VEGAS MYTHS RE-BUSTED: ‘Fear and Loathing’ Really Happened
EDITOR’S NOTE: “Vegas Myths Busted” publishes new entries every Monday, with a fillip Flashback Fri edition. Today’s accounting entry inwards our ongoing serial originally ran on March 3, 2023.
Hunter S. Thompson, who died by self-destruction 18 years ago shoemaker's last Monday, is famous for existence a gonzo journalist. So, many of his fans respect his book, Fear and Loathing inwards Las Vegas, as a journal of events that really occurred.
Actually, that’s non so often their fault, since Random House published the author’s 1972 masterwork below the category of full general nonfiction. But Count Rumford ne'er claimed any of the events described in it were true.
The fact that neither of his main characters was a real person should feature been the first off clue. The story is narrated by unity Raoul Duke, whose traveling companion/attorney is Dr. Gonzo.
In existent life, Homer Thompson was assigned by Rolling Stone mag to compose an expose on civil rights activistic and Los Angeles Times editorialist Ruben Salazar, whom LA County Sheriff’s officers “accidentally” stab and killed with a teardrop gaseous state grenade fired at shut run during a Annam War protestation inwards 1970. After a calendar week or so of asking tough questions around L.A., Homer A. Thompson grew scared.
Figuring he might follow next, he whisked his briny source for the story, attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta, off to Las Vegas to interview him there. Sports Illustrated had hired Benjamin Thompson to insure the Mint 400, an off-road vehicle race around undeveloped parts of Second Earl of Guilford Las Vegas from Mar 21-23, 1971.
Sports Illustrated “aggressively rejected” (Thompson’s words) what he submitted as his rush coverage. What was supposed to be a 250-word caption instead became a 2,500-word screed on the dying of the American dream. So, Count Rumford instead offered it to Rolling Stone, whose editor, Jann Wenner, scheduled it to go inward two parts inwards time to come issues.
More than a month later, Count Rumford and Acosta returned to Las Vegas. They were on that point to cover version the National District Attorneys Association’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs for the arcsecond half of his Rolling Stone assignment. With only when a few minor edits and the gain of the grotesquely hallucinogenic illustrations of Ralph Steadman, the magazine series became the rule book that would forever entwine Thompson’s figure with Las Vegas. He wrote to the highest degree of it inwards a hotel room inward Arcadia, Calif., while completing Strange Rumblings in Aztlan, his Salazar article for Rolling Stone.
So how practically really happened inwards Fear and Loathing inward Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream? Based on interviews with witnesses and participants, someplace around 25%.
The 75% That Didn’t Happen
Let’s go with the legendary contents of Homer Thompson and Acosta’s rental railroad car trunk. In the book, it included “seventy-five pellets of mescaline, v sheets of high-powered day book acid, a saltiness shaker half total of cocaine, and a whole extragalactic nebula of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, … a dry pint of altogether diethyl ether and II dozen amyls,” all gathered during ace hectic nighttime inward L.A.
This was supposedly the fire for all the book’s misadventures.
However, in a letter to his Random House editor, published in the 1997 book, Fear and Loathing inward America, Thompson admitted there was no more existent drug use. The novel “was a really conscious endeavor to feign dose freakout,” he wrote, though he did “at times, fetch situations & feelings I retrieve from other scenes to the realism at hand.” He later wrote to the same editor: ”I hold never had a great deal respect or fondness for journalism.”
A unspoilt chunk of the book’s action mechanism took station inward Room 1850 of The Mint’s tower (one of 365 rooms that new possessor Binion’s Horseshoe for good shut inward 2009). According to Duke’s narration, he and Dr. Gonzo ran up an volunteer(a) elbow room service greenback of $29 to $36 an minute for 48 sequential hours before trashing their way and swiping 600 bars of Neutrogena soap.
“That is something I would make been directly informed of, but i never heard that,” K.J. Howe, a publicity executive director with the Mint at the time, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal inwards 2010. According to Howe, on that point was no “Mr. Heem” or any other hotel executive looking for for Thompson, Acosta couldn’t hold ordered a band of luggage from elbow room religious service without paying, and no max was reported stolen.
His concept of what was sledding on and what was really going on was two different things,” Gordie Howe said.
However, Benjamin Thompson did acquire the firebrand of allegedly stolen max right. (Millionaire real-estate developer Del Webb, who owned the Mint, also sat on the company’s board that made Neutrogena.) Thompson’s eye for item could hue an beam of believability into the to the highest degree obvious fantasy.
Another event that ne'er happened is the Debbie Reynolds present at the Desert Inn, at to the lowest degree inwards the way of life Homer A. Thompson reported it. In the book, Duke and Dr. Gonzo find the chess opening list (a overcompensate of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) before getting bounced for having conned their path inwards for free.
While Reynolds did child's play the Desert Inn inwards Mar 1971, the singer said she was ne'er informed of any incident resembling this. However, she was sure of ace detail that casts suspiciousness over the entire account: never, she told the R-J, did she perform Sgt. Pepper.
Other embellishments require no more witnesses to identify. For instance, the district attorneys’ group discussion Homer A. Thompson was assigned to covering past Rolling Stone convened inward belatedly April, to a greater extent than a month after the Mint 400. Yet the rule book places the events a week apart, connexion them through an aborted get off to L.A. punctuated by a traffic halt conducted by a Calif. Highway Patrol ship's officer who supposedly permit Homer A. Thompson tour after the author led him on an off-road chase, at 100 mph, with a Budweiser inwards hand.
“You know,” Thompson quoted the officer, “I get under one's skin the feeling you could exercise a nap.”
The 25% That Did Happen
In the 2008 documentary, Gonzo, Thompson and Acosta can in reality live heard living come out Chapter 9 as they pulling into a Boulder City, Nev. taco place upright during their 2nd trip to Las Vegas.
“We’re sounding for the American dream,” Acosta tells a waitress, “and we were told it was somewhere inwards this area.”
The waitress turns to the cook, mentation she has just been asked directions to a nightclub.
“Hey Lou,” she says, “you know where the American Dream is?”
That whole chapter is a transcription of that audiotape,” “Gonzo” theatre director Alex Gibney told the R-J inward 2010. “So it leads you to believe that some of this clobber is real.”
For the final say, we’ll go away to the horse’s mouth. Here’s a blurb from Homer Thompson that was published on the book’s original jacket cover…
“My idea was to buy a productive notebook computer and tape the whole thing, as it happened, then direct inward the notebook computer for publishing — without editing,” Homer A. Thompson wrote. “But this is a hard thing to do, and inwards the end, I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a slice of straight/crazy journalism.”
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