The Snow Leopard’s Wife
February, 2007
It’s mid-March in Woody Creek, the small Rocky Mountain community that exists quietly just beyond Aspen’s northern fringe. The air up here is thin and crisp, and all around the drifts of winter snow are busy melting into spring. I’ve come here to meet Anita Thompson, wife of the late, legendary outlaw writer Hunter S. Thompson, and I’m about to have the first of several holy shit moments that will rock me throughout the evening. Anita, a pretty 35 year-old blonde, holds up a carton of orange juice and a bottle of vodka, and says with a warm smile, “How ‘bout a screwdriver?”
Holy shit. I’m at Hunter Thompson’s house and his wife is mixing drinks.
For the record, I do not usually booze with my interview subjects, not while I’m playing serious journalist. But on this particular occasion, I feel morally obligated to have a drink or three. I am, after all, standing in the kitchen of the man who wrote Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, the man who was attacked by giant bats on a lonely desert road paved with mescaline and shattered visions of the American Dream.
“Sounds good,” I say. “Better make it a double.”
Though it’s been two years since Hunter Thompson ended his brilliant, chaotic life in this very room, his presence remains vibrant and palpable. Anita keeps the house – called Owl Farm – exactly as he left it, from the hand-written notes plastering the refrigerator and walls (including an ominous one that says Never call 911 – This Means You), to the tall lampshade adorned with Mardi Gras beads, political campaign buttons, and all-access rock and roll tour laminates. In fact, the entire house is filled with bizarre objects from a lifetime of Gonzo adventures. In the living room, you’ll find an oversized Che Guevara banner, commemorative boxing gloves from the epic 1971 Ali-Frazier bout, an authentic Native American battle shield, and the jaws of a man-eating shark. And then of course, there are the peacocks. On a whim some years back, Hunter purchased several of the gangly creatures from a classified ad in the local paper, and now they roam the grounds like refugees from a forgotten Dr. Seuss book. If you listen closely, you can almost hear Hunter muttering, “We need birds. Large, exotic birds.”
Amidst the strange universe inhabited by Hunter Thompson and his merry band of co-conspirators, legendary for their pharmaceutical excess, antiauthoritarian values and deviant behavior, Anita was clearly a stabilizing force. Though they were only married twenty-two months before his death in 2005, their relationship would span eight years and have a profound impact on the final chapter of Hunter’s life. As with all great love stories, their meeting was a fortuitous blend of timing and happenstance.
In 1992, Anita Thompson – then Anita Bejmuk – left college during her sophomore year to work for the Sierra Club, a renowned environmental group in Northern California. “At the time, I was very political, and very angry,” recalls Anita. “I was the angry vegan.” Eventually, she fled the tense world of non-profit fundraising and headed for the ski slopes, landing a job at a snowboard rental shop on Aspen Mountain. These were carefree times for Anita, spending her days on the slopes and her nights mingling with Aspen’s social elite. One evening in 1997, she told her friend Don Dixon that she wanted to learn about football, hoping to better understand this universal male bonding experience. “I know just the person to teach you,” said Dixon. “His name is Hunter Thompson.” Driving back through Woody Creek, Dixon called to arrange the meeting.
“I’ll never forget the first time I heard Hunter’s voice,” Anita says fondly. “I could hear him through Don’s cel phone – he had such a powerful voice. And I remember exactly where we were on the road. I remember the railroad tracks. I remember the meadow. It was a beautiful voice.” She takes a sip of her drink, adding, “I could tell there was something very special about this man, so I really wanted to meet him.”
When football season rolled around, Anita – just 25 – was invited to Owl Farm and given a crash course on the gridiron basics. “Hunter taught me the rules by betting, incessantly, on every play,” Anita says laughing. “Game time was a big deal at Owl Farm. Everybody here took it seriously, and a lot of money was constantly changing hands. But it was always festive, with smoke in the air and drinks flowing.”
Over the next two years, Anita would become part of Hunter’s exclusive inner circle, meeting regularly at Owl Farm for sporting events and other social occasions. “He would read us things, and ask us advice,” says Anita. “We were part of the salon here, and it was enriching all of our lives.”
By the spring of 1999, Anita was planning to leave Aspen and return to college. Upon hearing the news, Hunter threw a curveball that would change their lives forever. “Wait,” Hunter pleaded. “I have an urgent situation.” He asked Anita to stay and help him work on his second book of letters called Fear & Loathing in America. For Anita, the decision was an easy one. She would become Hunter’s de facto assistant on the project, reading letters to him, photocopying, researching, and digging through some 800 boxes of unpublished archived material. “The hours he worked were just odd,” recalls Anita. “He’d start between 9PM and midnight and work straight through, sometimes until dawn. And I still had my job at the snowboard shop. Hunter would drive me to work at eight in the morning after we’d been up all night researching the book.”
