The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America

by Brian Kevin

  Is there anything sexier than hyperinflation? For all of the city’s sultry appeal, I spent my first couple of days in Rio looking into Brazil’s decidedly unsexy history of serial currency replacement. Before I left for South America, my grandmother had given me a five-cruzeiro bill, a piece of Brazilian paper money that she’d somehow picked up during the 1950s or 1960s. “Maybe you can use this?” she’d asked in a note. The bill was in pretty good shape. On its front was a mustachioed nineteenth-century diplomat named José Paranhos. On the reverse was a scene from the conquest of the Amazon. It’s a bill that was in circulation when Thompson was based in Brazil. I like to think that he was the one who brought this bill back to the States, where it somehow circulated and eventually ended up among my grandma’s keepsakes. At the time, a five-cruzeiro bill would have been worth approximately one-half of one cent. And it was dropping fast.

  Brazil’s toilet-bowl spiral of inflation began in the 1950s, when government spending surged with the large-scale effort to modernize Brazilian infrastructure and industry. When Brazil financed the ground-up construction of its shiny new capital, Brasília, it did so primarily by simply printing more money. That worked well enough that the government went ahead and printed some more money to pay off its foreign debts. Later, when the state-owned railroad started losing money hand over fist, Brazil just kept on printing it in order to keep the company afloat, and when the worldwide price of coffee (then Brazil’s main export) tanked around 1959, the government made up the slack by—you guessed it—continuing to print more and more money.

  These days, the only place in Rio to find a bill like the one my grandma gave me is at the National Historical Museum. I shared a subway car on my way there with an easygoing Oregonian kid who worked night shifts at my trashy hostel in exchange for room and board. Clean and uncrowded, Rio’s subways are a delight—even the usual two-toned “doors closing” chime is replaced by a couple of mellow notes strummed bossa nova–style on an acoustic guitar. The Oregonian was off to meet a Brazilian girlfriend downtown. I told him I had big plans to check out the museum’s numismatic collection, and he looked at me like he was waiting for a punch line.

  “You know, currency,” I said lamely. “Brazil has a really fascinating monetary history.”

  “Nu-mis-matic collection?” he repeated, chewing on the words like they were soggy vegetables.

  “Like coin collectors,” I told him. “There are a lot of people out there who take currency pretty seriously.”

  He shrugged and let his hand slide down the silver subway pole. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said with obvious disinterest. “After all, they’re always killing each other over it.”

  At the museum, the glass displays full of glinting coins are spread chronologically throughout the main exhibit so that visitors can follow the evolution of Brazilian currency over time. The first case I saw was filled with dullish, rough-hewn silver tokens that clinked in colonial cash registers during the sixteenth century. Many of them, said the object label, were minted in Potosí. Over the decades, they got a bit more polished and symmetrical. Eventually, they were joined by paper money, but it wasn’t until 1942 that all numismatic hell started breaking loose. That was the year that the value of Brazil’s historic currency, the real, disintegrated to the point that a new one was necessary to replace it. Thus was born the cruzeiro that my grandmother gave me, at a value of 1,000 reales to 1 cruzeiro.

  And here begins what Thompson in 1963 called “one of the worst inflationary spirals in the world,” a monetary sinkhole that just kept deepening for three decades after he left. The new cruzeiro hung in there until 1967, at which point the story starts sounding a little like an Old Testament genealogy passage. The cruzeiro begat the cruzeiro novo, at a rate of 1,000 to 1. The cruzeiro novo begat the cruzado, at 1,000:1 yet again. The cruzado begat the cruzado novo, once more worth 1,000 times its predecessor, and the cruzeiro real came after that, its value magnified once again by 1,000.

  Finally, in 1994, Brazil reverted to using the real, but this time a brand-new one with a fixed value linked to the dollar. The new real was valued at 2,750 cruzeiro reales. Which means that if you fight your way back through the whole ridiculous half-century equation, a Brazilian real in the mid-1990s was worth 2.75 quintillion of its 1941 self. No calculator of mine is up to the task of divining the value of that bill from my grandma, but suffice it to say that if she’d given me about a quadrillion of them, I might have been able to afford my subway ride back to Copacabana.

