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

by Marc Weingarten

  Latham’s profile of Sally Quinn, which ran a week after the Talese story, provoked even more outrage from its subject. Quinn, at the time a rising thirty-two-year-old star for the Washington Post’s Style section, had recently been hired to host CBS’s morning show in order to create a credible competitor for NBC’s ratings powerhouse Today, which was hosted by Barbara Walters. The article, which was the cover story for the July 16, 1973, issue, made a big deal of Quinn’s sex appeal and implied that the Washington Post writer was perhaps exploiting her female attributes to advance her career. Which wasn’t necessarily actionable on Quinn’s part: Latham, after all, was entitled to speculate about her motives.

  But one passage, in which Quinn allegedly conducted a “Gallup Poll” of penis sizes in Washington, was overheard by Clay Felker at a dinner party hosted by Walter Pincus and his wife, Arin. However, it had supposedly been Washington hostess Barbara Hower, not Quinn, who had sized up the sexual assets of one particular man, not “all the men in Washington.” Quinn was a guest at the party, but she claimed that the quotes about sex that Latham attributed to her weren’t accurate. “I’ve never read anything like this, even about a movie star,” an irate Quinn told the New York Times. “And this is not supposedly Screen magazine. That’s what shocks me.”

  This was all good business for the magazine, which managed to sustain its readership and healthy ad revenue even in the midst of New York City’s fiscal crisis in 1975. That made it an attractive property for a young Australian newspaper magnate who had set his sights on establishing a significant media beachhead in the most important city in the world.

  At the age of forty-five, Rupert Murdoch had built a $100 million empire that stretched from San Antonio to Sydney, largely on the strength of lurid headlines and pinup cheesecake in his tabloid publications. He owned eleven magazines and eighty-four newspapers, the majority of them tabloids, including the New York Post, a paper that he had acquired by sweet-talking its seventy-three-year-old owner, Dorothy Schiff into selling it to him for $32.5 million in November 1976.

  The New York Post acquisition would turn out to be one of Murdoch’s shrewdest moves, and he owed it all to Felker, who had introduced Murdoch to Schiff. As is often the case with ambitious social climbers, the two moved in the same social circles, and inevitably found themselves at the same dinner parties, their embossed placecards conveniently aligned on the same side of the table. Felker and Murdoch had first met in 1973 and had struck up a casual relationship in which the finer points of the publishing business were often discussed and argued. Felker envied Murdoch’s uncanny business acumen, his genius for buying properties at fire-sale prices and growing his empire. Murdoch, for his part, longed for some of the cultural cachet that Felker had accrued with New York. But as anyone in the publishing business understood, it was awfully hard to reconcile both impulses into one enterprise, and both men’s opposing tendencies would soon converge in ways that neither could have anticipated.

  Like Felker, Murdoch had been born into the business. His father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a famous World War I correspondent who had become one of the most famous practitioners of popular journalism in Australia. Sir Keith eventually became managing director of the Herald and Weekly Times, the largest newspaper group in Australia, but significant ownership in the company’s properties always remained just out of his grasp, his efforts at a greater stake blocked by the consortium of bankers and industrialists who maintained an iron grip on majority control. When Sir Keith died, he bequeathed the Adelaide News and the Sunday Mail, the Herald and Weekly Times’ two lowest-circulation papers, to his son and his four daughters.

  Rupert Murdoch came to the newspaper business well prepared and eager to flex his muscle. His academic CV was impeccable: a secondary education at Geelong Grammar, one of Australia’s best boarding schools, and then on to Worcester College at Oxford. But his education in the newspaper business had been hands-on from a very young age. “I was brought up in a publishing home, in a newspaper man’s home,” said Murdoch in 1989, “and I was excited by that, I suppose. I saw that life at close range, and after the age of ten or twelve never really considered any other.”

  Murdoch was studying at Oxford when his father died in 1953, and he wasted no time taking over the daily operations of both papers. He began as an obsessive micromanager, writing stories, designing the layout, and dashing off compelling headlines for the Adelaide News, but editorial stewardship was not what interested him. The goal was not to wind up like his father, who had grown embittered and frustrated by his lack of ownership in the company he helped to build. Two struggling papers would not provide Murdoch with the power and control he craved.

