The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (12 page)

The paper continued to operate in the red throughout the decade, averaging a loss of roughly $700,000 annually. Without a white knight to save them, the Reids continued to burn capital, and by 1957 the situation had become desperate. Tex McCrary, the veteran newspaper columnist who was doing publicity for the
Trib
, suggested that the Reids approach John Hay (Jock) Whitney, the millionaire scion of a vast railroad fortune who was now the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, with the notion of buying in. Whitney, who had turned down an earlier offer of minority ownership from Helen’s son Whitelaw Reid, was now more receptive to the idea if he could have a hand in the editorial content.

On the suggestion of Helen Reid’s other son, Ogden Rogers Reid (known as Brown), Whitney provided the paper with a $1.2 million loan, enough to cover the deficit the Reids expected the paper to run through the end of 1958. Energized by Whitney’s investment, Brown Reid, who had taken over the editorial reins of the paper, set out to remake the
Trib
into a more focused product, with eye-catching layouts and a stronger emphasis on newsy gossip. But nothing seemed to work; the
Tribune
lost $1.3 million in 1957, the biggest deficit in the paper’s history, and its ad linage had dropped from 15 to 12.4 percent, while that of the
New York Times
had risen from 23.4 to 30.6 percent over the past decade. By mid-1959, the paper had burned through Whitney’s loan and was on life support.

Instead of retreating, Whitney increased his commitment to the
Tribune
, with the proviso that some changes would be made. The first order of business was getting the Reids to give up their controlling interest in the paper. If Whitney was going to resuscitate the
Tribune
, he would have to do it on his terms, as a majority owner, and with his hand-picked team. Helen Reid made every effort to stave off the inevitable, searching in vain for a buyer who would allow the family to retain control, but time was running out. Finally Helen relented, and her family followed suit.

The search for an editor proved more difficult than Whitney or his closest confidant and business advisor, Walter Thayer, had originally envisioned. What the paper needed, in Thayer’s view, was a severe shock to the system; in John Denson, he found just the man to administer it.

Among magazine insiders, Denson was already a legend for remaking
Newsweek
into a formidable challenger to
Time
. He had done so by sprucing up the news package with zippy graphics—arrows, sidebars, highlighted pictures—and a breezy prose style that livened up even the most prosaic stories. As an editor, Denson had populist impulses; he wanted working stiffs and subway commuters to buy his magazine.

He wasted little time fulfilling his mandate to remake the paper. The standard vertical orientation of the broadsheet format was ditched; now stories might be splayed horizontally across the top fold of the front page, or a series of articles on the same subject—one providing the facts, the other offering perspective on the story—might run next to each other. The left column of the front page featured a section called “In the News This Morning,” in which short summaries of the most important stories could be absorbed quickly. Stories were placed in boxes, newsweekly style, and headlines evinced a cheeky wit.

Denson’s work yielded results; a month after his arrival in March 1961, circulation was up by forty thousand over the previous April. Although Denson had people buzzing about the
Tribune
, his scorched-earth policy was damaging morale. More important to Walter Thayer, his last-minute production tinkering cost too much to ignore, as the composing room began to rack up high overtime charges.

Though Denson had threatened to quit on at least eight occasions, only to relent each time, the day eventually came for Whitney to cast his lot with either his closest confidant or his mercurial editor. In October 1962 Whitney made his decision public. A prepared statement announced that Denson had refused “certain organizational changes” that had been proposed—a reference to Denson’s rejection of a plan that would delegate the handling of production deadlines to editorial subordinates—and was no longer with the
Herald Tribune
. Jim Bellows, a veteran of the Naval Air Corps with previous stints at the
Columbus Ledger
and the
Miami News
, was named editor of the
Tribune
.

