In the story, “The Soft Psyche of Joshua Logan,” Talese wrote of Logan’s emotional attachment to Feibleman’s play, how it reconnected him to his hardscrabble Mansfield, Louisiana, roots and the plantation where he was reared by a family of strong-willed females. Logan was identifying so strongly with the play, wrote Talese, that “it seemed he might be involved once again with Mansfield, the source of his old wounds and boyhood complexities; a trip, one might assume, that he could ill afford to make.” Logan had a lot riding on the play, mostly the need to keep himself financially afloat: “Though Logan earns in the neighborhood of $500,000 a year, it somehow seems barely enough and one evening after a hard day’s rehearsal of Tiger, Logan left the theatre and said, wearily, ‘I work for gardeners and psychiatrists.’”
The piece continued in this vein, with Logan constantly tweaking the play to his satisfaction, culminating in a screaming match with his female star, Claudia McNeil. Dobell and Hayes thought the story might be a little too revealing, perhaps even libelous, but when Talese read back the story to Logan, the director vouched for every word.
“The Soft Psyche of Joshua Logan” would be a benchmark story for Talese and Esquire. Talese had perfected the profile-as-short-story technique that he had been working toward for the past decade. As Lillian Ross had done with her John Huston piece, Talese wrote the article in scenes, but he added a layer of psychological complexity with his depiction of Logan, a self-made man whose track record as a Broadway King Midas, and the attendant pressure to produce a hit every time out, had coarsened him, turned him into something monstrous and crude.
Talese was catching Logan on the downward trajectory of his career; he was a once-dominant cultural icon who had lost his golden touch. Fallen characters fascinated Talese, because they had to function in a world that once revered them but now looked askance. It was only in defeat that a man revealed his true self to the world. That’s why boxers appealed to him. Talese had the corner on boxers at Esquire; as a Times reporter, he had profiled Jose Torres, Joe Louis, Ingemar Johansson, and Floyd Patterson. Talese had interviewed Patterson thirty-seven times, finding him to be unusually articulate, someone who could provide unique insights into his own psyche and the methodology of his technique. Talese had spent extended periods of time with Patterson at his training camp in upstate New York, and he came to know Patterson as intimately as a family member. “I had become almost an interior figure in his life,” said Talese. “I was his second skin.”
When Hayes assigned Talese a profile of Patterson in the winter of 1963, the twenty-nine-year-old former heavyweight champ had recently been knocked out a second time by his bête noire, Sonny Liston, and he was suffering from a severe bout of postmatch depression. Talese met him at his training camp, as he had done in the past, and it didn’t take much prodding for Patterson to express feelings of failure and self-recrimination. In his article Talese presented Patterson as a loner, living in a desolate two-room apartment sixty miles from his family in Scars-dale, fighting with the demons that had haunted him in the weeks since Liston had KO’d him in the first round. The story was a first for Talese in that he would use large chunks of dialogue to tell his story; Patterson was so good at describing what it really felt like to be in the ring with Liston that Talese wasn’t inclined to embellish.
“It is not a bad feeling when you’re knocked out,” he said. “It’s a good feeling, actually. It’s not painful, just a sharp grogginess. You don’t see angels or stars; you’re on a pleasant cloud. After Liston hit me in Nevada, I felt, for about four or five seconds, that everybody in the arena was actually in the ring with me, circled around me like a family, and you feel warmth toward all the people in the arena after you’re knocked out. You feel lovable to all the people …
“But then,” Patterson went on, still pacing, “this good feeling leaves you. You realize where you are, and what you’re doing there, and what has happened to you. And what follows is a hurt, a confused hurt—not a physical hurt—it’s a hurt combined with anger; it’s a what-will-people-think hurt; it’s an ashamed-of-my-own-ability hurt.”
To Talese, Patterson seemed to be everything a professional boxer shouldn’t be: sensitive, contrite, his personality tinctured with regret and world-weariness. When Talese accompanied Patterson on his Cessna plane as the fighter flew to Scarsdale to discipline some white kids who had been taunting his seven-year-old daughter, he found that Patterson, who had threatened to level the kids with a left hook, could not do anything more than deliver a gentle rebuke to the kids.
Later, Talese sat with Patterson as he returned to that night with Liston in Vegas, gently guiding him deeper into the recesses of his memory. When he wrote the piece, he chose to render this section as a running monologue, and placed it in italics as a framing device to alert his readers that they were inside Patterson’s head:
“And so then you know it’s time to get ready…. You open your eyes. You get off the table. You glove up, you loosen up. Then Liston’s trainer walks in. He looks at you, he smiles. He feels the bandages and he says, ‘Good luck, Floyd,’ and you think, ‘He didn’t have to say that; he must be a nice guy.’”
