The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (40 page)

Thompson told his editor at the
Observer
that he planned to make Rio his home base for a while. “It is about time I lived like a human being for a change,” he wrote. Rio was cheap compared to the Andes. Thompson had friends and contacts in town, including Bob Bone, a journalist and photographer whom he’d met years before during a brief stint at a small-town newspaper in New York. He had supplementary work lined up at the
Brazil Herald
, Rio’s English-language daily paper, and within a couple of months, his girlfriend of three years, Sandy Conklin, flew down to shack up with him. Sandy arrived just days before Thompson’s trip to Paraguay and Uruguay. When he came back at the end of November, the two of them moved into a tiny and kitchenless apartment in the beachside neighborhood of Copacabana, the center of a soon-to-be-famous expatriate scene that was just then getting off the ground.

“If you talked to people back then,” Bob Bone told me, “maybe they went to Europe, but they didn’t go to South America all that much.” I talked to Bone via Skype while sitting on a flea-ridden bunk bed in the cheapest hostel in Rio—also in Copacabana and, by sheer coincidence, within a few blocks of Thompson’s old apartment building. Bone was in Rio in 1962 running an English-language business magazine for the American Chamber of Commerce. He stayed there until 1963 as well, after which he went on to a long career as a travel writer and photographer. Now in his
eighties, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is still an active contributor to a number of travel publications.

Back then, Bone said, Rio de Janeiro didn’t yet have its worldwide reputation as a beach-blanket paradise. There were Americans and Europeans floating around, of course, many of them connected to the embassy and various English-language media, and yeah, the Copacabana Palace Hotel had been a storied celebrity hangout since the 1920s. But the idealized image of sunny, seductive, sophisticated Rio only cemented itself in the American imagination with the widespread export of bossa nova music a few years later. Bossa nova was the catalyst for the worldwide Rio “brand,” and even in Brazil the swinging, jazzy take on the samba was still a new phenomenon in 1962 (the phrase means “new trend” in Portuguese). The nightclub district on Copacabana Beach was the happening heart of the nascent bossa nova scene. In fact, a month before Thompson arrived, in a club just blocks from his soon-to-be apartment, an audience of hip students and artists heard the very first rendition of a song called “The Girl from Ipanema,” which would do more to define the sultry Brazilian mystique than all of the string bikinis and cocoa butter on the Atlantic coast.

What’s more, Brazil in 1962 wasn’t yet the stable, affluent world power that it’s since become. Back then, the largest country in South America was in many ways a microcosm of the continent as a whole, characterized by sporadic violence, a roller-coaster economy, and a vast gulf between the powerful and the powerless. Thompson wrote five
Observer
articles about Brazil. Four of them covered the country’s unstable political situation, which was rapidly deteriorating as hyperinflation prompted a crisis of confidence in Brazil’s leftist, labor-aligned president, João Goulart—popularly known as “Jango.”

Is there anything sexier than hyperinflation? For all of the city’s sultry appeal, I spent my first couple of days in Rio looking into Brazil’s decidedly unsexy history of serial currency replacement. Before I left for South America, my grandmother had given me a five-cruzeiro bill, a piece of Brazilian paper money that she’d somehow picked up during the 1950s or 1960s. “Maybe you can use this?” she’d asked in a note. The bill was in pretty good shape. On its front was a mustachioed nineteenth-century diplomat named José Paranhos. On the reverse was a scene from the conquest of the Amazon. It’s a bill that was in circulation when Thompson was based in Brazil. I like to think that he was the one who brought this bill back to the States, where it somehow circulated and eventually ended up among my grandma’s keepsakes. At the time, a five-cruzeiro bill would have been worth approximately one-half of one cent. And it was dropping fast.

Brazil’s toilet-bowl spiral of inflation began in the 1950s, when government spending surged with the large-scale effort to modernize Brazilian infrastructure and industry. When Brazil financed the ground-up construction of its shiny new capital, Brasília, it did so primarily by simply printing more money. That worked well enough that the government went ahead and printed some more money to pay off its foreign debts. Later, when the state-owned railroad started losing money hand over fist, Brazil just kept on printing it in order to keep the company afloat, and when the worldwide price of coffee (then Brazil’s main export) tanked around 1959, the government made up the slack by—you guessed it—continuing to print more and more money.

