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

by Marc Weingarten

  That two-letter change from “Supermarket” to “Supermart” nearly sabotaged Esquire’s working relationship with Mailer for good. Mailer was furious when he saw it and fired off a letter to the editor, which was published in the January 1961 issue. Felker tried to mollify the writer, but to no avail. “Mailer for some reason thought that we hated the story,” Felker recalled. “He just went bananas.” Mailer stopped writing for the magazine for nearly two years.

  Regardless of the title change, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” had a seismic effect on American journalism. Pete Hamill, at the time a young reporter for the New York Post, could sense a sea change among his colleagues at the paper. “I could actually feel the impact of that piece in the city room at the Post,” he said. “All the young guys were going, ‘Holy shit, what the hell is this?’ He just took the form and exploded it, and showed writers that there were other possibilities.” Mailer knew that the story was good, perhaps even epochal, and he would devote more energy to journalism than to fiction over the next four decades.

  Felker had pulled off a major coup, despite Gingrich and Hayes’s protestations. It should have solidified his stature at the magazine, but instead his power was methodically being chipped away by Harold Hayes, who was endearing himself to Gingrich. By the summer of 1961 the battle lines were clearly drawn. Hayes was leveraging his position at the magazine by fielding offers from competing publications, which prompted Gingrich to act. He appointed Hayes managing editor in July. Felker agreed to stay on as senior editor, but he started looking for other jobs.

  “It reminded me of my days at Columbia, where you were either a Mark Van Doren man or a Lionel Trilling man,” said former Esquire contributor Dan Wakefield. “Being a Greenwich Village guy, I took Felker to be more of an uptown dandy. I wasn’t a part of that society life and I didn’t admire it. Harold became my champion. He was one of those rare editors that didn’t have writer’s envy. At that time, a lot of editors wanted to be published, so there was a lot of tension and edge to them. Harold didn’t have any of that.”

  Now that he had a proper title, Hayes began to steer the magazine with a firmer hand. To Gingrich, Hayes was like a film auteur, an editor who could masterfully organize all of the graphic and editorial elements of an issue into a pleasing, unifying whole that reflected his own tastes and sensibilities. But Felker knew that much of what made Esquire exciting could be directly attributed to him—not only the Mailer piece, but the hiring of David Levine, an artist he had discovered at a small downtown art gallery. Levine’s distinctive line drawings of literary and entertainment figures in Esquire launched his long and distinguished career. He had also edited Tom Morgan, and brought in Peter Maas, who years later found literary fame as the author of the Mafia insider’s account The Valachi Papers. But “Harold was very ambitious, and he was undermining me with Gingrich,” said Felker. “He was a very good editor, but ruthless.”

  Hayes drafted a confidential memo to Gingrich, outlining his master plan to implement “a more active control of all our materials.” According to the memo, Esquire’s separate editorial camps were creating an “inequitable distribution of work inside the editorial office.” Hayes outlined a new top-down system in which he would oversee every aspect of the magazine. “It is very difficult—and even unfair of me—to assume responsibility and control over Clay’s features so long as he has implicit authority from you to handle them as he sees fit. I am willing to do this, however—in fact I am willing to provoke a crisis of several megatons if that should be the best way to handle the problem.” All story ideas would pass though Hayes’s desk first, and the overall budget would be determined by him as well. Gingrich would interface only with Hayes, who would become the sole emissary of the editorial department. The idea, Hayes wrote, is to “maintain maximum autonomy with minimum anarchy.”

