Published: May 2009, communigator, UF College of Journalism and Communications Alumni Magazine
 

It seemed fitting to pay tribute to the Kentucky-born journalist who lived life fast and hard by pouring two fingers of his favorite bourbon: Wild Turkey.
 

Department of Journalism Chair William McKeen sat in his living room in the middle of the night on Feb. 20, 2005, sipping the fiery liquor and remembering a writer whose razor-sharp prose enchanted and perplexed the masses, a hypnotic figure whose legend and provocative journalism even today inspires young-gun reporters.

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At 11:15 p.m., Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Geoff Boucher, JM 2007, called McKeen with news of Hunter S. Thompson’s self-inflicted, fatal gunshot to the head and questions about the life of the man known as the gonzo journalist.

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McKeen informed his wife, Nicole Cisneros, JM 2005.

 

“She urged me to say a prayer for him,” he said.

Whether he’s asked to discuss the eccentric writer’s psyche and work or his complicated public and private relationships, McKeen is considered a Thompson expert by journalists and academics alike. All it takes is a glance around his office to see why. A wall stacked with hundreds of books showcases his penchant for rock ‘n’ roll and literary journalism titans like Tom Wolfe.
 

Among the mass of books are McKeen’s published projects, including his 1991 Hunter S. Thompson, an examination of Thompson’s work. Personal notes from Thompson, displaying his frantic penmanship, and black-and-white photographs of Thompson’s visit to Western Kentucky University, where McKeen taught in the late 1970s, document the journalists’ quirky acquaintance.

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A framed, handwritten note scribbled in black marker hangs on a wall just below one from Tom Wolfe. The Thompson note reads: “I warned you about writing that vicious trash about me. Now you better get fitted for that black eye patch just in case one of yours gets gouged out by a bushy-haired stranger in a dimly lit parking lot. How fast can you learn Braille? You are scum.”

 

It’s signed “HST.”

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“It was his way of letting me know he really liked the book,” McKeen said.

 

The framed portion of the note is an excerpt from an eight-foot scroll Thompson sent McKeen about a bull-sperm auction.
 

The birth of Outlaw

In the days following Thompson’s death, news outlets such as the St. Petersburg Times and CNN sought insight into Thompson’s life and work.

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They called McKeen.

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“When the person from People magazine called, I asked, ‘Well, aren’t you also going to talk to this person and that person?’ And she said, ‘No, we’re talking to you and Johnny Depp, and that’s it,’ ” McKeen recalled.

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After a flurry of interviews, Cisneros suggested her husband’s next book should be a biography of Thompson. Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson was born.

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“He’ll say all of his best ideas come from me, and it’s true,” she said, smiling.
 

Before Thompson died, McKeen entertained the idea of revising his first book about the journalist, but never seriously considered writing more about him. After a handful of Thompson books appeared in the early 1990s, he saw little demand for another biography.

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Then Thompson died, and he felt the urge to write a book objectively examining the late journalist’s life – something he felt was lacking in the commercial market.

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“The people who wrote those earlier books put themselves in it too much,” McKeen said. “I thought, you really need somebody who’s going to stand back and be objective and not a) try to show off – they try to write like Hunter Thompson and therefore look like fools – and b) they want to emphasize their role in the story. I thought I didn’t know him well enough to do that, but I did know him well enough to know what the real guy was like.”

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McKeen, the author of five books and the editor of three, called his agent, Jane Dystel of Dystel and Goderich Literary Management. Dystel shopped McKeen’s idea around to publishers and landed a deal with a familiar editor at a familiar publishing company: Amy Cherry, vice president of communications and senior editor at W.W. Norton & Company, an independent publishing firm in New York City.

 

Cherry, who has worked at W.W. Norton for 23 years and with McKeen for nearly a decade, edited his last three books, including Rock and Roll is Here to Stay and Highway 61.

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Originally, she wanted McKeen to write the biography as an oral history, but he fought for a narrative and won.

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He started the book with a recreation of Thompson’s suicide using cell-phone records, but Cherry didn’t like it. She suggested telling the events in chronological order, he recalled. “She said, ‘Don’t mess with it. Just start at the beginning.’ ”

 

Typically, McKeen sends Cherry two to three chapters at a time. One of the greatest challenges in editing Outlaw, she said, was turning the seemingly endless supply of events in Thompson’s life into a cohesive chronology.

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“Especially in writing biographies, it’s hard to keep everything straight,” Cherry said. “Occasionally, I would have to say to him, ‘You know, maybe this should go over here or what happened between these two events?’ ”

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The manuscript, which is nearly 500 pages and about five inches thick, is scheduled for release on July 7. Cherry calls the book McKeen’s best writing to date.

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“It’s the most mature work he has done,” she said. “Highway 61 was good, fun and engaging. But I think the depth he brought to this book was much stronger. He let you see, without psycho-analyzing, what Hunter S. Thompson thought and why he did what he did.”
 

