The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

by Marc Weingarten

  Acosta and Thompson became fast friends, tying one on whenever they found themselves in the same city. In the winter of 1970, Acosta tipped off Thompson to the story of Ruben Salazar, a Chicano reporter for the Los Angeles Times who had been killed by an LAPD tear gas shell in an East Los Angeles restaurant during a civil rights protest. Although the death was officially ruled an accident by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Acosta and others felt that Salazar, an outspoken critic of the L.A. police and mayor Sam Yorty, had been intentionally killed, the investigation of his murder a clumsy coverup. Thompson pitched the story to Scanlan’s and, using Acosta as his guide, went down to L.A. to conduct interviews. But when Sidney Zion rejected the piece (along with Thompson’s $1,200 fee), Thompson sold it to Rolling Stone, with the proviso that Thompson would update the story and clarify some confusion in the timeline of the narrative.

  Thompson moved to L.A., setting himself up in a fleabag hotel in East L.A. Racial tension in the city had spilled over into violence; the LAPD reported scattered instances of hate crimes, and Acosta, a vocal critic of the Salazar investigation who had organized a protest outside the L.A. coroner’s office, was now surrounded by amateur bodyguards to protect him from his enemies during public appearances. Thompson, who had endured the knife-edge hostility of the Hell’s Angels and had traveled to some of the world’s most dangerous places for stories, now found himself surrounded by a pincer movement of angry Mexicans whenever he encountered Acosta. It was one of the few times in his career where he felt that physical harm was actually imminent.

  In order to separate Acosta from his phalanx of thugs, Thompson suggested they book a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel in order to discuss the Salazar case. But the metallic clang of jewelry on the dainty wrists of matrons lunching at the Polo Lounge was not quite the ambience Thompson was looking for. He had a better idea.

  Tom Vanderschmidt, a senior editor at Sports Illustrated and an old friend from the National Observer days, had called up Thompson a week earlier to determine his availability for a story. The magazine needed a writer to provide accompanying text for a photo spread about a motorcycle race called the Mint 400, a rally sponsored by Del Webb’s Mint Hotel in Las Vegas. Thompson initially hemmed and hawed, thinking that another assignment would compromise the complex Salazar story. But Vegas had always appealed to him as a potential story subject, and now he surmised that a trip there would be a great excuse for him and Acosta to distance themselves for a while from the madness in Los Angeles, grab some R&R, and get paid for it to boot.

  Thompson approached the assignment much like he approached every other story—by the seat of his pants. No hotel reservations, no press credentials—just expense money and a vague mandate to report on what he witnessed at the race. Acosta rented a Chrysler convertible and acquired a prodigious supply of mescaline, speed, and booze, and Thompson pointed the car east toward the desert.

  Jack Kerouac was in Hunter’s head when he pressed his foot to the accelerator of the rented wheels, heading east on Interstate 15. Kerouac’s books—On the Road, Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums— were thinly veiled memoirs of an existential life in which mad sensation counted for more than reason. Kerouac’s colloquial prose bounced across the page like a Charlie Parker solo; it was all sinewy brawn and earthy spontaneity. The trick was to steer clear of complacency and plunge headlong into the vortex of unreason, where life was truly, exuberantly lived.

  Thompson internalized Kerouac’s worldview with a close reading of the books, particularly On the Road, and he wanted his writing to resonate with that same flailing passion. The Vegas trip with Acosta would just be a continuation of his own antihero’s journey, which commenced with the Hell’s Angels and continued at the Kentucky Derby, the America’s Cup, and the campaigns in Aspen. Thompson wanted to be this generation’s Kerouac.

  Like those earlier misadventures, Thompson knew the Vegas assignment certainly wasn’t going to be a who-what-when-where reporting job. It couldn’t be, with Thompson and Acosta running roughshod through Las Vegas. To ensure that events and scenes wouldn’t be lost to the half-lit memories of a marathon drug binge, Thompson carried a notebook and a tape recorder with him at all times, recording every conversation with strangers, croupiers, cocktail waitresses. He hadn’t the foggiest notion if his fieldwork would amount to anything, but Thompson had always been a conscientious collector of his own data, however haphazard his gathering methods might have been.

  The Mint 400 was being held on a giant spit of dirt track that turned into a dust cloud when the race commenced. It was impossible to follow and just plain boring from a journalism standpoint. After wrangling mightily for press credentials and securing a driver to help him keep tabs on the racers, Thompson quickly abandoned the Mint 400 altogether.

  Recklessly driving the convertible down Las Vegas Boulevard, Acosta and Thompson ducked in and out of various casinos with the observant dispatch of bomb sweepers, marveling at the downcast midway attractions at Circus Circus, then crashing a Debbie Reynolds performance at the Desert Inn. “Hunter came into Circus Circus when I was performing in the bar,” said musician and friend Bruce Innes. “He wanted to see if he could buy one of the chimps from the Flying Wallendas. Alas, they wouldn’t sell one to him.”

