Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (73 page)

This is one of those private opinions of my own that even my friends in the “boxing industry” still dismiss as the flakey gibberish of a halfsmart
writer who was doing okay with things like drugs, violence, and presidential politics, but who couldn’t quite cut the mustard in
their
world.

Boxing.

These were the same people who chuckled indulgently when I said, in Las Vegas, that I’d take every bet I could get on Leon Spinks against Muhammad Ali at ten to one, and with anybody who was seriously into numbers I was ready to haggle all the way down to five to one, or maybe even four ... but even at eight to one, it was somewhere between hard and impossible to get a bet down on Spinks with anybody in Vegas who was even a fifty-fifty bet to pay off in real money.

One of the few consistent traits shared by “experts” in any field is that they will almost never bet money or anything else that might turn up in public on whatever they call their convictions. That is why they are “experts.” They have waltzed through that minefield of high-risk commitments that separates politicians from gamblers, and once you’ve reached that plateau where you can pass for an expert, the best way to stay there is to hedge all your bets, private and public, so artistically that nothing short of a thing so bizarre that it can pass for an “act of God” can damage your high-priced reputation . . .

I remember vividly, for instance, my frustration at Norman Mailer’s refusal to bet money on his almost certain conviction that George Foreman was too powerful for Muhammad Ali to cope with in Zaire ... And I also recall being slapped on the chest by an Associated Press boxing writer in Las Vegas while we were talking about the fight one afternoon at the casino bar in the Hilton. “Leon Spinks is a
dumb midget
,” he snarled in the teeth of all the other experts who’d gathered on that afternoon to get each other’s fix on the fight. “He has about as much chance of winning the heavyweight championship as
this guy
.”

“
This guy
” was me, and the AP writer emphasized his total conviction by giving me a swift backhand to the sternum ... and I thought: Well, you
dumb
loudmouth cocksucker, you’re going to remember that stupid mistake as long as you live.

And he will. I have talked to him since on this subject, and when I said I planned to quote him
absolutely verbatim
with regard to his prefight wisdom in Vegas, he seemed like a different man and said that if I was going to quote him on his outburst of public stupidity that I should
at least be fair enough to explain that he had “been with Muhammad Ali for so long and through so many wild scenes that he
simply couldn’t go against him on this one
.”

Well ...how’s
that
for equal time? It’s a hell of a lot more than you pompous big-time bullies ever even thought about giving me, and if you want to add anything else, there’s always the Letters to the Editor page in
RS
.... But the next time you whack some idle bystander in the chest with one of your deeply felt expert opinions, keep in mind that you might hit somebody who will want to insist on betting real money.

Some people write their novels and others roll high enough to live them, and some fools try to do both—but Ali can barely read, much less write, so he came to that fork in the road a long time ago, and he had the rare instinct to find that one seam in the defense that let him opt for a third choice: he would get rid of words altogether and live his own movie.

A brown Jay Gatsby—not black and with a head that would never be white: he moved from the very beginning with the same instinct that drove Gatsby—an endless fascination with that green light at the end of the pier. He had shirts for Daisy, magic leverage for Wolfsheim, a delicate and dangerously vulnerable Ali-Gatsby shuttle for Tom Buchanan, and no answers at all for Nick Carraway, the word junkie.

There are two kinds of counterpunchers in this world—one learns early to live by his reactions and quick reflexes—and the other, the one with a taste for high rolling, has the instinct to make an aggressor’s art of what is essentially the defensive, survivor’s style of the counterpuncher.

Muhammad Ali decided one day a long time ago, not long after his twenty-first birthday, that he was not only going to be King of the World
on his own turf
, but Crown Prince on
everybody else’s
...

Which is very, very
High
Thinking—even if you can’t pull it off. Most people can’t handle the action on whatever they chose or have to call their own turf; and the few who can, usually have better sense than to push their luck any further.

That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn’t entirely conquer—he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

Res ipsa loquitur
.

__ __ __ __

In 1982, after a few years of mostly false starts, failed stories, and missed deadlines, Hunter took an assignment from the magazine to cover what was shaping up to be the most scandalous and lurid divorce trial in recent history: Herbert “Peter” Pulitzer Jr. versus his estranged wife, Roxanne, in Palm Beach, Florida. “Big names in the mud, multiple sodomies, raw treachery, bad craziness—the Pulitzer gig had everything,” he wrote. Hunter embedded himself with the local culture of the idle rich, became mesmerized by both the details of the trial and what it seemed to represent (“What is a judge to make of two coke fiends who spent $441,000 last year on ‘miscellaneous and unknown’?”), and delivered a piece that announced his return to form. The fact that he became lifelong friends with Roxanne Pulitzer in the process—after describing her in the piece as like “a jaded Pan Am stewardess”—is a testament to Hunter’s legendary charm.

July 21, 1983

West Palm Beach, FLA., Dec. 28, 1982 (AP)—Herbert Pulitzer Jr., the millionaire publishing heir, won custody of his twin five-year-old sons today as a Circuit Court judge awarded less than $50,000 in alimony to Mr. Pulitzer’s wife, Roxanne.