  So he dragged both papers through the tabloid muck and emerged with two winners. Murdoch then merged the Sunday Mail with its most formidable competitor, the Advertiser, and purchased Perth’s Sunday Times with the profits. In what would become standard operating procedure for him, Murdoch fired practically the entire staff of the Sunday Times and remade the sleepy regional paper into a splashy editorial amusement park ride.

  From there, Murdoch’s company, News Corporation Limited, grew exponentially. In 1965 he gambled on The Australian, the country’s first national paper, whose sober-minded coverage of politics and finance veered sharply from Murdoch’s usual tarted-up recipe for solvency. It took fifteen years for The Australian to turn a profit, but more important, it established thirty-four-year-old Murdoch as a serious newspaper publisher, Australia’s answer to the Washington Posts Katharine Graham.

  In 1968, Murdoch acquired England’s largest-circulation Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, in a fierce bidding war with publishing magnate Robert Maxwell. Nine months later, he beat Maxwell to the punch again by snatching up daily tabloid The Sun, then ratcheting up the paper’s prurience. Murdoch published the first nude girlie shots ever to appear in a London paper and ran excerpts from middlebrow erotica such as Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine and J’s The Sensuous Woman. In less than a year, The Sun’s circulation jumped from eight hundred thousand to two million, and it would eventually become the most successful newspaper in Murdoch’s vast media empire.

  Despite the countless business triumphs, Murdoch still longed for the kind of prestige that he could accrue in the States through the acquisition of a quality title. Inch by inch, he began to acquire the stock that would give him majority control of Felker’s magazine.

  Felker was a revered and beloved editor, maybe the greatest magazine runner the city had ever seen, but he wanted to build an empire, perhaps even carry his ambitions beyond New York into national magazines. In 1974, despite a parlous economy, New York had $4 million in the bank and no debt. It was time, Felker thought, for the company to plow that money into another property. After getting Chemical Bank to agree to a $1 million loan, Felker made an offer to buy the Village Voice. If the Voice’s owners accepted, Felker could colonize the newsweekly business in the city and control the two most trusted cultural guides above and below Fourteenth Street. The Voice, which had made its reputation as a muckraker of the radical left, had always maintained a fierce independence from the kind of advertiser-friendly service stories that had become New York’s stock in trade, but Felker insisted that editorial autonomy would be maintained. “They’re passionate about some things, we’re passionate about others,” he told Time. “They can pound away week after week on a single issue in a way that we can’t.”

  New York’s board of directors flatly rejected Felker’s proposal. The magazine was in the black—why would Felker now want to saddle it with debt? But so desperate was Felker to control the Voice that he agreed to a merger with the Voice’s two largest shareholders, Carter Burden and Bartle Bull, even though it meant giving up a controlling interest in the magazine that he had spent ten years cultivating and nurturing until it had become an essential component of the city’s civic life. When the deal was consummated in June 1974, Bull and Burden received six hundred thousand shares of New York Co. sto
ck worth $800,000 and a 34 percent stake in the two weeklies, while Felker’s equity position had shrunk to 10 percent. Burden was now the largest shareholder, with 24 percent.

  “We didn’t foresee the consequences of that decision, how weak it would leave us in terms of control,” said Milton Glaser. “I guess we were blinded by what could have been. It could have been wonderful if there had been some sense of common purpose.”

  Instead of eliciting mutual comity between the two titles, the merger merely bred contempt. Many Voice writers were irate, fearful that their integrity would be compromised by a turn toward glib magazine feature journalism. Voice assistant editor Jack Newfield began writing mock headlines for potential Voice-New York stories, such as “The Favorite Recipes of the Ten Worst Bisexual Judges in New York.”

  The Voice staff’s misgivings were valid, but the verdict was still out as to whether Felker would make any substantive changes. Felker’s loss of control, on the other hand, was absolute. In order to compensate, Felker proposed that the board give him a 50 percent salary bump. It was, he reasoned, proper recompense for an editor and publisher who was now overseeing two weeklies and juggling a byzantine production schedule. Board member Alan Patricof balked; New York wasn’t making enough money to justify the raise, and now that Felker had taken on the Voice, he was inevitably going to burn through more money. But the other board members overruled Patricof, albeit with great reluctance, and Felker got his wish.

