Paul Auster On His Man in the Dark

The novelist Paul Auster died today at his home in Brooklyn at age 77. This is a piece I wrote for the LA Weekly in 2008 about him and his latest book at the time, Man in the Dark. (Photo via Faber and Faber)

By Steve Appleford

The mind of Paul Auster goes blank at night. He lies down to sleep in his Brooklyn home after a long day with pen and legal pad, or bent over the same manual Olympia typewriter he’s used since the 1960s, tangling with characters and ideas that can inhabit his imagination for years at a time before finding a place within one of his novels. Six, seven days a week he does this, obsessing and writing and rewriting, but then it goes quiet, and he leaves it all behind, observing only silence and serenity in the dark.

“Writing a novel is a very slow process,” says Auster, 61, speaking from the Park Slope office he keeps just around the corner from his brownstone. “You can only work so many hours per day. Then your brain starts to sizzle and short-circuit. I believe in rest, and not thinking about it. The powers of the unconscious seem to work very well with novels.”

Auster’s new novel, Man in the Dark, is told through the character of August Brill, a retired literary critic with a shattered leg, who spends his days in a wheelchair and his nights alone, creating epic narratives to keep the horrors and regrets of his recent past far away. The bad thoughts are personal and global, with echoes from the distant catastrophe in Iraq, and as immediate as his grieving daughter and granddaughter.

Auster has come to be known as “the chance man,” an author preoccupied with the wild coincidences of life and accidental connections between people and events. Such connections were central to the celebrated New York Trilogy, his metaphysical reworking of the detective genre, and have factored into his nonfiction essays and autobiographical vignettes. Yet these ideas have never truly represented the full scope of his work. “It’s sometimes maddening,” admits Auster of this lingering reputation. Much more is at stake in Man in the Dark, a novel that is obliquely topical but is also among his most emotionally charged.

For the wounded Brill, inventing stories is not a vocation or even a hobby, but a necessity. His wife has died, his daughter’s husband gone to another woman, and his granddaughter’s lover murdered. Auster’s novel unfolds during one of his nights in the dark, as he imagines a contemporary America in which the attacks of September 11 never happened. Instead, “one nightmare replaces another,” and we have an unthinkable second American Civil War, this one ignited by the bungled, stolen election of 2000. It is perhaps the novel’s greatest leap of fantasy to suggest this country might have risen up after the U.S. Supreme Court delivered the presidency to George W. Bush, which is literally the opposite of how Americans did respond. There were no mass protests or general strikes. New York and California did not secede from the union (as they do in Brill’s fantasy). In the real world where Auster and the rest of us reside, the nation yawned and kept score on Hardball.

‘I know,” says Auster, genuine regret in his voice. He laughs. “I was apoplectic for at least a year afterwards. And I still haven’t recovered, so perhaps this imaginary Civil War is some kind of wish fulfillment on my part.”

The greater the fantasy, the better the distraction. So the bedridden fabulist Brill imagines a young magician taken from New York and drafted to perform an assassination to end “this other war, an imaginary war on home ground, America cracking apart, the noble experiment finally dead.” And he decides that this magician’s mission is to kill Brill himself, to silence the old man in the wheelchair who is creating this awful story of war, to end all of this pain.

Man in the Dark is not a political novel in the traditional sense, but the consequences of our ongoing national nightmare are everywhere. The first mention of Iraq appears on page eight, September 11 on page 31, Bush on page 51, the election of 2000 on page 62, and so on. But the book draws its greatest rage and horror from the personal tragedy suffered by Auster’s good friend, the Israeli author David Grossman, whose son was killed during the 2006 war with Lebanon — and just days before a ceasefire. The novel is dedicated to Grossman and his family, and “in memory of Uri,” who died the very week his father and Amos Oz urged Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to end the conflict.

“He was a 20-year-old boy whom I knew,” Auster says gravely. “It’s one of the most terrible things that has ever happened to any of my friends. I love David very much. I think he is an extraordinary writer, an extraordinary man and someone who has been battling for peace in Israel all his life, and for this to happen to him of all people seems the cruelest turn imaginable. I’ve been thinking about this ever since it happened. This really propelled me into the book.”

In Auster’s novel, that tragedy is reshaped into the story of Titus, the former lover of Brill’s granddaughter Tatya. After she ended the relationship, the heartbroken Titus went to Iraq to drive cargo trucks, only to be kidnapped and killed, his final moments captured on terrorist videotape. Tatya has now dropped out of film school and spends endless days distracting herself from her pain and guilt by watching classic movies with her grandfather. Scenes from these films (Grand Illusion, The Bicycle Thief and The World of Apu, among others) provide some startling moments of revelation, much like the tender conversation between Brill and Tatya later in the book, a lengthy dialogue informed by Auster’s relationship with his own daughter, Sophie Auster, an actress just turned 21.

These scenes amount to more layers and dreams within imagined stories embedded in the larger, tragic narrative of Auster’s novel. He is notoriously comfortable with alternative levels of consciousness. Meanwhile, Brill’s adult daughter is writing a biography of Rose Hawthorne, the daughter of Nathaniel, and herself a minor American poet whose line “the weird world rolls on” captures Brill’s attention and provides a recurring motif in Auster’s book.

As always with Auster, the power within Man in the Dark is also in how he tells it. Back in 1985’s City of Glass, he described the perfect detective story but could have been describing his own distinctive voice, where there is “nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. … Since everything seen or said, even the lightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. … The center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward.’”

This newest novel is perhaps less noir than some of Auster’s previous work, but the crisp narrative style remains the same: words and ideas stripped to their essence, as vivid and direct as a coroner’s report, elegantly written and weighted with feeling.

“The thing about style, it’s almost as impossible to control as your thumbprint,” Auster explains. “It is you, and I’ve always aspired to write books that are composed of as few words as possible. I like the idea of leaving space for the reader to inhabit, not telling everything, making every word count, every syllable count, and every sentence. It has nothing to do with detective fiction. It just has to do with a certain aesthetic.

“Ideally, what I would hope for is that when someone is reading my book, they would get so entrapped inside the story that they would forget that the medium of the story is words, and that the words become transparent.”

In Man in the Dark, words are not exactly transparent, but they do illuminate a weird world in which tragedy is too often the norm and known to all of us, and the only possible escape is to imagine something worse.

MAN IN THE DARK | By PAUL AUSTER | Henry Holt | 192 pages | $23 hardcover

LA Weekly, September 10, 2008

Sally Mann’s Examination of Life, Death and Decay

Mann’s book and exhibition, “The Flesh and the Spirit,” at a Richmond, Va., museum, ranges from crisp early work to later chaotic meditations on death.

By Steve Appleford, Special to the Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Lexington, Va.

The meandering path to the cabin where Sally Mann once photographed her young children is through a forest of towering oak, maple and hickory. It’s on the Maury River, a mile and a half from the house and studio she designed for herself, and as she walks loudly through a thick layer of leaves and branches, she mentions something about bears.

She saw a couple of black bears here just the other day while on horseback. “They’re perfectly harmless,” she insists, still crunching through the leaves, her dogs barking around her in the fading afternoon light, “but they shake you up a little bit.”

The cabin is empty now and her three kids grown, each the subject of ongoing curiosity whenever spotted at one of their mother’s openings, art stars by birth. The period when she made those photographs was just the briefest of moments, a time of bloody noses and feral nudity at home and by the water, documented to great acclaim and discomfort in the 1992 book “Immediate Family.”

Her interests have since expanded from that youthful, naked idyll to images of mortality and inevitable decay, of ancient Civil War battlefields and cadavers rotting in the wild. She’s turned the camera unflinchingly on herself and photographed the progression of late-onset muscular dystrophy in her husband. At 59, that makes Mann the ultimate nature photographer, facing the raw and unthinkable of life experience with an 8x10 view camera. “The body is fraught,” she says. “It’s dangerous territory.”

This is the theme of “Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit,” a book and exhibition that examine the through-line from her crisp early work to her murkier, almost chaotic later meditations on death. Hosted by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, with a vivid catalog published by Aperture Books, it is not a true retrospective, but a gathering of images that cohere on the business of life and its end.

“She takes what’s close to home and makes that stand for universal themes,” says John R. Ravenal, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia museum. “If it’s not her children, then it's herself or her husband or the landscape around her. They’re nurtured by the land and their connection to the culture and community.”

“Every time a death occurs in my life, I’m just stunned by the emotional impact it has on me and the void that is left behind by that person,” Mann says. “There is a great line from Laurie Anderson: 'When my father died, it was like a whole library had burned down.' The power of death just knocked me flat. I thought it was something I better look into.”

Early this decade, that exploration took her from the 425-acre farm of rolling hills and forest she shares with her husband to the Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center (a.k.a. “the Body Farm”), where donated bodies are left to the elements so scientists can better understand human decomposition in criminal cases. On one of her three visits, there were 40 cadavers on the grounds. “And they were gorgeous. Beautiful,” she recalls. “Nature is really efficient, and she doesn't spare on the aesthetics.”

In some pictures she made there, she operated from a respectful distance, but in others she forces the viewer to take in the full ravages of nature on the human form. There are close-ups of torn flesh and faces drawn back into ghastly smiles.

Homebody

On the anniversary of her father’s death — he died in 1988 — she sits in her kitchen, dining on a casual meal of venison and fried apples harvested from her property. He was a country doctor and local eccentric, a noted gardener of trees and shrubs and the maker of playfully lewd abstract sculptures. He also passed on his 4x5 view camera to Mann.

She rarely leaves the premises, Mann admits happily, and she's clearly relaxed here, chatting seriously but unpretentiously about her work. She’s dressed in jeans and a black sweater, her long, brown hair streaked with gray and tied loosely behind her. In the next room is her library, crowded with books on Walker Evans, Nan Goldin and other photographers, below the mummified carcasses of rats and cats nailed artfully to the wall.

She was further awakened to an interest in mortality after a horse-riding accident in 2006. While riding on a nearby trail, her Arabian suffered an aneurism, threw Mann to the ground and then stomped on her before collapsing, breaking Mann's back. The horse died and the photographer was immobilized for months. “I felt completely smashed,” she says. “When you can’t move properly and everything hurts, you feel like you're 100 years old. And I thought, oh man, this is what’s right around the corner.” Her response was a series of shadowy self-portraits, shot up-close and mercilessly. For this and much of her later work, she turned to the archaic collodion wet-plate process, and the results were characterized by smudges, scratches, accidental chemical reactions and frayed edges, all suggesting the passage of time.

It's also how she has photographed her adult children and her husband, Larry, as he weakens from muscular dystrophy. In one portrait, titled “Was Ever Love,” he's bearded and on his back, still strong but as still as a battlefield casualty. In others, his muscles are wasting away. “We’ve been married for 40 years,” she says of the pictures, “so I think he knew it was coming. It really is about trust.”

