Three days later Kesey, who was out of jail on bail raised by his old Perry Lane friends, arrived to a hero’s welcome and barely registered the fact that Wolfe was in his midst, which was only to the writer’s advantage: he could observe Kesey and the Pranksters’ exploits without getting in the way. “We were beyond being freaked out by appearances,” said George Walker, a Merry Prankster and one of Kesey’s most trusted confidants at the time. “Tom was this very patrician guy who I don’t think ever got down to shirtsleeves the whole time he was with us, but we were too busy with our own stuff to pay any attention to him.”
Even for a group as willfully unconventional as the Merry Pranksters, it made for a bizarre tableau—a dandy among the heads. Wolfe observed the Prankster preparations for something called the Acid Test Graduation, accompanying Pranksters George Walker, Kesey’s former Stanford colleague Ken Babbs, and others on bus trips to Kesey’s compound in La Honda. “Despite the skepticism I brought here,” Wolfe would later write, “I am suddenly experiencing their feeling. I am sure of it. I feel like I am onto something the outside world, the world I came from, could not possibly comprehend, and it is a metaphor, the whole scene, ancient and vast.” The Pranksters were a true mystic brotherhood, “only in poor old Formica polyethylene 1960s America without a grain of desert sand or a shred of palm leaf or a morsel of manna wilderness breadfruit overhead, picking up vibrations from Ampex tapes and a juggled Williams Lok-Hed sledge hammer, hooking down mathematical lab drugs, LSD-25, IT-290, DMT, instead of soma water.”
After a while, Kesey began to test Wolfe, entreating him to put down his steno pad, drop acid, and join the Pranksters as a participant rather than an observer. “Ken usually believed, and he was often right, that through his magnetism he could bring you around to his way of looking at things,” said Wolfe. “But he and I were on different wavelengths.” Still, the communal nature of the Pranksters’ great utopian experiment appealed to Wolfe. Once when the two were dating, Elaine Dundy asked Wolfe if there was any subculture of which he had written whose lifestyle appealed to him the most. “He said, ‘If I could stop what I was doing, I would be one of the Pranksters.’ I think a group like that, who gave up the world without really rebelling in any violent way and supported each other, was attractive to him.”
At La Honda, on Kesey’s compound nestled among the tall redwood trees of the Santa Cruz mountain range, Wolfe took in the full expanse of the Pranksters’ mad technological swirl of sound and vision, the ecstatic mixed with the sophomoric. There were speakers mounted on the roof of the house and strung along the trees, blasting Ornette Coleman’s angular free jazz and Bob Dylan’s plugged-in folk. Strange mobiles hung from tree branches; abstract art was nailed to the trunks. Inside Kesey’s vast log cabin, tape recorders and 8 mm cameras and projectors were strewn about. These were the documentary tools for the Pranksters’ experiments in all-in-one consciousness, the Acid Tests.
A few Pranksters made some halfhearted attempts to rattle Wolfe. One afternoon George Walker took the writer for a spin in his Lotus, taking the curves around Menlo Park at ninety miles per hour. By the joy ride’s end, Wolfe was ashen and visibly shaken; Walker was amused but admired Wolfe’s stoic professionalism. When Kesey moved the Pranksters’ operations to La Honda from Harriet Street, Wolfe tagged along with Ed McClanahan in his sports car. As McClanahan negotiated mountain roads “that were as crooked as a goat’s hind leg,” Wolfe interviewed him, scribbling shorthand on a legal pad situated between them. “Every story I told him was letter-perfect in the book,” said McClanahan. “I couldn’t believe how good he was at it.”
The Pranksters were preparing for the Acid Test Graduation, in which Kesey would tell his followers to move beyond acid into a new level of being. What that might be, even Kesey didn’t know for sure. “It was quite strange, the mysticism of it,” said Wolfe of the graduation, which was held in a San Francisco warehouse. “As the hour grew late, people were getting pretty high. It became a religious atmosphere, not unlike that of snake handlers.”
“Their faces were painted in Art Nouveau swirls,” Wolfe wrote.
