The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

For Lynn

I
NTRODUCTION

1   R
ADICAL
L
IT
: S
OME
R
OOTS OF A
R
EVOLUTION

2   T
HE
G
REAT
A
MERICAN
M
AGAZINE

3   K
ING
J
AMES AND THE
M
AN IN THE
I
CE
C
REAM
S
UIT

4   T
OM
W
OLFE ON
A
CID

5   T
HE
C
ENTER
C
ANNOT
H
OLD

6   M
ADRAS
O
UTLAW

7   I
NTO THE
A
BYSS

8   H
ELL
S
UCKS

9   H
ISTORY AS A
N
OVEL, THE
N
OVEL AS
H
ISTORY

10   T
HE
K
ING OF
N
EW
Y
ORK

11   S
AVAGE
J
OURNEYS

12   F
UN WITH
D
ICK AND
G
EORGE

13   V
ULGARIAN AT THE
G
ATE

E
PILOGUE
A
FTER THE
B
ALL

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

“M
aybe we should just blow up the
New Yorker
building.”

That was Jimmy Breslin talking. It was a story meeting, an electrical brainstorm to generate some provocative ideas for
New York
, the Sunday supplement of the
New York Herald Tribune
. Clay Felker, the magazine’s editor, had mentioned that the great literary magazine of his youth had gotten so dull lately, so deadly dull. “Look … we’re coming out once a week, right?” Felker told his staff, which included general assignment reporter Tom Wolfe, columnist Breslin, assistant editor Walter Stovall, and art director Peter Palazzo. “And
The New Yorker
comes out once a week. And we start out the week the same way they do, with blank paper and a supply of ink. Is there any reason why we can’t be as good as
The New Yorker?
Or better. They’re so damned boring.”

“Well, Clay,” Tom Wolfe suggested, “maybe we can do that. How about blowing up
The New Yorker
in
New York
?”

Bingo. Felker loved the idea, and it was timed perfectly. This year, 1965, was the fortieth anniversary of
The New Yorker
, and the magazine was going to throw a big party for itself at the St. Regis Hotel. Besides, it was payback time. Lillian Ross had zinged Wolfe in a March 16 Talk of the Town piece called “Red Mittens!” “Zonggggggggggg! Innnnnnnnn! Swinging!” Ross’s piece began. “They’re hot! They’re so far in that they’re coming out the other side. And they’re fed up to the gillies with teenagery.” It went on like that. The thirty-four-year-old reporter had been flattered and amused by the piece, but turnabout was fair play, after all.

The culture of
The New Yorker
was shrouded in mystery, particularly its editor, William Shawn, who refused interviews and kept a profile so low that the witness protection program couldn’t have provided deeper cover. Wolfe called Shawn for an interview anyway, and the editor strongly advised Wolfe to beg off the story: “If we tell someone we want to do a profile and that person doesn’t want to cooperate, we don’t do the profile. We would expect you to extend us the same courtesy.”

One night, while dining with a number of writers and editors at a West Village restaurant, Wolfe happened to find himself sitting across the table from Renata Adler, a
New Yorker
staff writer. Might she help him suss out details of Shawn’s life? But Adler acted quickly to close ranks around the magazine, and the
Tribune
reporter found himself hitting a lot of dead ends, promising leads that would just sputter out. But there were sources closer to home, as it turned out. Walt Stovall’s wife, Charlayne Hunter, had been one of the first two black students to integrate the University of Georgia and was now working as a Talk of the Town reporter for
The New Yorker
. Wolfe didn’t want to compromise her position at the magazine, so he delicately danced around the subject, prodding Hunter to solicit information without actually telling her what he was doing. She gave Wolfe a trove of great stories regarding
The New Yorker’s
byzantine, cumbersome editing process. From a freelancer he picked up a choice anecdote about Shawn’s preference for using Coke bottles as ashtrays. He received a detailed description of Shawn’s apartment from a social acquaintance who had attended a dinner party there, and so on.

The best material was to be found at the magazine’s fortieth-anniversary party in the ballroom at the St. Regis Hotel. It was an invite-only affair, but no one stopped the
New York
reporter when he walked right in. Wolfe kept himself as inconspicuous as a man in a white suit can be, flitting around the edges of the party, keeping a close watch on Shawn.

By the time Wolfe sat down to write the article, he quickly realized that a straight-down-the-middle parody of
The New Yorker
would beget more of what the magazine offered: gray prose. “Something that’s dull is funny for about a page,” said Wolfe. “So I figured that I would treat them in a way that they would hate the most—like the
National Enquirer
, something that would be totally inappropriate.”

Using what Wolfe called his “hyperbolic style,” he wrote more than
ten thousand words, far more than the originally proposed few thousand words. But Felker loved every word of it and showed it to the
Tribune’s
editor, Jim Bellows, for his approval. Bellows, a two-fisted newspaperman who loved nothing more than to stir up controversy, flipped out. He might not have personally cared about the relative merits of
The New Yorker
, but he recognized a hot story when he saw one. Four days before the first installment hit the streets, Bellows messengered two copies of Wolfe’s piece to Shawn at
The New Yorker’s
offices with a card that read “With my compliments.”

What the
Tribune
received in return for this gesture of good faith was a salvo. Shawn was incensed by this poisonous yellow journalism. He reeled off a letter to the
Tribune’s
owner, Jock Whitney, calling the piece “murderous” and “certainly libelous,” and urged the
Trib’s
distinguished publisher to literally stop the presses and pull the piece from the Sunday supplement. If the paper’s legal department did in fact have reason to believe that the story was legally actionable, Whitney would have to give serious thought to killing the story.

