When illustrator Ralph Steadman hit the high seas in September 1970 to cover the America’s Cup with a new collaborator, journalist Hunter S. Thompson, he saw the writer taking numerous pills. So he asked if Thompson had anything to combat seasickness.
If it hadn’t been just their second time meeting, Steadman might have known better.
The pill Thompson gave him was LSD — marking the only occasion that the strait-laced Steadman has ever done the drug.
“I started to feel not only weird, but wanting to do something,” Steadman, 77, tells The Post.
Thompson had brought two cans of spray paint, and the tripping Steadman had the idea to paint something on the side of nearby boats. He decided on the phrase “F–k the Pope,” and the pair had just begun shaking their spray cans when they heard a voice asking them what they were doing.
“God, pigs. We’ve failed!” yelled Thompson. “We must flee!”
Thompson scrambled for the oars of the boat, tripping over himself. He fired off a series of flares which landed on some boats, causing chaos.
This was all part of Steadman’s immersion into Thompson’s participatory and often confrontational style of journalism known as “gonzo.” Their relationship is celebrated in “For No Good Reason,” a documentary on Steadman’s life and work that comes out on Friday.
The illustrator first met Thompson when the political magazine Scanlan’s Monthly assigned him to accompany the writer to the Kentucky Derby. Scanlan’s publisher considered Steadman an “evil-minded, twisty kind of guy,” perfect to work with Thompson.
The pair discovered they had an easy artistic chemistry that allowed Steadman to channel the writer’s perceptions through his own work.
At the time, Thompson was already on his way to becoming a literary icon. For his 1966 best-seller “Hell’s Angels,” he spent a year getting close to the motorcycle gang, eventually enduring a savage beating at their hands. In his work to come, he would combine this sort of experience with surreal elaborations upon his own drug intake that could, in his writing, find him swarmed by creatures of his own invention.
Steadman also made sense of the world through a cracked lens: In one of his panels for Thompson’s seminal “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” in which he depicts the author and his lawyer riding through the desert, the lawyer has become a monster, his open mouth spewing thick strips of blood on the passengers in the next car.
Over time, critics came to consider Steadman’s illustrations as characters in Thompson’s work. And the artist has no problem taking his share of credit.
During a taped interaction between the two in the film, we see Steadman telling Thompson that without his illustrations, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” would not have become the classic that it did. (Thompson laughed this off. )
“The pictures were a reflection of what was in Hunter’s mind,” says Steadman. “I became a visual chronicler of a part of Hunter, personifying him like a comic character. That chemistry made gonzo possible.”
Unlike Thompson, whose manic, drug-fueled intensity has been portrayed on film by Bill Murray and Johnny Depp — the latter narrates “For No Good Reason” — Steadman has always avoided narcotics.
“We were as different as chalk and cheese,” says Steadman. “[Thompson] popped pills all the time . . . he’d have grapefruits and about four Bloody Marys for breakfast.”
The artist generally accompanied Thompson on his reporting adventures, the one prominent exception being “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which Steadman illustrated based on the manuscript. (He long resented Thompson, who said he wasn’t sure he could trust Steadman, for not bringing him along.)
For all of Thompson’s perceived boldness and insanity, Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner — who considered the pair “jealous brothers,” and assigned them some of their most lasting work — says in the film that Steadman was the crazier of the two for a willingness to go to extremes that Thompson would not.
“It makes perfect sense. Ralph will say and do anything, with no regard for himself or the victims of his pen,” says the film’s director, Charlie Paul.
Steadman, born in 1936 in Liverpool, witnessed violent chaos at an early age, when the Nazis leveled England during the Blitz. In the mid-’50s, while in the Royal Air Force, he enrolled in a correspondence art school. During the turmoil of the late ’60s, as students rioted in opposition to the Vietnam War, Steadman drew his opinions in fierce terms: the Seal of the President with a blood-drenched eagle in the center, or two cops brutally beating a man, with one of them saying as his club smashes the victim’s head, “[And here’s] One From My Mother!”
“Ralph is put out by bad doings,” says Paul. “He’s constantly plagued by feeling things should be different.”
Thompson and Steadman, who has five grown children and lives in Kent, England, with his wife, worked together until Thompson’s death. (The writer committed suicide in 2005 at the age of 67.) Steadman is still commissioned as an illustrator.
Despite the caustic bitterness one finds in Steadman’s work, little resides in his personality.
“People say, ‘You must be quite a nasty person. Some of your drawings are horrible,’ ” he says. “And I say, ‘No, I’m not nasty. I get it all out on paper.’ ”