Their Napoleon hats are painted, masks painted, hair dyed weird, embroidered Chinese pajamas, dresses made out of American flags, Flash Gordon diaphanous polyethylene, supermarket Saran Wrap … A hell of a circus, in short, a whole carnival banner, a panopticon.
Neal Cassady was wearing a mortarboard and holding a bunch of rolled-up diplomas, while Kesey lurked in the shadows, wearing a white leotard, a white satin cape, and a red, white, and blue sash across his chest. “It’s … Captain America! The Flash! Captain Marvel! The Superhero, in a word.” But the great revelation never came. Kesey made some abstract comments about not going through the same doors, moving beyond “the Garden of Eden.” The crowd was befuddled by this, and the presence of a handful of cops didn’t help. The crowd thinned as Halloween turned into November 1, and at 3 A.M., Kesey’s inner circle gatherered in the middle of the floor and huddled close together, touching hands with their eyes closed in an attempt at some mass trance. At five, Neal Cassady handed out the diplomas to those who had made it through the evening and early morning, the true believers in the Prankster faith.
The whole Prankster experiment seemed to be trailing off into an uncertain future that night. Weeks later, Kesey was sentenced to a prison work farm. It would provide a fitting climax to Wolfe’s story. He now had his opening—Kesey returning to his followers after reentering the country—and his ending. But what he originally intended as a standard feature of a few thousand words had ballooned into a three-part epic that ran in three issues of New York in January and February 1967. “The first part, setting the stage, was O.K.,” Wolfe wrote in the New York Times. “The second and third were pretty thin stuff. Certainly they failed to capture the weird … fourth dimension I kept sensing in the Prankster adventure.”
Kesey wasn’t particularly impressed. “They’re all right,” he told Wolfe. “They’ll … intrigue people.” What they lacked, according to Kesey, was the marrow, the real substance, of the Prankster ethos—Wolfe hadn’t delved deep enough.
The series, which was illustrated with Ted Streshinsky’s photographs and supplemented with incidents that Wolfe learned about through extensive interviews with the Pranksters, wasn’t subpar by any means. They were thorough investigative stories, but written with a reporter’s detachment that came no closer to explaining the Pranksters’ reality than the early press coverage Wolfe had dismissed as hopelessly stodgy. Wolfe explains, but he doesn’t really reveal. A typical passage such as this one, in which Wolfe describes the effects of LSD, had the paternalistic tone of an educational film:
So far nobody in or out of the medical profession knows exactly what LSD does in the body, chiefly because so little is known about the workings of the central nervous system as a whole. It is the blackout on this score that has left so much room for mysticism in the LSD life.
The stories were, in short, too straight. There had to be a better way to approach Kesey’s story, but it wouldn’t fly in New York. This, Wolfe decided, was going to be the next book on his contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The question then became, exactly what was going to work?
He was stuck, just as he had been with the custom car feature for Esquire. How to capture the comic-spiritual nature of the scene without trivializing it? What Wolfe struggled with was the metaphysical aspect of the story; it was impossible to do justice to the Pranksters without really describing the effects of hallucinogens on the mind-set of the group.
“I froze,” recalls Wolfe, “because I somehow thought that it had to be something much more magnificent than a newspaper article, and writer’s block is the fear of not being able to produce what you announced, even if you’ve only announced it to yourself. I thought, is this so insignificant that I shouldn’t spend another minute on it? I kept trying to fit it into a regular newspaper feature form, and it wasn’t that kind of story. Finally, I just went through the process and got
it done.”
Wolfe needed to go back to the West Coast and gather more anecdotes, probe the inner lives of Kesey and the Pranksters more rigorously. “I had to follow the Pranksters’ story to the end, no matter how long it took.” He had his first chapter and the ending; now he needed to fill the space in between. The spring 1964 bus trip on the International Harvester bus the Pranksters called “Furthur,” in which the group traveled to New York and Canada, would provide the bulk of the narrative. But the acid trips would provide the meta-narrative—or, rather, the metaphysical narrative.
This objective presented a new set of problems. Anything Wolfe didn’t witness firsthand would have to be re-created from interviews and whatever else he could get his hands on. So he went back to La Honda, tracked down Pranksters such as Ed McClanahan and Stewart Brand, and interviewed them at length about what acid really felt like, what visions they might have had on the drug, and how it altered their perception of the world. Because the Pranksters were so attuned to the use of multimedia, Wolfe had the advantage of a tremendous amount of audio and visual documentation, particularly films of various Acid Tests, which Kesey screened for him.
