The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (38 page)

Hinckle agreed to retain the original lead that
Playboy
had cut, but Thompson strenuously objected when
Scanlan’s
tried to excise the last ten pages of the story; only there did he set aside the pointed barbs and sardonic set pieces and home in on his thesis about Killy being a metaphor for America’s celebrity culture worship. Hinckle, a man not prone to capitulation, relented, and the piece ran as Thompson intended.

This was a beautiful thing for Thompson, who had clashed with so many editors over editorial content and money that he had become inured to the routine. With Hinckle, he had found a kindred spirit, an editor who refused to put up obstacles before the far-flung excursions of Thompson’s prose. “Hinckle is an editor that would do anything to get a story, including writing bad checks,” said Thompson. “But I liked him as much as any editor I ever worked for. Whatever needed to be done, he would do it. I’ve always thought of him as a good offensive tackle. As long as he was blocking for me, even if it entailed questionable tactics, I valued it tremendously.”

Now Thompson would embark on an original story for
Scanlan’s
, a trip to the Kentucky Derby in his hometown of Louisville. Novelist James Salter, Thompson’s friend and neighbor in Colorado, had first suggested the Derby to Thompson during a soused dinner one night, and Thompson immediately pitched it to Hinckle with a 3:30 A.M. phone call. The Derby was obviously a perfect fit for him, a chance to lay bare the idiotic celebration rituals of the South’s ruling class and thus expose its reckless behavioral decadence.

Armed with a fistful of up-front expense money from Hinckle—a rare and pleasurable luxury—Thompson prepared for his trip, notifying his
mother, Virginia, that he would be staying at her apartment. But one matter still needed to be sorted out. Thompson was confident he could describe the gaudy awfulness of the Derby in his story, but he felt that it might play better if it was accompanied by illustrations, like the classic satires from
Punch
magazine in England. He suggested Pat Oliphant, the Pulitzer prize-winning political cartoonist, but there was no way Oliphant’s schedule could accommodate a trip to Kentucky. A few other illustrators were contacted, such as British artist Ronald Searle and photographer Rob Guralnick, but everyone was booked up.

Scanlan’s
managing editor, Don Goddard, had another idea. A British illustrator named Ralph Steadman had recently made an appearance in the office with his portfolio, and both Goddard and art director J. C. Suarés were impressed with his work, particularly his book
Still Life with Raspberry
, a selection of Steadman’s provocative line drawings that had been published by the British publishing house Rapp and Whiting in 1969. A native of Wallasey, Cheshire, Steadman had been drawing steadily in his native country for the past decade as a political cartoonist, mostly for the satire magazine
Private Eye
and the
Times
of London. Heavily influenced by the German Expressionists Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, Steadman had a fine eye for the macabre and sinister in everyday life. His exuberant line and Boschian flair for locating the molten core of his subjects kept him in steady work in England, a country that has never spared its public figures the satirist’s rod. Now he wanted to try his luck in the States, and make his long-deferred fortune.
Scanlan’s
wasn’t the pot of gold he was looking for, but it was a start.

Suarés called Steadman on Long Island, where the artist was staying with a friend during his fact-finding visit to the States.

Thompson had no idea what Steadman was all about, nor was Steadman aware of Thompson’s work, but they both shared a reflexive hatred of authority and unchecked power, and a conviction that they could
change the state of things. “At that time, one was intent on bringing down the establishment and having a better world,” said Steadman. “What a naive thing to think!
Scanlan’s
had a great sense of what was necessary for the time; they were on a crusade, too.”

No sooner had Steadman arrived in Louisville on April 30, 1970, and took the full measure of the Derby revelers in their white bucks and seersucker sports jackets than he knew he was in for the joy ride of his life. “I sensed the screaming lifestyle of America immediately,” he said. “It was apparent that America was different in a very wayward way.” It took two days for Steadman to track down Thompson, who had no press credentials and thus couldn’t be contacted through the Derby press office. “I figured
Scanlan’s
was a legitimate publication,” said Steadman. “Surely, I would find their writer in the press office!”

Eventually, they did encounter each other in the press box. Steadman was expecting to see a Hell’s Angels type, not a wild-eyed outdoors-man type. “His head was like a piece of bone,” said Steadman. “He was built like a footballer, wearing this multicolored hunting jacket with a big sun hat that fell over his eyes, and here I was with a beard and tweed coat. We were like chalk and cheese.”

Thompson set him at ease right away. “I’ve been looking for you for two days,” Steadman told Thompson, to which Thompson replied, “Well, we’ve met now. You want a drink?”

They never stopped having drinks for a week. Beer with bourbon chasers, brandy, an occasional mint julep for good measure. “Oh, we went on a bender,” said Steadman. “We were pissed the whole time. It was totally irresponsible of us as journalists, but we felt it was kind of a crusade. We thought we would put the world right with our shenanigans.”

There was nothing subversive about a marathon drinking binge in Kentucky, however: they were merely blending in with their environment, “going native,” as Steadman put it. To the artist, Churchill Downs was like a Brueghel tableau in the antebellum South, full of half-mad drunks falling into the mud, jockeying for position at the betting windows, frantically crashing and sloshing all over each other. The crush of the crowd was so intense that Thompson and Steadman never witnessed any of the race itself. Not that it mattered; the crowd was the story anyway. “Ralph was such an innocent audience,” said Thompson. “I could
take him anywhere and point something at him and he would make it interesting.”

