Angry for all the right reasons

Rules are for the weak ...
writing at escape velocity ...
the perils of writing true things ...

John Lombardi: Thompson was against what he thought were unnecessary limits. He had a sense of rules crowding in on life that I thought was absolutely wonderful. It was the thing that drew me to him from the very beginning. He was genuinely angry at the sort of social control, and intellectual control, and artistic control that was being manifested everywhere. He was always trying to break out of it, and that accounted in a way for the velocity of his writing, if you will. Along with rock musicians and certain movie directors, like Jean-Luc Godard, he thought you could outrun all this coruscating rule-making and confinement that just seemed to be strangling the whole world at the time. I know that's hard for young people to understand today, but there was this generational sense that you had to break out of that. It would account for many of the strange things that Thompson did over the course of his career at Rolling Stone, and before and after.

You knew him before he came to Rolling Stone, right?

I did. I was a writer and editor at an underground newspaper called The Distant Drummer in Philadelphia. The Drummer subscribed to all these papers that were part of the Underground Press Syndicate. Most of them were horribly written and over-the-top and too simplistic—but angry for all the right reasons and determined to make some kind of change, and eventually they did make changes is the way the mainstream press operated.

Anyway, Hunter wrote a piece called "The Ultimate Freelancer," which appeared in the Los Angeles Free Press. It was just wonderful. It was about this crazy guy who I guess preceded Thompson, in the late '40s and through the '50s, named Lionel Olay, who blew every chance at making it in journalism that came his way. He worked for Time and Life and The Saturday Evening Post and a bunch of magazines that no longer exist. But he insisted on writing true things that would eventually put him in harm's way in terms of editors and readers and publishers. He ended badly as a kind of wholesaler of dope and had a traffic accident on California Highway 1—he'd stopped being a journalist years before. Thompson wrote this wonderful obit about this guy, and it was a kind of generational summing-up: How did Lionel Olay get to be the way he was? And it was clearly a sign that Thompson wanted to model himself in some way on this fabulous character.

I remember one thing from "The Ultimate Freelancer." Olay somehow got on the presidential plane with President Eisenhower, just after Eisenhower gave that speech warning about the military-industrial complex. He asked a few polite questions, then he asked Ike why he waited until the end of his presidency to warn against this phenomenon. Of course he was fired from Life magazine as a result of that. Those were the kind of chances Hunter felt were necessary.

Olay definitely had a kind of Thompson-precursor quality ...

Well, there were a lot of Thompson precursors. You could go back and look at Lillian Ross' [New Yorker] piece on Hemingway, called "How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?" Or Truman Capote's profile of Marlon Brando in the New Yorker—John Hershey's stuff in the New Yorker. You had all these guys from Esquire and New York magazine who were innovating back in the early '60s. These guys were breaking a lot of rules. I think it came from this idea that the old rules, regarding everything—from politics to literature, music, painting—these things were breaking down. In today's climate, I think it's really hard for young people to understand the kind of hopefulness and just recklessness, I guess, that people had in those days. And Thompson embodied that. There was a lot of hope in Thompson. He was angry for the right reasons.

What happened at The Distant Drummer: I wanted to reprint the Lionel Olay piece, so I had to call Thompson to get his permission. It was in the afternoon, but he was still sleeping, because he was already keeping rock 'n' roll hours. I got a call from him about 5 o'clock; we just talked for about four or five hours. He let me reprint the piece, and we had some fond exchanges there. We couldn't afford him—we were paying $10 a story then—but sometimes he'd let me reprint things.

I was always trying to get him to write for me, and when I got to Rolling Stone, it just worked out. He called me one day, mumbling ... [here, Lombardi imitates Thompson's high-speed slur, impossible to do justice to in print, but which sounded something like this: urg um-can't find anything-mmmmgrr-think that little faggot will let me-urrrblegrmm-get any money at Rolling Stone?] It was like he was consuming his own language. If you saw him on TV, he was very hard to understand.

Thompson would begin in the middle of any story, kind of assuming you were going to be able to catch up and place yourself somehow. All of his writing suffered from that. That first meeting at Rolling Stone was essentially for a piece that became "Freak Power in the Rockies," the first political piece about the hippies. He was just talking; he came in in the middle of the story, garbled his words and did the whole thing. [See sidebar, "Smiling through the apocalypse."]

It's fascinating that he came in there that way—he wasn't diffident or "here I am looking for work." He sort of arrived on his own terms.

On his own terms is an understatement. Thompson had an enormous sense of himself, from the very beginning. He thought he was a great writer, and he was kind of a fierce personality.

Was it your sense that that was the genuine Thompson or even then was he crafting a bit of a persona?

I think there was a great deal of this crafting a persona idea about Thompson, but at the same time he was one of the most honest writers that I've ever dealt with, especially in those early years. I thought he was still holding it together pretty well for a long time—into the '80s. I think the role eventually subsumed him, the way that Hemingway's role subsumed him.

