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

by Marc Weingarten

  The call bothered Malcolm Perry. “Dr. Tom Shires, STAT,” the girl’s voice said over the page in the doctors’ cafeteria at Parkland Memorial Hospital. The “STAT” meant emergency. Nobody ever called Tom Shires, the hospital’s chief resident in surgery, for an emergency. And Shires, Perry’s superior, was out of town for the day. Malcolm Perry looked at the salmon croquettes on the plate in front of him. Then he put down his fork and went over to a telephone.

  “This is Dr. Perry taking Dr. Shires’ page,” he said.

  “President Kennedy has been shot. STAT,” the operator said.

  Breslin clinically enumerates Perry’s usual operating procedure, the standard routine for gravely wounded gunshot victims, while Jacqueline Kennedy, “a tall, dark-haired girl in the plum dress that had her husband’s blood all over the front of the skirt,” stands nearby, observing it all with a “tearless… terrible discipline.” Finally Perry defers to a priest for the last rites:

  The priest reached into his pocket and took out a small vial of holy oil. He put the oil on his right thumb and made a cross on President Kennedy’s forehead. Then he blessed the body again and started to pray quietly.

  “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,” Father Huber said.

  “And let perpetual light shine upon him,” Jacqueline Kennedy answered. She did not cry.

  The story ends on Perry, alone with his thoughts in a hospital conference room:

  He is a tall, reddish-haired thirty-four-year-old, who understands that everything he saw or heard on Friday is a part of history, and he is trying to get down, for the record, everything he knows about the death of the thirty-fifth President of the United States.

  “I never saw a President before,” he said.

  With “A Death in Emergency Room One,” Breslin created a charged narrative by relating the facts of Perry’s experience as a real-time docudrama, using Perry’s point of view and an occasional, unobtrusive detail to provide dramatic shading. It was the best column Breslin had written for the Trib, but it also brought to a head a long-running debate among Breslin’s colleagues: had he papered over inconvenient facts and made up dialogue? “A Death in Emergency Room One” contained a number of niggling errors. Breslin had recorded the sequence of events incorrectly, for example. But even Perry himself had to admit that, despite Breslin’s sloppiness, he couldn’t have captured the story any better had he been present in the ER. “A guy’s weight, the name of his mother,” Breslin told Newsweek in 1963, “I’ll blow it every time. But when it comes to a major insight, I don’t think I miss very often.”

  Over the next two days, the Trib ran two more Breslin stories, this time from Kennedy’s funeral in Washington, D.C.: “Everybody’s Crime,” in which the columnist observed dignitaries and citizen mourners as they passed by Kennedy’s coffin in the rotunda of the Capitol, and “It’s an Honor,” the story of Clifton Pollard, the man who dug Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. The second story developed as a result of Breslin becoming jittery amid the pomp of the presidential funeral, with its procession of world leaders and a bustling phalanx of international journalists. “I saw de Gaulle and Haile Selassie, who were great for the photographers, but I didn’t make a living writing about people like that,” said Breslin. Turning to his friend Art Buchwald, who was also covering the funeral, Breslin mentioned that he might ditch the funeral to interview the gravedigger. Buchwald thought that was a great idea, and Breslin left. “The story was about a dead body, after all,” Breslin said.

  Once again, Breslin brought the national tragedy down to the capillary level, the working-class guy with the dirt on his khaki overalls who is summoned from his Sunday bacon and eggs to do his duty:

  When Pollard got to the row of yellow wooden garages where the cemetery equipment is stored, Kawalchik and John Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, were waiting for him. “Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday,” Metzler said. “Oh, don’t say that,” Pollard said. “Why, it’s an honor for me to be here.” …

  When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it. “That’s nice soil,” Metzler said. “I’d like to save a little of it,” Pollard said. “The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I’d like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there, I’d like to have everything, you know, nice.”

  The country was in mourning, but a man still had to earn his pay. Breslin didn’t have to elaborate or moralize, throw in some obvious paragraph about the quiet dignity of Pollard and the pride of a job well done. It was all in the telling—the careful reconstruction of the scene, the halting cadence of the dialogue.

