And pathetic. One of the most beautiful lines in Michael Herr’s narration is when he says, “Kurtz had driven himself so far away from his people at home”—the idea that you could go so far that you couldn’t get back, even if you wanted to get back.
That’s what I was trying to do with Willard in that last section. I always had this image, over and over again, of being able to stare at the something that was the truth and say, “Yes, that is the truth.” Somehow a face was always important to me, and that’s why I liked just looking at Brando’s face for ten minutes or whatever. Remember Portrait of Dorian Gray? I mean, it was like ripping back the curtain—ahhhhh! There it is. And that’s the way I felt about Vietnam. You just look at it, you open your eyes and you look at it, and you accept it if it’s the truth. And then you get past it.
One line that seems to be coming out, following the L.A. screening in May and the Cannes screenings—and I’m speaking of the American press, since that’s all I’ve seen—is “The movie is terrific for the first hour or so: it’s so exciting, it’s well done, spectacular, it looks as if it were worth the money that was spent, you can see the money on the screen.” And then, “When the picture get to Kurtz, it becomes muddled and philosophical and pretentious—it falls apart.” That line is remarkably consistent. (And has remained so in most of the reviews that have appeared since the film was officially released.)
Audiences, and therefore certain writers, really know the rules of the different kinds of movies—and whether they want to admit it, in the first hour and a half of this movie, they’re locked into a formula. It’s a formula movie; you just get locked into the slot and it’ll take you up the river. And then, at a certain point, it doesn’t develop into the action adventure that it had set you up for. In my mind, the movie had made a turn I wouldn’t alter—it curved up the river. I chose to go with a stylized treatment, up the river into primitive times—and I eliminated everything in the script that didn’t take you there. It now takes you into various difficult areas, which you have to engage with a little. They’re riding down a big sled on a very formula movie, and they want it to resolve, and kick ’em off, just like movies are supposed to do, and it doesn’t do it. It’s like someone takes them off the slide and says, okay, now walk up the steps, and they don’t want to do it.
I’m not saying they are wrong in feeling that. I think some do and some don’t. But they would have preferred that it just went easy, without any difficulties—let the movie do it all. And I couldn’t do it in the end.
Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?
I couldn’t, I don’t think—I tried. I mean, I couldn’t give them an ending better than I did. I tried, and I’ve been trying and trying and trying. And if I could ever imagine how to do it, I would get out the goddamn film and I’d do it.
I think we live our lives hoping—impatient—for a time when things are resolved. I think that time will never come for any of us—and that’s part of the irony, even in this movie. Although there seems to be a resolution of some kind: that the healthy devour the sickly, and there is some sort of life/death, night-becomes-morning cycle taking place—to me the irony is that we stand on the edge, on the razor blade, all the time, and that’s why Willard looks to the left, looks to the right, and you hear, “The horror, the horror.” “The horror, the horror” is precisely that we are never really comfortable understanding what we should do, what is right and what is wrong, what is rational behavior, what is irrational: that we’re always on the brink.
“The horror, the horror” at the end, the fact that I wanted to end it on choice, because I think that’s the truthful ending—We hope for some sort of moral resolution about Vietnam and about our part in it, our participation in it. At the [true] end, you don’t have a resolution. You’re in a choice, still, between deciding to be powerful or to be weak. In a way, that’s how wars start. The United States chose: It wanted to be powerful, wanted to be Kurtz, in Southeast Asia. It chose not to stay home. But choice was just the only way I thought it could end.
Heart of Darkness ends with a lie. After Kurtz’ death, Marlow goes to Kurtz’ girlfriend, the intended, and she says, “What did he say before he died?” And Marlow says, “He mentioned your name,” when in fact what Kurtz said was, “The horror, the horror.” So I feel all lousy because I think the ending I had on the movie was the truth, but this ending that I’m going to put on it now is a lie—and I justify it to myself because Conrad would have ended with a lie, too.
TOM WOLFE
by Chet Flippo
August 21, 1980
Probably the most striking thing about ‘The Right Stuff’ is that it has made you very respectable. You’re no longer the hit man who literary people fear and hate. Now you’re eminently respectable.
Most of the things I have done have not been send-ups or zaps, but those things are remembered somehow. People love a little merciless mockery. So they’ll tend to remember something like Radical Chic, particularly, or The Painted Word, since, if you even make gentle fun of people who inhabit the world that you and I live in or the world of the arts, or anything having to do with expression, they scream like murder. And of course they have the equipment to bite back, so the fight starts. Everyone kind of enjoys it whether they’re paying any attention or not. But The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was not a send-up, was not mockery or satire.
It was not necessarily a subject the literary world understood or endorsed.
