Ralph Steadman and Hunter S. Thompson Crashed the America's Cup in a Rowboat and Escaped by Setting Off Flares
"I was going to write, 'Fuck the Pope,'" Ralph Steadman tells me.
Well, he told that to Hunter S. Thompson half a century ago, when the duo went up to Rhode Island for the America's Cup and Hunter proposed they commandeer a vessel of their own for the occasion. Steadman, a renowned satirical artist, worked with Thompson on some of his biggest stories as he birthed the Gonzo style, an extension of the New Journalism that abandoned objectivity and thrust the writer into absurd narratives as the protagonist. "Our idea was to get a band of scruffy buggers on another boat and get in the race," Steadman says in his Welsh-English lilt.
But they first set out just the two of them in a rowboat, meandering amongst the racing yachts while they were still docked in the harbor. Steadman got a bit sick, and he saw Hunter eating something and he asked what it was. "Oh, I don't know," Steadman remembers as the response, relayed through a perfect Hunter impression. "It's just some tablets."
They weren't just tablets, of course, they were psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, and they both took some while Hunter rowed them around the big racing craft. They pulled up between two of them and Steadman got himself in position, because you'd better believe he was going to draw something on the side of one of the boats for all to see once the race kicked off. Hunter was trying to hold the boat steady and Steadman was just about ready and then the guards showed up.
"What are you doing?" they said.
"Oh, we're just looking at the boat," Steadman remembers Thompson saying, again channeling that eerie impression. And then Thompson stage-whispered to him. "We'll make a run for it?"
The world around was surely filtering into Steadman's brainstem through a kaleidoscope by this point, and before he knew it Hunter was pulling on the oars wildly, trying to wheel away from the guards. "All I saw suddenly were a pair of feet up in the air," he remembers. The oars had come out of their sockets, and Hunter was flailing about. But he'd come prepared.
"He hadn't told me this, but he also brought with him some flares, for distress," Steadman says with a hint of a smirk, "and he set them off in the harbor and the people coming for us were completely diverted to putting out the fires that were all over."
Once they'd escaped, Hunter asked that question: "Well, what were you going to write?"
"I was going to write 'Fuck the Pope,'" Steadman answered.
Hunter didn't miss a beat. "Are you religious, lad?"
Ralph Steadman was always going to write Fuck the Pope on that yacht because he likes to take the piss out of powerful people but also because he has a reflexive need to draw on things. The dark caricatures and caustic shadings come tumbling out of his forefingers like industrial runoff, eating away at the pretense of our polite little world with acidic insight. I sat with him at the Vans store on the Bowery in New York this month, not long after he'd had a chat with Trevor Noah about his Gonzovationist partnership with the brand, which seeks to raise awareness of conservation efforts to save endangered animals. He's also got a coffee table book full of snow leopards and Monarch butterflies and Cuban crocodiles in explosive color, each bestowed with a particular brand of Steadmanian personality.
SHOP THE VANS x RALPH STEADMAN COLLECTION
But as we spoke, he'd pause periodically as people came up with something they'd like him to sign-a shirt he'd designed for the partnership, a pair of low-top Vans, a skate deck featuring a white rhino. Except he didn't just sign them. He rattled off a Ralph Steadman original each time, using nothing but permanent marker or whatever else was immediately available. He signed a jean jacket and, with a swooping flourish on the final letter, moved deftly into outlining a cartoon face that looped down to cover much of the back.
Steadman is known for his surreal and often grotesque depictions of human beings both notorious and anonymous. He has an uncanny ability to draw out some slice of someone's character and send it screaming off the page. That made him a great asset to Hunter Thompson, who died in 2005, as they went chasing Richard Nixon for Rolling Stone and what eventually became Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. It wasn't just the candidate-Steadman's treatments of the tribalist crowds at the Republican National Convention that year were just as savagely cutting. So, too, was his snapshot of racing fans for The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, his first work with Hunter that launched the Gonzo journalism movement. His ink-blot satires depicted attendees as fabulously dressed, hideously intoxicated, and crawling on their stomachs towards the muddy infield to lose more money at the races.
In fact, it was Steadman's craft that conjured one of the most hilariously disturbing passages in Thompson's watershed work.
Another problem was [Steadman's] habit of sketching people he met in the various social situations I dragged him into, then giving them the sketches. The results were always unfortunate. I warned him several times about letting the subjects see his foul renderings, but for some perverse reason he kept doing it. Consequently, he was regarded with fear and loathing by nearly everyone who’d seen or even heard about his work. He couldn’t understand it. “It’s sort of a joke,” he kept saying. “Why, in England it’s quite normal. People don’t take offense. They understand that I’m just putting them on a bit.”
