Greatly influenced by Lillian Ross and her Hemingway profile, Morgan structured his pieces like short stories, with individual scenes and ample swatches of dialogue that would run on for paragraphs at a time. His profiles of Nelson Rockefeller, Roy Cohn, Gary Cooper, Alf Landon, and Teddy Kennedy established him as a Felker favorite and one of Esquire’s masters of the personality profile.
Morgan’s 1959 profile of Sammy Davis Jr., “What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?” was Felker’s idea, suggested after the editor had seen the performer on the Ed Sullivan Show. “What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?” was a portrait of a man being tugged by two impulses—the desire of a black entertainer to make it in a white man’s world while maintaining some vestige of dignity. In Davis, Morgan saw a man working strenuously to assimilate himself into a world that clung tenaciously to Uncle Tom stereotypes:
Early in his act, Davis comes on wearing a gray porkpie hat, black suit, black shirt, white tie, with a trench coat flung over his shoulder, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey-colored water in the other. He blows smoke into the microphone, sips the drink, and says, “My name is Frank Sinatra, I sing songs, and we got a few we’d like to lay on ya …” The audience applauds wildly and somebody is certain to cry out: “My God, he even looks like Sinatra,” or words to that effect. A broken-nosed Negro does not look much like Sinatra, even though the latter is no work of art himself, but the illusion of Davis’ voice and visage and movements… produces a kind of Sinatrian hallucination.
Morgan, who never cracked open a notebook in Davis’s presence, stuck by him for seven days without a break: right after the nightclub act, when a euphoric but exhausted Davis feigned cordiality when greeting thirty or so well-wishing schmoozers while scheming with his agent about the next movie project; at four in the morning, closing a nightclub by jamming informally with the house band; at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, plotting the after-show revelry (“Hey baby, call up Keely [Smith] and Louis [Prima] and tell them we’ll be over after our show tonight. And chicks. Chicks, we need”).
Morgan had a knack for retaining huge chunks of dialogue and detail in his head, which he would then frantically transcribe at the end of each session, so that he could re-create dialogue such as this without the benefit of a tape recorder:
“Well, Dave, baby, it’s a definite leave from here in two-oh minutes, maybe even one-five, followed by a definite cab, which will speed me to Danny’s Hide-a-Way for a little din-din. Then it will be another cab-ola to the Hotel Fourteen, that is, one-four. After that, chickee, it is a definite lay-down with closed eyes, and Morpheus dropping little things in them for about forty winks, until I awake again, as myself— like refreshed—ready to go on. I mean, baby, is that clear?”
With the requisite reporter’s tools out of sight, Davis shared confidences with Morgan, articulated insecurities to which no other reporter had ever been privy:
“It takes a terribly long time to learn how to be a success in this business. People flatter you all the time. You are on all the time. And if you’re a Negro, you find yourself using your fame to make it socially. Let’s face it. The biggest deals with the big moguls are made in a social way, around the pool, that sort of thing. If you’re not there, well you’re not there.”
Esquire had never run a profile as formally inventive or as revealing as “What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?” As a thwarted novelist, Morgan wanted to get as close as he could to the richness of fiction with his nonfiction, and in so doing he elevated his reportage into literature.
“Nobody had ever written serious pieces about entertainers at the time,” said Morgan. “I earned Sammy’s trust enough for him to open up to me about his life in a way that he hadn’t to any reporter. He spent the weekend fishing with me and my wife at our summer home in Long Island, and I earned his trust that way. I had the feeling that he had never had a friend who was a journalist before.”
Morgan brought his careful observational prowess to Look in the winter of 1960 when the magazine assigned him to write a profile of Brigitte Bardot, the Parisian actress whose film … And God Created Woman had made her an international sex symbol four years earlier. Arriving for a noon appointment in Paris nearly five hours late, Bardot, accompanied by her husband, Jacques Charrier, opened their talk by asking Morgan, “Why are you here?”
“To see you.”
“I do not wish to do any more interviews. I cannot talk to you. Sorry.”
“But I’ve traveled all the way from New York to see you.”
“Sorry.”
Charrier told Morgan to wait in their apartment in the hopes that Bardot might change her mind. Morgan held a vigil for three days, catching only a fleeting glimpse of Bardot as she walked from one room to the next. He followed the couple to St. Tropez, practically stalking them to try to buttonhole the star for a formal talk. It took ten days before Bardot relented, but not until Morgan contrived a sob story about the enormous hotel bill he had run up at Look’s expense, and the fact that he would not get paid and might lose his job if he went back to New York empty-handed.
By the time Bardot acquiesced, the interview seemed an afterthought. Morgan was more intrigued by the actress’s coy feints and parries, the way she made a game out of being unapproachable. “I had a hard time writing about Brigitte,” wrote Morgan in the introduction to a 1965 anthology of his work. “Totally lost in herself, she brought the logic of impersonality to its ultimate conclusion—absurdity.”
So instead, Morgan turned his Bardot quest into the subject of the story, making himself a character and leaving the formal interview out altogether.
