For the drug-devouring, gunslinging godfather of of Gonzo journalism, there was only one way out of this world - a bullet in his brain. Blinking through the aftermath of Thompson's smoking-barrel suicide, Robert Chalmers joined Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn et al for Hunter's intimate, invite-only memorial bash and raised a defiant fist to a great American maverick.
"Hunter S Thompson f***ed up my life.” So begins the eulogy delivered by Ralph Steadman, Thompson's longtime collaborator, to the invited audience of friends and family at the writer's memorial service, in Aspen, Colorado."He was a bastard," Steadman continues. "But he was a good bastard. I used to tell him he was a fraud," the artist says, recalling Hunter's perennial threats to blow his brains out. "I am deeply sorry that I was wrong."
Steadman's opening line was a last-minute improvisation, fuelled by Flying Dog Ale and Courvoisier, and replaced the introduction he'd prepared earlier.
"The first words I will say," he had told me, as we drove to the function, "will be: ‘Are there any other rich bastards in this room?’ At which point I will raise my arm and you must raise yours too. Because if nobody else in the room puts their hand up, the next line won't work."
Halfway through his speech, Steadman suddenly remembers his original opening. "Are there any other rich bastards in this room?" he asks, staring pointedly at my table. I raise my right arm. No other hand goes up. Steadman pauses, stares into space, then forgets to deliver his punch line, drifting instead into an unrelated anecdote about horses, leaving me with my hand in the air, in my £17.99 Gap shirt, while certain fellow guests - without turning my head I can see Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, Jack Nicholson and Benicio Del Toro - stare at me as if I have taken leave of my senses. It is one of the less comfortable moments of my life.
It's a little over two weeks since Hunter S Thompson, sitting at his desk in the kitchen at Owl Farm, picked up his .45, put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was 67. His suicide, as Steadman says, was not entirely unpredictable.
The writer, who had been in a wheelchair for much of the previous two years following spinal surgery, always made it clear that, rather than dwindle away in a nursing home, he would prefer to exit in the manner of his hero Ernest Hemingway, whose chalet Thompson visited after the author of The Old Man And The Sea turned a shotgun on himself in Idaho, in 1961.
But Thompson's suicide was rendered shocking, even to those who knew him, when reports revealed that his son, Juan, daughter-in-law, Jennifer, and their seven-year-old son, Will, were in the next room when the shot was fired, and that Thompson was on the phone to his wife, Anita - his former research assistant, 35 years his junior - immediately before he pulled the trigger. Juan, hearing what sounded like "a large book" falling, entered the kitchen and, having made sure that his son was shielded from the scene, wrapped his father's body in gold scarves then walked out and fired a shotgun into the air.
The venue for Hunter S Thompson's wake is the ballroom of the Hotel Jerome, his favourite haunt in Aspen.
I realised just how unusual this night was going to be when, approaching the upstairs foyer, I became aware of something I have never seen on any previous visit to this town — tobacco smoke inside a hotel: along-forgotten phenomenon in Aspen, where lighting a cigarette on public premises has much the same effect as discharging a firearm.
"Given the nature of the guestlist," says one of the security staff," we preferred not to force people to Smoke in the street."
How is it a person who sometimes behaved like a deranged beast can have acquired such a sensitive and engaging circle of family and friends?
Inside the ballroom, 200 or so diners are seated around circular tables. In one corner is a shrine dominated by a life-sized photograph of Thompson. He stares down, a half-smile on his lips, as though observing his ultimate joke at our expense. Screens mounted on the walls show footage from films including Wayne Ewing's 2003 production Breakfast With Hunter and Nigel Finch's 1978 BBC Arena special on the writer. Finch's film ends with a scene in which Thompson and Steadman visit a bemused undertaker, and explain the writer's instructions for the dispersal of his remains: he wishes to have his ashes fired from a mortar housed in a large replica of a Gonzo fist, mounted on a 150ft steel tower, anchored in a 100ft pile of rocks. He wants the edifice built on the land at the back of Owl Farm, and the final detonation to be followed by Bob Dylan singing 'Mr Tambourine Man'. This proposal, which began as a piece of Surreal mischief, is a stipulation in Thompson's will.
