Climate of Hunter

February 20 will mark the third anniversary of the death of legendary journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Having been seriously ill for quite some time, the 67-year-old outlaw iconoclast committed suicide in the kitchen of his ‘fortified compound’ in Woody Creek, Colorado.

The inventor of a literary genre called ‘Gonzo’ – essentially a wildly exaggerated, drug-fuelled form of journalism where the writer is always at the centre of the action – went out with a bang, shooting himself in the mouth with his favourite .45-caliber pistol.
His suicide didn’t come as a complete shock. He’d been in ill-health for two years, and could barely walk following a recent hip operation. Apparently, he’d been talking about killing himself for months. Indeed, years earlier he had told his friend and artistic collaborator, Ralph Steadman, that he would feel “trapped” if he hadn’t known he could end his life at any given moment.
His son Juan was in the next room with his wife and child when Thompson – who was on the phone to his wife, Anita – pulled the trigger. Initially, they thought a heavy book had fallen.
Perhaps it wasn’t the most honourable exit for a legendary man of letters, but who’s to judge? As Juan recalled it: “He very deliberately did not have a final goodbye. He didn’t want to let on. It was a really nice afternoon. He was reading the paper, and me and Jen were reading, and I was taking a picture of something for Jen, and I think he just decided that that was the moment. I think he’d been hanging in there for a long time and just got tired of it.”
Always prone to excess, and never a man to do things by halves, Thompson actually went out with two bangs. The second was much louder. Six months after his passing, his cremated remains were blown out of the top of a specially designed 30-foot cannon in front of a small invited audience in Colorado.
Wanting to be as outrageous in death as he’d been throughout his hellraising life, he’d drawn up his bizarre funeral plans more than 30 years previously. His actor friend Johnny Depp – who portrayed Thompson in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film version of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas – paid for the ceremony.

Now that’s he’s dead, the Thompson industry is in full swing. Four books have been published since his suicide, and there are at least three more due out this year – including a final collection of his own writings entitled The Mutineer.
Steadman, who worked with Thompson on several key works, ignored his advice (“Don’t write, Ralph, you’ll bring shame on your family”) and penned an excellent tragicomic memoir entitled The Joke’s Over: “I felt that I was finally getting my own back on the bastard: finally writing it my own way.”
The other three published books all have the word ‘Gonzo’ in their title, and two of them feature introductions by Johnny Depp. His young widow, Anita, wrote a short and rather patchy memoir of her life with Hunter – who used to describe himself to her as “a teenage girl trapped in the body of an elderly drug fiend” – entitled The Gonzo Way (Fulcrum Publishing). Really, it’s for diehard completists only.
Last summer, Ammo Books published Gonzo – a striking, visually charged collection of previously unseen pictures from Thompson’s own archive that range from his early years in the Air Force to his debauched days living it down in Las Vegas and covering the 1972 Democratic primaries for Rolling Stone.
Initially published in a limited boxed edition of 3,000 (with a hefty price tag of €200), Gonzo will be released as a mass-market paperback this year.
Publisher Steve Crist began collaborating with Thompson on the project in 2004. “I like to think of this as his last book,” he told Rolling Stone last year. “I felt as if he was looking down at us, making sure we got the damn thing right.”
Johnny Depp penned the introduction – as he also did to the most recently published title, Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson (Sphere Books).
Compiled and edited by RS editor Jann Wenner and former magazine staffer and Thompson assistant Corey Seymour, it’s an oral biography drawn from interviews with more than 150 of Thompson’s friends, family members, colleagues and co-conspirators.
Contributors include everyone from his old Louisville schoolfriends, ex-wife and son to the likes of Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and William Kennedy (Anita Thompson refused to contribute following a falling-out with Wenner over what she felt was a negative portrayal of Thompson in his later years).
Excellently crafted, Gonzo begins right at the beginning and tells the story of his life through the words of those who knew him best – and also knew him at his abusive worst (the editors don’t shy away from stories about him beating his first wife up or cruelly abusing magazine staffers).
While the results were usually worthwhile, Thompson was undoubtedly an absolute nightmare to work with. According to Wenner, “Working with Hunter was a major hand-holding job. It meant a minimum of two, maybe three people assigned to the task, including me. He liked having a team of people working on his stuff, and he liked the crisis atmosphere.”
As unreliable as they come, Thompson used to insist on Rolling Stone buying him two separate first class flights wherever he travelled (in case he missed the first). Assigned to cover the Ali-Foreman ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, he sold the tickets and went drinking.
His public image as a crazed dope fiend was also a private reality. He was undoubtedly a serious alcoholic and drug addict in later years. In 1993, while away on assignment, he used Wenner’s FedEx account to have 300 grams of cocaine shipped to himself in a hollowed out pile of National Geographics. That’s a lot of coke by anyone’s standards, but he’d run out within weeks.
If he hadn’t become a writer, he probably would’ve been a career criminal. Born a rebel in Louisville, Kentucky, on 18 July, 1937, his mother later claimed that Hunter Stockton was “difficult from the moment of his birth.”
Although a bright student and enthusiastic sportsman, he was constantly in trouble. Two weeks before his graduation from Louisville Male High School, he was arrested on a delinquency charge, and sentenced to 60 days in juvenile detention.
Upon his release, he immediately enlisted in the Air Force. While serving at Eglin Base in Florida, he became the Sports Editor of the base’s newspaper, publishing a number of controversial pieces. Honourably discharged after two years, he began to pursue a career as a freelance writer.