Judge Carl Harper, citing “flagrant acts of adultery and other gross marital misconduct,” ordered the thirty-one-year-old Mrs. Pulitzer to move out of the couple’s lakefront home in Palm Beach, where she had maintained custody of the children since the separation. Judge Harper’s ruling came after an eighteen-day trial in which there had been testimony about cocaine abuse, extramarital affairs, incest, lesbianism, and late-night séances. The trial ended in November.

The decision was so aggressively harsh that even veteran courthouse reporters were shocked. “I couldn’t believe it,” one said afterward. “He whipped her like a dog.”

All history is gossip.

—Harold Conrad

There is a lot of wreckage in the fast lane these days. Not even the rich feel safe from it, and people are looking for reasons. The smart say they can’t understand it, and the dumb snort cocaine in rich discos and stomp to a feverish beat. Which is heard all over the country, or at least felt. The stomping of the rich is not a noise to be ignored in troubled times. It usually means they are feeling anxious or confused about something, and when the rich feel anxious and confused, they act like wild animals.

That is the situation in Palm Beach these days, and the natives are not happy with it. There is trouble on all fronts. Profits are down, the whole concept of personal privacy has gone up for grabs, and the president might be a fool. That is not the kind of news these people want to hear, or even think about. Municipal bonds and dividend checks are the lifeblood of this town, and the flow shall not be interrupted for any reason.

Nor shall privacy be breached. The rich have certain rules, and these are two of the big ones: maintain the privacy and the pipeline at all costs—although not necessarily in that order—it depends on the situation, they say; and everything has its price, even women.

The autumn months are slow in Palm Beach. The mansions along Ocean Boulevard are closed up and shuttered for the hurricane season, which ends sometime in December, when the rich come back to the island.

That is when the season starts, the winter social calendar. From the Patrons Opera Guild Luncheon in November at the Colony Hotel, to the premiere of the Lannan Foundation Museum in early March, the action is almost continuous: white ties and golden slippers, charity balls at the Breakers, cotillion dances at the Bath and Tennis Club, and endless cocktail parties.

“Eighty percent of the world’s wealth is here during the season,” said a local decorator one night over dinner at Dunhills in the heart of the off-season. “It’s a very exciting scene to be part of.”

The autumn months are boring, he said. But it is a nice time to be here, if you don’t mind staying inside. The sea is wild, the beach is like Norway, and relentless monsoon rains lash the island day and night. Only servants go out in this kind of weather, and the only cars on the street are people taking care of business, for good or ill.

The business of Palm Beach is business, even on a rainy day in the off-season. Despite the town’s image of terminal leisure and luxury, the people who live here are very aware of their money, and they tend to watch it carefully. Displays of naked greed are frowned on, and business is done discreetly—or, failing that, in private. Some people sell real estate, some spend all day on the telephone, raving at their brokers and
making $1,000 a minute on the stock market, and others buy fistfuls of speedy cocaine and spend their afternoons playing frantically with each other and doing their own kind of business.

There are hideous scandals occasionally—savage lawsuits over money, bizarre orgies at the Bath and Tennis Club, or some genuine outrage like a half-mad eighty-eight-year-old heiress trying to marry her teenage Cuban butler—but scandals pass like winter storms in Palm Beach, and it has been a long time since anybody got locked up for degeneracy in this town. The community is very tight, connected to the real world by only four bridges, and is as deeply mistrustful of strangers as any lost tribe in the Amazon.

The rich like their privacy, and they have a powerful sense of turf. God has given them the wisdom, they feel, to handle their own problems in their own way. In Palm Beach there is nothing so warped and horrible that it can’t be fixed, or at least tolerated, just as long as it stays in the family.

The family lives on the island, but not everybody on the island is family. The difference is very important, a main fact of life for the people who live here, and few of them misunderstand it. At least, not for long. The penalty for forgetting your place can be swift and terrible. I have friends in Palm Beach who are normally very gracious, but when word got out that I was in town asking questions about the Pulitzer divorce trial, I was shunned like a leper.

The Fastest Lane in the World

That’s the way it was last fall at the start of
Pulitzer v. Pulitzer
, and not even the worst winter rains in forty years could explain why the town was so empty of locals when Palm Beach had a world-class spectacle to fill the dull days of the off-season.

The
Miami Herald
called it the nastiest divorce trial in Palm Beach history, a scandal so foul and far reaching that half the town fled to France or Majorca for fear of being dragged into it. People who normally stay home in the fall to have all their bedrooms redecorated or to put a new roof on the boathouse found reasons to visit Brazil. The hammer
of Palm Beach justice was coming down on young Roxanne Pulitzer, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who had married the town’s most eligible bachelor a few years back and was now in the throes of divorce.

The trial was making ugly headlines all over the world, and nobody wanted to testify. Divorce is routine in Palm Beach, but this one had a very different and dangerous look to it. The whole lifestyle of the town was suddenly on trial, and prominent people were being accused of things that were not fashionable.