The Kitchen Table

In 1985, we shot a commercial with Hunter S. Thompson. It was, uh, interesting.

After Will Hearst took over the Examiner, he began hiring off-the-wall people as his columnists, and at the top of the list was H.S.T. We were doing TV spots with Will and his personnel in them, so we decided to do one with Thompson. Looking back, we were kind of asking for trouble.

The spot took place at a firing range.

John Francis was directing the commercials for us, and he found a range to use at the Army Presidio. Berlin and Silverstein went over to the shoot to get things started, and around eleven o’clock, I was at the office when I got a call from Berlin.

“Goodby, you’ve got to get out here and help me,” he said. He wasn’t being funny.

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Well, you know how you always thought Hunter Thompson was crazy but probably really fun to hang out with?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he’s crazy all right, but he’s a screaming asshole.”

I drove out there and went into the range. On the monitors, I saw Hunter waving a .44 pistol to make a point to the crew. Rich was standing alarmingly close to all this. I headed inside just as Hunter headed out the same door.

I can distinctly remember what he looked like. He was as tall as I am, maybe even a bit taller. He was scowling with big bushy eyebrows under an Air Force cap, and I could tell from his look that he’d definitely been doing drugs. His eyes looked right past me. “Excuse me,” he said in a Southern gentlemanly sort of way, but the way he brushed by me was not gentle. A nice-looking woman followed him, looking even more wasted. She would crop up again.

“You okay?” I asked Berlin and Hearst.

“Yeah, Hunter’s been a handful, though,” Will said. “I had to get the hotel security to let me into his room to get him up. Then, he got into the shower and wouldn’t come out. I sat on the bed for half an hour, watching TV. Finally, I went to the bathroom door. ‘Hunter, this is your publisher!’ I said to him. ‘Get the fuck out of the shower! Now!’ ‘Yes, sir, Mr. Hearst!’ he said to me, and got out immediately. I drove him over here.”

“He won’t read the script,” Berlin said.

“Why not?”

“And he wants real bullets in the gun, not blanks. He says he needs real bullets so that the recoil is realistic.” Just then, Hunter walked up.

I introduced myself. “You want to rework the script?” I said to Hunter.

“It’s terrible,” he said. “I can’t read that shit. You really think that’s good? Who wrote it?”

These were questions I didn’t think we should answer. “Let’s just fix it. What part is the problem for you?”

Hunter glowered at us. “Well, the ending, for one. This line isn’t funny.”

“Well, what do you want to say? I think you should say something you think is funny there, something that feels good to you.”

We all thought hard for about thirty seconds. Then Hunter brightened up.

“I want to say, ‘We will chase them like rats across the tundra.’”

I didn’t think it was a line Hunter could actually pull off. On the page, it might be good, but I was skeptical about saying it out loud. It didn’t seem to be a good time to explain all this. “Okay, let’s try it.”

Hunter and Hearst headed back inside. I watched from the monitor. Hunter’s girlfriend was next to me, pretty cooked on something. She started flirting with me egregiously.

“You’re cute. What do you do?” she said.

I told her and began to make small talk about Hunter and his predicament. Great, I thought. Hunter will come back out and see his girlfriend hitting on me.

“I just want to give him something he’s comfortable saying,” I said.

“He’s having fun,” she shrugged and smiled warmly at him on the monitor. It was like a mom smiling at her naughty child.

The “tundra” line was actually funnier than I thought it would be, but there was no way to end the commercial after Hunter said it. It was one of those lines that stops the whole drama in its tracks, that calls too much attention to itself. We ended up trying to get a funny look out of Will and just let everyone go home.

That was when the truly disturbing thing happened.

At some point, as they were dressing Hunter for the filming, someone suggested that he borrow a high school athletic jacket that one of the female crew members had on. It was big enough for Hunter to wear, I guess, and he liked it. It had patches and pins on it. At the end of the filming, Hunter started to head off with the jacket still on his back. A guy from the crew was dispatched to retrieve it, just as Thompson was heading into his girlfriend’s Saab.

“Excuse me, Hunter,” the guy said. “We need to get that jacket back from you.”

“They said I could keep it,” Hunter said, opening the car door.

“No,” the crew member said politely. “We need the jacket to do some insert shots of you firing the gun. I need it back.”

“Insert shots?”

“Well, you know, something where we just see your hand and the sleeve of the jacket. We’ll get someone else to be your hand.”

I could see Hunter was going to cause some kind of scene over this. “So you just need the jacket for the sleeve?” he said.

“Yeah.”

In one motion, Hunter took the jacket off, and suddenly a jackknife appeared in his hand. He hacked at the sleeve of the jacket until it was almost cut off, then gave up and flung the whole pile at the crew guy. “Here you go!” he said, got into the car and slammed the door. His girlfriend smiled and rolled her eyes like a wife leaving a Connecticut cocktail party, then got in, and they drove off.

There was a woman in tears next to me. “That was my boyfriend’s jacket,” she said to me. “Why did he have to do that?”

The next time we saw Hunter was at the Examiner Christmas party in some mansion on Nob Hill. He had a tumbler of bourbon in his hand and a yellow smoking jacket on. He remembered me and was as nice as could be. I asked him if he had seen the commercial.

“I thought it was great!” he beamed. “Really funny. Were you guys happy? Did you get what you needed?” Everything was forgotten, forgiven. He shook my hand, said, “Well, merry Christmas!” and walked off into the crowd.

Months later, I found myself playing pool with Artie and Jim Mitchell, the self-described “pornographers” who produced Behind the Green Door and Inside Marilyn Chambers. They owned the Mitchell Brothers Theatre, a notorious strip joint on O’Farrell Street. Years later, one of them, Jim, would murder the other. Artie was certainly the more irritating of the two.

Anyway, it was noontime, and Warren Hinckle, the ex-publisher of Ramparts, had taken us up to the brothers’ office, a Victorian room just down from the stage. Totally nude women walked in and out as we played pool, asking us to light their cigarettes.

After an hour of drinking and pool, Jim took us up onto a catwalk above the theater. At one o’clock in the afternoon, a half dozen men were receiving lap dances below us. It was dark up in the ceiling, and they couldn’t see us looking down at them. “We called Hunter ‘the night manager,’” Jim said. “He used to sit up here for hours, watching the action below.” And sure enough, there was a chair still up there. You could see Hunter in it, buzzed out with a cigarette in the holder, watching the futile, humorous, desperate parade below.

Thinking of that moment, I went to the Mitchell Brothers website this morning. The wallpaper behind the nude women in the pictures features Hunter’s signature and then, in his own handwriting, “THE CRAZY NEVER DIE!”

Well, here’s the final product: