Finally, Hinckle’s final chapter — gonzo book years in making
As Warren Hinckle lay dying, his latest corrections to a piece of writing he’d been working on for 10 or 11 years were being typeset for delivery to his publisher, appropriately named Last Gasp.
Hinckle, the longtime San Francisco journalist and author, was never one to prioritize deadlines, even one as
Ron Turner, 77, in the office of his Last Gasp Publishing, on Monday will release Warren Hinckle’s last book, “Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson?”
literal and final as this, but it was a race nonetheless. The print-ready file was loaded onto a flash drive at 1:30 a.m. Aug. 25, 2016. At 5:37 that morning, the larger-than-life, hard-drinking muckraker with the trademark eye patch slipped away.
Sixteen months later, “Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson?” will hit the stands for Christ-
mas, a miracle made possible only by the passing of Hinckle, who surely would be rewriting it still if he were living.
“We announced and canceled publication dates many times,” said Last Gasp Publisher Ron Turner, now the same age Hinckle was at his death, 77.
It was amazing that Hinckle lived as long as he did. His own father, a longshoreman also named Warren, had died at 66 on a barstool at the Philosopher’s Club in West Portal. That was the standard Hinckle upheld during his 60year career as a member of what he called “the drinking press.”
A second-generation San Franciscan known for his pirate eye patch, Hinckle lived all over the city and worked for all of its major papers, The Chronicle, the Examiner and the Independent. He took over and relaunched Ramparts, a Catholic monthly, then went on to start (and bury) the slick magazines Scanlan’s Monthly, City, Frisco and a quarterly review, the Argonaut.
He was a force in the rise of both the New Left and the so-called New Journalism, in which the writer was often part of the story. All the better if it meant getting arrested at his desk at The Chronicle, or having a drink poured over his head by the mayor, as happened with Dianne Feinstein after she’d endured a litany of insults.
His roguish ways were a link to San Francisco’s swashbuckling past, which had more in common with the Barbary Coast era than with the techie invasion already going full tilt when he died. He liked to write about the chaos that surrounded him, even making fun of his 1989 wedding to Susan Cheever, daughter of novelist John Cheever.
“Warren’s ideas were always in motion,” said Turner. “His words were the orchestra, and he was the conductor.”
As Turner spoke, 7,000 first editions of the $39.95 book — each weighing 3.7 pounds — were sealed in a sea container sailing the Pacific from the printer in China. Without further delay, they’ll be unpacked and stacked up Monday for a public book-release party at 111 Minna Gallery.
“Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson?” will debut a few months before another book, “Ransoming Pagan Babies: the Selected Writings of Warren Hinckle,” by Heyday Books of Berkeley.
The hardbound Heyday edition, priced at $35, includes gems such as Hinckle’s in-the-crowd coverage of the Belfast funerals for IRA hunger strikers Bobby Sands and Francis Hughes.
“On a morning gray and black, Bobby Sands’ mother came to church. The funeral got there before her,” it begins.
Heyday may have packaged up the best writing by Hinckle, but Last Gasp got his last writing.
“Edited & with a Humongous Introduction (A Book in Itself!) by Warren Hinckle,” reads the cover. That introduction, titled “The Crazy Never Die,” runs to 197 pages, dense with illustrations, magazine covers, photos and an eight-page gatefold.
With every turn of the page you can see Hinckle at work on a bar stool with his basset hound, Bentley, on his own stool, as they burned through the finances of yet another publisher or investor. Hinckle had a succession of bassets, all named Bentley. At least he’d never forget the current hound’s name.
“The book is both the longest and the costliest to produce in 47 years of Last Gasp,” said Turner, who built his Mission District publishing house on underground “comix” and lowbrow books.
The Hinckle book is primarily a collection of essays about Thompson’s excessive behavior. Hinckle’s ramble, titled “The Crazy Never Die,” is followed by 30 others in a category titled “Adventures with Hunter.” The authors range from Jerry Brown to Garry Trudeau, Johnny Depp to Wavy Gravy. Add in letters, midnight faxes and an index and it amounts to 530 pages on matte paper.
