The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  All of this was fraternal bliss. No pilot was shut off from it because he was “in the public eye.” Not even the rocket aces were isolated like stars. Most of them also performed the routine flight-test chores. Some of Yeager’s legendary exploits came when he was merely a supporting player, flying “chase” in a fighter plane while another pilot flew the test aircraft. One day Yeager was flying chase for another test pilot at 20,000 feet when he noticed the man veering off in erratic maneuvers. As soon as he reached him on the radio, he realized the man was suffering from hypoxia, probably because an oxygen hose connection had come loose. Some pilots in that state became like belligerent drunks—prior to losing consciousness. Yeager would tell the man to check his oxygen system, he’d tell him to go to a lower altitude, and the man kept suggesting quaint anatomical impossibilities for Yeager to perform on himself. So Yeager hit upon a ruse that only he could have pulled off. “Hey,” he said, “I got me a problem here, boy. I caint keep this thing running even on the emergency system. She just flamed out. Follow me down.” He started descending, but his man stayed above him, still meandering. So Yeager did a very un-Yeager-like thing. He yelled into the microphone! He yelled: “Look, my dedicated young scientist—follow me down!” The change in tone —Yeager yelling!—penetrated the man’s impacted hypoxic skull. My God! The fabled Yeager! He’s yelling—Yeager’s yelling!—to me for help! Jesus H. Christ! And he started following him down. Yeager knew that if he could get the man down to 12,000 feet, the oxygen content of the air would bring him around, which it did. Hey! What happened? After he landed, he realized he had been no more than a minute or two from passing out and punching a hole in the desert. As he got out of the cockpit, an F—86 flew overhead and did a slow roll sixty feet off the deck and then disappeared across Rogers Lake. That was Yeager’s signature.

  Yeager was flying chase one day for Bill Bridgeman, the prime pilot for one of the greatest rocket planes, the Douglas Skyrocket, when the ship went into a flat spin followed by a violent tumble. Bridgeman fought his way out of it and regained stability, only to have his windows ice up. This was another common danger in rocket flights. He was out of fuel, so that he was now faced with the task of landing the ship both deadstick and blind. At this point Yeager drew alongside in his F—86 and became his eyes. He told Bridgeman every move to make every foot of the way down … as if he knew that ol’ Skyrocket like the back of his hand … and this was jes a little ol’ fishin’ trip on the Mud River … and there was jes the two of ’em havin’ a little poker-hollow fun in the sun … and that lazy lollygaggin’ chucklin’ driftin’ voice was still purrin’ away … the very moment Bridgeman touched down safely. You could almost hear Yeager saying to Bridgeman, as he liked to do:

  “How d’ye hold with rockets now, son?”

  That was what you thought of when you saw the F—86 do a slow roll sixty feet off the deck and disappear across Rogers Lake.

  Yeager had just turned thirty. Bridgeman was thirty-seven. It didn’t dawn on him until later that Yeager always called him son. At the time it had seemed perfectly natural. Somehow Yeager was like the big daddy of the skies over the dome of the world. In keeping with the eternal code, of course, for anyone to have suggested any such thing would have been to invite hideous ridicule. There were even other pilots with enough Pilot Ego to believe that they were actually better than this drawlin’ hot dog. But no one would contest the fact that as of that time, the 1950’s, Chuck Yeager was at the top of the pyramid, number one among all the True Brothers.

  And that voice … started drifting down from on high. At first the tower at Edwards began to notice that all of a sudden there were an awful lot of test pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. And pretty soon there were an awful lot of fighter pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. The air space over Edwards was getting so caint-hardly super-cool day by day, it was terrible. And then that lollygaggin’ poker-hollow air space began to spread, because the test pilots and fighter pilots from Edwards were considered the pick of the litter and had a cachet all their own, wherever they went, and other towers and other controllers began to notice that it was getting awfully drawly and down-home up there, although they didn’t know exactly why. And then, because the military is the training ground for practically all airline pilots, it spread further, until airline passengers all over America began to hear that awshuckin’ driftin’ gone-fishin’ Mud River voice coming from the cockpit … “Now, folks, uh … this is the captain … ummmm … We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not … uh … lockin’ into position …”

  But so what! What could possibly go wrong! We’ve obviously got a man up there in the cockpit who doesn’t have a nerve in his body! He’s a block of ice! He’s made of 100 percent righteous victory-rolling True Brotherly stuff.

  Those Whom God Hath Joined Together

  “You’ve been living together for four years. Why get married now?” “I’m tired of being snubbed by the doormen.”