  Gingrich signed off on the memo, and Felker was left in the lurch. In June 1962 Felker was the apparent aggressor in a heated shouting match with comedian Mort Sahl shortly after an appearance by Sahl at the Basin Street nightclub. Sahl had taken issue with a story in the magazine that had referred to him as “the light that failed,” and asked Felker if someone at Esquire had a personal animus against him. Felker’s response was typically curt: “I don’t like you, Mort.” “Felker was quite drunk at the time,” recalls Sahl. “I didn’t take kindly to his tone.” Then, according to legal papers filed by Sahl, Felker threatened to bury the comic in the magazine. Felker claimed that the incident had occurred in Sahl’s dressing room; the editor had tried to convince Sahl to reconsider an interview with a writer the comic had initially rejected. When Sahl’s lawyers began sending letters to the magazine hinting at a lawsuit, Gingrich, who had maintained a polite distance from all the infighting among his editors, couldn’t allow Felker’s short-tempered outbursts to continue if lawyers were now going to be involved. Forced to play his hand, he gave Felker the shove.

  Felker’s replacement, an editor at Time-Life Books named Byron Dobell, had the owlish aspect of a college professor and a lively intelligence that translated into unorthodox story ideas. “I moved right into Clay’s office, which wasn’t easy at first,” said Dobell. “Despite what had happened with Gingrich, the staff liked him. I had to win everyone over by doing a good job.”

  Even as a newcomer, Dobell was unwilling to indulge the digressive whims of star writers, even if it meant a complete blue-pencil evisceration of a story. He favored reporting over think pieces and enjoyed the work of such dependable contributors as political correspondent Richard Rovere and Tom Morgan, whose Susskind piece “put my hair on end.” As for Mailer, Dobell found him brilliant but long-winded: “He took his metaphysical insights to be God’s truth.”

  Now that Hayes was securely in command, he had a few new writers he wanted to give a try. One of them, Gay Talese, was a New York Times reporter who was eager to spread his wings, push himself beyond the two- to three-column limitations of general assignment work, and really expand a story as far as it was willing to go.

  The son of southern Italian immigrants, Gaetano “Gay” Talese was born on February 7, 1932, in Ocean City, New Jersey, near Atlantic City. Ocean City in the 1930s was a polyglot town where Irish coexisted with Italians, Catholics with Methodists, but there was little cultural common ground, and so little ethnic archipelagos formed. Talese was reared as an Italian Catholic, but he attended an Irish Catholic school. His father, Joseph, was a tailor and the owner of a dry cleaning business who dressed elegantly even for breakfast, thus bringing “the rakish fashion of the Continental boulevardier to the comparatively continent men of the south Jersey shore.” His mother, Catherine, a stylish and fastidious but emotionally distant matriarch, ran a dress shop under the Taleses’ apartment.

  Talese at an early age was steeped in the sartorial codes of class and the ways in which wardrobe can connote sophistication; he dressed himself in suits and ties as early as high school. Thus he was cast out as a snob, reinforcing his own feelings of cultural isolation. “I was olive-skinned in a freckle-faced town,” Talese wrote in his 1992 book Unto the Sons, “and I felt unrelated even to my parents, especially my father, who was indeed a foreigner—an unusual man in dress and manner, to whom I bore no physical resemblance and with whom I could never identify.”

  “My father was a miserable man during World War II,” said Talese in an interview. “His brothers were in the neo-fascist army in Italy, but my father had a strong sense of patriotism. He joined a citizens’ committee of patrolmen who looked out for enemy ships along the Jersey shore at night.” Talese remained aloof from his volatile father during his childhood. “My father was a total prick all day long, but he’d go to restaurants with his friends and he’d be very happy.”

  Joseph ensured that his son, an indifferent student at best, made it all the way though parochial school by not charging the priests for dry cleaning their vestments; in exchange, Gay would get promoted to the next grade with an administrative nudge.

 
Sports saved his miserable childhood. Talese played baseball on his high school team and assiduously followed the fortunes of the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Giants in the city’s tabloid newspapers. That’s when Talese became addicted to newsprint. At fifteen, Talese began covering his baseball team for the local paper, the Ocean City Sentinel Ledger. After only seven articles, Talese’s assignment was expanded when he was given a column to cover general high school news for the paper. Talese’s “High School Highlights” ranged across any number of topics, making it a kind of running commentary on the New Jersey enclave’s academic life. Talese was free to write what he pleased, and he discovered that he could file quickly on tight deadlines. From 1947 to 1949 Talese wrote over three hundred columns.

