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

by Marc Weingarten

  Mailer views the marchers as artists in their own right, appropriating the iconic images of popular culture and subverting them into the pagaentry of a freak parade:

  The hippies were there in great number, perambulating down the hill, many dressed like the legions of Sgt. Pepper’s Band, some were gotten up like Arab sheiks, or in Park Avenue doormen’s greatcoats, others like Rogers and Clark of the West, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone in buckskin, some had grown mustaches to look like Have Gun, Will Travel—Paladin’s surrogate was here!—and wild Indians with feathers, a hippie gotten up like Batman, another like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man—his face wrapped in a turban of bandages and he wore a black satin top hat… They were being assembled from all the intersections between history and the comic books, between legend and television, the Biblical archetypes and the movies.

  Mailer is constantly shifting between enthusiasm and enervation in “The Steps of the Pentagon.” Look to the feel of the phenomenon, Dwight Macdonald had told him; “If it feels bad, it is bad.” Nothing is excised for propriety’s sake, neither the pissing incident at the Ambassador nor Mailer’s contempt for middle-class liberalism and its phony pieties (“He had no sense of belonging to any of these people. They were much too nice and much too principled for him”), his timidity in the face of law enforcement, his “gloomy hope” for the children of the march, “twenty generations of buried hopes perhaps engraved in their chromosomes, and now conceivably burning like faggots in the secret inquisitional fires of LSD.” The march, Mailer agrees, was a just and proper demonstration of outrage, but is the left really any match for the infernal power of “technology land”? It was the same dialectic that Mailer pondered in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”: Can a nation beholden to consumer culture be transformed by a movement that wanted to banish its coarsening impediments to social reform?

  Thus “The Steps of the Pentagon” worked on two levels: as an adroit disquisition on the events surrounding the march, but also a speculative essay about a nation that had sacrificed its ingenuity on the altar of technology and the corporation, and loosed its wild, untamed energies upon imaginary enemies using the Cold War as its organizing principle.

  [T]he center of Christianity was a mystery, a son of God, and the center of the corporation was a detestation of mystery, a worship of technology … The love of the Mystery of Christ, however, and the love of no Mystery whatsoever, had brought the country to a state of suppressed schizophrenia so deep that the foul brutalities of the war in Vietnam were the only temporary cure possible for the condition—since the expression of brutality offers a definite if temporary relief to the schizophrenic.

  But there is also a generosity of spirit, however grudgingly offered, in Mailer’s clear-eyed examination of both his motives and those of the other participants on both sides of the barricade. He’s acutely observant and shrewdly self-aware. If the marshals seethe with malice, it’s only because they are products of social engineering, the Pentagon’s malleable instruments of power. He is capable of empathetic feelings for his enemies, even if they are merciless oppressors.

  As for Mailer’s own motivations, they are never reconciled. His short time as an imprisoned detainee presents him with a moral dilemma—to do right by the movement or by his family, to serve whatever sentence might await him or scramble back to the comforts of his middle-class life. Instead of the polemical flame-thrower, here is Mailer offering himself up as flawed and vulnerable to feelings of cowardice and shame. “To have his name cheered during a season at every deadly dull leftist meeting to raise money—he would trade such fame for a good hour’s romp with the—yes, doomed pater familias—with the wife and kids.”

  When Mailer, after considerable negotiation on the part of his lawyers, is released on bail pending appeal, he feels cleansed and possessed of something virtuous, even beatific, at its core, “not unlike the rare sweet of a clean loving tear not dropped, still held.” But to what extent had the protest and its aftermath impacted the consciousness of the country? Mailer isn’t entirely sure. “Some promise of peace and new war seemed riding the phosphorescent wake of this second and last day’s siege of the Pentagon, as if the country were opening into more and more on the resonance of these two days, more that was good, more that was bad.”