  It didn’t quite work out as well for the Voice staff. Shortly after taking over as editor in chief, Felker engaged in a wholesale overhaul of the paper that amounted to a makeover in New York’s image. Milton Glaser was recruited to create a splashy redesign, while Felker fired writers and accepted the resignations of some others. Ron Rosenbaum announced his departure by dramatically tearing up his paycheck over Felker’s desk.

  The way Rosenbaum and other disgruntled writers saw it, Felker was pulling a Murdoch-style mutiny, jettisoning the epic investigative pieces that were the paper’s specialty in favor of catty personality profiles, pithy and pointed jabs at local politicians, and stories that touched on matters of sex, violence, and celebrity. By year’s end, Felker had pumped over $2 million into the Voice, but the net results were dispiriting. First-quarter earnings for 1975 were $46,000, as opposed to $255,000 the year before, and now New York’s losses were mounting, too: $151,000 as against $97,000 during the first quarter of 1974. Patricof and fellow board members Bob Towbin and Thomas Kempner were losing patience with Felker’s profligacy, but they no longer had to answer to him now that the merger had created a power vacuum in which Burden and Bull were controlling partners. So Patricof tried to orchestrate an end run.

  Carter Burden was not a man well suited to the calculated maneuvers of corporate power brokering. A scion of the Vanderbilt fortune who was reared in the embalmed, old-money culture of Beverly Hills, Burden was a prominent bleeding-heart dilettante in the city, throwing high-profile fund-raisers in his River House compound, which featured indoor tennis courts and a private heated pool—parties that were ripe targets for “Radical Chic” ridicule. In the fall of 1969 Burden, who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, announced his candidacy for City Council from the Fourth District, and won with more than 80 percent of the vote.

  Felker didn’t hesitate to send up Burden’s political ambitions with a little deflating mockery. Julie Baumgold’s cover story on Burden and his wife, Amanda, for the January 19, 1970, issue of New York stopped short of ridicule, but Baumgold’s Wolfeian touch was unmistakably patronizing, from the way Burden’s campaign buttons had given his wife “pinpricks on all her Ungaro’s” to the way Baumgold described Carter, a rich man’s son who was now the civic steward of East Harlem, as a “second-year Columbia Law student from peach stucco Beverly Hills” who had now become a foe of “lead-based paint and landlords.”

  Burden’s inner-city Camelot didn’t last long. In 1974 he divorced his wife, who had carried on an affair with Ted Kennedy, and the bottom fell out of his political career. That year, Burden had the worst attendance record on the City Council. “Burden was such a pipsqueak in my view,” said former New York senior editor Byron Dobell.

  Patricof recognized in Burden a man of means who longed to become a man of substance, and the acquisition of the Voice with his old Harvard classmate Bartle Bull was the first lurching move toward that reinvention. “Carter Burden was a very nice man who was looking for a place in life,” said Milton Glaser. “He had decent instincts, but he did not have a forceful personality. He and Clay had a visceral dislike for each other.” The New York merger was going to solidify his standing in the world’s media capital, but with a fractious board of directors and a fiercely autonomous editor in chief with whom he had already tangled, the path toward ratifying his status as a publishing magnate was strewn with thorns.

  Patricof, who had made his fortune running a private investment firm that had struck it rich in railroads, animal feed, and meat distribution, was intent on maximizing short-term profits in order to keep New York’s stock price at a comfortably profitable level for shareholders, but Felker’s determination to expand the reach of his power beyond New York complicated matters. Ever since Patricof had attempted to dilute Felker’s power by requesting that he sell a percentage of his stock to Jimmy Breslin in 1971, the two had been at loggerheads over just about every aspect of the magazine’s operational budget; now the situation was becoming untenable.