“I don’t know if we will ever recover the cost,” Turner said.
As with so many misadventures of Hinckle’s cohort, “Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson?” starts at the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Street Theatre, the San Francisco strip club and porno house.
As Turner recalls it, notorious gonzo journalist Thompson, famous for his “Fear and Loathing” literary franchise, had gotten a six-figure advance from a New York publishing house to write a book on his experience as the night manager at the O’Farrell. The ensuing book, to be titled “Polo Is My Life,” was never finished. In fact, never started.
“Not a word was written,’’ Turner deadpanned. “Fun got in the way.”
The fun ended on Feb. 20, 2005, when Thompson shot himself inside his log home, at Owl Farm, Woody Creek, Colo.
In the aftermath of Thompson’s suicide, Jim Mitchell, owner of the theater, decided the book must live on. He would supply a fresh advance of $10,000 and a new title, “The Night Manager.” Hinckle, who had a gift for procrastination second only to that of Thompson, was appointed as author. Mitchell persuaded Turner to publish it.
Two years later, Mitchell died of a heart attack at 63. Turner changed the title again, to “Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson?” It would turn out to be something of a misnomer.
“As Warren was writing about Hunter, he got off on this whole autobiographical tangent about editing Ramparts and Scanlan’s,” said Turner. “He inserted himself into the story.”
That’s one way of putting it. Hinckle is 88 pages into the story before getting around to the nut of it, which is that he introduced outlaw journalist Thompson to the Welsh illustrator of the grotesque, Ralph Steadman, thereby creating the consummate writer-illustrator partnership of New Journalism.
The chapter is titled “Scanlan’s and the Birth of Gonzo,” and details Hinckle’s editing of “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” in one of the big red booths at the North Beach bar Tosca. It took many cappuccinos (steamed hot chocolate and brandy) to get the job done.
“When Steadman’s sketches arrived the next morning in the overnight mail I knew we had a game changer,” Hinckle writes. “The Derby article ... ends with the artist being Maced by the writer, which thus begat gonzo.”
But he was still only halfway through the introduction. To get the other half, Turner, whom Hinckle called “Ronzo,” had to chase him from Gino and Carlo to Tosca to the Double Play. Turn-
er’s son and associate publisher, Colin, 38, has so many emails of their pleadings that he had to commit them to a backup server.
“Hi Warren: Can’t wait to see the final edit,” he wrote with tentative optimism in 2009.
A plea for help went out to Hinckle’s daughter Pia, an editor and writer who’d declined to work with her father since he’d fired her years before.
“You had to be crazy to work with my dad because things take years and stop and start,” she recalled recently. But she took him on again and agreed to edit the introduction. As they worked, she saw the decline in her father’s health and focus.
“This was a guy who could go for three days with no sleep and edit four magazines,” said Hinckle.
One by one, contributors to the collection died — Thompson’s attorney John Clancy, illustrator Dennis Eichhorn, and journalist Bill Cardoso, who’d coined the term “gonzo.”
All had completed their work for the book. There was a hex in that.
“I don’t believe he ever intended to finish it before he died,” said Linda Corso, Hinckle’s partner of 20 years. “Warren hated deadlines, and the only deadline for this book was his death.”
Because Hinckle worked on paper proofs, every fresh round of his fixes and changes had to be reset by the book’s typesetter. She’d print out the new pages for Turner and Hinckle, who would always find something new to fix or rework.
“Four times before, I had done the last readthrough,” said Turner. “I did a fifth. This time I did not have Warren to block my decisions.”
When the ordeal was finally over, Turner sent Pia a sealed copy of the finished product. There it sits on the shelf in her home office, still wrapped in plastic, alongside one of her dad’s mini-bottles of Jameson Irish Whiskey and the seven other books he wrote.
“If I open it,” she said, “it will mean that he is really dead.”