She never relocated to New York to become part of the art and photography establishment, meeting curators and buyers, but chose to remain in rural Appalachia, where she found her greatest subjects and purpose.

Until Mann was 7, she refused to wear clothes and ran naked through the isolation of her parents' 30 acres with a pack of dogs. It's largely how she raised and photographed her own kids. “The Flesh and the Spirit” includes lesser-known color images of her family, shot with a medium-format range-finder camera (in contrast to the 8x10 black-and-white vision of “Immediate Family”).

“They were made in such a unique set of circumstances,” Mann says now. “America being a fairly suburban country at this point, people can't imagine a situation where children can live as freely with nature as those kids did. It seems jarring and forced and strange. But it would have been jarring and forced and strange to tell my kids to put on a bathing suit to swim in a river when there's not a living soul for five miles in any direction.”

The realization that her own children could be an important photographic subject came as the result of an accident in 1985, when her daughter Jessie came home with an eye swollen nearly shut from a bee sting. The picture Mann made that day was “Damaged Child,” still one of her best-known images.

“When you’re a parent, you don’t think it’s so remarkable, and you think you’re going to see that stuff all the rest of your life and you're stuck with diapers and you’re stuck with wet beds and you’re stuck with bloody noses,” Mann says. “I look back on those pictures and even I have a little involuntary gasp when I see them. They were the most ordinary things in the world then.”

Major galleries were initially uninterested in showing the work, but when Aperture published “Immediate Family,” it arrived during a season of outrage over museum showings of Robert Mapplethorpe’s most explicit pictures and Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” The San Francisco home of Jock Sturges was raided by the FBI for his photographs of young nudists. And Mann found some of her own family pictures condemned by critics.

The atmosphere had an effect. “I was resolute and I wanted to put forward this face of complete commitment and belief in the work,” she says. “But looking back on it, I second-guessed myself all the time. I didn't take pictures that I might have taken.”

She took the photographs off the market six years ago, determined to focus on new work, but the family work remains popular. “I bet we could reignite the culture wars with one little, tiny match. It’s right under the surface of conservative America.”

Odd workplace

“Oh, Jesus, there’s a bird in here!”

Mann steps into her barn workroom just as a sparrow rushes past. The walls are already spattered with the black marks of light-sensitive silver nitrate from the last bird that got in, and the room smells of ether. Her big cameras stand high on tripods and jugs of chemicals are collected everywhere.

Hanging from a hook is the pelt of her beloved greyhound, Eva. The dog’s death led to an early exploration of mortality and the body. Her husband skinned the animal and Mann photographed the decay process. It’s a subject she's still looking at.

Mann turns 60 in May, and is already contemplating how much longer she can work. She has much more to do. “I try not to examine the muse too closely. I do tend to go off on tangents and head off into strange territory with no concern that this doesn’t ‘look like a Sally Mann,’” she says. “I just really want to grow and change and evolve, and not take the same thing over and over again.”

Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2010

Photographs by Sally Mann/Aperture Books

Master of the House of Playboy

Hef, still doing it his way (does he really have a choice?)

By Steve Appleford

The young women assembled on the lawn have come from around the country for this moment, delivered to the Playboy Mansion by mothers and boyfriends, each girl prepared for the day in extravagant states of undress. Standing on stiletto heels, they wear G-strings and micro-bikinis, lingeries of lace and silk, while showing off golden tans or blindingly pale skin beneath a warm, cloudless sky. They are here for a Playboy casting call, 225 of them ready to be chosen for a new generation of naked girls next door, to land on the glossy pages of an intimate magazine pictorial. By tomorrow another 300 will have arrived, flying in from Boston, New York, Florida, Australia. But today's search has come to a halt as the young women anxiously await the imminent appearance of the man of the house, the esteemed publisher and chief lothario, Hugh M. Hefner, or, simply, "Hef."

The front door opens to a round of girlish cheers when Hefner steps from his castle with a wave, a video crew documenting the boss in his red-satin robe and white captain's hat. He is 84 now and walks with the stiffness of age, but he moves quickly past the stone cherubs in the fountain, past the wishing well where he married his second wife (now divorced), and through this crowd of young admirers. He does not linger.

"Hi, Hef! We love you!" shouts a petite woman with auburn skin and bleached-blond hair, nearly bursting out of her frilly bikini top and panties. Hefner smiles again but keeps leaning forward, walking with an entourage that includes several security men and his new No. 1 girlfriend, Crystal Harris, the magazine's Miss December for 2009, an athletic blonde a fraction of his age, strolling beside him in a little black dress.

In a moment, Hefner is at the tennis court, where temporary photo studios are erected inside white tents, as models wait their turn to disrobe for a quick test in front of a Playboy camera. (One asks photographer Arny Freytag if she can fill out an application to be Hef's girlfriend.) Hefner poses for a quick snapshot with a crowd of would-be Playmates, and sits for a brief interview for Playboy Radio. It's there that he is presented with a large, jovial portrait of himself, created by an artist who paints exclusively with his penis.

Hefner has hosted scenes like this for more than five decades: all the parties and political events, the nude sunbathing by the pool and roller disco on the tennis court, mingling with actors, athletes, presidential candidates and an endless rotation of young women. It is a life and image he invented for himself, and it continues to define the Playboy dream. The man and the brand remain inseparable.

It has been a long run of high style and decadence, a nonstop pajama party at the Mansion, his personal Shangri-la. Hefner rarely leaves the premises, and he will tell you with a satisfied cackle, "Life is tough here, as you can see."

There are the expected "aches and pains," the occasional trouble with the ex-wife and girlfriends, and his hearing is going. He also hosts fewer of the famous house parties now, citing the cost of all that hedonistic fun. More ominous is the health of Playboy Enterprises Inc., which he took public during boom times nearly four decades ago, and which now faces the same declining fortunes and circulation numbers as all print media. Playboy magazine's current 1.5 million circulation represents a staggering drop from its 1971 peak of 7 million.

The stock price has been in a steady fall for years. Rumored attempts by the board to sell the company or find new partnerships have stalled, with Hefner's ongoing role the ultimate complication. He remains majority owner with 70 percent of the stock, and he is not about to sell, or to abandon his role as the living symbol of the empire. That would kill him. This month, Hefner surprised the board and financial analysts with an offer to buy back the company stock he doesn't already own, reasserting himself as the master of the house of Playboy, with no intention of leaving the mansion or the life.

The dream that sustains him, as it does his most committed readers, is a small one. It is not movie star Hef. It is not Hef in the White House. Hef on the moon. It is a dream that can fit comfortably inside the mind of any American male: big house, naked girls. This is a dream that can carry you for many years, from adolescence and apparently well into your 80s. But is the dream still a dream after half a century of uninterrupted wish fulfillment? Does Hef still look at his bedside bottle of baby oil with the same level of enthusiasm?

On the walk back from the tennis court, Hefner and Miss Crystal chat happily about the day's big turnout of would-be Playmates, as a brown-and-white spaniel named after Charlie Chaplin runs beside them. Once inside, the couple pauses at the bottom of the stairs. Hefner turns to his lady and says quietly, "See you later tonight?" It's a simple, ordinary question, but he says it with such vulnerability, a fragile whisper from an older man still craving romance and affection. It's almost breathtaking to witness.

Of course she will be there, Harris tells him. Then she has to repeat it, shouting loud enough for him to hear.

*

He enters the mansion library abruptly, a vague sense of impatience about him. Despite the permanent leisure wear, the satin and slippers, Hef keeps to a tight schedule. It's an afternoon in early April, and his 84th birthday is only days away. The signs of time passing are inescapable.

His good friend actor Robert Culp had just died suddenly from a heart attack, another longtime pal and mansion regular to pass away in the last year. "This is a time of reflection. I have some very dear friends in the last handful of years who are gone," Hefner says. "You get to a place where you reflect on the life and look back over the good times. That, in a very real way, makes this as good a time in my life as I've ever had."

What goes on behind that impish grin is unknown to most of us. While he is a dependably charming and intelligent interview, Hefner's not about to bare his soul to another visitor sitting across from his backgammon table. But he is always ready to reexamine the events of his life and career. There is a new documentary, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, directed by his friend Brigitte Berman, who won an Oscar in 1986 for Artie Shaw: Time Is All You've Got. And Taschen has released a five-volume, encyclopedic history of the man and the magazine, from his baby pictures and earliest cartoons to Playboy's 25th anniversary, at the end of the '70s.

He looks and sounds exceptionally fit for a man of 84, but Hefner is quick to acknowledge that he no longer cuts quite the same image he did during Playboy's rise. "Of course not. The image now is the image as it really is," he says. "But I think one of the messages of my life is that age is just a number, and you can define your life in a lot of different ways. What my life has been all about is that there is more than one way to do it, more than one moral way, and a lot of the traditional ways are suspect.

"Retirement is the first step to the grave if you're doing what you enjoy. My work is a pleasure."

Arrayed behind him are framed pictures of his children, his mother, the second wife, and a new one of Hef with Crystal. There is a model of his Big Bunny jet, his stretch DC-9 painted tuxedo black, which he sold back in 1976, and a life-size porcelain bust of Barbi Benton, his girlfriend from the good times of the late '60s and early '70s.

The 30-room Playboy Mansion is a home as Hollywood-famous as Pickfair or Neverland, and Hefner's brother Keith predicts that after Hef is gone, the property will become something like Graceland, a shrine. Hefner bought the 6-acre property in 1971 for $1.1 million, with another $14 million in capital improvements in the years since, but none of the recent renovations has altered the flavor and mood of the residence. It looks essentially as it has for decades.

The house is lived in, and an unlikely candidate as a showplace for modern living in Architectural Digest. Nothing here can be found in Dwell. Hef will receive an iPad for his birthday, but a lot of the fixtures and décor date back to the Nixon administration. Hefner is a man who hates change.

Even the paintings by Picasso, Pollock and Dali — long since sold at auction — have been replaced by reproductions and hang exactly where the originals once did. (The original Matisse drawing with a cigarette burn left by John Lennon remains.) His leather footrest in the screening room is well-worn, and the drapes by the dining room fireplace are stained from ash.

It is the same with his life. Nothing changes except the names of his women, and Hefner keeps to a rigid schedule.

"Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays — they all have to be the same as last week's and the weeks before," says Kendra Wilkinson, his former girlfriend and an original cast member from the hit reality series The Girls Next Door. "He has to have the exact drink at the exact time. He has to have his chicken noodle soup at the exact time, and he has to have his movie at a certain time. You can't be late. He's always on a schedule. Always — except for girls."

He also remains deeply involved with the creative and entrepreneurial side of Playboy, on the phone with his editorial director in the magazine's Chicago headquarters. Hefner has his reasons for remaining in Los Angeles, in his big house on Charing Cross Road, atop a hill with his zoo and swimming pool and tennis courts. He spends almost no time in any office other than the one he keeps in the upstairs living quarters. He hates meetings.