The ballroom has a small stage with a single microphone. Thompson's favourite music is playing: 'Walk On The Wild Side', 'Will The Circle Be Unbroken?', Warren Zevon's 'Hula-Hula Boys'. The event, whose location is a secret, is guarded and will not be filmed.
Dr Hunter S Thompson was — as Ralph Steadman used to warn strangers — not a medical practitioner. His title was a self-awarded doctorate in Gonzo journalism: the term he used to describe his rambling, drug-fuelled, Sublime pieces in which abuse and profanity are as common as love and redemption in the gospel of St John.
In his 1971 masterpiece, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, Thompson took the Wodehousian bachelor's blithe and adventurous attitude to alcohol and extended it to LSD and munitions. He had a lifelong attraction to firearms and tear gas, and a history of igniting marine flares in situations of no obvious nautical emergency (he detonated one in a Manhattan pizzeria while he was having lunch with Tom Wolfe). Once he had established his international reputation, Thompson brought the hubris of a delinquent rock guitarist to the normally sedate world of American letters.
Every major figure from his life is present at the Jerome-Anita; his first wife, Sandy, with her son, Juan, and daughter-in-law, Jennifer; Hunter's brother Davidson, and Deborah Fuller, for many years his protector and confidante. Side by side with the Hollywood stars Thompson liked to Cultivate are neighbours, waiters from his local bar (the infamous Woody Creek Tavern) and people who helped him in his many campaigns, notably his efforts to free Lisl Auman, a Colorado woman convicted of murder after a companion shot a police officer. (Auman, now 29, who has spent almost ten years in prison, had no criminal record and was handcuffed and in a police car at the time of the Crime.)
Tonight sees the launch of the Hunter S Thompson Foundation, a charity which will seek to defend the victims of miscarriages of justice — beginning with Auman — defend civil rights and encourage young Writers. (The first of what will be an annual festival, celebrating Thompson's life and work, is due to be held in Aspen on 20 August 2005).
Johnny Depp walks over to the small stage and prepares to read his favourite pașage from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Depp played Raoul Duke — a character inspired by the more deviant aspects of Thompson's own personality in Terry Gilliam's 1998 film of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. By way of preparation for the role, the actor — who, like Thompson, was born in Kentucky - spent weeks sleeping in the downstairs bedroom at Owl Farm, observing the author, who referred to him as "Colonel Depp". The two men formed a deep and lasting friendship.
Returning to the pages of Fear And Loathing, Depp says, reminds him how "like many of us - probably most of us - here tonight, I was forced, almost at gunpoint, to read from Hunter's work". As Thompson listened, Depp adds — accurately, in my experience - the author liked to mutter encouragement at your shoulder: "Louder... Slower... Shit... Yes... No. F*** you."
For all that, says Depp, “I had that feeling that we all feel, still. That you would never ever want to let the motherf***er down. Ever. On any level. "You could strike sparks anywhere..." he reads. "We had all the momentum; We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
Depp is currently preparing a film of Thompson's novel, The Rum Diary, starring Josh Hartnett, who is also here tonight. Other projects in various stages of development include The Curse Of Lono - an adaptation of Thompson and Steadman's unique take on the Honolulu Marathon - starring Sean Penn and Jack Nicholson. The idea of a screen version of Hell's Angels, Hunter's book on his alarming experiences with the Oakland chapter, is reported to be occupying John Cusack.
This evening at the Jerome has witnesses from every stage of Thompson's life, from his first attempts at writing, brilliantly recalled by novelist William Kennedy, to his increasingly chaotic later years, evoked by close companions such as attorney Gerry Goldstein, and Aspen's sheriff, Bob Braudis, who supervised the removal of Thompson's body from Owl Farm. Braudis and Goldstein were two of the few friends who managed to keep pace with his frenetic socialising after the point, as one of the author's friends put it, that "Hunter's fun button had got stuck on hold".
"Some years ago," declares the actor Bill Murray, who played Hunter in the 1980 film Where The Buffalo Roam, and follows Depp on stage, "after I'd been staying with Hunter in Aspen, I came back home and I said to my wife: "Honey, Hunter has told me about this big ranch. It's got five acres of land and it's right next to his place. It's only $850,000". And she said: "I will never live next door to Hunter S Thompson".
