The Secret World of Johnny Depp by Nigel Goodall

Author:Nigel Goodall [Nigel Goodall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843582953
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

‘MAYBE ONE DAY I’LL MAKE A MOVIE THAT REALLY BLOWS PEOPLE AWAY. THE SORT OF MOVIE THAT I CAN POINT TO ONE NIGHT WHEN I’M REAL OLD AND WATCHING TV AND SAY TO MY GRANDCHILDREN: “HEY, GUYS, GRANDPOP WAS PRETTY COOL IN THIS FILM DON’T YOU THINK?” YEAH – I’D LIKE TO BE ABLE TO SAY THAT ABOUT MYSELF ONE DAY.’

IN LOVE WITH LOATHING

Five days into his stay with Hunter S Thompson, Johnny longs to sleep. Thompson, the self-styled King of Gonzo journalism and noted author of 1971’s Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas is not a man noted for keeping regular hours. Like some kind of nocturnal vampire, he would live by night and then, finally, in the late afternoon, trail off to bed for a few hours before rising again. At that moment, Johnny would escape to the basement room, or ‘the dungeon’ as it was known, at Thompson’s isolated Aspen retreat, still exhausted from Hunter’s display of tireless excess, knowing that in a very short time the writer would be hammering on the door, yelling for him to get up.

After a couple of days, Johnny recalls, ‘I began to appreciate more and more that sleep was my friend. I was staying in the dungeon and it was the darkest room in the house. I’d go down there and lie on the bed, just rest up and read a book and smoke a cigarette. I really needed that time just to recharge before facing Hunter again.’

All the same, Johnny continues, ‘He was incredibly generous to let me live in his basement. I spent the first week absorbing as much as I could by staying holed up with nothing but his books and my roll-ups for company. On the sixth day, I suddenly realised the room was packed with gunpowder kegs and I was smoking. I was lucky not to have blown the whole house up. Hunter just laughed when I told him.’

That was two years after the two men first met at the Woody Creek Tavern in Aspen, Colorado, Thompson’s favourite drinking haunt. It was Johnny’s, too. During his Christmas stay when taking a break from filming, he journeyed out to the ski resort with Kate, her mother and some others for a few days off. What he didn’t expect was for Thompson to walk in, Johnny recalls, ‘with a Taser gun in his left hand and a huge cattle prod in his right hand, swinging them around getting people out of his way.’

Neither did he expect him to take a seat at Johnny’s table, to swap tales about their Kentucky roots; Johnny on Owensboro, Thompson on Louisville. He was even more surprised when he invited Johnny and his party back to his ‘fortified compound’ to carry on drinking. That compound, it turns out, had enough explosives, small fire-arms, canned food, bottled water and alcohol to survive even the aftermath of a nuclear war.

It was where Johnny’s intense interest in the nickel-plated shotgun hanging on Thompson’s wall turned to sheer delight.

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