Anita and Hunter had been platonic friends for the better part of two years, but that was about to change. “Once I started working with him one-on-one, it was impossible not to get together,” says Anita. “By the time I quit the snowboard shop, we were definitely an item.”
To provide some perspective on their relationship, it’s important to understand the nature of sex and celebrity. If you’re famous, even for the lamest of reasons, people will have sex with you. Whether your moment in the spotlight comes from eating goat spleen on Fear Factor, impregnating Britney Spears, or writing several of the most important books of the 20th century, you’re going to get laid. And over the years, Hunter had many romantic liaisons with star-struck women, including several of his former assistants. Initially, some of Hunter’s closest friends wondered if Anita wasn’t just another notch on the Gonzo belt.
“At first, you really didn’t know her significance in this whole thing,” says Ralph Steadman, the English artist whose brilliantly twisted illustrations accompanied much of Hunter’s work. “Was Anita part of it, or was she just piece of totty?”
But Anita was more than a pretty conquest. And unlike many of the women who pursued Hunter in the past, she wasn’t a literary groupie, a gold digger, or a fame junkie out to fuck a superstar. “Sure, I’d heard of Hunter Thompson,” she says, “But I hadn’t read Vegas or Hell’s Angels or any of his work. I had no preconceptions about him, except that he knew a lot about football.”
“Anita wasn’t enthralled by his legend – There was no hero-worship. There was none of that,” confirms Ralph Steadman. “She just met the guy she thought was really interesting. It was quite a lovely relationship.”
NOBODY PUTS BEJMUK IN A CORNER
Anita was 27 when she moved in with Hunter, and her parents were unhappy because she’d once again postponed her college plans. “That’s when my mom started reading up on Hunter, and she came across all the drug rumors,” recalls Anita. “And being a traditional Polish woman, she was terribly worried.” In a classic bit of melodrama that plays like a scene from Dirty Dancing, Anita’s mother forced her to choose between her family and her lover. Of course she chose Hunter, and it caused a terrible rift within the Bejmuk clan.
Her family was also concerned with the age disparity. There were thirty-four years between them, and at 61, Hunter was older than Anita’s mother. For Anita, this was never an issue. “The age-thing was all blurred with Hunter,” says Anita. “He was very childlike – not childish – but childlike in so many ways. Sometimes, I was definitely the more responsible one in our relationship.”
Life with the legendary writer could be challenging, and no one knew this better than Ralph Steadman, his longtime friend and collaborator. “Living with Hunter is a bit like having a gorilla in your house,” says Steadman laughing. “And he lived out there in that old farm – It was like entering a gorilla’s cage. He needed someone who would understand the gorilla.” Fortunately, Anita understood the gorilla all too well, and her relationship with Hunter thrived – both romantically and creatively.
Anita and Hunter certainly loved each other and were even trying to have children, but theirs was a relationship based on work. Though initially hired to make photocopies and perform other administrative tasks, Anita quickly assumed a more active role in the creative process. Her most significant contribution, however, was that she motivated Hunter to write. He’d been in a creative slump for over a decade and hadn’t produced any work of real importance since The Curse of Lono in 1983.
“Hunter wanted to write again. And Anita gave him a great deal of hope,” says Ralph Steadman. “Because you can actually burn out, you know. And he burned out more times than once.” Steadman adds, “A lot of the relationships he’d been indulging in were not creative relationships. But I think with Anita, there was a genuine sense of getting back on track.”
It’s important to note that Hunter had been married once before – for seventeen years – to a woman named Sandy Tarlo. She’s the mother of his son Juan, and is believed to have been the source of Hunter’s strength in the early part of his career. She appears by name in Hell’s Angels and The Great Shark Hunt, and Hunter dedicated Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail to her. They divorced in 1979, and many see a correlation between her departure and his diminished creative output in the subsequent years. Nearly twenty years would pass before Anita came into his life, re-igniting the spark that had dimmed.
With Anita’s unflagging love and support, Hunter began to turn out the kind of biting, insightful and politically vitriolic work that had made him famous. It was a true return to form, and in those last years, he published the books Kingdom of Fear, Proud Highway, Fear & Loathing in America, and his “lost” novel The Rum Diary. He also wrote a weekly column for ESPN, and contributed to high-profile magazines such as Playboy and Rolling Stone.
When I ask Anita how she inspired Hunter to write again – how she became his muse – she laughs and says, “It’s really a question of motivation. What do you have to do to get the writing done?” She takes the last sip of her drink and says, “Here’s a typical scenario: It would be midnight with a deadline looming, and he still hadn’t written anything. So I’d say, Come on Hunter – Let’s write. And that’s what we did for years. That was my job, to get him to write. And he loved having someone encouraging him.”