  To me, the modern history of Brazilian currency nicely illustrates the fundamental nonreality of money—the act of pure invention that is ultimately the assigning and reassigning of value. But as Thompson points out, there are real-world consequences to the fluctuation of even imaginary things. In January, Thompson made the Observer’s front page with a story that foretold Jango’s downfall. The year before, he explained, the cost of living in Brazil had soared by 60 percent, and even the president’s allies were frustrated by the government’s inability to halt inflation. Thompson speculated in his story that Jango wouldn’t last through the end of his term.

  “A revolution, even without shooting, probably would come from within the armed forces,” he predicted. “Further, it would probably succeed; the president doesn’t have enough of the military on his side to survive a showdown.”

  Which is pretty much exactly how things played out the following year. On April 1, 1964, Brazil’s army generals led a march on Rio de Janeiro, where the presidential palace and several government ministries were still located. Jango fled in exile, and the triumphant generals promised free elections within two years. Instead, the coup kicked off twenty-one years of an oppressive military dictatorship.

  Needless to say, this was not the “new trend” that the young bossanovistas had anticipated.

  III

  “At that time, Hunter was the best reporter we had.”

  So explained Bill Williamson over Skype one afternoon, the former editor and managing partner of the Brazil Herald from 1959 to 1979. Williamson, now in his eighties and living in Florida, hired Thompson on Bob Bone’s recommendation, just days after Thompson’s arrival in Rio. “Our correspondence showed me that he was a bit, um, flaky in some areas, but there was no question in my mind that he was a good journalist.”

  The office tower that once housed the Brazil Herald is a painfully nondescript stone building across from the US consulate in downtown Rio. I got a look at it one afternoon on my way to the National Library, where I went to leaf through a few old issues of Williamson’s now-defunct newspaper. From an office window on the fifteenth floor, Thompson could have looked out on the spot where I was standing—a small green plaza called Praça 4 de Julho, or Fourth of July Square. He would have seen a bronze statue of a woman holding some laurel leaves, with an inlaid bust of George Washington below, commemorating the friendship between Brazil and the United States. Maybe, I thought, he would have looked at it and thought of home.

  Thompson had written to Williamson several months earlier, asking about a job, and the editor told him what he often told the stream of itinerant foreign journalists who wrote to him back in the day: The pay’s not much, but we might be able to use you—stop by when you get into town. At the time, the Brazil Herald had a circulation of about 7,000, mostly around Rio and São Paulo. The newsroom was run by a motley crew of a half dozen expatriates: an Austrian PhD, a couple of Russians, a British society writer. The Herald also leased space to CBS and a young Latin American bureau chief named Charles Kuralt, later famous for his folksy road-tripping segments on the network’s nightly news, inspired by Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. Williamson took a look at Thompson’s Observer clips, and he was impressed enough to hire the young writer as his primary reporter, a gig that paid $100 a month. It was a respectable sum, considering Thompson’s apartment with Sandy cost only $30 a month and the Observer was shelling out $175 per story. During his first few months in Brazil, Thompson was living comparatively l
arge.

  “Right now,” he wrote in October of 1962, “I have more money than I can reasonably waste.”

  In the periodicals room of Brazil’s National Library, I flipped through several giant bound volumes of the Brazil Herald. The pages had a musty, grassy smell. The Herald didn’t look so different from any American newspaper of its day. I spotted Peanuts cartoons and Dear Abby columns, cigarette ads and movie showtimes. The vast majority of the news stories were written without a byline. Strikes seemed to garner a lot of ink. There were pieces on police strikes, transit strikes, and rice-growers’ strikes. One issue began with an apology for a three-day lull in publication, caused by a printers’ strike. There was also a society column covering parties and receptions for Americans and other expats. The column had a slightly glib, above-it-all tone, and I imagined it appealing to people like the British rooftop golfer and his well-connected chums. I even saw an ad promoting “lands in the Mato Grosso,” inviting Brazil Herald readers to invest in real estate “in the most prosperous agricultural colony, with good watering places and rich in hardwoods.”

