Thompson’s housewife fan from the Midwest had taken to writing him nearly every day.
June 8, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Mrs. Hoffman …
Terry and Tiny got busted for rape in Denver. I’m out of jail and headed for Mexico, where I own a silver mine. Don’t send any money; it won’t reach me and I don’t need it anyway. I appreciate your concern, but your letters are more than I can handle. These are strange and savage times. My condolences to Merle.
Sincerely,
H. S. Thompson
TO MARGARET HARRELL, RANDOM HOUSE:
Thompson looked to his Hell’s Angels copy editor for help dealing with the downside of success.
June 8, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear M.A. …
Somehow the initials seem appropriate, considering this wild heap of garbage I’m sending … 867757463544p058$***$@ … or which I was in the process of sending 3½ hours ago when I heard a car in the driveway (at 2:30) and now they just left … “they” being a guy I barely knew last summer and a girl and a carload of hashish from California—and who showed up here foaming desperate because he’d just heard that the sheriff and federal narco people were waiting for him at his apt. Two hours of wild speculation hiding cars (2) and a little brown bag worth as much as I could make with a best-selling novel. Speed freaks are hard on the nerves—jabbering about heat on the (Sunset) Strip, borrowing shovels to bury the evidence along with $12,000 in small bills. Jesus—summer is coming on again; I can feel the mad vibrations.
Anyway, I want you to mail these two letters for me—from New York—but I thought you’d like to see the background on my letter to Mrs. Hoffman. Notice the dates on her letters; they came like hailstones, one a day, ruining my breakfast. Each one worse than the last, a raving nightmare. I left my final note to her un-sealed, so you can see the end of the saga. At least I hope it’s the end … and that’s why it’s crucial that you mail this from NY. I can’t allow this woman to find out where I am. So please mail my “off-to-Mexico” note after reading it. The xerox copies are a souvenir for you; they are a stark and terrible example of that secret madness I was talking about in the book. I was talking sort of abstractly when I wrote that stuff, projecting in the sense that I was using a novelist’s license for journalism … but jesus, it’s true. They’re out there, and they’re real … and they’re tracking me down. You can’t imagine the wild shit that gets forwarded to me via RH. The other letter came in the same mail with one of the Hoffman poems. Show it to Jim, along with my reply suggesting that he contact him (Silberman). Hell, this may be the Great White Southern Dope Novel.
Don’t get these things mixed up. All I want you to mail are the two (entirely separate) replies that are already in envelopes. I only left them open so you could read them before mailing. Hang onto the xerox copies and the original Stanford letter. We’ll all be involved in a terrible lawsuit if you mail xerox copies of that woman’s correspondence back to her. But it struck me as right and necessary that you should see this awful evidence of that syndrome I was talking about. This is really the nut of the whole Hell’s Angels book … jesus, when I read this woman’s first letter I thought “No! goddamnit, I can’t humor these freaks any longer. …” So I wrote what I considered a cruel and final letter. I figured the worst thing I could lay on her was the prospect of a visit by Terry and Tiny, plus a demand for $500.
… and you see her reaction. The “rising tide” is worse than I knew; the iceberg is about to flip over and dump all these freaks out of hiding. That stinking arab in Los Angeles:70 the losers are coming out of their passive cramp; five years from now Sonny Barger will run for president as a moderate. The “new Barger.”
Another terrible prospect is that Carol and Shirley will mail me some money and set me up for a mail-fraud bust. She sounds serious about it, and if any money arrives I’ll send it to you immediately so you can return it to her with a very rude, severe and wholly impersonal letter … saying perhaps that I’ve been put away somewhere, for my own good, and that any further letters from her will result in the whole file being sent to her husband.
But maybe she’d like that. Her husband must be worse than she is. Where do these people come from? How can they stay alive? Thank god for the American Dream; if it weren’t for that I might think these freaks are real. (I have at least fifty letters like that first one; they keep coming, day after day, now that we’re into the paperback audience.)