At this point, Anita asks if she can refresh my drink – which is yes – so I follow her back into the kitchen. She continues talking as she mixes another round of screwdrivers. “Hunter wrote about me after I helped him on the first book, and I was very proud to appear in his work – very proud.” She hands me a tall cocktail glass and adds, “I wanted to make him proud too, and I did that by moving him to write. I wanted him to be as successful as possible on my watch. I worked very hard for that.”
When assisting Hunter with his writing, Anita learned to accommodate his unique creative process. He worked in the kitchen, always late at night, and always on a typewriter. “He wrote on an IBM Selectric. He had six of them,” recalls Anita. “Sometimes he’d say, the typewriter’s broken or goddammit, this one has the wrong font. I’ve gone through three typewriters in one night with him.”
Music was also a key component of the writing process. “When Hunter liked something, he’d play it over and over. I loved it too, especially when we were hooked on the same song,” says Anita. “We must’ve listened to Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown twenty-five times a night. Same with Dolly Parton’s Silver Dagger. And Dylan’s Hard Rain – I think we had to buy a second Hard Rain CD because we wore out the first one.”
Hunter was also a good editor of his own work, able to ferret the garbage from the gold. “We called him Doctor Chop – he was ruthless,” says Anita. “I often think he cut too much. But I loved everything he wrote, so I wasn’t the best editor.”
Any conversation about Hunter Thompson must eventually turn to the topic of drugs. Though his predilection for narcotics – both legal and illegal – has been covered ad nauseam, it’s important to note their place in his creative process. He referred to certain drugs as his “tools” – particularly marijuana, alcohol and cocaine – and often used them to facilitate his writing, the way an athlete might dope up before a competition. “If your goal for that evening is to write three pages or finish an article, then you could use some pot or some coke to help you get the pages,” says Anita. To illustrate this point, she launches into the following story, which appears here in its unedited transcript form:
“Hunter’s first book was Hell’s Angels, and it came out when he was 29. He always thought that if he didn’t have a book published by the time he turned 30, the gig was up. He even went to barber school, just in case the writing thing didn’t pan out. Can you imagine Hunter as a barber? So he finally got a contract with a publisher, and he’d written half of Hell’s Angels and it was fantastic. But the deadline was in four days. So he checked into a hotel room by himself, and stayed up for four days on Wild Turkey and Dexedrine. He finished the book on time, and it was brilliant. So he used the Wild Turkey and Dexedrine as a tool.”
Anita pauses to check on a rustling noise coming from the porch – it’s just the peacocks settling into their pen for the night. She continues her thought, adding, “Hunter could consume more than any human I’ve ever met, but you would rarely see him drunk. He handled his substances differently than other people for some reason, which may have been a curse, and may have been a blessing… I’m not sure.”
***
The sky is dimming as the sun prepares to set on Owl Farm. Anita and I are trudging through calf-deep snow at the edge of their property, angling for the best view of the valley at twilight. Their house sits on acres of pristine, untamed land and stretches back to the mountains behind it. In the distance, I can see the leveled mound where – per Hunter’s wishes – his cremated ashes were shot from a giant cannon. As we push a bit further, we come across the fresh remains of a bloodied deer sprawled helplessly in the snow. “The wolves are all around,” says Anita. “They killed this one today.” It’s easy to see why Hunter loved this place – the raw natural beauty of it all, and the limitless realm of savage possibilities. The only thing he may have loved more in his final days was Anita.
“Once you move into Hunter’s life, you quickly become very much a part of it,” says Ralph Steadman. “You become a satellite, and you revolve around Hunter. And that’s not demeaning in any way. I think Anita filled an enormous space in his life. She became extremely important to him.”
Hunter’s health had begun to deteriorate in the last few years of his life, and this may have hastened his desire to get married. A lifetime of substance abuse had taken its toll on his body, and the chronic back pain – which had troubled him for years – was becoming unbearable. He was scheduled for surgery to replace a portion of his spine and wanted to exchange vows before undergoing the risky operation. “He was worried that if something happened to him during the surgery – if he died on the operating table – that I wouldn’t be protected,” says Anita. “He said they would eat me alive, though he never specified who they were. So that’s one reason why the marriage certificate – the legal piece of paper – was so important to Hunter. He wanted me to have some kind of legal leverage.”
Hunter would ask Anita to marry him several times in the months leading up to his surgery, until finally she said yes. “He wrote me the most beautiful letter I’ve ever read – it was like something from a fairytale. And it came with a traditional ring,” recalls Anita. “So I said yes, I’d love to be your wife.”