But the story itself was changing, and the truth was uglier than Wolfe had anticipated. There was a dark side to the Prankster experience for those who weren’t as psychologically strong as Kesey and who looked to LSD as a palliative that might make them whole again. Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, Wolfe’s primary source, was the saddest case of all. A sound engineer from New York, Sandy had been introduced to Kesey through his brother Carl, a colleague of Kesey’s at Stanford during the Perry Lane era. Among the Pranksters, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt had a reputation for erratic behavior and manic-depressive tendencies—the life of the party who could without warning succumb to his worst impulses and turn against everyone, including Kesey, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship. “Sandy could be extremely ingratiating in his manic mode,” said George Walker. “But he could also be an extreme drag.”
Lehmann-Haupt’s experience with Kesey had been marked by paranoid episodes and bad drug experiences. He had endured an unusually frightening trip on the powerful hallucinogen DMT during the Pranksters’ visit with Timothy Leary at the LSD guru’s Millbrook estate in upstate New York, as well as a series of unsettling flashbacks. When the Pranksters traveled to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, Lehmann-Haupt, suffering from paranoid delusions, ran away to Monterey, fearful that Kesey had initiated a plot to kill him. Lehmann-Haupt eventually rejoined the Pranksters, but he incurred Kesey’s wrath during the 1964 expedition, when he stole audio equipment from Kesey and headed back to New York on his motorcycle.
Despite his separation from Kesey, Lehmann-Haupt was still enamored of him for years afterward. “At the time that Tom talked to Sandy, I don’t think he would have been averse to getting back in [with the Pranksters],” said Sandy’s brother Christopher, who had retrieved Sandy from prison in Monterey when he was arrested for disturbing the peace. “He was very much hung up on Kesey, though I was very negative about the whole thing from the beginning.” It was Sandy Lehmann-Haupt who, in a series of interviews with Wolfe in New York, provided Wolfe with the specifics for a number of important scenes, most crucially Kesey’s primitive jungle existence as a fugitive in Mazatlán and Manzanillo, Mexico, his trip back to the States, and his subsequent arrest, as well as some of the intimate details of Kesey’s extramarital relationship with Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Adams.
There was another disturbing undercurrent to the Prankster experience: their uneasy relationship with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. For information about Kesey and the Pranksters’ encounter with the Angels at La Honda over Labor Day weekend, 1965—a toxic culture clash that would result in a gang rape—Wolfe turned to another writer, Hunter S. Thompson, who had spent considerable time with the motorcycle gang for his own book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.
Wolfe and Thompson’s relationship had started inauspiciously. In 1965 Thompson was a struggling freelancer who was starting to make a name for himself as, among other things, a roving foreign correspondent for the National Observer, a newsweekly published by Dow Jones. When The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby was published in July 1965, Thompson embraced it as a revolutionary step forward for American journalism and wrote a rave review of the book for the Observer. The magazine’s book editor, however, was not a fan of Wolfe’s writing; like so many traditional journalists, he felt Wolfe was bastardizing a time-honored tradition. When the magazine killed the review, an enraged Thompson severed his ties with the National Observer for good, thus cutting off what was at the time his most reliable and remunerative outlet.
In a letter to Wolfe from San Francisco that accompanied the unpublished review, Thompson explained what happened:
I owe the National Observer in Washington a bit of money for stories paid and never written while I was working for them out here, and the way we decided I’d work it off was book reviews, of my own choosing. Yours was one; they sent it to me and I wrote this review, which they won’t print. I called the editor (the kulture editor) the other day from the middle of a Hell’s Angels rally at Bass Lake and he said he was sorry and he agreed with me etc. but that there was a “feeling” around the office about giving you a good review. I doubt this failure will do you much harm, but it pisses me off in addition to costing me $75, so I figured the least it could do would be to send the carbon along to you, for good or ill.
