My Wild Night With Harry Dean Stanton

In 2005, I spent my first-ever time in Los Angeles. By day, I interviewed friends of the late Hunter S. Thompson for the oral biography I was putting together; at night, I drove around town looking for addresses where F. Scott Fitzgerald used to live; I tried to track down the storage unit behind Sunset Boulevard where Guns N’ Roses used to eat, sleep, rehearse, and do so many other things; I spent hours on the phone with Marilyn Manson—he and Thompson had become very close—talking endlessly about Lewis Carroll while trying to arrange a time to drop by his house for a proper interview. I pined by the phone, waiting for Johnny Depp to call me back.

Harry Dean Stanton, who passed away at 91 on Friday, had played a sort of fearsome, hallucinatory judge in Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and had—or so I was told—a deep rapport with Hunter, so naturally he was on my list of people to talk to. After procuring his home number from a mutual friend, who passed it along with a wink and a smirk, I dutifully called him every day—but each time he picked up, he grumbled and deferred, telling me to try him again the next day. I’ll admit it: The notion of actually sitting down and talking with the man, the legend—forever fixed in my mind as the wordless cipher and prophet Travis Henderson from Paris, Texas—shook me a bit, but I continued playing the charade.

Finally, after spending three hours of one late afternoon laughing, crying, and chain-smoking with Jack Nicholson at his house on Mulholland Drive (Thompson, let it be said, had very good friends), I thought I’d try Stanton one more time. I dropped Nicholson’s name (I had no idea at the time that the two used to be roommates, or that Stanton was best man at Nicholson’s 1962 wedding), and presto: “Okay, goddammit, why don’t you just come over right now?!” Stanton said, sort of half-barking. “Oh, this one’s gonna be fun,” Nicholson said, giving me that Nicholson smile, those Nicholson eyes, and accompanying Nicholson eyebrows.

Stanton’s gate was just down the road. After a brief mishap in which my cab became stuck on a bump in the middle of the road leading to his house, spinning dirt and gravel in both directions, Stanton emerged from the doorway—wearing a dress shirt unbuttoned to the navel, some very short shorts, and a pair of beat-up cowboy boots—and began screaming at me: “What the hell is going on here?!” With me profusely apologizing, he invited me inside, but told me to keep the cab’s meter running: “This won’t take long.”

Inside, we sat down in his living room on an overstuffed L-shaped sofa piled high with newspapers, manuscripts, books, a phone, and an ashtray. While I was happy to get down to business, Stanton seemed to have other plans; he seemed mildly suspicious of me, as I’d been spending months showing up to people’s houses and asking them to tell me everything they knew about Thompson, the notorious outlaw writer and dope fiend who had shot himself in the head a few months earlier.

We didn’t exactly chat about small talk—Stanton wanted to talk about the Book of Revelation, which he began quoting from at length, before moving on to talking about The Gnostic Gospels, which, Stanton told me, present a wildly different and more human Jesus. I brought up my friendship with a legendary Jesuit priest from Georgetown who was the world’s preeminent scholar of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit philosopher and geologist whose work bridged science and theology. Stanton responded by closing his eyes and quoting a favorite line from Teilhard—lost on me then, lost on me now—and from there, we segued over to discussing various principles and schools of Buddhism—something I was a bit better-versed in—while I got up and followed Stanton around his house as he searched for books, Bibles, scraps of paper where he’d scribbled something or other, cigarettes, ice cubes, and more cigarettes.

Eventually, we settled back on the sofa, but every time I tried to bring up Thompson, Stanton changed the subject. He was just then beginning to film his parts for Big Love, the HBO series in which he played an apocalyptic cult leader, and asked if I minded reading some scripts with him. So I began feeding him lines, and each time, Stanton delivered his lines back to me in utterly compelling and different ways, giving me an intimate glimpse at a master at work. He asked me what I thought—about both his delivery and the lines themselves—and when I, ever the editor, said that I didn’t understand why this word or that word needed to be there, we began rewriting the script together.

