The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (43 page)

Thompson was having a bit of fun at Muskie’s expense by claiming that the Maine senator was perhaps ingesting a South American hallucinogen that was known to enhance sexual performance. “Even some of the reporters who’d been covering Muskie for three or four months took it seriously,” Thompson said. “That’s because they don’t know anything about drugs.” Former
Rolling Stone
managing editor John Burks thought that Thompson’s stunt was irresponsible and reckless and that it may have lost the nomination for Muskie. “Reporters believed it enough that they asked Muskie about it at press conferences,” said Burks. “Pretty soon he was losing primary after primary, and he was out of the game. In my opinion, Muskie was the only guy that could have beaten Nixon.”

Thompson liked to think that his story might have tipped the campaign in favor of McGovern, whom Thompson respected as a principled politician, but in point of fact, the story didn’t have any legs; it was just a blip in the long media cycle of the campaign, and it went away in due course. No serious journalist on the trail ever really believed it. If anything, Muskie’s public breakdown in New Hampshire contributed more to his downfall than the Ibogaine rumor. “I don’t think anything Hunter wrote had an appreciable effect on Muskie’s campaign,” said Burl Bernard. “But I did tell him at one point, ‘Hunter, you’re not covering the campaign, you’re looking to destroy it.’” “That stuff about Muskie was preposterous,” said Frank Mankiewicz. “Everyone knew it was preposterous. But he did catch the essence of Muskie—the man did seem narcotized most of the time.”

It was pure advocacy journalism delivered with a feint that tilted toward the absurd, and those who played along got off easier than the ones who didn’t. A few interview subjects, such as Mankiewicz, got into the spirit of things with the writer after a few primaries. “If Hunter asked a left-field question, I’d give him a cockamamie answer.” Thompson had more respect for guys like Mankiewicz, who maintained a healthy respect for the process but still regarded it as a game, just another beloved American pastime that never amounted to anything but mediocrity and deceit at the highest levels of government.

As journalists who had engaged in bids for public office on fairly radical platforms, Thompson and Norman Mailer, who was covering the campaign for
Life
, had little tolerance for mainstream politics. But while Mailer’s experience had convinced him to stick to his strengths, Thompson
had not given up on proselytizing from within. He buttonholed Mankiewicz on a few occasions during the primary campaign and drilled him on the salient points of his Freak Power political philosophy, but Mankiewicz just shrugged it off—a sure sign, Thompson thought, of myopia on the McGovern side.

Thompson was fortunate that Mankiewicz felt so charitable toward some of his more spurious reporting, particularly one incident in New Hampshire in which Thompson claimed to have been cold-cocked by Mankiewicz in the driveway of the Wayfarer Hotel—a contract hit apparently set up by Crouse, who tipped off Mankiewicz in exchange for a White House job. “All that talk about me chasing him with a tire iron is patently false,” said Mankiewicz, “but there’s a spirit of passion in there that clicks.”

Jules Witcover, who was covering the campaign for the
Los Angeles Times
, found fault with Thompson’s shoot-from-the-hip-flask reporting, which he felt was willfully fallacious and unfair to its subjects. “Hunter was a total screwball, a whirling dervish on the trail,” said Witcover. “I understood what he was after and I found it amusing, but he didn’t read people that well. He dealt in exaggeration, and I don’t think it really ever did Muskie or anyone else any real damage. He was an entertainer first and foremost.”

Bob Semple, who was covering the Nixon campaign for the
New York Times
, wasn’t entertained. Semple and Thompson had forged a casual relationship while covering Nixon in New Hampshire, driving frantically from speech to speech across black ice with the
Los Angeles Times’s
Don Irwin in tow, nipping from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to keep themselves warm. “I feared for my life in that car,” said Semple. “I’ve never been closer to my maker.” Semple even managed to obtain White House plane press credentials for Thompson after reassuring Nixon’s assistant for domestic affairs, John Erlichman, that Thompson “wouldn’t harm a flea.” (Erlichman was convinced that Thompson was a homicidal maniac.) But Semple felt betrayed by Thompson’s description of him in his story “Fear and Loathing: The Fat City Blues,” which ran in
Rolling Stone’s
October 26 issue, particularly a passage in which Thompson expressed revulsion at the sycophancy of Nixon beat reporters such as Semple, who whimpered around “kissing [White House press secretary] Ron Ziegler’s ass.”

