It was like a Christmas ritual at Hunter S. Thompson’s cabin in Colorado. owl farm. Every year, his secretary, Deborah Fuller, would remove the Christmas tree and leave it on his front porch rather than get rid of it completely. That’s because hunters often wanted to set it on fire. In 1990, Sam Allis, then a formidable magazine writer, time Magazine visited Thompson’s home to watch the fiery tradition unfold. He wrote:
I gave up on the interview and started worrying about my life when Hunter Thompson sprayed two cans of fire starter several feet away from an unopened crate of 9mm bullets into the Christmas tree he had planned to burn in his living room fireplace. That the tree was too big to fit in the fireplace didn’t matter to Hunter, who at the time wore a dollar store wig and looked like Tony Perkins from Psycho. Minutes earlier, he had slammed a Polaroid camera on the floor.
Hunter had decided to videotape the Christmas tree burning, but in the ensuing replay, I heard the horrified voices of his longtime secretary and babysitter, Deborah Fuller, and me off-camera, pleading with him, “No, Hunter, no! Please, Hunter, don’t do this!” The original copy of Hell’s Angels was on the table, and so were the bullets. I haven’t done anything. Thompson was now a man possessed, full of Chivas Regal he was sipping straight from the bottle and gin he had been mixing with pink lemonade for hours.
It appears that burn marks are still visible on the wooden mantelpiece above the fireplace.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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