‘Gonzo’ journalist marched to beat of own drum
By TROY HOOPER Aspen Daily News the fortified compound known as Owl Farm after hearing what sounded like a book crashing to the floor.
Anita, the writer’s wife of almost three years, was not at home at the time. Thompson’s 6-year-old grandson, William, was the only other person in the house.
“I can’t believe it. It just doesn’t make sense that Hunter would do this. But we all know there were a lot of times Hunter didn’t seem to make sense,” said Gaylord Guenin, a Woody Creek Tavern chieftain and neighbor of Thompson who knew him for 36 years. “He was an intricate part of the valley. It takes something like this to make you sit back and really appreciate it.”
Ever since moving to the rural, funky neighborhood of Woody Creek in 1967, Thompson’s kitchen at Owl Farm served as his office, his gambling parlor, his political war room, his rehabilitation clinic and, simply, a place to hang out.
Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a regular gambling partner and close friend of Thompson’s, described the kitchen as “a salon reminiscent of Paris in the 1920s. It was full of artists, politicians, winners, losers — and Hunter made the house rules, especially when it came to wagering.”
Whatever the situation, the counterculture author known best for the 1972 classic “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” spent much of his time perched on a stool behind the kitchen counter that supported the typewriter he used to create some of his best work. In recent years, Thompson began to spend more and more time there.
He suffered a broken left leg in December 2003 at the Kahala Mandarin Oriental Hotel after he “executed a sharp turn at the mini-bar” and fell on the polished floor of his ninth-floor suite. Up until his last days, Thompson’s leg continued to plague him with pain. He also has an artificial hip and he recently had back surgery.
“I knew he was dying from a distance. It hurt him being in so much pain,” said Jimmy Ibbotson, a longtime neighbor and former singer-guitarist of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who, like others before him, had been 86’d from Thompson’s kitchen for poor behavior. Ibbotson isn’t the only one to feel Thompson’s wrath.
Behind “Keep Out” signs and the security personnel who stood guard at Owl Farm’s front gate, Thompson’s family and close friends comforted one another.
“The family is hugging, huddling and supporting each other through a difficult time. There has been literally hundreds of phone calls from friends, admirers and people all over the world,” the sheriff said.
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who has been in the midst of archiving Thompson’s material for Tulane University, was en route to Aspen on Monday night to set up a media command post for the Thompson family.
Over at the Woody Creek Tavern, one of Thompson’s favorite haunts, a grubby mix of ex-cons, alcoholics and drug addicts exchanged shots of Chivas Regal and wild stories about their famous neighbor who lived up the road.
“I haven’t ruled out this is all part of an elaborate hoax,” said Ibbotson half-jokingly. “There are times when you’ve had enough of fame.”
Talk also turned to Thompson’s fascination with firearms. He kept an arsenal of weapons in the house and enjoyed experimenting with explosives. On Super Bowl Sunday, a bomb technician from the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office had to respond to his home to remove an old, potentially explosive keg of gunpowder.
But at the end of the day, all stories led back to Thompson’s kitchen.
“Dr. Thompson indelibly transformed journalism with his gonzo flair, but we should remember that his best stuff was rooted in reporting and sharp-eyed observation,” remarked Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine and one-time chairman of CNN.
Like many in the mainstream media, Isaacson had spent time in Thompson’s kitchen, where groundbreak-ing prose flowed as freely as the whiskey and wine.
“He sure stomped the earth, but he also knew how to write sentences that, because of their deft embedded clauses and personal riffs, and the way they were juxtaposed with short declarative eruptions, had a syncopated rhythm that delighted the ear,” Isaacson said.
“He was a wonderful talent. The whole gonzo journalism thing and the idea of inserting himself into the story was something he legitimized,” agreed Larry Kramer, former Chairman and CEO of MarketWatch, now an executive for Dow Jones.
Kramer was executive editor at the San Francisco Examiner during the 1980s when Thompson was a weekly columnist for the paper.
“He made the stories more real,” said Kramer. “He was a larger-than-life character, but it really was him.... By making it so entertaining, and by making it so outrageous, he captured a very broad constituency. He did it at a time when there was a lot of social activism and he would call a spade a spade and go further. He’d say things a lot of people thought, but would never say.”
Aspen resident Tim Mooney, a former manager for musicians Jimmy Buffet and John Denver, reminisced about his times in the kitchen.
“The kitchen was the center of the family business. The nourishment was intellectual ideas: sports, gaming, current events, politics, sex, drugs and rock and roll,” said Mooney. “The family business ran 24 hours a day, eight days a week, and it was as relevant to be as close to the refrigerator and the ice machine and the toaster oven as it was to be next to the phone, next to the typewriter, next to the drawers full of the tools of the lifestyle.”
“Hunter could watch the front door and the back door at the same time. Nobody could sneak up on him. He could perch himself eye-level with a constant revolving bulletin board full of information. He was constantly re-layering his thoughts... The scene was totally controlled by Hunter because he was the one who had the deadline,” Mooney said. “Everybody else was there for amusement, either Hunter’s or their own.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 22, 2005. Read the original PDF.