July 18, 2010 is Hunter’s 73rd birthday, although for many years he would not acknowledge that date whenever asked. Instead, he would say proudly, “I’m like a thoroughbred. All horses have the same birthday, January 1st.” Which is true. In the world of racing all horses are considered to have been born on the first day of the year in order to make it easier to calculate age qualifications for a race.
In Hunter’s case, his claim on New Year’s Day as his birthday was part of an interesting strategy of denial at the passage of years which he picked up from his Mother. He would often say that not only was he born on January 1st but that his Mother was as well. They were both thoroughbreds in his mind, immune to time.
So for many years we purposely ignored Hunter’s birthday until his 50th came around in 1987. We could not resist celebrating his half century and assumed he would be pleased if we had a bit of a surprise party for him. About a dozen of us gathered at the Woody Creek Tavern at the corner table by the front window under the buffalo head and waited for Sheriff Bob to deliver him with the excuse of just stopping by the tavern for a drink.
When they came through the front door, we all screamed “Happy Birthday!”
Hunter yelled “Fuck You!” turned on his heels and went back to the car, followed by the Sheriff. They sat out there talking while we waited under the buffalo head. After twenty minutes, they drove off. I always wondered what they talked about. Getting old, I imagine.
“Who do you think you are? Peter Pan?” Hunter would often exclaim. I have a feeling that he wished that he was, like we all do.
However, towards the end of his life, Hunter began to acknowledge and enjoy his birthdays. He actually encouraged Deborah and Anita to have parties for him on July 18th . They were wonderful summer time affairs with gin watermelons and fireworks. We brought him gifts without fear. He particularly liked things that exploded unexpectedly, and we all had great fun.
So I think Hunter would appreciate the present I have for him this July 18th . Animals, Whores & Dialogue is the sequel to Breakfast with Hunter and somewhere on the edge of the desert in Utah right now they are pressing the DVDs that we will begin shipping early next week to those who want to spend some more time with Hunter.
Here’s a preview:
I’m hoping more than a few will have a Gonzo birthday party and gather their friends to watch the new film and celebrate Hunter’s life and work. We will be shipping via First Class Mail on Tuesday, July 13. So, if you’re in the continental US you should receive the film in time for a screening on the 18th . We’re also offering all four of the films together at a discount with Priority Mail shipping.
“It’s not art unless it sells,” Hunter often said, so I feel little shame in pitching. His Estate also benefits directly from the DVD sales; Hunter was a shrewd business partner.
When my Producer Jennifer Erskine looked at the first cut of Animals, Whores & Dialogue she said with a tear in her eye, “Now he’ll live for ever.”
A lot of us have a hard time watching the film with dry eyes, but there’s much fun to be found there too, not unlike those afternoons in July with watermelons filled with gin, exploding ketchup bottles, and a twinkle in Hunter’s eyes.
The May, 1998 New York premiere of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was of course filled with both fear and loathing for Hunter. He feared the film would be panned, and he loathed Terry Gilliam.
Hunter had already seen the film at an unusual screening in Aspen two weeks earlier. Universal sent a 35mm “double system” print of the film in which the sound is separate from the film. Only in Aspen could you find a 35mm projector capable of playing two monstrous rolls of 35mm picture and sound together in sync. The screening room of an Owl Creek mansion owned by a women’s clothing magnate had just the right equipment, including luxurious sofas and an elaborate bar in the back. Sheriff Bob drove me, Hunter, and Heidi – his assistant and girlfriend at the time – to the screening and stayed to see the show.
“This is better than I thought. I’m pleasantly surprised,” hollered Hunter, as the credits rolled and the Stones played “Sympathy for the Devil. “
“It is ugly,” Hunter then added, a bit begrudgingly.
“It’s your life. What do you expect?” Heidi countered.
“Like a drug survival trip,” Hunter admitted.
“We survived,” the Sheriff concluded.
But, surviving the actual premiere in New York was another matter. For some reason Terry Gilliam seemed intent on insulting Hunter while publicizing the film, and Ralph Steadman joined him. The two of them sat down for two and a half hours together to talk about the film and Hunter. Ralph taped their session, and then gave the tape to The New York Times. Amidst what is actually an interesting conversation about film making and Gilliam’s career, they went out of their way to disparage Hunter:
GILLIAM. He is an outrageous romanticist, a huge romantic about America, and a hugely self-absorbed person as well. That’s why he thinks he’s the Messiah in a strange way. He’s God, he’s God.
STEADMAN. He’s a Messiah of a kind.
GILLIAM. And they come to the mountain all the time, and he’s stuck in there. I think that’s a sad side of Hunter’s: he’s stuck in time. I keep saying the guy died around 1974, and the guy that’s here is this mummified version of him. He has to keep living a life, and being here.
The ending of The New York Times piece was particularly offensive to Hunter:
GILLIAM. When I first met Hunter, there was a bottle of Chivas, a bottle of wine, a can of beer, I think. There was a tin of coke. He had his hash — what else did he have?
STEADMAN. He snorts whiskey, too. Have you seen him clean his nose with whiskey?
In a FAX to Depp on the day the piece was published Hunter wrote, “Well, Mr. Gilliam has done his version of Pearl Harbor on me in the NY Times (May 3, ’98)…Chatting intimately about his Personal Access to me puts him on the same level as a Police Informant, like some crab-ridden slut on the street who sells tips to cops and mendacious gossip to Tabloids – some kind of failed whore who turns in her customers.” At the premiere in New York, a confrontation with Gilliam seemed inevitable, and could easily result in real violence.
The Carlyle Hotel at 76th and Madison was one of Hunter’s favorites, and mine as well. The staff at the Carlyle was discrete and understanding of their guests’ needs. Once, after being nominated for an Emmy Award and then losing at the awards dinner, I returned to the Carlyle with my girlfriend and in despair we drank every bottle in the mini-bar. Upon checkout I discovered a $445 dollar charge for the binge on my bill, and complained that it must be in error.
“How could anyone drink the entire mini-bar in one night?” I protested to the cashier.
“Of course, you’re right, Sir. I’ll remove the charge completely,” said the cashier with a look that still shames me today to remember. The man knew I was lying, but was too polite to argue. Just the kind of slack Hunter would require when he checked in under the name “Omar Gray” switching from his first choice of “Victor Suave” at the last minute since it had been used before. I see from my notes that Depp was checked in at the Four Seasons under the name “Mr. Stench.”
A taxi strike was in the offing, but that worried me more than it did Hunter who would hardly settle for anything less than a stretch limo. A mere town car could be a source of immense dissatisfaction (the Beast did have long legs and a bad back), and I made sure a stretch would be there courtesy of Universal to get us to the premiere. We charged Hunter’s rental tux to Omar Gray’s account at the Carlyle so that Universal would also end up paying for the monkey suit along with thousands of dollars in room service.
The night before the premiere Ed Bradley dropped by the Carlyle for a visit. Hunter was highly agitated, wondering what to say to the press about the movie. Ed had a good answer which I wrote down in my notebook and would repeat for Hunter over the next 24 hours like a mantra:
“I hope people who have read the book will see the movie, and I hope people who have seen the movie will read the book.”
I was staying at the New York Hilton courtesy of my sister Kathleen who had connections there for a rate far less than the Carlyle. Even though I worked as the Road Manager off and on for years, I usually paid my own expenses. Making my self “useful,” as Hunter put it, enabled me to make my film along the way. Kathleen and her assistant Sara Lyons came up from Washington, DC to help me wrangle the Beast through the city. But that meant I had to take taxis (provided they weren’t on strike) which could take a half hour from the Hilton to the Carlyle. So I moved my dress clothes into a large closet off of the living room of Hunter’s suite at the Carlyle to change for the premiere.
