The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
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“wearing a reefer coat”: Ibid., 127
“Every day I would go into [Allene Talmey]’s office”: Kuehl, “The Art of Fiction.”
“Hathaway removed the cigar from his mouth”: Joan Didion, “John Wayne: A Love Song,”Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 34-35.
“Joan Didion is one of the least celebrated and most talented writers”: Dan Wakefield, “Places, People and Personalities,”New York Times Book Review, July 21, 1968.
6. MADRAS OUTLAW
“Wolfe’s problem”: Hunter S. Thompson, “Jacket Copy for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 1979), 108.
Page 125 “I’ve always felt like a Southerner”: E. Jean Carroll, Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson (New York: Dutton, 1993), 25.
“I had a keen apetite for adventure”: Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 10.
“Turn back the Pages of history”: Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 (The Fear and Loathing Letters, Volume 1) (New York: Villard, 1997), 5.
“In short, we both know”: Ibid., 10.
“no one is hanging over me”: Ibid., 16.
“The whole thing”: Ibid., 39.
“rebel and superior attitude”: Ibid., 59.
“If this path leads up”: Ibid., 76.
“Do you realize that sunlight”: Ibid., 112.
“Goddammit, Hills”: Ibid., 168.
“It was not so much the money”: Ibid., 272.
“I am going to write massive tomes from South America”: Ibid., 312.
“As it turned out”: Hunter S. Thompson, “A Footloose American in a Smuggler’s Den,”The Great Shark Hunt, 347.
“I tried driving a cab”: Craig Vetter, “The Playboy Interview: Hunter S. Thompson,”Playboy, November 1974.
“To my mind”: Thompson, Proud Highway, 489.
“quietly hysterical for five hours”: Ibid., 494.
“The difference between the Hell’s Angels”: Hunter S. Thompson, “Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders,”The Nation, May 17, 1965.
“The moral here”: Thompson, Proud Highway, 529.
“For reasons that were never made clear”: Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 47.
“I overslept”: Ibid., 106.
“grouped around a gray pickup”: Ibid., 107.
“When I went on runs with them”: Vetter, “The Playboy Interview.”
“like being caught in a bad surf”: Thompson, Hell’s Angels, 135.
“I was so firmly identified”: Ibid., 137.
“was convinced that he’d died”: Ibid., 226.
“When I grabbed the guy”: Vetter, “The Playboy Interview.”
“using the dome of the rearview mirror”: Ibid.
Review excerpts: Richard M. Elman, The New Republic, February 25, 1967; Leo Litwak, New York Times, January 29, 1967.
“There is not much argument about basic facts”: Thompson, Hell’s Angels, 34.
“Into first gear”: Ibid., 262.
“The best of the Angels”: Thompson, Proud Highway, 618.
7. INTO THE ABYSS
“The existential heroes”: Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 236.
“We have to confront them”: William Prochnau, Once upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett—Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles (New York: Vintage, 1996), 11.
“You couldn’t believe anybody”: Ibid., 22.
Page 148 “Of course I’d read that [George Goodman story]”: All John Sack quotes, as well as the back story of M, are taken from transcripts of a series of 1993 interviews conducted by Carol Polsgrove; the quotes are used with Polsgrove’s permission.
“This week’s Time”: Letter from John Sack to Harold Hayes, October 25, 1965, WFA.
“combat with all of its wild inanities”: Ibid.
“Jesus Christ”: Letter from Harold Hayes to Sack, October 28, 1965, WFA.
“These would be the only expenses”: Sack to Hayes, November 5, 1965, WFA.
“stiff IBM cards”: John Sack, M (London: Corgi/Avon, 1986), 24.
“the purist for whose sensibilities”: Ibid., 57.
“Peoples, all of your khaki shirts”: Ibid., 58.
“the Vietnamese in the village”: Ibid., 108.
“to kill, wound, or capture”: Ibid., 123.
“In actual fact”: Ibid., 166.
“A cavalry sergeant”: Ibid., 168.
