Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (104 page)

1967

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL … WHOOPING IT UP IN THE PLAZA FOUNTAIN … NAKED AND ALONE ON THE CELEBRITY CIRCUIT … HERO OF
THE NEW YORK TIMES
 … SAVED BY STUDS TERKEL … SWARMED OVER BY PARASITES … FUCK YOU, YOU'RE FIRED … THE FIRST VICTORY LAP …

There is no shortage of documentation for the thesis that the current Haight-Ashbury scene is only the orgiastic tip of a great psychedelic iceberg that is already drifting in the sea lanes of the Great Society, Submerged and uncountable is the mass of intelligent, capable heads who want nothing so much as peaceful anonymity. In a nervous society where a man's image is frequently more important than his reality, the only people who can afford to advertise their drug menus are those with nothing to lose.

–Hunter S. Thompson,

“The ‘Hashbury' Is the

Capital of the Hippies,”

The New York Times Magazine
,

May 14, 1967

 

 

Thompson paid tribute to Lionel Olay, “the ultimate free-lancer.”

January 5, 1967
Woody Creek, Colorado

Dear John:

You asked me for an article on whatever I wanted to write about and since you don't pay I figured that gives me
carte blanche
. I started out tonight on an incoherent bitch about the record business … I was looking at the jacket copy on the Blues Project album and I noticed that none of the musicians' names were mentioned anywhere on the album … but the “producer's” name was in huge script on the back, and underneath it were four or five other names … punks and narcs and other ten-percenters who apparently had more leverage than the musicians who made the album, and who managed to get their names on the record jacket.

I was brooding about this—which I'll write about sometime later—when I picked up the latest
Free Press
and read an obituary for a three-year-old kid named “Godot” … which is nice, but as I read it I was reminded again of Lionel Olay and how the
Free Press
commemorated his death with a small block of unsold advertising space that had to be used anyway, so why not for Lionel? I am also reminded that I've asked you twice for a copy of his article on Lenny Bruce (in which Lionel wrote his own obituary), and that you've disregarded both queries. Maybe there's no connection between this and the fact that the Blues Project people were fucked out of any mention on their own album, but I think there is. I see it as two more good examples of the cheap, mean, grinning-hippie capitalism that pervades the whole New Scene … a scene which provides the Underground Press Syndicate with most of its copy and income. Frank Zappa's comments on rock joints and light shows (
Free Press
12/30/66) was a welcome piece of heresy in an atmosphere that is already rigid with pre-pubic senility. The concept of the UPS is too right to argue with, but the reality is something else. As Frank Zappa indicated, if only
in a roundabout way, there are a lot of people trying to stay alive and working WITHIN the UPS spectrum, and not on the ten-percent fringes. That's where
Time
magazine lives … way out there on the puzzled, masturbating edge, peering through the keyhole and selling what they see to the big wide world of Chamber of Commerce voyeurs who support the public prints.

Which brings us back to Lionel, who lived and died as walking proof that all heads exist alone and at their own risk. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe his funeral procession on the Sunset Strip was enough to bring even cops to their knees … but since I didn't hear anything about that action, I have to doubt it. I suspect Lionel died pretty much as he lived: as a freelance writer, promoter, grass-runner and general free spirit. I'm sure a lot of people knew him better than I did, but I think I knew him pretty well. I first met him in Big Sur in 1960, when we were both pretty broke and grubbing for rent money. After that we did a lot of writing back and forth, but we'd only met (usually at the Hot Springs in Big Sur) after long months of different action in very different worlds. He was broke somewhere in New England when I was in Peru, and later in Rio I got a letter from him with a Chicago postmark … when I got back to New York he wrote from L.A., saying he'd decided to settle there because it was the “only home we had.”