  In April 1976 Felker extended his reach to the West Coast by establishing New West as a California analogue to New York, but he had overspent on his upstart costs by nearly a million dollars. Much of that money, Patricof felt, had been spent frivolously on exorbitant expense accounts by the New West executive staff, who were tooling around L.A. in leased Alfa Romeos. Felker was convinced it was money well spent, goodwill that would curry favor with advertisers in virgin territory, but Patricof complained about the cost overruns and aired his grievances to Burden.

  His back to the wall, Felker attempted a palace coup of his own, convincing Burden that the removal of Patricof and founding board member and Felker critic Bob Towbin from the board would be in the company’s best interests. But without the leverage of controlling stock, Felker’s overture meant little to the board, and Patricof and Towbin remained.

  Back and forth it went like an Ealing farce, with Patricof and Felker trying to manipulate Burden behind each other’s backs. Glaser was adamantly opposed to giving Burden, whom he regarded as weak and ineffectual, any more power than he already had, but the publishing business wasn’t that abstruse; perhaps Felker and chief financial officer Ken Fadner could teach him the basics, reward him with a token editorial position, and win an ally in the process. But a crash tutorial had borne out Glaser’s misgivings: Burden could barely wrap his mind around the most fundamental concepts, but that didn’t stop him from submitting an attendance bill to the company for a total of $8,725.

  Sidestepping Burden, Patricof held clandestine meetings with all of the board members, trying to convince them that Felker’s irresponsible spending would lead the company to ruin. No one budged until the fall of 1976, when Patricof took his grievances public and began actively searching for a buyer for the company in order to definitively wipe the ledger clean.

  While Patricof was recruiting a buyer, Felker was trying to convince Burden to sell him his stock, but Burden, who didn’t know whether to fish or cut bait, refused to respond. The word on Wall Street was less ambivalent—if someone approached Burden with the right price, he might be willing to sell. Powerhouse investment firm White, Weld and Co. had the perfect candidate: Rupert Murdoch, who had just purchased the New York Post and was looking for more properties to increase his stateside market share.

  Murdoch had been apprised of the internecine battles between Felker and the board by his investment banker, Stanley Shuman, and it pleased him: a board divided against itself cannot stand. If he could get verbal agreements with Towbin, Kempne
r, and Patricof to buy their stock, he could then approach Burden with a price and gain control. Felker would be out of the picture without having had any say in the matter.

  New York’s editor in chief knew none of this on November 29, the day before Shuman called Patricof, when Felker and Murdoch sat down to discuss the fate of New York. “What you ought to do,” Murdoch told him, “is borrow a lot of money in order to own something like 51 percent, then work your tail off for two or three years, scrimp and save and pay off the thing, you’ll own 100 percent and then you don’t have to take any crap from anybody.”

  Two weeks later, Murdoch summoned Felker to his office on Third Avenue to discuss purchasing the company for $6 a share, with the proviso that Felker could retain ownership of New West—that is, if he agreed to buy it from Murdoch for a million dollars. Two days later, Felker called Murdoch to inform him that there was no deal.

  “New York had a different meaning to Clay than it did to me,” said Milton Glaser, who had continued to run Push Pin Studios while working on New York. “It was his child and the center of his life. To me, it wasn’t, even though I loved the magazine. I just felt very sorry for Clay.”

  Felker was under siege. Murdoch was closing in on a hostile takeover, and Felker didn’t have the financial resources to counter it. The company had only one other resource at its disposal, a right-of-first-refusal clause in the shareholder’s agreement that would give Felker fifteen days to match any third-party offer made for Burden’s stock. But he had to move fast: New York’s stock was trading heavily, which raised suspicions that Murdoch might already be maneuvering for control.

  Felker sought council from his friend Felix Rohatyn, a mergers-and-acquisition specialist who had made a fortune for his firm, Lazard Frères. Rohatyn suggested that perhaps Washington Post owner Katharine Graham might be interested in helping out. Rohatyn, Felker, and Graham worked up an offer of $7 a share for Burden’s stock, which Burden’s lawyer, Peter Tufo, agreed to in principle. It seemed like a perfect fit: Graham would put up the capital and the company would be folded into the Washington Post, with Felker retaining complete editorial control.