The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (21 page)

MADRAS OUTLAW

I
n 1971, on the verge of becoming the most infamous journalist in America, Hunter S. Thompson unloaded a fusillade of playful vitriol in an essay that was meant to distinguish Thompson’s balls-out approach from that of his closest rival, Tom Wolfe. “Wolfe’s problem,” Thompson wrote, “is that he’s too crusty to participate in his stories. The people he feels comfortable with are dull as stale dogshit, and the people who seem to fascinate him as a writer are so weird that they make him nervous. The only thing new and unusual about Wolfe’s journalism is that he’s an abnormally good reporter; he has a fine sense of echo and at least a peripheral understanding of what John Keats was talking about when he said that thing about Truth & Beauty.”

In short, Wolfe was a very artful stenographer, always keeping a discreet distance and never sullying his suit. Thompson, on the other hand, was a man willing to throw himself into the breach and risk his well-being, if necessary, to get the story. As much as Thompson admired
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
and was willing to stand by his opinion of the book at the expense of his own livelihood, he regarded it as a brilliant exercise in simulacrum. It was Thompson, after all, who had been present during the Hell’s Angels gang rape at La Honda, providing Wolfe with audiotapes that captured the scene for
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. No story was worthy for Thompson unless he could immerse himself, body and soul, and come out on the other side with a piece of writing tinctured with his own blood and sweat.

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 18, 1937, the eldest son of Jack Robert Thompson and Virginia Davidson Ray. Jack was an insurance engineer for First Kentucky Fire Insurance Co. The marriage was Jack Thompson’s second; his first wife, Garnett Sowards, had died of pneumonia in 1923. A stern disciplinarian and a veteran of World War I, Jack was fifty-four years old when his son Hunter was born. That age gap militated against any significant bond between father and son, and so Hunter gravitated to his mother, who nurtured his love of literature, the ripping picaresques to be found in the books of Mark Twain and Jack London.

Thus at a very early age Hunter was cultivating an image that was equal parts aesthete and roughneck. It was as if the warring impulses of the South’s two great traditions—its regional pride forged in blood and its literary heritage—merged to make an uneasy alliance in Thompson’s psyche. “I’ve always felt like a Southerner,” said Thompson. “And I always felt like I was born in defeat. And I may have written everything I’ve written just to win back a victory. My life may be pure revenge.”

As a teenager, Thompson cultivated his taste for adrenaline kicks—verbally provoking his schoolmates into fistfights, knocking over mailboxes, or engaging in war games with BB guns by the creek near his house, using animal life—and other kids—for target practice. “I had a keen appetite for adventure, which soon led me into a maze of complex behavioral experiments that my parents found hard to explain,” Thompson wrote in his 2002 memoir
Kingdom of Fear
. “I was a popular boy, with acceptable grades & a vaguely promising future, but I was cursed with a dark sense of humor that made many adults afraid of me, for reasons they couldn’t quite put their fingers on.”

He lived to get under people’s skin, to be unpredictable and hair-trigger dangerous, but he was also rakishly charming, and too smart to ignore. As a student in Louisville Male High School, his scabrous essays impressed English teacher Harold Tague enough for him to recommend Thompson to the Athenaeum Literary Association, an exclusive student organization at “Male” whose members contributed pieces to the association’s annual yearbook,
The Spectator
. Thompson’s contributions revealed a taste for playful polemics. “Security,” one of his
Spectator
essays, laid out Thompson’s philosophy of choosing a life of excitement over dull complacency:

In June 1956, right before he was to graduate, Thompson, along with two schoolmates, was arrested for violently harrassing a couple in their car for cigarettes and was sentenced to six months in Jefferson County Jail. By enrolling in the electronics program at Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Illinois, Thompson was able to reduce his sentence to only thirty days. After his graduation from the program, Thompson was assigned to Eglin Air Force Base in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, where he finagled a job as the sports editor of the
Command Courier
, the base’s newspaper. “In short,” he wrote to his old high school friend Gerald Tyrrell, “we both know that I’m no more qualified for a post like this than I am for the presidency of a theological seminary,” but as was often the case, Thompson’s chutzpah compensated for his inexperience.

Thompson’s tenure as the
Courier’s
sports editor was backbreaking and exhilarating. A virtual one-man staff, he not only wrote and edited all the stories and his weekly column, “The Spectator,” but also was responsible for copyediting, page layout, and paste-up. Often working around the clock to whip the section into shape, Thompson consumed twenty or more cups of coffee and ran through four packs of cigarettes a day, a habit he eventually curtailed when he switched to a pipe. When he wasn’t working on the paper, Thompson was taking speech and psychology classes at nearby Florida State University, leaving precious little time for the kind of drinking and carousing he had grown fond of in high school.

Nonetheless, Thompson made time, forming a large network of on-and off-base contacts that would help him make a smooth transition to citizen-writer when the time came—including the debutante daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Campbell. “I met all kinds of people in Fort Walton, which has the most beautiful beaches in all of Florida,” said Thompson. “I became part of Café Society, hung out with Bart Starr and Max McGee, guys like that. It was a rush. Looking back on it
now, I don’t see how I could have done all those things and done them successfully.”

But the life of a professional journalist was pure liberation; for the first time, he wrote to his half-brother Jack, “no one is hanging over me saying, ‘my oh my Hunter, just see what you can do when you apply yourself.’” There was no question in his mind: he would make journalism his life’s work.

