The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  As happens with people who love a thing too much, it destroys them. Oscar Wilde said, “You destroy the thing that you love.” It’s the other way around. What you love destroys you.

  George closed the fiftieth-anniversary issue of the Paris Review two days before he died, and we spoke that afternoon about how he might contribute to SI’s upcoming fiftieth-anniversary issue. As always, he had numerous ideas. He took me to dinner that night at the Brook Club, where we sat at a long, communal table with other members. George loved the Brook and spent many nights there, where as a long-standing member his celebrity didn’t pester him.

  Peter Matthiessen had mentioned to me that sometimes if George thought he was unobserved he would let his face drop and go blank, with his jaw hanging open, and it made him look like a dead man, or at the least very sad, or even fighting something dark. Peter said it made him sad when he saw George that way, but I had never seen it until that night. When we were leaving, he told me he had recently committed to a $750,000 contract to write his memoirs.

  George died the next night.

  —

  A FEW DAYS LATER his wife, Sarah Dudley Plimpton, was searching his computer and came across a “Notes & Obligations” file. The last entry was written at 1:25 a.m. on September 25, the morning he died in his sleep. George often returned home from late dinners and sat typing away until he was tired enough to fall asleep. The memo was a run of reminders, ideas for future issues of the Paris Review, drafts of letters, anecdotes for the memoir he was determined never to write. That last morning George finished his notes with a poem by Emily Dickinson:

  Fame is a bee.

  It has a song—

  It has a sting—

  Ah, too, it has a wing

  And the very last entry was a quote from André Gide:

  The drawback to a journey that has been too well planned is that it does not leave enough room for adventure.

  −ENDIT−

  Camouflage (370)

  IF YOU WORK WITH NOTORIOUS WRITERS, some of what they are famous for comes off on you. It’s never the other way around and, if you’re a good editor, what you do is invisible anyway. That’s the job. Brace yourself and be aware that you will be associated with creativity that is not yours at all, although it is tempting to try to keep some of the credit. Bad idea.

  I am not proud of it, but in college I took the SATs for money. It was easy to just sign in then, and so were the tests. George was appalled at the dishonesty even before he knew the scores I got for one friend helped get him into Stanford, where he signed up for an accelerated program in something like “Modern Thought, Science and Literature.” I don’t remember the details, but my friend flunked out at the end of his freshman year.

  I thought about him from time to time whenever I would feel myself faking it—posturing with casual self-importance as a kind of camouflage to hide insecurity when moving into deeper water, like when I was going to meet George Plimpton for the first time to ask him to write for me. Or later, when George and I were arriving at Owl Farm several hours before Hunter expected us, and I didn’t know Hunter then as well as George thought I did.

  Or much later, in 2010, when I was asked to moderate a conversation at the Time, Fortune, CNN Global Forum in Cape Town between Danny Jordaan and Francois Pienaar. Jordaan had fought beside Nelson Mandela as an anti-apartheid activist and was now chief executive officer of FIFA’s first World Cup in South Africa. Pienaar was the former captain of the South African Springboks and the soulful national hero played by Matt Damon in the film Invictus, about the newly elected president Mandela uniting the country by enlisting the national rugby team on a mission to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup. That was a sacred moment in South Africa’s history and I was supposed to lead them through it.

  “You ready?” asked the stage manager, queuing me to go on.

  A shrug from me. Camouflage.

  −ENDIT−

  Hunter (4,763)

  GEORGE PLIMPTON AND I DECIDED to visit Hunter after he sent me a photograph of himself sinking a thirty-foot putt at the Aspen Golf Club. He signed it to me with Res Ipsa Loquitur across the image, and there was a message on the back: Come out and play golf with me sometime—+ bring George—and money; I will beat both of you like mules.

