‘Gonzo’ retraces Thompson’s boozy steps

THIS is a sad book -- tragic, really. Here’s an alternate subtitle: “How the Most Promising Writer of His Generation Blew His Gig.” In giving us this “oral biography” of the late Hunter S. Thompson via recollections of friends and colleagues (the most thorough portrait of Thompson thus far, it is the sixth book about him and probably not the last), Rolling Stone founder Jann S. Wenner and writer Corey Seymour -- who held Thompson’s hand as a Rolling Stone assistant editor in the ‘90s -- trace the slow spiral into infirmity and depression ending in Thompson’s suicide on Feb. 20, 2005. What “Gonzo” makes abundantly clear is that he circled the drain for a long time.

In his salad days, Thompson was a savage, gimlet-eyed observer of the (in his view) despoiled American landscape, with three classic books in relatively quick succession -- “Hell’s Angels”(1967), “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (1971) and “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72” (1973) -- and many brilliantly discursive dispatches for Rolling Stone. There was also the spirited run for sheriff in Aspen, Colo., in 1970, a near-miss yielding a couple of hilarious pieces for Wenner’s magazine. But in the mid-’70s that productive period ended. From then on, it was lots of alcohol and drugs, much ugliness all around. There was little distinctive work, save for an occasional column in the San Francisco Examiner displaying flashes of the old cynical wit. Otherwise the soused-rake persona sustained him, gave him celebrity status and a chance to hang out with movie stars. It didn’t amount to much more than a helluva good time.

According to “Gonzo,” an artfully edited mix tape of more than 100 interviews, the booze and drugs chased away the muse. Summoning indignation over some perfidious politician or social injustice wasn’t difficult for a man with a hair-trigger temper, but channeling it into writing was agonizing; instead, he railed at associates, cursed editors, philandered -- anything to avoid the blank page. Why did he give up? It wasn’t the complacency that comes from affluence; money was a constant concern, despite robust book sales. But defining the motives of someone as complex as Thompson is next to impossible. It’s wiser to do what “Gonzo” does so well: retrace his steps and let readers draw their own conclusions.

Perhaps Thompson’s emotional imbalance had to do with his bifurcated nature. He grew up an aspiring hoodlum in a lower-middle-class Louisville, Ky., household. It’s interesting to learn that he and his gang carved out quiet reading time at the local library. A brief stint in jail for a mugging fueled the 18-year-old Thompson’s sense of disenfranchisement: He felt he’d been hung out to dry while his rich thug friends got off easy. He would take a stand against authority and for individual freedom from then on.

If only he’d extended that respect to the women in his life. His longtime agent Lynn Nesbit recalls that Thompson could never reconcile his “generous heart” with his machismo. Fellow writer Tim Ferris and others say that Thompson sucked the energy from anyone in close contact with him. He liked to have comely assistants around, and some became lovers, and then jilted lovers. It was all or nothing with Thompson; either you devoted yourself to his needs or you were worthless. His first wife, Sandy, sums up their relationship thus: “Hunter was the king, and I was the slave.”

But when the going was good, it was very good, and a lot of amazing Thompson tales are retold here by eyewitnesses. To name a few: George McGovern reports on his first meeting with an insouciant Thompson on the campaign trail in 1971; illustrator Ralph Steadman recalls Thompson spraying restaurant patrons with mace at the 1970 Kentucky Derby; Pat Buchanan remembers him nearly blowing up Richard Nixon with the injudicious use of a Zippo lighter on an airport tarmac. Some of these anecdotes are a bit shopworn, but they’re well told.

Thompson could be a fabulist, but if anyone thinks his partying descriptions were overplayed, this book settles that bar bet. He was by all accounts an unrepentant booze lover, which led to a lot of hairy scenes, such as Thompson pointing a gun at various and sundry and missing them by inches, and buffoonish antics at public events.

And the words? They wouldn’t come. Assigned to cover the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire in 1974, Thompson didn’t even bother to watch it, let alone file a story.

“He was letting his energies and his talent dissipate,” says Wenner, who gave him that assignment and many others that came to nothing.

Thompson was physically infirm near the end. A spinal operation and a hip replacement laid him out; then he broke his leg and was so hobbled he had to be pushed around in a wheelchair, an enormous indignity for a man who modeled himself on Hemingway.

But he couldn’t even write two sentences in a row anymore. Wenner says that at one point he offered Thompson $10,000 for every 1,500-word column he could deliver. Still, no words appeared -- no good ones, anyway. And therein lies the tragedy.

Marc Weingarten is the author of “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote & The New Journalism Revolution.”