How much of Thompsons wild-man persona was an act, and how much was it real?
You know, he writes about staying up all night in a San Francisco motel, doing crank and typing out the manuscript of “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.” How much is he kind of fronting and playing with that, and how much is he recording what really happened? It’s hard to answer that. I mean, I think he was doing speed in tremendous amounts and going on these binges, but earlier on it was more of an act and less of the real McCoy. He kind of descended into his own character later in life. He was doing all the drugs and all the alcohol all the time, and it started to slow him down. Rather than pretending that he was always on speed, maybe he was on speed a lot of the time. He used to have this big pill bottle. Tim Crouse [Thompson’s Rolling Stone reporting partner] talks about how he would gently say, like a father figure, “Don’t go for too many of those gray ones, Tim. Those are for people like me, not for you.” So there’s no question that he was doing the drugs, but I thin
