Young, Crazy, and In Love: The Beginnings of Mr. and Mrs. Hunter S Thompson

Summer, sunny Big Sur. cliff. Sandy sunbathes nude. Agar, the dog, keeps gaurd. Hunter smacks words on his typewriter, a letter to a friend:

"Time passing, getting balder, no money, a great thirst for all the world's whiskey, my clothes rotting in the fog, a motorcycle with no light, a landlady who's writing a novel on butcher paper, wild boar in the hills and queers on the roads, vats of homemade beer in the closet, shooting cats to ease the pressure, the jabbering of Buddhists in the trees, whores in the canyons, Christ only knows if I can last it out."

The 60s had begun, though who, besides perhaps Hunter, had any idea of the oncoming onslaught of insanity. 

He had a mission, become the next Great American Novelist. He had already written a novel--the only problem, it was someone else's. He had painstakingly transcribed, word for word, Hemingway's classic The Sun Also Rises. He did it, Hunter said, just to feel the words flow through him. As if literary genius was not internally organic but rather an external force, like electricity, that could be channeled by any conduit ready to receive it.

Hunter was now working as a caretaker, while writing freelance magazine articles, and putting together his first novel, one he had started the year before, when he and Sandy lived in Puerto Rico.

Hunter had accepted a sportswriting job for a magazine called El Sportivo in late '61. Lured by the promise that the magazine would be the Sports Illustrated of the Caribbean, Hunter left the states with his photographer friend Robert Bone. 

There he finally did what he had dreamed: sit on a veranda shaded by a palm tree, pipe and cocktail at hand, and pen his first novel, The Rum Diary. He was disciplined and driven. He would write for six hours a day, every day, said Sandy. Sometimes she would type up his notes.

He described their life at the time:

“I live 5 miles from town, on the beach, 4- room house, motor scooter, no job, writing freelance stuff for Stateside newspapers, also fiction, so many bugs I can barely breathe, wife here and cooking, no money, vagrant artist from New York also living here, all in all life is not bad.”

They had meet in New York,  through mutual friends. "Puerto Rico," said their friend Peter Flanders, who was living with them at the time, "was their honeymoon."

Sandy recalls cutting open coconuts and drinking coconut rum drinks, and making love. "There was a big screen, and we were right on the ocean, the sand and the ocean, and I remember I was sitting up and I was in bed and I just thought I cant' get any higher. If I were to die the next instant I would be happy."

Set in the late 1950s, the novel encompasses a tangled love story of jealousy, treachery and violent alcoholic lust among the Americans who staff the newspaper. Like Hunter's work that would follow, such as Fear and Loathing, and The Kentucky Derby is Decedent and Depraved, the story is an warped lens of reality, so twisted and sharply observed that it seems to tell the truth truer than the bare facts could.

Supposedly, the sexual Sandy was the model for the character Chennault. The book's gang rape scene is loosely based on time when they were in Brazil for Carnival. Sandy loved the music and started dancing. A local came up behind her and was rubbing on her. Hunter appeared, collared the guy, and asked, tiene problemas?

Hunter then locked Sandy in their room, while he went out.

In the novel, the scene goes farther: the Character Chennault is dancing, and transfixed in the moment of the music, begins to open her blouse. Little by little, she strips down, encouraged by the bacchanalian crowd, until she is naked, and then suddenly pulled away by a group of men. Her husband struggles, but is taken out back of the bar and beaten until his friend, the narrator Paul Kemp, pulls him to safety.

After Puerto Rice, Hunter and Sandy lived in Big Sur for a year, dirt poor. Literally scrapping abalone off the sea rocks to eat, and Hunter roaming the hills at night with lights to shoot animals to eat. (This apparently pissed off his pacifist neighbor, Joan Baez, Sandy recalls.)

After only a year, Hunter had made one too many derogatory anti-gay comments, and they were evicted.

In may 1963, they married, and moved to Aspen, a small compound called "Owl Farm" at Woody Creek, where Hunter would spend the rest of his life, writing, drinking, snorting copious amounts of cocaine, and shooting off any number of firearms. 

A year later they had their son, Juan. They would try to expand their family, but were tragically stricken by a series of miscarriages and infant deaths. Sandra would be with Hunter during the very first and all the way through his height as a writer; he created his lasting works during the period of their marriage: Hell's Angles, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and On The Campaign Trail.

They divorced in 1980 and she left Woody Creek. In 2003, Hunter remarried, to his then 30-year-old assistant, Anita Beymuk. In 2005, like his role model Papa, Hunter put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Hunter at his typewriter in Big Sur. Not a bad view for inspiration.

Hunter and his motorcycle (missing a headlight) overlooking Big Sur. He would later ride it when doing his research of the Hell's Angels for his first published book.

Sandy sits nude on cliffs of Big Sur, soaking up summer sun.

Hunter in Puerto Rico, perhaps jotting a first draft of his first novel, The Rum Diary.

The sexy bikini-clad Sandy posing on Hunter's shooter in Puerto Rico.

A young Hunter and Sandy set off. Boarding a plane in the Carribean.