He created a new style of journalism, bequeathed us the phrase ”fear and loathing”, was played on screen by Johnny Depp and Bill Murray, kept a peacock as a watchdog and claimed to have first seen President George W Bush passed out in a bathtub in a Texas hotel.
Last Sunday night, Hunter S Thompson, at the age of 67, took his life with a gunshot to the head at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado.
The local sheriff, Bob Braudis, an old friend of Thompson’s, confirmed the death of the man who once said: ”I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone but they always worked for me.” This week Thompson’s son, Juan, who found the body, and his second wife, Anita Thompson, issued a brief statement that made clear that ”Dr Hunter S Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head”.
Locals used to the sound of gunfire from the home of the man who had ridden with the Hell’s Angels, paid tribute to his neighbourly qualities. Friends could think of no immediate reason for his action although he had been in pain after breaking a leg in Hawaii, ”executing a hairpin turn at the mini-bar”, as he put it.
Admirers around the world mourned a man who only recently described the possibility of another Bush term as ”four more years of syphilis”.
”It’s not unlike Mark Twain dying,” said cartoonist Ralph Steadman, who illustrated Thompson’s most famous books.
He said that he was puzzled as to why he had invited his son and grandson for the weekend if suicide had been on his mind.
It was as national affairs editor of Rolling Stone that Thompson achieved his international reputation as the founder of ”gonzo journalism”, a hybrid of fact and fiction, fuelled by the real or imaginary intake of drugs and alcohol.
Countless young journalists aspired to follow in his freebooting footsteps, but none has ever quite had the elan or stamina of the man portrayed as ”Duke” — one of his many pseudonyms — in the Gary Trudeau cartoon strip, Doonesbury.
The first major book was Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, his account of his time with the bikers. His best-known work was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the phrase has since become a standard headline cliché that perhaps now could be retired in his honour.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail followed, along with The Great Shark Hunt and the novel, the Rum Diary. Beneath the drug-crazed madness was one of the sanest and most moral of commentators who claimed that his special subject was ”the death of the American Dream”.
In the 1998 Terry Gilliam film, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson was portrayed by Johnny Depp, thus bringing ”gonzo” to a new generation. He was also played by Bill Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam.
But perhaps the only person who could really capture the essence of Dr T is now awaiting burial in Colorado. — Â