  “Hunter would call me up from Vegas, and there would be all this commotion,” said Rolling Stone editor David Felton, who had been assigned to work on the Salazar story. “He would be yelling into the phone, ‘David, Oscar’s out of control, I don’t know what to do.’ I’d hear all these strange noises in the background, things breaking and crashing to the floor. I think they were high, but I also think it was an act for my benefit. Hunter liked to push things, but only to a point.”

  After a few days in Vegas, Thompson and Acosta skipped out on their hotel bill, which had snowballed to $2,000, and gunned it back to L.A. The Vegas trip had temporarily delayed Thompson’s work on the Salazar story, and he was past his deadline. There was also the matter of writing a short piece for Sports Illustrated, but, having missed the race, he had little to write about. Thompson checked into a Ramada Inn near Felton’s Pasadena apartment and tried to fashion a Salazar piece based on the information Acosta had provided. Keeping himself awake for days on end with a prodigious supply of speed, Thompson struggled with the complexities of the case, which folded issues of racism and class conflict within the context of a byzantine court case. It was the most complicated story of his career, and he struggled to make it something worthwhile.

  During breaks from the story, he tapped out incidents from the Vegas trip on his IBM Selectric typewriter to keep himself sane. With the Rolling Stones’ album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! blaring from his stereo, Thompson summoned the words easily; it was pleasurable, not like work. One paragraph became a page, then ten pages. By the last week of April, Thompson had written more than two thousand words on the Vegas trip. He turned in the manuscript to Sports Illustrated’s Tom Vanderschmidt, who summarily rejected it. He couldn’t even extrapolate any captions out of the manuscript; it was of no use to the magazine. “Your call was the key to a massive freak-out,” he wrote to Vanderschmidt. “The result is still up in the air, and still climbing. When you see the final fireball, remember that it was all your fault.”

  He decided to try his luck at Rolling Stone. “We were supposed to meet about the Salazar piece,” said editor David Felton. “Hunter walks into my place with this paper in his hand and starts reading from the Vegas story. He was obviously very excited about it.” Felton got excited too and Hunter forwarded the manuscript to RS editor John Scanlon and Jann Wenner, who upon reading it demanded that Thompson keep going.

  But there was always the matter of scraping up enough money to keep going. A deal was also struck with Random House to publish the article in book form, with the proviso that Thompson write more material. Thompson eventually sold the project to Jim Silberman for a $100,000 advance and then drove back to Vegas (in a white Cadillac this time) to
observe the National District Attorneys’ Association conference on narcotics and dangerous drugs, which was scheduled to start on April 26. After that he returned to Woody Creek and tried to make sense of all he had seen and wrecked in Nevada.

  Thompson invoked the rebel spirit of Kerouac when he sat down to write the rest of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the cramped guest bedroom at Owl Farm that he called the “war room.” The title was a play on Danish philosopher S⊘ren Kierkegaard’s book Fear and Trembling, though Thompson always denied it. “Kerouac taught me that you could get away with writing about drugs and get published,” he told the Paris Review in a 2000 interview. “Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer … in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.”

  In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson, like Kerouac, cloaked real events in a mythic realm where the verisimilitude of journalism encounters the juiced-up rhetorical style that had become his trademark. It was journalism as bricolage: Thompson moved around freely in space and time, moving from internal acid monologues to brittle comic scenes, contrasting the high times on Parnassus Avenue in San Francisco with the gold-lamé depravity of Vegas, always searching in vain for the American dream. One morning, his friend and house guest Lucian K. Truscott IV came in at 1 A.M. and found Hunter pounding away. “What are you working on?” Truscott asked. Thompson handed him some pages; Truscott approved. “I don’t know,” Hunter said. “I’m just going to keep writing until it makes sense.”

  But if gonzo can roughly be defined as a provocation on the reporter’s part to drive the story forward, then Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas doesn’t exactly qualify. Acosta, as the manic, drug-ingesting Dr. Gonzo, is the driver of the story—a character of boundless energy and unrestrained temperament, testing every situation to the breaking point, a 300-pound Samoan with a severe amyl nitrate habit and a tendency to light up his hash pipe in public.

  Thompson is Raoul Duke, an amalgam (derived from Fidel Castro’s brother and John Wayne’s nickname) that he had used in a Scanlan’s story the previous year. Throughout the book, Thompson/Duke finds himself trying to negotiate a way out of the awful predicaments Acosta/Dr. Gonzo creates. Dr. Gonzo is a great Falstaffian force of nature, Raoul Duke his bemused foil.

  “Certainly many of the character traits that Dr. Gonzo posesses had parallels to my dad,” said Marco Acosta. “He wasn’t Samoan, of course, but in the Samoan culture, the men tend to be large, and Hunter was trying to invoke my dad’s dominant physical presence. There are many aspects of him that you don’t see, but Hunter’s goal was to be funny first and foremost.”

  Thompson wasted little time kick-starting his story into motion. From Fear and Loathing’s very first line, Thompson and Acosta are on the move, in search of … well, who knows what.

  We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded, maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

  The ostensible objective is a journey to Vegas to report on the Mint 400, but as in On the Road, the journey is the point. Raoul Duke wants to revel in the great gift of freedom that all Americans share; the Vegas trip was a “a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country—but only for those with true grit.”