The Gonzo effect

McKeen first became fascinated with Thompson’s work when he read “The Battle of Aspen,” an egomaniacal essay about the rise of hippie political power in Aspen, Colo., in 1970.

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“There was a picture of him in the article where he had his head shaved,” McKeen said. “It was demonic. He looked like an alien. I thought, ‘This is a weird guy.’ ”

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That image stayed with him. During the 1972 presidential elections, McKeen worked for a small newspaper in Bloomington, Ind., and read Thompson’s coverage of the campaign each week in Rolling Stone magazine.

 

He viewed the writing as a brilliant flight of fancy.

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“There I was, a young reporter,” McKeen said, “and here was a guy who was so funny and so entertaining. I was attracted to it immediately.”

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McKeen, 19 at the time, tried to emulate Thompson’s style on an assignment in Roselawn, Ind., while covering the Mr. and Ms. Nude America pageant at a now defunct nudist resort, Naked City. The result: an article riddled with incomplete sentences, unworthy of being published.

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“The lesson I learned is that only one person can write like Hunter S. Thompson,” he said, “and that’s Hunter S. Thompson.”

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In 1978, McKeen met and interviewed Thompson when he started his teaching career at Western Kentucky. At the time, he was hosting a speaking engagement featuring the writer. He was surprised. Backstage, Thompson was a Southern-bred gentleman who hated to say no to enthusiastic fans, especially women.

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“He was not at all what I expected,” McKeen said. “He was kind and gentlemanly. People would come up to him and say, ‘Hunter, I met you eight years ago in Atlanta.’ He would always pretend to remember. He didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

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Once Thompson stepped onto the stage, he transformed into character. He became the straight-shooting wild man of infamy. He changed the way he walked, amped up his language and exaggerated his motions so that he was like a cartoon character.

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“His public persona was a literary creation as much as Huck Finn or something like that,” McKeen said. McKeen’s book is creating a buzz among UF’s Thompson fans, such as Lauren Sachs, a journalism senior, who’s fascinated with the way Thompson broke every journalistic rule.

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“Whenever I see or hear or read something of Thompson’s, I immediately see myself in it,” said Sachs, who owns a rescued pet chinchilla named Dr. Gonzo and has taken two classes with McKeen.

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In three years, McKeen interviewed about 100 sources and poured over mounds of documents. Although it took some convincing on his part, McKeen landed key interviews with Thompson’s widow, Anita; Deborah Fuller, his assistant for 23 years; Laila Nabulsi, his former girlfriend; and Bob Braudis, Thompson’s best friend.

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More than a year later, they came forward after McKeen spoke with Thompson’s longtime friend Monty Chitty.

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“Monty teased me about talking on the record for about 18 months, and then he calls me and said, ‘Get a plane ticket. I’m putting you up.’ I don’t know what made him do that, but that sort of helped other people decide I was OK,” said McKeen, who stayed with Chitty in Aspen for 10 days and attended the Hunter S. Thompson Symposium at the Aspen Institute.

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Although he worked tirelessly at times to find key sources, other sources found McKeen. For instance, in 2005, Tom Corcoran, an author, journalist and photographer from Lakeland, learned of McKeen’s first book about Thompson and sent him an e-mail. McKeen replied instantly asking Corcoran for an interview.

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Corcoran knew Thompson for 28 years and collaborated with him on a series of projects including a never-produced screenplay about marijuana smuggling in the Florida Keys and a never-written Esquire magazine article about powerboat racing. He also worked closely with the journalist in 1981 and 1982 on The Curse of Lono, Thompson’s book about his experiences in Hawaii.

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“After Bill and I exchanged a few e-mails, I knew his view of Hunter’s career coincided with mine – I had grown to dislike all the attention given to Hunter’s behavior – and the too-scant praise offered for his brilliant journalism,” said Corcoran, 64. McKeen drove to Lakeland for a face-to-face interview. “I dug out some old memorabilia and yakked until his tape recorder almost caught fire,” Corcoran said.

Since, Corcoran and McKeen have corresponded, leading him to other sources like Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine and former Sen. Gary Hart.

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“I gave him a few tips on additional people to contact – friends of Hunter who, like me, had slipped under the radar of all the other biographers,” he said. “We compared notes on a few existing HST ‘legends,’ some true and some built of ‘expanded’ truth. I think I was able to confirm a few stories and debunk a few more.”

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Among all of the possible sources for his book, everyone asks McKeen if he talked to Johnny Depp, a friend of Thompson’s who portrayed him in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

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“Well no, in fact I didn’t even try,” McKeen said. “I feel ashamed, like I should.”

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When the biography is released, it will have been five years since McKeen published his last book – a period he calls “an awful long time.”

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“It’s like I always say, ‘I don’t like to write. I like to have written,’ ” he said.

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“I’ve had such a good time doing this book. What’s funny is when I go back through the copy-edited manuscript, I look back and say, ‘Some of this is really good.’ You don’t really realize what you’re writing when you’re in the frenzy of it.”