But Bellows would have none of it. He sent the letter in full to reporters at
Time
and
Newsweek
, then handed the story over to the copy-editing department. Let the boneyard at
The New Yorker
rattle; Wolfe’s story was going to run on Sunday.

“Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” screamed the headline in the April 11 issue of
New York
. Peter Palazzo ran an illustration of
The New Yorker’s
monocled Victorian icon Eustace Tilley, but swathed him in a mummy’s shroud. “They have a compulsion in the
New Yorker
offices, at 25 West Forty-Third Street, to put everything in writing,” Wolfe wrote.

Wolfe explicated the magazine’s complex memo distribution system:

Wolfe characterized Shawn as an absentminded, passive-aggressive manager, his office a “kind of horsehair-stuffing atmosphere of old carpeting … and happy-shabby, baked-apple gentility.” He made up words like
prestigeful
and used sentence fragments such as “William Shawn–editor of one of the most powerful magazines in America. The Man. Nobody Knows.”

The second story, “Lost in the Whichy Thickets,” ran the following Sunday and was even more audacious. Here Wolfe had the temerity to question the value of the magazine’s literary worth:

In both form and content, the two stories were a frontal attack on the battlements of an august institution. Shawn was a funeral director, his writers the walking dead, his staffers “tiny mummies.”

Felker’s instincts were right on the money. The indignant letters poured in from the unknown and the famous alike—Muriel Spark, Richard Rovere, Ved Mehta, E. B. White, even the notoriously elusive J. D. Salinger.

“At first I found all the attention quite frightening,” said Wolfe thirty-eight years later. “Here I was, this general assignment reporter making $130 a week, which even in those days was very sad, and all these big names were coming down on my head. Clay was rocked, too.”

According to Wolfe, Shawn hired a lawyer to tail the
Tribune
reporter, hoping to catch him in some damning, libelous act. When Wolfe agreed to be interviewed about the controversy by radio personality Tex McCrary, he spotted a mysterious suited figure in the front row of McCrary’s audience, writing everything down in a little black notebook.

Dwight Macdonald, one of America’s most prominent postwar intellectuals and a staff writer for
The New Yorker
since 1951, wrote a thirteen-thousand-word counterattack that ran in two issues of the
New York Review of Books
and methodically refuted Wolfe’s two stories. (Felker had originally offered to run Macdonald’s pieces in the
Trib
, but Macdonald declined—“why print it in the
Trib
and keep their pot boiling?”)

The first piece was called “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine,” in which Macdonald skewered Wolfe’s style of writing as being “a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction. Entertainment rather than information is the aim of its producers, and the hope of its consumers.” Macdonald went on:

Macdonald went on to attack Wolfe’s mannerist style, skewer his penchant for “elaboration rather than development,” and speculate that “Wolfe will not be read with pleasure, or at all, years from now, and perhaps not even next year.” In the second piece, Macdonald really laid
into Wolfe. He dismissed the reporter’s two
New Yorker
stories outright: “their ideas bogus, their information largely misinformation, their facts often non-facts and the style which they were communicated to the reader neither orderly nor meaningful.”

“Well, I passed it off lightly,” said Wolfe of Macdonald’s criticism, “but I wasn’t happy about it. Macdonald was a good writer and he understood the art of attack, but I tried to act as if I didn’t care.” Did Wolfe harbor ambitions to one day be published in
The New Yorker?
“I didn’t think that way. It never occurred to me that
The New Yorker
would want anything of mine, because my approach was so different than theirs.”

“Tiny Mummies” brought into the open what had been hiding in plain sight for a few years now, which was the widening rift between traditional reporters and the “parajournalists” of whom Macdonald had so witheringly and disparagingly written. As the de facto ringleader of this irreverent bunch, as well as the writer with the biggest cojones, Wolfe was most vulnerable to attack. But as it turned out, the decade’s most exciting developments in reporting would bear Wolfe’s imprint far more than
The New Yorker’s
.

Wolfe and many of his contemporaries recognized, some earlier than most, one salient fact of life in the sixties: the traditional tools of reporting would be inadequate to chronicle the tremendous cultural and social changes of the era. War, assassination, rock, drugs, hippies, Yippies, Nixon: how could a traditional just-the-facts reporter dare to provide a neat and symmetrical order to such chaos? Many of them couldn’t and didn’t. Witness
Time’s
and
Newsweek’s
clumsy mishandling of the hippie movement, or the embarrassing countercultural appropriations of broadcast journalism (Dan Rather reporting from Vietnam in a Nehru jacket, to name just one egregious example).

Within a seven-year period, a group of writers emerged, seemingly out of nowhere—Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, Michael Herr—to impose some order on all of this American mayhem, each in his or her own distinctive manner (a few old hands, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, chipped in as well). They came to tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldn’t, stories about the way life was being lived in the sixties and seventies and what it all meant. The stakes were high; deep fissures
were rending the social fabric, the world was out of order. So they became our master explainers, our town criers, even our moral conscience—the New Journalists.

Was it a movement? Not a movement in the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Corso sense or in the Abstract Expressionist sense. Many of these writers were cordial with each other, but they didn’t share apartments or sex partners. But consider the fact that most of the books and articles discussed in this book were all written within seven years of each other. Not just any stories, either, but
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Dispatches
—some of the greatest journalism of the twentieth century, stories that changed the way their readers viewed the world. It was an unprecedented outpouring of creative nonfiction, the greatest literary movement since the American fiction renaissance of the 1920s.