When I emerged from the closet in my coat and tie, George Plimpton was standing in the middle of the living room making notes while Hunter dressed in the bedroom. Plimpton was everything you expected him to be and more – quite the gentlemen with a wry sense of humor and great patience and respect for Hunter. He later wrote that “Everyone seemed involved in getting Hunter ready for his premiere like preparing a somewhat balky float for a parade.” Later, Hunter complimented Plimpton that the writing was a “good lick” just as he would have said to Keith Richards about his guitar playing.
George Plimpton was a wise, soothing companion for Hunter on the way to the premiere, first in the elevator of the Carlyle and then in the stretch going downtown, as you can see in Breakfast with Hunter.
Plimpton’s line, “How is any filmmaker going to get into your head? It’s impossible,” is a keen observation about both Hunter and the film, even though George hadn’t seen the movie yet; the interior, drug-fueled monologues throughout FLLV are what made it so hard to translate to the screen.
Always caught between my dual role as filmmaker and Road Manager, I neglected the latter when we arrived at the theater. Hunter wanted a plan before we got out of the car so I said “let’s jump” like paratroopers. Kathleen and Sara were waiting at the curb, and they led Hunter quickly inside, rushing by the mob of mostly amateur paparazzi behind the barriers and into the theater too quickly. For some stupid reason I thought Hunter wanted to avoid the mob, forgetting that the press, even if it was a mob, is the whole purpose of a premiere. Naturally, we were booed heavily by the photogs behind the barricades for running by so quickly, leading to bitter complaints from Hunter. Once Plimpton was by his side, Hunter calmed down like a nervous thoroughbred with his favorite stable mate.
Hunter lumbered down the red carpet and then onto the escalator to the lobby of the theater below, leaving the gauntlet of A-list press upstairs also unsatisfied, even though they had gotten Hunter to stand still for a few shots, unlike those outside. Perhaps Hunter and I thought there was more press downstairs in the theater lobby, but once we got down the escalator he refused to go back up the stairs.
Jann Wenner joined Laila Nabulsi in pestering Hunter to go back up for more photos. They seemed to think he was being a diva, and then Hunter sadly whispered in my ear, “My legs are giving out. I can’t walk back up the steps.”
I pulled Plimpton aside and told him the real problem Hunter was too embarrassed to admit. George instantly thought of a solution. “We’ll make the escalator go up rather than down,” George declared and hurried to find the manager to reverse the escalator.
Unfortunately, no one could find the key for the escalator control so we stayed in the lower lobby where Hunter began to get even more agitated. I spied a door off to the side with a combination lock on it and got the manager to give me the code. Now we had a more private place to retreat. Fortuitously, that was where they stored the popcorn in tall, clear plastic bags. When Hunter saw the popcorn, his eyes brightened in the same way they would at the sight of a fire extinguisher. A prank was in the making.
Johnny stopped by to hang with Hunter who gave him the calla lilies he had been carrying since leaving the Carlyle. Universal’s publicists also came to his hideout off the lobby, saying that they had brought the press into the downstairs lobby. But Hunter could see that Gilliam was now posing with Depp and Benicio del Toro and refused to have his picture taken with Gilliam. Hunter waited until Gilliam was pulled away by a savvy publicist and then pounced with the popcorn.
The rest of the evening was a blast, and I concentrated on enjoying it while still taking care of the Beast and shooting a bit along the way. The official premiere party was at the China Club where Hunter contrarily insisted he wanted to watch basketball on television. I found a television set in the manager’s office, which became Hunter’s headquarters and the new VIP room of the China Club for the night. All the right people stopped by to knock on the door and see if we would let them in.
The next event was even more discreet – a dinner hosted by Depp at Jezebel’s, a fancy, lace-curtained restaurant without a sign outside, but inside there was to be NO SMOKING in the days when this was not a law but rather a rarity in New York. I think Johnny must have pleaded Hunter’s case to Jezebel since she grudgingly allowed Hunter, and only Hunter, to smoke. Years later, one of the reasons Hunter rarely ventured from the kitchen at Owl Farm was the escalation of the war against smoking. Even the Woody Creek Tavern became a No Smoking Zone, and he rarely went there and then only after closing time.
I wrote about my experience with Jimmy Buffett that night leaving Jezebel’s earlier in my vodcast “The Gonzo Pilot” so I won’t repeat the story here except to say moments like that justified the difficulties of life on the road with Hunter.
The night ended with George Plimpton about 3am at Elaine’s – the fashionable writers’ watering hole on the East Side often identified with George. While we guzzled a bottle of Cristal Champagne compliments of Hunter’s old friend and lawyer John Clancy (look for a fascinating piece by John Clancy in Warren Hinckle’s soon-to-be-released book Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson), I eyed the two NYPD cruisers parked directly in front of Elaine’s window, the two cops sitting together in the front car, just staring back at me through the window. Paranoia started to creep up my spine, and I thought about how many possible missteps it was from the front door of Elaine’s to our limo sitting a few yards in front of the cops. Fortunately, Hunter behaved himself on the sidewalk as we left; he could see the obvious danger as well as I. He hated cops, and though he had no fear, he would never taunt them.
Back at the Carlyle I gathered up my dirty clothes from the closet and packed up my camera. Hunter was as pleased as I ever saw him in twenty years, and spontaneously inscribed a blad of The Rum Diary to me. Blads are pre-publication sales tools for books that usually have only a chapter or two. They are often considered highly collectible, especially if signed by the author, but I would never part with mine in a million years.
On the street outside the Carlyle at 4am I wandered helplessly, clutching my dirty clothes and the blad, searching for a taxi. “Did they strike,” I wondered. It certainly seemed so that morning in Manhattan. But, I didn’t care; we had shot the gap.
1996 marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and the Gonzo celebrations of that fall produced great scenes for Breakfast with Hunter (and the soon to be released Breakfast with Hunter, Volume Two which I’m considering calling instead Animals, Whores and Dialogue. What do you think?).
Fortunately, I had just gone fully digital the summer of 1996, buying the first Sony prosumer mini-digital video recorder, the DCR VX1000. What a beast! Almost impossible to focus, especially while zooming, but it produced images that I hoped might be good enough to blow up to 35mm one day. In 2003, I did just that to qualify Breakfast with Hunter for the Academy Awards, and the movie looked surprisingly sharp.
The fall of 1996 was a rock and roll style Fear & Loathing tour: first, the Viper Room appearance with Johnny Depp; then, the Lotus Club in New York with George Plimpton, P.J. O’Rourke, and hundreds of other literati and stars. That Manhattan night ended with Hunter splayed out, fully clothed in the bathtub of his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, overwhelmed by adulation. For me the high point was feeding Kate Moss french fries in Hunter’s crowded bedroom (one at a time, very slowly) while Johnny watched suspiciously from across the room.
But, the return of Billy the Kid to Louisville in December, 1996 for “A Tribute to Hunter S. Thompson” at the Memorial Auditorium was the true climax of the tour. Returning to Louisville as a hero after leaving in disgrace was Hunter’s revenge on all those who doubted his youthful certainty that he would write the great American novel.
I flew into Louisville a day early to advance the event. Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis brought Hunter in the next day, flying commercially via Chicago, and I met them at the gate at the Louisville airport. This was my first gig with Sheriff Bob, and he seemed relieved to see a radio in my hand.
