MOBILE — Hunter S. Thompson, the writer who invented gonzo journalism and spent a career blurring the line between reporter and subject, died by suicide at his Colorado home on Sunday, Feb. 20, 2005, according to authorities and a statement released by his family. He was 67.
What most of his readers never knew — and what struck even devoted admirers as improbable — is that one of his books was written in Mobile.
Around 1980, Thompson spent two or three months in the Maison Imperial apartment of Pierre Pelham, a Mobile attorney and former state legislator, and Pelham’s wife, Eva, while the couple wintered at Spanish Wells in the Bahamas. Thompson stayed with his girlfriend Laila, who remained a close friend and confidante for the rest of his life, and used the borrowed rooms to get The Curse of Lono down on paper — a lesser-known work than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 or The Great Shark Hunt, but a book with a genuine Mobile provenance nonetheless.
Other than that stay, Pelham said, Thompson never came back to Mobile.
‘He was life magnified’
Pelham and Thompson had been close friends, though they had not spoken much in recent years. Each had tried to reach the other by telephone in recent months, Pelham said, without ever connecting. News of the death left him with "a terribly empty feeling."
"Hunter was an eminently decent guy," Pelham said. "We spent a lot of time together from the Florida Keys to the Canadian border." He added, dryly: "He damn near got us arrested by Canadian Customs." The two had been driving back from a prizefight in Montreal when border police began randomly searching vehicles; Thompson’s restless hopping around in the back seat caught their eye. He was, Pelham said, a master at concealment. They crossed without incident.
Pelham’s son, Marc, then marketing director for the Mobile Airport Authority, also became a friend of the writer and spent time at Owl Farm, Thompson’s compound in Woody Creek, Colorado.
"He was a guy who lived on his own terms," the younger Pelham said. "There was a time when those terms were … intriguing. Recently they had become maybe less so."
"He was an incredible guy. Bright. Fascinating. He knew a great deal about a great many things. He was eccentric, no question," he said. "He always had an interesting view and he was absolutely fearless. He would go anywhere anytime."
Almost any encounter produced a story. "I can think of no interaction with him that wasn’t memorable," Marc Pelham said. "Even breakfast was an event. You hear the expression ‘larger than life.’ I don’t know if he was larger than life. He was life magnified."
He recalled a Super Bowl weekend in New Orleans in the late 1970s, when his father let him tag along with a group that included Thompson, Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner and the novelist Norman Mailer. They had flown over in a Mobile businessman’s plane. "There were a lot of extraordinary people. Just an interesting time."
The myths, mostly true
The legends about Thompson — the arsenal of firearms, the pharmacopoeia, the intimidating Dobermans, the peacocks, the volume of liquor — were not exaggerations, Pelham said. They were simply accurate.
He remembered a bitterly cold night at Owl Farm when Thompson, worried his well pump would freeze, sent his houseguest out to the water shed with a light bulb to screw in for warmth. Mission accomplished, Pelham turned back toward the house and found his path blocked by a large shadow with white teeth and a low, rolling growl — a jet-black Doberman named Lazlo, in homage to one of the writer’s more vicious fictional attorneys. "That dog scared the heck out of me," he said. "It turned out he was a very friendly dog."
The security measures that critics called paranoid had a straightforward origin: the Hell’s Angels, less appreciative of Thompson’s book about them than the critics had been, issued death threats. "No doubt, his house was well-armed," Pelham laughed.
Beneath all of it, Pelham insisted, Thompson remained a working reporter. He recalled a night — or an early morning, the two being much the same at Owl Farm — when Thompson, chasing a rumor about a possible Muhammad Ali comeback, telephoned a source who was almost certainly asleep. In the fog of sleep, Thompson explained, people tell the truth.
A shock, not a surprise
Asked why Thompson had taken his own life, Pelham reached for Joseph Conrad. "Every man has an image he tries to live up to," he said. "Maybe Hunter’s image of himself was something at some point he could no longer live up to."
His wife, Lisa — the daughter of retired Mobile Judge Lionel Layden, and someone who had met Thompson several times — asked him that Monday morning whether he was surprised. "I said it was a shock, but not a surprise," Pelham said.
He remained an admirer of the work, particularly the early books. "Hell’s Angels is just incredible; I couldn’t put it down," he said. "The Campaign Trail ’72 book showed just how bright and insightful he was. He always had a different take on things. Always. Which was what was so fascinating about him."