Hunter S. Thompson
Fame and its consequences

Thompson's journalistic work began to seriously suffer after his trip to Africa to cover the Rumble in the Jungle —the world heavyweight boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali —in 1974. He missed the match while intoxicated at his hotel and did not submit a story to the magazine. As Wenner put it to the film critic Roger Ebert in the 2008 documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, "After Africa, he just couldn't write. He couldn't piece it together". It was in 1973 that Thompson tried cocaine for the first time and various friends, family members, and editors remarked that its impact upon his productivity and creativity was devastating.

In 1975, Wenner assigned Thompson to travel to Vietnam to cover what appeared to be the end of the Vietnam War. Thompson arrived in Saigon just as South Vietnam was collapsing and as other journalists were leaving the country. Wenner allegedly canceled Thompson's medical insurance, which strained Thompson's relationship with Rolling Stone. He soon fled the country and refused to file his report until the ten-year anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. Wenner, writing in 2022, denied the claims that he cancelled Thompson's insurance, saying that Thompson spent most of his time in Saigon obsessing over evacuation plans. Thompson filed an unfinished dispatch that Wenner described "strong and promising, but nothing substantial." He then took a commercial flight to Bangkok where he met his wife for what Wenner described as a few weeks of "totally undeserved rest and recreation." While in Thailand, Thompson had a custom brass door plaque made that read "Rolling Stone: Global Affairs Suite. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" marked with a map of the world and two lightning bolts. "That was it," Wenner wrote. "No story. Just that plaque." Thompson later finished the story in time for the 10-year anniversary of the Fall of Saigon.

Plans for Thompson to cover the 1976 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone and later publish a book fell through as Wenner dissolved Straight Arrow Press ' book publishing division. Thompson claimed Wenner canceled the project without informing him. In his memoirs, Wenner told a different story: "The issue wasn't money... The real issue was whether he had the discipline to spend so much time on the campaign trail and whether he had that much to say about the same subject again." Thompson went on to spend a day with Jimmy Carter at the Georgia Governor's Mansion and write a 10,000-word cover story endorsing Carter for president. "After that, we were virtually an official part of the Carter campaign, and they treated us as such," Wenner wrote of the episode.

From the late 1970s on, most of Thompson's literary output appeared as a four-volume series of books entitled The Gonzo Papers. Beginning with The Great Shark Hunt in 1979 and ending with Better Than Sex in 1994, the series is largely a collection of rare newspaper and magazine pieces from the pre-Gonzo period, along with almost all of his Rolling Stone pieces.

Starting around 1980, Thompson became less active by his standards. Aside from paid appearances, he largely retreated to his compound in Woody Creek, rejecting projects and assignments or failing to complete them. Despite a lack of new material, Wenner kept Thompson on the Rolling Stone masthead as chief of the "National Affairs Desk", a position he held until his death.

In 1980, Thompson divorced his wife, Sandra Conklin. The same year marked the release of Where the Buffalo Roam, a loose film adaptation based on Thompson's early 1970s work, starring Bill Murray as the writer. Murray eventually became one of Thompson's trusted friends. Later that year, Thompson relocated to Hawaii to research and write The Curse of Lono, a Gonzo-style account of the 1980 Honolulu Marathon. Extensively illustrated by Ralph Steadman, an iteration of the work first appeared in Running in 1981 as "The Charge of the Weird Brigade" and was later excerpted in Playboy in 1983. The book was a disappointment, with its editor calling it "disorganized and incoherent." It was poorly reviewed, and sales were disappointing.

In 1983, he covered the U.S. invasion of Grenada but did not write or discuss the experiences until the publication of Kingdom of Fear in 2003. Also in 1983, at the behest of Terry McDonell, he wrote "A Dog Took My Place ", an exposé for Rolling Stone of the scandalous Roxanne Pulitzer divorce case and what he called the " Palm Beach lifestyle". The story included dubious insinuations of bestiality. Wenner described it as one of Thompson's "least-known but best pieces." In 1985, Thompson accepted an advance to write about "feminist pornography" for Playboy. As part of his research, he spent evenings at the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre striptease club in San Francisco. The experience evolved into an as-yet-unpublished novel tentatively entitled The Night Manager.

Thompson next accepted a role as weekly media columnist and critic for The San Francisco Examiner. The position was arranged by former editor and fellow Examiner columnist Warren Hinckle. As his editor at The Examiner, David McCumber described, "One week it would be acid-soaked gibberish with a charm of its own. The next week it would be incisive political analysis of the highest order."

Many of these columns were collected in Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2: Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1988) and Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3: Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream (1990), a collection of autobiographical reminiscences, articles, and previously unpublished material.
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