  He barely made it through high school academically, and so undistinguished was his academic record that even the principal advised against college. He was rejected by every local university, and all hope for higher education seemed lost until the family doctor pulled a few strings and got young Gay into his alma mater, the University of Alabama. But Talese could see the way clear to a path now; there was no question that his major would be journalism.

  For Talese, journalism was an escape hatch—not only from the pinched circumstances of his childhood but also from his own personality, which tended toward reticence. “I didn’t know who I was in those days,” he said. “I had no sense of myself.” Now a northeastern Italian Catholic in a southern school, Talese yet again found himself buffeted by ethnic and cultural differences, but writing would be his redemption. If he paid close attention to others, he could gain their confidence, and strengthen his own self-worth in the process. It was all about being empathetic, listening closely. It was a trait he had learned from his mother, who was always careful never to interrupt any of her customers. “I learned [from my mother] … to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt even when people were having great difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting and imprecise moments … people are very revealing,” Talese wrote in 1996. “What they hesitate to talk about can tell much about them. Their pauses, their evasions, their sudden shifts in subject matter are likely indicators of what embarrasses them, or irritates them, or what they regard as too private or imprudent to be disclosed to another person at that particular time.”

  At the University of Alabama, Talese thrived. His literary tastes matured, and he began reading a steady diet of American fiction, particularly John O’Hara, Carson McCullers, and Irwin Shaw. Talese admired McCullers for her empathetic depictions of the southern underclass and the ways in which she treated marginal characters with dignity and a minimum of sentiment. From O’Hara and Shaw, Talese learned how to sketch the peculiar mores of urban dwellers in clear, elegant prose. He began to structure his stories around individual scenes or set pieces, and he used more dialogue to bring his stories to life. In his junior year Talese was named the sports editor of the University of Alabama’s Crimson White student paper, and created a sports column for himself called “Gay-zing,” a forum that allowed him to further develop his literary storytelling skills.

  By the time Talese graduated from the University of Alabama in 1953, his literary reporting style was fully formed. A college friend of his who was a cousin of the New York Times managing editor Turner Catledge suggested that Talese get in touch with Catledge and ask about potential work. Talese headed straight for the Times’s headquarters on West Forty-third Street and asked the receptionist if he could see Turner Catledge. Amazingly, Catledge invited Talese up to his office, and two weeks later Talese was offered a copy boy job.

  Talese’s first unsigned stories for the Times were unsolicited pieces that he wrote during his off hours and then forwarded to Times editors. A few of these, such as a story about the man who operated the ticker-tape billboard that curled around the Times Square building, made it into the paper, and soon Talese was getting assignments to write harmless general-interest stories. His earliest signed pieces—a story on the pedal-operated rolling chairs on the Atlantic City boardwalk, Sunday magazine features about Broadway star Carol Channing, the new bowling chic, and baseball-themed pop songs—were written in the prevalent Times style of the era, foursquare and structurally sturdy.

  Talese’s Times career was interrupted by a short stint in the Army Tank Corps in Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he wrote a column called “Fort Knox Confidential” for the base paper. It wasn’t until Talese returned to the Times in 1956 and was assigned to the sports desk that his lucid writing style blossomed. Talese was especially drawn to boxing, because it was a metaphor for just about everything—personal redemption, race, celebrity, and especially the trying art of losing. An athlete’s failures were more intriguing to Talese than his or her triumphs. “Sports is about people who lose and lose and lose,” Talese said. “They lose games, then they lose their jobs. It can be very intriguing.”

  For a three-column profile of the Puerto Rican boxer Jose Torres, Talese sketched a portrait of a smart, ascetic loner beholden to a manager, the legendary Cus D’Amato, who wanted to transform him into an ethnic hero, despite Torres’s trepidations.

