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

by Marc Weingarten

  Norman Mailer also retreated from print journalism but didn’t give up the practice entirely. The Executioner’s Song, his epic about Utah killer Gary Gilmore, was the end result of hundreds of hours of interviews conducted by the writer and his partner, Lawrence Schiller. The Executioner’s Song won Mailer his second Pulitzer prize in 1980.

  As the years wore on, Hunter S. Thompson continued to fitfully produce good work, particularly during his brief run in the mid-1980s as a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, when he inveighed against the evils of Reagan-era villains such as George H. W. Bush, Oliver Stone, Jim Bakker, Ed Meese, and the Gipper himself. By the late 1990s, Thompson’s output had slowed considerably. He was no longer writing consistently for any print publications; instead there was a sports column for ESPN.com that was really a wide-open forum for whatever was on Thompson’s mind come deadline’s eve. Despite some occasionally hilarious and insightful pieces, it seemed an odd place for Thompson to land. Some claim that he was too strung out on drugs to produce another significant book; others claimed he was just letting his legacy speak for itself and leaving the present to younger people.

  Thompson loved to talk about his salad days, but there was a wistful, almost rueful catch in his voice when the past was discussed. Two years before fatally shooting himself on February 20, 2005, he summed it all up thusly:

  The sixties were a distinct time, a trip. I looked around and I saw a lot of intimidating voices out there, but I never had to think about pleasing them. I had editors who let me write what I wanted to write, and I worked hard at it. It was no free ride, but it was a very exciting, intoxicating time for me. But it took me a while to realize that it’s not gonna come back. Not in my lifetime, not in anyone else’s.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  “Look … we’re coming out once a week”: Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 250.

  “Zonggggggggggg!”: Lillian Ross, “Red Mittens!”The New Yorker, March 16, 1965.

  “If we tell someone”: Hooking Up, 251.

  He reeled off a letter: Ibid., 253.

  “They have a compulsion in the New Yorker offices”: Ibid., 256.

  “The New Yorker comes out once a week”: Ibid., 278.

  Excerpts from Dwight Macdonald’s counterattack on“Tiny Mummies” are from“Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe & His Magic Writing Machine,”New York Review of Books, August 26, 1965; and“Parajournalism II: Wolfe and The New Yorker,” New York Review of Books, February 3, 1966.

  1. RADICAL LIT: SOME ROOTS OF A REVOLUTION

  “In New York in the early 1960s”: Tom Wolfe and E. W Johnson, eds., The New Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 47.

  Roots of print journalism: Franklin Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690-1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962); George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline Wingate, Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London: Constable, 1978).

  “There is likewise … great advantage”: Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal, 1729.

  “We thought we almost saw the dingy little back office”: Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, excerpted from The Oxford Illustrated Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957).

  Background of Joseph Pulitzer: James McGrath Morris, The Rose Man of Sing Sing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 964.

  “I went down into the under-world of London”: Jack London, The People of the Abyss, Gutenberg Project e-book 1688 (1999; transcribed from the Thomas Nelson and Sons edition), available at www.gutenberg.org/etext/1688, 1.

  Biographical background of George Orwell: Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980).

  Page 16 “There was … an atmosphere of muddle”: George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986).

  In the introduction to the French edition of the book: Crick, George Orwell, 187.

  “The five-gallon can”: A. J. Liebling, “The Foamy Fields,”The New Yorker Book of War Pieces (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), 147.

  “I guess I’d been thinking from the beginning”: Jonathan Dee, “Writers at Work: John Hersey,”Paris Review, Summer-Fall 1986.

  “The journalist is always the mediator”: Sybil Steinberg, ed., Writing for Your Life: 92 Contemporary Authors Talk About the Art of Writing and the Job of Publishing (Wainscott, N.Y.: Pushcart Press, 1992), 255.

  when Kennedy ran for the House of Representatives: Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Scribner, 2000), 184.

  Background on the origins of the writing of Hiroshima: Ibid., 183-93.