I've always wondered if maybe the fact that he got to the point where editors would buy practically anything he wrote, that he wasn't forced to go out and report—

You know, Thompson had a really hard time writing. He had a really, really difficult time writing at all. He would do these sort of brilliant bursts; they were almost like surreal flashes of insight. But it wasn't connected. There was no through-line. We used to have this great big, long room [at Rolling Stone]. And we had what we called the Mojo wire, an early way of sending stories in by wire. And his stuff used to come in, and I started working on it, and I would make a bunch of suggestions. I would call him up and say, "What if we connected this and that?" And those connections started making sense to him. So when it came time to really finalize the story, he just flew in from Aspen. We had all these pages from "Freak Power in the Rockies" printed out and spread across this very long room. And we both sat down and moved the pages around until they were in some kind of rough sequence. Then I said, "You need a bridge here, or you need something over there." That helped him. And then we went across the street to some little joint there and got loaded, and he started thinking about that cannon-shot stuff [Thompson's fantasy about being shot from a cannon]. He was thinking about that even then.

It seems like the era was ripe for someone like him to come along.

Yeah. He embodied the times. The times seem to change in this imperceptible way, but lots of savvy people see it and feel it. It was just good timing. Just like it was wonderful timing for Marlon Brando to begin his mumbling-and-T-shirt stuff and "Stella" and all that.

If he had done that before, or if he tried to be that kind of rebel-hero now, as you know, you just get laughed off the stage, right? We're so sophisticated.

How much of his anger at authority was the spirit of the times and how much of it was genetic with him?

I think he was wired that way, really. His dad was a kind of blue-collar guy; I want to say he worked in a garage or something like that, and was like a baseball-hat-wearer and a gum-chewer, and followed the St. Louis Cardinals religiously and didn't have much to say. A Sam Shepard character, almost. He died early; Thompson was just a kid.

His mother was bookish. So you had these two things going on. He wanted to be his dad, who went away young, and yet he was influenced by his mom, who was very, very bookish and took him to see plays and art and stuff.

He was enormously well-read, that's the thing. You could sit and talk to Hunter about Thomas Hardy or James Jones or Norman Mailer or Hemingway, for hours, and he'd be able to recite passages from all these folks' books. Jude the Obscure? My God!

This is another thing I've always admired about Thompson—was a lower middle-class person. He wasn't a middle-class or upper middle-class. He wrote a lot of stuff because he had to write a lot of stuff. He needed to write to eat and pay the rent. That's probably what led him into journalism, and he saw what was going on at that time, with Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe and John Sack and all those guys who were writing all this great stuff, and he was drawn in that direction.

Also, there was this sense of urgency, Scott. It's very hard, again, to re-create this mind-set, but there was this sense of urgency, that you gotta get it out now, you don't have time to sit around plotting all these novels, developing all these characters and putting out all these artificial modes of expression.

I wonder if his metabolism was too high for the long-term project of a novel. In old interviews, he mentions a lot of novel projects that never came off. I wonder if the need to be on the ground, doing journalism, kept getting in the way.

It was partly that, it was partly the need to earn money. But I think you're right, I think there was something that was hard-wired into Thompson that was just very fast, and reading him, as an editor, it was the thing I responded to equally with his genuine outrage at the way things were going in the country. I don't know what to call it. Rock 'n' roll velocity? There was a certain velocity to his work that I think was dead-on. The country was going faster, and Hunter was going faster and faster. He, and a lot of us, felt like, if you weren't hip to that, if you didn't understand that, there was no point in reading you. And so John Updike, a perfectly fine, wonderful craftsman whom I admire, was not to be read in those times, because he didn't dig the need for speed.

It seemed to me that he did his best work when he was on the ground, engaged with the times ...

Yes.

... and when you can sit on your mountaintop in Colorado and issue communiqués, perhaps you lose that sense of front-line engagement, and maybe a little of your mojo goes.

I think there's certainly some truth to that. To the extent that you become a star and then gradually remove yourself—you know, the famous case was Wenner sending him to Vietnam and Hunter not filing anything. I mean, that was incredible. From all reports, he checked into a hotel and got loaded. I don't think he did anything.

When you think of Thompson's decline, how much of it do you think is just the sap lowering naturally and how much was it the times evolving away from him?

Well, the times were definitely evolving away from him, and that probably affected the sap lowering. There are other things. You know, if you have your foot jammed to the floor all the time, and you jam your foot on the brake at the same time, it makes for a terribly destructive rocking that you take. And I think that was kinda what happened with him.

The last time I talked to him was on the occasion of my having written that "Smiling Through the Apocalypse" piece. He sent me an e-mail saying, "You pigf--ker! When are you going to stop selling those stories?" When you do! Something had happened. The stories that I hear about his last years are sobering. You're right, I think the times were definitely going away from him. But I also think he just wore himself out.

Where does Thompson fit among the cultural figures of that time?

Um, let's see ... he was as important as Jim Morrison, maybe not as important as Dylan. Thompson loved Dylan, by the way. Some of the more serious politicos of the time—he was as important as they were. I hesitate to compare him just to other writers. He was a cultural figure, and he transcended writing, in a funny way. He was important.

Were you surprised that he killed himself?

