She had vaguely heard of him but had never read his work. Not his chronicle of living with the Hell’s Angels or any of his various pieces of journalism; not even his masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – that seminal 1972 novel in which Thompson, thinly disguised as crazy hack Raoul Duke, goes with his Cuban attorney on a drug-and-booze-fuelled jaunt to the gambling capital of Nevada.Perhaps her ignorance was just as well. Through his writing, Thompson comes across as an alarming figure, capable of living above all known limits of excess. In the event, she says, “we became instant friends. I fell in love with his voice on the phone even before meeting him”. Although eloquently aggressive on the page, Thompson was apparently every inch the gent: “He was a gracious and a beautiful man. I was very comfortable with him.”
He hired her as his “researcher, editor, photocopier and cook” and she moved into his sprawling home – Owl Farm in Aspen, Colorado – a year later in 2000. Although he continued to be gentlemanly in his ways, it was clearly a feisty relationship.
“We were always fighting,” Anita admits. “We started fighting almost the day we met, but the fights were pretty dramatic towards the end.” She pauses. “We had pretty loud fights. We were pretty intense people.
“We had to make a living, so my job was to get him to write, and his job was to write so we could pay the bills. So there was tension there. We were always on deadline.”
[ ... ]
On the day of Thompson’s death, the scene unfolded thus: his only son, Juan, from his former marriage, was down from his home in Denver and staying at Owl Farm with his wife and son Will, 7. The night before, Thompson – who loved to perform pranks and adored anything to do with guns, had decided to combine both passions.
“He was pointing a pellet gun around the house and aimed it at a gong next to my head,” says Anita. Although the image of Thompson capering around with an air rifle could have come straight from the Fear and Loathing archive, Anita was not amused: “I had never seen him act that crazy around the house. He was very careful and responsible with guns. This was the first time I had seen him be so sloppy – particularly with Will in the room.”
His behaviour provoked a huge row. “We had been in a fight over that, and the next day I was still angry about the night before,” she says. It was at that point that she went off to her yoga class at the gym, 26 minutes away by car.
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