  “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight”: John Hersey, “A Reporter at Large: Hiroshima,”The New Yorker, November 1, 1946.

  “Mrs. Nakamoto”: Ibid.

  “I don’t believe”: Lillian Ross, Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), 34.

  “Bogart nodded”: Lillian Ross, “Come In, Lassie!”The New Yorker, February 21, 1948.

  “‘Come In, Lassie!’ taught me how to watch and wait”: Lillian Ross, Ibid., 34.

  “About our old piece—the hell with them!”: James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 574.

  “As I spent time with the characters”: Lillian Ross, Here but Not Here (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998), 90.

  “Huston as a person is almost too interesting”: Ibid., 90-91.

  “I’m on the first floor”: Lillian Ross, Picture: 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), 23.

  Ross’s anecdote about Nicholas Schenck: Here but Not Here, 101-2.

  “It was as strange to me”: Jane Howard, “How the ‘Smart Rascal’ Brought It Off,”Life, January 7, 1966.

  “People who don’t understand the literary process”: Ibid.

  “It wasn’t a question of my liking”: Ibid.

  Using John Hersey’s Hiroshima as a model: Yagoda, About Town: 347.

  “My theory”: Howard, “‘Smart Rascal.’”

  “During this visit Dewey paused at an upstairs window”: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (New York: Random House, 1965), 153.

  The New Yorker fact checker found Capote to be the most accurate writer: Yagoda, About Town, 347.

  2. THE GREAT AMERICAN MAGAZINE

  “the publishing equivalent of a lemonade stand”: Robert J. Bliwise, “The Master of New York,”Duke Magazine, September-October 1996.

  One day Carl came home: Ibid.

  Background on Arnold Gingrich, the founding of Esquire, and the internecine battle between Hayes, Ginzburg, and Felker is taken from Arnold Gingrich, Nothing but People: The Early Days at Esquire (New York: Crown, 1971) and Carol Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, But Didn’t We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), as well as interviews with Clay Felker and Ralph Ginzburg.

  “I floundered around for four or five years”: From a speech given to Wake Forest students by Harold Hayes, Wake Forest University Archives, Winston-Salem, N.C. (henceforth WFA).

  “His persistent refusal to accept an ordinary approach”: Harold Hayes, “Making a Modern Magazine,” WFA.

  “Arnold’s removal from the heat of everyday activity”;“They wore the same kind of clothes”: Harold Hayes, “Building a Magazine’s Personality,” from an unpublished memoir, WFA.

  “our drinking editor”: Gingrich, Nothing but People, 207.

  “a test of lung power”: Ibid., 205.

  “I spent the whole afternoon reading these things”: Bliwise, “The Master of New York.”

  “Early in his act”: Thomas B. Morgan, “What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?”Esquire, October 1959.

  “Well, Dave, baby”: Ibid.

  “It takes a terribly long time”: Ibid.

  “I had a hard time writing about Brigitte”: Thomas B. Morgan, Self-Creations: 13 Impers
onalities (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), 98.

  “Brigitte swung around the car again and again”: Thomas B. Morgan, “Brigitte Bardot: Problem Child,”Look, August 16, 1960.

  “TIME: Afternoon”: Thomas B. Morgan, “David Susskind: Television’s Newest Spectacular,”Esquire, August 1960.

  “I really think the watershed book was Advertisements”: Hilary Mills, Mailer: A Biography (New York: Empire Books, 1982), 194.

  “He had the deep orange-brown suntan”;“Eisenhower’s eight years”: Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermart,”Esquire, November 1960.

  “enormously personalized journalism”: Mills, Mailer, 195.

  “a more active control of all our materials”: Hayes memo to Gingrich, WFA.

  Details of the Felker-Sahl confrontation can be found in Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty.

  “the rakish fashion of the Continental boulevardier”: Gay Talese, Unto the Sons (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 6.

  three hundred columns: Barbara Lounsberry, “Portrait of a (Non-Fiction) Artist,” available www.gaytalese.com.