No. I was horrified. I remember an old friend called to tell me. It hit me in stages, and over the next few days, I was just depressed. And I don't precisely know why, except that I was happy Thompson was still alive out there, the idea that Thompson, however messed up he may have become, was still there. I knew his spirit so well, it made me feel better that he was still out there, in contravention of all the other things that were going wrong culturally.

He'd been talking about this kind of thing before. When we were editing "Freak Power in the Rockies" he talked about being shot out of a cannon.

The other thing he said before the coming-out-of-the-cannon business, is that he wanted to form a group of real guerillas up there in the mountains of Colorado, just sort of ride down on the villages and just take what you need until the feds came and shot it out with you, and he wanted to go out that way. He said that would be cool because he would finally transcend the mind-body dichotomy. [Laughs.] He always presented these things as jokes, but there was always some kind of rumbling darkness in there that made me think he was partly serious about it. And I'm sorry that it got to that point.

(Toward the end of the '70s, Robert Ward and Mike Disend, two writers turned TV script person and actor, respectively, decided to form a writers' gang. They called it "The Savage Pens," and their motto was "Writing Should Hurt." Black T-shirts with a logo of a red quill dripping blood. Thompson was elected president. Hunter loved his T-shirt , and I remember him roaring up Third Avenue on somebody's hog, and then squirreling over to Second to Elaine's, gunning the engine and cursing happily on the sidewalk outside. It was as close as he came to his guerilla band idea. ...)

It's a shame that no one could help Thompson. I feel sorry that among all those people he knew, no one could actually help him. That there wasn't any way to reach him. The same thing with Hemingway. He was surrounded by all these fools who would indulge him in all this crap. The same thing happened to Belushi in a lesser kind of way. No one could help him.

I was working for Esquire, [but] I had kept my hand in with Rolling Stone, and they asked me if I wanted to profile James Brown, who was down in Washington. Thompson had been made political editor of Rolling Stone and was living in Silver Spring, Maryland. So I thought, okay, I'll go hang out with James Brown for a while, then I'll go see Hunter. Brown had been putting me off, in New York and various places, and then finally he said you can come down and hang out backstage, and when the show's done, we'll go out, eat and have our big interview. When I got down there, they kept shuffling me around and no one would talk to me, and around 2:30 in the morning, when the last show was over, they piled out of the theater and took off. I called Thompson and he said, "Come right over." He was there with his wife, and I was still mad. He told me, "That was predictable. Someone should have told you. Brown is mad because [Rolling Stone writer] David Dalton-he traveled with Brown for six weeks and never wrote the article. So Brown was just paying Rolling Stone back. That's what that was all about. Here, smoke this." I thought it was just a regular joint, so I'm smoking it and drinking some wine, and pretty soon I'm hit with this incredibly weird feeling. Turned out it was psilocybin. He didn't say anything about the fact that he was dosing me. Which was an old Rolling Stone tradition. They did that a lot. The only times I ever took acid was inadvertently, at Rolling Stone parties. So he'd given me this huge Jamaican spliff that I'd smoked half of, and I was just gone. I got so sick. His wife took mercy on me and escorted me to one of their extra bedrooms, and I was laying there, trying to get myself together in between throwing up, and I went into this strange, half-awake state. And every once in a while I'd wake up and there'd be this sort of demon at the foot of my bed. And it was Hunter, dressed in a full scuba outfit with some kind of devil's mask on and a fire extinguisher, which he kept firing at me, and cackling and roaring and stuff. But I wasn't getting any better, and Hunter was kind of worried that something was really wrong. I said, "Just get me back to my hotel, man." So his wife drove, and he sat in the front seat. We had to pull over every so often so I could splat. He was very concerned that I not throw up in the car, and that we not get caught. And when we got to the hotel, he wanted me gone. Very strange story. Interpret it how you will. I probably failed him in some way-that was probably some kind of a test. You go though this thing with James Brown and get whacked on this huge dose of psilocybin, now let's see what kind of man you are. I don't know.

He used to quote from memory from books that he thought were the real deal. The taps scene in From Here to Eternity was one, when Robert E. Lee Prewitt, who's been broken from the Bugle Corps for being a f--k-up, sneaks a nightly taps at Schofield barracks from the guy who was supposed to blow it, not long before he's killed; or the night court "show-up" scenes at the beginning of The Man With the Golden Arm, where the old gray strays of Clark Street in Chicago are paraded before "Record Head" Bednarik, the stoic, sad police captain, who trades icy witticisms with them before condemning them to County: "Do any of you guys remember me?" one skanky old rummy cries out to the bums in the drunk tank. "I used to be a conductor on the Illinois Central line ..."

It was weird to hear him recite those things, and then switch it up with Milton, on Samson Agonistes:

"My hopes all flat: Nature within me seems/In all my functions weary of herself: My race of glory run, and race of shame,/And I shall shortly be with them that rest."

Doesn't fit with the wild man stuff that everyone looks down on now; or the great "humorist" caricaturist Tom Wolfe saw in him, in his Wall Street Journal obit. And neither does his suicide note, written four days before he shot himself:

"No more games . No more bombs ... No more fun ... 67 ... Act your old age. This won't hurt."