  If Jimmy Breslin was the Herald Tribune’s foremost chronicler of the dispossessed and overlooked, then Tom Wolfe was the paper’s dazzling wordsmith of the decade’s emerging status class, the new 1960s youth culture and its mores. Breslin and Wolfe were working opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, but they shared the same uncanny flair for character and setting.

  Wolfe, unlike Breslin, was not a product of New York, which was to his advantage; it gave him the gee-whiz enthusiasm of the outsider who found himself suddenly plunging headlong into a vibrant urban pageant. Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia, on March 2, 1931. His mother, Helen Perkins Hughes, was a landscape designer; his father, Thomas Wolfe Sr., was an agronomist, the director of a farmers’ cooperative, and a professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Wolfe senior was also the editor of the Southern Planter, a farm magazine with a literary bent. Tom Wolfe first became enamored of the writing life as he watched his father draft his farming articles in longhand, on yellow legal pads. “A couple of weeks later, there would be this nice, sparkling print in the magazine,” said Wolfe. “I just thought that was great.”

  Tom Wolfe was reared in the Sherwood Park section of Richmond, an economically mixed neighborhood of academic types and working-class families. Wolfe’s house, which was located about a mile from a railroad yard, would often be visited by tramps looking for a handout; his mother always graciously obliged with homemade sandwiches. Despite this, Wolfe looks back fondly on his childhood. “Even though it was the Depression when I was growing up, I was not very conscious of it,” said Wolfe. “Doctors called that the old oaken bucket delusion. You just screen out everything around you that’s unpleasant.” He attended public schools until the seventh grade, when his mother, an educated woman who had once aspired to a career in medicine, enrolled him in St. Christopher’s Day School, an Episcopal institution that educated the children of Richmond’s elite farming families. Hethrived there, becoming an honors student, chairman of the student council, and coeditor of the school paper. His column “The Bullpen” crackled with the earliest examples of Wolfe’s Roman-candle prose. For an article on the school’s men’s basketball team, Wolfe wrote that “different spectators have suggested motorcars, bicycles and rickshaws for keeping up with Coach Petey Jacob’s live-five.”

  At Washington and Lee, a private university in Lexington, Virginia, Wolfe, who had consumed books such as Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf and L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz as a child, had dreams of becoming a great American novelist. His parents had a couple of Thomas Wolfe novels on their bookshelf, and young Tom was convinced that the author of Look Homeward, Angel was a relative and that he could carry on his namesake’s literary legacy. “My parents had the hardest time convincing me that I wasn’t related to that Wolfe,” he said. Wolfe wrote short stories when he wasn’t filing sports stories for the school’s paper and throwing curveballs for the school’s varsity baseball team. He dreamed of becoming a big-league ballplayer: “You got no applause for writing. Lots of it if you played games.” James T Farrell’s trilogy of Studs Lonigan novels had a profound influence on him; Wolfe was taken with the way Farrell used the raw material of a child’s life to create a riveting coming-of-age story, written in the novelist’s gritty, plainspoken prose. “Farrell got inside
the minds of adolescents,” said Wolfe. “Nothing of note happens in the books—Studs just watches his contemporaries rising and sinking in life—but it’s riveting.” Wolfe would eventually master Farrell’s gift for writing convincing interior monologue, a talent that would serve him well at the Trib.

  Wolfe was a solid student at Washington and Lee, but he kept his distance from the other students, mostly the rich sons and daughters of the southern gentry. “Tom was a bit of an oddball,” said Professor Marshall Fishwick, Wolfe’s mentor in college. “He was much more intellectual than most of the students, who would come for a degree, rather than an education.”