Back in the '50s and '60s, there were speedy, all-night Benzedrine binges, enough to keep him going nonstop two or three days at a time. All those hours weren't spent humping bunnies. He was working, bent over text and cartoons and photographs, the makings of Playboy scattered on the floor around him, actually editing, a pencil in one hand, a pipe in the other, sometimes spending his nights alone in his infamous round, rotating, vibrating bed. Which doesn't sound very leisurely at all.

"I still pick the covers, still pick the centerfolds, still pick the cartoons, the party jokes, edit overall pacing of the book and what goes into it," Hefner says. "I'm probably the oldest working editor of a major magazine in history, I imagine.

"About six months ago I started Twittering," he adds, about to repeat his favorite new joke. "I used to be a jitterbug, now I'm a Twitter-bug."

Last year his estranged wife, Kimberly Conrad, threatened to sue over his selling of her house; Hefner later settled "by giving her more money." His three original live-in girlfriends from The Girls Next Door are long gone, and two of their replacements, the Shannon twins, were invited to move elsewhere. With Harris, he is down to a single female companion for the first time since the breakup of his second marriage, in 1998.

Those changes are less traumatic than the existential threats to print media in an era of free online content. Even though Playboy was the first magazine to establish an Internet presence, the publication has suffered from an industrywide fall in circulation. "I thought it was the future," Hefner says of the company's early steps online, but blames "the business end of our business" for ignoring the potential and falling behind. He fully expects to survive.

Leading the magazine for him in Chicago is editorial director Jimmy Jellinek, who came to Playboy after a decade of gigs as editor of the exploding Maxim, FHM, Stuff and Complex, the kinds of next-gen young men's magazines once expected to eclipse Playboy. Jellinek now dismisses each of the surviving lad mags as "really just a pamphlet serving as a marketing vehicle to get Pepsi products advertising."

Jellinek grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and remembers seeing the original Playboy tower above the city as he rolled along Lakeshore Drive. "It was the Playboy building, man. You're talking about one of the world's most resonant brands, you see the name, you see the bunny — it's imbued with a certain sense of values, and you immediately know what it stands for. When you saw the building, you'd get excited. We'd take our pictures out in front of the building. It was something very much part of the fabric of the city."

The editor is now an aggressive, almost defensive advocate for the historic publication, and has no patience for critics who have questioned the viability of a lifestyle magazine for virile men on the prowl when its symbol is a wrinkled man in his 80s.

"I don't see any prevailing wisdom from anybody else in the magazine world," Jellinek says. "All these analysts have never worked on a magazine. ... These guys just sit and throw rocks without any basis for conversation whatsoever."

He meets with Hef on occasional trips to Los Angeles, but "the bulk of our relationship is on the phone and is through memos." They agree on the ongoing direction of the magazine, changing little from its heyday, still drawing attention for the monthly Playboy Interview. (Rocker John Mayer got in as much trouble this year for his racial/sexual wisecracks as Jimmy Carter did while a presidential candidate, with his 1976 admission to "lust" in his heart.) There is high-end fiction, pop culture and investigative journalism in the classic mode, beneath the notable bylines of Martin Amis, Bill Zehme, Stephen King, Paul Theroux, John Waters and Roger Ebert, even if the general magazine audience has forgotten it's still there amid the nude women.

"Success and popularity by their nature are like a bell-shaped curve. You have the high point and then there's an aging process, etc. The remarkable thing in terms of Playboy — certainly in terms of my own personal life — is how this thing has gone on and on," Hef says. "We sell fewer magazines in the old-fashioned way than we did in the '70s and '80s, but we reach a larger audience now on a global level than any other time in history. ... I must be doing something right."

Hefner does not deny the economic problems facing his magazine. "That's real. We live in the real world. But it's more interesting and newsworthy when it's related to Playboy. We're doing better than some, and not as well as others."

It is the running theme of recent news coverage of the Playboy empire, with serious implications for Hefner's future. After two decades as CEO, his daughter, Christie Hefner, stepped down, and new corporate leadership began to make changes, cutting costs through layoffs and consolidation. "It wasn't just business as usual," Hefner says now of the move. "We had to do some dramatic things."

More alarming was discussion of a sale, and the possibility of real changes in Hef's rigid schedule, with outsiders suggesting the Playboy Mansion be sold, his legacy dismantled, as if the central figure throughout Playboy's history were as interchangeable as the CEO of General Mills.

Then came Hefner's surprise July 12 announcement of his interest in taking Playboy Enterprises private, offering to buy out minority shareholders for $5.50 a share (for a total of $123 million), which represents a 30 percent leap over the stock's most recent closing price. Within days, a lawsuit was filed in Delaware State Court against Hefner and members of Playboy's board of directors by a group of irritated investors, who had watched with horror as stock value plummeted. The share price was at $15 as recently as 2006.

In the current climate of fading media giants, Hef's offer might seem like a way out of further losses for long-suffering investors, but the suit calls the plan "the product of a flawed process designed to sell ... on terms detrimental" to stockholders. And when a much-rumored sale to clothing corporation Iconix was derailed last year over unresolved questions about Hef's continued role, stockholder David Brown filed another suit in Los Angeles, accusing the founder of maneuvering to preserve his lifestyle at all costs.

"He controls 70 percent of the vote of the company, so the fate of the company is really in Hef's hands and nobody else's," says David Bank, global media and research analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

The most brutal assessment came from analyst David Miller of the investment bank Caris & Company, whose most recent report on Playboy Enterprises Inc. predicted good times for stockholders once the old man is gone. "We believe Mr. Hefner's death could result in a material stock-price uptick on the notion the mansion could eventually be sold, which would leave the company net-debt-free," Miller wrote.

There goes Graceland.

Hef is of the old school, more Mad Men than Mad Money, comparable to George Steinbrenner and other outsize corporate owners whose cults of personality are not incidental to the high profile of their companies. So says Todd Harrison, CEO of Minyanville Media and a former investment banker. "There comes a point where you have to hand the baton to the next generation, but there's a bit of a dichotomy. He's built this franchise and it's his life's work and he should be able to live out the rest of his years in his home."

Hef may also be on to something, ignoring the media gloom and hand-wringing, maybe sensing untapped value in Playboy, the brand. The bunny remains one of the most recognizable logos on the planet. It is on women's underwear and energy drinks, on pillowcases and shot glasses, on T-shirts, handbags, cigars and lingerie. There is a Playboy maid's costume for your little terrier ($22), a bobble head of young Hef circa 1953 ($18) and bunny-logo hardware for your tongue and navel piercings (at Sears for $18). You can run to a local 7-Eleven for a bottled shot of Playboy Passion Enhancer to get your lady friend back in the mood — for a mere $2.99. All exist for good reason, earning Playboy Enterprises $37 million in licensing revenue alone last year.

Even if all print media, including the centerfolds of Playboy, were to disappear, there is reason to believe the bunny brand would survive, with or without Hefner's iconic presence. "He's important to the brand," says Bank, "but I think it outlives him."

Since announcing his intentions to the board, Hefner has stepped back from his usual heavy interview schedule. On the phone just days ahead of his offer this month, Hefner revealed nothing of his plans but sounded upbeat about the company that began at his kitchen table in 1953: "Things are looking up significantly."

*

A young woman steps discreetly from a backroom, leaving behind the throw pillows and mirrored walls, the convenient box of tissues and the vintage dimmer switch on the wall. She walks unsteadily in a yellow dress, rust-colored dreadlocks bunched on her head. She makes it past the pool table and across the games room to a man in plaid shorts trying his luck at a Playboy pinball machine. "How are you doing?" he asks her.

"Great," she replies, with a flushed, crooked grin. "I just got laid!"

They arrive by the busload and stretch limo, rolling up the driveway past the "Playmates at Play" traffic sign, the men in black suits or resort casual, the women in bras or pasties, stepping out onto the hilltop Shangri-la right beneath Hefner's bedroom window. Girls pose for quick snapshots by the front door and the fountain they've seen on TV before they're sent around to the party in the mansion backyard, with the tents and buffet, the go-go dancers and DJs. It's like a nightclub back there.

Hef is in a cabana with Crystal and some girls, as a huge crowd of guests gathers in front of him, raising cameras and cell phones and just staring at the great man, the center of attention. But this isn't one of his parties. He throws fewer events than he used to but allows outsiders to take over the property for a night, bringing their own guest list and female eye candy, tonight charging $1,000 a ticket or $10,000 a cabana, with a portion going to charity.

This night is the annual Kandyland event, another party hosted by the Karma Foundation, an upscale networking and nightlife business. Close to $50,000 will be raised here for Star Education, an environmental program for children, according to Karma President Marvin Epstein. Parties at the mansion are a hot ticket, fueled by stories of painted ladies and wet, naked encounters in the grotto. Young women are invited to submit photos and apply for free admission, described on the Karma casting site as an "opportunity for beautiful and classy people to attend the most sensational and breathtaking" of events. And the event, not hero worship, is the point for many.

"We don't come for Hefner, we come to party," says Dayna DeVorre, 24, wearing a bikini made from strings of hard candy.

Guests enter through a glowing portal, greeted by tiny actors dressed up as green-haired Oompa Loompas from Willy Wonky and the Chocolate Factory. Seven guests dressed as cowboys in matching black twirl a woman in bunny ears on the driveway, and she falls partly out of her bikini top.

Back in the games room, Kally Wyatt, 18, sits at the upright piano playing "Moonlight Sonata" and some "retarded" Justin Bieber, along with her own music. Her cheeks are pierced and she is wearing black fishnets. Next to her is friend Laci Kay Somers, an aspiring model in a pink bikini top who is considering trying out for Playboy. "I want to," says Somers, "but I can't tell if I really want to."

Both Somers and Wyatt have been running into people having sex all night, out on the grounds and in one of the mirrored cubbies of the games room. "Five minutes ago, I saw them!" says Somers, 18. "They were very loud. I've seen, like, 5 million people having sex so far tonight."

The proximity to Hef and his sexual playground has some of the guests crossing boundaries they might not elsewhere. "This guy, like, grabbed my butt hole! I've never been touched like that at a club," says Wyatt. "He stuck his hand in me and I pushed him. They think they can do whatever they want, just cuz they're here. They're crazy."

Hef's own sex life has been the subject of great interest since the debut of Playboy, his healthy complexion owing much to the baby oil he's slathered over himself and a thousand girlfriends over the decades. That interest only grew after he reemerged as a single man at the end of the '90s, making the rounds with seven blond live-in girlfriends.

"Complicated, yes," he recalls of the arrangement, "though not as complicated sometimes as one wife."