These days, the only place in Rio to find a bill like the one my grandma gave me is at the National Historical Museum. I shared a subway car on my way there with
an easygoing Oregonian kid who worked night shifts at my trashy hostel in exchange for room and board. Clean and uncrowded, Rio’s subways are a delight—even the usual two-toned “doors closing” chime is replaced by a couple of mellow notes strummed bossa nova–style on an acoustic guitar. The Oregonian was off to meet a Brazilian girlfriend downtown. I told him I had big plans to check out the museum’s numismatic collection, and he looked at me like he was waiting for a punch line.

“You know, currency,” I said lamely. “Brazil has a really fascinating monetary history.”

“Nu-mis-matic collection?” he repeated, chewing on the words like they were soggy vegetables.

“Like coin collectors,” I told him. “There are a lot of people out there who take currency pretty seriously.”

He shrugged and let his hand slide down the silver subway pole. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said with obvious disinterest. “After all, they’re always killing each other over it.”

At the museum, the glass displays full of glinting coins are spread chronologically throughout the main exhibit so that visitors can follow the evolution of Brazilian currency over time. The first case I saw was filled with dullish, rough-hewn silver tokens that clinked in colonial cash registers during the sixteenth century. Many of them, said the object label, were minted in Potosí. Over the decades, they got a bit more polished and symmetrical. Eventually, they were joined by paper money, but it wasn’t until 1942 that all numismatic hell started breaking loose. That was the year that the value of Brazil’s historic currency, the real, disintegrated to the point that a new one was necessary to replace it. Thus was born the cruzeiro that my grandmother gave me, at a value of 1,000 reales to 1 cruzeiro.

And here begins what Thompson in 1963 called “one of
the worst inflationary spirals in the world,” a monetary sinkhole that just kept deepening for three decades after he left. The new cruzeiro hung in there until 1967, at which point the story starts sounding a little like an Old Testament genealogy passage. The cruzeiro begat the cruzeiro novo, at a rate of 1,000 to 1. The cruzeiro novo begat the cruzado, at 1,000:1 yet again. The cruzado begat the cruzado novo, once more worth 1,000 times its predecessor, and the cruzeiro real came after that, its value magnified once again by 1,000.

Finally, in 1994, Brazil reverted to using the real, but this time a brand-new one with a fixed value linked to the dollar. The new real was valued at 2,750 cruzeiro reales. Which means that if you fight your way back through the whole ridiculous half-century equation, a Brazilian real in the mid-1990s was worth 2.75
quintillion
of its 1941 self. No calculator of mine is up to the task of divining the value of that bill from my grandma, but suffice it to say that if she’d given me about a quadrillion of them, I might have been able to afford my subway ride back to Copacabana.

To me, the modern history of Brazilian currency nicely illustrates the fundamental nonreality of money—the act of pure invention that is ultimately the assigning and reassigning of value. But as Thompson points out, there are real-world consequences to the fluctuation of even imaginary things. In January, Thompson made the
Observer
’s front page with a story that foretold Jango’s downfall. The year before, he explained, the cost of living in Brazil had soared by 60 percent, and even the president’s allies were frustrated by the government’s inability to halt inflation. Thompson speculated in his story that Jango wouldn’t last through the end of his term.

“A revolution, even without shooting, probably would come from within the armed forces,” he predicted. “Further,
it would probably succeed; the president doesn’t have enough of the military on his side to survive a showdown.”

Which is pretty much exactly how things played out the following year. On April 1, 1964, Brazil’s army generals led a march on Rio de Janeiro, where the presidential palace and several government ministries were still located. Jango fled in exile, and the triumphant generals promised free elections within two years. Instead, the coup kicked off twenty-one years of an oppressive military dictatorship.

Needless to say, this was not the “new trend” that the young
bossanovistas
had anticipated.

“At that time, Hunter was the best reporter we had.”

