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

by Marc Weingarten

  If the sixties didn’t really begin until Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, then they ended in 1972, when the left’s last offensive against Nixon sputtered and fizzled out. It would take a final, epic act of hubris on Nixon’s part for him to be removed from the White House for good, but if Watergate was sweet vindication for Thompson, it was a sobering cautionary tale for Mailer. “Richard Nixon is one of the great American villains, but that is not because he tried to cover up a scandal,” Mailer wrote in 1976. “Rather he is a villain by way of the twenty-five years he did his best to murder the English language with a margarine of pieties—he is a villain because he had a negative charisma.” While it was true that Nixon “was awful—with a force larger than himself,” he was also a a litmus test for liberal forbearance. “The liberals failed. If Richard Nixon had been standing alone on the street and a thousand nonviolent liberals had been standing around him with flails, they would have beaten each other to death in their rush to get at him.” Nixon’s fumbling perfidy had inflamed both the left and the right and had distorted the political discourse beyond recognition: “He had scorched reason a little further out of existence.”

  VULGARIAN AT THE GATE

  The ideological breakdowns of the sixties were a bitter disappointment to Thompson, Mailer, and all of those journalists who truly believed that they just might bear witness to a great American political awakening. But Nixon was reelected, the New Left splintered and faded, and Haight-Ashbury became a seedy countercultural Disneyland. There was a new revolution afoot, but it was directed inward, toward the cultivation of one’s own personality, mental health, and physical well-being. It was the era of encounter sessions, EST, group therapy. Tom Wolfe called it the third great American awakening, a natural evolution arising from the drug experimentation and communal living of the previous decade. The Me Decade, for short. “Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to,” Wolfe wrote in his 1976 New York story “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “for better or worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American luxury: the luxury enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self.”

  This was good news for Clay Felker and New York. The magazine, which had positioned itself as an essential how-to manual for well-heeled urban survivalists, only benefited from a cultural movement toward self-fulfillment, as such a trend tended to involve material self-fulfillment as well.

  New York had undergone a number of transformations in the five years since Felker had established it as a stand-alone publication, the most significant of which was a move toward service features. Felker ran stories that rated the best of everything New York had to offer: doctors, pastrami, Chinatown grocery stores, Tiffany lamps, whatever. The magazine provided card-carrying members of the Me Decade with tips for the best yoga classes and African-dance lessons. In converting New York into a lifestyle magazine, Felker created an editorial template that would be re-created in regional periodicals all over the country; by 1976, over seventy imitators had sprouted up nationwide.

  Many of the writers who had established New York’s reputation had defected or found more remunerative homes. Gloria Steinem, whose career as a serious political writer had blossomed at New York, was moving toward a determined commitment to fight for women’s reproductive rights and political representation, having campaigned on behalf of the women’s caucus at the 1972 Democratic convention. Steinem was frustrated by Felker’s lack of interest in the women’s liberation movement. It was a curious blind spot for Felker, who did more to advance the cause of female journalists of his time than any other male editor. When Steinem first broached the idea of writing about the struggle for women’s rights, Felker suggested that the magazine do a cover story about the need for more domestic help now that both spouses in many families were working.

  New York eventually did cover women’s issues, but Steinem felt that the magazine equivocated—Steinem wrote pro-equality pieces, while Julie Baumgold and Gail Sheehy argued the opposing view. One such article’s headline read, “Waking Up from Women’s Liberation—Has It Been All It’s Cracked Up to Be?”

  And yet when Steinem was struggling mightily to launch a women’s magazine in 1971, Felker came to her aid. After trying for months to raise funds for the start-up with little success, Steinem approached Felker for help. His solution was to run a 30-page excerpt of the proposed magazine in the year-end double issue of New York, then publish a 130-page preview of the magazine to test the waters. New York would keep all of the advertising revenue from both the insert and the preview and half the newsstand profits for the market-testing issue. Beyond that, New York would have no continuing interest in the venture. Thus Ms. was born, and Steinem was on her way to becoming the face of women’s lib.

  Tom Wolfe’s output for New York had slowed to a trickle. In 1972 he embarked on the most ambitious writing project of his career thus far—a history of the U.S. space program, from John Glenn to the Apollo missions. The Right Stuff, whose eventual historical scope Wolfe truncated considerably, took seven years to complete, but Rolling Stone, not New York, would publish three excerpts in 1973. The rest of his major magazine pieces of the seventies, with the exception of “The Me Decade,” would run in Esquire and Rolling Stone.

  It wasn’t all bodegas and bialys at New York, however. The magazine was still capable of producing trenchant pieces on the machinations of power in City Hall and the boardrooms of Wall Street, and its best writers could sense cultural currents long before the national press caught up. Contributing writer Richard Goldstein’s January 8, 1973, article on the Continental Baths and its star attraction, Bette Midler, alerted the magazine’s readers to a thriving gay subculture in their midst, and Susana Duncan’s piece on anorexia nervosa a few weeks later was one of the earliest mainstream features on the eating disorder. But New York was no longer reinventing regional magazine journalism the way it had in the early days. Investigative journalism was being supplanted by a move toward “Top Ten” service features and softer lifestyle stories. Banal covers such as “200 Things You Can Buy for $1” and “The Sound of the Cornball Invasion,” a story on country music in the city whose cover featured Tony Randall with a corncob in his ear, were the rule rather than the exception. It was working, however: New York pulled in $9.7 million worth of advertising in 1973.