“Rotarians”: Michael Herr, “Fort Dix: The New Army Game,”Holiday, April 1966.
“Send any and all pictures”: Telegram from Hayes to Sack, June 16, 1966, WFA.
“You don’t understand your story”: Polsgrove interview transcript.
“One, two, three”: Sack, M, 11.
“[T]he Marines had fought”: Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Popular Library, 1962), 78.
“Burn, burn, burn”: Sack, M, 134.
“Charlie tries to creep up on me”: Ibid., 183.
M reviews: Publishers Weekly, unsigned;“Two Sides of Our Side,” Neil Sheehan, The New York Times, May 14, 1967; Leonard Kriegal, The Nation, October 23, 1967.
8. HELL SUCKS
“higher journalism,” “the best kind of journalism,” “extended vignettes”: Carol Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, But Didn’t We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 172.
“I don’t have a journalist’s instincts”: Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), 33.
“Conventional journalism”: Michael Herr, “The War Correspondent: A Reappraisal,”Esquire, April 1970.
“As an overwhelming, unavoidable fact”: Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty, 172.
“This lapse of four months”: Cable from Herr to Hayes, November 15, 1967, WFA.
“I was twenty-seven years old”: Schroeder, Vietnam, 34.
“Tet changed everything here”: Letter from Herr to Hayes, February 5, 1968, WFA.
“passed through so many decimated towns and cities”: Ibid.
“Where we have not been smug”: Ibid.
Page 165 “There are two Vietnams”: Letter from Herr to Hayes, May 4, 1968, WFA.
“$3,000 a month digs”: Ibid.
“For all the talk”: Schroeder, Vietnam, 38.
“We know that for years now”: Michael Herr, “Hell Sucks,”Esquire, August 1968.
“made this an entirely different war”: Ibid.
“It stayed cold for the next ten days”: Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1991), 68.
“The eyes are ice-blue”: Herr, “Hell Sucks.”
“I think the [television] coverage”: Schroeder, Vietnam, 38.
“extraordinarily perceptive”: Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty, 176.
“He’s fiction”: Letter from Herr to Hayes, May 18, 1968, WFA.
Shortly after“Hell Sucks” was published: Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty, 47
“If all the barbed wire”: Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1991), 123.
Herr witnessed some savage scenes: Ibid., 152.
“My ties to New York were as slight”: Ibid., 101.
centrifugal instinct: Garry Wills, Lead Time: A Journalist’s Education (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1983), xi.
“You jus’ another dumb Grunt”: Herr, “Khesanh,”Esquire, September 1969.
“I say to myself”: Schroeder, Vietnam, 43.
“Everything … happened”: Ibid., 44.
“massive collapse”: Ibid., 35.
“Sometimes I was crazy in a very public way”: Ibid., 40.
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“I had trouble adjusting to the seventies”: Thomas B. Morgan, “Reporters of the Lost War,”Esquire, July 1984.
“This is already a long time ago”: Herr, “High on War,” manuscript, Bentley Historical Library Archives, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
“Quite simply”: C. D. B. Bryan, “The Different War,”New York Times, November 20, 1977.
“because I didn’t want to become”: Morgan, “Reporters of the Lost War.”
9. HISTORY AS A NOVEL, THE NOVEL AS HISTORY
an ad signed by 149 draft-age men: Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975 (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1984), 20.
On July 3, 1964 … a group of protesters: Ibid., 20.
In 1967 the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation: Dana Adams Schmidt, “Sartre, at the ‘Tribunal,’ Terms Rusk a ‘Mediocre Functionary,’”New York Times, May 5, 1967.
Background on Mailer, the VDC march, and the march on the Pentagon taken from Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985) and Mary V Dearborn, Mailer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) as well as interviews with David Dellinger, Edward de Grazia, Bob Kotlowitz, and Midge Decter.
“embattled aging enfant terrible”: Willie Morris, New York Days (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 211.
“Mailer has grown”: Manso, Mailer, 454.
Page 178 “There had been all too many years”: Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (New York: Plume, 1994), 8.
