By Craig Vetter
When things get slow on the set, everybody tells Hunter stories,” Bill Murray told me during the filming of Where the Buffalo Roam, a movie based on a Hunter S. Thompson magazine story, in which Murray was starring as the infamous gonzo journalist. There were plenty of Hunter stories on that set, as there were everywhere he went. He was in life as he portrayed himself in his writings: an outrageously funny, often frightening, one man guerilla-theater company. Those who knew him well, those who worked with him, were drawn into his wild dramas, often at great psychic cost. Even so, his personal magnetism and his powerful literary talent surrounded him with a loyal, loving and wildly diverse array of friends. And it’s their Hunter stories that are collected in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, an oral biography by Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour.
The book is made of snippets, quotes rarely more than a page long, and arranged chronologically around seminal events in Thompson’s life. It begins in Louisville, Kentucky, where he began making his name as a high school writer and petty criminal.
After an honorable discharge from the Air Force, which he had been compelled to join as an alternative to serious jail time, he took a job at a Middletown, New York, newspaper and met Sandy Wright, who would become his first wife. She was beautiful, smart and hopelessly in love with Thompson, whom she described this way: “He was very good looking, tall, slender. He had this wonderful gait—and just a tremendous power of seduction. And he knew this very early on: how he could seduce not just women but men, children, anybody he really wanted to.” They were married for 17 years, had a son, Juan, and her tough, honest and painful insights about Hunter and their life together as he made his literary reputation from the ground up—through Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72—are the most powerful passages in the book.
The other 110 storytellers quoted here are testimony to the wide range of characters he met and befriended in the course of his work. They include Sonny Barger, the grand poobah of the Angels, along with George McGovern, Patrick J. Buchanan, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Jack Nicholson and Johnny Depp, the actor who played Thompson in the movie version of the Vegas book. Their tales stand with those of the armies of editors and assistants who spent the withering, drug-addled hours it took to coax and threaten the work out of him over the years.
The form of the book took a huge job of interviewing from Seymour and delicate editing from Wenner, whose stories about Thompson’s part in the success of Rolling Stone are also included.
For me, who knew Hunter for 35 years and worked on many projects with and about him, the accounts of outrageous behavior (all true) become a bit tedious and, in a way, seem to have edged out stories that might have thrown brighter light on the writer at the center of it all. There are paeans from Tom Wolfe and others on the literary impact of the work, but I would have liked more along the lines contributed by two editors who played sidemen to Thompson’s literary jam sessions. “Hunter loved the Mark Twain quote,” says Shelby Sadler, “‘The difference between the almost right word and the right word is a really large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and lightning.’ He knew that better than anyone.”
“You might come up with the idea of saying someone had the loyalty of a snake,” adds Curtis Robinson, “and he would come back with ‘the loyalty of a rented snake.’ Sometimes we’d have a four-hour search for a word that’s like posh but not posh.”
In fact, there is a caution from Depp in his deeply felt introduction to the book, which seems to worry that perhaps the theatricality of Thompson’s life tends to loom over the writing. “You owe it to yourselves,” he writes, “not to be cheated or shortchanged by merely the myth. Understand that his road and his methods were his and only his and that he lived and breathed his writing 24 hours a day.”
The story grows progressively sad over the last years and months leading to Thompson’s suicide at age 67. Disabled by hip replacement, back surgery and a broken leg that didn’t heal well, he was ultimately unable to get around and sank deeper and deeper into what he described as “the death of fun.”
Finally, though, there are no rented snakes in this book. It stands as a celebration of the deep friendships and loyalties he shared with those whose lives he and his lightning crashed through.
As Sandy Thompson reflected after his death: “For so many people—and for me for years, even though I had this angst and was scared—being around Hunter was exciting.”
Exciting yes, and as Depp puts it: “...my God it was fun. Too much fun.”
Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson
*** 1/2
Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour
Little, Brown & Co., $28.99