What Ross wanted was an exact chronicle of the events as they transpired in real time, much like a documentary movie crew tracking six characters without any subsequent edits. Whenever Hersey got ahead of the story, or referred to something that the characters weren’t experiencing at that specific point in time, Ross suggested he take it out.
Hersey introduces all six characters by describing exactly what they were doing at the moment of the bomb blast, thus giving his narrative an unsettling specificity. The story begins,
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiki Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.
Hersey’s story becomes a struggle for the characters to reclaim normalcy in the teeth of an atrocity, and he sticks to the particulars of the struggle, the small acts of self-sacrifice and resourcefulness that become crucial to his characters’ survival. What makes “Hiroshima” a crucial New Journalism antecedent, among other things, is the way Hersey assiduously describes his characters’ internal reactions, the thoughts racing through their heads when the “noiseless flash” makes its appearance over Hiroshima. Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the seamstress, finds herself spared from the total destruction of her house, but the disaster quickly impinges upon her, and she acts quickly.
Mrs. Nakamoto … came across the street with her head all bloody, and said that her baby was badly cut; did Mrs. Nakamura have any bandage? Mrs. Nakamura did not, but she crawled into the remains of her house again and pulled out some white cloth that she had been using in her work as a seamstress, ripped it into strips, and gave it to Mrs. Nakamoto. While fetching the cloth, she noticed her sewing machine; she went back for it and … plunged her symbol of livelihood into the receptacle which for weeks had been her symbol of safety—the cement tank of water in front of her house, of the type every household had been ordered to construct against a possible fire raid.
“Hiroshima” is not a celebration of the extraordinary heroism of ordinary people. It’s far too grim for that. For a magazine that tended to hold to a somewhat genteel line, it’s extremely graphic (“their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks”), but its tone is calm and measured. Without undue hysteria, Hersey limns an apocalyptic landscape from precise description, internal monologue, and constantly shifting points of view.
“Hiroshima” was a radical piece of writing for 1946, only a year after the war’s end. It gave a voice and a sense of the tragic to the enemy, and its powerful imagery resonated with those who had never given a thought to—or who had even dismissed outright—the plight of the bomb’s victims. In 1999 New York University’s department of journalism named “Hiroshima” the most important news story of the twentieth century.
Another New Yorker writer, Lillian Ross, shared Hersey’s affection for an unadorned storytelling style. A native of Syracuse, New York, Ross’s writing career began auspiciously; as a teenager, she was already a regular contributor to the literary magazine P.M. under the stewardship of editor Peggy Wright. Lillian Ross came to the attention of The New Yorker when the magazine offered Wright a job and Wright, who was getting married, instead suggested the services of her young star writer.
Ross believed in functioning as a reporter by proxy and letting her subjects tell the story for her. She relied heavily on direct quotations, her keen observational instincts, and an elegant, uncluttered prose style to move her readers briskly through a piece. “I don’t believe a reporter has the right to say what his subject is thinking or feeling,” she wrote in her 2002 book Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism. The 1948 New Yorker story “Come In, Lassie!” was the first magazine article to chronicle the climate of paranoia that had overtaken Hollywood in the wake of Senator Joe McCarthy’s ongoing Communist witch-hunt and the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten (the story’s title referred to the only actor in town whose politics were unassailable). Ross gained access to some of the city’s most prominent players and used her material to lay bare the conflicting attitudes toward McCarthy and Communism. The story contains entire scenes in which little more than dialogue is used, but with material this rich, Ross didn’t need embellishment. Here is an exchange between Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, and John Huston on the set of the film Key Largo:
Bogart nodded. “Roosevelt was a good politician,” he said. “He could handle those babies in Washington, but they’re too smart for guys like me. Hell, I’m no politician. That’s what I meant when I said our Washington trip was a mistake.”
“Bogie has succeeded in not being a politician,” said Huston, who went to Washington with him. “Bogie owns a fifty-four-foot yawl. When you own a fifty-four-foot yawl, you’ve got to provide for her upkeep.”
“The great chief died and everybody’s guts died with him,” Robinson said, looking stern.
“How would you like to see your picture on the front page of the Communist paper of Italy?” asked Bogart.
“Nyah,” Robinson said, sneering.
“Come In, Lassie!” was to provide the model for every subsequent Ross story of the next half century. “‘Come In, Lassie!’ taught me how to watch and wait for the interactions of my characters,” wrote Ross in 2002. “I learned how to set the stage with facts, find the essential characters and their dialogue, and Go!” In 1950, Ross used the same technique for a New Yorker profile of Ernest Hemingway called “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” Ross provided a real-time account of two days spent with Hemingway in New York City—dining with the writer and his wife in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, shopping for a jacket, looking at cherished paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By not sanitizing her prose or “cleaning up” her quotes—a common practice among journalists who want their subjects to sound more articulate than they are—Ross stripped away layers of myth to reveal a willful eccentric enamored of both boxing and beluga caviar, whipsawing between mannered cultivation and crude machismo.