It is a lifestyle perfected decades ago, back at the old Playboy Mansion in Chicago, with the fireman's pole, the indoor swimming pool. Age does factor into this. After a decade or more of testing in his second-floor boudoir with a long line of volunteers, Viagra remains Hefner's rocket fuel of choice, a brand he can trust.

When Kendra Wilkinson first arrived for a party at the mansion, she was 18, and Hefner immediately asked her to move in as one of his girlfriends, as she recounts in her just-released book, Sliding Into Home. She went back home to San Diego instead. Hef kept calling.

This is how it's done: "I called her, and said: 'This may be a little presumptuous. This summer, unless you're otherwise involved in a serious relationship, I thought you might like to spend the summer here as my girlfriend,' " Hefner says today. "I only learned more recently, when she received the call, she was sitting there in bed with her then-current boyfriend. Obviously, it wasn't a very serious relationship because she was here in short order."

By the time she was 20, The Girls Next Door had made cable-TV stars of Wilkinson as well as co-stars Bridget Marquardt and Hef's No. 1, Holly Madison. The questions they got from journalists and the curious were often the same, focused on age and sex, and Wilkinson includes in her book moderately graphic scenes of weekly group-sex sessions with Hef. She participated but recalls those nights as a crowd of girls taking turns for a joyless 60-second hop on pop, not romance. She now calls him her "mentor," and one of her closest friends, and was worried about his reaction to the book. Wilkinson says she got an e-mail from Hefner after the book came out, thanking her: "You wrote a really great book."

Wilkinson is unimpressed with young men who openly crave his life, who want to emulate the man. "If they really knew the gentleman, if they really knew the type of man Hugh Hefner really is — the gentleman and the great guy — do they really want to be Hugh Hefner? Really? Come on."

*

Another side of Hugh M. Hefner is the focus of Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, which documents the publisher's role during the turbulent postwar period. (For a review, see Film openings.) In it, director Berman makes that case for Hef as crucial figure and spokesman for not only the sexual revolution but civil rights and human rights. That was not the prevailing wisdom of the time.

During a vintage television interview, future 60 Minutes icon Mike Wallace drilled into Hefner and Playboy: "I think you'll agree that it's a sniggering kind of sex. It's a lascivious kind of sex. It's certainly not a healthy approach to sex, but you suggest that it is."

Gloria Steinem has ridiculed Playboy's revolution as being about "Making more women sexually available to men," and refused three times to be interviewed for the documentary, but feminist Susan Brownmiller appears in the film, in footage from her withering 1970 debate with Hef on Dick Cavett's show and in a new interview. Brownmiller's views on the man are unchanged.

"She still thinks he's the devil," says Berman. "I don't agree with her, but I respect her opinion. She fought for that. Indirectly, I was also helped and affected by that whole feminist movement. ... It still is a man's world. Getting less so."

Playboy began during a time of social and cultural upheaval, and Hefner chose to embrace change. He hired Dalton Trumbo to write for the magazine during the blacklist era, defended the confrontational work of comic Lenny Bruce and allowed African-American Dick Gregory onstage in front of a visiting white, Southern audience at his Chicago Playboy Club. The publisher debated loosening sexual values with William F. Buckley on public television, hosted Martin Luther King Jr. at the mansion in Chicago and published the last essay King wrote before his death.

There were consequences. Hefner was arrested in Chicago after printing a 1963 pictorial on Jayne Mansfield. "The real reason behind the arrest," Hefner says now, "was because I had spoken out in an editorial in the magazine protesting Chicago's too-friendly connection to the Catholic Church, and the fact that they had arrested Lenny Bruce. When I objected to that, they came and arrested me."

Berman first met Hefner years ago as a result of her films on jazz greats, including his favorite, Bix Beiderbecke. For the new film, she spent many nights working deep into the early morning in the mansion's third-floor scrapbooking room, reading the history Hefner has kept since adolescence, filled with drawings, snapshots and every article written about him, good or bad. Many times, Hefner was up there too, working on another scrapbook of memories, adding another page to his recorded history.

Berman's most recent visit included a screening of Chinatown, accompanied by an introduction read by Hefner and a lengthy discussion afterward. He is a movie fanatic, hosting screenings at the Mansion three times a week. He produced some feature films in the 1970s but is now more fan than player, donating millions to the USC and UCLA film departments, and he's twice written checks to preserve the Hollywood sign.

There have been discussions of a feature film based on his life going back to the '50s. A movie is in the works, with Robert Downey Jr. expressing interest, and a screenplay to be written by Diablo Cody. "It looks like it's going to happen," Hefner says hopefully. "Brian Grazer has the project, and I said to him not too long ago, 'I don't want this to he a posthumous tribute here.' "

Hefner has his plans for eternity already mapped out, entombed right beside Marilyn Monroe. He owes much to Norma Jean. Her prefame nudes in the first issue of Playboy turned the magazine into an immediate sensation, sending the young, untested publisher on his momentous journey toward becoming Hef. They were born within months of each other in 1926, but he never met Monroe, and only spoke with her once, on the phone in the weeks before her death. He wanted her to appear again on the cover. When Hefner discovered the slot to her left was available at Pierce Brothers Westwood Memorial Park, he reserved the crypt. "It seemed to be a natural," Hefner says.

He has other friends buried on the grounds there: among them, Mel Torme, Buddy Rich and Dorothy Stratten, the 1980 Playmate of the Year, murdered by her husband. Hefner's mother lived to 101, but his father died of a stroke at 80, so the future remains uncertain, and the end is inevitable, though he likes to quote the key lyric to Sinatra's "Young at Heart": "If you should survive to 105/Look at all you'll derive from being alive."

Some things at Playboy are eternal. At the magazine's West Coast offices in Santa Monica, another naked lady is having her picture taken. She is Rachel Summer, a regular over at the Mansion, and her Playmate test is being photographed in Studio A by Arny Freytag, a 34-year veteran at the magazine, with more centerfolds shot than anyone. He will shoot at least 500 pictures of Summer today.

Freytag is working with three assistants, including a female intern, on a simple set of soft pinks and white. Summer stands in a bathrobe, but her nude image from earlier is still on the digital monitor. In it she is kneeling on a white-leather chair, facing the lens with a warm, inviting expression, wearing nothing but a pair of pink socks.

"Most girls don't walk in with a body like that," Freytag says, looking at the screen. "That's pretty rare. That's a pretty awesome body." This is a man who loves his work.

The pinups of Freytag and photographer Stephen Wayda have been at the magazine's visual core these last few decades, hardly shifting with contemporary trends seen in the evolving starlet images in Esquire and GQ — just as Hef likes it.

"I can make any girl look really good," Freytag says. "I believe there is one angle on every face that will look fantastic, and I will go until I find it."

The old man doesn't micromanage the making of these pictures, but once the day's test is done, Summer's session will go directly to Hef. The publisher rarely makes an appearance at Playboy Studios West, but his presence is felt, with stylish framed photographs of the young Playboy founder in the '50s and '60s lining the hallways. And his surprising move to retake full ownership of Playboy is fresh news.

"I hope he gets it," says Freytag. "It's impressive that he's still interested in keeping it going his way at this stage of his life."

If Hefner prevails, the bunny brand may spread into new venues, but content at the magazine will still unfold the old-fashioned way — Hef's way, just as it always has.

L.A. Weekly, July 29, 2010.

Photograph by Steve Appleford

3rd Degree: Harvey Pekar

On the plague of superhero comics, fighting, and the let-down of being a film character
Harvey Pekar is a comic hero, the hard-luck central character of his ongoing autobiographical American Splendor, an illustrated chronicle of his life so far. He doesn’t draw, but he delivers his words and stick-figure storyboards to a wide range of comic artists – from R. Crumb to Tony Millionaire – who help make sense of the ordinary struggles of an ordinary guy in Cleveland, Ohio. Crumb himself once described the result as “so staggeringly mundane, it verges on the exotic!” But it has touched a nerve for three decades. And it has brought Pekar fame and no fortune.

Not much changed even after his life story was turned into 2003’s acclaimed film version of American Splendor. But, now that he’s retired from his job as a civil-service file clerk, he keeps even busier as a writer. He has a wife and kid to support, he keeps saying. Pekar has just released The Quitter, which recounts the internal struggles of his young adulthood – his first book for the Vertigo wing of DC Comics (which will also publish the next volume of Splendor). He recently contributed a story to author Michael Chabon’s comic book The Escapist, and he continues to write about music and politics for his hometown weekly, The Free Times. The personal stories keep rolling on, feeding his comics pages and bad attitude.

“You gotta go through shit, man,” Pekar says. “You gotta go through it all your life. There’s no end to it.”

–Steve Appleford

CityBeat: I noticed you blogged for a while in 2003.
Harvey Pekar: You want to know why I’m not blogging anymore? Because they were paying me to blog. And I hate computers and stuff like that. They drive me nuts. My kid would get me on the thing, and then I would type out some type of a blog, then she would send it in for me. But when the money stopped coming in, I didn’t keep it up.

Do you think anyone’s life can be made interesting to a reader?
Yeah, virtually anyone’s life. If they live long enough.

How did The Quitter come about?
The guy who illustrated it, Dean Haspiel, hooked me up with the people who made the American Splendor movie. I asked him what I could do in return, and he said he would like to illustrate a long work of mine. He had connections at DC Comics, and they were interested, and they wanted me to do a graphic novel. I’ve been covering my life pretty closely since I started doing autobiographical comic books in 1972. But I hadn’t been doing a lot of stuff about my life prior to that. I decided I would do a narrative about my life, mainly from when I was a little kid to when I was in my 20s. Obviously, for everybody those are pretty important years.

It surprised me how tough a guy you were as a kid.
I was brought up in neighborhoods where the toughest guy was the guy who got the most respect. And I was having to wade through armies of guys to get back home from school every day. It turns out that, as I grew up, I found that I wasn’t a bad athlete and I was real strong for my size. When I had to fight, I just got into it, because I got prestige from it. I’m not into hurting people; I’m not a sadist or anything. But I just like to win; I wanted to get praise for something. Anything.

Did you imagine a time when you and Crumb and the alternative side to comics would become so well known?
I thought it would be better known. I’m not exactly a household word yet. It took that movie to get some people to know me. I thought that alternative comics – once they got going back in the ’60s, there was going to be a big change in comics. Now that people saw you could do anything in comics, I thought comics were going to be transformed. I saw Crumb’s work, and it occurred to me that there’s no limit in what you can do in comics.

It took a while, as it turns out.
It’s happening way too slow. I’m pretty disappointed that at this point superheroes are still the most popular form of comic books. Regardless of my opinion of superhero comics, no subgenre should dominate a medium, like they dominate comics. That’s just ridiculous.

It got caught in a rut that it couldn’t get out of.
I thought everybody would realize that you could do this stuff with comics, and there would be all these good writers and illustrators that would just gravitate to comics. They’d say, “Wow, here’s a new area for us to work in,” you know. I was tickled pink when I realized, “My God, here I have a chance to be an innovator.” Like I discovered a field of gold or something.