"Anyhow," Murray shrugs, then adds, with a look of indifference: "She's gone now." Apparently unaware of the laughter around the room, he bows his head. When he raises it, his face has an expression of a man overcome by a sudden realisation of irretrievable loss. "God," Murray says, "I would be so rich if I had bought that ranch. I would be so f***ing rich, I would ask you all to leave. Right now."
Once you have played Hunter, Bill Murray tells Johnny Depp, you can never quite get him out of your system. It's a perceptive observation borne out by Pirates Of The Caribbean: much as Depp famously used Keith Richards as his model, there are certain facets of his glorious performance - the berserk yet penetrating stare; the wild gesticulations - that came straight from Owl Farm.
The party, hosted by Hunter's literary editor, Doug Brinkley, lasts more than four hours. Sean Penn shares his recollections of a whisky-fuelled trip he took to Hawaii, with Hunter and Penn's family. After being introduced to Thompson, Penn recalls, his young daughter waited until the writer had left the room, then turned to her father and said: "Daddy - what is wrong with him?" .
The greatest contributions to the memorial come not from celebrities but from Thompson's friends and immediate family: there are intense, moving speeches from Juan and Jennifer and from Anita, who begins by reading part of a letter Hunter sent her in March 2003. "I will always be with you," he wrote. "Always. Never doubt it. Never be afraid of anything, no matter how weird it might seem at the time. We are far beyond 'seems' and we have no fear... only moments of confusion, now and then."
It has been assumed by some - because of her age and the way she looks - that Anita Thompson is a gold-digger of the old school. The real woman is smart, funny and engaging, and worked closely with Thompson before they married in April 2003.
"My own feeling is that before Hunter shot himself, he was absolutely confident that he was leaving his legacy in safe hands, in the form of Anita and his family," Steadman tells me. "I even think that the circumstances of his suicide, with Juan close by, were calculated to ensure that the immediate trauma would be dealt with as he would have wished."
Thompson's son is a calm, eminently sensible man of 40, who has inherited his father's courage, intelligence and facility with words, but not his volatility.
"Hunter trusted Juan implicitly." Steadman goes on. "He knew that he would not panic and he'd handle things properly."
His wake encapsulates one of the central mysteries of Hunter S Thompson - a far more complex character than the cartoon drunk he often felt obliged to impersonate in public. This was a man who - even by the accounts of those who cherished him most dearly (a constituency unquestionably led by himself) - periodically behaved like a deranged beast. How is it such a person can have acquired such a sensitive and engaging circle of family and friends? A group of people who, with a few exceptions, reflect the contemplative, brilliant, considerate individual that Thompson was capable of being?
At my table is Thompson's journalistic mentor, Rolling Stones editor Jann Wenner, a man I have always assumed to be emotionally bulletproof. At several points in the evening Wenner is, as one fellow guest put it, “visibly struggling to hold it together".
Wenner says he believes Thompson to be "a comic genius, the Mark Twain of our times". It is true that Thompson's work was uneven — especially in his later years — but if you doubt his abilities as a satirist you might look up his obituary of Richard Nixon, delivered from the Jerome stage by his friend Shelby Sadler, who is a former speechwriter for George Bush Sr.
"Richard Nixon was the real thing," Sadler reads. "He had the unique ability to make his own enemies seem honourable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together. Nixon laughed when I told him this. T, too, am a family man, he said, 'and we feel the same way about you."
Hunter's friends are characterised by a sense of humour, moral commitment and — it has to be said — an unusual capacity to forgive. On this trip Steadman and I are staying in a cabin next door to Deborah Fuller. Shot by Hunter five years ago ("I mistook her for a bear"), Deborah, who still has pellets embedded in her flesh, remains deeply loyal to him. At his memorial service, one of the loudest rounds of applause went to the writer's first wife, Sandy, who began her brief speech by saying: "I want to thank, honour and acknowledge all the women who ever loved him." [Wild cheers in female voices]. "And there were a lot of us."