So explained Bill Williamson over Skype one afternoon, the former editor and managing partner of the
Brazil Herald
from 1959 to 1979. Williamson, now in his eighties and living in Florida, hired Thompson on Bob Bone’s recommendation, just days after Thompson’s arrival in Rio. “Our correspondence showed me that he was a bit, um, flaky in some areas, but there was no question in my mind that he was a good journalist.”

The office tower that once housed the
Brazil Herald
is a painfully nondescript stone building across from the US consulate in downtown Rio. I got a look at it one afternoon on my way to the National Library, where I went to leaf through a few old issues of Williamson’s now-defunct newspaper. From an office window on the fifteenth floor, Thompson could have looked out on the spot where I was standing—a small green plaza called Praça 4 de Julho, or Fourth of July Square. He would have seen a bronze statue
of a woman holding some laurel leaves, with an inlaid bust of George Washington below, commemorating the friendship between Brazil and the United States. Maybe, I thought, he would have looked at it and thought of home.

Thompson had written to Williamson several months earlier, asking about a job, and the editor told him what he often told the stream of itinerant foreign journalists who wrote to him back in the day: The pay’s not much, but we might be able to use you—stop by when you get into town. At the time, the
Brazil Herald
had a circulation of about 7,000, mostly around Rio and São Paulo. The newsroom was run by a motley crew of a half dozen expatriates: an Austrian PhD, a couple of Russians, a British society writer. The
Herald
also leased space to CBS and a young Latin American bureau chief named Charles Kuralt, later famous for his folksy road-tripping segments on the network’s nightly news, inspired by Steinbeck’s
Travels with Charley
. Williamson took a look at Thompson’s
Observer
clips, and he was impressed enough to hire the young writer as his primary reporter, a gig that paid $100 a month. It was a respectable sum, considering Thompson’s apartment with Sandy cost only $30 a month and the
Observer
was shelling out $175 per story. During his first few months in Brazil, Thompson was living comparatively large.

“Right now,” he wrote in October of 1962, “I have more money than I can reasonably waste.”

In the periodicals room of Brazil’s National Library, I flipped through several giant bound volumes of the
Brazil Herald
. The pages had a musty, grassy smell. The
Herald
didn’t look so different from any American newspaper of its day. I spotted
Peanuts
cartoons and
Dear Abby
columns, cigarette ads and movie showtimes. The vast majority of the news stories were written without a byline. Strikes seemed
to garner a lot of ink. There were pieces on police strikes, transit strikes, and rice-growers’ strikes. One issue began with an apology for a three-day lull in publication, caused by a printers’ strike. There was also a society column covering parties and receptions for Americans and other expats. The column had a slightly glib, above-it-all tone, and I imagined it appealing to people like the British rooftop golfer and his well-connected chums. I even saw an ad promoting “lands in the Mato Grosso,” inviting
Brazil Herald
readers to invest in real estate “in the most prosperous agricultural colony, with good watering places and rich in hardwoods.”

I read several stories about Cuba, a few on the Alliance for Progress, and a handful more covering the problem of Brazilian inflation. Thompson, I realized, might have written any of them, but they were all pretty dry, just straightforward examples of no-frills news reporting. Only one article I saw really showed a glimmer of Thompson’s caustic humor and no-bullshit style, and that one had his byline on it. It was also the article that ended Thompson’s brief career at the
Brazil Herald
.

At the end of October 1962, Williamson left Rio for a conference in Chile. In his absence, he told me, he put Thompson in charge of the newsroom. That week, Thompson covered a Chamber of Commerce luncheon where a pair of visiting US senators were the guests of honor. Both of them were conservative, segregationist “Dixiecrats”—Herman Talmadge of Georgia and A. Willis Robertson of Virginia (father of batshit-crazy televangelist Pat Robertson). They were also rabid anti-Soviet alarmists and establishment relics from the Eisenhower era. On page 2 of the
Herald
’s October 23 edition, I saw a grainy black-and-white photo showing a dour-looking Senator Robertson speaking into a microphone, flanked by three identically flat-topped
men in suits, ties, and thick-framed glasses. The image was practically a caricature of 1950s Cold War conformity.