After many more cigarettes, Stanton suddenly said, with a great rushed fervor, “Corey, do you mind if I do my exercises? I do the same series of five exercises 21 times each day—an ancient Tibetan practice that stimulates your chakras.” I mumbled no, and Stanton rose from the couch, stubbed out his cigarette, extended his arms out to the side until they formed a wing, closed his eyes, opened them again, and asked, “Are you sure?” I nodded, and he began spinning around clockwise at a high speed while emitting an unsettling and odd high-pitched sound, then laid down and performed a sort of crunch, alternately lifting his head and his legs. After that, Stanton got on his knees, slumped forward, and threw his torso backward, grunting with each reverse thrust, before scrambling into some kind of ceiling-facing crab position with his hands behind him, thrusting his groin upward again and again before finishing with a variation on a hybrid downward dog or cobra.

If I wasn’t freaked out before, I was now. (It was only years later, on a trip to a remote corner of Jamaica, that I learned from another eccentric genius that Stanton’s practice, known as the Five Rites, was actually an acknowledged ritual that, according to some, predates yoga.) I closed my eyes and thought of Paris, Texas. Stanton sat down, took a few deep breaths, lit a cigarette, and then said, “Do you smoke reefer, Corey?”

In fact, I’d mostly given up the habit, but as the notion of Hunter S. Thompson’s biographer refusing a joint from the Repo Man himself seemed, well, preposterous, so we inhaled. I tried to get him to talk about Thompson again, but he wanted to practice “Danny Boy” on his guitar, which he was planning to perform at Hunter’s bacchanal/memorial service that he and I, among a couple hundred others, were to attend in a few weeks. So we wandered behind his sofa, where he had an armada of finely tuned acoustics, resonators, and banjos, and picked our guitars. I played simple chords while Stanton played a wicked slide guitar—his skill was virtuosic—and sang his heart out.

“Hey!” he said, almost leaping off the cushions. “You know what I like to watch on TV? The Game Show Network! Do you mind?” Hell, no. Soon we were watching and playing along with Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune. When those were over, Stanton turned to me and said, “Do you know Owen Wilson? Let’s go out with Owen!” while dialing him up on his phone. I only heard one end of the call: “Hey, Owen! Yeah—guess who I’m here with? This reporter from Rolling Stone who wants to talk to me about Hunter Thompson . . . . Hey, what do you say we hit Dan Tana’s? . . . What? Yeah? . . . Oh . . . Owen—how about you suck my cock?!” Stanton slammed the phone down hard, cackling wildly, clearly having a wonderful time. “Let’s go!”

Before we hit Dan Tana’s, though, Stanton wants to stop at another place, where we meet two of Stanton’s best friends, both undercover LAPD detectives, and are joined by two young actors trying to work their way up in Hollywood, one of them the son of the pro wrestler and former governor of Minnesota, Jesse “The Body” Ventura. But Stanton soon tires of the place, and so it’s on to Dan Tana’s, the celebrity and industry canteen where Stanton is known to tell strangers who think he looks familiar that he is, in fact, a retired astronaut. After hearing shockingly mundane stories about names that are anything but—Nicholson, yes, but also Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard—I bring us back around to the reason I’m there and implore Stanton to please, please tell me something about Hunter S. Thompson. Stanton fixes me with a steely stare, composes himself, and says, pointing to my recorder, “Okay. Is that thing on?” Yes. “Are you sure?” Yes. “Okay. Put this in your book.” He speaks slowly, as if to help later with the transcription: “I wish . . . that I had spent . . . more time . . . talking with Hunter . . . about Buddhism.”

Somewhere around 2:00 a.m., seven hours after I stepped foot on Stanton’s lawn, his driver takes us back toward my hotel—I’m flying back to New York in the morning—and Stanton is beside himself telling me what a wonderful time he’s had and that, if I’m ever back in town, we must do this again. As luck would have it, I was back the next week for more interviews and found myself doing something abnormally normal: I called Harry Dean Stanton to see if he wanted to hang out. He answered the phone, but didn’t seem to remember me at all. I talked to Marilyn Manson a few days later, and just before I was going to tell him about my weird night, he cut me off at the word “Stanton.” “Now that guy,” said the honorary minister in the Church of Satan and the auteur behind Antichrist Superstar. “That guy is crazy.”