  Wolfe published two short stories in Shenandoah, the college literary magazine that he coedited, stories that were hammered out in George Foster’s weekly fiction seminars at the Dutch Inn pub off campus. It was in Foster’s seminars that Wolfe learned to absorb harsh criticism, but he also realized that the write-what-you-know mentality of fiction was not necessarily what he had inmind for his own career. It was Marshall Fishwick’s American studies course, which folded cultural, artistic, and sociological history into a kind of unified theory of American history, that radicalized Wolfe’s attitude about his own writing. He learned about William James’s pragmatism and Freud’s theories of the subconscious, and it opened him up to new ways of thinking. “The impulse behind American studies was not to accept the dogma of scholars, but to use your own scholarship, to develop a healthy skepticism about things,” said Fishwick. “Tom took that to heart. He wrote an early paper for me called ‘A Zooful of Zebras,’ which was about the lockstep conformity of academics. He was always very suspicious of that.”

  Wolfe earned a doctorate in American studies at Yale, studying under brilliant mavericks such as Norman Holmes Pearson, writing poetry, and reading big-screen social fiction such as John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy. His dissertation was titled “The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942.” Wolfe was offered a job teaching history at a small midwestern liberal arts college, but instead he tried to gather material for novels by taking a job as a furniture mover for a trucking company in New Haven. “Jack London of all people was my model,” Wolfe said. “But I could see that the girls in the offices weren’t impressed. Believe me, there is no insight to be gathered from the life of the working-class milieu.”

  Wolfe decided to pursue a career in journalism, if only because it would allow him to write steadily, without the uncertain financial vagaries of fiction writing. Wolfe wrote letters of introduction to 120 papers all over the country and received only one encouraging response, from the Springfield Union in Springfield, Massachusetts. “They hired me, mainly because they were curious about this guy with a Ph.D. from Yale who wanted to work on their paper,” said Wolfe.

  Wolfe was a general assignment reporter, sometimes working on five stories at the same time, covering the police beat on weekends, then commandeering the night desk, which would give him a $5 bonus on his $55-a-week paycheck. It was an invaluable apprenticeship—for the first time, Wolfe was exposed to the political and cultural machinations of a multiethnic community—but Wolfe was eager to make it in a major city. Delighted by the exciting portrayals of newspaper life to be found in films such as Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page, he hungered for the competition and adrenaline rush of urban newspaper work, where reporters from four different papers might battle it out for a scoop. In 1959 Wolfe took a pay cut and landed a job at the Washington Post, working the city desk.

  Wolfe chafed at the Posts institutionalized, regimented approach to news gathering. “It was very much like an insurance office, with gray metal desks all lined up,” said Wolfe. “You couldn’t eat at your desk, and at one point, they even tried to ban smoking, but everyone just started climbing the walls.” As a cub reporter, Wolfe was beholden to his editors, who tended to assign standard-issue stories to him, which he would then embellish out of sheer boredom, turning crime blotter items into rococo flights of fancy. One time when Wolfe was on night rewrite, a job that required him to write stories from facts fed to him by police reporters, he got a call from the Post’s Les Whitten about a homeless man in the Adams Morgan district who had been shot by a cop—the kind of two-paragraph story that might get buried in the paper. Wolfe pumped Whitten for information: Was the man’s head in the gutter? What was the location of the bullet holes? From this, Wolfe fashioned a story that was pure Raymond Chandler, with a dramatic flourish about the five bullets in the man’s chest forming the perfect shape of a heart.

  Among his fellow reporters, Wolfe gained a reputation as a major talent who refused to abide by the Posts assembly-line methods; he was constitutionally incapable of feeding the maw with merely serviceable copy. “The Post wanted everybody to march in lockstep, and Tom simply couldn’t do it,” said Whitten, who sat three desks away from Wolfe. Most days Wolfe could be found at his desk, leisurely reading the New York Daily News while editors Ben Gilbert and Alfred Friendly stewed and waited for the writer to turn in a story, which would invariably come in too late to run in the first edition. “A lot of us were delighted by that, because we didn’t have the effrontery to do it,” said Whitten. “We admired his fuck-all attitude.”