No journalist had ever pierced the facade of an athlete this way before, had ever gotten this close to what it felt like to be a champion who now felt like a coward. But Talese had earned this access over countless hours of hang time with Patterson across seven years, and it paid dividends when it counted the most. “The Loser,” which ran in the March 1964 issue of Esquire, was a new high-water mark for the magazine, daringly innovative but suffused with empathy for its subject. Talese was now Hayes’s pet writer, and their relationship would reap even greater rewards as the sixties progressed.
Clay Felker was missing out on all the fun at Esquire, but he wasted little time in establishing a new beachhead for himself. He returned to his newspaper roots and jump-started the New Journalism in an unprecedented fashion.
KING JAMES AND THE MAN IN THE
ICE CREAM SUIT
By the time Arnold Gingrich showed Clay Felker the door, the editor was already plotting his next move, taking a consulting job at Infinity, a trade magazine for professional photographers, managing the film career of his wife, actress Pam Tiffin, and editing part time for Viking Press. He also unsuccessfully interviewed for a job at the New York Herald Tribune. The Trib was Felker’s kind of challenge, a historical institution that was he morrhaging money and readership and was looking for a fresh infusion of ideas to compete in the city’s crowded newspaper market. Before long, Felker would get his chance at the Trib and lead it into its last great era.
The Herald Tribune’s lineage was one of the most distinguished in all of American journalism. It was created by the merger of two venerable newspapers, the New York Tribune and the New York Herald, in 1924. In the nineteenth century, under the stewardship of editor Horace Greeley, the Tribune was a leading advocate of social reform. A member of the pro-business Whig party until its dissolution in the 1850s, Greeley became a vocal supporter of the Republican party and helped engineer Illinois senator Abe Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency in 1860. For the next eighty years, the Tribune continued to support Republican causes, advocating Wendell Willkie’s nomination against Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and championing Dwight Eisenhower’s two terms as president in the fifties.
In 1872, the year of Greeley’s death, the Trib was taken over by Ogden Mills Reid, a former reporter for the Cincinnati Gazette and the managing editor under Greeley. Reid engineered his purchase of the paper with the help of Jay Gould, the notorious financier who cornered the silver market in August 1869. Thus began one of the great dynastic newspaper families; three generations of Reids would retain ownership of the paper for nearly a century.
A perpetual money-loser, the New York Herald Tribune was never a front-runner in the great New York newspaper wars of the early twentieth century, when as many as fifteen papers battled for readership, but its aggressive recruitment of great reporters made i
t a formidable editorial powerhouse. During World War II, correspondents Homer Bigart and Tex O’Reilly filed harrowing dispatches from the front lines from both the European and Pacific theaters; sports writers Red Smith and Grant-land Rice honed their snappy prose styles while working for the Trib, while critic Virgil Thomson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, critiqued classical music for the paper. Its news columnists were among the most widely read in the nation. Walter Lippmann, whom the Reids had poached from the New York World in 1927, was a Harvard graduate who had helped establish the New Republic as the leading periodical of the left before turning to newspaper work. Lippmann’s column “Today and Tomorrow,” which offered a pragmatic approach to national politics, was syndicated in a hundred newspapers, brought the Trib two Pulitzer Prizes, and ran for thirty years. During the postwar years Joseph and Stewart Alsop’s column, “Matter of Fact,” which was syndicated in 137 papers during its twelve-year run, warned of the imperialist evils of the Soviet Union as it cut a swath through Eastern Europe, and argued for a renewed commitment to strengthening the U.S. military to meet the new Communist threat.
Despite the quality of its editorial content, the Tribune’s financial health was constantly in flux. During World War II, there had been a significant increase in ad revenue, orchestrated by Ogden Reid’s wife, Helen Rogers Reid, and ad director William Robinson, but a newsstand price increase from a penny to a nickel in a quick-fix attempt to increase revenue in 1946 left the Tribune unable to boost its readership. When Robinson imposed a higher advertising rate, the Tribune found itself working from a position of weakness on both sides of the ledger. The Trib was charging three times as much for the same ad space as the New York Times, yet it had only 57 percent of the latter’s circulation by 1950.
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 wh
at 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.”
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 9