“Fuck England,” I said. “This is Middle America. These people regard what you’re doing to them as a brutal, bilious insult. Look what happened last night. I thought my brother was going to tear your head off.”
Steadman shook his head sadly, “But I like him. He struck me as a very decent, straightforward sort.”
“Look, Ralph,” I said. “Let’s not kid ourselves. That was a very horrible drawing you gave him. It was the face of a monster. It got on his nerves very badly.” I shrugged. “Why in the hell do you think we left the restaurant so fast?”
“I thought it was because of the Mace,” he said.
“What Mace?”
He grinned. “When you shot it at the headwaiter, don’t you remember?”
“Hell, that was nothing,” I said. “I missed him … and we were leaving, anyway.”
Steadman remembers it all well. He says the America's Cup was actually one of relatively few times he got into illegal drugs. "I was the innocent abroad," he says, and then, pondering it: "I was ages coming down." He was still distraught by the time he got back to New York, where he needed the editor of Scanlon's Monthly to get him a cab to a friend's house because he had scarcely a penny to his name. When he arrived, his friend asked if he needed a doctor. "Do you usually do this sort of thing?"
It's all in sharp contrast with Hunter, whose record as an abuser of wild and dangerous narcotics may be unrivaled in recorded human history.
"He used to have, sent up to his room, a breakfast tray with six margaritas on it," Steadman says. "He used to be hideous. People would give him tablets, he'd eat it, then he'd say, 'What was that?'"
"That's been his real talent, though," he adds. "Pay the ticket, take the ride."
For all that relative sobriety, however, Steadman's mind is a quantum wonder, a dream machine capable, in an instant, of twisting our reality into new and perplexing shapes that uncover the texture and material from which it's all been made. Ask him a question, and you'll start on the same lily pad. By the end, or sometimes right away, he's shouting over from a lily pad in a different dimension. When Trevor Noah queried him about his relationship with his collaborator of the last seven years, Ceri Levy, Steadman broke out in song and crafted a freestyle hymn about the exposed brick and wood moldings that composed the Vans store's Lower East Side aesthetic.
"You end up in the Steadman Space-Time Continuum," Levy, a music-video and documentary filmmaker in a past life, says with a laugh. "Black holes are safer. You never know where you're going to come out, but it's usually somewhere really interesting."
Steadman's discussion with Noah, then, was scarcely about the partnership or conservation at all. It was a rollicking skip through the phantasmagorical corridors of his mind. When I asked him later about the prospects for the environment and the endangered species he'd set out to help protect, we went down a number of them.
"It's time for the [younger generation] to think seriously about doing something-without violence," he said, "And stop being unpleasant, spiteful, sarcastic..."
Was he positive about the future?
"Oh, yeah. We have to be. There's nothing else."
Is he hopeful we'll do what's needed to safeguard the environment and these animals?
"Not really, no."
Are we going to make it?
"No."
Should I have kids?
"Yeah, for your own sake."
Occasionally, he would arrive quite purposefully on politics. He's made his views on the current leadership plain before, chiefly to the Guardian. "Trump is a lout," he said then. "He's a godawful disgrace to humanity." He expanded on it here. "Nixon was at least a real politician-even a crooked one. Trump is nothing but a businessman-and a really stupid one at that. I mean, cunning."
I asked him what he made of the crowds at Trump's rallies, and how he might draw them having so memorably depicted the Young Republicans chanting, "Four More Years!" in 1972.
"Well, you'd have to use Revlon lipsticks for the colors," he said simply. "I mean, I'd like some lipstick now. I've got some work to do on that," he added, motioning to a print of his Dodo work that had been auctioned off for charity, and to which he was now adding looping caricatures here and there. "I didn't come expecting to do this tonight. The black is all anyone's got."
And then he was back to creating Ralph Steadman original works of art for anyone that had the gumption to come by. One was a young kid, fronted by his mother.
"Brandon, B-R-A-N-D-O-N, is going to go to the Olympics for skateboarding," she said, presenting a skate deck for Steadman to sign. He seemed to have no idea what she was talking about.
"He's going to the Olympics on his skateboard," she said.
"Ah, that's wonderful!" Steadman said, still not entirely there as he started scrawling another bizarro sketch on the back of the board. He finished, signing his name with a flourish, and presented it for Young Brandon the Olympic Skateboarder. It even was addressed to him personally.
"BRANDAN," it read.
('You Might Also Like',)