  Wolfe eventually branched out into international news, writing a long feature on Castro’s newly hatched Cuban revolution “because none of the other writers felt like going to Cuba.” Armed with a portfolio of presentable articles, Wolfe sent off a scrapbook of his clippings to the Tribune’s Buddy Weiss in late 1961. He was hired on the spot at $9,000 a year as a replacement for departing reporter Lewis Lapham. Wolfe’s supercharged copy, Weiss reasoned, was a fitting compliment to the Tribune’s high-definition prose style. After a liquid lunch with John Denson at Toots Shor’s, where the Tribune’s editor made Wolfe pound five drinks at the bar, Wolfe realized that he had made the great leap into the world’s capital of newsprint, and he could hardly believe his good fortune. “This must be the place!” Wolfe wrote a decade later. “I looked out across the city room of the Herald Tribune, 100 moldering yards south of Times Square, with a feeling of amazed bohemian bliss…. Either this is the real world, Tom, or there is no real world.”

  Wolfe may have stood out from the crowd at his previous two jobs, but he was running up against some formidable competition at the Trib. There was Breslin, but also Charles Portis, a gifted general-assignment reporter and fellow southerner from Arkansas who filed some of the era’s best newspaper pieces on the civil rights movement, and Dick Schaap, who had quit his job as the city editor of the paper to write features. Portis and Wolfe would later become friendly when the two worked on the rewrite desk, much to the dismay of rewrite editor Inky Blackman, who felt the two writers bantered too much during lulls. There was also Sanche de Gramont, a French count who won a Pulitzer Prize on the rewrite bank while covering the death of Metropolitan Opera singer Leonard Warren, who in the autumn of 1960 had collapsed from a heart attack in midperformance. De Gramont, who changed his name to Ted Morgan, would later become an acclaimed biographer of Winston Churchill and Somerset Maugham, among others.

  Wolfe was entranced by all the talent in that enormous, clattering, smoke-filled room, with its exposed “electrical conduits, water pipes, steam pipes, effluvium ducts, sprinkler systems all of it dangling and grunting from the ceiling,” the walls painted in “industrial sludge … that grim distemper of pigment and filth.” It was one “big pie factory, a landlord’s dream,” and Wolfe breathed it in lovingly. The southern initiate had found his Valhalla. “I still get a terrific kick out of riding down Park Avenue in a cab at 2:30 in the morning and seeing the glass buildings all around,” said Wolfe in 1974. “I have a real cornball attitude towards [New York].”

  Wolfe stood out from the rolled-up-sleeve culture of the Tribune in more ways than one. At Washington and Lee, he had begun to wear custom-tailored three-piece suits with pocket squares and extra-wide ties—“Tom Sawyer drawn by Beardsley,” one wag would later wr
ite. It was a look Wolfe cultivated in part because his father had dressed that way, and also because it set him apart in a respectably eccentric manner. “I didn’t have any other minor vices,” said Wolfe. “I didn’t belong to a club, I didn’t play tennis or golf or take vacations. My wardrobe budget was the kind of money you spend on a hobby.” Wolfe got his suits custom-made by a traveling employee of the esteemed Savile Row tailor Hicks and Sons for $212. Now he was reporting for work at the Trib in those threads, and it sent a little tremor of speculation throughout the city room. Who was this guy, anyway?

  “I think the thing that really annoyed people was the nipped-in waist,” Wolfe said. “That seemed unpatriotic, a real affectation. But my contention is that all men are fashion-conscious; they just want to fit in. I could have attracted more attention to myself—I could have worn a dashiki, for example—but I wanted to be in the game. The important thing was, I wanted them to say, ‘Who in the name of God does he think he is?’”

  From the start, Wolfe’s stories for the Trib were written in his hyperactive style. Even for a paper that encouraged fanciful departures from the usual gray reportorial formula, Wolfe’s approach stood out. It didn’t matter what the story was about; Wolfe would Wolfeorize it. In a two-column throwaway piece about bad winter weather, Wolfe described a “mean, low-down cold streak, made up of practically every foul blow in the book.” In another early story, Wolfe wrote about frat boys, “with eyes that looked like poached eggs engraved with a road map of West Virginia, those guys who were trying to stumble, stagger, fall down, grope, heave, lurch, list and tetter their way through the lines of an aria called ‘Dirty Lil.’”

  Another early story, which ran on April 13, 1962, reported on a rent strike by New York University students, and the activities of some of the protesting students: