A willowy co-ed with Godiva-length blonde hair came forth from the throng and, to symbolize the approach of a new day, showed how she combed her lavish locks each morning: 20 runs from head to hips along each strand. Some applauded rhythmically and others chanted: Yes, yes.
The salient facts of the story weren’t Wolfe’s primary concern, although he always had them all in place; the idea was to set the scene with an accretion of peculiar details that other reporters might find tangential, but which were in fact crucial to the event in question—and to Wolfe’s meticulously constructed mise-en-scéne. “I learned that from Gay Talese, who was very good at reporting a story until you had the little things that helped bring the big things to life,” said Wolfe. “You just had to be around, hang out.”
Wolfe might hold off on the expository “nut graph” until the middle of the piece and forcefully guide the reader into the story from some other starting point, pulling back slowly to reveal the true subject. Wolfe’s language was something else entirely, a vivid Technicolor vernacular that had editors scratching their heads and fellow Tribune writers wondering just what the hell he was doing. In Wolfe’s stories, the East River was “chilled hogwash,” paperback books were “white-meat slabs of revelation and culture,” Grand Central Station was “the glamour depot of the East.” The florid language was in part derived from Wolfe’s love of southern patois, the rich, honeyed speech patterns of Virginia’s native sons and daughters. But he also loved the gossip sheets and pulp magazines of his youth, the slangy prose of Confidential and True Detective magazines, with their playful double entendres, lurid metaphors, and adjectival sprees.
His main literary influence was a school of Russian avant-garde writers he had read at Yale called the Serapion Brothers, who came of age during the 1920s and were thus under pressure to produce agitprop for Stalin. Instead, they rebelled against literary conformity and pledged anethic of absolute freedom from doctrine, state-sponsored or otherwise. The movement’s leader, Eugene Zamiatin, was a brash and formally brilliant satirist, a naval engineer who also wrote plays, short stories, and novels. His major work, We, which was published in 1929, was a savage indictment of Soviet collectivist groupthink that presaged Orwell’s 1984. But it was Zamiatin’s prose that had a profound impact on Wolfe’s work—the way he broke up sentences with ellipses in order to mimic nonlinear thought, and liberally used exclamation points. Wolfe’s habit of writing stories in the historical present—a conceit that would become a trademark of his Esquire stories—was picked up from a popular biography of Napoleon by Polish writer Emil Ludwig that was published in the States in 1925. Wolfe became enamored of Ludwig’s style as an eight-year-old, transcribing passages from Ludwig’s book into his own heavily plagiarized biography of Napoleon.
He folded all of it into his articles—anything to avoid sounding like the “usual non-fiction narrator with a hush in my voice, like a radio announcer at a tennis match.”
Jim Bellows worked him ragged, but Wolfe chafed at the space restrictions he was given in the daily paper. Not all of the subject matter was that interesting, either—writing stories about the new baggage carts at Grand Central or the increase in liquor tax wasn’t going to rock the city to its foundations. He needed an outlet such as the one the Times’s Gay Talese had with Esquire, and he wouldn’t have to look very far to find it.
Today’s Living, the magazine supplement of the Trib’s Sunday edition, had been an Achilles’ heel for years, but Bellows was open to new ideas. Working with editor Shelly Zalaznick and Clay Felker, Bellows mapped out some basic ideas for the magazine, which would be renamed New York. Each week Breslin and Wolfe would contribute a story. A staff of arts columnists, including classical music critic Alan Rich, film critic Judith Crist, and theater critic Walter Kerr, would be featured in the Lively Arts section. Design editor Peter Palazzo would create a classy template that would give the entire Sunday paper a nice lift. And, just to make sure everyone at least rifled through it, the TV listings would go in the back of the book.