  Hunter’s Owl Farm had seen numerous visitations far more exalted than ours. Jimmy Carter and Keith Richards, among dozens of others, had passed through, sometimes shooting clay pigeons and improvised targets in the meadow next to the house. After all, Owl Farm was designated a “Rod and Gun Club” on Hunter’s stationery. Bill Murray had come close to moving in when he was preparing to play Hunter in Where the Buffalo Roam, and Johnny Depp actually did before he filmed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter liked to play host—even picking you up at the airport in the ’71 Chevrolet Impala convertible he called the “Red Shark.” When John Belushi died and there were rumors he had been visiting Hunter, the wires quoted him saying John was “welcome at Owl Farm dead or alive.”

  FRIENDS OF FRIENDS CAN’T BRING FRIENDS was taped to the refrigerator; but they did. Hunter complained but when you saw him playing his games with new guests you knew he loved it. They would tell him how much they were influenced by this or that in his work and he would ask them to read a little of it aloud. Just a paragraph to start but it would become a page and then a chapter. “Slower,” Hunter would say, “slower.” Some people wondered if they’d ever get out of there.

  I had visited Owl Farm before and told George there would be distractions, but we arrived hopeful about our connected missions. My plan was to get Hunter to write a piece for the premier issue of Smart. George was there to interview him for what he planned to be the first interview for “The Art of Journalism” series for the Paris Review. Hunter said first we had to play golf.

  —

  WE PLAYED THAT FIRST EVENING, in the dying light, at the municipal Aspen Golf Club, which was closed. Hunter just waved to a guy in the pro shop, who brought us a bucket of balls. Hunter had a 12-gauge shotgun in his golf bag and we had Heinekens in a cooler on the cart—also a fifth of Chivas, a fifth of Jose Cuervo, limes, a fifth of Dewar’s (for George) and an extra cooler of ice.

  “Here,” Hunter said, holding out three white tabs of blotter paper with an unfamiliar red symbol on them. “Eat these.”

  He put one on his tongue and stuck it out at us. I took my tab and did the same back at him. When George said he wanted to concentrate on his golf, Hunter licked the third tab. “Ho ho…last of the batch!”

  Following Hunter’s lead, we used the first tee as a driving range to warm up. His swing was explosive if not smooth and his third drive was solid and long. George had a fluid swing and drove each of his balls successively farther. I had never played but wasn’t pathetic. Hunter accused me of sandbagging. After we had each hit five balls, Hunter said it was time to get serious and we rode the cart to his favorite hole, the fourteenth—a short par-3, straight shot over a large pond. The Aspen course is a Certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary and the pond was full of geese.

  “Goddamn geese,” said Hunter.

  “Branta canadensis,” said George.

  “You’d like George’s bat trick,” I said to Hunter.

  “No fucking bats!” Hunter said.

  “Alas,” George said, and made himself a Dewar’s and water.

  Hunter always said (and wrote in Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga) that his acid-eating experience was limited in terms of total consumption, but widely varied as to company and circumstances, and that he liked the electric atmosphere it put him in, especially when taking it with the Angels.

  They just swallowed the stuff and hung on…which is probably just as dangerous as the experts say, but a far, far nuttier trip than sitting in some sterile chamber with a condescending guide and a handful of nervous, would-be hipsters.

  We, on the other hand, were playing golf. And gambling. Each of us would hit five balls in a row off the tee and then proceed to the gr
een to putt. Only our best ball would count. We were all in for $1,000, Hunter said.

  George put all five of his balls on the green, three close enough for makeable birdies. Hunter put three in the water and two on. I managed one on the green but didn’t care. I didn’t know golf but I knew a little about acid. My college roommate for a year was Steve Lambrecht—Zonker of Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the suave stoner portrayed in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as getting “higher than any man alive.” Zonker talked me into going to class on acid, which turned out fine. Tom had also written that LSD made the Hells Angels strangely peaceful and sometimes catatonic, in contrast to the Pranksters and other intellectuals around, who soared on the stuff. I was now peacefully soaring.