  In the early seventies, a time when the overall magazine market was soft due to a national recession, Felker and his staff relied on a time-honored lure for newsstand sales: suddenly the cover was being graced by a procession of female models, even when the subject matter didn’t warrant it. A story on graffiti, for example, featured a comely woman being scrawled upon with spray paint. In February 1973 the magazine devoted an entire issue to couples and draped a red XXL bathrobe over a naked man and woman for the cover.

  Jimmy Breslin wanted no part of New York’s move toward service and lifestyle features and the uptown elitism of which, in Breslin’s opinion, Clay Felker was so enamored. “Felker was never much of an editor in my view,” he said. “He was good at taking ideas from other people, but not much else.” There was a halfhearted attempt by Breslin at an editorial mutiny, in which the writer, with the help of publisher George Hirsch, who felt Felker was too extravagant with his own expense account, tried to right the course back to investigative journalism by doing an end run around Felker and wresting control of the magazine through the board of directors. It backfired miserably when the board fired Hirsch in the winter of 1971, leaving Breslin in the lurch. Breslin resigned shortly thereafter.

  “Breslin doesn’t like me, but there’s a good reason for it,” said Felker. “He wanted to change the direction of the magazine, and I didn’t do it. He really wanted New York to be more of a political magazine. He wanted to know why we were doing stories about life in Manhattan and ignoring what was happening in East Brooklyn. But I felt that advertisers were buying a responsive audience and I could provide it for them.”

  Without Breslin’s moral
conscience and Wolfe’s keen satirical eye, New York’s New Journalism was now being adulterated in the service of sensationalism. In the skillful hands of regulars such as Gail Sheehy or Julie Baumgold, New Journalism was a powerful tool, but it had to be wielded carefully. Given the freewheeling artistic license Felker permitted, the temptation to embellish the facts could be tempting. The first rule of New Journalism as laid down by Tom Wolfe, who published his anthology The New Journalism in 1973, was that whenever the style roamed freely, the facts had to be unassailable. Otherwise, the technique collapses, and its legitimacy along with it. When Hunter Thompson wrote that Ed Muskie was an Ibogaine addict, the claim was so outlandish that it entered the realm of metaphor—a Swiftian stab at character elucidation. When Sheehy conflated characters and senior editor Aaron Latham wrote about events he didn’t witness firsthand, however, it created a credibility crisis for the magazine and called into question the whole enterprise of New Journalism.

  Sheehy’s most ambitious undertaking for New York to date was a sprawling, multipart examination of prostitution in New York—not only Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen, but the glittering precincts of wealth along the Upper East Side and the $500-a-night suites in the Waldorf-Astoria. For six months Sheehy melded into the seedy milieu of streetwalkers and their pimps, slowly gaining the confidence of the various sex workers she encountered, and walking the Lexington Avenue beat during the peak hours for business—6:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. Occasionally she would be accompanied by her brother-in-law, Bernie Sheehy, who posed as a john or a peep show operator, thus providing an entry point for Sheehy to talk to her subjects. Over time, Sheehy gained the trust of a handful of prostitutes; she even had the great good fortune of being able to stash her tape recorder under a few fleabag hotel beds in order to record the seismic activity that transpired there. She interviewed cops and assistant DAs as well, and followed prostitution lawyers from criminal court to their favorite watering holes.

  “Redpants and Sugarman,” the first of five installments in the series, took up the entire feature well of the July 26, 1971, issue, and it was more sexually graphic and existentially bleak than anything New York had attempted before. Even Walter Pincus, a stockholder in New York’s holding company Aeneid Equities, questioned the use of so much explicit detail, and wondered whether the magazine was compromising its standards by publishing borderline smut. The story focused on Red-pants, a black prostitute whom Sheehy encountered, and her initiation into the business of organized sex. Sheehy chronicles Redpants’s passage from aspiring fashion model to her infamy as a star among the stable of girls controlled by her pimp, Sugarman, a “voluptuous figure of a man, radiantly clothed,” who kept his charges in an apartment building in the Murray Hill district of Manhattan.

  By utilizing her gift for mise-en-scène and shaping a gripping narrative from reams of source material, Sheehy elevated hustling from TV movie cliché. Less a cautionary tale than a look at how New York’s working girls mortgaged their futures by tapping into the thriving, quick-return economies of sex and petty theft, “Redpants and Sugarman” spared no detail. Sheehy was privy to everything, as in this scene at the Lindy Hotel, where Redpants is about to turn a trick with a john:

  “That’s $7.75, pal.” The john fills out a registration card. Halfway up the staircase the couple is stopped by a shout from the tattooed man.