“I understood that Hunter was looking for deeper truths, and that his reporting was part fiction, but it really pissed me off,” said Semple. “I had gone out of my way to help him. I just didn’t know what he had in mind.”

Thompson was just trying to keep himself entertained, staving off the mind-numbing tedium of twenty-three primaries in five months, the boilerplate stump speeches, the glad-handing rituals, the horrid food in dingy motel rooms. With a mandate to file a story every two weeks, Thompson fulminated out loud in his stories about buckling under the weight of his burden.

“I am growing extremely weary of writing about politics,” he wrote in “Fear and Loathing in California: Traditional Politics with a Vengeance” for
Rolling Stone’s
July 6, 1972, issue. “My brain has become a steam-vat; my body is turning to wax and bad flab; impotence looms; my fingernails are growing at a fantastic rate of speed—they are turning into claws; my standard-size clippers will no longer cut the growth, so now I carry a set of huge toenail clippers and sneak off every night around dusk, regardless of where I am … to chop off another quarter of an inch or so off all ten fingers.”

Every story that Thompson filed was an painful and protracted ritual of false starts and piecemeal construction. Thompson would agonize over a lead and toss it in the trash, only to have his wife, Sandy, iron out the wrinkles by hand and send it over. Thompson had to transmit every page though the telefax, which he nicknamed the “Mojo Wire”—an antediluvian creaker that transmitted one page every three minutes onto thermal paper at the receiving end. Invariably, the copy would be fired off at an ungodly hour of the morning, and it was Charles Perry’s job to stand by and receive it as it moved though the phone lines.

“I had to wait for the call, which could come at any time,” said Perry. The stories, which often ran to eight thousand words and more, came in sections, which Perry would then have to reconstruct according to Thompson’s alphabetical system of inserts. “We’d shuffle it all around and arrange a story one way or another,” said Perry. “Hunter could drive editors to tears,” said David Felton. “He would be up on speed and write for three days in a row, producing a paragraph an hour, and Charles Perry would have to stay up for three days and retrieve it, and we’d have to fix it. And if he didn’t like what you did, he would scream and yell at you.”

In his stories Thompson laid waste to all of the Democratic contenders. Ed Muskie “talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year’s crop”; Humphrey was “a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack,” an unprincipled panderer who didn’t seem aware that “his gibberish is not taken seriously by anyone except Labor Leaders and middle-class blacks.” Only George Mc-Govern gave Thompson hope, however faint, that a decent candidate might emerge from such a mediocre field, but even Thompson conceded that the South Dakota senator was perhaps too timid and too earnest to be taken seriously as a national contender. “Crowds turn him
off
instead of on,” Thompson wrote in his dispatch from the New Hampshire primary. “He lacks that sense of drama—that instinct for timing and orchestration that is the real secret of success in American politics.”

Norman Mailer had a less charitable view of McGovern. Mailer shared Thompson’s opinion of McGovern as a decent and principled politician, but virtue was not enough for him to support the ticket. McGovern’s emergence was emblematic, for Mailer, of the Democratic party’s transformation from a vibrant and sometimes chaotic alembic of ideas into a quiescent repository of uninspiring cant. In fact, McGovern was just as beige as Nixon; he projected “that same void of charisma which can prove more powerful than charisma itself.”