“helps you to think better”: Richard Copans and Stan Neumann, Mailer on Mailer, American Masters documentary (New York: Thirteen/WNET, Reciprocal Films, Films d’lci & France 2, 2000).
“[L]isten, Lyndon Johnson”: Norman Mailer, The Time of Our Time (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 551.
“He knew that by telling everyone”: Manso, Mailer, 408.
“Three cheers, lads”: Ibid.
“A Communist bureaucrat”: Mailer, The Time of Our Time, 553.
“under the yoke”: Ibid., 540.
“hit the longest ball in American letters”: Seymour Krim, “Norman Mailer, Get Out of My Head!”New York, April 21, 1969.
“Moving from one activity to another”: Paul Carroll, “The Playboy Interview: Norman Mailer,”Playboy, January 1968.
“transmute myself”: Norman Mailer, Pontifications (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 176.
“Mailer received such news”: Mailer, Armies, 9.
“Mitch, I’ll be there”: Ibid.
“kind of up in the air”: Manso, Mailer, 45.
“I pissed on the floor”: Mailer, Armies, 50.
“He was forty-four years old”: Ibid., 78.
“an obscene war”: Ibid., 79.
“Picture then this mass”: Ibid., 108.
“large and empty”: Ibid., 119.
“You Jew bastard”: Ibid., 143.
“In jail”: Ibid., 165.
“He was being treated worse than anyone in jail”: Manso, Mailer, 458.
“there was a part of me”: Manso, Mailer, 461.
“in many ways a literary genius”: Morris, New York Days, 211.
“one that would strike to the taproots”: Ibid., 214.
“We just closed the deal”: Ibid., 214-15.
Given the ambitious scope: Manso, Mailer, 463.
“written in a towering depression”: Mailer, Pontifications, 152.
“I remember thinking at the time”: Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing (New York: Random House, 2003), 99.
“On the one hand …”: Mailer, Pontifications, 153.
“true protagonist…”: Ibid., 153.
“The kind of editing”: Manso, Mailer, 462.
“It’s marvelous”: Morris, New York Days, 217.
“What will my father think?”: Ibid., 219.
“Mailer was a snob”: Mailer, Armies, 14.
“Lowell looked most unhappy”: Ibid., 40.
“Lowell’s talent was very large”: Ibid., 45.
“The hippies were there in great number”: Ibid., 91.
“If it feels bad, it is bad”: Ibid., 25.
“He had no sense”: Ibid., 68.
“twenty generations of buried hopes”: Ibid., 34.
“[T]he center of Christianity”: Ibid., 188.
Page 196 “To have his name”: Ibid., 206.
“not unlike the rare”: Ibid., 213.
“Some promise of peace”: Ibid., 214.
“All these people”: Morris, New York Days, 222.
Armies of the Night reviews: Alan Trachtenberg, “Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon,”The Nation, May 27, 1968; Henry S. Resnik, “Hand on the Pulse of America,”Saturday Review, May 4, 1968; Alfred Kazin, “The Trouble He’s Seen,”New York Times, May 5, 1968.
10. THE KING OF NEW YORK
For Clay Felker: Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 405.
83 percent of female readers:“About New York,” publishing statement by George A. Hirsch, April 1968. From George Hirsch, personal archive.
“I saw the impact of the magazine”: Stuart W. Little, “How to Start a Magazine,”Saturday Review, June 14, 1969.
“The Beatles of illustration”: Seymour Chwast, Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004), 11.
Background material for the founding of New York was drawn from the following sources: Gail Sheehy, “A Fistful of Dollars,”Rolling Stone, June 14, 1977; Little, “How to Start a Magazine”; interviews with Clay Felker, Jimmy Breslin, George Hirsch, Shelly Zalaznick, Milton Glaser, Pete Hamill, Gloria Steinem, and Tom Wolfe.
sixty thousand subscribers: George A. Hirsch, “A Report from the Publisher,” from George Hirsch, private archive.