“He’s got the shits,” remarked Bob. “He could barely get out of the bathroom in Chicago. You got a car?”
“Right here,” I said, raising the van driver at the curb outside on the radio.
“Nice,” observed Bob, as Hunter lumbered up the ramp from the plane.
That radio link to the van cemented my relationship with the Sheriff. Every once and awhile, when things get really rough in the indie film making world I think of taking him up on his jesting offer after Louisville to become a Deputy Sheriff. That’s how artist Tom Benton survived some of the last of his years, as a jailer for Bob. But, then I think about having to show up everyday, even if it’s a powder day.
The van took Hunter and Bob to the classic Brown Hotel downtown, while I returned to the Memorial Auditorium to finish lighting the stage and see if the dozen fire extinguishers I had ordered for Hunter had been delivered yet. Most importantly, they had to be the CO2 type, not the dry chemical type. CO2 just tickles you a bit, and might even freeze your skin if exposed at a close distance, but the dry chemical type makes your tongue dry up like beef jerky, and breathing almost impossible. Back in New York, Hunter had used the dry chemical type on Jann Wenner (as you can see here), who swore that it cost $10,000 to clean the fine, white powder out of his office after wards.
The fire extinguishers were on stage when I arrived at the Memorial Auditorium, a classic Louisville venue with a façade of Doric columns. A local sound company was setting mikes, and I tried to make the only four lights available illuminate the whole scene. Daylight flooded the stage annoyingly as the back door opened and Warren Zevon entered, wearing the oddest wig I have ever seen in rock & roll. Trying to ignore the hair piece, I introduced myself as Hunter’s Road Manager & Filmmaker. Zevon seemed to care little who I was. Too many years on the road, the last few essentially alone, had left him gruff and even more cynical than his lyrics. Years later, when we did the “Free Lisl” rally in Denver we would become friends, but today in Louisville he was cold and mistrusting.
We worked on the mix for a bit, Zevon hitting the first chords of “Lawyers, Guns & Money” repeatedly until he got the sound where he wanted it. “I think it should be beastly,” he commanded. A good excuse for a rough audio system, I thought.
Then Hunter arrived, taking over the stage and the rehearsal with his charismatic presence. I barely got a sound check from him. Hunter was more intent on playing with the fire extinguishers lined up on stage than jabbering into a mike for an empty auditorium. I worried how the show was going to go, with no script that I could discern, except for crumpled sheets of typed and illegible handwritten pages that Douglas Brinkley carried.
A film making comrade, Mark Muheim, arrived to operate my new, second Sony DCR VX1000. We were now a crew of two – a far cry from my last concert production filming the Eagles return to the Rose Bowl for 80,000 fans. There I directed four film cameras remotely from beneath the stage. At least here, I hoped security wouldn’t be an issue.
After doing all I could to make sure the set was ready for the show I went back to The Brown Hotel. Hunter’s son Juan was sitting in the lobby of the Brown with his laptop writing intently. I wondered what he was up to, and found out later that night when he delivered one of the most insightful and elegant appraisals of his iconic father that has ever been written. Juan’s speech appears throughout Breakfast with Hunter, and this is how it and the film ends.
The Louisville show went far better than most Hunter Thompson stage events which usually involved rambling question & answer sessions with the answers mostly indecipherable. But, on this triumphal night returning to the scene of his youthful crimes, Hunter was remarkably well behaved, also perhaps because his Mother was there. I found her before the show sitting in a wheelchair in the Green Room backstage, a cigarette in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. Then in her nineties, she was still imposing, and cowed me when I introduced myself, the DCR VX1000 in hand, by warning, “If you point that camera at me, I’ll break it!” I never got a shot of her, unfortunately.
The show also went well due to the supporting cast, many of whom are in Breakfast with Hunter and more to be seen in BWH, Volume Two (or is it Animals, Whores, & Dialogue ? I still can’t decide.) However, the event ended, as only a Hunter event could, with a heavy dose of weirdness and a dash of violence.
I was on stage shooting as the band, lead by David Amram and accompanied by Johnny Depp on slide guitar, finished playing “My Old Kentucky Home.” Hunter grabbed me around the neck and whispered in my ear that we had to flee. There was someone only a few feet away that he feared meant to attack him.
The potential assailant was stage left so we went stage right into the wings. I tried to raise Sheriff Bob on the radio for backup, but got no response.
“You’ll be arrested,” Hunter shouted over his shoulder as we left the stage.
I looked back but had no idea who the assailant might be, but I knew this was Hunter’s greatest fear, to be shot down by a freak out to prove he was the weirdest of all. Given John Lennon, you couldn’t consider it simply paranoia on Hunter’s part.
We found a room backstage and locked ourselves inside. Finally, I got Sheriff Bob on the radio and asked him to bring the limo around behind the auditorium where a door from our refuge opened onto the street. When the Sheriff confirmed that he was in position with the limo, I unlocked the backdoor and we started for the car. Then, a weirdo jumped out of the bushes coming our way. I screamed at him to get back.
“You’ll be arrested,” Hunter growled and the weirdo from the bushes fled down the street.
“Was that him?” I asked.
“No. It was (let’s call him “Joe”) on the stage,” he said, getting into the limo.
It took me awhile to figure out who “Joe” was. Hunter pointed him out to me in a crowd shot when we were viewing the footage back at Owl Farm. “Joe” was the boyhood friend who, according to Hunter, he went to jail for, after his friend threatened to rape a girl if she didn’t give him a cigarette one late night on a lover’s lane in Louisville. Talk about your past coming back to haunt you!
Now that Hunter was safely out of the venue, I went back inside to wrap my equipment. In our absence, chaos had erupted on stage with a huge, ugly crowd surrounding Johnny Depp who was signing autographs. Hunter always advised against starting to sign for fans, since once it started, you could never satisfy them all. The few event volunteers left behind were overwhelmed, so I started kicking people off the stage to relieve Depp.
The crowd got even nastier, and a few went into the wings and then into the green room where they set fire to an overstuffed chair. I grabbed a fire extinguisher to douse the flames, but it was empty, as was every other red canister nearby. The crowd had used them up on each other, imitating Hunter’s earlier antics.
“Someone better call 911,” I said, but being kitchen trained, I knew it would not be me who made the call. (see my vodcast “Never Call 911.”)
I gathered up my cameras and friend Mark, and we walked out the back stage door as the fire engines rolled up.
“Hunter’s probably off on some adventure. Let’s go have a beer, and maybe catch a strip show,” I suggested as we headed back to the Brown Hotel.
Six months had passed since Hunter’s trip to Hollywood in the spring of 1997 to replace Alec Cox as the director of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (FLLV), and now, with the film in production, the Beast was bedeviled by another director interpreting his most famous work. Terry Gilliam inspired a special paranoia in Hunter, especially when it came to Hunter’s cameo role slated for the film. Thus, in September, 1997 Hunter asked me to advance his appearance on the set of FLLV.
Since Hunter’s spring stay at the Chateau Marmont (see “The Chateau Marmont Parts 1 & 2” herein) I had sailed the Barney Google to Ventura, where I was directing the TV series “Mike Hammer” with Stacy Keach. So it was an easy reach between episodes to drive down to the classic small, old time movie studio in Hollywood where they had built the major sets for FLLV and were shooting. Hunter’s former girlfriend, Laila Nabulsi had taken comfortably to her role as the Producer of the film with a nice office overlooking the lot where we met to talk about Hunter’s cameo.