Thompson and Wolfe were unlikely allies. Thompson also was from the South, a liberal firebrand from Louisville who abhorred authority and lived his life in a perpetual state of conflict with just about everyone in his personal and professional life. Wolfe, on the other hand, held to a more conservative philosophy, skeptical and wary of the liberal political movements of the decade. What bound them together was their break from conventional journalism, the feeling that they were both fighting the good fight for new ways of reporting. “I never competed with Wolfe,” said Thompson. “We were fellow travelers.”
A few days prior to Labor Day, Thompson had run into Kesey in San Francisco at the studios of KQED, where they were both being interviewed, and the pair wound up having a few beers afterward at a nearby bar. Thompson talked up the Angels, and Kesey felt a surge of fellow feeling coming on—the outsider’s empathy for a rebel gang that also existed on the lunatic fringe. He tagged along with Thompson to the Box Shop, a de facto clubhouse in San Francisco, and, according to Thompson, “several hours of eating, drinking and the symbolic sharing of herbs” prompted an invitation from Kesey for a party at La Honda.
After reading Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, Wolfe wrote to the author asking him to send any material that might be useful for Wolfe’s book. Thompson complied with some interview tapes and audio recordings of the Hell’s Angels at La Honda. Wolfe now had the Labor Day party scene in hand, as well as the rape, which Thompson had also written about in his book.
Using Thompson’s research as well as Kesey’s extensive archive—diaries, photographs, correspondence, the Acid Test movie reels, and a forty-five-hour mass of film of the Pranksters’ tour on the Furthur bus from La Honda to New York—Wolfe would meticulously piece the story together like Margaret Mead among the Samoans. “The movies that Kesey had were hardly great cinema,” said Wolfe. “But they allowed me to describe scenes, the clothes that people were wearing. And those strange diaries were quite useful, too.”
But just as Wolfe was about to start the book, Tom senior was hospitalized with asymptomatic myocardial endocarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart. In order to help out with his father’s convalescence, Wolfe took a sabbatical from the Tribune and moved home to Richmond. Three daily hospital visits left him little time to write, but “there’s something about not having much time that makes you say, ‘I better put the hours in between to good use.’”
The writing process was fraught with indecision, however. Wolfe had mastered features for magazines, bu
t this was a considerably larger canvas. “I initially had to think of each chapter like a separate article,” he said. “That way, I could work my way through the book without worrying too much about it.” More often than not, Wolfe didn’t start writing until the early evening, churning out pages until two or three in the morning. “At first, I was trying to turn out ten triple-spaced pages a day, or fourteen hundred words,” said Wolfe. “But soon I was experiencing these long sieges where I would produce twenty pages a day, about three thousand words, and I just held steady to that page rate.”
He wrote nine hundred manuscript pages in four months, an astonishing rate even for a fast writer such as Wolfe. Just about everything he had written in the New York series was reworked. The prose style was a complete departure, even for a fanciful stylist like Wolfe. He stuck to the narrative he had mapped out: the Pranksters’ bus trip to New York and all of the intriguing detours along the way, including a trip to a Beatles concert, the Hell’s Angels party, and the meeting with Timothy Leary. But the Pranksters didn’t function in conventional narrative time, not with all those drugs, and the book couldn’t work if it was restricted to a linear storyline. So he fractured the story like a Braque painting. Instead of the omnipresent third-person voice, Wolfe shifted point of view, using interior monologues when necessary, thus taking the fictional trope of the unreliable narrator to unprecedented extremes: “Whomever I had as a source, I would try to be inside their skulls.”
Wolfe rearranged his words in nonlinear fashion and used punctuation as a graphic element, like E. E. Cummings on a mescaline bender. He was fond of ellipses, because his subjects talked in elliptical patterns, even thought in them. Punctuation, Wolfe discovered, allowed him to control the pace and timing of a scene, so he could write the way people on hallucinogens actually think. By subverting his language, he was in effect dosing his prose. Everyone’s reality was a subjective construct anyway, according to Kesey—a “movie” only they could see. Wolfe, in essence, was tailoring his style to accommodate Kesey’s. In his recounting of Sandy Lehmann-Haupt’s DMT flashback, Wolfe captures his paranoid, hallucinatory visions:
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 14