“You get hooked on this city”:“About New York,” editorial statement by Clay Felker.
$1,250 for a black-and-white Page: Temporary rate sheet, 1969. From George Hirsch, personal archive.
“The people here met that challenge”: Ruth A. Bower, “New York Announces Spring Rate Increase,” press release, 11/7/69. From George Hirsch, personal archive.
“Women stood with tears streaming down their faces”: Gloria Steinem and Lloyd Weaver, “The City on the Eve of Destruction,”New York, April 22, 1968.
“Man, he only some itty-bit”: Ibid.
“Ethel Kennedy knows life from bullets”: Gail Sheehy, “Ethel Kennedy and the Arithmetic of Life and Death,” New York, June 17, 1968.
“Right at the start”; “Armed robbery isn’t a grin”: Jimmy Breslin, “‘Bonnie and Clyde’ Revisited,” New York, July 8, 1968.
The idea had germinated at an after-hours story meeting: Manso, Mailer, 498.
why Mailer was on the top of the ticket: Jimmy Breslin, “I Run to Win,” New York, May 5, 1969.
“I wanted to make actions”: Steven Marcus, “Norman Mailer,” Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 3rd Series (New York: Penguin, 1979), 278.
Background of the Mailer-Breslin campaign: Manso, Mailer; Peter Manso, ed., Running Against the Machine: The Mailer-Breslin Campaign (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1969).
Page 210 “[T]he condition of the city of New York at this time”: Breslin, “I Run to Win.”
“I’d piss on it”: Jimmy Breslin, I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 121.
“After Norman Mailer and I finished”: Jimmy Breslin, “And Furthermore, I Promise,”New York, June 16, 1969.
“A wistful Republican malaise”: Julie Baumgold, “Going Private: Life in the Clean Machine,” New York, January 6, 1969.
“We’ll show you how”: New York ad, 1969. From George Hirsch, personal archive.
“Writing is like performing”: Uncommon Clay: Notes on a Brilliant Career, program for the opening of the Felker Magazine Center at the University of California at Berkeley, 1994.
“Women … tend to hav
e a more personal point of view”:“Making It,”Newsweek, July 27, 1970. Unsigned.
Upper-level trains carry: Gail Sheehy, “The Tunnel Inspector and the Belle of the Bar Car,”New York, April 29, 1968.
With his tall, blond Establishment looks: Adam Smith, “Notes on the Great Buying Panic,”New York, May 6, 1968.
The magazine’s circulation was 145,000: Confidential memo from George Hirsch to New York staff. From George Hirsch, personal archive.
“The party was held”: Tom Wolfe, prefatory note to“Radical Chic,”New York, June 8, 1970.
“There they were”: Charlotte Curtis, “Black Panther Party Is Debated at the Bernsteins’,”New York Times, January 15, 1970.
a Times editorial: New York Times, January 16, 1970.
“He could see himself, Leonard Bernstein” and all subsequent quotes: Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,”New York, June 8, 1970.
“As an American and as a Jew”: Meryle Secrest, Leonard Bernstein: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 323.
11. SAVAGE JOURNEYS
“I suppose it’s only fair”: Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 1979), 191-92.
“You don’t understand!”: Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, 79.
“He is a handsome middle-class French boy”:“The Temptation of Jean-Claude Killy,” Ibid., 95.
“Here is the Killy piece”: Letter from Thompson to Hinckle, in Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist: The Gonzo Letters, Volume II, 1968-1976 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 222.
“a conspiracy of anemic masturbators”: Ibid., 223.
“socio-philosophical flashbacks”: Ibid., 296.
“In a narrow Southern society”:“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, 31.
“Not much energy in these faces”: Ibid., 34.
“I’m ready for anything, by God!”: Ibid., 25.
Page 234 “What riot?”: Ibid., 25.
“It’s a shitty article”: Letter from Thompson to Bill Cardoso, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 295.
“Dear Hunter”: Tom Wolfe to Thompson, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 335.
“with the perhaps fading exception”: Thompson to Wolfe, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 338.