I've never been sure if he included me in the definition, but I know he was talking about a lot of people beyond himself and his wife, Beverly. Lionel saw the west coast of the 1960's as Malcom Cowley saw New York after World War One—as the “homeland of the uprooted.” He saw his own orbit as something that included Topanga, Big Sur, Tijuana, the Strip and occasional runs up north to the Bay Area. He wrote for
Cavalier
, the
Free Press
, and anyone who would send him a check. When the checks didn't come he ran grass to New York and paid his bills with LSD. And when he had something that needed a long run of writing time he would take off in his Porsche or his Plymouth or any one of a dozen other cars that came his way, and cadge a room from Mike Murphy at the Hot Springs, or in his brother Dennis's house across the canyon. Lionel and Dennis were old friends, but Lionel knew too much—and insisted on saying it—to use that friendly leverage as a wedge to the screen-writing business, where Dennis Murphy was making it big. Lionel had already published two novels and he was a far better plot-maker than most of the Hollywood hacks, but every time he got a shot at the big cop-out money he blew it with a vengeance. Now and then one of the New York editors would give him enough leeway to write what he wanted, and a few of his articles are gems. He did one for
Cavalier
on the soul of San Francisco that is probably the best thing ever written on that lovely gutless town. Later he wrote a profile on Lenny
Bruce (for the
Free Press
) that if I ran a newspaper I'd reprint every year in boldface type, as an epitaph for free-lance writers everywhere.

Lionel was the ultimate free-lancer. In the nearly ten years I knew him, the only steady work he did was as a columnist for the Monterey
Herald
 … and even then he wrote on his own terms, on his own subjects, and was inevitably fired. Less than a year before he died his willful ignorance of literary politics led him to blow a very rich assignment from
Life
magazine, which asked him for a profile on Marty Ransohoff, a big-name Hollywood producer then fresh from a gold-plated bomb called
The Sandpiper
. Lionel went to London with Ransohoff (“first-cabin all the way,” as he wrote me from the S.S.
United States
) and after two months in the great man's company he went back to Topanga and wrote a piece that resembled nothing so much as Mencken's brutal obituary on William Jennings Bryan. Ransohoff was described as a “pompous toad”—which was not exactly what
Life
was looking for. The article naturally bombed, and Lionel was back on the bricks where he'd spent the last half of his forty-odd years. I'm not sure how old he was when he died, but it wasn't much over forty … according to Beverly he suffered a mild stroke that sent him to the hospital, and then a serious stroke that finished him.

Word of his death was a shock to me, but not particularly surprising since I'd called him a week or so before and heard from Beverly that he was right on the edge. More than anything else, it came as a harsh confirmation of the ethic that Lionel had always lived with but never talked about … the dead-end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules. Like his anarchist father in Chicago, he died without making much of a dent. I don't even know where he's buried, but what the hell? The important thing is where he lived.

And there's the chill of it. Lionel was one of the original anarchist-head-beatnik-free-lancers of the 1950s … a bruised forerunner of [Timothy] Leary's would-be “drop-out generation” of the 1960's. The Head Generation … a loud, cannibalistic gig where the best are fucked for the worst reasons, and the worst make a pile by feeding off the best. Promoters, narcs, con men—all selling the New Scene to
Time
magazine and the Elks Club. The handlers get rich while the animals either get busted or screwed to the floor with bad contracts. Who's making money off the Blues Project? Is it Verve (a division of MGM), or the five ignorant bastards who thought they were getting a break when Verve said they'd make them a record? And who the fuck is “Tom Wilson,” the “producer” whose name rides so high on the record jacket? By any other name he's a vicious ten-percenter who sold “Army Surplus commodities” in the late 1940's, “Special-Guaranteed Used Cars” in the 1950's and 29-cent thumb-prints of John Kennedy in the 1960s … until he figured out that the really big money was in the drop-out revolution. Ride the big wave: Folk-rock, pot
symbols, long hair, and $2.50 minimum at the gate. Light shows! Tim Leary! Warhol! NOW!