After the party at the Jerome, I leave with Steadman for the house of Thompson's longtime companion Gerry Goldstein. One of North America's most feared criminal defence S, Goldstein is a vigorous socialiser who, even at 3am — as befits the man hosting Gonzo's final thrash — is in the highly animated state that the French describe with the phrase "farting fire". His farewell soiree for Thompson is a function worthy of Jay Gatsby: fine wines, wonderful food, and a few dozen eloquent, fascinating (and, in some cases, hammered) guests, gathered in a large house bathed in candlelight.
A couple of hours before dawn, Steadman is drawing a typically vicious portrait of Benicio Del Toro, who listens patiently while I make the admittedly debatable case that the best production the actor has ever been involved with was the obscure 1997 film Excess Baggage. Afterwards I find Steadman completing another savage caricature, this time of John Cusack.
"What worries me about you," Steadman (age: 69, weight: 180lbs) tells his sitter, "is that you appear to be letting yourself go, physically. You should get a grip on yourself. You have to get in shape. You need to work out; you need to get your body more... how should I put it..." “Like yours?” the star of High Fidelity inquires, good-naturedly. “Precisely”, Steadman says. Also at the party is Thompson's friend and neighbour Bob Rafelson, director of *Five Easy Pieces *and Blood And Wine. Rafelson says he was attending a celebration in his own honour on the evening of 20 February, when he got a call to say that Hunter was dead.
Once the formalities had been completed by the coroner, Thompson's family, friends and some deputy sheriffs gathered around the body and read from his works. The hearse was waiting outside when Rafelson and his wife, Gaby, arrived. The director unzipped the body bag, looked Thompson in the face and said: "Hunter, you sure knew how to f*** up my birthday party." Somebody asks Rafelson how Thompson looked. "Surprised," he replies. "He looked surprised."
Before the vehicle left, Juan put a ghetto blaster next to the body, playing 'Where Were You When The Fun Stopped?', an EMI compilation of his father's favourite songs. Hunter set off for the mortuary to the accompaniment of Robert Mitchum singing: "Thunder was his engine, and white lightning was his load."
Nobody would say that Hunter S Thompson was the easiest of interviewees. It was a combination of things, really: the ubiquitous firearms and narcotics, his nocturnal regime and sudden mood swings. ("Interviewing Hunter,” Loren Jenkins — *Newsweek *bureau chief in Saigon, currently in Baghdad — told me, “was the most excruciating experience of my life.”)
I first encountered Thompson in 1993 when I was working for The Observer, which had decided to send him to join the Royal press corps for the Highland Games met him at Gatwick Airport at 6am. He lit his hash pipe while we were still in sight of the customs hall and insisted on being driven to Smithfield Market for whisky. When we reached his hotel, he barricaded himself in his suite for 36 hours, then fled back to Aspen in the middle of the night. His subsequent faxes referred to me as an "evil treacherous dingbat" and a "weird limey freak".
"Insults," says Ralph Steadman, "are Hunter's way of articulating affection."
I have made several trips to Owl Farm with Steadman, the first in 1996. At one point on that visit, Hunter's brutal behaviour had the British artist in tears. At the same time Steadman was one of the very few people who really understood Thompson, and there can be no example in modern times of an artist and writer whose grotesque visions of the world have collided so successfully.
The two men's relationship was a curious one, to say the least. The quietly spoken Welshman contributed generosity, patience and good humour. Thompson responded with theatrical abuse that sometimes crossed over into malice.
They first met in 1970, assigned to cover the Kentucky Derby. On a second excursion — a report on the America's Cup race at Newport, Rhode Island, later the same year — Steadman began to feel seasick aboard their yacht, and asked if he could have one of the tablets of psilocybin (a powerful hallucinogen similar in effect to LSD) that Thompson had been swallowing like Smarties. An hour later, Steadman was in a rowing boat with an aerosol in his hand, seeing red dogs in the ocean, urging Thompson, whose shoes had gone overboard, to row faster so that he could spray the words "F*** The Pope" on the hull of the Australian challenger, Gretel II.