  “Hey, you’re man and wife, right?” Redpants giggles.

  “Right.”

  Speaking as a professor to a new student, he points to the registration card. “Well, you gotta put it down, sweetheart.” Of course, his protection.

  Nothing in the front room but a glass night lamp on a table and set flat out under the windows like a cheap plastic placemat, the bed. Above it rattle curtains of plastic brocade. Fluorescence intrudes; across the street is a block of windows framing eccentric postal workers at their night labors. Fixing on those windows, she bites down on the plastic brocade curtains and gives him fifteen minutes for 30 dollars.

  The national press picked up on the series; Newsweek called Sheehy “the hooker’s Boswell” and praised her vividly detailed reporting. Tom Wolfe wrote Sheehy an admiring letter, noting that the story “gives you such a rich emotional experience, from inside the skull, as it were, but also more to think about than all the bales of prostitution stories in the past.”

  But for some close readers of the series, particularly the “Redpants and Sugarman” installment, Sheehy’s vivid details were a red flag indicating that something was amiss—there were too many undocumented statistics, anonymous sources, and interior monologues. Sheehy dissembled at first, claiming that “the original Redpants made an appointment to see me, but the other girls said they’d cut her up if she talked.” The editors had neglected to publish a disclaimer explaining that the character of Redpants in the story was in fact a composite of many different prostitutes Sheehy had encountered in her research.

  “Nobody had the good sense to realize what the hell we were doing,” said former senior editor Shelly Zalaznick. “I knew the full meaning of the French word chagrin—I had a feeling of hopeless stupidity about the whole thing.” Zalaznick allowed that a simple disclosure would have obviated the need to defend Sheehy’s reporting after the fact, but he admits that the piece “was so seductive, you were swept into it and it suspended any disbelief of any kind. Everyone read it in manuscript, and it should have occurred to somebody to check it all out.” Former senior editor Jack Nessel, who edited the piece, has a more pragmatic explanation for the lapse: “There was really no such thing as composite characters in New York in those days, Adam Smith notwithstanding, which is why no one thought of it.”

  Jack Nessel thinks Sheehy’s eagerness to please Felker played a significant role. “I think Clay was in love with Gail from the start of their professional relationship, and she was extremely willing to be molded by him,” he said. “Clay wasn’t a writer—he needed people to be his writing implements, to set down his ideas on paper—and Gail fit the bill. They played into each other’s needs. If ambition could be incarnated, it would look like Gail. I’ve never seen any man or woman as ambitious as her.” (Felker and Sheehy were married in 1984.)

  For traditional journalists who disparaged New Journalism and regarded its biggest stars with skepticism and a twinge of jealousy, Sheehy’s gaffe was the beginning of the end of New Journalism. “New Journalism is rising,” the Wall Street Journal wrote, “but its believability is declining.” It was hard to dispute that, in the absence of a published disclosure or some explanation of Sheehy’s methods, “Redpants and Sugar-man” was New Journalism run amok.

  Sheehy wasn’t the only New York writer whose methods were called into question during the post-Breslin era. Two profiles by Aaron Latham were criticized by their subjects for massaging facts and not using proper editorial discretion. Latham, a former Esquire editor, had been assigned to write a profile of Gay Talese. Harold Hayes’s favorite writer had already written two best-sellers— The Kingdom and the Power, a history of the New York Times, and Honor Thy Father, the first insider account of the inner workings of the Mafia, which had sold over 2.2 million copies in paperback. Talese’s reputation as the most meticulous and aggressively immersive journalist in America had only been burnished by the two books, and now he was researching his most ambitious project; a history of American sexual mores, for which he had been paid $1.9 million by Doubleday as part of a two-book deal.

  A key component of Talese’s research involved working as the night manager in two different massage parlors in Manhattan, the Middle Earth and the Fifth Season; Latham, in true New Journalism fashion, decided to accompany Talese on his rounds in the summer of 1973. The piece, “An Evening in the Nude with Gay Talese,” shocked readers who regarded Talese as a prim and proper gent, a writer who was rarely photographed without a suit and tie. Here was Talese in various stages of undress, engaging in erotically charged situations with sex workers:

  Amy reached out and took hold of Gay�
��s penis as calmly as if it had been a pool cue. She was ready to play a new game.

  “I’m going to tear it off,” she said.

  “I love it, I love it,” he said. “Do it. I have dreams about it. I have fantasies about it.”

  Amy continued to tug gently at Gay as if his appendage were the knob of some reluctant bureau drawer.

  Gay kidded, “Next time I work there you can chain me and then whip me.”

  Amy said, “I’d hit you with a chair.”

  Gay said, “I love chairs, especially Chippendale.”

  Talese felt that Latham’s article, while factually accurate, lacked the dignity and compassion that he brought to the subject of professional sex, but Latham was merely abiding by New York’s new code of sensationalism, in which New Journalism was callously exploited. It was what Hunter Thompson had carped about in Hell’s Angels, the “supercharged hokum” of the mainstream press resorting to certain “disparities in emphasis and context” in order to pump up the noise of a story.