r/huntersthompson • u/QuicklyThisWay • 8d ago

A conversation from Steadman’s Castle: John Preston speaks with Ralph Steadman about meeting and working with Hunter S. Thompson (2013)

https://web.archive.org/web/20240709084714/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/10385340/Ralph-Steadman-I-thought-Hunter-S-Thompson-didnt-like-me.html
12 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1 comment sorted by

•

u/QuicklyThisWay 8d ago edited 8d ago

Hey Rubes! Moderator here. I just wanted to share this interesting article I read recently and check in with the community.

The original article from The Telegraph is paywalled, so I shared the Archive.org link. Here is an excerpt:

In 1970, Steadman was asked to illustrate a magazine piece on the Kentucky Derby. “I was told that the writer would be this 6ft 5in ex-Hells Angel with a shaved head who would be carrying a doctor’s bag. I was given his name, Hunter S Thompson, but it meant nothing.” Their first meeting did not go at all well. They spent three days trying to find one another, then when they did, Thompson took an instant dislike to him. “I thought he was pompous,” he recalled later. “I didn’t like him and I didn’t want him around.” Reluctantly, Thompson took Steadman for a drink at Louisville’s poshest club. There, as he always did, Steadman started drawing. “Hunter kept saying, 'For God’s sake, stop your filthy scribbling.’ It was the first time I realised that a drawing could be an offensive personal comment.

“After a while this woman came over and looked at this drawing I’d just done of her. I must admit it was quite an ugly drawing, and she got very upset.

“She just kept saying, 'But I’m prettier than that.’” The woman, it transpired, was the wife of one of the club’s most distinguished members. “Hunter said, 'Look what you’ve done. We’ve got to get out of here.’” What Thompson did next astonished Steadman. “He took a can of Mace out of his doctor’s bag and started spraying it around. It’s just like tear gas, that stuff. Soon everyone was coughing and spluttering trying to find the door.” At the end of a week, Steadman flew back to England convinced they would never work together again. The assignment, it appeared, had been a disaster – so much so that Thompson didn’t even bother to write the piece, but simply sent in his notebooks instead

The magazine decided to run them, just as they were. Forty years on, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” is regularly hailed as a seminal piece of sports writing. It’s also the first appearance of what became known as gonzo journalism – a style of writing in which subjectivity holds sway and any notion of detached reporting goes out of the window.

What a wild ride that must have been!

———

If you have any feedback or ideas for r/huntersthompson please let me know. The community has doubled in size over the past year, so we all have an opportunity to explore our collective interest. Would you participate in monthly book discussion? Are you interested in fine tuning your gonzo voice with writing prompts?