They were married on April 24, 2003. “We went down to the courthouse in Aspen with a small group of friends,” says Anita. “We stopped by the Woody Creek Tavern on the way back – we didn’t even get out of the car. Hunter drove his JEEP up into the tables on the patio, right up to the front door.”
Hunter described the nuptials with typical flair in his ESPN column:
“It was done with fine style and secrecy in order to avoid the craziness and drunken violence that local lawmen feared would inevitably have followed the ceremony… Our honeymoon was even simpler. We drank heavily for a few hours and accepted fine gifts from strangers, then we drove erratically back out to the Owl Farm and prepared for our own, very private celebration by building a huge fire, icing down a magnum of Crystal Champagne and turning on the Lakers game until we passed out and crawled to the bedroom.”
Hunter survived the back surgery, but his health continued to deteriorate. He had serious complications from a previous hip replacement operation, and in December 2003 he shattered his leg bone while in Hawaii.
“There was a lot of care involved with his health issues, especially in the last year,” says Anita. “It could be tiring at times, for everyone – especially Hunter. At the end, I think he was just exhausted. We all were.”
As the pain increased, his moods began to wildly fluctuate. “The last few months before he died were not easy,” says Anita. “He had these awful drops in his personality, and he could be very cruel.”
The night before his death, Hunter was more affectionate and loving than he’d been in months. On February 20, 2003, Hunter shot and killed himself in the Owl Farm kitchen. His son Juan, who was visiting, found Hunter’s body slumped over in his writing chair. Anita was not home at the time. “I was at the gym,” she says. “We were actually on the phone when he did it. He told me that he loved me, and then I heard the gunshot. It was like he wanted me to be there with him when he went.”
“Buddhists believe in planning every detail of the day of your death – where you’ll be, what you’ll be wearing, who you’ll be with. So that way, your death is this beautiful experience,” says Anita, visibly choking back tears. “It wasn’t out of cruelty that we were on the phone when he did it. It was part of his plan.”
I ask Anita if she wants to take a break, but she shakes her head and continues. “At that moment, there was a lot of tumult and chaos and pain and love and beauty all swirled into his kitchen. But he was very peaceful.”
In the two years since his death, Anita has worked tirelessly to preserve Hunter’s literary legacy for future generations and to save his beloved Owl Farm. Unfortunately, he left behind very little money and a mountain of debt. “People want to tear this place down and build condos,” says Anita. “So we’re hoping to sell Hunter’s archives to a University – that would allow us to support Owl Farm for many years to come. Eventually, I’d like to turn this place into a retreat for writers. Hunter would’ve loved that.”
There have been other hurdles as well. Since the days immediately following Hunter’s death, the Thompson family has been battling Anita for control of Owl Farm and its valuable land. “She was in danger of being marginalized by the armies of lawyers with guns and money,” says Ralph Steadman, one of Anita’s staunchest supporters. “They are trying to diminish her role in this, and that’s terribly unfair. Anita was anything but a wife for hire. She was absolutely the personification of a young wife who was devoted to Hunter Thompson.”
Though Anita refuses to recriminate anyone from the Thompson camp, their actions have made one thing abundantly clear: The wolves are all around.
Despite this adversity, Anita has soldiered on. In the fall of 2006, she enrolled at Columbia University in New York to finish her degree – she’s on spring break when this interview takes place. She’s also doing her best to keep the Thompson literary tradition alive. Her first book called The Gonzo Way, a collection of the wisdom she gleaned from Hunter, is due out next month. She’s also helping to edit Hunter’s third book of letters, and is hoping to release his long-in-the-works novel Polo is My Life.
It’s just after midnight, and the vodka bottle is empty – which means it’s time to wrap things up. Anita continues talking as I pack my things. “People should know that Hunter was the ultimate student of life. It wasn’t about the mescaline and the uppers, downers or the salt shaker full of cocaine. It was about learning as much as he could.” She hands me my jacket, adding, “That’s why he admired excellence in any field. It didn’t matter if you were a lawyer, an actor, a cowboy or a garbage man – you just had to be excellent at what you do. It’s like Hunter said: At the top of the mountain, we are all snow leopards.”
As I’m driving away from Owl Farm, down the twisting road into blackness, Anita’s final words echo in my head. At the top of the mountain, we are all snow leopards. As I round the narrow bend heading into the gully, something leaps from the underbrush and darts across the road in front of my car – something that looks like a giant wild cat. Though it’s probably the vodka playing tricks on me, I choose to take this as a sign that one day, with enough hard work and determination, I too may join the snow leopards on top of the mountain. Then my vision sharpens into focus, and I see that the creature is actually an enormous grizzled skunk, waddling into the ravine. So I continue down into the valley, down, down into the darkness.