“It’ll be so easy. All Hunter has to do is sit on a stool in front of a green screen. Terry wants to have his face just float through a scene, like a hallucination,” said Laila off-handedly.
Having listened interminably the night before to Hunter ranting about how he would not be “manipulated” or “abused” by Terry Gilliam, I imagined it more likely Gilliam could get a 500 pound panther on meth to sit for the shot than Hunter.
“Hunter won’t stand for that, much less sit, once he realizes the green background makes it so Terry can do whatever he wants with his image,” I warned, and then suggested an idea that had occurred to me driving down the Pacific Coast Highway to the studio. “How about if Hunter and Johnny have a brief, chance encounter in some scene? They just pass by each other. Maybe with some recognition. Maybe not.”
And Laila, bless her persistent soul, took to the idea immediately, suggesting that the Matrix Club scene scheduled to be shot in the next few weeks might be perfect. The real, old Hunter could be sitting in the crowd as Johnny walked by as the young Hunter of FLLV.
Depp was friendly as ever and his trailer looked like a good place to stash Hunter when we came back. The sets were cool, especially the Circus Circus promenade which was built on an extreme angle to create the illusion that Johnny and Benicio would be walking bent over from the ankles. When I was introduced to the set dresser as Hunter’s “road manager,” she inquired what would be an appropriate book to have in the hotel room. Since Hunter had just been raving about The Death Ship by B. Traven, I suggested that title, and sure enough this cultish book about a man enslaved by the lack of a passport on a tramp steamer appears in the final film prominently next to Depp’s head when he awakes from a drugged stupor.
Hunter was far from stupefied when he arrived at the Burbank airport a few weeks later on a Lear jet to appear in his own movie. His neighbor and friend Don Johnson had loaned Hunter the plane to get to Burbank after they had flown together from Aspen to San Francisco.
Hunter’s long time secretary Deborah Fuller who rarely traveled with us, came along to make sure the cameo went well. Since my berth on the Barney Googlewas now seventy miles away in Ventura, I slept on the floor of her bungalow at the Chateau Marmont until she left and then Hunter got me my own room, where I lived like a troll in luxury under the stairs off the lobby. Depp lent Hunter his blue Porsche since Hunter had lent the production his red convertible for the film. Every morning I expected to find it trashed in the Chateau garage. But Hunter never put a scratch on that slick car, despite some wild rides around Hollywood.
One night Hunter took the Porsche and his Brooke Shields look-alike girl friend to the industry watering hole known as the Buffalo Club. While the car survived, he did manage to injure the pride of a fellow diner when he dramatically threw a drink nonchalantly over his shoulder, soaking the haute couture of a Bel Air madam. The wet lady threatened to call the police until the proprietor of the Buffalo Club – Tony Yerkovitch (who also created “Miami Vice”) – bought her dinner. But that was after Hunter’s visit to the set of FLLV. Until then – for one night – he was all business.
The making of FLLV into a movie from Hunter’s pov is one of the main threads in Breakfast with Hunter and his set visit and cameo appearance are an interesting counter point to Cox’s disastrous visit to Owl Farm earlier in my film. Yet, there is much that I had to leave behind that happened that day in a warehouse/studio in the San Fernando Valley. The company had moved out of the old time studio with the great sets in Hollywood and taken up residence in a cheaper location in the valley to finish the film. Hunter began the day apprehensive but in a good mood all things considered. Rolling Stone writer Chris Heath accompanied us in the limo to the set where we arrived on time (per the call sheet below) promptly at 11:30 a.m. for Hunter to shoot his scene. (Note that it will be day 47 of 44. Clearly Gilliam is over budget)
Hunter and Gilliam began sparring as soon as they met on the set, as you can see in Breakfast with Hunter. The dialogue between them about the art of writing vs. filmmaking is quick and clever, and the sub text is that these two egos have little use or respect for each other. Ultimately, this animosity would increase to the point where at the premiere of FLLV in New York the next spring, Hunter would refuse to be photographed with or stand near Gilliam who had made a point of trashing Hunter during the FLLV publicity tour. (Also note Chris Heath in the background of the conversation, madly scribbling down every word in his notebook, as if recording devices had yet to be invented. But, he did report their dialogue accurately, as you can see if you follow the link on his name above to his article.)
Looking back, I’m not sure if it was sheer incompetence, or the Assistant Director giving us an early call expecting a very late arrival, or Terry Gilliam simply fucking with Hunter, but we spent the next nine (9) hours waiting for Hunter’s scene with disastrous results. The waiting might have been easier if Hunter had been given his own trailer, but there was no trailer with “Dr. Thompson” on the door, which Hunter took as a direct insult from Gilliam. Instead, we relied on the good manners of Depp who shared his with us for the day.
After hanging out on the set until lunch, we retreated to Johnny’s trailer. Dramatic filmmaking is one of the most boring occupations imaginable, despite the supposed glamour, unless you happen to be blowing up cars that day. That’s one of the many reasons I came back to documentaries. Hunter’s reaction to boredom was to drink more, and by mid-afternoon he was flat out drunk and slurring his words, as you can see when he tries his old trick of tossing a large bottle of Chivas Regal in the air and catching it with one hand. Earlier in the film at Simon & Schuster in New York, Hunter does the trick perfectly. In Depp’s trailer, he forgot to put the cap on the bottle before flipping it in the air. “I thought it would come around faster,” he remarks, as Depp bends over with laughter.
Given too much time on his hands, Hunter also defaced himself with an indelible, black Sharpie marker as you can see in the previous clip, making his own form of a mustache which a makeup girl later spent an hour patiently erasing.
I keep going back to the set and asking when Hunter’s scene would be shot. “Soon,” became “later” and then “we’re not sure,” until finally it was apparent that they had intended from the beginning to shoot Hunter’s Matrix Club scene at the very end of the day. When we were finally called to the set at almost nine at night, Hunter had sobered up and was ready to fight. And there was much to quarrel with since what Hunter would do in the scene had yet to be determined.
Hunter insisted that he be seen as he was in 1969 in San Francisco – “an observer.” Gilliam seemed to agree, but Hunter was so perturbed that he disagreed with every direction from Gilliam, and argued with Laila who was now dressed as Grace Slick to make her own cameo appearance in the Matrix Club scene. When Hunter watched Lyle Lovett’s scene where he appears as an acid dealer in an extreme wide angle shot, he insisted he would not be grotesquely distorted as Gilliam had done to “poor Lyle.” I found the endless bickering boring and left it out of the final film. However, I did include Johnny Depp, despite suffering from the flu, doing his best to comfort his friend Hunter, and saying, “Whatever you want to do, I’ll be there.”
In the end, what Johnny and Hunter did in the course of three takes was interesting. Hunter wanted to do something other than just sit there, while Gilliam was looking for “barely a glance.” Of course, in his film Gilliam used the take he preferred, one in which there is only a quick look exchanged between them, and I used the one Hunter and I liked – the third in which he reaches out unexpectedly to seize Johnny who has taunted him into the move.
Hunter never did appreciate Gilliam’s version of his classic novel. Hunter did like Johnny’s performance and Benicio del Toro’s as well. But, the best he ever felt about the movie as a whole was that it wasn’t the disaster he feared. Hunter felt that Gilliam had no understanding of the sixties in America, having been an émigré in England at the time, and even less understanding of drugs, which Gilliam took pride in never having taken. Nonetheless, Hunter did his best to promote the film, and kept his opinion of Gilliam more private than Gilliam did his of Hunter.