  By Tom Wolfe

  THE KANDY-KOLORED TANGERINE-FLAKE STREAMLINE BABY (1965)

  THE PUMP HOUSE GANG (1968)

  THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST (1968)

  RADICAL CHIC & MAU-MAUING THE FLAK CATCHERS ( 1970)

  THE NEW JOURNALISM (1973)

  THE PAINTED WORD (1975)

  MAUVE GLOVES & MADMEN, CLUTTER & VINE (1976)

  THE RIGHT STUFF (1979)

  IN OUR TIME (1980)

  FROM BAUHAUS TO OUR HOUSE (1981)

  Notes

  a From The Pump House Gang (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968). First published as “Upward with the Arts—The Success Story of Robert & Ethel Scull” in New York, the World Journal Tribune’s Sunday magazine, October 30, 1966.

  b From The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965). First published as “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” in Esquire, March 1965.

  c From The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. First published in New York, the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday magazine, January 5, 1964.

  d From The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. First published as “Public Lives: Confidential Magazine; Reflection in Tranquility by the Former Owner, Robert Harrison” in Esquire, April 1964.

  e From The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. First published in New York, the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday magazine, February 9, 1964.

  f From The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. First published in New York, the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday magazine, December 6, 1964.

  g From The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. First published in New York, the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday magazine, February 21, 1965.

  h From The Pump House Gang. First published as “The Pump House Gang Meets the Black Panthers—or Silver Threads Among the Gold in Surf City” and “The Pump House Gang Faces Life” in New York, the World Journal Tribune’s Sunday magazine, February 13 and 20, 1966.

  i From The Pump House Gang. First published in the London Weekend Telegraph; appeared subsequently in New York, the World Journal Tribune’s Sunday magazine, November 27, 1966.

  j From The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, chapters 6 and 7 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968).

  k From Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, pp. 3—31 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). First published as “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” in New York Magazine, June 8, 1970.

  l From Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.

  m From Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976). First published in Esquire, October 1975.

  n From Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. First published in New York Magazine and New West Magazine, August 23, 1976. Portions of this piece appeared, in an earlier version as “The Third Great Awakening,” in The Critic, May/June 1973.

  o
Carter is not, however, a member of the most down-home and ecstatic of the Baptist sects, which is a back-country branch known as the Primitive Baptist Church. In the Primitive Baptist churches men and women sit on different sides of the room, no musical instruments are allowed, and there is a good deal of foot-washing and other rituals drawn from passages in the Bible. The Progressive Primitives, another group, differ from the Primitives chiefly in that they allow a piano or organ in the church. The Missionary Baptists, Carter’s branch, are a step up socially ( not necessarily divinely) but would not be a safe bet for an ambitious member of an in-town country club. The In-town Baptists, found in communities of 25,000 or more, are too respectable, socially, to be called ecstatic and succeed in being almost as tame as the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists.

  p Ignored or else held in contempt by working people, Bauhaus design eventually triumphed as a symbol of wealth and privilege, attuned chiefly to the tastes of businessmen’s wives. For example, Mies’s most famous piece of furniture design, the Barcelona chair, now sells for $1,680 and is available only through one’s decorator. The high price is due in no small part to the chair’s Worker Housing Honest Materials: stainless steel and leather. No chromed iron is allowed, and customers are refused if they want to have the chair upholstered in material of their own choice. Only leather is allowed, and only six shades of that: Seagram’s Building Lobby Palomino, Monsanto Chemical Company Lobby Antelope, Arco Towers Pecan, Trans-America Building Ebony, Bank of America Building Walnut, and Architectural Digest Mink.

  q The real “marathons,” in which the group stayed in the same room for twenty-four hours or longer, were developed by George R. Bach and Frederick Stoller of Los Angeles.

  r This figure of speech consists of repeating a word (or words with the same root) in such a way that the second usage has a different meaning from the first. “This is WINS, 1010 on your dial—New York wants to know, and we know it” (1. know = “find out”; 2. know = “realize” or “have the knowledge”) … “We’re American Airlines, doing what we do best” (1. doing = “performing”; 2. What we do = “our job”) … “If you think refrigerators cost too much, maybe you’re looking at too much refrigerator” (1. cost; 2. size or complexity). “The smart money is on Admiral” (Admiral’s italics) … There is also an example of the pun in the WINS slogan and of epanadiplosis in the Admiral slogan (the ABBA pattern of refrigerator … too much/too much refrigerator).

  s From Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. First published in Harper’s, July 1976.

  t From In Our Time (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). First published in Harper’s.

  u Twentieth-century American slang for bohemian, obverse of hobo.

  v Likewise, in the field of psychology. So many leading Freudian psychoanalysts came to the United States (e.g., Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris), the United States became the only important center of Freudian psychology in the world. American contributions to psychology, even those well regarded in Europe, such as William James’s, were for the next forty years regarded as backward.

  w Edgar Tafel, Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1979).

  Introduction © 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

  Copyright © 1963, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1970, 1975,

  1976, 1981, 1982 by Tom Wolfe

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Published simultaneously in Canada by McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., Toronto

  Designed by Tere LoPrete

  eISBN 9781429961547

  First eBook Edition : May 2011

  “The Voices of Village Square,” “A Sunday Kind of Love,” “The Girl of the Year,” and “The Woman Who Has Everything” copyright © 1964, 1965 by I.H.T. Corporation; reprinted by permission

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Wolfe, Tom.

  The purple decades.

  I. Title.

  PS3573.O526P8 1982 813′.54 82-11879