The following day, Steadman landed at New York's La Guardia airport, where he entered the baggage hall with no shirt, shoes or socks, hallucinating. ("I told him it was common for people to wander around New York barefoot." Thompson wrote later. "How would he know? He was British. I told him the really fastidious ones wore black socks. Maybe he didn't believe me, but by then I had his shoes on my feet.") Their relationship resembled that of brothers, with all the intuitive understanding and potential meanness that such a bond can bring.
The last time I saw Hunter alive was on my last visit to Aspen with Steadman, just before the November 2004 presidential election. One afternoon on that trip we'd called in at Owl Farm around 2pm — four hours before Dr Thompson usually rose. We passed Anita, whose relationship with her husband in those last few months was troubled, to say the least. She was leaving to spend a week at her mother's.
We woke the doctor up, and his housekeeper laid out his usual requirements for breakfast: orange juice, coffee, hash pipe, Dunhill cigarettes, a half-pint tumbler of Chivas Regal on ice and a small black bowl filled with cocaine.
I took out a tape recorder and Thompson settled into a quiet, almost trance-like state. He was able to walk unaided, but was physically weak, and wore only a dressing gown. In what would be his last major interview, he gave an extraordinary, bravura performance when I asked him his opinion of George W Bush.
Before replying he consulted not, as I'd expected, the political section of his vast library, but the shelves devoted to legal studies. He retrieved a large volume entitled Black's Law Dictionary, opened it and began to read: "Imbecility: a more or less advanced feebleness of the intellectual faculties. Are you with me so far? That weakness of mind which, without depriving the person entirely of his reason, leaves only the faculty of conceiving the most common and ordinary ideas. It varies in degree from merely excessive folly to an almost total vacuity of mind. That's our boy."
The subheadings under "Insanity" in 'Black’s', Thompson explained, "define the legal, not the medical, condition of madness. I chose imbecility just now but there is also... let's see now…'Derangement: manifested by delusions, incapacity to reason, or by uncontrollable impulses.' Sh**, yes. 'In law, such a want of intelligence as prevents a man from comprehending the nature and consequences of his acts."
"Ronald Reagan..." Steadman ventured.
"Well." Thompson said, "Reagan was out of his mind. Although I always had a soft spot for him, because he started as a sports writer and his wife gave the best head in Hollywood."
Thompson returned to his dictionary. "Dipsomania...Pyromania. George knows all about those…’Mania Fanatica: a form of insanity characterised by a morbid state of religious feeling’. Need I go on?"
The worst thing about Bush, he added, was that "nobody now gives the United States any respect, apart from a handful of fascist Brits and that simpering little whore Tony Blair.”
Throughout this conversation, Thompson was sitting in his chair at the kitchen table, the position in which he would eventually shoot himself. On one wall — then as now — was a notice filched from a theatre foyer, which reads: "Gunshots Will Be Heard During This Performance." On the fridge, a handwritten sheet of A4 saying: "Never Call 911. Never. This means you. HST,"
On my first visit to Owl Farm, I reminded Hunter, I had asked him if he had ever contemplated suicide."From the very beginning," he had replied. "Always. But if I had tried it, I certainly would have succeeded."
Now - eleven years after we first met — I told him, I still found myself marvelling, in idle moments, that Hunter S Thompson was still alive. Did he have that experience?
"Sure I do," Thompson had replied. "Repeatedly. I never figured I would live past 30."
In my strongest memory of the last night I saw him alive, Thompson had half an eye on a late-night erotic movie, while polishing a ceremonial sword with impregnated cotton wipes from a tin inscribed with the brand name: "Never Dull".
The day after the party at Gerry Goldstein's, at the crack of noon, I wake to the sound of Steadman pouring a small glass of white wine. I remind the artist how, as we pulled away from Owl Farm after that last meeting with Thompson back in October, he turned to me and said, "You know, I think this could be the last time — the last time we ever see Hunter alive."
"I remember that well," says Steadman. "It was an instinctive feeling, it overwhelmed me. I just didn't think it would happen quite so soon."
That afternoon, we drive over to Owl Farm again. A group of ten or so people, including Anita, Depp, Cusack and Del Toro, are trying to decide which part of the fields to the rear of Hunter's property might best accommodate the huge steel monument.