Gilliam’s FLLV is a study of the difficulty in turning great writing into great cinema. Ironically, Hunter meant for FLLV to be a movie from the very beginning and wrote it with that purpose in mind. But, as he always said, laughing at himself, “I forgot about the camera. It has to be somewhere other than inside your head.”
FLLV is filled with fantastic dialogue and action inside the minds of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, but not much on the outside where the camera can observe their actions. This is the dilemma Alex Cox was struggling with and led to his demise when he insisted on using what Hunter called “cartoons” that would cheapen his greatest prose. Ironically, Terry Gilliam – a director who began his career as a cartoonist – was hired to replace Cox.
After our day on the set, we stayed at the Chateau until Heidi Opheim arrived to replace the Brooke Shields look-alike. I found a Cadillac to rent for the Beast with a powerful Northstar engine, and he and Heidi headed up the coast where he had a paying gig to address the Stanford Medical Society in Pebble Beach. That trip became the basis for much of the article he wrote for Time Magazine entitled “Fear & Loathing in Hollywood: Doomed Love at the Taco Stand” (11/10/97 issue) in which Heidi concludes, “You’re very strange and you don’t know why, do you?….It’s because you have the soul of a teenage girl in the body of an elderly dope fiend.”
I always thought that was one of the most insightful observations anyone ever made about Hunter and insisted that he use it at the end of his last book Kingdom of Fear where it appears as “Fear and Loathing at the Taco Stand” (and wherein Heidi is now “Anita.”)
Hunter did not return to Hollywood until a year or so later in December, 1999 when we went to pitch The Rum Diary to producers with Depp in the Tiki Hut in his backyard. Hunter’s first and only published novel presents many of the same dilemmas as FLLV being adapted to the screen, and it will be interesting to see how writer/director Bruce Robinson (Withnail and I) meets the challenge now that the film will be released in 2010. Over the years I shot far more with Hunter about The Rum Diary than I ever did about FLLV, little of which has ever been seen…..yet. Stay tuned!
Hunter’s six days at the Chateau Marmont in March, 1997 developed into an odd routine. Mid-morning I would wake up in Marina del Rey on the Barney Google – a 1960s wooden motor yacht that served as my LA base – and head out for Hollywood after calling ahead to order the first round of breakfast for Mr. Green – two Bloody Marys, two Heinekens, a pot of coffee, and a pitcher of ice. The tray would be waiting by the time I got to the front desk at noon. The Beast no longer dead-locked the door after that first morning, and I used my key to enter, always anticipating some new weirdness on the other side.
Yet on this journey to replace the director of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter stayed quite focused. “We are professionals after all,” he would say. The “start date” for production on the movie was less than two months away, and unless Hunter could get Johnny to agree to change his schedule and delay production, the train would inevitably leave the station with Alex Cox as the conductor.
The Chateau Marmont was literally crawling with out of work film directors like Abel Ferrara, helmer of The Bad Lieutenant, the story of a drugged out cop gone wild. Hunter had spoken to Ferrara on the phone before we left Woody Creek, and the first time we went downstairs at the Chateau, there Ferrara was in the lobby, glad-handing Hunter with a strange, crackling laugh. Hunter took an instant dislike to Ferrara, as he did ironically with most folks who were sloppy when chemically altered. Drunken women were especially repugnant to Hunter. That chance encounter in the lobby of the Chateau ended any hope for Ferrara to direct the movie.
Depp was the key, even without a replacement director. Johnny was finishing post-production on his first directing attempt – The Brave – and we didn’t see him until the fifth night in town. Hunter’s old girlfriend, now Producer, Laila Nabulsi arranged a party in the Hollywood Hills in Hunter’s honor, and Johnny was to be there. This was a time before Johnny came to Woody Creek to live in the basement of Owl Farm and study Hunter’s habits. They were yet to become fast friends, and Hunter was nervous about seeing him at the party that fifth night.
Time was running out, both for getting rid of Cox and staying at the Chateau, since I had only made reservations for five nights. The Marmont Manager ignored my pleas for an extended stay, insisting that Suite 69 had been promised for many months to another guest. I suspected that even hundred dollar tips were not compensating for the weirdness, and thought of another plan: get Johnny to invite Hunter to stay at his mansion above Sunset the next night. Hunter would not be homeless in Hollywood and they would have the whole night to scheme about the movie.
The Beast was in a foul mood as we got ready to leave the Chateau for the party, accusing sweet Jennifer of stealing his Mont Blanc pen since she had a similar model to his which we could not find. “It’s mine, but please take it anyway,” Jennifer said graciously offering him her $150 pen. And he took it without hesitation. Later I found his pen in a shirt hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Hunter was most chagrined and made a huge show of returning Jennifer’s pen months later at Owl Farm. The Beast had a charming way of making up for his transgressions, which also made it possible for him to keep misbehaving and still not lose his friends completely.
The reckless ride to party in the Mustang appears in Breakfast with Hunterto the tune of Robert Mitchum’s “Thunder Road.” Mitchum, one of Hunter’s true heroes, having been busted for marijuana with a starlet in 1948 both wrote and sings the tune. [See Hunter’s liner notes for his album “Where Were You When The Fun Stopped” for more about his respect for Mitchum, as well as a scene in my upcoming Breakfast with Hunter, Volume Two where Hunter talks about “Thunder Road” and Mitchum.]
At the party in the Hollywood Hills, Hunter swept into the garden, making a grand, late as expected entrance. His old pollster buddy from the McGovern days, Pat Caddell immediately glommed onto him. I spent some time talking with Warren Zevon who wasn’t an easy guy to get to know (until years later) and then got a chance to speak to Depp about our being kicked out of the Chateau.
“He may have to leave early tomorrow unless we find someplace else acceptable to move for just one night,” I explained.
“No problem. He can stay at my house,” said the star with an endearing grin soon to be worth tens of millions per picture.
Mission accomplished, I left the Beast and his Brooke Shields in the Hollywood Hills and retreated to the boat with Jennifer who had followed with our own car. “Always have your own wheels” was one of Hunter’s wisest rules of the road.
With Hunter, checking out of a hotel never happened by the official “check out time” unless we headed out at dawn after staying up all night. At first the Chateau management agrees to a late check out of 2pm. I arrive by noon, as usual with the Bloody Marys, but clearly this is going to be a difficult move, even though Johnny’s mansion is only a few blocks away. You could only pester Hunter so much before rousing his ire and insuring he would do the exact opposite.
2 PM comes and I call the Manager and negotiate a 4pm check out. Hunter is still reading the paper and just beginning to eat a real breakfast. 4 PM comes and the Manager now insists we have to pay for this day, and still leave by 6 PM. Hunter orders more room service, and continues to read the newspaper. At 6 PM the Manager seems resigned to our continued occupation of Suite 69. I try and pack up camp at the Chateau. Finally, I get him into the Mustang convertible with his Brooke Shields at 9pm, promising the Chateau front desk, that I will be back to finish packing.
At the Mansion Johnny’s still out working on editing The Brave – a film about a man who agrees to be killed on camera for money to save his family – while his entourage waits. The house man feeds me some lightly fried flounder, and I notice there is an actual electric chair, just like those used for capital punishment, in a room just off the kitchen. Inspiration or a prop for The Brave perhaps? Hard to tell if it’s plugged in or not.
