http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/books/review/Blythe.t.html . . .
They met in 1970 on Thompson’s home turf of Louisville, covering the Kentucky Derby on assignment for the short-lived magazine Scanlan’s. Steadman’s drawings — vicious caricatures of local residents, including Thompson’s brother — shocked the writer with their predatory vigor. Thompson, soon to become famous for a similar bloodthirsty tack in prose, demanded of the artist: “Why must you scribble these filthy ravings and in broad daylight too? ... This is Kentucky, not skid row. I love these people. They are my friends and you treated them like scum.” Their first collaboration ended with the journalist spraying Steadman from a can of Mace. “We can do without your kind in Kentucky. Now get your bags and get out, and take your rotten drawings with you!”
Isn’t this how all great buddy movies begin? Of course they were bound to work together again, and they did a few months later, scoping out the America’s Cup in Newport, R.I. Steadman, a woozy sailor, asked Thompson if he might have one of the little yellow tablets that he assumed the writer had been taking for seasickness. Thompson obliged; a colossal acid trip ensued. The two men decided to jump-start their nonexistent story by spray-painting profanities deriding the pope on the hulls of multimillion-dollar racing yachts. Detected, they panicked, nearly setting a boat on fire with a flare. “Pigs everywhere!” Thompson cried. “We must flee like hunted animals.” Steadman spouted gibberish, which Thompson avidly recorded in his notebook. “That’s good, Ralph. ... Go on. What else?”
Steadman ended up catching a flight to New York — no shoes, no socks and a suitcase containing only dirty underwear and a sketchbook. He collapsed at a friend’s home, where a doctor was summoned and shot him full of Librium. “This trip ... established a pattern of journalism, if that is what it was, that cemented my friendship with Hunter and laid the ground plan for future assignments. ... It remains a defining moment in the evolution of gonzo and, without doubt, a dress rehearsal for ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.’ For Hunter, it provided living proof that going crazy as a journalistic style was possible.”
For a few years in the 1970s, it did appear that insanity was a great career move, that a deranged journalist might fruitfully subvert tired conventions that kept a writer from injecting himself into his work. “He was his own best story,” Steadman writes. “The Joke’s Over” shows Thompson stumbling and mumbling his way through the early ’70s with the heart of a lawyer for the A.C.L.U. and the brain of an acidhead. His gift then was not so much for intoxication as for high dudgeon. Thirty-five years after its publication, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” illustrated by Steadman at bargain rates (he’s still bitter), holds up as more than a generational relic. Thompson depicts himself as a drug-taking idealist blundering through a nightmare, all the while gripping his sanity as tightly as a steering wheel.
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