The kitchen is exactly as it always was, with one significant difference. Steadman examines the bullet hole, which has made one hell of a mess of Thompson's cooker hood.
"It's funny," the artist says. "I always thought that he must be fundamentally decent, because he kept white wine in the house."
Juan is with Hunter's lawyers downstairs, beginning the painful process of sorting through his archives. Depp and Del Toro lend a hand shifting boxes. Their gesture is symptomatic of the atmosphere at Owl Farm, which is utterly devoid of celebrity posturing: these people had to highest regard for Hunter, and knew him well. "He was," as Depp puts it, "without question, the most loyal and present friend I have ever had the honour of knowing."
Depp has accepted the unenviable task of co-ordinating the scheme to erect Thompson's monument. He's brought a prototype of the awesome structure, five-feet high and built to scale, which is mounted on a plinth in the living room, half-concealed by a blue and yellow Kentucky state flag.
The model is finely crafted and detailed, down to the clothes worn by the tiny human figures which cluster around the base of the tubular steel monolith. Anita presses a button, starting a mechanism which plays Norman Greenbaum's 'Spirit In The Sky', and automatically draws away the flag, revealing, to great applause, a gentle lightblinking from the green and whitefist at the top of the tower.
Later, after the actors and the lawyers have left, and the sun has gone down, Anita props a large photo of Thompson against the fridge. "I keep thinking he's going to come back," she says. "And about how I'm going to tell him all about this day, and about all the people who came around, and how much he will enjoy hearing about it." I tell her how calm, perceptive and insightful Hunter had been when we were last here, by contrast with his obvious physical discomfort.
"I did ask for an autopsy on his brain," Anita says. "I just wanted to know that it was OK. They told me that it was a beautiful, healthy brain. There was no sign of damage from alcohol or drugs."
At the end of the evening, she plays the Nigel Finch Arena documentary, where Thompson and Steadman are sketching out the memorial tower for the undertaker. When the film finishes, Anita starts it again, as if she can't accept that it is over.
I come back to Aspen alone, a few weeks later, and drop in at the office of Pitkin County Sheriff, Bob Braudis. Braudis has the kind of huge, muscular frame that makes you wonder why he could possibly require any supplementary assistance (such as other deputies, vehicles or weapons) to help him enforce law in Aspen. But his intimidating physique gives little clue to the character of a man who has brought dignity, intelligence and great imagination to his role in public office.
Braudis was called personally by Juan Thompson immediately after his father's suicide, and the sheriff arrived at Owl Farm shortly after the ambulance. The day before he killed himself, Hunter had fired a pellet gun at Anita, narrowly missing her: a gesture which provoked an understandably robust response from his wife, through the two had reconciled the differences over the incident before Hunter died.
All kinds of rumours have been circulating about his death. According to one story, Hunter left a suicide note that read: "It is my decision. My body is letting me down. I made a fool of myself. Relax. It won't hurt.”
There was no note, says Braudis. "I was in a state of shock that night," the sheriff recalls. "It took me weeks to deal with my own grief."
I drive up to Owl Farm, where protective tape has been stretched across the bookshelves which already makes Anita's home feel like a museum. Her mother Barbara has made it four-hour drive from her home in Fort Collins, Colorado, to take care of her. I drive Anita the few miles from Owl Farm to the Jerome."It has eventually sunk in," she says, as we sit down for dinner, "that he won't be coming back. I dressed his body. But even so, I was certain, in the back of my mind, that he was coming back."
For those of us who were connected to Hunter in a peripheral way, his suici less appalling than it should have been, less horrific than if he'd died of heart failure or in a car crash.
"Well, people tend to forget that Hunter had a son," Anita replies, "and a daughter-in law, and a grandson and a wife, and that all of these people loved him very dearly. There were two sides to him. At the same time," she adds, referring to the decisive manner of his death, "he did have balls of gold."
"I remember him once telling me that, as a young man, he used to type out whole chapters by Hemingway and Faulkner," I tell her, "just to see what it felt like to write those words. It's the writer's equivalent of air guitar. Just as he was desperate to live a literary life," I suggest, "he wanted a literary death."
