Credit: Magnolia Pictures
Sat 23 May 2026 20:11, UK
Every friendship is built differently, and it’s befitting each of their reputations that the bond between gonzo journalism pioneer Hunter S Thompson and hell-raising actor Jack Nicholson was far from your typical bond. The pair were close for decades, but they hardly went about celebrating their mutual admiration for each other in the usual way.
For Nicholson’s 60th birthday celebrations in 1997, Thompson decided that the best way to pay tribute to their longstanding kinship was to leave his buddy so terrified that he was forced to seek refuge in his basement. At the time, The Shining star had recently moved from densely populated California to Aspen, Colorado, partially to get as far away as possible from a stalker. His children had joined him for the milestone occasion, while Thompson had announced his impending arrival ahead of time.
For anybody familiar with Thompson, though, the line between affection and madness was always perilously fucking thin. This was a bloke who treated friendship almost like performance art, forever testing the limits of loyalty, nerve and absurdity in equal measure. The same instinct that drove his writing bled directly into his personal life. In Thompson’s manic world, a polite knock at the door would have been infinitely more suspicious than a midnight battle involving firearms and animal organs.
However, instead of simply walking up to the front door and ringing the doorbell as was revealed in the Ancient Gonzo Wisdom book of collected interviews, Thompson appeared in the midst of a blizzard that had caused widespread power outages, with his accoutrements including firearms, flare guns, a flashlight, and a loudspeaker system. Naturally, he began unleashing his weaponry directly outside of the Nicholson homestead, shining the light into the windows and using his portable audio to blast a recording of pigs being mutilated by a bear at full volume.
Credit: Far Out / Alamy
For another flourish, Thompson also put a bloodied elk heart on Nicholson’s doorstep, all while the actor’s recent stalking ordeal had left him frightened that somebody with ill intentions had opted to torpedo his birthday plans by murdering him. It saw the lauded A-lister seek shelter with his children in the basement in an attempt to ensure that the mystery assailant couldn’t get anywhere near him.
In true Thompson fashion, though, he claimed to have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of the events until the following day, when he was notified that the local authorities were seeking the culprit for a would-be assassination attempt on Nicholson. Once the truth became clear, the matter was resolved, and the pair went about their friendship as if nothing had ever happened.
That strange elasticity was ultimately what held the friendship together for so long. Nicholson, after all, occupied a similarly mythologised corner of American culture: another figure who blurred the line between charisma and danger so convincingly that audiences were never entirely certain where the performance ended. In many ways, they recognised themselves in each other: two men addicted to excess, spectacle and the freedom that came with refusing to behave like everybody else.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
They’d remain close right up until Thompson’s death in 2005, where Nicholson was one of many celebrity guests at the funeral service organised by Johnny Depp. As part of the subsequent memorial service, the three-time Academy Award winner drew and signed two portraits of his dearly departed friend and awarded them to his widow, with one of them bearing the inscription “How’d ya like the elk heart?”
Although the significance was no doubt lost on a number of attendees, Nicholson clearly hadn’t forgotten the time Thompson left him so petrified for his well-being that he was sent scurrying downstairs for fear of his life being in genuine jeopardy.
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