It seemed that the
Tribune
was destined to fail. No sooner had the paper gained some momentum than its editor was fired. Now a newspaper strike would shut the
Trib
down against its will. On December 8, 1962, the printers’ union, led by ironfisted Bert Powers, closed shop after a prolonged negotiation between the union and the city’s newspapers, including the
Trib
and the
Times
, had broken down. Whitney, for his part, was content to ride out the strike until the
Trib
could begin publishing again.

In the meantime, the paper would use its down time to its advantage. Bellows, who admired Denson’s wayward creativity, wanted to continue to push the
Trib
in daring new directions. But instead of focusing on the front page at the expense of everything else, a tactic that proved to be Denson’s undoing, Bellows would focus on the rest of the paper.

In a memo to national news editor Richard Wald, Bellows wrote that “there is no mold for a newspaper story” and that the truth behind a story often “lies in the way a man said something, the pitch of his voice, the hidden meaning in his words.” Like Denson, Bellows believed the inverted-pyramid formula could be spruced up without sacrificing integrity for frivolity. Bellows had learned the lessons of his vanquished boss and began to recruit young writers to implement his ideas.

“I’d urge writers to open their eyes, to seek the new and different,” Bellows wrote in his memoir,
The Last Editor
. “Because news is what is
unusual
. We think it’s just
recording
things that take place. But it isn’t. You’ve got to decide, with intuition and instinct, what is unusual here.” For 114 days during the strike, Bellows and his brain trust, which included Wald and city editor Murray Michael “Buddy” Weiss, reconfigured the soul of the paper.

He also hired Clay Felker as a consultant in the fall of 1963. “Clay was hired because he was a social swinger, and he knew a lot of people in the city,” said Bellows. “He also got along fairly well with people, and I thought he could contribute ideas that we could use.”

To
Trib
staffers, Bellows was something of an enigma. Communication with his writers and editors usually involved a few muttered half-sentences, followed by some vague gesticulations meant to convey what he couldn’t articulate verbally. “Bellows never finished a sentence,” said Tom Wolfe. “You would get the gist of what he meant but you never got the end of it.” If his writers didn’t quite understand him when he spoke, they were clear about his mission to shake up New York with an aggressive newspaper war, just like the one he had waged in Miami against the
Miami Herald
. The
Trib
had existed for too long in the shadow of the
Times
, and Bellow, reveling in the underdog role, would hire young writers who shared his appetite for the main chance.

One of Bellows’s most significant early hires came from an unlikely source: Jock Whitney’s sister Joan Payson, who owned the New York Mets baseball team. In 1962, the Mets suffered the most abysmal season in baseball history to date by losing 120 games, an epic tale of ignominy
that attracted a young sportswriter from the
New York Journal-American
named Jimmy Breslin, whose credo, like Gay Talese’s, was “the loser is always more important than the winner.” But Talese was intrigued by the free fall of fame; Breslin was more interested in the striving chump who never made it beyond the ladder’s first rung.

The thirty-two-year-old Breslin, already a fifteen-year newspaper veteran, had interviewed Payson a few times for his book about the Mets,
Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game?
In the preface to an early collection of his articles, Breslin remembered trying to buttonhole Payson at Penn Station just before the heiress was heading to Florida. “I get there and I can’t find her nowheres. So I ask this guy, and he says, ‘Sure, her train is over there in the corner.’ God damn, she’s got two private cars going to Florida, and there I was looking for her in the Pullman. How the hell was I supposed to know? So we get into this big goddamn drawing room with the servants in the other one and she offers me this drink and she has one, and before I knew it, I was stiff. I mean stiff. They threw me out at Trenton. And she just took it all in like it was part of life. Beautiful. What a broad.”

Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game?
became a regional bestseller. Payson loved it and passed the book along to Jock Whitney. The
Trib
owner, too, was taken with Breslin’s flinty prose style, the way he sketched the team’s colorful characters using sharp-tongued quotes and roguish humor. Whitney brought the book to sports editor Hal Claassen and told him to inquire about first serialization rights. It turned out that assistant editor Lawton Carver had already broached the same idea to Claassen a week earlier. The
Tribune
acquired the rights, and Breslin’s career at the
Trib
was launched.