And he was hungry for more. In January 1957 he sold his first story—a two-hundred-word piece on the base’s wrestling team, to the
Playground News
, Fort Walton Beach’s civilian newspaper. Not long after it was published, the paper offered Thompson the job of sports editor. Despite Air Force regulations that forbade
Command Courier
staffers from taking civilian jobs, Thompson accepted, using the pseudonyms Thorne Stockton and Cuubley Cohn to keep the Air Force off his trail. “The whole thing,” he wrote to his childhood friend Porter Bibb at the time, “tends to make my eyes water with wonder at my sudden eruption of ambition.”

Thompson’s idyll didn’t last long. His snide swipes at the establishment and his broad-stroke send-ups of high-ranking military officers in the
Courier
didn’t sit well with the Air Force’s Information Services Office’s chief, W. S. Evans; his savage eviscerations of cultural icons such as Ted Williams and Arthur Godfrey were thought of as heretical. His “rebel and superior attitude,” Evans wrote in a letter recommending a discharge to Thompson’s personnel officer, “seems to rub off on other airmen staff members. He has little consideration for military bearing or dress and seems to dislike the service and want out as soon as possible.”

The Air Force had also found out about his
Playground News
gig. Thompson, chafing at the Air Force’s stiff-necked protocol, wanted out anyway. After being demoted to the Communications Squadron, Thompson was given an honorable discharge in October 1957. Finally he was free to pursue the culturally rich and remunerative career of a professional reporter. Or so he thought.

The
Jersey Shore Herald
covered the cities of Lock Haven, Williams-port, and Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, and did a poor job of it. A small-circulation daily where expediency trumped quality, located in a dreary urban area, it was the diametric opposite of his
Command Courier
experience. Thompson was miserable there. “If this path leads up,” he wrote to
his friend Larry Callen, “then I’d rather go down.” He didn’t last two months in the job. Instead he took the northward migratory path of so many other journalism aspirants, such as Wolfe, Clay Felker, and Harold Hayes, and headed to New York City to try his luck. On Christmas Eve, no less.

With only $110 to his name, Thompson called on a local YMCA in the city, only to be told it was full. He then lived for a short time in a flophouse in Secaucus, New Jersey, until his old Air Force buddy Jerry Hawke, who was attending Columbia Law School, agreed to put Thompson up at his apartment at 110 Morningside Drive until the young writer found gainful employment. In early January 1958, after experiencing his fair share of “sustained fear,” Thompson, using the flimsiest of family connections, landed a plum job as a $50-a-week copy-boy for Henry Luce’s mighty
Time
.

The
Time
job was to be an invaluable experience, a ground-level peek at the inner workings of one of the largest news-gathering organizations in the world. “Shit, that was a gravy train of access and perks,” said Thompson. “What an education that was, all pumped into me in a year and a half.”

Despite Thompson’s eagerness to prove himself with Luce’s best and brightest, the inner reprobate, which had been patiently lying in wait, pounced only weeks into his tenure. One night after the magazine had closed production and everyone had gone home, he snuck into the office of Henry Grunwald, the magazine’s managing editor, and stole a case of “the best scotch money could buy.” He also had a tendency to filch books and office supplies. Incidents such as these led to a number of run-ins with editors and other Time-Life employees; at one point during a cocktail party for new executives, he called the magazine’s business manager a “fat lecher.” At his apartment at 562 West 113th Street, Thompson engaged in other mischief, throwing a garbage can down five flights of stairs and turning a fire extinguisher on a couple of unsuspecting neighbors. It was all he could do to maintain some levity at a time when he was working for meager wages and trying desperately to keep afloat financially in a city that didn’t make it easy.

He wanted to leave New York and try to make it as a freelance writer, because “Ernest Hemingway had shown me that you could be a freelancer in this country and get away with it.” Thompson was enthralled
by Manhattan’s frenetic cultural currents, but they also made him miserable. When he finally found his own place, a dingy basement apartment on Perry Street in the West Village, he wrote to an old girlfriend, “Do you realize that sunlight NEVER ENTERS MY APARTMENT?”

Thompson was fired from
Time
after only a year, but his stint at the magazine, along with a canny bluff about extensive reportorial experience, helped him land a job with the
Middletown Daily Record
, a two-and-a-half-year-old newspaper located in upstate New York with a staff consisting entirely of writers and editors under the age of thirty. It seemed a dream gig: for $70 a week, Thompson would work as a general assignment reporter, writing copy and even shooting photos for the paper when the situation called for it. But he didn’t last three months. Fired in March 1959 for sending back food in a restaurant that advertised heavily in the paper and then putting his foot through the office candy vending machine shortly thereafter, Thompson was out on the street again. “It was no free ride in those days. I worked very hard at [making a living].”

He started a novel called
King Jellyfish
and submitted short stories to various magazines; when
Esquire’s
fiction editor, Rust Hills, failed to respond fast enough to a story called “The Cotton Candy Heart,” Thompson reeled off a frustrated missive. “Goddammit, Hills, I don’t think there’s an excuse in the world for you people holding onto my manuscript this long.” After sending countless letters of inquiry, he found a job in Puerto Rico on
El Sportivo
, a weekly sports magazine that emphasized bowling coverage, and he freelanced for the
Louisville Courier-Journal
on the side.
El Sportivo
went out of business shortly thereafter.

Thompson decamped to Big Sur, on the northern California coast, in order to start work on another novel based on his Puerto Rico adventures, to be called
The Rum Diary
. More important for Thompson’s future prospects, he sold his first magazine story, a piece on Big Sur and its boho inhabitants, for $350 to
Rogue
, a downmarket
Playboy
knockoff “It was not so much the money,” he wrote to his new friend,
San Juan Star
editor William Kennedy, “but the feeling that I had finally cracked something, the first really valid indication that I might actually make a living at this goddamn writing.”