  I read several stories about Cuba, a few on the Alliance for Progress, and a handful more covering the problem of Brazilian inflation. Thompson, I realized, might have written any of them, but they were all pretty dry, just straightforward examples of no-frills news reporting. Only one article I saw really showed a glimmer of Thompson’s caustic humor and no-bullshit style, and that one had his byline on it. It was also the article that ended Thompson’s brief career at the Brazil Herald.

  At the end of October 1962, Williamson left Rio for a conference in Chile. In his absence, he told me, he put Thompson in charge of the newsroom. That week, Thompson covered a Chamber of Commerce luncheon where a pair of visiting US senators were the guests of honor. Both of them were conservative, segregationist “Dixiecrats”—Herman Talmadge of Georgia and A. Willis Robertson of Virginia (father of batshit-crazy televangelist Pat Robertson). They were also rabid anti-Soviet alarmists and establishment relics from the Eisenhower era. On page 2 of the Herald’s October 23 edition, I saw a grainy black-and-white photo showing a dour-looking Senator Robertson speaking into a microphone, flanked by three identically flat-topped men in suits, ties, and thick-framed glasses. The image was practically a caricature of 1950s Cold War conformity.

  Without an editor to rein him in, Thompson couldn’t resist taking pot shots at such easy targets, and he seeded his article with belittling jabs at both the senators and the president of Rio’s Chamber of Commerce. As each of them took turns condemning the various popular movements around South America—movements that, unlike Thompson, they had not witnessed firsthand—Thompson countered with subtle mockery:

  Talmadge admitted that “great social change is taking place (in South America) and will continue … but if the people move faster than their governments it will benefit nobody but Moscow.” Not all observers were quite sure just what he meant by this, but all agreed that it had an ominous ring.

  When the chamber president denounced the anti-business stance of Brazil’s leftist government, voicing concerns about the country’s “present climate,” Thompson noted wryly, “It was generally agreed that Mr. Fallon was not talking about the recent rainy spell.” The president went on to request that Senator Robertson “throw some light” on the issue of American businessmen operating in Brazil, but Thompson scoffed that “Sen. Robertson’s light was none too revealing.” Thompson painted Talmadge as a loudmouth who “delivered his address in such a way as to render the mike obsolete,” and he ended with a cheap shot at the chamber’s windbag president:

  In closing, Mr. Fallon tossed in an analogy of obscure and indeterminate import. He noted that when Yankee Stadium was constructed in 1923, it was decided that seats of from 17 to 19 inches wide would be adequate for the average spectator. But when the new stadium was constructed last year in Washington DC, it was deemed necessary to install seats of 20 to 23 inches in width.

  At least one spectator interpreted this to mean that if Brazilians refrain from harassing American businesses, Rio’s man in the street will be three inches fatter 40 years hence.

  “It was pretty irreverent,” remembered Williamson. “Fortunately, I didn’t get much blame for it because I was out of the country.” Williamson admired Thompson’s cleverness, but the Chamber of Commerce and several major advertisers did not. The editor had to phase out Thompson as a reporter. He might have contributed a few more stories after that, Williamson told me, but Thompson’s byline never appeared again in the Brazil Herald.

  “It upset a number of the powers that be,” said Williamson, “but I still laugh every time I read it.”

  IV

  For all of Rio’s sun and sand, Bob Bone said that he, Thompson, Sandy, and their friends were really just “sit-around-and-talk people.” Sure, they’d hit the beach every so often. Maybe they’d go for a quick swim, then lie around on their towels sipping liters of Brahma Chopp, the watery lager that’s still the de facto national beer of Brazil. More often than not, though, they pulled up a table at some dark bar and talked long into the night—about current events, mostly, but also about books, politics, ambitions. Wherever the conversation led. Drugs were out, of course. If there was a drug scene among Rio’s expats back in the day, Bone said they didn’t know about it. At that point in his life, even Thompson had only ever dabbled in drugs.