Breslin had come a long way from his hardscrabble roots. He was born on October 17, 1929, in a gray frame house on 134th Street and 101st Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, the son of two alcoholics. James Earl Breslin, a piano player, abandoned the family when Jimmy was an adolescent. His mother, Frances, took a job as an elementary school teacher for a while, then found steady work as a supervisor in the city’s welfare department in order to support Jimmy and his younger sister, Deirdre. She never got over her husband’s abandonment and drank heavily. Breslin remembers one bender during which his mother put a gun to her temple and cocked the hammer. Mercifully, she didn’t pull the trigger.

Breslin had a troubled relationship with his mother, an emotionally distant matriarch. But Frances was different at work—there she was a sympathetic supervisor who often invited black workers to her home despite the opprobrium of her Irish friends. From her, Breslin learned about basic decency and how the inequities of the city split along race and class lines.

A poor student, Breslin’s solace was sports and sportswriters, particularly the great
New York Sun
columnist W. C. Heinz and
Chicago Tribune
writer Westbrook Pegler, whose anthologized collection of articles Breslin treasured. When he was eight, Breslin began collecting schoolyard gossip and hand-printing a one-sheet newsletter called
The Flash;
one issue featured the banner headline “Mother Tried Suicide.” Breslin wrote to avoid dealing with real life; he could just sublimate it all though his work, use it an excuse to “keep all storms in my life offshore.” He was never much of a book reader. “I read a Balzac novel once,” he said. “It took me two years to finish it.” Language was another matter; he loved playing with words and building sentences with them. After graduating from high school, Breslin hustled for newspaper work and found a job at the
Long Island Press
, attending class at Long Island University at night because “I needed it for my working papers. The
Long Island Press
was an incredible education for me, because I worked every desk—City, Sports, Night. It was incredibly hard work for no money, a backbreaking job.”

Breslin moved up the newspaper chain quickly, taking sportswriting jobs at the
New York Journal-American
, a Hearst newspaper, and the Scripps-Howard syndicate. By the spring of 1963 the young reporter had grown weary of the sports beat, which was too circumscribed and a bit too easy for him. His first freelance column for the
Trib
, which ran in conjunction with the serialization of
Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game?
was ostensibly a story about the Mets’ first four-game winning streak, but it was really a gimlet-eyed portrait of a lovable no-goodnik, Mets first baseman Marv Throneberry:

One evening after work in May 1963 Whitney asked Breslin to meet him at Bleeck’s bar, near the
Tribune’s
offices, to feel him out for a potential job offer. Breslin went into the meeting wanting no part of yet another low-paying newspaper gig; encouraged by the success of his Mets book, he was thinking about new book ideas and becoming a full-time freelancer. “Mr. Whitney, with all due respect, you can’t pay me enough to work for you. I’ve had it with newspapers,” Breslin barked, to which Whitney responded, “Well, what do you want?” Breslin knew that he had found a home and that Whitney was the kind of stand-up guy who would reward good work with proper recompense. He would be pulling down an annual salary of $125,000 within four years.

A few months after being hired as a sportswriter, Breslin was given his own column on the split page (the first page of the second section). The objective for Bellows was to neutralize the paternalistic tone of old-line columnists such as Walter Lippmann and the Alsops with a column that was written in the common-man cadence of a working-class readership that the
Trib
had been criticized for avoiding. “I never thought about how to do a column,” said Breslin. “It just came naturally, I guess. It had a point of view and it had to spring right out of the news. Everything of the moment demands that it be done that day. Even when a few sentences don’t work when you get to the deadline, there is an immediacy that makes the column fresh. Like you were covering the eighth race at Belmont. But no one was doing it when I started. That’s why everyone thought it was new.”