When did you realize that it wasn’t the field of gold?
Well, it was and it wasn’t. I took a great deal of satisfaction from just writing the things that I did. And that made me feel really good. The thing that bothers me now is that it’s still not very lucrative, at least the kind of stuff that I do. And now I depend on the income that I get from comics.

How did you feel about being known as a movie character?
I’d rather they knew about my books. A lot of people have a lot of notions about me because of that movie that aren’t really true. That lovable-curmudgeon stuff is really starting to choke me. For a while, you couldn’t read my name without “curmudgeon” preceding it. They’re sort of laying off that a little bit now -- they’re switching over to “dyspeptic.”

Is that a step up?
I don’t know.

But were you generally happy with the movie?
Yeah, sure, I thought it was an excellent movie.

And you went to the Oscars?
I went to the Oscars. I went along, and tried to help promote the thing. It’s not my favorite thing to do. The Oscars were just a big drag. Who could possibly enjoy that? I mean, God!

When you were doing David Letterman’s show in the ’80s, you once came out to criticize General Electric on camera. That was a political act.
I’m real interested in politics, but I’m not an activist usually. That came about as a result of my realizing that I had nothing to lose by doing anything I wanted to do on the Letterman show. I wasn’t getting much money, my books weren’t selling. It was fine with me to try and make jokes with Letterman, try and create some humor on the show, but I didn’t particularly like being stereotyped as the parody of the rust-belt worker.

What are your feelings about politics right now?
I’m very disturbed that so many people are supporting George Bush that are being hurt by him. Like they’re masochists or something. They don’t benefit. They give rich people tax breaks, and poor people still love him. He’s just done everything wrong, and still he benefits. He obviously lied about Iraq, about the rationale for going in there, and they don’t care.

People are starting to care now.
I hope they do. And then the big thing to me is, we’ve got all this global warming – we’ve got all these serious problems. Even if we start with the best of intentions and spend a whole lot of money, we’re probably going to be in for a whole hell of a lot of trouble as a result of all that shit in the atmosphere. But it’s like Bush doesn’t even recognize it exists. I mean, how fucking stupid can you get?

Los Angeles CityBeat, November 24, 2005.

Illustration by Jordan Crane.

Dreams of Life and Death Looking Back With Patti Smith

Patti Smith steps onstage with a shy, joyous grin, as if still surprised by the applause. At the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater to perform a tribute to her friend, the late folk archivist, filmmaker and painter Harry Smith, she rests her coffee cup on a stool and reads passages from Just Kids, her newly released memoir of her years as friend, lover and confidante to the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989 of complications from AIDS. The three of them had once lived in New York's Chelsea Hotel — "a doll's house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe" — and when Harry first met young Patti and Robert, he'd asked them, "Who are you? Are you twins?"

Harry was of a tradition to which Patti and Robert aspired, scraping by in the days before the mass distribution of credit cards, making art with few resources and no rewards. "If we didn't have money, we just didn't eat. That's when men were men," Smith says, playfully making a fist. Bohemia wasn't a romantic notion but stark reality, even for the likes of Harry Smith, a beloved resource of Americana, whose 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music album was a crucial influence on Dylan's generation. He died at the Chelsea in 1991. "I don't know if Harry died in obscurity," Smith says, "but he certainly lived it."

She skips through the book, reading of a lobster dinner at Max's Kansas City with Sam Shepard, already a recognized playwright, though then known to Patti only as a hillbilly drummer named Slim Shadow. (After Smith discovered the truth, Shepard drawled, "Eat your ice cream, Patti Lee.")

Smith recounts her first meeting with poet Allen Ginsberg, who immediately expressed great interest, taking her out for a sandwich but then suddenly asking in alarm: "Are you a girl?"

The theater is packed, with an overflow crowd watching from the courtyard on video screens. Smith picks up an acoustic guitar and begins strumming the simple, disarming chords of "Grateful," shifting from one foot to the other as she sings in a voice of gentle force. "Harry and Robert were the first people who had me sing to them," she says with a smile, patches of gray in her long, auburn hair. "Harry would say something that would embarrass me then, but now I like it: 'You are quite the chanteuse.' "

Smith dedicates a song to the late J.D. Salinger, another to Howard Zinn, more losses to mark and signify. And she performs one last song for Harry Smith, "My Blakean Year," (from her 2004 LP, Trampin'). It erupts from her as a howl, raging and wise: "So throw off your stupid cloak, embrace all that you fear/For joy shall conquer all despair, in my Blakean year."

*

Smith and Mapplethorpe were barely 20 when they met, a couple of androgynous hippies newly arrived in New York City to live among the bohos and Beats, the Factory divas and "extravagant bums" swirling around the boroughs, the Bowery and the Chelsea. He introduced himself as Bob, but she preferred to call him Robert. They spent their first night together paging hungrily through books of art. Smith was a South Jersey girl turned on by Rimbaud and rock & roll, driven to write and sketch each day, laying a foundation for her future as a poet and rocker. Mapplethorpe had been a Long Island altar boy and was naturally gifted with a pen and brush, a classicist who would become the most notorious photographer of his generation. They inherited a lineage of art and confrontation, with Smith discovering her voice and confidence under the influence of Beat poets Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso. For Mapplethorpe, the model initially was Warhol, and he was determined to be noticed.

"I always expected to be a starving, suffering artist who would die young and hopefully leave good things behind. But Robert didn't share that romantic notion," says Smith, now 63. "He really wanted us to do well in our lifetime. The irony of Robert only living until he was 42 is that I was the sickly one. I had gone through tuberculosis, I had gone through various childhood diseases. I was considered the fragile one of the two of us. I wound up the survivor."

Just Kids isn't written in the electrified lingo of Smith's early, prefame poetry or her essays for the likes of Creem and Rolling Stone. It's a gentler tale, direct and unguarded, thoughtful and deeply emotional, with subtler turns of language. It arrives years behind schedule, delayed simply because she took the project so seriously as a work of art, not a memoir of celebrity nostalgia. Just Kids reveals the process of becoming an artist, and bearing witness to the flowering and internal conflicts of her beloved Robert.

"I was a bad girl trying to be good and ... he was a good boy trying to be bad," Smith writes of their relationship. But already, she recalls, "He was an artist and he knew it."

As young, starving artists in Brooklyn, they often chose between buying food and art supplies, sometimes buying the food and shoplifting the ink and brushes (inspired by tales of Lee Krasner doing the same for Jackson Pollock). She worked in bookstores, he sometimes hustled on 42nd Street. They lived and created together, and by 1969 had moved into a tiny room at the Chelsea. He was so nervous about meeting Smith's parents the first time in South Jersey, he dropped acid. They "noticed nothing unusual except his continuous smile," she remembered later. He told his strict Catholic parents they had eloped to Aruba and got married.

The couple disagreed about Warhol: Mapplethorpe idolized him; Smith did not. "His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid," she writes. But they understood and encouraged one another. It was Smith who first suggested that Mapplethorpe pick up a camera. He was given a Polaroid instant camera, and he responded to the immediacy of the process, progressing to the square formality of a Hasselblad. It was an unexpected turn.

"I actually thought it was a phase," Smith says now. "I thought he would pass through that phase and get back to installations and collages and drawings, but he became completely devoted to it. He was smitten with the elasticity of photography, how in a photograph he could say so much."

He photographed Smith constantly, and many of the pictures from that era remain some of his most lasting, striking images: Patti as a boho Mary Magdalene, or cool and coiled by a radiator in a rare nude. Mapplethorpe's cover photograph for her 1975 debut album, Horses, was a landmark for both of them, drawing as much attention as the revolutionary rock music inside. The photo session unfolded in the apartment of Sam Wagstaff, by then Mapplethorpe's patron and lover, but the cosmic connection that day remained between photographer and subject, an intimacy reflected in the startling part-poet, part-Sinatra figure in the frame. He was done shooting after a dozen pictures.

"Then in the mid-'70s he was given entrance to the sadomasochist community, which I knew nothing about," Smith says. "They trusted him in this community, and he had it in mind to do something that no one had ever done. Which was to raise certain areas of human consent into art. That was his mission, to take the very difficult pictures with the same classic view as he would taking flowers or a portrait."

Just Kids is also Smith's antidote to the thousands of pages written on the photographer since his death, in many cases depicting him in ways Smith says she does not recognize. She publicly condemned the portrait painted by 1995's authorized Mapplethorpe: A Biography, written by Patricia Morrisroe, named his official biographer in the weeks before his death. That book cast Mapplethorpe as a dark and perverse figure, more a cruel hustler and self-promoter than any kind of artistic visionary. "... if he had demonstrated any talent as a painter," Morrisroe wrote in one typical aside, "he probably never would have picked up a camera."

Smith remembers things differently.

"Robert and I were not avant-garde–type people," she says. "Both of us studied art in a classical, even self-taught way. We looked at art books for hours on end: William Blake, Michelangelo, surrealism ... I've always studied classical literature, classical music. We were modern kids, thrown into a modern era, but I was quite a romantic and Robert had a real sense of the importance of history. To be a great artist, I believe, is to understand the importance of history and to assimilate it but then do something new."

One night, Smith went to see the Doors perform at Fillmore East, where Mapplethorpe worked briefly as an usher. She found herself observing the singer analytically, recognizing something in the Lizard King prowling the stage. "I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that," she writes. "I felt both kinship and contempt for him."

*

The opening and closing chapters of Just Kids recall the impact and heartbreak of Mapplethorpe's death, in New York, years after Smith moved to Detroit for marriage and family with Fred "Sonic" Smith, onetime protopunk guitarist for MC5. Near the end, Mapplethorpe regretted that he and Smith never had children. She promised to one day tell their story, clinging to her memories and a lock of his hair, still fueled by the self-confidence he helped her discover.

In the 1970s, Smith became the "punk priestess" who helped to reinvent rock as a setting for bold, literary revolt. And death was a recurring theme. Horses acknowledged and celebrated the passing of Morrison, Hendrix and the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. In the album's opening moments, she famously declares, "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," words she wrote at age 20. She embraces life and death in equal measure. On the epic title song, she roars with intensity and release: "Life is full of pain, I'm cruisin' through my brain/And I fill my nose with snow and go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud/And go Johnny go, and do the watusi!"

Even the album she called Dream of Life, recorded at a time of contentment in Smith's life, includes "Where Duty Calls," a chilling meditation on the killing of 220 U.S. Marines in Lebanon by a suicide bomber in 1983.

Smith reemerged in 1996 with the jaggedly mournful Gone Again, in the aftermath of her husband's fatal heart attack and the deaths of her brother, Todd, her keyboardist, Richard Sohl, and Mapplethorpe. There was also sadness at the suicide of Kurt Cobain, whom she'd never met but recognized as a kindred, troubled soul. The music and delivery on Gone Again were weighted with experience and implication that even her best '70s work didn't carry. She now calls the album "the most painful record I ever did.


