Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (77 page)

That is a lot of money when my people start adding it up. I am making ninety-nine cents a day out of Palm Beach alone, and ten times that much from Miami. The take from New York and L.A. is so massive that my accountant won’t even discuss the numbers with me, and my agent is embarrassed by my wealth.

But not me, Jack. Not at all. I like being rich and crazy in Palm Beach on a pink Sunday morning in a new red Chrysler convertible on my way to an orgy with a magnum of French champagne and two gold-plated lesbian bimbos exposing themselves to traffic while my own song croaks from the radio and palm trees flap in the early morning wind and the local police call me “Doc” and ask after my general health when we speak to each other at stoplights on the boulevard . . .

The police are no problem in Palm Beach. We own them and they know it. They work for us, like any other servant, and most of them seem to like it. When we run out of gas in this town, we call the police and they bring it, because it is boring to run out of gas.

The rich have special problems, and running out of gas on Ocean Boulevard on the way to an orgy at six o’clock on Sunday morning is one of them. Nobody needs that. Not with naked women and huge bags of cocaine in the car. The rich love music, and we don’t want it interrupted.

A state trooper was recently arrested in Miami for trying to fuck a drunk woman on the highway, in exchange for dropping all charges. But that would not happen in Palm Beach. Drunk women roam free in this town, and they cause a lot of trouble—but one thing they don’t have to worry about, thank God, is the menace of getting pulled over and fondled by armed white trash wearing uniforms. We don’t pay these people much, but we pay them every week, and if they occasionally forget who really pays their salaries, we have ways of reminding them.

The whole west coast of Florida is full of people who got fired from responsible jobs in Palm Beach, if only because they failed to understand the nature of the Social Contract.

Which brings us back to the story, for good or ill: not everybody
who failed to understand the nature of the Social Contract has been terminally banished to the west coast. Some of them still live here—for now, at least—and every once in a while they cause problems that make headlines all over the world.

The strange and terrible case of young Roxanne Pulitzer is one of these, and that is the reason I came to Palm Beach, because I feel a bond with these people that runs deeper and stronger than mere money and orgies and drugs and witchcraft and lesbians and whiskey and red Chrysler convertibles.

Bestiality is the key to it, I think. I have always loved animals. They are different from us, and their brains are not complex, but their hearts are pure and there is usually no fat on their bodies and they will never call the police on you or take you in front of a judge or run off and hide with your money . . .

Animals don’t hire lawyers.

May 30, 1991

MEMO: FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

T
O
: Jann S. Wenner
F
ROM
: Hunter S. Thompson
D
ATE
: April 15th, 1991
S
UBJECT
: Nancy Reagan/Kitty Kelley Book Review
C
OMMENTS
: Cancel

The Taming of the Shrew

There are some things, Jann, that we know in our hearts are Ugly, and this book is one of them. It is old swill in a new bottle, a squalid tale from a squalid time that unfortunately seems to be ours. There is something weird about any calendar that has the Year of the Weasel happening thirteen times in a row.

Anyway, thanx for the review copy of Kelley’s book on Nancy. It was good for a few laughs, but not many. And there is
meaning
in it, for sure, but not much. It is an ugly, mean little package that made me feel cheap for just reading it or even holding the thing in my hands.

This book is a monument to everything low and mean in the human spirit. It is a marketing triumph for that dingbat from Simon and Schuster, but it is far too wrong and repugnant to keep around the house, and last night I had to get rid of it. My friend Semmes Luckett took it away and jammed it into a garbage compactor, along with a case of old beer bottles. He was shocked and deeply embarrassed when he
opened the book to
page 14
and saw the Nancy Davis Reagan family tree, which shows that both he and Nancy are descended from the same family of Lucketts that left Maryland and fled westward around the turn of the century, when the family name came under a cloud of scandal. “My mama never talked about it,” he said, “but she always left the room whenever
that woman
appeared on our TV set ... Good Lord, I hope she never sees this book.” He seized it off the table and stood up to leave. “Don’t worry,” he muttered. “I’ll put it where it belongs.”

Let’s give Nancy all the credit she deserves. The Democrats have lost five out of the last six presidential elections, so maybe they can learn something from this book instead of just giggling about it. Kitty Dukakis, among others, might have put this evil handbook to good use if it had been available back in 1988. But, alas . . .

If politics is the art of controlling your environment, Nancy is a master politician and probably a lot more fun to live and work and travel with than I ever suspected. She has been the Best That She Can Be, and she has come a Very Long Way for a Size 2 Anorexic Dwarf. Jesus! What if she’d looked like Marilyn Monroe?

She (allegedly) had the morals of a slut on acid and behaved like a beast while the president was stoned day and night; and all that time she was talking about remodeling the White House in the style of Dolley Madison or Grandma Moses, she was acting like Linda Lovelace and Christine Keeler and Madame Defarge all at once.

They turned the whole East Wing of the White House into a Cave of Orgies and a dope den worse than anything in Singapore ... It was horrible ... and the press never noticed. They called him John Wayne, but he was weirder than Caligula, and the weirder he got, the more the voters loved him and the more respect he got from Ted Koppel.