Christ, it’s nearly 7:00 & I have to get to bed. Unless I get arrested before noon, I face about six hours of brutal bike-climbing in a few hours. Forcing a motorcycle uphill over logs and snow and rockpiles up to 14,000 feet. For no reason or profit. No sense at all.
Oh yeah … Oscar Acosta called yesterday; he asked about you. He’s the lawyer for that Brown Beret case in LA. McCarthy gave him $8000 to defray legal costs. And Lee Berry71 is writing some very good long pieces from Paris for the Albany Times-Union. Bill Kennedy sold his novel to Dial and I just finished building a beautiful log fence in Woody Creek. That’s the news for now….
H
TO JIM SILBERMAN, RANDOM HOUSE:
Thompson updated his editor on his field research on “The Death of the American Dream.”
June 9, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Jim …
I’m enclosing a draft of a letter I’ve been meaning to tone down and rewrite … mainly because any rewrite would probably need another “tone job,” and that would mean another week on my desk. So read the enclosed for what it is. Selah.
Lynn seems to be handling the foreign rights. I sent her that letter from Penguin that Leon [Friedman] received several weeks ago. Have you sent them anything? I have the impression that Hell’s Angels bombed terribly in England; somebody sent me one tepid review, and that’s all I’ve heard. Except for a constant stream of requests from a freak who calls himself Sir Allan Lane; he keeps sending copies of the paperback edition, with requests that I autograph them for his personal library … I signed the first one he sent, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to mail any more books to England at $2.50 a crack. Judging from their performance on all fronts, I suspect Penguin’s corporate structure was the blueprint for the rape/murder of the British Empire… and my concept of “rape” is necessarily conditioned by those cases I treated with in Oakland & points west.
Anyway, Lynn has the Penguin letter, and also a query from a German publisher that Shir-Cliff received last November. At least I assume she has the German query. The wheels of justice, I’ve discovered, are not the only wheels that grind terrible slow.
…And now to the point of this (tonight’s) letter. For weeks—nay, months—I’ve been trying to absorb the fantastic amount of printed matter that fills my box every morning: in addition to three daily papers (the NY Times, the SF Chronicle & The Denver Post) I get about five magazines a day—ranging from Business Week to Open City to Human Events and the American Rifleman, Time, Newsweek, Life, The Nation, The New Republic and a regular assortment of flyers for such toys as electric anal stimulators, vibrating plastic penises that “feel like human flesh,” and numerous home movies with titles like “Eight Lesbians in a Family-Size Sleeping Bag” … yes, that was one I ordered, as I recall, but I have no projector.
Selah, and so much for that. I was trying to say that my mail is driving me mad (I just sent Margaret a mind-boggling sample of the sort of things that come to me, almost daily, via the blithe spirits at the Random House forwarding service. The sequence I sent concerned a crazed housewife in Illinois … it’s too horrible to explain; you wouldn’t believe it unless you read it, anyway. Ask Margaret for that and the other one from the White Southern Dope Fiend …). All that keeps me sane is the fact that I can look out my window and see space: sky, mountains, grass, water, horses—and no freaks. If you get a chance you should come out here and see how the non-urban world lives. I’ll take you for a ride on my motorcycle.
Anyway,
the awful volume of wisdom I’m trying to cope with on this search (or autopsy) inre: the Death of the American Dream has thus far confused me more than it’s helped … to the extent that I’m losing any hope of a focus, and I think that would be unhealthy. So the idea that came to me tonight took the form of a query letter (a form letter of sorts) to perhaps 30 of the people I might be dealing with in this investigation … sort of “Dear Sir, I’m investigating a rumor that somebody killed the American Dream and since the neighbors recently reported screams from your apartment, I thought I’d ask if you might possibly be able to suggest an explanation for these rumors, and perhaps name a few suspects.”
I wouldn’t presume to tell people like George Meany or Tom Kuchel or Doctor Spock or Abe Fortas or Thruston Morton or Cassius Clay or Hugh Hefner72 or my cattle-ranching neighbors or a dope freak in Malibu … that the American Dream is dead … nor would I want to suggest this to [U.S. commander in Vietnam General William C.] Westmoreland or Roosevelt Watkins. But I think if all these people were forced to confront the rumor—which they could then either deny, ignore, explain or confirm—I think I might put the answers and comments together and derive a pretty good notion of where to start looking for the killers. I also think the replies would amount to a good Esquire-type article that couldn’t do the book any harm if it appeared prior to publication.