“The pain of singing those songs," she says, "I wouldn't want to have to go through that again."

Yet the tributes to fallen friends and heroes have only continued, as Ginsberg, Burroughs and other comrades fell in the '90s. Mapplethorpe was rarely far from her mind. In 1996, Smith published The Coral Sea, a collection of poetry inspired by his life and passing, mingled with his photographs. A decade later, that work was translated into a live improvisational reading set to brooding, shimmering waves of sound from Kevin Shields, leader and guitarist of My Bloody Valentine. The effect was something like her first recital with Lenny Kaye at St. Mark's Church in 1971. On the new recording, Smith performs this memento mori to the scraping reverberations of guitar strings and organ: "He was destined to be ill, quite ill ... art, art, not nature moved him ... His delicate eyes saw with clarity what others did not."

*

At KCET studios in Hollywood, Smith sits at the very edge of a plaid couch in a room left over from the silent era, her round, wire-rim glasses sitting next to a bowl of fruit. Her jeans are tucked into purple socks and boots as she awaits her moment with Tavis Smiley.

"I write every day," Smith says. "I wrote this morning. I've written four or five books that aren't published. But I also had a lot of little diaries at the Chelsea Hotel, which would chart everything we did every day. Simple things, like, 'Cut Robert's hair like a rockabilly star,' 'Met Janis Joplin,' 'Went to the Museum of Modern Art and saw the de Kooning.' These notations were like stepping stones."

Wyclef Jean is talking with Smiley on a TV mounted on the wall. Smith reluctantly submits to a brief session with the makeup artist and soon enters the studio, where Smiley awaits, muscles bulging beneath his suit and tie. "You chose me," she tells him with a smile, noting the few interviews she has granted, "but I chose you." The makeup lady takes another look, and Smith jokes, "Maybe I'll find a husband." And as the countdown to taping begins, she smiles at the host. "Nice shoes."

Behind Smith and Smiley is a huge blowup of the downtown L.A. skyline, and a large boom camera sways across the floor in front of them as she tells of her awakening as an artist, how she coped when Mapplethorpe told her he was gay, and the love she still feels for him: "We sat and we cried with each other many, many, many times. ... But the fact is, we had much to save, much more than a physical relationship."

When the TV interview ends 30 minutes later, Smith gives the host a hug. "She speaks in prose," Smiley tells his producers, nodding his head with an amazed laugh.

Smith has been a poet and an essayist for decades, publishing small chapbooks early on. Her magazine work celebrated the Stones and Dylan, or the bop jazz men and the great singers she heard while growing up. In that, she was an early-'70s contemporary of literary rock crits Nick Tosches, Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs. (She was familiar enough in that circle that when Tosches was assigned an interview for Creem years later, she suggested that he already knew her well enough to just make it up. And he did.)

"Criticism is kind of a funny word, because I never wrote anything bad," she says now. "I only wrote about things that I liked. I thought that a critic was there to open people's eyes, not criticize. I only wrote about things I wanted to share with people. It could be Clifton Chenier or Lotte Lenya or Albert Ayler. I truthfully wrote on the side to make money to eat. You'd make $10. I had a really nice piece in Rolling Stone, I got $20 for that. Twenty dollars back in 1971 was real money." Rent at the Chelsea was $65 a week.

*

Barely a year after his death, Mapplethorpe became a rallying point for opposite ends of the culture war, a dividing line between free expression and the conservative campaign to abolish federal funding for the arts. His most controversial pictures were already years old by then but were quickly caught up in the same moment of moral outrage that surrounded Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and the family pictures of Sally Mann, and led to the FBI raid on Jock Sturges in 1990.

Throughout his short career, Mapplethorpe explored a small but diverse variety of subjects, with graceful, sensuous images of flowers, sculpture and nudes, with evocative portraits of himself and others. In 1990, all that was eclipsed by his most difficult work, the pictures of rough sex, and of abused and bloodied genitalia. Not all of it was unprecedented. His Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, from 1979, had a leather-clad male couple in a relaxed living room setting, one of them in chains, not unlike a classic Diane Arbus portrait of the unseen. There were also pictures of very young children au naturel, which critics interpreted as grimly as possible. A scheduled exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., was abruptly canceled, which didn't stop U.S. Senator Jesse Helms from tearing up the show catalog on the Senate floor. The same exhibit was shut down by police in Cincinnati.

"I think the controversy would have deeply disturbed Robert on one end, especially the idea that he was taking forbidden pictures of children," Smith says. "I remember when he took those pictures. He said, 'Look at this picture. Isn't it so cute?' And I said, 'Oh, Robert, that's so sweet.' We just looked at them as really cute pictures of kids. And having looked at so many pictures of the Victorian photographers and their pictures of children, to me they expressed Robert's love of children. That kind of sensibility never occurred to either one of us. It's the only thing that I'm happy he was spared."

Her own relationship with photography continued. Smith became a compelling subject and muse to Annie Leibovitz and others. Magazine photographer Steven Sebring spent 11 years shooting documentary footage of Smith for his film Dream of Life, released to acclaim in 2008. Smith has also devoted creative energy to her series of ghostly Polaroids, which she began soon after her husband's death.

"I couldn't do anything else. I really couldn't write. I used whatever energy I had to take care of my kids," she says. "So these photographs are really to give me a sense of self-worth. Then, like Robert, I got hooked on it. And I started taking Polaroids seriously at the end of the '90s, and devoted time to them, and then developing them as silver prints and then platinum. It's become an important part of what I do."

She asked the monumentally influential photographer and Beat comrade Robert Frank to create the music video for her "Summer Cannibals." At the shoot, Smith dared to show him the Polaroids she had been making. "I see what you're doing," he told her. She liked that.

Smith is now well into the recording of a new album with her band, with guest appearances by Tom Verlaine, Flea and her two grown children, pianist Jesse Smith and guitarist Jackson Smith. But the wide attention Just Kids has already received has been encouraging. Other books are likely, exploring other facets and periods of her life and work.

"I was hoping for Robert's sake that people would like it," Smith says. "I thought I could probably count on a certain hard-core audience, but it seems like it has spread. Robert would like that. He always wanted me to be successful. If the book does really well, it will be in Robert's name. So it's perfect that it's probably the biggest response I've had for something in some years. It figures Robert would be behind it."

L.A. Weekly, Feb. 18, 2010


PHOTO COURTESY OF PATTI SMITH ARCHIVE
Patti and Robert on the Coney Island boardwalk, circa 1969

Photographer: Julius Shulman 1910 - 2009

Function and Imagination at Human Scale

By Steve Appleford

Photographer Julius Shulman lived high up in the hills of Laurel Canyon, where visitors to his landmark 1947 steel-frame modernist house would usually find chocolates and a big jar of peanuts amid the organized clutter of his office. That’s how Shulman, who died in his sleep July 15 at age 98, liked his architecture: lived in, with function and imagination rendered at human scale.

His pictures were, of course, idealized images of modern homes and other buildings, but the human figure often played a crucial role, perhaps most spectacularly in the startling elegance of his “Case Study #22.” In that 1960 photograph, two young women sit comfortably in the corner living room of a glass-walled Pierre Koenig home as it extends out over the lights of nighttime Los Angeles, interior and exterior in vibrant harmony. It was powerful evidence of a rich culture in Los Angeles — though too many of his pictures have outlived the original structures.

Shulman was an enthusiastic champion of other L.A. photographers and was still shooting during his final years with the help of collaborator Juergen Nogai. He’d traveled the world, but never felt the need to relocate to Manhattan or any other city bursting with architecture. He found his greatest subject right here.

LA Weekly, July 29, 2009

He Was Wrong

Strange Rumblings from the Gonzo Afterlife … Ralph Steadman Ink Stains and Battle Scars … Flashback to a Final Campaign … The Suicide Solution … New Books and Old Photographs … One More Fling in Hollywoodland … An Outlaw’s Farewell, A Son’s Revenge

By Steve Appleford

"Would you like a drink?” It is still an hour before noon, but the man is thirsty and British and far from home, with a mountain of books still to sign and a speech to make about his old friend and tormentor, author Hunter S. Thompson, dead now for nearly two years. It will be fun tonight, another celebration at another bookstore, greeting the fans of gonzo journalism at one more stop on the road. But his friend is gone now to the afterlife, a “road man for the Lords of Karma,” as Thompson liked to say in his final years. Game over. So Ralph Steadman orders us a couple of beers. Mrs. Steadman will have a Manhattan.

This is a peaceful moment on the patio of the Sunset Marquis Hotel, but Steadman looks weary. His hair is completely white. And his left eye is swollen and red from this week’s trip to Los Angeles, a blazing, ghastly eyeball that could have come from one of his own violent drawings. Around his neck hangs a clay talisman shaped like a primitive ceremonial head, a gift from Thompson: “Wear this, Ralph. It will ward off evil spirits.”

Steadman does an excellent impression of his old friend and slips into it easily, his voice deepening and flattening into a serious monotone of authority, like a newsman teetering over the edge: “Ah, Ralph, you filthy little animal. You nasty little beast, I have a job for you ….” And who better? For 35 years they had shared an appetite for dementia and savage humor in their work, beginning in 1970 with an outrageous magazine article on the Kentucky Derby for Scanlon’s Monthly. Thompson’s piece was a vivid deconstruction of Southern high-society and low morals on derby day, and Steadman responded with great splashes of ink and paint that unmasked an America of bruised flesh and gnashing teeth. The horror, the horror ….

The article was “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” a pivotal moment in what Tom Wolfe would soon call the New Journalism, a movement of nonfiction writers who used the literary tools of novelists to tell a more vibrant true story. Thompson preferred to call his stuff Gonzo. And Steadman remained his occasional collaborator, illustrating Thompson’s pieces in Rolling Stone magazine and his most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Wolfe would later declare Thompson “the greatest comic writer of the 20th century,” a Mark Twain for a new age, and Steadman’s role was to create an equally dangerous new visual style.

“There was lots of fun about it all,” Steadman says now with a grin. Thompson was a unique collaborator, a man with insatiable appetites way out on the margins. “There were a lot of strange contradictions. He had a kind of violence, but a gentility as well. It was a relationship I don’t think would happen now. People are far too politically correct. You can’t even get started. It’s fascist, in many ways.”

That was before February 20, 2005, when, at age 67, Thompson shot himself in his kitchen, with his new wife on the phone and his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson in the next room. They were horrified. But the last few years had been dark days for Thompson. He suffered through elaborate surgeries on his spine and hip, and was frustrated with the inevitable dulling of his art after decades of drink, pranks, and extremely dangerous drugs, plus the trauma of one more presidential election gone terribly wrong. He spent months in a wheelchair, and then could barely walk. He spoke of suicide, as he always had. This was understood. And he wanted his ashes shot from a cannon on his property in Woody Creek, Colorado. Steadman hoped he wouldn’t resort to suicide, but often drew images of Thompson with a gun to his head, or with his brain simply exploding off the page with ideas and intensity.