Lyndon LaRouche was atomized and the Deviate Reverend Jim Bakker was sent to prison for forty-five years for
just dabbling
in the kind of brazen, low-rent crimes that were apparently taken for granted and pursued with relentless zeal—day and night, 366 days of the year, in full view of the servants and the Secret Service—by the folks who lived in the White House.

Just folks. No different from you or me or the Mitchell brothers. And
they never claimed to be anything else, really. Just Good Ol’ Dutch and What’s Her Name, the maniac little sex doll who squawked openly (allegedly) with Frank Sinatra on dim-lit couches in TV studios, where she went constantly to tape public-service announcements about Just Say No.

It was a very wild act in a very fast lane, and I have to admire it for the Heaviness. It is no small thing in some circles to make headlines lewd and shocking enough to bump a new Kennedy/Palm Beach rape case off the front page of the tabloids ... That is Strong ... That is Charles Manson country.

Remember, they laughed at Thomas Edison. And don’t forget that
Deep Throat
was a box-office hit in the same years that Nancy spent grooming her mongrel stud for the Real Derby, the biggest race of them all . . . and They Won!!! Twice!!!

So, never mind that review we were talking about. The book is a shitrain of old gossip and sleazy little stories that we read a long time ago and never quite believed ... for good or ill.

So what
if the former First Lady was a relentless fellatrix with the soul of a Pod and the style of a chicken in heat? She was, in her time, perhaps the highest and finest expression of the American Dream in action ... and that is worth noting. Some people are Born to Win and others are spewed out like tadpoles. This is all ye know and all ye need to know—except that weasels speak English and God is a King Snake, and if Kitty Kelley and Nancy Reagan are what America is all about these days, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

But not here. I am glad to be rid of this book. It is like a bracing dose of ether on Monday Night in a Crack House. The very sight of it fills me with queasiness and shame. To read it and believe that it might be True is to wallow in the depths of personal and professional degradation.

Okay. That’s about it, for now. Never send me a book like this again.

Thanx,

Hunter

Res ipsa loquitur.

__ __ __ __

In 1991 Hunter, seemingly spontaneously and after a lengthy hiatus from long-form writing, began faxing large chunks of copy—or “pages,” as he referred to them, always “pages”—to the office. I was lucky enough to be on the receiving end of these pages, and ritually read them aloud to my boss, Bob Love, and whoever else might gather around. The story that began to emerge was both simple and complex, hilarious and disturbing; essentially, it involved Hunter witnessing a car crash in the Nevada desert and finding that the man driving the car was Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas—who at the time was still sitting for his controversial Senate confirmation hearings amidst allegations of sexual harassment. Hunter and “the Judge”—who was traveling with two hookers—essentially fled, and spent the rest of the story locked in a twisted cat-and-mouse game with both each other and the long arm of the law. But to describe what became “Elko” as a story about Clarence Thomas is like calling the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry, Baby” a song about a drag race: technically correct, but short on inspiration.

—Corey Seymour

Letter from JSW to HST

October 29, 1991

VIA FAX
Hunter S. Thompson
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, CO 81656

Dear Hunter:

Time is running short and I’m getting worried. You have one big insert to write and a couple of transitions and it all has to be done this week.

Please call me asap.

All the best,
Jann

JSW/mm

Letter from HST assistant Deborah Fuller to JSW

2:32 pm
Tuesday 10.29.91

To: Jann
From: HST

OK—HERE ARE THE FIRST 5 PAGES/RAW COPY (OF THE 8 OR 9 PAGES) HUNTER HAS COLLAPSED FROM FATIGUE.

THE OTHER PAGES WILL BE FAXED OVER WITHIN THE HALF HOUR.

Best.
Deborah

Letter from JSW to HST

October 30, 1991

VIA FAX
Hunter S. Thompson
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, CO 81656

Dear Hunter:

Get out of the car. Get off the road. I know how you drive. Do the hotel scene. Without this, we don’t have a piece. There are two nights left.

Call me when you get up.

No more driving. Orgy, please.

Best,
Jann

JSW/mm

Letter from JSW to HST

November 1, 1991

VIA FAX
Hunter S. Thompson
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, CO 81656

Dear Hunter:

Keep going. It continues to be terrific stuff. You still have to get us to Leach at the trailer court and then, escape from Elko, i.e., the airport farewell, which needs to be pretty brief.

We’re almost home.

Love,
Jann

JSW/mm

Letter from HST to JSW

Friday 11/1/91

Dear Jann,

There is no hope for the satisfied mind. We all know that—but it don’t worry us, eh? Or not me, anyway. No. My problem is a Diseased mind, and a body so wracked with death-germs & festering, backed-up poisons that I can barely speak or talk or even think in a straight line for more than 40 or 50 seconds at a time ... Yes. I am deeply Sick & Wrong in many basic functions. Cazart!

For this reason I must know immediately if the Real Deadline for this Elko piece is NOW or next week or maybe sometime in March, when I expect to be recovered ... I can get it finished & roughly wrapped by Sunday, but that will be a nasty drain on my health & it will also require some Skilled edit/assistance from yr. end. Ho, Ho. As in SUBHEADS, Bridges, Continuity, etc. If you know what I’m saying. Yes. So pls. let me know instantly on this, so I won’t have to destroy what remains of my fragile health for nothing. Please.