Well, the literary world certainly doesn’t endorse the subject of astronauts; it hasn’t been a very popular subject. As a matter of fact, one of the things that interested me most was not the space program but military life. I could see that the military, particularly the officer corps, had really been a vacant lot in the literary sense. Serious writers stopped looking at the military around 1919—in any sympathetic way or even empathetic way. It’s around then that you start finding the fashion of dealing with the military in a way in which the only acceptable protagonist is the GI, the dog soldier, the grunt, the doughboy, who’s presented as a victim, not as a warrior, a victim of the same forces as civilians.
I would think the astronauts weren’t eager to talk to you, some weirdo saying, I’m from ‘Rolling Stone’ and I want to investigate your private life. Obviously you didn’t say that; how did you go about it?
They weren’t all that tough. By that time, some had left the astronaut corps. They were a lot looser about the whole thing, they were no longer under the Life magazine contract. I think many had become rather bored with the way astronauts had been described. They tended to be pretty open if they agreed to talk at all. A few wouldn’t be interviewed. Alan Shepard told me that he only cooperated in documentary ventures that had a scientific purpose . . . later on he indicated that he had read the Rolling Stone pieces and didn’t particularly like what was there; I don’t know why. Neil Armstrong said he had a policy of not giving interviews and didn’t see any reason why he should change it. I think he had hopes, and perhaps still does, of writing his own book. All the Mercury astronauts who were still alive—[Gus] Grissom was dead—were willing to talk and were cooperative.
Was John Glenn open?
Very open. I spent a day with him when he was campaigning for the Senate in 1974, the year he finally won the primary against Howard Metzenbaum, who had beaten him just a few years before. Then I spent an afternoon with Glenn after he won; he was actually pretty generous with his time, as senators go, and he was very helpful.
I’ve been surprised by the number of reviews that found my picture of John Glenn negative. I wasn’t trying to send him valentines, but in my mind he came off as an exceptional and rather courageous figure. He did a lot of unpopular things. He told off a lot of people, and he almost lost his flight by telling the administrator of NASA and everybody else that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t go into his house, that he and his wife didn’t want him in there. That took a lot of courage.
When did the notion first strike you—of course it should have been
obvious to everyone—that the original astronauts were not the Boy Scouts who were presented to America?
I guess from the first conversation that I ever had with any of them. It’s not that they bragged about their exploits or talked about things like driving these wild races on the highway. At the same time I was starting this thing, in late 1972, there had been reports in the press indicating trouble in paradise among the astronauts. Buzz Aldrin’s nervous breakdown had been revealed. That was the same year there was a stamp scandal, which wasn’t really much of a scandal, but nevertheless it made people stop and ask, “What, astronauts took a cut of some stamp sales?” One of the astronauts had just become an evangelist. Two or three had been photographed with long hair, and this was immediately interpreted by newspapers and magazines as a sign that there were astronauts who were turned into hippies, which never happened as far as I can tell.
Perhaps because the general whitewash of the astronauts’ flaws had gone to such an extreme at the beginning, the least little crack was overinterpreted. To this day, so many people think that most of the astronauts who went to the moon have suffered breakdowns or become alcoholics. It just isn’t true.
For a while there was the assumption that this voyage was traumatic because it removed them from all familiar environments, and that this just had devastating effects on these simple men who weren’t prepared for it. The truth was, they had had such sophisticated simulations that there was very little new to see when they reached the moon. By the time Armstrong got there, he had had probably 500 simulated missions in replicas of the Apollo command module, with moving pictures of the moon, based on films that had been brought back by manned and unmanned vehicles. I think it was false for Armstrong to have delivered some apostrophe to the gods or some statement of poetic awe about what he had seen, ’cause he had already seen it all simulated in such high fidelity, how the hell could he pretend there was something startling about it? So he said it’s “a small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.” When I asked him about it, he said, “Sure, I worked on it for a couple of weeks.”
How did you get the notion to cut this book off where you did? The idea of the end of innocence—I believe you make the point that the astronauts’ parade was, in a sense, the peak of American innocence.
I think that was the last great national outpouring of patriotism. There was some of that with Gordon Cooper’s flight, but it was much bigger in the case of Glenn. By the time Cooper flew in 1963, there were many signs that the United States and the Soviet Union were reaching some sort of rapprochement, so that there wasn’t the tension about the flight. The cold war was still a big thing at the time of Glenn’s flight.
I liked your characterization of the press as the proper Victorian gent, that the press was reverent through all this.