Only the timing surprised him. “He was a guy who knew how he wanted to die,” Steadman says. “He’d already told me he knew he’d commit suicide one day. He said he’d feel real trapped in his life if he didn’t know that he could commit suicide at any moment. And he had an arsenal of weapons. He was a frontiersman, pioneer type. He would have been one of the first to go into Indian country crossing towards the West in a covered wagon.”

Thompson’s sudden exit made a memoir inevitable. Steadman began considering it on the train west from the Colorado memorial service and finished it a year later. He has published many illustrated books, but the Thompson memoir, The Joke’s Over, is his first book of extended writing at nearly 400 pages. The result is a chronicle and character study, a clear-eyed assessment of his time with the outlaw journalist, and not always pretty. As he wrote, Steadman says he often heard Thompson’s voice, repeating one of his frequent admonitions: “Don’t write, Ralph. You bring shame on your family.”

They were comrades forever, and there was occasional friction. “Did people notice the writing before they noticed my pictures, or did my pictures get noticed before the writing? I think that was always a bone of contention,” says Steadman. “He’d say, ‘It was me, Ralph. It was always me doing it. You were along for the ride.’” Steadman has said as much himself. He was like artist Sir John Tenniel to Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, or the E.H. Shepard to Winnie the Pooh’s A.A. Milne. Except with blood and beasts and broken bone. These weren’t kid stories.

“We were like chalk and cheese,” Steadman notes, “but it worked.”

They often communicated by fax, with letters sent over the mojo wire at 3 a.m. Woody Creek time. Steadman kept all of them, and is traveling with some of that correspondence on his book tour, carefully preserved in plastic folders. A letter from Thompson could be read as either rage or affection, if one knew how to interpret it. Steadman pulls one out, this one written on letterhead for the Woody Creek Rod & Gun Club, and begins reading, again in Thompson’s voice: “Ralph, your Baroque style of psycho gibberish is appreciated here. What I really need is a six-month loan of $50,000 at whatever rate you can handle. Keep your advice and send money ….”

Those days are over, but there remains a hunger for more, to find an afterlife for gonzo. The Joke’s Over is merely the first book to respond to Thompson’s suicide and the life and career he left behind. There is also GONZO, a massive, elegant volume of photographs by and of Thompson. His widow, Anita, will have a book early next year. There will be another volume of letters, an oral history from Rolling Stone, and a book by his son, Juan, in 2008.

A film version of The Rum Diary, Thompson’s only published novel, is planned. And new documentaries, including Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (a portrait on the Starz pay-TV network), and an upcoming authorized documentary, with access to the author’s film and audio archives, directed by Alex Gibney (the acclaimed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room). In July comes the Hunter S. Thompson Symposium on Literature, Law and Politics at the Aspen Institute.

Looking back is all anyone can do now. More than a decade ago, Steadman and I had talked once before, as he passed through Los Angeles on another book tour. There was an edge to his voice then, a spark of excitement in his eyes, and he talked openly of his desire to join Thompson on one more gonzo super-adventure. Maybe on a slow boat to China. Steadman liked that idea, but it never happened. He is busy on other projects now, and all that’s left is to cope with what it meant. He still wonders about that. In his book’s closing chapter, he writes a letter to Thompson, questioning the reasons and timing of his suicide, conceding that in the wake of Bush’s reelection, “Your America had gone.”

His wife, Anna, looks up from her drink. “I kind of liked that, really. Maybe it sounded more philosophical.”

Ralph nods. “I’d like to find out for sure what is the gonzo essence.”

Anna notes that he has attempted to understand that legacy before, in his 1998 book Gonzo: The Art, which collected much of his work with Thompson. Steadman agrees.

“I said there was ‘banzo’ as well, which is bad gonzo,” Steadman says. “That’s something I don’t want to do: lousy gonzo.” Thompson himself often said there was nothing worse than reading a writer trying to ape his style, even if those he influenced have a hard time escaping that urge.

There is also, of course, a School of Steadman, the generations of imitators who have adopted the Welshman’s intense scrawl, splashed and slashed across the page, and not always to good effect. “The worst thing for me is for people to try and imitate my style of drawing. But you can’t stop it, can you?”

* * *

“Who are you? Are you smart?” Thompson wants to know who I am. It is October 2004 and he’s just landed on the Sunset Strip. I am here to observe him in action, just as he once traveled to the feet of McGovern, Ali, etc., in search of wisdom and adventure. Now Thompson is himself that source of all-knowing craziness.

He appears to be in excellent spirits, at 67 a grandfather but no less determined and ready to indulge his whims in a blaze of broken glass and burning lighter fluid, if it comes to that. And he has come to meet the reading public, to sit at a bookstore counter with a tall glass of golden fluid and a collection of pens and exploding props, as 250 of his Los Angeles fans line up with copies of his newest book – the longest line on the Strip this night. Just minutes ago, as his van passed the long line in front of Book Soup, he leaned out a window to shout: “You commie bastards!”

“He’s in a good mood,” his wife Anita says anxiously, and it seems true enough as Thompson signs the books and teases his admirers one by one, poking them with a fork or drawing a line across their faces, and accepting their gifts: a bottle of whiskey, a book, a sweater, a joint, a hug.

“Is anybody in this room going to vote for George Bush?” he asks suddenly, and the room goes quiet. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

He is a cultural hero to these people, an outlaw and social critic with a demonstrated obsession with sports and politics, a man who has known presidents and openly cursed his most beloved sports teams. Hey Rube is his newest book, a collection of short essays from his sports column on ESPN.com. But he is not well. His body is broken. Thompson’s left leg is a mess and has been for a year, ever since breaking it in a fall by the minibar in a Honolulu hotel suite. So he’s arrived late, after hours of physical therapy on his leg, which still seizes up at the bookstore, leaving Thompson to laugh and moan between signatures.

Joining him is actor Benicio Del Toro, Oscar-winning Method man and genuine Hollywood celebrity. But here he is most recognized for his alarming presence in the film version of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as the crazed and insatiable attorney Dr. Gonzo. It was the portrait of a desperate man about to burst, overstuffed with drugs and madness and the weight of post-’60s malaise. He put on 50 pounds for the role. But tonight the actor is a quiet presence in a black suit and fedora, hovering beside Thompson with a burning cigarette as the great man signs books and pours himself another drink. “Don’t take any shit from these people,” Thompson tells him.

On a nearby CD player, Mick Jagger yowls an ancient lament of real folk blues, a lovely tune raw and dreamy (“I felt so sad so lonesome, that I could not help but cry”). It is a fitting soundtrack to this scene of pain and celebration. Soon Thompson’s leg seizes up again, and he’s led out the back door for a smoke. He notices me there, sees my note-taking, remembers that I am here as a journalist. “Who is he? He better be fucking good,” he begins shouting, slapping Del Toro on the shoulder. “He better be fucking righteous!”

I am the least of his problems. One by one, his fans are led out back to meet him, to get an autographed book or two. Veteran political wizard Pat Caddell stops by to say hello, suggesting they meet for a drink later. Thompson has only signed about 100 books, and he suddenly needs to leave. His leg, his whole body, is turning on him, and he is led to a waiting SUV downstairs, his posture degenerating into the shape of a gnarled claw. The 150 gonzo fans still waiting to meet him are about to be seriously disappointed. Some are angry. As he is driven away, Del Toro follows in his own car, which is when a young woman in black appears and throws a full can of Tecate beer in his direction, just missing the car as he turns the corner.

Two nights later, Thompson is in his 5th floor suite at the Chateau Marmont, settled at a table by the window, a jug of Chivas Regal at his feet. Also on the floor are the three galley pages from his upcoming essay on the presidential election for Rolling Stone, the venue for some of his greatest work. Anita is cooking linguini in the kitchen and Thompson is talking with Laila Nabulsi, his one-time fiancée and the long-suffering force behind turning Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas into a movie, a 10-year quest that ended up as an epic black comedy starring Johnny Depp and Del Toro in 1998, terrifying matinee audiences across the country.

The phone rings. Thompson picks it up, shouting: “What?! Oh. Benicio who? … What are you up to? … Well, I’m up here doing an in-depth interview with a scholarly looking gentleman from the L.A. CityBeat. … He’s a big kind of Frankenstein-looking guy who was looming in front of the stage wearing a big, bright, white shirt, caught all the light? … No, no, I’m having a little fun. And I can’t walk and I don’t have a ride back. So, what do you mean, Where am I at? I’m at the – yeah, yeah … I’ve got nothing but time. Laila’s here … Yeah, definitely, we’ll do a stunt! Yeah … If you bring a bunch of lighter fluid and a burning paper, we could hold that out on the front of this balcony and from the edge, shower the lighter fluid on it, it will go down into the garden. All right.” He hangs up.

Our interview has yet to begin. Thompson is distracted, worried about confirming a private jet back home to Colorado, occasionally rising to struggle across the carpet, stretching his leg, hobbling painfully on the cane Anita bought this afternoon at a drugstore. He blames the weather for his trouble. Young hotel bellmen come in and out, carrying food and towels and a vat of boiling water. Soon, Del Toro arrives with some friends. But there is much to discuss: Thompson did not spend 2004 traveling on a presidential campaign bus, as he did in ’72 during the Nixon-McGovern contest, or when he chased Jimmy Carter for an influential magazine profile four years later. Thompson is no longer the most dangerous boy on the bus, though he had planned on attending both political conventions this year (and missed both). He does, however, remain deeply connected to major players in national politics. He knows these people.

He first met John Kerry during the 1972 protests of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and knew Bill Clinton back when he was a young campaign worker entrusted with a losing district near Waco, Texas. Thompson has warm friendships with Democrats and Republicans, with both James Carville and Pat Buchanan. But he knows no one in the current White House. No one except maybe George W. Bush himself.

“I haven’t told this story before,” Thompson says, and the room goes quiet. “I met George Bush in 1976, I guess, in Houston. And my first real memory of him, and only one, is of him passed out in my bathtub.” It was at the Hyatt Regency, where he also remembers dropping a naked blow-up doll down into the Atrium from his hotel balcony. “I knew people who were in the drug business from Houston, and I was there for a Super Bowl and I was looking for drugs. Of course.”

Could this be true? Had a young G.W. just been another party-boy passing through Thompson’s gonzo orbit, or was this something like his conjecture during the ’72 primaries that candidate Ed Muskie’s bizarre behavior on the campaign could only be explained as a heavy addiction to the powerful, obscure drug Ibogaine? Columnist Ron Rosenbaum wrote about witnessing the same Bush-Thompson encounter in the New York Observer on March 27, 2000, though he says nothing of bathtubs and remembers the year as 1974, after Bush had been a classmate of Rosenbaum’s.