  “I learned [from my mother]”: Gay Talese, “Origins of a Nonfiction Writer,” in Gay Talese and Barbara Lounsberry, Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 2.

  “Sports is about people who lose”: Lounsberry, “Portrait of a (Nonfiction) Writer.”

  As the men talked: Gay Talese, “Portrait of a Young Prize Fighter,”New York Times, October 12, 1958.

  “I am currently trying to gather”: Talese letter to Harold Hayes, February 24, 1960, WFA.

  “New York is a city of things unnoticed”: Gay Talese, “New York,”Esquire, July 1960.

  Page 63 a piece that Village Voice writer: Hentoff letter to Hayes, September 18, 1961, from WFA.

  “it seemed he might be involved”: Talese, “The Soft Psyche of Joshua Logan,”Esquire, April 1963.

  when Talese read back the story to Logan: Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty, 60-61.

  “I had become almost an interior figure”: Talese and Lounsberry, Writing Creative Nonfiction, 106.

  “It is not a bad feeling with you’re knocked out”: Gay Talese, “The Loser,”Esquire, March 1964.

  “And so then you know”: Ibid.

  3. KING JAMES AND THE MAN IN THE ICE CREAM SUIT

  The Herald Tribune’s lineage: Richard Kluger, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).

  The history of the New York Herald Tribune is recounted in extraordinary detail by Richard Kluger in his book The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. All of the historical background is taken from this book.

  “I get there and I can’t find her”: Jimmy Breslin, The World of Jimmy Breslin (New York: Viking, 1967), 19-20. Introduction to“The Reds.”

  “keep all storms in my life offshore”: Jimmy Breslin, I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 24.

  “Without Throneberry”: Jimmy Breslin, “The Mets,”The World of Jimmy Breslin, 17-18.

  “I never thought about how to do a column”: Jimmy Breslin, The World’ of Jimmy Breslin, introduction, xv.

  “It’s news reporting”: Jack Newfield, “An Interview with Jimmy Breslin,”Tikkun, February 23, 2005.

  “were a little poorer than some”: Jimmy Breslin, The World of Jimmy Breslin, 31.

  “Marvin the Torch never could keep his hands”: Ibid., “Marvin The Torch,”34.

  “Yes, sir?”: Ibid., “Jerry the Booster,”42.

  “into a shape like a bowling ball”: Tom Wolfe and E. W Johnson, eds., The New Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Tom Wolfe, “The New Journalism,”13.

  The New York Times’s metropolitan editor A. M. Rosenthal: Jimmy Breslin: The Art of Climbing Tenement Stairs, radio documentary produced by Jon Kalish for KCRW

  One day in March 1964: David W Dunlap, “If These Walls Could Publish …,”New York Times, August 25, 2004.

  The call bothered Malcolm Perry: Jimmy Breslin, “A Death in Emergency Room One,”The World of Jimmy Breslin, 169.

  “A guy’s weight”:“Keep Me Going,”Newsweek, May 6, 1963. Unsigned.

  When Pollard got to the row of yellow: Jimmy Breslin, “It’s an Honor,”The World of Jimmy Breslin, 177-80.

  “different spectators have suggested”: Toby Thompson, “The Evolution of Dandy Tom,”Vanity Fair, October 1987.

  Page 84 “Jack London of all people was my model”: Elaine Dundy, “Tom Wolfe … But Exactly, Yes!”Vogue, April 15, 1966.

  “This must be the place!”: Wolfe and Johnson, eds., The New Journalism; Tom Wolfe, “The New Journalism,”4.

  “electrical conduits,” “industrial sludge,” “big pie factory”: Ibid.

  “I still get a terrific kick”: Joe David Bellamy, “Sitting Up with Tom Wolfe,”Writer’s Digest, November 9, 1974.

  “Tom Sawyer”: Dundy, “Tom Wolfe … But Exactly, Yes!”

  “mean, low-down cold streak”: Tom Wolfe, “Miserable Weather to Continue; Ships, Aircraft, Shores Battered,”New York Herald Tribune, December 8, 1962.