Benicio del Toro drops by and the two of us have to eject a drunken, and now unwelcome visitor. Benicio’s not a bad guy to have as backup. But after we get rid of the weirdo, Benicio takes off as well. I figure he must have a day job.
Finally, sometime after 2am, Johnny comes home from work, and Hunter swings into high gear as a lobbyist. They disappear in the darkness of a gazebo outside to talk where I cannot film. When they return about 4am, I can see from Hunter’s mood that he is successful: Johnny has agreed to delay the start date of the movie while they replace Cox.
Now I get a chance to bring out my camera and start to shoot in the kitchen. Sweating profusely, I record this scene at the kitchen table inBreakfast with Hunter. The subtitles are a bit of a cheat since the conversation described has already occurred in the gazebo too dark to film. What Hunter is really talking about is his obsession with the 15,000 copies of the first hardcover edition of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” that he believed were lost by Jann Wenner (a story for another time).
On the other side of the kitchen from the electric chair room is an elegant barroom where Johnny keeps his mynah bird named Edward in honor of Hunter’s mynah by the same name who appears in the 1978 BBC documentary. Johnny asks Hunter to teach the bird to say his name, so we move into the barroom which is lit only by the spill light coming from the kitchen. I dare not turn on any more lights for fear of squirreling the scene.
I was working with the first mini-digital video camera available from Sony. The DCR-VX1000 was revolutionary at the time, allowing me to shoot affordable video of a quality that ultimately would blow up to 35mm film, but that camera could not see into the dark like those today. I’m still amazed that I got anything, much less a priceless piece of cinema verite.
Making a large mistake, Hunter lets the small bird out of the cage, and a pursuit begins through Depp’s dark mansion.
This scene is the essence of what I tried to do with Breakfast with Hunter – create a cinema verite based portrait of Hunter, rather than a “clip show” like Alex Gibney’s post-mortem film Gonzo. Traditional biographical docs, like Gibney’s, rely on interviews and narration to tell the story of someone’s life. Instead, I relay that information through the words and actions of the subject as they occurred and were captured in reality.
Thus, rather than hearing an omniscient narrator tell you that Hunter was jailed for rape as a youth, Hunter himself says that to the bird who bites him when it’s caught. Then, when Hunter puts the bird back into the cage in the dawn light coming through Lugosi’s stained glass windows, he says “I’ll be back. You won’t be alone. You won’t be alone. You won’t be alone…” foreshadowing a comment at the end of the film from the Chateau Marmont more than a year later when Laila says to Hunter, ”Hell for you would be…stuck in some place with no one else there.” You can get both historical and emotional truth with cinema verite, but it takes time. In the case of Breakfast with Hunter, it took almost twenty years.
Notice that the time is 5:50 am on Hunter’s wristwatch. The pursuit of Edward the Mynah actually took almost an hour, rather than the minute or so you see in the film. We were all afraid that Edward would have a heart attack, but before he keeled over in fright, Hunter grabbed him with a one-handed catch a gun fighter would envy. After the funny banter in the barroom you see in Breakfast, Johnny went to bed, and I took Hunter out to the waiting limo.
I walked back to the Chateau, too tired now to drive, and collapsed in the midst of the mess we had left. Fearing that I would be taken into custody at check out time, I called Jennifer, who left her day job to recover first the Mustang convertible from Johnny’s and then me from the Chateau. Looking now at the final $ 2957.38 bill, I see that they charged Hunter $1339.90 for room service along with a special $100 cleaning fee. But the real ”cleaner” was Jennifer.
“Be careful. It changes you and it changes me,” said Hunter as he handed me the grinder. “This is a very important night.”
We were sitting in his car on Galena Street in downtown Aspen next to the Ritz Carlton Hotel (now the St. Regis) – about to meet Keith Richards for the first time.
We were as ready as you could hope to be after almost a week of insane preparation. (see Part 1 of this for the back story) A Hi-8mm video camera loaded with a fresh tape was in my hand. Hunter had his own personal public address system – a bull horn on top of an audio cassette player in the form of a square briefcase, powered by a dozen D-cell batteries with a shoulder strap to handle the weight. Before leaving Owl Farm for town I had replaced the batteries and cued up one of Hunter’s favorite tapes – pigs being killed. Their squeals of death made me quite uneasy.
Another dozen D-cells powered the combo taser/cattle prod that Hunter also carried. Blue bolts of electricity would dance up and down the two foot shaft, accompanied by a 110 decibel siren that made your ear drums bleed.
We left the car with the Ritz Carlton doorman who wisely asked no questions. The staid après ski crowd in the lobby bar was too inviting a target and Hunter immediately hit PLAY. Heads snapped at the sound of dying pigs, but no one stopped us as we headed for the elevator.
“What’s Keith’s room number,” asked Hunter.
“Suite 1017,” I said “But we have to go to Jane’s (his manager) room first and she will take us to Keith. He won’t open the door for anyone. Jane has to get us in. That’s the plan”
“Fuck your plans,” said the Beast who had just replaced the Nervous Fan of Keith Richards that had been with me in the car. “We’re going to Keith’s room.”
“We’ve got to go to Jane’s first,” I insisted..
“Fuck You. We’re going straight to Keith’s,” growled the Beast.
The pigs began to squeal as the elevator opened on the tenth floor. A few squeamish guests opened their doors to investigate the horrible noise, and closed them very quickly when Hunter brandished the sparking cattle prod. At the large double doors of Suite 1017 Hunter turned up the pigs’ volume and hit the cattle prod’s siren, screaming “Keith, Keith Come out,” and damned if he didn’t.
Keith seemed overjoyed to meet his hero, and Hunter was beside, under and over himself with glee as well. Clearly this meeting, months in the making meant the world to these two members of a small oddball tribe of celebrities, bold-faced names who shared a love of music, drugs, and words – outsiders who had found uncommon success on the edge.
Hunter and Keith shared some laughs and I sat on the floor in front of them in the suite and recorded the scene on Hi-8. As someone who had spent decades working with real film, or better video formats, I was as nervous about the Hi-8 as Hunter was about meeting Keith.
Back at Owl Farm, a camera crew that I had hired from Denver was lighting the living room for a two camera interview shoot in Betacam SP – a far superior format that we had moved to from Hi-8 when the decision was made for me to direct and shoot the interview as a “work-made-for-hire” for Keith’s production company who would license it to ABC for their “In Concert” Friday night series. The initial plan to shoot my own project – “The Thompson Tapes” – was quickly being co-opted by money.
I left first for Owl Farm and finished lighting the set. Looking at the footage now on YouTube I’m surprised how dark the foreground is. Hunter and Keith were lit by instruments outside on the porch in and around the peacock cage with just a bit of fill light on the camera side. An interesting choice and I’m not sure why I made it. Yet, the YouTube video is still considerably darker than ever intended. The VHS off-air tape source introduces much unintended contrast.
The interview itself was, like most of Hunter’s interviews, quite disappointing. You can begin to see why it took me so many years to shoot and piece together enough material with Hunter to make intelligible films – Breakfast with Hunter & the work-in-progress Breakfast with Hunter: Vol. Two. Old television interviews with Hunter like these abound on the internet, except this one has Keith.
At 4am we stopped shooting, and I urged the crew from Denver to wrap as quickly as possible. Rather than splitting asap as you expect, Keith hung around while we wrapped, sitting on the couch in the kitchen, not wanting to leave the inner sanctum of Gonzo quite yet. Hunter clearly wanted to get the Denver crew out so he could have more private time with Keith, who by now had fallen asleep on the couch, looking exactly like the famous 1972 Annie Leibovitz shot of him splayed out in a chair. As the crew endlessly wrapped cables, an unconscious Keith began to slide off the couch onto the floor.