Everywhere he turned at the Miami Democratic convention, Mailer saw the dissipated remnants of the youth movement that had galvanized the left in the sixties, coddled suburban kids lulled into a “complacent innocence altogether near to arrogance.” The passions of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, in which the clash of ideologies played out in a bloody street fight between Mayor Daley’s cops and antiwar protesters, had died out. Television had asserted its control over the tenor and timbre of the event, leaving the dissenting protestors entirely out of frame, but also inducing an acquiescence to proper decorum. If TV didn’t want a circus, then it wouldn’t get one. The new, professional class of delegates made sure of it.

At McGovern headquarters at the Doral Hotel, Mailer mingled with the candidate’s supporters, “Phi Beta Kappas with clean faces and hornrimmed glasses, their presence to offer clear statement of a physiology which had little taste for liquor and much taste for good marks,” as well as “suburban youth with long hair and the sense of boredom of waiting another evening for some tribal left wind to touch the hair of their
nostrils.” Mailer felt a twinge of nostalgia for the back-room horse trading of previous conventions; an utterly benign convention left little for Mailer to decode. Even Nixon disappointed him. The president’s old, simmering misanthropy had been ground down to digestible gruel. He was now the perfect TV president,“a bland drone of oscillating ideological dots” preaching a policy of middle-class entitlement to “the wad,” those Zenith supplicants out there in America’s living rooms who tacitly approved a policy that spent almost twice as much on the Vietnam War as it did on welfare.

If Mailer was disheartened by the lack of intrigue in Miami, he wasn’t as quick to dismiss the other major candidates as Thompson, who ranked them a notch above low-rent carnival barkers. In Thompson’s view, the Democratic convention was nothing more than a procession of “shameless dingbats who saw no harm in cadging some free exposure on national TV by nominating each other for vice-president.” So much convention time was devoted to chest-thumping rhetoric and jostling over the choice for the vice-presidential nominee on nomination night that McGovern didn’t give his acceptance speech until three-thirty in the morning, by which time most of the TV audience had gone to sleep. As for the delegates, they were zonked out on booze and liquid THC administered by a “smiling freak” who “was giving free hits to anybody who still had the strength to stick their tongues out.”

Mailer’s reporting from the two conventions, which would be published in his book
St. George and the Godfather
, was more generous and nuanced than Thompson’s, more willing to concede that a vestige of decency could be excavated if one looked hard enough. It was a waste of his time to write about subjects that weren’t worthy of his consideration, that didn’t have some latent complexity to be unearthed, and Mailer had complete confidence in his ability to tease out the superego from the id simply from standing on the sidelines with his notebook.

Unlike Thompson, who believed in absolute numbers and what they revealed, statistics weren’t as important to Mailer as were the methods used to attain and broker power. The selection of a running mate, for example, was more or less a search for the perfect brand name: “Recognize that a man named Proctor running for President would look for Gamble to go along.” Billboard euphony, the pleasing sound of the two names when combined, was more important than political compatibility,
and thus McGovern, after being rejected by the likes of Boston mayor Kevin White, Ted Kennedy, and Florida governor Ruben Askew (“a perfect name! Govern and Ask-You”), settled on Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton, whose name “had connotations of the American Eagle, a stern virtue, a modest plus.” But Eagleton would prove to be McGovern’s undoing when it was revealed that he had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion and had received electroshock therapy on two separate occasions.

Here was intrigue, at last, but Mailer was careful not to arrive at any easy conclusions about Eagleton, who had agreed to an interview with Mailer on the afternoon of his resignation. He accepted the fact that Eagleton had perhaps not given his past any serious thought when his name was being mentioned as a vice-presidential nominee, having whipped “a miserable recollection from shell to shell” so many times that he’d ceased to worry about it. He was a fallen character that might have stepped from the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Mailer maintained that Eagleton’s sharp patrician features gave him a passing resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald (was Eagleton, like Jay Gatsby, a man who had learned to suppress his mysterious past?), but when Eagleton responded by telling him that
The Great Gatsby
was one of his favorite books, Mailer could sense the disingenuous pandering of the professional vote beggar, and the disappointing realization that politicians were “no more magnificent” than himself.