  “He would put down drug people, in fact,” said Bone. “Called them ‘hopheads’ and things like that.”

  Bone mentioned a bar called the Kilt Club, where the group used to hang out. Apparently Thompson didn’t care much for the place, but it was close to his apartment, and there were cheap drinks, girls, and dancing. I saw an ad for it in an old Brazil Herald (“Whisky a Gogo—Come Enjoy Yourself with International Singer Jean Pierre!”), and I scribbled down the address. The former Kilt Club turned out to be just a few blocks from my hostel, on a singleblock cobblestone pedestrian street called Rua Carvalho de Mendonça.

  A little Googling told me that Rua Carvalho de Mendonça used to be a happening nightlife strip during the early days of bossa nova, with a number of small clubs that helped incubate the new sound. It’s not a leisure spot anymore, despite being just two blocks from the beach and the grand Copacabana Palace Hotel. I strolled the block one drizzly Saturday morning, passing a hardware store and a grungy-looking dry cleaner. The address that used to be the Kilt Club was now a bakery. There was only one bar on the whole block—an open-fronted affair with a blue awning, a sandwich board, and a few simple wooden tables spilling out onto the sidewalk. I walked inside and took a seat.

  It was early, and the place was empty. On the wall nearest me was a tacky airbrushed mural of a liquor bottle exploding its contents, announcing that I was the sole patron of the Orgasmo Bar. Classy, I thought. So much for International Singer Jean Pierre. In the back of the room, a wide-gutted guy in his fifties looked up from the cooler he was stocking. When he strolled out to my table, I asked in fumbling Portuguese whether he had any coffee.

  “I’m sorry,” he said kindly. “We don’t serve coffee during lunch.”

  I parsed this statement without making much sense of it. It was ten a.m. The alternative was either a sweet caipirinha cocktail or a tall liter bottle of beer. So I surrendered to fate, ordered a Brahma Chopp, and settled in for some morning-time drinking.

  The Orgasmo had a television in the corner, and a Brazilian morning news show was showing pictures of President Obama standing in front of a pair of armed humvees. The voiceover was in Portuguese, but I gathered he had made a surprise trip to Afghanistan. Briefly, the screen flashed a picture of Obama meeting with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff a few weeks before, followed by a quick shot of a waving Mitt Romney, and I thought of how far away the whole shrill American news circus seemed. Election coverage had hardly begun when I’d left. By now, I thought, the commentators and pundits would be at full froth. The segment ended, and the news show cut back to its coanchors, a sho
rt-haired blond woman wearing an ear microphone, and what seemed to be a large green animatronic parrot. They exchanged a few observations, the parrot’s voice a kind of sarcastic half squawk. Then they moved on to a cooking segment.

  For Thompson and his friends, the biggest news story for cocktail chatter down at the Kilt Club would undoubtedly have been the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even as Thompson was subbing in as newsroom director at the Brazil Herald in October of ’62, twenty Soviet ships were streaming toward the US naval blockade around Cuba, possibly containing missiles capable of deploying nuclear warheads. The very night that he wrote his offending Chamber of Commerce piece, President Kennedy was on TV back home, announcing the discovery of missile bases in Cuba and warning that any attacks launched from Castro’s island would incur “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” The Cold War that Thompson had followed to South America was arguably reaching its apex. The possibility of all-out nuclear war had never seemed so real.

  Thompson described the moment in his book Kingdom of Fear, published in 2003, just two years before his suicide. The crisis felt real despite the distance, he wrote. He was living well in Rio at the time, but feeling burned out from “a long year on a very savage road, mainly along the spine of the South American cordillera, working undercover in utterly foreign countries in the grip of bloody revolutions and counterrevolutions.” It must have been a hell of a thing, I thought, to have spent the year trying to make sense of South America’s violent power struggles only to settle in Rio just in time to see the United States poised on the brink of the greatest violence of all. It was a moment, Thompson wrote, “when expatriate Americans all over the world glanced around them in places like Warsaw and Kowloon or Tripoli and realized that life was going to be very different from now on.”