Hunter grabbed the “Marine Defender” – a stainless steel pump 12 gauge that I knew was loaded with OO, killer buckshot that I had recently procured for Keith’s visit. The Beast went out into the driveway where the Denver crew was slowly loading up their van in the Rocky Mountain dawn and blew apart the garbage can next to them with the Defender. They left quickly, seeing no humor in the assault.
Back in the kitchen I gave the all tapes to Jane Rose, and left as Keith picked his butt up off the floor where it had finally ended its slide from the couch.
The lesson: if you want to make your own films don’t do a “work-made-for-hire.” Copyright 2009 By Wayne Ewing
One of the more popular YouTube videos with Hunter is a ten minute clip wherein he interviews Keith Richards. The piece has been up for almost three years and received over 50,000 views. I’m amazed that whoever owns the copyright has never done a takedown of what appears to be an old VHS recording of the original ABC broadcast, but I’m grateful that they haven’t. Otherwise I would never have seen something that I shot as a “work-made-for-hire” as they say in the contracts.
In the late winter of 1993 I had just finished shooting and directing the first season of the dramatic TV series “Homicide: Life on the Street” for NBC. Episodic TV is like factory work once you have made the mold, as I did with “Homicide,” and after a season of fighting with ugly producers from New York, I thought it was time to shoot some more with Hunter and see if there was a fun movie to be made.
What became “Breakfast with Hunter,” I was then calling “The Thompson Tapes.” The original plan was that Hunter and I would travel to New York City where he would check in to the Carlyle Hotel and interview one his greatest heroes, Keith Richards, for ABC’s Friday night show “In Concert.” Someone else from MTV would shoot the interview and I would video the whole scene in Hi-8 for my project -“The Thompson Tapes,” while Keith and Hunter emptied the mini-bar and chatted.
But Hunter came down with a virulent flu and we never went to New York. Instead, a few weeks later in the middle of March, Keith and his manager Jane Rose , along with Laila Nabulsi, Hunter’s old girlfriend who knew Jane well, and a couple of producers flew out of New York after one of those “snow storms of the century” and checked into the Ritz Carlton in Aspen. My plan to shoot my own video was pushed aside when I took on the “work-for-hire” shooting the interview for Keith’s production company and ABC, and I never saw the results until it went up on YouTube in 2006.
I wrote the following notes the day after the shoot in March, 1993:
THE THOMPSON TAPES
OR
BEWARE OF WHAT YOU WISH FOR
3/16/93
It was a long hard night, a night that came at the end of a crazed week, a week devoted to taping, a conversation between Hunter Thompson and Keith Richards. I had this idea I called The Thompson Tapes – Hunter’s video autobiography. The interview with Keith was a separate deal Hunter made with ABC and Keith.
At six o’clock last night, I was still feverously working on the autobiography. Hunter – nothing if not a perfectionist – had taken my observation to heart that his Canon L-100 – a five thousand dollar camera – was soft. This was one of his main concerns this last week, second only to the fact that he was convinced (perhaps rightly so) that “a ni**er in the woodpile,” as he referred to the MTV director slated to helm the interview with Keith, would creep into his house with a camera crew, as he had done not too long ago, tape Hunter’s antics, and then sell the footage to every news outlet between Woody Creek and Saigon. [ which is why Hunter in the end insisted I shoot the interview ]
So Hunter’s Canon was fuzzy, and to rent another camera for the event I committed some four hundred dollars of mine that Hunter’s staff promised to reimburse along with the $334 for 250 rounds of .44 Magnum bullets, thirty pounds of gun powder, and 100 double 0 12 gauge shells that could blast through steel.
“What are you guys doing up there?” inquired the fat man in the Basalt Police cap behind the counter at Western Sports as he slid the special order of 00’s across the counter. “Nuthin.,” I mumbled, wondering as I wrote a corporate check whether or not I, as President of Wayne Ewing Films, Inc., would be held somehow responsible for the killed and wounded. Nonetheless I was excited by the prospect of the next day, Saturday, when Keith would arrive and we could witness Hunter’s pyrotechnics.
Hunter’s mood had been foul all week, but it was particularly nasty that Friday afternoon. He fired all his staff – Deborah and Nicole – because the housekeeper’s boyfriend, who was hired to clear the firing range of snow, had made an unholy quagmire of mud. I first heard the news while waiting for an hour and a half for him to meet me for a cheeseburger at the Tavern. I spent some of the time with Nicole who was hiding out, trying to gauge Hunter’s movements so as to make a dash back to the house for cover once he left. Once Nicole left, I went in search of “the Beast.”
I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall back on Deborah for protection as I entered the gates of Owl Farm. Nicole had reported her MIA after the Beast had threatened to shoot out the tires of her car to keep her from leaving. Hunter had become a walking contradiction of anger; firing Deborah, and then threatening to shoot her car out from under her to keep her from leaving.
Now he was leaving as I drove up. Noriss the housekeeper darted about the garage, as he gunned the Wagoneer into reverse. I jumped into a snow bank to keep from being crushed. The Beast screamed “Get in!”
He gunned the car down the small two lane road. I scanned the horizon for dogs, deer, police, and other solid objects that might impede our supersonic trip back to the Tavern. At the Tavern, he growled at college sophomores on ski vacations demanding autographs. I warned them that he was dangerous, yet they still kept coming, holding out soiled napkins with pens for a record of their momentary brush with fame, even when we moved to the bar for more protection.
Hunter just couldn’t stop lamenting the muddy firing range, insisting that Keith’s visit was ruined, and refusing to even consider taking Keith onto the range. I kept suggesting wacky solutions, while I thought of the $334 worth of ordinance that Keith would miss. Losing ground on the firing range issue, I switched to suggesting goofy ideas for the video with Keith. “It’s not your movie!” the Beast growled at me, “It’s Keith’s!”
We returned to Owl Farm, barely missing two head on auto collisions and three deer. Ron, the firing range mutilator, was lurking by the side of the garage. Nicole’s car was gone. “Lucky for her,” muttered the Beast.
We hung in the kitchen for an hour, maybe three. I concluded that Hunter’s irrational lashing out at his loyal staff (and, unfortunately, I seemed to be creeping into the serf-to-be-beaten category in his eyes) seemed to apparently stem from his deep anxiety about Keith Richards’ visit. His ability to transfer anxiety was quite creative. The arrangement of objects on the piano, the shine of the kitchen floor, and the placement of liquor bottles on the cabinet by the front door all were objects of intense concern and belittling of the “staff.”
It was dark when we heard the car in the driveway. Hunter immediately became like a guilty little boy, dreading his mother’s return, then quickly lashed out at himself. “Look at me. I’m quaking, worried about Deborah coming back. See what they do to me,” he observed, adroitly turning the guilt back on the staff for making him feel guilty.
I went out to meet Deborah, thinking I could capitalize on his guilt, and arrange a rapprochement between Hunter and her. I knew that Deborah was tough, you’d have to be after ten years or more taking care of the national treasure known as Hunter Thompson. She wouldn’t back down easily.
“He wants everything to be alright with you. He’s just uptight about Keith,” I implored.
It was an easier sell than I anticipated. Deborah smiled and handed me bags of groceries. “I know that,” she said, as if her intuition had been insulted.
