VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: ‘Fear and Loathing’ Really Happened

Hunter S. Thompson, who died by suicide 18 years ago last Monday, is famous for beingness a gonzo journalist. So, many of his fans regard “Fear and Loathing inward Las Vegas” as a journal of events that actually occurred.

Actually, that’s not so practically their fault, since Random House published the author’s 1972 masterwork below the category of full general non-fiction. But Thompson never claimed any of the events described inward it were true.

The fact that neither of his main characters was a real mortal should have got been the for the first time clue. The story is narrated by I Raoul Duke, whose traveling companion/attorney is Dr. Gonzo.

In real life, Homer Thompson was assigned past Rolling Stone cartridge to indite an exhibit on civic rights activist and Los Angeles Times editorialist Ruben Salazar, whom LA County Sheriff’s officers “accidentally” barb and killed with a snap gas grenade fired at close mountain chain during a Vietnam War protestation inward 1970. After a week or so of asking tough questions, Benjamin Thompson grew scared.

Figuring that he power follow next, he whisked his main source for the story, attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta, sour to Las Vegas to question him there. Sports Illustrated had hired Homer Armstrong Thompson to compensate the Mint 400, an off-road vehicle rush around undeveloped parts of Frederick North Las Vegas from March 21-23, 1971.

Sports Illustrated “aggressively rejected” (Thompson’s words) what he submitted as his race coverage. What was supposed to be a 250-word caption instead became a 2,500-word screed on the decease of the American dream. So, Benjamin Thompson instead offered it to Rolling Stone, whose editor, Jann Wenner, scheduled it to flow inwards 2 parts inward future issues.

More than a month later, Homer Thompson and Acosta returned to Las Vegas to continue the National District Attorneys Association’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs for the endorsement half of his Rolling Stone assignment. With only when a few pocket-size edits and the addition of the grotesquely hallucinogenic illustrations of Ralph Steadman, the magazine serial suit the volume that would forever entwine Thompson’s make with Las Vegas. He wrote to the highest degree of it inwards a hotel elbow room inwards Arcadia, Calif., at the same clip he completed “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” his Salazar clause for Rolling Stone.

So how often really happened in “Fear and Loathing inward Las Vegas: group 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 starting with the legendary table of contents of Thompson and Acosta’s renting railroad car trunk. In the book, it included “seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered day book acid, a salt mover and shaker half total of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, … a dry pint of altogether ethyl ether and two dozen amyls,” all gathered during ane feverous dark inwards LA.

This was supposedly the fuel for all the book’s misadventures.

However, inward a missive to his Random House editor, published inwards the 1997 book “Fear and Loathing inward America,” Homer Armstrong Thompson admitted on that point was no more actual drug use. The refreshing “was a real conscious try to assume drug freakout,” he wrote, though he did, “at times, bring situations & feelings I call back from other scenes to the reality at hand.” He later wrote to the same editor: ”I have got ne'er had often observe or fondness for journalism.”

A just chunk of the book’s process took come out in Room 1850 of The Mint’s tower (one of 365 rooms that unexampled proprietor Binion’s Horseshoe for good shut inward 2009). According to Duke’s narration, he and Dr. Gonzo ran upward an unpaid way divine service measure of $29 to $36 an time of day for 48 successive hours before trashing their elbow room and swiping 600 bars of Neutrogena soap.

“That is something i would get been like a shot 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 in 2010. According to Howe, in that respect was no more “Mr. Heem” or any other hotel executive looking for for Thompson, Acosta couldn’t have ordered a go down of luggage from room serving without paying, and no more scoop was reported stolen.

His construct of what was sledding on and what was really going on was 2 different things,” Gordon Howe said.

However, Homer A. Thompson did let the firebrand of allegedly stolen scoop right. (Millionaire real-estate developer Del Webb, who owned the Mint, also sat on the gameboard of the company that made Neutrogena.) Thompson’s eyeball for item could hue an transmit of believability into the most obvious fantasy.

Another event that ne'er happened is the Debbie Sir Joshua Reynolds demo at the Desert Inn — at least the way Homer Armstrong Thompson reported it. In the book, Duke and Dr. Gonzo see the gap identification number (a deal of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”) before getting bounced for having conned their right smart inward for free.

While Reynolds did run the Desert Inn inward Mar 1971, the vocalizer said she was never informed of any incident resembling this. However, she was trusted of i particular that casts suspicion over the entire account: never, she told the R-J, did she do “Sgt. Pepper.”

Other embellishments require no more witnesses to identify. For instance, the territorial dominion attorneys’ group discussion Count Rumford was assigned to screening past Rolling Stone convened inward later(a) April, to a greater extent than a month after the Mint 400. Yet the book places the events a calendar week apart, connexion them past an aborted touch off to LA punctuated by a traffic kibosh conducted by a California Highway Patrol officer who supposedly net ball Homer Thompson turn after the author led him on an off-road chase, at 100 mph, with a Budweiser inward hand.

“You know,” Thompson quoted the officer, “I acquire the intuitive feeling you could enjoyment a nap.”

The 25% That Did Happen

In the 2008 documentary “Gonzo,” Thompson and Acosta put up actually live heard living come out Chapter 9 as they overstretch into a Boulder City, Nev. taco stand up during their back actuate to Las Vegas.

“We’re looking for for the American dream,” Acosta tells a waitress, “and we were told it was somewhere inward this area.”

The waitress turns to the cook, mentation she has just now been asked directions to a nightclub.

“Hey Lou,” she says, “you know where the American Dream is?”

That unit chapter is a written text of that audiotape,” “Gonzo” manager Alex Gibney told the R-J  in 2010. “So it leads you to trust that some of this poppycock is real.”

For the final say, we’ll spell to the horse’s mouth. Here’s a blurb from Benjamin Thompson that was published on the book’s original jacket cover…

“My idea was to purchase a fat notebook computer and register the unit thing, as it happened, so get off inwards the notebook for publishing — without editing,” Homer Armstrong Thompson wrote. “But this is a strong thing to do, and inward the end, I found myself imposing an essentially fictional fabric on what began as a bit of straight/crazy journalism.”

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