Brigitte swung around the car again and again. She walked briskly with a completely un-self-conscious liquid motion of the hips. She came by, snapping French negatives, and passed on in the increasingly wider circles that finally took her 15 yards away from the car. I began to get the rhythm of her march and stopped talking when she was out of earshot…. On the eighth circumnavigation of the car, as suddenly as she had started, she stopped, smiled and said, “Get into the car. We go to my home.”
Morgan earned a reputation for skillfully teasing out insights from recalcitrant interview subjects. When Felker assigned him a John Wayne profile for Esquire, Morgan had to cool his heels on a movie set for a week until Wayne agreed to talk to him, and then wound up writing a scathing portrait of a right-wing reactionary, wary of Kennedys and anti-American Hollywood subversives. For a profile of David Susskind called “Television’s Newest Spectacular,” Morgan observed a week in the life of the television producer as he skillfully negotiated his way through the worlds of television, theater, and film. Morgan structured the piece like a screenplay with the action prefaced by slug-lines, as in a shooting script:
TIME: Afternoon. Susskind, in his office, was just saying, “Look, when you’re dealing with sponsors and an advertising agency you’ve got to come on—pow! They’re like women. They keep shifting around. After you explain that you got lipstick on your collar kissing your mother, they accuse you of being late for dinner. So you have to handle them. I hate it, but you have to.”
Morgan sketched a portrait of a man as unrepentant about tailoring his product to meet the conservative demands of corporate sponsors, but who also fancied himself a patron of high culture, remaking Broadway plays with B-level actors for television. Susskind was infuriated by the story, which ran in the August 1960 issue of Esquire. The impresario had somehow obtained an advance copy of the magazine and called Morgan at home, telling him he needed a psychiatrist and vehemently denying that he had ever used the word fink in a quote that Morgan had attributed to him. After thirty minutes of ceaseless haranguing, Susskind finally asked Morgan, “Why did you do it to me? Don’t you see what it means? You’ve made it possible for the finks to get me!”
“I think Susskind thought I had fallen in love with him,” said Morgan. “I just thought he didn’t know who he was. The only thing David ever wanted more than anything was for somebody to say that he was important. I didn’t hail h
im, and he wanted to be hailed.”
Morgan was Felker’s reclamation project, a frustrated novelist who had become Esquire’s best writer of profiles. Now the editor would turn the preeminent novelist of his generation into a magazine journalist. Felker’s first encounter with Norman Mailer transpired at the Five Spot on Fifty-second Street during a performance by pianist Thelonious Monk. “Mailer was with his wife, Adele, there had been some drinking going on, and they were fighting,” said Felker, who was friendly with the club’s owner and thus availed himself of the chance to sit with Mailer. “I mean, I had never seen such fighting. They were hitting each other.” It seemed an odd time to approach Mailer about writing for Esquire, but Felker took his best shot. After Adele stormed out of the club, leaving the two men, Felker asked Mailer, “Have you ever written about politics?” The 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles was approaching, and Felker asked if Mailer would like to cover it for Esquire.
Mailer had indeed written about politics for a brief time at the Village Voice, the weekly downtown New York paper that he had cofounded in 1958, and intermittently throughout his career. He made his fiction debut with the publication in 1948 of the World War II novel The Naked and the Dead, a book based on Mailer’s own wartime experiences in the Philippines, and it had launched him to the top of the New York Times best-seller list at the age of twenty-five.
That book had immediately established Mailer as a major American novelist, but his energies were too protean for fiction alone, and his reputation as an unorthodox polemicist was beginning to take hold. In his 1957 essay “The White Negro” Mailer introduced the concept of the existentialist hipster hero, living outside the normal constraints of society in order to avoid annihilation by social conformity, abiding by the code of the Negro (who had been bred into a culture of oppression and danger), adapting his jazz, his marijuana, even his urge toward knife-edged violence. The hipster had therefore “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for all practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.” The essay, which was published in Irving Howe’s political quarterly Dissent, was discussed far more than it was actually read, but it turned Mailer into a lightning rod of controversy and a public intellectual.
In November 1959 Harold Hayes had purchased the serial rights to a chapter from Mailer’s book Advertisements for Myself. “The Mind of an Outlaw” was a lengthy analysis of the troubled origins of his Hollywood novel The Deer Park and Mailer’s struggles to write and publish it. Felker didn’t like the story much, finding it long-winded and self-indulgent, and had objected to Hayes’s suggestion that the magazine run it as a cover story. But Advertisements for Myself despite meager sales, became a touchstone for Mailer as a public persona. The book was a self-annotated anthology of novel excerpts, essays, poetry, and social observations, a kind of “greatest hits” of a still-young career. It was the interstitial writing that Mailer used to introduce the pieces, written in a hubristic, self-regarding tone, that attracted the most attention. Here was Mailer positioning himself as the supreme thinker of his generation, a philosopher-king whose Herculean talents and keen turn of mind would change the world, elevate the national dialogue, and, most important, cure what ailed America. “The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time,” Mailer wrote at the beginning of the book.
“I really think the watershed book was Advertisements for Myself Mailer would later say. “I thought that was, oddly enough, the first book written in what became my style. I never felt as if I had a style until that book. When I developed that style, for better or for worse, a lot of other forms opened to it.”