  “The Steps of the Pentagon” inspired more letters than any other article in the century-plus history of Harper’s. Some readers of the magazine were outraged at Mailer’s language and requested subscription cancellations. Others were delighted to find such a nuanced take on the present American crisis in the pages of the magazine. Mailer was taken aback by the avalanche of letters that had flooded into Harper’s offices. “All these people sitting all over America writing these letters,” he told Morris. “They’re carrying on a conversation with a magazine as if a magazine itself were a human being.”

  Mailer had another section prepared for publication—“The Battle of the Pentagon,” a thirty-thousand-word examination of the origins of the march, a careful analysis of the sectarian battles and failures of the Old Left and new guard, and the price paid in violence and bloodshed—but Morris rejected it for space reasons. In hindsight, he was right to turn it down; “The Battle of the Pentagon” lacks narrative punch because Mailer isn’t in on the action as a character. Instead, Decter’s husband, Norman Podhoretz, published it in the April issue of Commentary.

  When New American Library published both articles in book form as The Armies of the Night, it brought Mailer the best reviews of his career since The Naked and the Dead. The Nation’s Alan Trachtenberg singled out Mailer’s “brilliantly demonstrated coincidence between the objective event and the subjective experience” and regarded the book as nothing less than a “permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility.” Henry S. Resnik in the Saturday Review praised Mailer’s “amazing stylistic virtuosity” and “breathtaking verbal cadenzas.” In his lead review of The Armies of the Night in the May 5, 1968, New York Times Book Review, Alfred Kazin compared Mailer to Walt Whitman, another writer who “staked his work on finding the personal connection between salvation as an artist and the salvation of his country.” Kazin found Mailer’s balancing act as a reporter of the personal and the political as dexterous an amalgam as Whitman’s great Civil War diary, “Specimen Days.” “Mailer’s intuition in this book is that the times demand a new form,” Kazin wrote. “He has found it.”

  In 1969, Mailer was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer prize in nonfiction for The Armies of the Night.

  THE KING OF NEW YORK

  For Clay Felker, “The Steps of the Pentagon” was the one that got away In early 1966 he had offered Mailer an assignment for the New York World-Journal-Tribune, the awkwardly titled new iteration of the Tribune that had resulted from a merger of that paper, the World-Telegram, and the Journal-American. Felker’s plan was for Mailer to file dispatches for the paper from Vietnam, reporting on whatever he saw fit. Mailer wasn’t sure if he was up to it; it had been more than twenty years since he had seen the horrors of combat up close. Resorting to a familiar negotiating tactic that he used whenever he felt unsure about a prospective assignment, Mailer played hardball with Felker and Jim Bellows; none of his stories could be cut for space or content, and all of them had to appear on the front page of the paper. It was only fair, Mailer reasoned, for the Tribune to make some concessions if Mailer was going to risk his life for the paper.

  Contracts were drafted, and Mailer was set to go, but Jock Whitney’s paper, which had been losing money and readership to the New York Times and the city’s tabloids since the early 1960s, folded on May 5, 1967, in the midst of a labor dispute involving the newspaper merger. Felker’s great experiment in newspaper New Journalism seemed over as well.

  Felker had been tipped off to the Trib’s demise by Jimmy Breslin, who called him the night before the announcement. Over drinks at the Monsignore bar, Breslin and Felker commisera
ted, toasted their achievements at the Trib, and pondered their next move. Breslin suggested that they somehow keep New York magazine afloat. Too much of their blood and sweat had gone into the supplement, Breslin said. They couldn’t let New York, the best general-interest magazine in the city, die with the paper. New York was the best thing about the Tribune, the number one reason why nearly 83 percent of female readers and 75 percent of male readers bought the Sunday Trib every week. It was incumbent upon Felker to try to save it.

  Felker was intrigued. Certainly no other newspaper would give him the creative latitude he had enjoyed at the Trib, and a return to the staid precincts of conventional journalism was unfathomable. “I saw the impact of the magazine,” said Felker. “I was committed to it. And I knew the formula was right.”

  So he decided to take Breslin’s advice and attempt to establish a stand-alone magazine that would retain New York’s spirit and, he hoped, the same cast of contributors. For Felker, it would be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream: to finally own a magazine. “I never thought about the risk,” said Felker. “It had nothing to do with bravery. It was a dream I had and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try.”