So the next steps would appear to be these: 1) For you to send me about 200 sheets of valid RH stationery with about 400 matching second sheets, 2) for you to suggest any and all names who might prove out in terms of suspects or leads to suspects, and 3) for me to draft the query, which I’d assume you’d want to see, since nine-tenths of its effectiveness will derive from the RH letterhead. Let’s not kid ourselves about George Meany’s reaction to a vaguely unsettling letter about the Death of the American Dream if it comes from an Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colo. But I think Meany would feel compelled to answer a very formal, cleanly-typed, discreetly worded yet urgently-toned letter on this subject if it came from Random House. Needless to say, we’d have to include a murky hint that failure to reply will be interpreted as lack of interest on this subject, and duly noted when the returns are published. Let’s make the bastards answer: 1) Is the American Dream still pertinent? 2) If so, how does it apply inre: The War in Vietnam? The U.S. Balance of Payment? Andy Warhol?73 The Politics of Joy? The editorial policies of The New York Times? Ed Sullivan?74 … (the composition of the query would amount to an outline of the book … and the answers, I think, would provide a tangible framework for my research …).
TO NICK RUWE, NIXON PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN:
Nick Ruwe—a midlevel Nixon advance man and associate at the New York law firm of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander, and Mitchell—had done what he could to gain Thompson access to the candidate and senior campaign staff for his Pageant article. Ideologies aside, Thompson clearly respected Ruwe’s professionalism.
June 10, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Nick Ruwe
c/o Nixon Presidential Campaign
Nixon–Mudge
20 Broad St., NYC
Dear Nick,
My long-delayed and oft-scrambled Pageant article finally appeared in the July issue, for good or ill … (or, as Pageant seems to prefer, “… either for good or for ill”). If you find time to read it, keep several points in mind: 1) My assignment, very specifically, was to go to N.H. and do a hatchet job on Nixon; my original subject was Billy Graham, but he came down with viral pneumonia last winter, and the editors finally substituted Nixon. So it was simply a question of where to aim me, and your boy won by default … 2) I submitted around 45 triple-spaced pages, most of them dealing with backstage, mechanical, seemingly trivial stuff—and 15 of the first 20 of these pages were deleted by the editors; this is sort of like trying to race an 8-cylinder car on 4 spark-plugs … and, 3) My central emphasis, once I got to Manchester, was more and more focused on the silent (or at least unpublicized) mechanics of the campaign, rather than the straight “Tricky Dick” article I’d been sent there to write. The comment that interested me most, in the course of that 10-day gig, was something you said one late night as we dealt with the Old Crow jug. … I don’t feel like rooting through my notebooks to find it, but one phrase I remember distinctly was: “… it makes everything else I’ve done seem pretty dull.” The “it,” of course, referred to your work as an advance man in a major political campaign. In one of my drafts I took off on this and worked up a long and complicated analogy comparing advance men to horse-trainers and fight managers … and I still think it was the most interesting angle I tried to develop, despite the fact that nearly all of it was chopped out for “space reasons.” The only example that appeared in print, as I recall, was your explanation of why Nixon stayed at the Holiday Inn, rather than the Wayfarer.
All this came back to me vividly a few moments ago when I read in Newsweek that one of [Robert] Kennedy’s advance men, Jerry Bruno, looked out at the crowd that had come to see Kennedy’s body off at the L.A. airport and said something like, “He would have liked this crowd.” I wouldn’t have recognized that thinking without the context, in memory, of some of your observations in Manchester. But, given that context, I recognized Bruno at once for an 18-carat gold advance man.
All of which reminds me of another thing you said: that somebody whose name I forget (but I have a Boston Globe article by him somewhere in my file) wrote a novel (?) called The Advance Men … which couldn’t be published because none of the subjects would sign a release.
