<http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=1O4IK4JJKT1JRQFIQMFSNAGAVCBQ0JVC?xml=/news/2005/02/22/db2201.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/02/22/ixnewstop.html> The Telegraph Hunter S Thompson (Filed: 22/02/2005) Hunter S Thompson, who shot himself on Sunday, aged 67, was the explosive, funny and frequently shocking self-styled "Mad Doctor of Gonzo Journalism". Where Tom Wolfe and the "orthodox" New Journalists were observers, Dr Thompson (he had a doctorate in Divinity, bought by mail order) cast himself as catalyst and participant, charging into situations with a headful of hallucinogens and a safari jacket weighed down with guns and bottles. His most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), concerned a trip to Vegas with his 300lb Hawaiian-shirted Samoan attorney, supposedly to cover a motorcycle race and a national drug enforcement convention. But in carrying out the assignment Thompson largely ignored both events and instead focussed on his own antics. The opening paragraph set the tone: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like: 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive... ' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" Later on Thompson remarks: "This is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted." Before becoming national affairs editor of Rolling Stone magazine in 1970 (a title he held until 1999), Thompson had worked as a freelance, writing relatively straight reports on sports and South America, plus an excellent book about the Hell's Angels (1966), some of whom became close friends, until the book appeared and they beat him up. He invented "Gonzo" journalism when he and his favourite colleague, the British cartoonist Ralph Steadman, were sent by Scanlan's Magazine to cover the 1970 Kentucky Derby (held at Thompson's home town of Louisville). Unable to produce a piece, Thompson ripped pages straight out of his notebook, numbering them and sending them to the printer. The technique was fuelled by terrifying quantities of drugs, alcohol and tobacco. He wrote later that Gonzo was "a style of 'reporting' based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism - and the best journalists have always known this". He also admitted his own work was not Gonzo, that it was all a failure because he was unable to write or report his reactions to events literally as they occurred. He said that "the writer must be participant in the the scene while he's writing it", and that such instantaneous effort was beyond him. In the 1960s and early 1970s Thompson was also celebrated for his excoriating political reporting - the writer Nelson Algren called him the finest political reporter in America, whose "hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest". Thompson's coverage of the McGovern-Nixon election in 1972 resulted in his best book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973), in which he famously characterised the Republican candidate as speaking to "the Werewolf in us, the bully, the predatory shyster". "Jesus! Where will it end?" Thompson mused. "How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?" Nixon's victory effectively brought an end to Thompson's career as a political journalist, although he became a self-confessed "Watergate junkie". While he went on to write several more extraordinary books, including The Great Shark Hunt (1980), he later became more widely known for his own bad behaviour, and as the model for Duke, the dope-addled character in the comic strip Doonesbury. Journalists who visited Thompson at his cabin discovered that it was fatal to try and drink with him. Thompson's biographer E Jean Carroll described his routine: "3pm rise. 3.05 Chivas Regal with the morning papers, Dunhills. 3.45 cocaine. 3.50 another glass of Chivas, Dunhill. 4.15 cocaine. 4.54 cocaine. 5.05 cocaine... 9pm starts snorting cocaine seriously. 10pm drops acid. 11pm Chartreuse, cocaine, grass. 11.30 cocaine, etc, etc... 12.05 to 6am Chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhills, orange juice, gin, continuous pornographic movies. In later years, the biographical note in Thompson's book described him as living as a "freelance country gentleman" and existing "in a profoundly active Balance of Terror with the local police authorities". Hunter Stockton Thompson was born at Louisville, Kentucky, on July 18 1937. His father sold insurance and died when Hunter was 14, an event that propelled the boy, so he recalled, into becoming "an outlaw". Thereafter, his mother became alcoholic and slovenly, while Hunter became a leader of his gang, and was much admired by girls. Aged 18 he was jailed for his part in a robbery, and he took a writing course in prison. On release, he joined the United States Air Force, doing sports writing for a base newspaper in Florida until his commanding officer noted that "his flair for invention and imagination" and "rebellious disregard for military dress and authority seem to rub off on the other airmen". Honourably discharged, Thompson took, and was quickly fired from, a job with the Middletown (New York) Record, then did a traineeship at Time magazine. He worked for a bowling magazine in Puerto Rico and in 1960, at least partly in emulation of Jack Kerouac, drove across country to California. While living at Big Sur, he began work on The Rum Diary, an autobiographical novel based on his beginnings as a journalist in Puerto Rico, which was eventually published in 1998. After investigating the beatnik scene in San Francisco, Thompson spent two years in South America, sending dispatches to the National Observer. Returning to San Francisco, he combined freelance journalism with driving a cab, before being commissioned by Random House to write Hell's Angels. The first reporter to meet with the Hell's Angels on their own turf instead of relying on police information, Thompson rode with them for a year. In 1963, Thompson moved to the Rockies so that he would be free to live by his own anarchic rules - among his stunts were blowing up the pool table in his local bar and driving around drunk with a glass of bourbon in hand. Not surprisingly, he deplored Aspen's subsequent fashionability, the influx of "Day-Glo fur and Manhattan chic". In a bid to "prevent the greedheads from moving in" he ran for sheriff in 1970 on a "freak politics" ticket, promising to turf the streets, rename Aspen Fat City and put dishonest marijuana dealers in the stocks. He lost by 1,533 votes to 1,068. Thereafter he resorted to "direct action", using what he called "firepower demonstrations", such as firing 50 shots from his automatic rifle over the house of an arriviste property developer. In 1990 he was accused of assaulting a former porn film actress who had come to his house to interview him. The woman, Gail Palmer-Slater, accused Thompson of "squeezing and twisting her left breast and threatening to blow her head off" after she refused to join him in his hot tub. Thompson said she was drunk, and was seeking publicity for a new range of sex aids and manuals. A police raid on the house turned up white powder, explosives, a 12-bore shotgun and a.22 calibre machine-gun. Claiming he was a victim of a revitalised police state unleashed by the Bush administration anti-drug hysteria, Thompson suggested a newspaper headline: "Life-style police raid home of crazed Gonzo journalist. Eleven-hour search by six trained investigators yields nothing but crumbs." He promised to enliven the the court case by showing the actress's movies Hot Legs and Prisoner of Paradise at the Aspen Opera House. Not that criminal proceedings interfered with his lifestyle. "The whiskey stores opened at seven, and I didn't have to be in court until ten," he wrote in Songs of the Doomed. The charges were soon dropped, after potential witnesses failed to co-operate with the prosecutors. "We beat them like stupid rats," Thompson declared. "We beat 'em like dogs." Stopping in Aspen to load his car up with beer, he then sped off, firing blanks. Fearful of "growing old and helpless", he admitted in interviews that suicide had occurred to him, saying in 1998 that he planned to fill his house with "cold liquid glass" so it was preserved forever, with him inside, "and people can come and look through the front window". Hunter S Thompson married first, in 1963, Sandra Dawn Conklin. They had a son, Juan, "and seven miscarriages". She left him in 1978. He is survived by his second wife, Anita Beymunk. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'