  “with eyes that looked like poached eggs”: Tom Wolfe, “He Elevates Fraternities,”New York Herald Tribune, December 2, 1962.

  “A willowy co-ed”: Tom Wolfe, “600 at NYU Stage Lusty Rent Strike,”New York Herald Tribune, April 13, 1962.

  “usual non-fiction narrator”: Wolfe and Johnson, eds., Tom Wolfe, “The New Journalism,”The New Journalism, 17.

  “Is that Joan Morse”: Wolfe, “The Saturday Route,”The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 223.

  “When I reached New York in the sixties”: Wolfe and Johnson, eds., Tom Wolfe, “The New Journalism,”The New Journalism, 30.

  “When great fame”: Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968; Bantam edition, 1978), 8.

  “Here you are, boy, put your name right there”: Tom Wolfe, “The Marvelous Mouth,”Esquire, October 1963.

  “It’s the automobile that’s the most important story”: Emile Capouya, “True Facts and Artifacts,”Saturday Review, July 31, 1965.

  “I don’t mind observing”;“Plato’s Republic for teenagers”;“They’re like Easter Islanders”;“shaped not like rectangles”: Thomas K. Wolfe, “There Goes (VAROOM! VAROOM!) that Kandy-Kolored (THPHHHHHH!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (RAHGHHHH!) Around the Bend (BRUMMMMMMMMMMM …),”Esquire, November 1963.

  4. TOM WOLFE ON ACID

  “he appeared in a white-on-white”: Elaine Dundy, “Tom Wolfe … But Exactly, Yes!”Vogue, April 15, 1966.

  “wild and ironic”: Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 4.

  “Once an athlete so valued”: Ibid., 5.

  “thick wrists and forearms”: Ibid., 7

  “Despite the skepticism I brought here”: Ibid., 27

  “only in poor old Formica”: Ibid., 31.

  “Their faces were painted in Art Nouveau swirls”: Ibid., 391.

  “The first part”: Tom Wolfe, “The Author’s Story,”New York Times Book Review, August 18, 1968.

  “So far nobody in or out of the medical profession”: Wolfe, “Super-Hud Plays the Game of POWER,”New York World-Journal Tribune, February 5, 1967 300

  Page 110 “I owe the National Observer in Washington”: Letter from Thompson to Wolfe, in Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman: The Fear and Loathing Letters, Volume 1 (New York: Villard, 1997), 524.

  “several hours of eating”: Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 220.

  Certain vibrations of the bus: Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 110.

  A very Christmas card: Ibid., 55.

  Miles, Miles, Miles: Ibid., 47.

  [S]ome blonde from out of town: Ibid., 176.

  “Certain passages—such as
the Hell’s Angels gangbang”: From an interview sent to the author from Paul Krassner, used with Krassner’s permission.

  “The ceiling is moving”: Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 40.

  Wolfe would revert to a“controlled trance”;“I felt like my heart”: Toby Thompson, “The Evolution of Dandy Tom,”Vanity Fair, October 1987

  5. THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD

  Biographical background on Joan Didion is taken from Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Random House, 2003) and Michiko Kakutani, “Joan Didion: Staking Out California,”New York Times, June 10, 1979.

  “I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl”: Linda Kuehl, “The Art of Fiction No. 71: Joan Didion,”Paris Review, Fall-Winter 1978.

  “Nothing was irrevocable … the shining and perishable dream itself”: Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That,”Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 229-30.

  “the way the rivers crested”: Didion, Where I Was From, 157.

  “paralyzed by the conviction that the world”: Kakutani, “Joan Didion: Staking Out California.”

  “Most of my sentences drift off, don’t end”: Kuehl, “The Art of Fiction.”

  “So they had come … to see Arthwell”: Joan Didion, “How Can I Tell Them There’s Nothing Left?”Saturday Evening Post, May 7, 1966.

  “adolescents drifted from city to torn city”: Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,”Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 84.

  “Debbie is buffing her fingernails”: Ibid., 92.