Hunter hugged her at the door. I was overwhelmed. I felt like Kissinger with the Vietnamese – a true diplomat in the land of the terminally crazed. Deborah and Hunter laughed and joked, even about the firing range.
I asked Deborah for my Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum that I had left the other night to avoid complications in case I were stopped weaving my way back to Taylor Creek at three in the morning. She brought it from the safe, in the shoulder holster that Hunter had given me the day we bought it. He seemed to like when I wore it around Owl Farm, as if I were some kind of pseudo bodyguard, so I put it on to give them a few laughs.
It turned out to be a wise move, for the .44 soon became my only security as I stood between Hunter and Deborah, now screaming at each other across my face. I had checked the revolver to make sure it was unloaded before putting it on so I felt it would be safe to pistol whip them without fear of an accidental discharge if things really got crazy.
Crazy doesn’t begin to describe the level of argument. Hunter made more and more outrageous accusations to the point where Deborah returned the fire with incredible force, ending with the simple observation that “You’re an asshole, Hunter.”
Hunter smiled, taking it like a man, and was the Beast no more. “That’s impressive, Deborah. Really impressive,” he said, genuinely complimenting her outburst.
Deborah smiled proudly and I followed her into the red room. “I’ve never seen him like this,” I said.
“It’s OK,” she replied. “Anger’s good sometimes. Hunter thrives on anger. It’s just when it gets so misplaced, that it’s bad.”
The “tempest of the century” was shutting down the East coast by the time I left the farm, and Keith’s Lady Jane called to say they couldn’t fly out of New York on Saturday. As I white knuckled Frying Pan Road, I figured there was no way Keith would ever come to Woody Creek, and wondered how to avoid a $400 rental charge for the Hi-8 camera we would never use. I felt lucky though. Lucky to have seen the fury of the Beast and know that my hopes for his “video autobiography” were best doomed. The gypsy’s curse about “getting what you wish for” seemed particularly appropriate.
Despite this rare moment of wisdom and insight, come Monday (or was it Sunday?), when the word came down that Keith was coming, I scrambled, along with the rest of “the staff” to somehow document this historic event – the meeting of the two “bad boys” of our time.
Copyright 2009 By Wayne Ewing
To Be Continued
Here’s the video: Hunter appears in the first five minutes and the last minute.
“Thank God you’re here,” said Hunter, collapsing like a rubber man into my arms at the gate of his flight arriving at Washington Dulles airport from Denver.
It was April 7, 1997, and in those pre-911 days, you could still get through security to meet folks as they came off the plane. As the Road Manager it was my duty to be there to greet the Rubber Man, and thankfully I was on time since he clearly could not make it any further without assistance. As he continued to go limp in my arms, I spied an empty wheelchair sitting in the boarding area. He could barely put one foot in front of the other as I dragged him into the chair.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The stewardess was giving me a hard time about drinking. I decided the wise course was to take a Halcion rather than get in a fight with her,” replied the Rubber Man.
Keep in mind that Halcion is a cleverly named drug for the treatment of insomnia. George Bush Senior once blamed the pill for causing him to vomit on the Prime Minister of Japan at a state dinner in Tokyo and then pass out. Hunter took it regularly, but never before while traveling. But this was an important trip and he dared not be delayed by armed FAA agents upon arrival. The next day was George McGovern’s birthday and Hunter was expected at a lunch in George’s honor and a symposium afterwards at the National Archives.
The stretch limo was waiting at the curb outside the baggage area. Unfortunately, I had found on the way to Dulles that the driver did not have much of a sense of humor, so I feared he would be the next source of trouble. Life on the road with Hunter was always the Art of the Next Fifteen Minutes; what could go wrong next?
In the limo, Hunter came around quickly from the Halcion, and it’s after effect kept him from fucking with the driver, although he did let loose a ton of abuse on the cell phone at his secretary Deborah when she dared to suggest that he should not have stayed up all night before getting on the plane for Washington, DC.
“Fuck You!. I’ll do it again and again anytime I want to, “he screamed into the phone.
Hunter had agreed to stay at the Fairfax Hotel, a fashionable choice just off Dupont Circle and the home of the storied Jockey Club. Checking into a hotel was always stressful for Hunter, especially the part where they asked for his credit card, so upon arrival I walked him straight through the lobby and into their elegant bar, crowded with men and women in serious suits. Distracted by the women, Hunter gave up his credit card with surprisingly little resistance, and I went to find the Manager to make sure “Mr. Ben Franklin” (his road name that spring) would have a choice room.
The manager must have read a bit of “Fear & Loathing” and seemed to know the dangers involved in any delay so I was back in the bar in less than five minutes with the room key. The Rubber Man was gone, replaced by a suave and sophisticated “Mr. Franklin” who had already managed to pick up a thirtysome lawyeress from Nashville with great legs and a sweet accent in town for a job interview with US Securities and Exchange Commission. Thinking that this development could either make my job a whole lot easier or worse, I sat down for a drink to see how it played out.
“You look just like that crazy writer….you know…what’s his name?” observed the Lawyeress.
“I’m not him,” replied Mr. Franklin with a sly grin.
“Yes he is,” I interjected, anxious to cut to the chase and get him to the room.
Hunter actually welcomed my intervention since it hooked her so thoroughly that she instantly agreed to go to the room with us, rather than being left behind in the wake of fame. Up in the room, we all got quite drunk and giddy as Hunter held court, attempting to seduce the Lawyeress into spending the night with him. I kept trying to excuse myself, but he seemed to want me to stay, fearful that she would bolt as soon as they were alone.
After a few hours of this game, the mouse finally left, insisting that she had to get ready for her job interview. Hunter and I talked for a bit about McGovern’s birthday. Making a sharp appearance was most important to him, and he wanted to be ready for the event. He had marked certain passages in the campaign book to remember, and asked me to read them to him while he got in bed and soon fell asleep. It was a touching moment with The Beast, one that I had never seen before or after. Usually I faded away while he partied on, but not on the eve of McGovern’s Birthday.
The next morning I showed up at the Fairfax sharply at 8am as agreed. Apprehensively I walked down the corridor of his floor, wondering what to expect. At other times I’ve had to call hotel security and have the door removed from its hinges to get him up, but not today, not on McGovern’s Birthday. As I rounded the corner he was already opening the door and grabbing the newspaper from the floor with a smile.
The rest of the day was smoother than a Biff from the Woody Creek Tavern (Bailey’s Irish Cream with an Irish Whiskey floater). The limo driver tolerated us and everyone Hunter invited into the stretch along the way for refreshments. You can see most of the day in “Breakfast with Hunter,” a short preview of which is included here.
The staff of the National Archives even let him smoke in a special room back stage at the symposium. For Hunter, that was a bit of true respect, and that’s what he was looking for that day in Washington, DC. He was lauded by two Presidential candidates – Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern – and his old friends from the Washington press corps from Bill Greider to Jules Witcover came out to hear him speak. That night we went to the Australian Embassy where the Ambassador – a rabid non-smoker – spent the evening chasing Hunter around to stop him smoking, and we ended the night in stitches drinking at the apartment of PJ and Tina O’Rourke.
The next day when I dismissed the serious limo driver, Hunter put a hundred dollar bill for him in an envelope with a piece of Fairfax Hotel stationery on which he wrote:
“Good Luck in Jail”
Still without a sense of humor after three days with Hunter, the driver read the note and then asked sorrowfully, “Am I going to jail?” I noticed that he didn’t ask “Why?” – just whether or not he was. So I replied “Not yet, but I’ll let you know.”