  In order to create a prototype, Felker enlisted Milton Glaser, the brilliant thirty-eight-year-old graphic designer who had contributed some freelance drawings to New York and had cowritten with Jerome Snyder a column called “The Underground Gourmet.” A graduate of New York’s Cooper Union and a Fulbright scholar, Glaser founded Push Pin Studios in 1954 along with fellow Cooper Union alumni Seymour Chwast, Ed Sorel, and Reynold Ruffins. Push Pin quickly established itself as a cutting-edge commercial design firm—“The Beatles of illustration and design,” according to writer Steven Heller—eschewing more lucrative advertising commissions for venturesome magazine, poster, and album cover art work, anything that might offer a creative challenge for the erudite and imaginatively fecund team of Glaser, Ruffins, and Chwast. The operative word was eclectic; Push Pin found ideas anywhere and everywhere—comic strips, Art Deco, Italian Renaissance painting, Victorian typography, even their own medicine cabinets—combining disparate design elements into an aesthetic of funhouse formalism that transformed the design industry. Push Pin’s images became lasting visual icons; Glaser’s famous 1967 poster of Bob Dylan, which combined a chiaroscuro profile topped by a Technicolor tangle of hair, became the most famous rock poster of the decade.

  Glaser was no stranger to magazine publishing; he had helped produce fifteen issues of the Push Pin Almanack, a compendium of the firm’s work that was sent to potential clients as a bait for commissions. Felker thought of Glaser as the greatest designer of his time, an artist sensitive to the beauty and sensuality of typography, to how the careful juxtaposition of words and images could convey an attitude and a subtextual complexity that moved beyond the mere shilling of product. “Milton is a certifiable genius,” said Felker. “Before he undertakes a project, he takes the time to understand what the potential market might be for whomever it is directed, what message the client is trying to convey. He is a man for whom design with a point of view is crucial.”

  The push and pull between Felker, the mercurial idea man, and Glaser, the oracular, intellectual guru, would result in one of the most fruitful collaborations between an editor and an art director in the history of American magazine publishing. “Glaser edited Clay in a way,” said Pete Hamill, an early contributor to New York. “If Clay had an idea, Milton would say, ‘That’s great, but what’s the illustration gonna be, what’s the headline?’ He helped Clay conceptualize notions into workable ideas.”

  The idea was to emulate the editorial and graphic template of the New York supplement, the assumption being that those Tribune readers who harbored goodwill toward the defunct paper would migrate to the newsstand edition. But there was a stumbling block; Felker couldn’t use the name New York, which remained the property of Jock Whitney. Other names—Metro, Gotham, The Express, The Metropolitan, even New York, New York—were floated. Tom Wolfe suggested New York Moon, so when a new issue hit the stands, ads could proclaim, “The Moon is out!”

  But Felker wouldn’t give up on New York so easily. It took six months of negotiations with the World-Journal-Tribune’s president, Matt Meyer, to acquire the name, during which time Glaser and Felker, with assistance from Jimmy Breslin, freelancer Gloria Steinem, and other Trib writers, continued to tinker with a prototype to present to potential investors. Other Tribune alumni, such as New York managing editor Jack Nessel and Eugenia Sheppard, the most respected fashion writer in the country, whose Tribune column had been syndicated in over a hundred papers, would also join the fold. “We didn’t know what we were doing at first,” said Felker. “We had to design for a smaller page now, the logo had to be stronger. It took us nearly a year to figure everything out.”

  In November 1967 Meyer relented, and the name was purchased by Felker for the price of his severance pay—$6,575.00. With a mock-up in hand, Felker—accompanied in many instances by the comely Steinem, whom he used as a beard to soften up potential investors—began trying to raise money on Wall Street. The first targets were the lowest-hanging fruit. His old friend Armand Erpf a partner in the investment firm Loeb, Rhoades and Co., had always been intrigued by the publishing world, and the two of them had idly discussed the idea of starting up a city magazine for years. Now Felker was ready for Erpf to ante up.