Surely, Felker surmised, this was a writer who could bring something intriguing to bear to the national political scene. And now that the political landscape was changing, with a young, dynamic senator from Massachusetts bringing an element of Hollywood glamour to the Democratic party, surely Mailer’s take on things would be provocative, perhaps even newsworthy.
Mailer welcomed the opportunity to expand his literary palette in the relatively untested waters of nonfiction, and Felker would give him his head, allowing him to write whatever, and however, he saw fit. Esquire would pay Mailer $3,500 for the piece; Felker would accompany Mailer to L.A. and introduce him to the right people.
As it turned out, Mailer didn’t need Felker’s help. His notoriety preceded him, and his Hollywood contacts, most notably Shelley Winters, whom he had met in the early fifties while adapting The Naked and the Dead as a screenplay, got him into all the best cocktail parties. It was, for the most part, politics as usual. Mailer had always been wary of Washington—all of those drab, unimaginative representatives setting the national agenda for the rest of us—but in Kennedy, he glimpsed the spark of something new. Not exactly a pinstriped insurrectionary, but perhaps someone who could reclaim some of the country’s vibrancy. Peering over the balcony one night from his hotel room at the Biltmore, Mailer spotted Kennedy arriving via motorcade.
He had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor, and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards. For one moment he saluted Pershing Square, and Pershing Square saluted him back, the prince and the beggars of glamour staring at one another across a city street, and then with a quick move he was out of the car and by choice headed into the crowd.
Mailer saw at once what Kennedy’s election might mean for the country—a move toward some great reawakening of the American soul. “Eisenhower’s eight years,” he wrote, “has been the triumph of the corporation. A tasteless, sexless, odorless sanctity in architecture, manners, modes, styles has been the result.” Kennedy could unleash the “subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires” that had lain dormant during the two Eisenhower terms, reigniting the human potential that had been tamped down for so long. In his piece, which Mailer called “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Mailer linked Kennedy’s ascendance to the great American creed of unbridled adventure, virtue, and self-actualization; Kennedy’s election could start a mission in earnest for the new frontier, returning America to its first principles.
It was perhaps too simplistic a dialectic to accept at face value; even Mailer was aware of that. But Mailer was canny enough to leaven his enthusiasm with a cold shot or two of skepticism; he didn’t want the piece to read like Kennedy campaign boosterism. John F. Kennedy, after all, was the product of a smooth and efficient political machine whose patriarch, Joe Kennedy, had a criminal past. Was one witnessing “the fortitude of a superior sensitivity” or “the detachment of a man who was not quite real to himself”? Even Mailer couldn’t say for sure.
It’s Mailer’s fresh combination of a reporter’s detatchment with a novelist’s vision—his ability to hold his subject up to the light and examine that person from every angle—that makes “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” the most insightful magazine article of the Kennedy era. The sheer intellectual expansiveness of the piece, coupled with Mailer’s penchant for capturing the mood of the room with a few deft strokes, gives it the layered heft of great psychological fiction. His descriptions of the convention floor (“If one still smells the faint echo of a carnival, it is regurgitated by the senses into the fouler cud of a death gas one must rid oneself of”), Los Angeles (“a kingdom of stucco, the playground for mass men—one has the feeling it was built by television sets giving orders to men”), Lyndon Johnson (“When he smiled, the corners of his mouth squeezed gloom; when he was pious, his eyes twinkled irony”), and other aspects of the convention are first-rate, but his analysis of Kennedy and the social forces that conspired to make him a viable candidate—the link between Kennedy and the enduring American myths—was something new altogether. Certainly no other reporter had recognized so early the potential for a cultural renaissance with Kennedy in the White House, while at the same time openly acknowledging the potential dangers of a countr
y submitting too readily to a seductive personality cult. The value of the piece is in Mailer’s ability to hold those two opposing ideas in equipoise.
“Superman Comes to the Supermarket” was a new hybrid—think piece, personality profile, and polemic. It was unmistakably journalism, but a newspaper editor would be hard-pressed to place it. Years later, when the term “New Journalism” became commonplace, Mailer admitted that “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” fell squarely into that rubric of creative reportage. What Mailer had contributed to the form, in his view, was an “enormously personalized journalism in which the character of the narrator was one of the elements in the way the reader would finally assess the experience. I had felt that I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time.”
Felker loved the piece; Hayes and Gingrich had strong reservations. Never a fan of Mailer’s to begin with, Gingrich considered scrapping the story, which he considered the scattershot jottings of an otherwise gifted writer. The magazine had reserved sixteen pages in the feature well for the story, and the issue had to be shipped to the printer by the end of August to make the newsstands on October 15. Felker, Hayes, and Gingrich fought it out for days, until it came down to the wire. “We had three hours to go before we shipped the magazine to the printers,” said Felker. “Gingrich kept insisting it was the worst piece of dreck he had ever read, and I kept insisting otherwise.” Felker eventually prevailed, and the story made it, albeit with one minor change, courtesy of Gingrich, who changed the title to “Superman Comes to the Supermart” without Mailer’s consent.
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 7