  True grit, just like John “Duke” Wayne himself. But there was no wild frontier to explore in the West, just a “cluster of grey rectangles in the distance, rising out of the cactus.” The sixties notion of a new age of enlightenment in the West, glimpses of which Thompson had encountered in San Francisco, had never taken root, “burned out and long gone from the brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, 1971.” The Mojave Desert, the West’s last untouched frontier, had been colonized by the greed-mongers, and nobody at the keno tables seemed bothered by the rising body count in Vietnam. For Sal Paradise/Kerouac, the characters on his cross-country trip are an affirmation of the beatitude and bedrock virtue of the underclass; the freak parade of humanity that Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo encounters is merely bestial and overfed on excess.

  Raoul Duke/Thompson’s cognitive dissonance in Vegas is most acute when he and Dr. Gonzo attend the National District Attorneys’ Association conference on narcotics and dangerous drugs in the ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Thompson, who was registered as an accredited journalist for the event, ducked out to score mescaline from a Vegas contact, only to return to a ballroom of fifteen hundred vehemently antidrug cops loudly deriding the use of controlled substances:

  Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to address his troops during the Siege of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phase with the speaker’s gestures.

  “We must come to terms with the Drug Culture in this country! … country … country …” These echoes drifted back to the rear in confused waves. “The reefer butt is called a ’roach’ because it resembles a cockroach … cockroach … cockroach …”

  “What the fuck are these people talking about?” my attorney whispered. “You’d have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach!”

  Thompson eventually does find the American dream, but it’s been corrupted beyond recognition. Manifest Destiny is just a money grab now—drunk tourists in Vegas amusing themselves to death, throwing their money into a rabbit hole, where it is retrieved by greedy casino owners. As for the counterculture, it has been beaten into submission by a heavy load of drugs: “All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too.” The dream was over, and there was no turning back now.

  David Felton regarded the story as a eulogy for the dashed hopes of the sixties: “I think he saw the generation as falling apart long before most of us who were still trying to be practicing members. It was pure inspiration.”

  In a letter to Tom Wolfe that accompanied the first part of the story, Thompson explained his objectives:

  What I was trying to get at in this was [the] mind-warp/photo technique of instant journalism; One draft, written on the spot at top speed and basically un-revised, edited, chopped, larded, etc. for publication…. Raoul Duke is pushing the frontiers of “new journalism” a lot further than anything you’ll find in Hell’s Angels.

  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream was the greatest achievement thus far of Thompson’s fifteen-year career; with Wenner, he had found a sympathetic editor who gave him the space to push the throttle all the way and develop a “mindwarp/photo technique” that resulted in a new voice—antic, lysergic, blackly humorous, gently moralizing. Published in two parts in the November 11 and November 25 issues of Rolling Stone and illustrated with garish slash-and-burn ink drawings from Ralph Steadman, it created a huge stir among readers and envy from his peers. “I just thought it was phenomonally good,” said Tim Ferris. “Something like that doesn’t come along too often. It just had a bombshell effect.”

  William Kennedy, Thompson’s old Puerto Rico running buddy, thought of it as a “totally original piece of work. It was so over the top, the result of morphing his fictional aspirations into his journalism.” Tom Wolfe, whom Thompson regarded as his closest competitor, declared it a masterpiece of New Journalism, a “scorching, epochal sensation.”

  It should have been time for some well-earned gloating, but with critical approbation came a number of complications. First and foremost was the matter of recompense for the piece. Aside fro
m the initial $300 that Sports Illustrated had forwarded him, Thompson had laid out the rest of the expense money for both Vegas trips on credit cards, an amount exceeding $2,000. When Thompson, in a frantic telegram from the Flamingo Hotel, had begged Wenner to send along some money, he received $500—but that was just his monthly retainer, as it turned out. The expense money would have to be absorbed by the story fee. “I think the thing to do is for you to lend me the 1K-plus to pay off Carte Blanche,” Thompson wrote in a letter to Wenner. “Fuck. Maybe I should. I’ll never deny the thing was excessive. But I don’t recall spending anything, out there, that didn’t strike me as being necessary at the time. But this is a hard thing to argue or defend, it drags us into the realm of the preternatural.”

  Acosta wasn’t getting paid a dime for providing all of that fodder for Thompson’s story, which was all well and good until he read the piece. Being classified as a slovenly Samoan didn’t sit well with him, and when the story was published in book form, he threatened a libel suit against both Thompson and Random House for defamation of character.

  Thompson was baffled. He had thought he was doing the right thing—protecting his friend by using a pseudonym. But Acosta, who constantly feared disbarment and worried about how the story might affect his already shaky legal career, wasn’t having any of it, especially since the book carried a back-cover photo of Thompson and Acosta in Caesar’s Palace, sitting at a table strewn with drink glasses. “I’ve been mistaken for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan and Arabian,” Acosta wrote in his book The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. “No one has ever asked me if I’m a spic or a greaser. Am I Samoan? Aren’t we all? I groan.”