Playboy - Hunter S. Thompson: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview)

Hunter S. Thompson, November 1974

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and for the past 15 years has worked as a freelance writer. He began it all in the Air Force by lying his way into a job as sports editor of the base newspaper. He was fired and threatened with duty in Iceland when his superiors discovered that he was also writing about sports for a civilian paper under another name. After he was discharged, he took writing jobs and was fired from them in Pennsylvania (for destroying his editors car), in Middletown, New York (where he insulted an advertiser and kicked a candy machine to death), at Time magazine (for his attitude) and in Puerto Rico, where the bowling magazine he was working for failed and he decided to give up journalism. He moved to Big Sur, where his wife, Sandy, made motel beds while he wrote a novel that was never published.

His first real success as a writer came when he moved to South America and began sending stories on tin miners, jungle bandits and smugglers back to The National Observer, which was printing them on the front page and paying him well for them. He continued to write for it when he returned to the States but quit finally in a bitter dispute with his editors over coverage of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. After another try at a novel, this time in San Francisco, he wrote a story for The Nation on a gang of motorcycle outlaws that he turned into his first book, Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. He continued to write for magazines, developing his wide-open, often-criticized style. Then, in 1971, he turned two abortive magazine assignments into a stunning romp called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, which earned him an almost immediate reputation as one of the toughest and funniest writers in America.

Since then, he has written about football and power politics for Rolling Stone and his dispatches written during the 1972 presidential campaign became his third book, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 72.

Early in the year, Playboy sent Craig Vetter to interview Thompson. Vetters report:

This interview was hammered and stitched together over seven months, on the road, mostly, in Mexico and Washington, San Clemente and Colorado, and as I write this, we are in Chicago, where tornado warnings are out, and we are up against a hellfire deadline that has me seeing ghosts and has Dr. Thompson locked in a penthouse full of mirrors on the 20th floor of an Astor Street high-rise. He has the heavy steel window louvers cranked shut, there is a lamp behind him that has had its neck snapped off and he is bent over a coffee table cursing. We are trying to salvage this interview, making changes, corrections, additionsall of them unnecessary until nine days ago, when Richard Nixon quit. Thompson is mumbling that the motor control in his pen hand is failing and he is not kidding. You cant read his Rs anymore and all five vowels may become illegible soon. We might have finished this thing like gentlemen, except for Richard Nixon, who might as well have sent the plumbers unit to torch the entire second half, the political half, of the manuscript we have worked on so long. All of it has had to be redone in the past few sleepless days and it has broken the spirit of nearly everyone even vaguely involved.

Thompson is no stranger to this sort of madness. In fact, he has more than once turned scenes like this into art: gonzo journalism, his own wild and dangerous invention, was born in the fires of a nearly hopeless deadline crisis and although no one can storm his demons and win every time out, the mad and speedy doctor does it more often and with more humor than any other journalist working today. Hes still talking to himself over there, chewing on his cigarette holder, and a few minutes ago he said, When this is over, Im going back to Colorado and sleep like an animal, and he wasnt kidding about that, either. Because for the past two weeks, Nixons last few weeks, Thompson has suffered and gone sleepless in Washington with another deadline on an impeachment story that was finally burned to a cinder by the same firestorm that gutted the White House. Finally it has been too much even for the man they call the quintessential outlaw journalist. We have been forced over the course of this epic to use certain drugs in such quantity that he has terminated his personal drug research for good and in the same desperate fit, he has severed all connection with national politics and is returning, for new forms of energy, to his roots.

Were well into the 30th hour now and there wont be many more, no matter what. Thompson is working over his last few answers, still talking to himself, and I think I just heard him say, The rest will have to be done by God, which may mean that he is finished.

And though this long and killing project is ending here in desperate, guilty, short-tempered ugliness, it began all those months ago, far from this garden of agony, on a sunshine island in the Caribbean where Thompson and Sandy and I had gone to begin taping.

The first time I turned on the tape recorder, we were sitting on a sea wall, in damp, salty bathing suits, under palm trees. It was warm, Nixon was still our president and Thompson was sucking up bloody marys, vegetables and all, and he had just paid a young newsboy bandit almost one dollar American for a paper that would have cost a straighter, more sober person 24 cents.

Playboy: You just paid as much for your morning paper as you might for a good hit of mescaline. Are you a news junkie, too?

Thompson: Yeah, I must have the news. One of these mornings, Im gonna buy a paper with a big black headline that says, Richard Nixon Committed Suicide Last Night. Jesuscan you imagine that rush?

Playboy: Do you get off on politics the same way you get off on drugs?

Thompson: Sometimes. It depends on the politics, depends on the drugsthere are different kinds of highs. I had this same discussion in Mexico City one night with a guy who wanted me to do Zihuatanejo with him and get stoned for about 10 days on the finest flower tops to be had in all of Mexico. But I told him I couldnt do that; I had to be back in Washington.

Playboy: That doesnt exactly fit your image as the drug-crazed outlaw journalist. Are you saying youd rather have been in the capital, covering the Senate Watergate hearings or the House Judiciary Committee debate on Nixons impeachment, than stoned on the beach in Mexico with a bunch of freaks?

Thompson: Wellit depends on the timing. On Wednesday, I might want to go to Washington; on Thursday, I might want to go to Zihuatanejo.