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These are sad days here at ROLLING STONE. This morning I cried as I struck "National Affairs Desk: Hunter S. Thompson" from the masthead -- after thirty-five years. Hunter's name is now listed with Ralph Gleason's on what Hunter would have called "the honor roll." Hunter was part of the DNA of ROLLING STONE, one of those twisting strands of chemicals around which a new life is formed. He was such a big part of my life, and I loved him deeply.
He was a man of energy, physical presence, utter charm, genius talent and genius humor. It's very hard to have to give him up and to say goodbye.
When I was a young man, twenty-four years old, in the summer of 1970 (the year of the photo on the cover of this issue), I had the great fortune of meeting Hunter. He came to my office, then in San Francisco, to settle the details of writing an article about his campaign for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado. He was thirty-three, stood six-three, shaved bald, dark glasses, smoking, carrying two six-packs of beer; he sat down, slowly unpacked a leather satchel full of "travel necessities" onto my desk -- mainly hardware, like flashlights, a siren, knives, boxes of cigarettes and filters, whiskey, corkscrews, flares -- and didn't leave for three hours. He was hypnotic, and by the end I was suddenly deep into his campaign.
The record indicates that in 1970 we did "The Battle of Aspen"; in 1971, he wrote about the stirrings of Mexican unrest in East Los Angeles, based in part on a fiery lawyer named Oscar Zeta Acosta, who later that year emerged as Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
In 1972, we began nonstop coverage of the Nixon-McGovern presidential campaign. Hunter took over my life then -- and for many years after that when he was reporting (long nocturnal telephone calls and frequent all-night strategy sessions) and especially when he was writing. He was demanding in his need for time, attention, care, handling and editing. He was relentlessly creative, honest and wickedly funny.
After Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, everything else he wrote was a full-out siege. Setting up the assignment was easy -- Hunter was pretty much welcome everywhere and had the skills and instincts to run a presidential campaign if he had wanted. But then came the travel arrangements: hotels, tickets, researchers, rental cars. Then, later in the process, finding a place for him to hunker down and write -- the Seal Rock Inn, Key West, Owl Farm, preferably somewhere isolated and with a good bar; flying in IBM Selectric typewriters, with the right typeface, booze, drugs (usually he had this part already done); arranging for a handler-assistant at his end; and then back at Rolling Stone I had to be available to read and edit copy as it came in eight- to ten-page bursts -- via the Xerox telecopier ("the mojo wire"), a primitive fax, which had a stylus that printed onto treated paper (at a rate of seven minutes per page) and smelled. I had to talk to Hunter for hours, then track and organize the various scenes and sections; he usually began writing in the middle, then would back up, or skip around to write what he felt good about at that moment, reporting scenes that might fit somewhere later or spinning out total fantasies ("Insert ZZ" or "midnight screed") that would also find a place -- parts that were flights of genius. Generally the lead was easy, describing the invariably dramatic weather wherever he was writing from. Then a flurry of headlines and chapter headings and the transitions he had to produce on demand to create the flow and logic, and always, sooner or later, the conclusion, which we always called "the Wisdom."
He liked to work against a crisis, and if there wasn't a legitimate one, he made one. We never had a fight about the editing. I never tried to change him or "improve" him, but since I had a pretty deep understanding of his style and his motives, I could tell where he was going and sit at his side and read the map to him. If I didn't personally supervise everything he wrote for ROLLING STONE, he wouldn't finish. It was a bit like being the cornerman for Ali.
The pages would come in, the writing brilliant and high-pitched, scathing, hysterical imagery -- and I'd run out of my office reading it out loud to anyone I could find.
I devoted myself -- and as much space in ROLLING STONE pages as he ever asked for -- gladly and lovingly, with appreciation and gratitude. Editing Hunter required stamina, but I was young, and this was once in a lifetime, and we were both clear on that.
(Excerpted from RS 970, March 24, 2005)