His dialogue is a strange patois in which articles and verbs are dropped (Ross later referred to it as his “joke Indian language”), baseball metaphors are liberally applied, and flashes of insight into his creative process are judiciously revealed (“The test of a book is how much good stuff you can throw away”). Ross is a presence, but she keeps herself in the shadows of the narrative; her writing is pure, Hemingwayesque stage direction that pushes Hemingway’s compelling monologues into the foreground. Ross achieved a drawing room intimacy with Hemingway, a casual rapport and candor, that no reporter had ever been able to pull off. What’s most remarkable about Ross’s interviewing technique is that she considers tape recorders anathema and relies on her memory and extensive note taking in her 3 × 5-inch spiral Claire Fontaine notebooks to record dialogue. Considering the peculiarities of Hemingway’s speech and the prolix nature of his sentences, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” is a remarkable triumph of transcription.
“How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” was received with a mixture of perplexity and revulsion by some New Yorker readers when it ran in the May 13, 1950, issue. Ross had simply recorded what she saw and heard, and she was pilloried for it. In a preface to the Modern Library edition of the profile, Ross theorized that readers “didn’t like Hemingway to be Hemingway. They wanted him to be somebody else—probably themselves.” Ross also claims that Hemingway loved the profile and defended Ross against her critics. In a series of letters written to Ross after the piece was published, he reassured her that she had done an admirable job (“About our old piece—the hell with them!”). Perhaps Ross, in her own nonjudgmental fashion, had moved a little too close to the truth.
Although “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” benefits from Ross’s desire to simply get it all down without embellishment, the story suffers from an amorphous structure; i
n her determination to not change in any way the shape of her raw material, Ross lets the story trail off unsatisfyingly. For her next assignment, a profile of the film director John Huston, Ross didn’t have such problems.
At a time when the inner workings of Hollywood filmmaking were still a mystery to the general public, Ross had full access to one of the great directors as he adapted Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, for MGM. She was friendly with Huston, and that would open any and all doors for her in California (Ross never had any compunction about cultivating friendships with her story subjects, perhaps because she was not the muckraking type). As Ross began soaking up information in story meetings and observing the production on Huston’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley, it became apparent that her story was something else entirely: a primer on how a film really gets made in Hollywood. “As I spent time with the characters involved in the making of the picture,” Ross wrote in her memoir Here but Not Here, “I became more and more excited about their relationships with one another, the development of the action, the drama of the story. It was like a novel unraveling right in front of me.”
In a letter to Shawn, Ross remarked, “Huston as a person is almost too interesting to be true—he’s complicated, funny, colorful, lonely, generous, crazy, driven, talented and outside of the conventional pattern of Hollywood, yet drawn and held by it, and the people in the business are attracted to and held by him.” Ross suggested that the story be written like a novel: “I don’t know whether this sort of thing has ever been done before, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t try to do a fact piece in novel form, or maybe a novel in fact form.”
As Ross continued to observe, the story coalesced in her mind. She would focus on four main characters: Huston, MGM vice president in charge of production Dore Schary, producer Gottfried Reinhardt, and studio head Louis B. Mayer, and present their story as a microcosm of the way things got done in Hollywood. It was a propitious time to undertake such a writing project, as the old studio system was about to crumble and television would soon challenge film’s hegemony as the country’s leading entertainment medium.
Ross was excited about the story, which she felt seemed to be unfolding for her benefit alone. Her subjects were comfortable around her, so much so that they answered just about every question she posed to them. During her first meeting with Gottfried Reinhardt, the producer explained the nature of Hollywood’s office hierarchy: “I’m on the first floor, Dore Schary is two floors up, right over me. L.B. is also two floors up. I have a washbasin but no shower in my office. Dore has a shower but no bathtub. L.B. has a shower and a bathtub.”
The production was complicated, with large-scale battle sequences involving hundreds of extras. The trick was to bring the film in on budget and thus prevent Mayer, who had objected to the film from the very beginning, from meddling with the final product. After one battle sequence had been shot in Chico, Ross overheard the following conversation:
“Well,” Huston said as we started off. “How much ahead of schedule are we, Gottfried?”
“A day and a half,” said Reinhardt. “Reggie says if we had done that shot of the river crossing in the tank at the studio, it would have cost twelve thousand dollars more than this did. Albert, the box of cigars. Under my coat next to you.”
“We can have the river crossing on the screen for a minute,” Huston said.
“That long?” asked Reinhardt, who was driving.
“It’s worth it,” Huston said.
As the production progressed, an inevitable clash between art and commerce emerged. Mayer wanted to add narration to clarify the protagonist’s thoughts. Huston didn’t budge. When the film was finally completed, it tested poorly in two sneak previews, and Mayer felt he had been vindicated. During a meeting with MGM producer Arthur Freed, Mayer makes an impassioned pitch for good old-fashioned escapism:
“The Red Badge of Courage? All the violence? No story? Dore Schary wanted it. Is it good entertainment? I didn’t think so. Maybe I’m wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong. I know what the audience wants. Andy Hardy. Sentimentality! What’s wrong with it? Love! Good old-fashioned romance!” He put his hand on his chest and looked at the ceiling. “Is it bad? It entertains. It brings the audience to the box office. No! These critics. They’re too tony for you and I. They don’t like it.”
