By Lauren Daley
With a free, rare retrospective up now in Maine, Legendary gonzo artist Ralph Steadman talks favorite works, “Breaking Bad” — and the time Hunter S. Thompson took drugs, shot flares and attempted to deface a yacht in Newport.
One night in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1970, Ralph Steadman felt seasick and took a pill handed to him by Hunter S. Thompson.
That was his first mistake.
It was psilocybin because, of course, it was.
The Welsh satirical artist and the freak-flag-flying freelance journalist were covering the America’s Cup yacht sailing race for the short-lived Scanlan’s Monthly. They’d just established themselves as icons of gonzo journalism with the seminal “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” for Scanlan’s.
Now in New England and high on a powerful hallucinogen, they decided to hop in a dinghy, paddle out to a yacht and spray-paint it.
“I was going to write something on the side of one of the boats: “F— The Pope,” Steadman tells me with a laugh.
When he told Thompson his plan, he says, Thompson quipped, “Are you religious, Ralph?”
“I only thought about writing it — I didn’t do it,” the 89-year-old tells me now from his Kent, England, living room. “I think I’d still be in prison.”
Instead, someone heard their shaking paint cans. Hunter frantically rowed away, but fell backwards. His legs popped straight up from the boat.
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Image credit: Ralph Steadman. Photo by Rikard Osterlund