Now what? While the new wave flowered, Lenny Bruce was hounded to death by cops. For obscenity. Thirty thousand people (according to Paul Krassner
¹
) are serving time in the jails of this vast democracy on marijuana charges, and the world we have to live in is controlled by a stupid thug from Texas. A vicious liar, with the ugliest family in Christendom … mean Okies feeling honored by the cheap indulgence of a George Hamilton, a stinking animal ridiculed even in Hollywood. And California, “the most progressive state,” elects a governor straight out of a George Grosz painting, a political freak in every sense of the word except California politics … Ronnie Reagan, the White Hope of the West.

Jesus, no wonder Lionel had a stroke. What a nightmare it must have been for him to see the honest rebellion that came out of World War Two taken over by a witless phony like Warhol … the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Lights, Noise, Love the Bomb! And then to see a bedrock madman like Ginsberg copping out with tolerance poems and the same sort of witless swill that normally comes from the Vatican. Kerouac hiding out with his “
mère
” on Long Island or maybe St. Petersburg … Kennedy with his head blown off and Nixon back from the dead, running wild in the power vacuum of Lyndon's hopeless bullshit … and of course Reagan, the new dean of Berkeley. Progress Marches On, courtesy, as always, of General Electric … with sporadic assists from Ford, GM, AT … T, Lockheed and Hoover's FBI.

Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson had learned of the death of a Hell's Angel
.

February 8, 1967
Woody Creek, Colorado

Sonny—

I was surprised and saddened to hear about Elsie.
²
I didn't get any details, just a late-night collect call from San Francisco, so I don't know how it happened. But it doesn't really matter now. She was good people in every sense of the word.

One thing I can't really understand about the Angels is that the ones who get killed, snuffed, or whatever you want to call it, always seem to be among the best of the breed. You might give this some thought, because it puts you right up there at the head of the class.

Anyway, I was sorry as hell to get the news about Elsie. I hope you'll do whatever you can for the kid; he always struck me as being pretty bright and decent.

Take care of yourself.

Sincerely,
Hunter

Random House had assigned Shapiro to do the publicity for
Hell's Angels.

March 21, 1967
Woody Creek, Colorado

Dear Selma.…

Sorry for the outburst today. But another piece of evidence that the CBC was fucking around with me was more than I could handle without shouting. They've lied to me about every aspect of this thing, so why should I assume they're being straight about the $500???
³
And since I took your word that I'd be paid for that fiasco I figure you're responsible for getting the $500.

The outburst was also triggered by the fact that I got no sleep last night … just lying there, sweating, from midnight until 5:30, when I got up and smoked some grass. And for all those 5½ hours I thought about RH, the contract and the future. So when I woke up at 2:30 to find the CBC hassling me again, I flipped out.

Unfortunately, you just happened to be the one on the other end. But against the background of my absolute conviction that Silberman and Shir-Cliff have deliberately screwed me, I doubt that today will be the last time you'll have to take that kind of bullshit. If I thought it would do any good, I'd scream the same way at Silberman, but I don't think he has any blood in his veins. Every time I start yelling at him he just laughs sort of hopelessly and defensively, as if he were talking to an idiot child. Every time he says, “Don't look back,” I focus more intensely to the rear, the past, and the indefensible fucking I got on the
Hell's Angels
contract. And I'd rather not hear the same kind of corporate, pawnshop bullshit from you.
Silberman is very candid about admitting that he screwed me, so it hardly becomes you to go reaching for those awkward misinterpretations that you've been trying to pass off on me. You may as well live with the fact that I see our whole thing on two very distinct and separate levels, and when you try to mix them up I begin to distrust you. I suggest you recall what you told me about your benefactor and mine (no corporate names, of course) long before this dirty argument came out in the open. So don't try to whitewash him now. And don't assume, either, that I'm basing what I say and think on what
you
told me. I'm a better reporter than that … and if my bitching seems too loud and crazy to you, keep in mind that I've given the whole thing enough quiet consideration to think that I know what I'm doing.