  When we got to the green, George put two of his balls in for birdies. Hunter had one ball left to tie, if he could sink a thirty-foot putt like the one he was celebrating in the photo he had sent. He walked back and forth between his ball and the hole several times. I was on the other side of the cup, holding the flag. It was dark now, as dark as it gets in Aspen on summer nights, and although the sky still had a glow, I could barely see his ball. George was by the cart, making another Dewar’s and water. The ice tinkled in his glass.

  “Silence!” Hunter shouted. “I know your tricks.”

  Hunter took at least another two minutes lining up his putt, then struck it quickly. He missed the putt by about a foot and, charging after it, let out a howl as he winged his putter into the pond. The geese started honking and Hunter ran back to the cart, pulled the 12-gauge from his golf bag and fired over the geese, and they lifted off the pond like a sparkling cloud of gray and white feathers. It occurred to me as I watched the glitter blend into the fading sky that having a story to tell about acid golf with Hunter and George was probably good for my career.

  Hunter looked at me and said, “You’re higher than I am, goddamn it.” I started laughing. Hunter seldom laughed, but he did then.

  “Maybe I should have, well, ‘eaten’ some myself,” George said.

  On the way back to Owl Farm in the Red Shark, George told us that playing ahead of Arnold Palmer in the San Francisco pro-am had been like being chased by a migration. Of geese? I wondered. George also said that when he’d played in the Bob Hope Classic at Indian Wells, his ball had almost hit Hope and the popular comedian Phyllis Diller in their cart at the fourteenth. He remembered that both comics had been wearing “sullen frowns”

  “Fuck Bob Hope,” Hunter said.

  —

  HUNTER AND GEORGE STAYED UP that night, but I fell asleep on the couch. The next morning I got up early and went to the supermarket ten miles up the road in Aspen. I was under the delusion that we needed supplies for the interview, and returned with several bags of groceries: a smoked ham, assorted crackers, cheese, olives, peanuts, etc. As it turned out, no one ate any of it.

  The interview started late that afternoon when Hunter got up, and went for twelve hours. Doug Brinkley, who would later edit Hunter’s letters, was there, working his own angles, which annoyed George. About an hour into it, Walter Isaacson, then the managing editor of Time, came by and had questions as well. A string of locals also dropped in, with various distractions that Hunter welcomed and George hated.

  Hunter was at his kitchen “command post,” chain-smoking through a gold-tipped cigarette holder and rocking back and forth in his high swivel chair. As George pressed on with the interview, sometimes rephrasing the same question, Hunter’s mood swung wildly. He was angry and mocking and then suddenly strangely sincere, or flamboyant and hilarious and then respectful (of Kerouac, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey, David Halberstam, William Kennedy and Tom Wolfe). When it came to Vietnam, Hunter would cloud over, but he kept talking.

  He said he had arrived, sweating, in Saigon with what he called his “seminal documents” (Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Phil Knightley’s The First Casualty, Hemingway’s In Our Time), too much electronic equipment (walkie-talkies!), sketchbook-sized notebooks and his usual felt-tip pens (they bled all over the paper because of his sweat). Plus, he said, he had carried a .45 automatic. Hunter had never talked about it, but he was haunted by Vietnam: The war had been part of my life for so long. For more than ten years I’d been beaten and gassed. I wanted to see the end of it. In a way I felt I was paying off a debt.

  PLIMPTON

  To whom?

  THOMPSON

  I’m not sure. But to be so influenced by the war for so long, to have it so much a part of my life, so many decisions because of it, and then not to be in it, well, that seemed unthinkable.

  PLIMPTON

  How long were you there?

  THOMPSON

  I was there about a month. It wasn’t really a war. It was over. Nothing like the war David Halberstam and Jonathan Schell and Phillip Knightley had been covering. Oh, you could still get killed…

  PLIMPTON

  You hoped to enter Saigon with the Vietcong?

  THOMPSON

  I wrote a letter to the Vietcong people, Colonel Giang, hoping they’d let me ride into Saigon on the top of a tank. The VC had their camp by the airport, two hundred people set up for the advancing troops. There was nothing wrong with it. It was good journalism.