Clay Felker, working closely with Shelly Zalaznick as an editorial consultant, orchestrated Tom Wolfe’s transition from workaday general assignment reporter to magazine feature writer. “It’s rare to find someone with real insight into good ideas, but Clay had the ability to match the right writer up with the story,” said Zalaznick. Given Bellows’s directive to come up with stories for Wolfe, Felker thought the reporter might be interested in a piece on the mad moneyed oglers who swarmed the art galleries every Saturday afternoon on Madison Avenue, the city’s high-end retail artery. A shade over three thousand words long, “The Saturday Route” was the longest story Wolfe had filed for the Trib, and it started a run of pieces in which Wolfe observed the rituals of Manhattan’s cultural tribes with a mixture of gentle mockery and the bemused wonder of a Virginia transplant:
Is that Joan Morse, the fabulous dressmaker, over there on the curb? With that fabulous Claude yellow heath coat, those knee-high Rolls Royce maroon boots and the biggest sunglasses since Audrey Hepburn sunbathed on a cantilevered terrace in the Swiss Alps? Well, it has to be Joan Morse.
“Joan!”
And there at Madison Avenue and 74th Street Joan Morse, owner of A La Carte, which ranks in fabulosity with Mainbocher, swings around and yells: “Freddie! I saw you in Paris, but what happened to you in London?”…
One is not to find out immediately, because the light has just changed. Joan is doing the Saturday Route down Madison Avenue. Freddie is doing the Saturday Route up Madison Avenue. But they keep on walking because they know they will meet sooner or later at Parke-Bernet and catch up on London.
Cinched in by the two-column stories he was filing for the paper, Wolfe’s style took off like Air Force One in New York. Wolfe and Felker became the paper’s trend spotters, with Wolfe filing stories on subjects that the Trib never would have taken seriously before: record producer Phil Spector, the Peppermint Lounge nightclub, stock car racing on Long Island. Two days a week, he was cranking out straight news stories as a general assignment reporter; the other three days were blocked off for a fifteen-hundred-word feature to run in New York. “Tom once told me that his body had taken more of a beating from writing than from playing baseball,” said Elaine Dundy, a writer who dated Wolfe during the Tribune era.
In the Trib newsroom, opinion was divided as to whether the Virginian was a brilliant talent or just a facile trickster, a careerist with a marketing hook. Some, such as Jimmy Breslin, respected Wolfe as a dogged reporter who worked as hard as anyone to get his stories. “Everyone would make such a fuss about his clothes, but I knew he was a serious reporter, someone who did the legwork,” he said. Others, including city reporter Dave Burgin, didn’t understand what the fuss was about. “I didn’t get it myself,” said Burgin, who commiserated with a number of Trib writers who thought the paper’s “Manhattan fop” was getting too much attention from Bellows. “Some guys were insanely jealous of him,” said Burgin. “But no one, not even Bellows, could get him to take the punctuation out. I remember one guy, a business writer, told me, ‘If I thought an exclamation point or two would get me a raise, I would have done it a long time ago.’”
Wolfe was fascinated by the insurgency of urban youth, largely because he felt it was the story of the decade, and he had the territory all to himself. “When I reached New York in the sixties, I couldn’t believe the scene I saw spread out before me,” Wolfe wrote in the New Journalism anthology. “New York was pandemonium with a big grin on.”
What fascinated Wolfe were the myriad ways in which people with money were carving out new ways of living—novel approaches to leisure time, new choices in music, fashion, and film, and most important, new approaches to flaunting status. For Wolfe, New York was one big collection of “statuspheres,” each with its own rules of engagement and hierarchies based on fame, style, and infamy, rather than archaic notions of an established social order. “When great fame—the certification of status—is available without great pro
perty,” Wolfe wrote in the introduction to The Pump House Gang, his 1965 anthology, “it is very bad news for the old idea of a class structure. In New York … it is done for, but no one has bothered to announce its death.”
As a southern outsider trying to carve his own niche in New York’s hotly competitive newspaper world, the notion of self-made status appealed to Wolfe. “Wolfe is a kind of aristocrat, but he doesn’t admit it,” said Gay Talese. “He’s southern gentry, but he’s a classy man. The best manners I’ve ever seen. There is a combativeness about him, but Tom never spoke ill of anyone.”
Esquire editor Byron Dobell had spotted a story that Wolfe had written, about the 1962 gubernatorial campaign between Nelson Rockefeller and district attorney Robert Morgenthau, and contacted him about writing pieces for the magazine. His first published piece for Esquire, a profile of heavyweight contender Cassius Clay called “The Marvelous Mouth” that ran in the October 1963 issue, was trouble from the start. Clay wanted Esquire to pay him for the interview. Harold Hayes rejected that idea outright: most subjects were proud and honored to be interviewed by Esquire. Clay didn’t want honor; he wanted cash. Hayes finally agreed to pay Clay $150—$50 when he met with Wolfe, $50 during the second interview, and $50 when Wolfe’s time with him was completed.