  As the men talked, the prize fighter sat silently in a chair listening. Then he got up and went down a flight of stairs to Fifty-first Street and headed to Stillman’s gymnasium. Puerto Ricans, recognizing the fighter, waved at him, and some followed him into the gymnasium to watch him spar. The fighter is a quick, clever puncher standing 5 feet 10 inches. His chest muscles twitched this way and that as he moved around the ring, jabbing at a sparring partner, without malice.

  Talese’s sharply etched portraits stood out, but he felt confined by the Times’s space limitations. “I was limited to two thousand words in the daily paper, and twenty-five hundred tops in the Sunday magazine,” he said. “I wanted to know more than what the article could contain. I wanted to be a marathon runner of journalism.” Talese was promoted to cover the Albany statehouse in 1959, but he felt even more bound by newspaper convention, and now his copy was being rewritten with impunity. When he was passed over for the job of writing the “About New York” column, a plum assignment he felt he deserved, Talese, with the paper’s approval, started to pitch stories to Harold Hayes at Esquire in February 1960.

  His timing was propitious. Hayes happened to be looking for New York stories for a special summer package the magazine was compiling. Did Talese have any good ideas? Talese jumped, culling various leads from his articles, rewriting them, and then stitching them together in a single article. “I am currently trying to gather unusual facts on people and things in New York,” Talese wrote in his cover letter, “in the hope that someday I’ll have enough for a good book … please excuse any typing errors.”

  Hayes bought the piece and ran it near the front of the issue. It began, “New York is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building. The ants were probably carried up there by wind or birds, but nobody is sure; nobody in New York knows any more about the ants than they do about the panhandler who takes taxis to the Bowery; or the dapper man who picks trash out of Sixth Avenue trash cans.”

  Esquire paid $500 for “New York,” and it established Talese as a comer, someone for Hayes to watch. After writing a few more stories in the vein of “New York” and a profile of New York mobster Frank Costello—a piece that Village Voice writer Nat Hentoff had told Hayes was the best he had ever read in a national magazine—Talese was becoming a favorite of Hayes. “I liked the toughness of Hayes, because I was tough,” said Talese. His article fee was bumped to $850; Hayes felt that Talese had been invaluable in “forming a fairly specific Esquire point of view.” But Talese still had a full-time job at the New York Times, which kept him busy from 1 P.M. to 7:30 P.M. every weekday except Friday, which was his day off. He had to squeeze the Esquire work in between filing stories for the paper, which left him with very little tim
e for anything else—that is, until the New York papers went on strike in December 1962, providing Talese with a short break from his job and a chance to devote his energies to a feature story Dobell had assigned him: a profile of Broadway director Joshua Logan.

  Dobell felt that Logan had coasted too long on an inflated reputation; it was time to set the record straight on this peddler of meretricious clichés and overblown productions, who was now in rehearsals for Tiger Tiger Burning Bright, Peter Feibleman’s drama about African Americans in New Orleans. Dobell couldn’t figure out Talese; the two had fought over what Dobell felt were disparaging remarks made by Talese about Hayes, the man who had turned Talese into a magazine writer. But he knew that beneath Talese’s calm exterior there lurked “a bratty street kid” who would scrape and claw for a good story.

  Talese, who had already staked out Logan during the premiere of his show Mr. President on October 22, was now free to observe to his heart’s content. “I am a reporter who is forever in search of the opening scene,” said Talese. “I never start writing until I have that scene, and then I become a man in search of a final scene. This all tends to take a lot of time.”

  Talese made good use of his time, sitting in the back of the Booth Theater with a notebook on his knee (Talese never used a tape recorder for fear that he would become too dependent on it) and watching Logan fulminate, cajole, and stage-direct while his actors slowly melted down from the heat of their director’s temper tantrums. He spent days with Logan and the cast, recording all of their conversations, sparing no one. Then he blocked out all of the scenes on a large corkboard in his apartment, much like a film director uses a storyboard to direct the narrative flow of his film. The scenes alone would dictate the direction of his story; Talese would leave himself out of it.