  PLIMPTON

  Did you ever think of staying in Saigon…?

  THOMPSON

  Yes, but I had to meet my wife in Bali.

  Hunter’s timing was perfect. He wanted to stop talking about Vietnam, so he cracked everyone up. He looked relieved. Vietnam was still festering at the bottom of all his work, his outrage feeding his commitment to his individuality, his disdain for the legal system and his relentless physics lesson that all political movements give rise to their own anti-movements of equal and opposite force—Machiavelli should have thought of that.

  We moved on to what Hunter wanted to talk about: Nixon and the NFL and, most important, who he was as a writer. George asked about writing under the influence of booze or drugs, noting that every writer he’d interviewed over the years for the Paris Review had said they couldn’t do it.

  THOMPSON

  They lie. Or maybe you’ve been interviewing a very narrow spectrum of writers. It’s like saying, “Almost without exception women we’ve interviewed over the years swear that they never indulge in sodomy”—without saying that you did all your interviews in a nunnery. Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe? Or Scott Fitzgerald? Or Mark Twain? Or Fred Exley? Did Faulkner tell you that what he was drinking all the time was really iced tea, not whiskey? Please. Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?

  Hunter was angry now and that was it, interview over. George noted that the most prominently posted quote in the room, in Hunter’s hand, twisted the last line of Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”: “Rage, rage against the coming of the light.”

  When the interview was about to appear, George sent Hunter an advance copy. Hunter sent back a page from the Bible (Revelations) with a big black spot on it—like the page Long John Silver sent to Billy Bones in Treasure Island to pronounce him guilty of stealing Captain Flint’s treasure from the rest of the pirates.

  —

  LAUNCHING SMART with less than $200,000 depended on the new desktop technology, and on convincing writers to work for shares in the magazine—that is, more or less for free. Their names were the only real collateral I had for raising money and every one I asked signed on. It was a strong run of bylines, including Plimpton, Harrison, McGuane, Peter Maas, Warren Hinckle, Eve Babitz and Jay McInerney. Some even invested money beyond their work, and Elaine Kaufman kicked in a few grand, too.

  Hunter loved the idea of having stock almost as much as he hated working for free but he eventually agreed. His first assignment was to write about his Aspen neighbor Jack Nicholson. He never filed. Then he was going to write a column called “Year of the Wolf,” but he said he needed more words, at least five thousand. Fi
ne, but no copy was forthcoming until, without discussing it, he faxed me a piece about his trouble with a new neighbor named Floyd that he’d spun into a complicated Republican conspiracy. The lede was: It was just before dawn when the queers rushed my house. Politically incorrect, but right up the tailpipe of the anti-gay conservatives he was after in the piece.

  At the top of the first page of the manuscript was a note in his unmistakable hand: “You’ll pay in the end…”

  Smart was struggling by then and I was running out of money. I learned to forge Hunter’s distinctive “HST” and began signing books. I must have signed twenty first editions of his Songs of the Doomed for potential advertisers who loved him. When I confessed this on another visit to Owl Farm, he smiled with a curious, surprised look and handed me one of his preferred Sharpies.

  “Show me.”

  I grabbed one of the random books on the bar, scratched “Thanks for the crack” on a flyleaf, then scrawled my counterfeit “HST.” He lifted the book to the light to see it better, then slapped it back down on the bar.

  “Jesus, you’re desperate,” he said.

  When I lost Smart to a Japanese investor and went to Esquire, Hunter’s “Year of the Wolf” column idea came with me. He wrote the first one about Pete Axthelm’s death, but after that the column was plagued by deadline slippage and he kept promising a draft of a secret novel instead. It was called Polo Is My Life and he said it had grown out of his piece on the Pulitzer trial in Palm Beach, the assignment I had used to lure him back to Rolling Stone. But we kept struggling with “Year of the Wolf,” and he would call often, always late at night. I could sometimes hear laughter in the background, in which case I’d get off quickly if I could.