Mayer then proceeds to tell a bizarre story about a female critic-turned-screenwriter who used to knock MGM’s films:
“I see Howard Strickling running across the green. You know Howard.” Mayer huffed and puffed to demonstrate how Strickling ran across the green. “‘Why are you running?’ I ask Howard. He tells me the girl tried to commit suicide. I go with him, just as I am, in my golf clothes. In the hospital, the doctors are pushing her, trying to make her walk.” Mayer got up and acted out the part of the girl. “Suddenly, she sees me, and she gives a cry! ‘Oh!’ And she walks. And this is what she says: ‘Oh, Mr. Mayer, I am so ashamed of myself. When I think of how I used to knock the movies, I am ashamed.’”
That was the end of Mayer’s story. Freed looked puzzled.
“You knock the movies, you’re knocking your best friend,” Mayer said.
Ross learned the true lesson of filmmaking as a collaborative art: those who pay the bills have the last word. When The Red Badge of Courage was finally released, it had been bowdlerized and watered down, beaten back into some gray area between art film and war picture. But Ross still needed an interview with the man who had green-lighted the film: MGM president Nicholas B. Schenck, who was based in New York. He could provide her with an ending, give her some kind of postmortem on the project. When Ross returned to the city, Shawn insisted that she stake Schenck out in the lobby of MGM’s offices at 1540 Broadway-arrive at 8 A.M., and then wait for as long as it took for Schenk to show up. Schenk materialized on Ross’s first try, pulling up in a stretch limousine. Ross introduced herself and explained the nature of her project, and asked if Mr. Schenk could spare a little time. Schenck didn’t hesitate and, accompanied by his press agent, Howard Dietz, escorted Ross into his office:
“Red Badge had no stars and no story,” said Dietz. “It wasn’t any good.”
“They did the best they could with it,” said Schenck. “Unfortunately, that sort of thing costs money. If you don’t spend money, you never learn.” He laughed knowingly. “After the picture was made, Louie didn’t want to release it,” he said. “Louie said that as long as he was head of the studio, the picture would never be released. He refused to release it, but I changed that.”
Schenck puffed quickly on a cigarette. “How else was I going to teach Dore?” he said. “I supported Dore. I let him make the picture. I knew that the best way to help him was to let him make a mistake. Now he will know better. A young man has to learn by making mistakes. I don’t think he’ll try to make a picture like that again.”
Ross’s story, “Production Number 1512,” ran in five issues of The New Yorker, beginning with the May 24, 1952, issue. When it was published in book form as Picture the following year, it was hailed as a breakthrough, a meticulously rendered chronicle of realpolitik within Hollywood’s corridors of power. Ernest Hemingway called it “much better than most novels.” It was the most novelistic book-length piece of journalism since Down and Out in Paris and London, leavened by Ross’s light and lucid prose, her elucidation of character through description, and the dialogue-heavy interactions between the main players.
When novelist Truman Capote traveled to Garden City, Kansas, in November 1959 at the behest of The New Yorker to investigate the murder of Holcomb wheat farmer Herbert Clutter, his wife, and two of his children, he had to piece together a story that had only two living witnesses, as it turned out—the murderers themselves.
Capote at first refused to camouflage himself within the local milieu, to meld seamlessly into the sleepy rhythms of the midwestern town. In his sport jacket and bow tie, his epicene features set off by a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, Capote was
every inch the northeastern bon vivant-cum-bookish nerd. No one recognized him or his work; of the entire population of Holcomb, only two high school teachers had ever read any of his books. Many of his interview subjects asked to see his credentials, which turned out to be a single letter he obtained from the president of Kansas State University. Capote, whose work had taken him all over Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean, felt like an alien. “It was as strange to me,” he said at the time, “as if I’d gone to Peking.”
“Truman was a little out of his element,” said Bill Brown, the former editor of the Garden City Telegram, whom Capote enlisted to help him track down interview sources. “The first time I met him, he walked in in a fur-lined women’s coat and hung out a limp hand. But while I think a lot of people may have laughed behind his back, they were cooperative with him.”
As Capote investigated the mystery of the Clutter murder, he became an informal assistant to Alvin Dewey, the Kansas detective in charge of the case, as they both tried to piece together the motives behind the murders. Working with his friend Nelle Harper Lee, who functioned as Capote’s stenographer, Capote traversed the state, lending an empathetic ear to everyone who would consent to talk to him.
“Harper was a genuinely friendly person, and if people were put off by Truman, they felt they could talk to her,” said Herb Clutter’s former attorney, Clifford Hope, who became the executor of the Clutter estate. “If someone would be talking to Truman, Harper would be behind him, taking notes, getting everything down on paper.”
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 4