke his heart when, after functioning for a stretch as the de facto ME, and just as the magazine was making its move to New York, Marianne Partridge informed Jann Wenner she was leaving Rolling Stone to work for Clay Felker at the Village Voice.
According to people who were there, Jann screamed at her, “You fucking cunt!” and threw a chair across the room. Immediately after she left, he had her office repainted, grieving for days over the betrayal.
But before all this, back in 1974 when Walsh brought her on as copyeditor, Marianne saw the brainpower she had in Sarah Lazin, Harriet Fier, and Christine Doudna and put them to work, Christine as her assistant copy chief, Lazin and Fier to establish and run a fact-checking department. Barbara Downey, a new editorial girl who had come on the scene (and taken my place in David Felton’s affections until, he says, she took up with writer Jon Landau, who went on to become Bruce Springsteen’s manager), joined them in copyediting. They thrived. Sarah recalls that she got really interested in learning how to be an editor, that she started to see the work there as a long-term career rather than just a job and a groovy place to be.