During Wolfe’s first meeting with Clay, which took place at the Americana Hotel in Times Square, Wolfe noticed that the champ wore the call letters of the New York radio station WNEW on his black tie—a small endorsement deal that paid him $150. Clay begged Wolfe not to mention it in his article. “As it turned out, the Louisville syndicate that handled Clay didn’t want him to have any money, so he wouldn’t wind up like so many boxers, with big entourages and distractions,” said Wolfe.
Clay had so many reservations about Wolfe’s questions that the formal sit-down interview was virtually useless. Wolfe soon realized that he would get his story by observing Clay in his element—the Gay Talese technique of “just hanging out.” Trailing Clay to the Metropole Café, where the fighter was swarmed by goggle-eyed fans, Wolfe took notice of the quiet grace and dignity of the fighter, the unflappable cool. At one point the reporter noticed a white man, “obviously a Southerner from the way he talked,” requesting an autograph:
“Here you are, boy, put your name right there.”
It was more or less the same voice Mississippians use on a hot day when the colored messenger boy has come into the living room and is standing around nervously. “Go ahead, boy, sit down. Sit in that seat right there.”
Cassius took the Pennsylvania Railroad receipt without looking up at the man, and held it for about ten seconds, just staring at it.
“Where’s your pen?”
“I don’t have a pen, boy. Some of these people around here got a pen. Just put your name right there.”
Cassius still didn’t look up. He just said, “Man, there’s one thing you gotta learn. You don’t ever come around and ask a man for an autograph if you ain’t got no pen.”
The notion for Wolfe’s next Esquire story was inspired by the annual car show at the New York Coliseum, in which numerous examples of the latest custom cars—or “Kustom Kars,” in West Coast insider’s parlance— from Los Angeles were on display. Wolfe, who was covering the show for the Tribune, was fascinated by the cars—tricked-out hot rods with exposed engines, bold graphics, blue- and red-flake paint jobs, designed by little-known customizers such as Dale Alexander, George Barris, and Ed Roth. “It’s the automobile that’s the most important story today,” Wolfe told Saturday Review in 1965. “The automobile dominates society. To incredible numbers of people, the automobile is a cult object.” Wolfe pitched Esquire on a piece on custom cars—he would fly to Los Angeles and observe the phenomenon in its natural element, then write a feature with far greater scope than even New York magazine could accommodate.
Wolfe was overwhelmed by what he saw in L.A. It was the efflorescence of what he had witnessed in small doses in New York—the youth movement writ large. At the Teen Fair, an annual event in Santa Monica that functioned as a kind of pop-cultural World’s Fair, produced by a few savvy businessmen, Wolfe witnessed the West Coast statuspheres—the surfers, the drag racers, the fruggers and twisters—converge on an event that combined rock music, teen product peddlers, and most important, the flamboyant custom cars of Barris, Roth, Von Dutch, and others. He went to Barris’s shop, Kustom City, in North Hollywood, where Barris showed him how the cars were manufactured and then painstakingly painted and airbrushed. “Wolfe spent many hours, many days with me. He even came over to the house and cooked dinner with my wife,” said Barris. “He wanted to know everything about the cars, and it was great for me, because of the publicity.”
Wolfe had an abundance of interview material, but he was flummoxed as to how he should organize it into a cohesive story. What he lacked was a thesis, a compelling through-line that could justify three thousand words. He knew that the custom car subculture was unprecedented, but what did it represent? For a week he sat in front of his typewriter in his studio apartment in Greenwich Village, waiting for inspiration to strike, watching TV and doing sit-ups to keep himself occupied.
A call from Wolfe to Byron Dobell put the Esquire editor on alert that a story might not materialize after all. The magazine’s art department already had a color photo of a Barris car from the New York show in place, and the magazine’s production schedule dictated that stories with color art had to go to the printers first, before the rest of the issue. Esquire’s small budget couldn’t accommodate a rewrite man to fashion the story from Wolfe’s notes; if Wolfe couldn’t make it work, then Dobell would write a few paragraphs to accompany the picture, and that would be the story.