Thompson talks of another Bush classmate, now one of the writer’s close associates, who claims to have been personally branded by the future president during a fraternity hazing. “And it was torture,” Thompson says. “Twenty-four hours of sucking raw eggs and no sleep and people telling you they’re pissing on you and pouring streams of hot water on your back. And the final thing was the president branded the goddamn pledges with a hot poker. It was a scandal. It’s a matter of record in the Yale Daily News.”

Then he hands me the galleys to his Rolling Stone piece and asks me to read a long passage aloud, including a crude limerick young George Bush is said to have told over and over again for two years while at Yale:

“There was a young man named Green
Who invented a jack-off machine
On the twenty-third stroke
The damn thing broke
And churned his nuts into cream.”

I read it twice, and it gets a laugh every time.

He was not sentimental when Richard Nixon died in 1994, still calling his former nemesis “a crook … a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy.” But Thompson now recognizes Nixon’s behavior as entirely reasonable in comparison to the current administration. And he is not confident about Election Day, or of the wave of newly registered voters supposedly primed to eject Bush from office.

“I’ve been through elections where people are counting on the youth vote before, but they’re not very reliable,” he says. “People tend to inflate it. I think there are more of us than there are of them in this country. That’s what this election is going to be about. Not whether Bush is a liar or thief or a pig or a murderer or a swine and stealing everyone’s retirement funds, but whether the American people want it that way. This will be a very defining moment for the American people.

“Kerry will win the election. Whether he moves into the White house or not … .” He laughs bitterly. “These people are not going to go willingly or not in any spirit of democracy. They never believed in democracy anyway. Shit, if this election goes against us, I’m not going to believe much in democracy either. If these crooked swine are able to manipulate the election and convince the voters to vote against their own interest … .”

He trails off, the thought unfinished, unthinkable. He rubs his leg. It is 2:30 a.m. and I have been a witness to his pain and his fun, but my interview is over and ruined. Virtually nothing of use was discussed. I borrow a cigarette. Benicio lights it for me.

“He’s all right,” the actor says to Thompson. “I can tell.” And for a moment I feel like that young Okie hitchhiker in the back of the red convertible hurtling toward Las Vegas, in the book and the movie, accepted into dangerous territory. (“We’re your friends … . We’re not like the others.”)

Thompson’s not so sure. “How can you tell?”

“I don’t know. I just can,” Del Toro says, watching me. “Well, we’ll find out later.”

Yes, and nearly three hours after I arrived, I say my goodbyes. I’d had many questions, on presidents and politics, on journalism and the writing process. Instead, I’m left with a tape filled mainly with Thompson in a frenzy over his travel plans and of myself reading his words back to him.

He shakes my hand. “Good luck with the piece,” he says, sitting down. “And if it’s not good, someone will be coming by to take care of you.”

Four months later, he was dead.

* * *

This is a party Thompson might have enjoyed. There is beer, wine, and the music is Hunter’s personal playlist: Dylan, the Stones, Neil Young, the Band. The man has been gone almost two years, but he is very much present at the M+B Gallery in West Hollywood. His face is everywhere, in huge photographs printed on archival paper, with color digitally restored. There are pictures of Hells Angels and Dobermans, of pretty girls and slaughtered pigs. But many more are self-portraits, studies toward creating the public legend of a dangerous literary man, modeled first on Hemingway and the Beats, and then something weirdly his own. The aviator shades and cigarette holder, the weapons and loping gait, an image as easy to caricature as Twain’s, and one he would sometimes come to regret. In the pictures is a man slowly ending his time as an observer and becoming the observed.

The images are from GONZO, a large-scale visual biography of Thompson, now selling briskly at the front desk at $300 each. He took most of the photographs himself, back when he was a working journalist providing art for his own stories, and a young novelist documenting his life.

Tonight’s opening has drawn a good crowd. Chatting in one corner is actor Bill Murray, who portrayed the outlaw author in 1980’s Where the Buffalo Roam, the first film interpretation of “the twisted legend” of Hunter S. Thompson. He had also been the subject of the writer’s final “Hey Rube” column, which was a 3 a.m. dialogue between them about a new sport Thompson invented: shotgun golf.

Standing beside him is Juan Thompson, who can be seen as a toddler in Woody Creek in one picture, a Frisbee in one hand, his other pointing to a photograph of G-man J. Edgar Hoover that’s been blasted with a shotgun. Good times. Juan is now 42, and he wears his father’s Aztec medallion over a white tuxedo shirt. “It means the world to me,” he says, touching it gently.

The gallery show opening is one more family reunion of the HST circle, but it can only be an echo of the gatherings that always swirled around Thompson, a rare blend of politics, art, literature, and heavy weaponry. “The reality is that Hunter was the hub and he connected a lot of people and for a lot of reasons he attracted a lot of people,” says Juan. “And when he died, he left a hole there, and there’s no way to fill that.”

Juan Thompson is writing about growing up gonzo for a book to be published by Knopf. He’s not a writer but a computer consultant. And yet he knew that he would one day write this book. They had discussed it. And Hunter wanted his son to wait until he was dead. He supported the idea, but didn’t want to have to read it. “By that time, he knew I wasn’t gonna do a hatchet job on him,” he says. “It just would have been too uncomfortable to actually read it. But he died. I really wanted to try to portray a different side of Hunter than the public persona. That’s how it started.”

His father wasn’t always around. He was often on the road on assignment, and then, after Juan’s parents separated and divorced, they lived apart. “So a part of this book is how both of us dealt with that, and tried to create a relationship where there hadn’t been one, and also how I gradually came to understand that he was a lot more present than he appeared to be at the time.”

* * *

On his final day in L.A., it was Laila Nabulsi who hustled the wounded antihero onto a private plane. It would be the last time she saw him, waving at her from a window. Just a few nights before, she had helped organize a party for him at the Taschen Bookstore. Taschen was set to publish an oversized version of The Curse of Lono, his long-out-of-print excursion into the depths of Hawaiian culture with Steadman. His editor there, Steve Crist, agreed to host the party, even if Thompson was actually in town to promote Hey Rube. And Thompson gave Nabulsi a long list of friends from across the planet who had to be invited. They included some of his Hollywood pals … Depp, Del Toro, Sean Penn, Angelica Huston. Hugh Hefner would arrive with an armful of Playmates. But Nabulsi told him that others further away would never be able to make it. Still, he insisted, “I just want them to know they were invited.”

Something was different. And for months after, Hunter kept thanking her for the party, that “elegant evening,” as he called it. Back in Woody Creek, he would watch a video from the party often. But as Nabulsi stood at the airport watching Thompson prepare to fly out that day, she sensed a change.

“It was so dramatic, and so like a movie, watching this plane,” Nabulsi says now. “And he said, ‘I wish you would come with me.’ And I almost jumped on the plane. I wish I had,” she says, shaking her head. “But, you know, I had something to do, and I couldn’t leave.”

She met him at the end of the ’70s in John Belushi’s dressing room at Saturday Night Live, where she worked, a young producer of short films for the show. That was the center of the universe in those days, a groundbreaking collision of comedy and counterculture. Belushi was her closest friend. And Thompson fit right in.

They had two great weeks in New York together. It turned out he was married. Must not have come up. Eventually, she moved into his house in Woody Creek, traveled with him around the world, became his fiancée, and then left him in the ’80s. Thompson joked that he always feared the exposé she might write. He talked about it for years after, and he even had a title for her: He Was Wrong.

But they remained close friends, and she began working toward finally making a film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

After a decade of struggle, she managed to put the pieces together, producing a movie directed by Terry Gilliam in 1998. Gilliam saw the story as an antidote to the increasing humorlessness of the endless Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton eras. Gilliam described the book’s dangerous duo as a modern Dante and Virgil, descending into the Inferno of contemporary America, with Vegas casinos as the circles of Hell, while around them raged the Vietnam War, the Nixon presidency, and a disheartened youth movement. He thought the time was right for a reawakening of everything that was irresponsible and politically incorrect. It wasn’t. At a press screening I attended on the Universal lot, the film erupted onscreen to a packed room, and only myself and a strange woman sitting next to me seemed to be laughing. The rest was uncomfortable silence.

The reviews were extreme. Critics called the film either a remarkable translation of an acclaimed book, or a document of unspeakable ugliness. It was brutal. More importantly, it was not a hit, which is worse than death in some circles. The timing was just wrong. Five years later, the DVD version was greeted with rave reviews and was embraced as a cult movie for a new generation not even born when the book was first published. College kids were heard quoting the dialogue. And a band called Avenged Sevenfold, a punk-pop-metal act from the O.C. committed to tattoos and styling mousse, had a career breakthrough with “Bat Country,” a song directly inspired by Fear and Loathing. The accompanying video was thick with images lifted from the movie.

Thompson also loved the film, but by then he was on to other things. A new marriage, more books. “He was serious about his stuff,” says Nabulsi. “You couldn’t just hang out and party. He hated that word. It wasn’t about that. It was about working. And if you couldn’t take it, you were out of there. There was one night where he was trying to work on something so he started talking about it, and there were three or four people there, who were supposedly helping. At one point Hunter said, ‘Is anyone writing this down? If no one’s writing this down, it’s just bar talk!’”

That scene was six months before he died. He had many projects: a sex book titled Polo Is My Life, a collection of short stories called The Night Manager, the film adaptation of The Rum Diary. Weeks before shooting himself, he still talked of future work with Steadman. He was on the phone with Simon & Schuster about more books. And Steve Crist had a plane ticket to see him at his Owl Farm compound the Tuesday after that fatal weekend, to meet and discuss the GONZO photo book (to be published by Crist’s new publishing house, AMMO Books), a huge project co-edited by Crist and Nabulsi.

His mountain of unfinished writing projects was not an uncommon affliction for writers who had set a new impossible standard. It took his New Journalism colleague Gay Talese 12 years to finish his last book. Starting and stopping, tinkering and rewriting, throwing it all out and beginning again. Talese would sometimes then study his words from across the room with binoculars. (The next book could be a while.)

Even so, Thompson left behind an impressive stack of books, including the first two volumes of his collected letters that earned his best reviews since the days of Fear and Loathing and The Great Shark Hunt. He wasn’t finished. Only his body betrayed him, the final revenge for a lifetime of fun and abuse. He is still beloved by his long-suffering friends and family, still read and worshipped by fans. All was well enough in his work, right up until the moment he sat at his typewriter and pulled that trigger. For those who cared, it ended too soon. He was wrong.

Illustration by Ralph Steadman, from The Joke's Over, courtesy Harcourt Books.

Los Angeles CityBeat, December 28, 2006