Jesus, that sounds odd, now that I see it in print. Was it a novel? If so, he must have been a piss-poor writer if he needed releases to get the thing published. But then Thomas Wolfe75 had that sort of trouble, so … I’d give it more thought if I considered it relevant, but I don’t.
The point is that Bruno’s remark revived my interest in the subject of advance men. I recall a story one of Nixon’s staffers told about getting accidentally booked into Kennedy’s St. Louis suite (or bloc) in 1960, because he had an Irish name and the room-clerk assumed that any sinister-looking east-coast type with an Irish name was with Kennedy. And your story about the [Chamber of Commerce] freak in Nashua who gave you the “you, buster,” routine when you were trying to set up that dinner.
And I keep wondering how [Nixon campaign press aide] Henry Hyde got into the act … but I guess that gets away from the subject of advance men; I only mention it because I had a beautiful (and deleted) sequence in the article, a fantasy version of Henry’s call to Pageant … but, what the hell. …
And back to the point. Which is, in a nut, that I might like to do a quick book on advance men—their relevance, realities, raison d’etre, backgrounds, etc. It’s the only critical profession that I know of (or at least the only one that interests me) that almost nobody has ever heard of. Beyond politicians and political reporters, how many people even know that advance men exist?
The other side of that question is the problem of writing and publishing even an article—much less a book—on the subject, without getting involved in a gaggle of lawsuits, arguments, bullshit, etc. Given that probability, my style of research would be pretty useless, and I’ve never had much use for the Ben Hecht76 style. That’s the TV/showbiz/Front Page act … but I prefer the sort of “thinking out loud” scene, in fairly congenial circumstances and a long-range mutual interest … and on this score I don’t think I can be faulted on my performance in N.H., or even in what I wrote. One of the scenes deleted from my piece was my first encounter with Pat Buchanan (about 30 minutes before I met you), and his very visible and verbal reaction to me was so consistent with what I expected that it took me several days to cool off and realize that my real interest was less in Nixon and more in the mechanics of his (or any presidential) campaign. And my only serious bitch about the article is that it doesn’t reflect this interest except by accident. You can’t lose 15 of your first 20 pages and still say what you mean; you don’t necessarily lose the sense of what you
mean, but without the details you cripple both the context and the evidence.
And so much for that. I wouldn’t want you to misinterpret any of this. If I didn’t make it clear in the article, let me say again and now that I went to N.H. with the idea that Richard Nixon was a monster … and although I left N.H. with a strange affection for the man, as a man … I still tremble at the prospect of “President Nixon.” He is the unlucky personification of all the root problems that I’m beginning to suspect are going to croak us very shortly. He doesn’t realize this, and I think if he did he would want to be something else … but he’s not, and he can’t be. And I wouldn’t be writing this sort of thing in a personal letter if I honestly thought it would offend you. Nor would I expect you to agree with me … which is more or less beside the point if we’re talking about advance men (and I’m not looking for agreement on that score, either).
Jesus … this is tricky ground. I just wanted to assure you that I wasn’t apologizing for anything I said about Nixon. My interest—and my reason for writing this letter—is beyond any specific candidate in any specific election. I’m interested in Why Advance Men Are Necessary. This sounds naive, and especially to you, but in this context your opinions don’t matter. You know why you’re necessary because you’ve been there, time and time again. And it’s as obvious to me as it is to you that a candidate’s chances of winning any election are massively influenced by his selection of advance men. I tried to make this point in the article, but I doubt if it came through.
I believe it, and on this point I think you might even admit that you agree. So, I suppose, in closing, that I should pose a tangible question and perhaps a possibility. So: the question—How feasible is the prospect of a non-fiction book on advance men? Given your experience with me and my research style, do you think I could get close enough to the reality of the thing to do an honest (short) book or even an article? That’s the question. The “possibility” has to do with the fact that I’m momentarily in a position to write a book on almost anything; I assure you I’m not talking pie in the sky. Heh. So let me know what you think—by return mail if possible. And thanks again for the help in New Hampshire. Sincerely,
Fear and Loathing in America Page 15