  Erpf was a major power broker, which made him an appealing partner for Felker. A patron of the arts, Erpf lived lavishly among the spoils of his Wall Street fortune. His Margaretville, New York, mansion was filled with modern art; its sculpture garden, with its giant Henry Moore bronzes, rivaled any domestic museum’s collection. “Armand was an utterly fascinating character,” said George Hirsch, who joined the New York team as publisher from Time-Life’s international division. “He used to have these dinner parties that were like salons, with people from the arts and finance coming together to discuss a wide range of subjects. He was a legendary figure in his time, and I don’t use that word lightly.”

  Erpf and Felker made the rounds of Wall Street and the city’s cultural elite and, after many months of appeals, accrued a group of $25,000-or-more investors: Loeb, Rhoades CEO John L. Loeb, Great Western United Corp. Chairman William White Jr., mergers and acquisitions specialist Alan Patricof investment bankers Dan Lufkin and Bob Towbin, Joseph E. Seagram and Sons president Edgar Bronfman, Random House cofounder Bennett Cerf All told, Erpf scraped together $2.4 million (Erpf himself contributed $100,000). The magazine was a limited partnership, with participations distributed among its board of directors. Felker, publisher George Hirsch, and Milton Glaser represented management on the board, while Erpf and Patricof represented the money. Token amounts of stock were also distributed to contributing editors Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and “Adam Smith,” the pseudonym of financial writer and portfolio manager George J. W Goodman. Glaser cut Felker a deal for his time and office space: Glaser would work for $25,000 a year and provide rent-free offices for the magazine in Push Pin’s walk-up townhouse at 207 East 32nd Street.

  In October 1967 Felker and his eight editorial staffers moved in, bringing along some discarded furniture from the Tribune’s offices to fill it up, including John Whitney’s conference room chairs and Helen Rogers Reid’s mahogany desk. Felker and Hirsch worked out a production schedule that would allow them to begin publishing in April 1968. T. Swift Lockard was brought on as advertising director, and an aggressive direct mail campaign—with prizes as incentives, no less—was initiated in order to attract charter subscriptions. Half of the start-up investment was eaten up by the campaign, which resulted in sixty thousand subscribers.

  “You get hooked on this city,” Clay Felker wrote in a mission statement sent to potential advertisers. “You want to revel in it and rail at it…. You want to participate in this city because it is alive…. New York is the quintessence of urban civilization…. New York is, in fact, the capital of the world…. We want to be the weekly mag
azine that communicates the spirit and character of contemporary New York.”

  New York’s strength would be good writing, according to Felker, because “it’s what reading is all about.” The magazine would provide a multifarious view of the city: “Jimmy Breslin’s New York, and Tom Wolfe’s New York, and Adam Smith’s Wall Street, and Eugenia Sheppard’s Seventh Avenue and Harold Clurman’s theatres …”

  Felker printed 250,000 copies of the first issue, which sold for 40 cents and featured a color-saturated cover shot by Jay Maisel of the Manhattan skyline as seen from the East River. It didn’t stray far from the Tribune iteration of the magazine, but it had more heft. Lockard and his team wrangled up enough clients for the premiere issue to produce sixty-four ad pages, with advertisers paying $1,250 for a black-and-white page and $2,010 for a color page.

  There were subtle but significant design changes. The elegant New York logotype, based on the Caslon typeface, became thicker and bolder; the “scotch rule” border that enclosed the logotype on the old New York was eliminated. Instead, Glaser placed one scotch rule above the logo, and left space above it for “teasers” that would clue in readers to the magazine’s editorial content each week. The scotch rule would be used as a unifying design element within the magazine as well. Many of the popular features of the Trib-era New York were retained, such as Glaser and Snyder’s “Underground Gourmet” column, which scoped out the best ethnic cuisine in the city; and the Felker creation “Best Bets,” a two-page spread of coveted products that became the first destination in the magazine for many of its female readers.