“I was anxious to get something,” said Dobell. “Wolfe always had difficulties with deadlines, but we were ready to roll without any text. I just asked him to tell me enough information so I could write the copy myself.”
Wolfe was panicked. Starting at eight o’clock one night, he sat down and began typing a memo to Dobell that described everything he had seen in L.A., from the moment he first laid eyes on Barris’s cars to the goings-on at the Teen Fair. Fueled on coffee (a habit he would kick a few years later) and an AM radio blaring Top 40 pop, Wolfe didn’t stop typing until six-fifteen the next morning; by that time, the memo had swelled to forty-nine typewritten pages. He walked to Esquire’s offices as soon as the place opened at nine-thirty, and turned in his memo to Dobell.
“I read it and thought, ‘Well, this is something new,’” said Dobell. “The story was there, even though Wolfe didn’t know it. I walked into Harold Hayes’s office and said, ‘Don’t worry, this is an astonishing piece.’ It was well worth all of the strain and nervousness.”
Dobell barely amended it, excising a few vernacular asides (“He had a lot of ‘for Christ sakes’ in there for some reason, little filler kind of things”) and crossing out the “Dear Byron” salutation at the top of the memo. The throat-clearing headline—“There goes (VAROOM! VAROOM!) that Kandy-Kolored (THPHHHHHH!) tangerine-flake streamline baby (RAHGHHHH!) around the bend (BRUMMMMM-MMMMMMMMMMM …)”—was editor David Newman’s.
A thesis had emerged from the accretion of detail that Wolfe had recorded in the memo, namely, that custom cars represented an overlooked episode in contemporary art history, the convergence of postwar prosperity with a new, ritualized formalism that wasn’t beholden to, or even cognizant of, anything that had preceded it. “I don’t mind observing,” Wolfe wrote in the story, “that it is this same combination—money plus slavish devotion to form—that accounts for Versailles or St. Mark’s Square.”
“My definition of art is anything that you can take out of its natural environment and regard as something that’s beautiful and significant unto itself,” said Wolfe. “Customized cars were art, with those exposed motors and shiny chrome parts.” In the story Wolfe made grand claims for custom cars as high art on a par with the works of Brancusi, Dalï, and Mondrian—perhaps even more significant
. He called the Teen Fair a “Plato’s Republic for teenagers” and wrote that the cars meant more “to these kids than architecture did in Europe’s great formal century, say 1750 to 1850. They are freedom, style, sex, power, motion, color—everything is right there.” Wolfe framed Barris and Ed Roth, the other major customizer in L.A., as outsider artists working under the cultural radar. “They’re like Easter Islanders,” Wolfe wrote of their custom cars. “Suddenly you come upon the astonishing objects, and then you have to figure out how they got there and why they’re there.”
Everywhere he looked on the streets of Los Angeles, Wolfe found vernacular art. The city’s buildings were “shaped not like rectangles but like trapezoids, from the way the roofs slant up from the back and the plate-glass fronts slant out as if they’re going to pitch forward on the sidewalk and throw up.” Here was a New York-based writer giving serious consideration to West Coast culture in all of its magnificently gaudy (as in Gaudi) splendor. For Esquire, a magazine that regarded New York as the epicenter of just about everything, Wolfe’s story was a revelation, evidence of life on the other side of the country.
“When I started writing in what became known as my style, I was trying to capture the newness and excitement of the West Coast thing,” said Wolfe. “It’s where all the exciting youth styles were coming from. They certainly weren’t coming from New York. Everything I was writing about was new to the East Coast.”
Hayes loved it, but Felker wasn’t pleased that Wolfe was moonlighting for Esquire when he should have been writing his longer features exclusively for New York. Once again, Hayes and Felker found themselves at loggerheads, with Wolfe in the middle. “None of us were really pleased with the arrangement, especially Clay,” said Shelly Zalaznick. “I hated the idea of Tom working for others, but it was something that Tom had worked out with Bellows, and so we really couldn’t do anything about it.”
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 12