Steadman was entranced by the faces that swept by him all day and night, the ruddy complexions and jaundiced stares of the jowly reprobates. He never went anywhere without his sketchbook, drawing caricatures of anyone who caught his eye, which was nearly everyone. He had misplaced his colored pencils in a cab in New York and had to borrow eye shadow and lipstick from Don Goddard’s wife, who was an executive at Revlon. It was the ideal medium for an event in which the mascara streaked and runnelled with beer and sweat. This led to some huffy scenes, much to Steadman’s dismay. “Here was this limey drawing these denatured pictures of people, and they were taking it personally, like a personal insult. I got a few ‘fucking limey’s thrown my way.”

Thompson insisted that Steadman cease and desist his “filthy habit” at once, but the artist persisted. One night after a few drinks, while Thompson and Steadman were having dinner at a local restaurant with Thompson’s brother Davison and his wife, the artist got into an argument with another patron who objected to an unusually garish rendering that Steadman had drawn of him. “The drawing just kept getting ruder and ruder,” said Steadman. “So it got kind of ugly in there.” Thompson proceeded to pull out a can of Mace (he referred to it as “Chemical Billy”) and sprayed it in the general direction of the waiter, then fled with Steadman. “You’re a guest in our country,” Hunter told Steadman. “I didn’t want them to hurt you!” “I just accepted it as part and parcel of what the job entailed,” said Steadman. “It didn’t occur to me that it was completely nonsensical on Hunter’s part. A lot of it was paranoia. It was purely in Hunter’s head. He was very protective towards me.”

Back in New York, Hunter had to file the story for
Scanlan’s
, but he couldn’t recall most of what had transpired. The trip was lost to hazy recollections of wild drinking bouts with Steadman, or short, cryptic notes written in red ink in his notebook. But he had missed his deadline and Goddard was screaming for the story. The rest of the contents of the fourth issue had already been shipped to the printer in San Francisco, leaving Thompson’s feature as the only gaping hole. Warren Hinckle suggested that Thompson lock himself in a room at the Royalton Hotel on
Scanlan’s
dime and not leave until he had the piece written.

With Goddard standing by, Thompson leaned hard on his notes
and cranked out what he remembered—the Rabelaisian adventures of a native son and a limey outsider adrift in the innermost circle of southern hell. Goddard edited on the fly, as the pages were ripped from Thompson’s typewriter, cutting what Thompson referred to as “socio-philosophical flashbacks” and “weird memory jogs” in order to streamline the narrative.

“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” was Thompson’s revenge on the uptight, cosseted South that he had left behind in the 1950s, the first piece ever written about the Derby that was brave enough to admit that the ritual had little to do with ladies in sun hats fanning themselves with programs and men in seersucker suits sipping mint juleps. That stifling and hermetic culture of noblesse oblige wasn’t charming, and it was so out of touch with the rest of America as to be completely severed from it. “In a narrow Southern society,” Thompson wrote, “the closest kind of inbreeding is not only stylish and acceptable, but far more convenient—to the parents—than setting their offspring free to find their own mates, for their own reasons and in their own ways.”

The Derby was a metaphor for the “doomed atavistic culture” of the South—its inbred racism and chauvinism, its willful disengagement from the civil rights struggles that it had engendered. No one talked about Vietnam, the better to ignore it. “Not much energy in these faces,” Thompson wrote, “not much
curiosity
. Suffering in silence, nowhere to go after thirty in this life, just hang on and humor the children.” Thompson and Steadman didn’t bother to watch the race because no one at the Derby really cared, anyway: Churchill Downs was just a big bar with a bunch of desperate characters trying to stave off their inevitable obsolescence with enough booze to kill a pack of thoroughbreds. Thompson was convinced that the counterrevolution would just swallow them whole.

“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” is a meditation on the moral decline of the South; it’s also very, very funny. Here is Thompson encountering a hail-fellow-well-met Texan in the airport lounge:

Thompson tells his drinking buddy that he’s a photographer from
Playboy
and that his assignment is to “take pictures of the riot.”

“It’s a shitty article,” Thompson wrote in a letter to his friend Bill Cardoso after he returned home to Woody Creek, Colorado, “a classic of irresponsible journalism.” It
was
irresponsible, in the traditional sense, but a scathing critique of a blinkered culture lay just under the surface of Thompson’s humorous set pieces, a seriocomic tightrope act that no other journalist in America was capable of negotiating with as much panache. The harried journalist just might be nuts, but the good ol’ boys and half-wits are much more dangerous.

“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” ran in the June 1970 issue of
Scanlan’s
with the bylines “Written under duress by Hunter
S. Thompson” and “Sketched with eyebrow pencil and lipstick by Ralph Steadman.” Bill Cardoso called it “pure gonzo,” so outrageous that it needed its own name. It became the most notorious Thompson dispatch since his Hell’s Angels stories for
The Nation
. Journalists from the
New York Times
made the trip to Woody Creek to interview him, while Tom Wolfe sent Thompson a copy of his latest book,
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
, along with a personal note: “Dear Hunter, I present this book in homage after reading the two funniest stories of all time—J. C. Killy and The Derby. You are The Boss! Not the sheriff, maybe, but you are The Boss!”

Flattered and quite pleased with himself, Thompson wrote back, pointing out to Wolfe that “with the perhaps fading exception of Kesey, you’re about the only writer around that I figure I can learn from.” In its reckless disregard for proper reportorial decorum, its skillful blend of comic picaresque and moral tract, it mapped out the blueprint for all of Thompson’s subsequent work of the decade.