"Yes. And I know that this was not the first time he had had a gun in his mouth," Anita says. "He has written suicide notes before."
The incident with the gun the night before he died, Anita says, was an accident. "That night I was still extremely pissed off with him that he would be so careless. And I told him so. But the next day he said, Anita, I want you to know that I would never do anything to hurt you. I stood up and said that I knew that, and I knew how much he loved me." By that time, she says, she was on her way out to the health club.
"And you were working out at the health club when you heard he had died?"
"Right. I haven't gone back since. The whole experience was like a horrible dream. It was like being underwater. This girl, Robin, found me and she said, Anita you need to check your messages and I'll sit with you while you do it. And then what I heard was Juan saying 'Anita, you need to come home. He's dead. I kept looking around for some sign to confirm that it was a dream," she says.
Their final telephone conversation had begun just after 5pm, when Anita called her husband from the parking lot of the gym. "He was tender and loving," she says, and towards the end their discussion was "routine - Hunter was talking about what he would write in his column, and asking about what I would bring home for dinner. He sounded calm. But he had picked up the handset, which was unusual." (Hunter usually answered on speakerphone.)
"Then he put the handset down, and I heard this clicking. I thought it must be the typewriter. I thought, 'OK - he's just letting me know that he is getting started. Then I hung up."
"But you realised afterwards that the clicking wasn't the typewriter," I say.
"No. He was putting in the clips."
The idea that his suicide was an impulsive and malicious gesture towards his wife is rejected by one of Thompson's closest friends.
"My understanding," he says, "was that it was a planned act of escape. The ultimate cause of Hunter's suicide was that he was physically impaired to the point of terminal frustration. He was a control freak, and he lost control."
Thompson's state of mind towards the end is reflected in his last work of fiction, a short story — illustrated by Steadman, but as yet only privately published — called Fire In The Nuts. It's a remorseful narrative about a failed author, Harrison Fieler, who is sexually impotent, requires alcohol to Write and is violent towards Women. The main character is at one stage referred to as "Ace", the nickname Will, Juan Thompson's son, used for his grandfather.
Hunter completed Fire In The Nuts in the last, pain-stricken period of his life. Yet, when I saw him last autumn, he appeared to be getting better. "He was, but he was up and down." Anita says. "After the back surgery two years ago, he had to learn to walk again, Write again, brush his hair again. Then he broke his leg and had to learn to walk yet again. He was in a wheelchair for a few months, which made him miserable. He was on painkillers. He was violent. He could be a monster, like something you have never seen." It was when the writer travelled down to New Orleans in January of this year (2005), Anita says, that his final decline began. Thompson went to meet Sean Penn and Doug Brinkley, to write an article about Penn's remake of All The King's Men. The copy never arrived.
"New Orleans was a disaster." Anita says. "Hunter went down there four days before I did. He was supposed to have assistants. But the only ones looking after him were Sean and Doug Brinkley. They are wonderful people," she adds, "but they are not care-givers." When she arrived in New Orleans, Anita discovered that Thompson had not eaten in four days.
"He was just drinking whisky. He was totally emaciated. He was in a wheelchair. As soon as I walked in the room, I thought, "This is bad."
"What did he look like?"
"As if he wasn't totally there. I got a private plane to get us home. The nurse and I gave him Gatorade. He drank that but he wouldn't eat." One of the things Hunter taught her, Anita adds, is that "bad things happen - the important thing is to recover from them. But New Orleans was different. New Orleans he never recovered from."
It was noticeable that, at the wake and the subsequent gatherings, there was a great deal of laughter as well as distress. "And with this monument project, the joke is on us, ultimately."
Aspen's planning regulations are rigorous. There is still doubt as to whether permission will be granted for even a temporary, fibreglass version of the monument, and it's doubtful that detonation will take place on the weekend of 20 August, at the Hunter S Thompson Festival, as originally intended. The festival will include a literary symposium, film screenings and, it's hoped, performances by artists including Lyle Lovett. Any money raised will go to the Hunter S Thompson Foundation.