His burning ambition was to become a novelist and, with this in mind, he took himself down to Puerto Rico in 1959. Supporting himself by working for a bowling magazine, he wrote two novels during the five years he spent in the Caribbean. One of these, The Rum Diary, was eventually published to considerable acclaim in 1997.
Commissioned by The Nation magazine to write a piece on biker gangs, he returned to the US in 1965. The article led to a book contract. Hell’s Angels was a critically lauded bestseller when it was published in 1966.
Success was hard-earned. After riding with the Angels for almost a year, his biker ‘friends’ had battered him senseless when he refused to split the royalties with them.
His first story for RS was an account of his unsuccessful campaign to get elected as sheriff of Aspen.
His next book made him a true literary star. The debauched and drug-soaked Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was originally published in two instalments in Rolling Stone in 1971.
The following year, Thompson reported on McGovern and Nixon’s presidential campaigns. The resulting book, Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail ’72, remains the most unorthodox account of a US presidential race ever written (described by one of McGovern’s aides as “the least factual but most accurate account of the campaign”).
Although Thompson went on to write many more books, he was never able to fully recapture the magic of his key Fear & Loathing works. This wasn’t necessarily his fault. A victim of his own success, he’d become so famous that he was mobbed by autograph hunters almost everywhere he went.
He apparently enjoyed his celebrity. At college lecture tours, he would drunkenly slur from the stage, “I hate to advocate weird chemicals, alcohol or insanity to anyone... but they’ve always worked for me.”
In 1980, Bill Murray played Thompson in the disappointing biopic Where The Buffalo Roam. Eighteen years later, Terry Gilliam somehow filmed the un-filmable, and made an excellent movie version of Las Vegas.
While he was notorious for his decadent lifestyle, Thompson was still working right up to the day of his suicide – contributing a regular sports column to ESPN.com (his last column was about playing “shotgun golf” with Bill Murray). He never lost his bite, either, describing Bush’s election victory in 2000 as, “the most brutal seizure of power since Hitler burned the German Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the new boss of Germany.”
He never became the great novelist he’d always aspired to be. According to his first wife, Sandy Thompson, “When I asked him once, long after our divorce, if things had turned out like he wanted, he said, ‘Well, of course not’ – and he paused and then gave me that look – ‘but it’s been glamorous.’”
For all of his addictions, eccentricities and bad behaviour, Thompson was much loved by many of those who knew him. As Pitkin County sheriff Bob Braudis – whose own memoir of his unlikely friendship with the outlaw journalist, The Kitchen Readings, will be published in April – puts it at the end of Gonzo: “From now on when the phone rings at 4am, it’s just bad news.”
Hunter Stockton Thompson, 1937 –2005. RIP.