I’ll never forget working on the Herald Tribune the afternoon of John Kennedy’s death. I was sent out along with a lot of other people to do man-on-the-street reactions. I started talking to some men who were just hanging out, who turned out to be Italian, and they already had it figured out that Kennedy had been killed by the Tongs, and then I realized that they were feeling hostile to the Chinese because the Chinese had begun to bust out of Chinatown and move into Little Italy. And the Chinese thought the mafia had done it, and the Ukrainians thought the Puerto Ricans had done it. And the Puerto Ricans thought the Jews had done it. Everybody had picked out a scapegoat. I came back to the Herald Tribune and I typed up my stuff and turned it in to the rewrite desk. Late in the day they assigned me to do the rewrite of the man-on-the-street story. So I looked through this pile of material, and mine was missing. I figured there was some kind of mistake. I had my notes, so I typed it back into the story. The next day I picked up the Herald Tribune and it was gone, all my material was gone. In fact there’s nothing in there except little old ladies collapsing in front of St. Patrick’s. Then I realized that, without anybody establishing a policy, one and all had decided that this was the proper moral tone for the president’s assassination. It was to be grief, horror, confusion, shock and sadness, but it was not supposed to be the occasion for any petty bickering. The press assumed the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman.
I say Victorian gentleman, because it’s he who was the constant hypocrite, who insisted on public manifestations of morality that he would never insist upon privately in his own life. And I think that one tends to do that on a newspaper. Less so in a magazine. A newspaper seems to have such an immediate tie to the public. Television doesn’t have it. Newspapers do. I’m not entirely sure why, but it makes newspapers fun to work for.
It also leads to these funny sorts of reactions. People never read editorials. All newspapers know this. And yet if you would publish a newspaper without editorials, it would be as if you had sold your soul to somebody. Everyone would ask, in effect, “Well, where are the editorials? They must have sold them. They’re taking something on the side.” And so newspapers are quite right to run editorials. It all has to do with this moral assumption.
Hell, to this day you can’t get anything in newspapers. I think of this as the period of incredible shrinking news. I’m really convinced that there’s less news covered in America now than at any time in this century. Television creates the impression that there’s all this news because the press has become very incestuous and writes stories about the press, with all these marvelous phony wars about television and what it does or doesn’t do. But television as a news medium has no reporting at all, really, except for some cosmetic reporting done by so-called Washington correspondents, who usually stand in front of some government building with a microphone covered in black sponge rubber, reading AP or UPI copy. In effect, every shred of news on television comes from either the wire services or from nonevents, to use Daniel Boorstin’s phrase—the press conference, the basketball game and so on. So you then have to ask, “What are the wire services giving us?” Well, the wire services are totally creatures of local newspapers. Those big wire services just cannibalize local newspapers. Suddenly you’re up against the fact that there’s no competition in most parts of the country at all. I doubt if there are five cities where there is still newspaper competition. When this happens, the monopoly newspaper cuts back on its staff—always happens. They just stop covering local events—too expensive.
So really, what you’re seeing on television via the wire services is just getting smaller and smaller. It’s really very sad. I don’t know how much corruption there is at the local level, but there’s never been a better time in the century for there to be corruption in local government, because the press is not gonna spot it.
Television, which has the money to do the reporting, has gotten away so beautifully without doing it that it’s not about to start. You talk to these guys and they’ll say, “Well, they sent me from Beirut to Teheran, and I had forty-five minutes to get briefed on the situation.” What they should say is, “I read the AP copy.” Just try to think of the last major scoop, to use that old term, that was broken on television. They can do a set event. And that’s what television is actually best at. In fact, it’d be a service to the country if television news operations were shut down totally and they only broadcast hearings, press conferences and hockey games. That would be television news. At least the public would not have the false impression that it’s getting news coverage.
I believe it was in the ‘New Republic’ that Mitch Tuchman wrote that the reason you turned against liberals is that you were rejected by the white-shoe crowd at Yale.
Yeah, he wrote that after The Painted Word. All I ever did was write about the world we inhabit, the world of culture, with a capital C, and journalism and the arts and so on, with exactly the same tone that I wrote about everything else. With exactly the same reverence that the people who screamed the most would have written about life in a small American town or in the business world or in professional sports, which is to say with no reverence at all, which is as it should be. And these days, if you mock the prevaili
ng fashion in the world of the arts or journalism, you’re called a conservative. Which is just another term for a heretic.
Have you always been a real clothes horse, really careful about clothes?
The first time I remember being interested at all in clothes was after I saw The Kiss of Death [1947] with Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo. That was his first big role, he was the villain; Victor Mature was the hero. It was a gangster movie. I was at Washington and Lee, and there was a custom, I guess you’d call it, of conventional dress. It was an all-male school, and everyone had to wear a conventional jacket and tie. I guess I just wanted to put a spin on the custom without transgressing the rules, so I decided on these dark shirts.
Style, men’s clothing, has very rigid presumptions about it, and if you really experiment, suddenly you’re out of the ball game. You could certainly cut a striking figure by wearing a royal blue caftan everywhere you go, but you would remove yourself from most transactions of life. So if you want to have any fun with it, it really has to be rather marginal. But the interesting thing is that marginal things seem outrageous at first.
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 19