Heavy duty, eh? First E.B. Williams & now Bailey. Are you ready for that?
Letter from HST to JSW, February 16, 1972
2/16
Royal Biscayne Hotel
555 Ocean Drive
Key Biscayne, Florida 33149
Jann/
—the Fla gig is so far running about 600% better than I could possibly have predicted. After 2 days of steady personal hassling with Lindsay, I think he’s about ready to spring for the Freak Power trip.
—whatever happens, these fuckers will never forget that the campaign of ’72 was “the one that Rolling Stone covered.”
—terrible heavy showbiz; I feel like an alligator in the dog show. I have a clean ’72 version of the Great Red Shark. But the thing that really brings them to their fucking knees is the telecopier.
The poor bastards are totally bamboozled. They can’t grasp it. Here’s some hopelessly out of control freak from Rolling Whatever, running around in a big red convertible with a fucking phone-transmitter in the trunk. It’s wonderful—like putting a big red Twister on them.
OK for now. I’ll call.
—H
Letter from JSW to HST
April 20, 1972
Hunter:
We can no longer go through this deadline scene as we have now with every one of your reports. The late deadlines on the Wisconsin piece and the Florida piece were quite understandable, but your latest piece should have been in no later than Friday evening. I am afraid that you literally have Dan Parker, Charles Perry, Robert Kingsbury, Cindy Ehrlich, Barbara Ziller, Paul, Hank and other members of the editorial staff quite angry about the situation.
Furthermore, the unvarying dullness of the layout and the continued proliferation of minor errors and improper structuring results only from the fact that you submit it so late. For everybody’s good I think we have got to start considering Friday evening/Saturday early a.m. as the final deadline.
Sincerely,
Jann
bcc: Dan, Charles, Robert, Cindy, Barbara, Paul, Hank, Max, Jane (Wenner), Laurel
Memo to RS staff from HST
Fear & Loathing: CORRECTIONS, RETRACTIONS, APOLOGIES, COP-OUTS, ETC. (undated 1972) [handwritten at top] Jann—this was written before I left to cover the Fla. primary
For various reasons that probably don’t mean shit to anybody but me, I want to get straight—for the record, as it were—with regard to some of the most serious of the typographical errors that have marred the general style, tone & wisdom of “Fear & Loathing.”
I have tried to blame various individuals in the San Francisco office for these things, but each time we trace one of the goddamn things back to its root, it turns out to have been my fault. This is mainly because I never seem to get my gibberish in to [RS copy chief Charlie Perry, aka “Smokestack El Ropo”] El Ropo, who has to cope with it, until the crack of dawn on deadline day—at which time I have to get him out of bed and keep him awake by means of ruses, shocks and warnings while I feed my freshly typed pages into the Mojo Wire, which zaps them across the nation to El Ropo at the rate of one page every four minutes.
This is a fantastic machine, and I carry it with me at all times. All I need is the Mojo Wire and a working telephone to send perfect Xerox copies of anything I’ve written to anybody else with a Mojo Wire receiver . . . and anybody with $50 a month can lease one of these things.
Incredible. What will they think of next?
The only real problem with the Mojo Wire is that it tends to miss or skip a line every once in a while, especially when we get one of those spotty phone connections. If you’re playing “New Speedway Boogie” in the same room, for instance, the Mojo machine will pick up the noise and garble a name like “Jackson” so badly that El Ropo will get it as “Johnson”. . .or “Jackalong” . . . or maybe just a fuzzy grey blank.
Which would not be a problem if we had time to check back & forth on a different phone line—but by the time El Ropo can assemble my gibberish & read it I am usually checked out and driving like a bastard for the nearest airport.
So he has to read the whole thing several times, try to get a grip on the context, and then decide what I really meant to say in that line that came across garbled.
This is not always easy. My screeds tend to wander, without benefit of such traditional journalistic landmarks as “prior references” and “pyramid reverse-build foundations.” I still insist “objective journalism” is a contradiction in terms. But I want to draw a very hard line between the inevitable reality of “subjective journalism” and the idea that any honestly subjective journalist might feel free to estimate a crowd at a rally for some candidate the journalist happens to like personally at 2000 instead of 612 . . . or to imply that a candidate the journalist views with gross contempt, personally, is a less effective campaigner than he actually is.