I suggest that a more practical site for the permanent monument might be outside Colorado. One possibility, Anita says, is to build it in the Californian desert "outside Barstow".
"Johnny Depp thinks he can buy the land there," she says. "The monument would look beautiful on the edge of the desert."
Wherever the vast tower is finally erected, the eventual resting place for the Gonzo fist (which, Anita says, will be "as wide as a couch — about seven feet") will be on top of the lighthouse on the island Johnny Depp owns in the Bahamas, from where it will shine out to Sea, like a beacon.
There seems little likelihood that Hunter S Thompson's myth will be diminished by death. Aside from the forthcoming films based on his work, his novella Fire In The Nuts will be commercially published in the near future, and there is an elegant new edition of The Curse Of Lono. This last volume was originally going to have a bold introduction by actor, pugilist and bard Sean Penn.
"I don't know why," it began, "but my jaw is locked / My gaze is set / And my bladder is full / I don't know why, but my hair blows forward over my face / Christmas lights pass in my peripheral view in strobes of colour/They work into a distant V / And, I don't know why the floating Ethiopian stalks me / He stalks me/ Stalks me in a fluid gait..."
The floating Ethiopian, together with all the rest of the actor's preface (which also contains the line "I uttered only one word - diarrhoea") has now been scuttled. It's hard to know who will be more disappointed by this this editorial decision — Penn’s fans, or his enemies.
Juan Thompson, meanwhile, is working on a memoir of his father, and helping it launch the Hunter S Thompson Foundation as a charitable trust. "Any money we raise will be used to preserve my father's legacy," he told me, when we met for lunch in his home town of Denver, where I stopped on my way back from Aspen to London. "The funds will be used to promote freedom, to encourage young writers and to address cases of injustice, like Lisl Auman's."
Juan is now struggling to try to ensure that his father's inheritance — both literary and financial — does not degenerate into the kind of legal wranglings that so often bedevil great writers. Whether he will succeed is another matter. I tell Juan that I find it almost impossible that Hunter can have fathered such a tranquil, reflective man as his son.
"I guess that was just the way I handled it," he says. "I imagine that subconsciously I thought, Much as I love and respect my dad, I do not want to be like that; this is not the way I want to live."
Of the many speeches I heard at the Jerome, I tell Juan, the most dramatic and energising came from his wife, Jennifer, whose contribution ended with a magnificent rush of blood. "So," she'd told the distinguished gathering, "Hunter is gone now. His tyres were studded, and he was built for speed. He is gone. But we are still here. And I say - let's lose money on wild bets. Let's drink whisky, Let's write letters. Let's send faxes. And let's get Lisl Auman out of prison."[Wild applause.]
"Let's hand the White House to one of our own in 2008," Jennifer continued. "Let's make Hunter proud. Let's live the truth that was that wild man, and not waste his teaching. Let's set it on fire."
When I got back to England, I drove down to visit Ralph Steadman, and sat with him at a table by the swimming pool of what Hunter used to call "Steadman's Castle" in Kent. Since Thompson's death, the artist says, "everything has been a hell of a mess. It seems like everything that mattered is in the past. What we did together was a hugely significant gesture against the forces... the forces of evil, you could say. Now I just feel absolutely disappointed."
His friend's suicide, Steadman admits, has started to focus his thoughts on his own morality.
Hunter, I remind him, was constantly talking about his afterlife. "I know," Thompson once told me, "that I will be back around. You get your assignment in the great hall. It's like going to court. Your name is called, and you go to stand in front of the judges, in the great hall of karma. And you get your judgment in the form of your next assignment. Who knows?" he said. "I might be back as a three-legged dog on a Navajo Indian reservation. But I don't think that will happen."
"I'm not so sure he'll be back at all." Steadman says. "I think Hunter will find out where Richard Nixon has gone to - heaven or hell. Then he'll follow him and stay there."
"By the way," I ask him, "what was the payoff for your original opening line at the Jerome?" "Which opening line?" "Are there any other rich bastards in this room?" "Oh," says Steadman. "That. Well, what do you think it would be? Hunter S Thompson is dead. And we are all the poorer for it now."
