The hilarious moment Hunter S Thompson stole Demi Moore’s private plane
If you’ve met Hunter S Thompson in person and it hasn’t unravelled into some sort of absurdity, then surely, you’d feel hard done by. To leave an evening with the wild and ragged writer with all your faculties, property and money intact would surely have been a waste of his greatest talents. To end the night in one piece would surely be the worst outcome, even if the ensuing farce resulted in a private plane being pirated by the late writer.
If you doubt Thompson’s ability to complete such a task, then you should re-read some of his best works. Thompson commandeered culture for his own whims, so a jet was child’s play. Besides, with private planes rightfully getting a bad rap at the moment and environmentalists trying to save the planet from the curse of pointless excesses, famed actor and Striptease star, Demi Moore didn’t really have a leg to stand on.
So, how exactly did this particular farce come about? Well, it begins with the unstable friendship of two of history’s leading iconoclasts: the esteemed Thompson and the proud leader of the Velvet Underground and one of the ultimate leaders of the countercultural revolution, Lou Reed. With two of the century’s biggest hellraisers, it’s no spoiler to say that this didn’t end well.
For a while, however, even a shell suit survives the first few hours of bonfire night, and Thompson and Reed enjoy a cosy honeymoon period after they first meet. The duo, it appeared, were a match made in heaven. One was a bedevilled writer capable of reducing the highest concepts into the bursting bubbles of a freshly popped Budweiser, and the other was the leader of the most controversial poetic pop band ever. The writer was, after all, a huge fan of Reed’s anthem for the disenfranchised, ‘Walk On the Wild Side’, and he had previously licensed the song from Reed for use on a project.
Reed was more than happy to oblige, and with mutual admiration in the air – like Romulus and Remus of the counterculture – a union of seismic artistic outsiders was formed. Then, it split like an atom in 2000. Thompson had just published Fear and Loathing in America and was on a book tour despite ill health. His back was ailing, and he developed an intense aversion to stairs. In fact, anywhere with an incline was met with Thompson’s wrath. However, many of his cohorts suspected that this was a cunning ploy to simply remain at home, seeing as though stairs have been a fairly ubiquitous worldwide phenomenon since the turn of the 13th century.
After a book signing in Manhattan, Thompson was due to meet Reed in a swanky restaurant. Much to the writer’s fearsome chagrin, it was one of these new-fangled joints with dastardly stairs! Thompson’s assistant emerged to find the daunting staircase, and Reed was already angered at the top of it, wondering where his guest was. Word got back to Thompson that Reed was not at ground level, and for him, this was an insurmountable impasse.
It is worth reiterating that although Thompson had a bad back, he was still more than capable of physically tackling a set of stairs. Considering his daily routine of drugs, drink, and as much shotgun golf as humanly possible, Thompson’s capabilities should never be dismissed.
Unable to see any way he could defy gravity to meet Reed, he decided to stand Reed up and go for a ground-level feast with Johnny Depp and Demi Moore instead. As it happens, this turned out to be somewhat of a major victory for him as Depp managed to convince Moore to lend Thompson the private jet that she and Bruce Willis had recently bought to get to Washing DC after he had voiced concerns that he would never survive that perilous voyage on America’s paved roads in a premium vehicle.
Once the jet offer had been cited, it was not the sort you could slip off the table. Thompson reportedly seized upon the hesitant suggestion like the man who hears, ‘You could always sleep on our sofa if worse comes to worst,’ and ends up instantly grabbing his suitcase. Yes, he wailed in the restaurant. And soon enough, he was airborne, and Demi Moore and Bruce Willis (wherever he was) were left on the terrestrial plain.
As it happens, Thompson not only chartered the jet to Washington DC, but he subsequently never paid the sizeable fuel bill that he owed Moore and Willis, left the jet and its pilots abandoned without any further instructions and scurried away from the airport without ever mentioning it again. He also never spoke to Reed again. It was an evening dictated by stairs and left behind a whole wave of disruption.
