The Purple Decades - a Reader

by Tom Wolfe

  Thus, Junior Johnson’s stock cars of “The Last American Hero,” as seen through Wolfe’s eyes, are like the totems of the Easter Islanders or the formal architecture of the Regency period, critically important cultural artifacts that are the focus of both veneration and status competition for their creators. Or, as in The Right Stuff, among the test pilots, the fraternity of “the right stuff” is the basis for the display of almost incredible forms of heroism, which Wolfe clearly admires. But, even here, it is the fierce status competition within the group that serves to motivate the men, a desire for the “sinfully inconfessable … feeling of superiority, appropriate to him and his kind, lone bearers of the right stuff.”

  Grounding his insights about human nature firmly on his belief in the potent force of status in human affairs, and its expression through fashion, Wolfe claims—in The Painted Word and in From Bauhaus to Our House, for instance—that styles in contemporary painting and architecture can be understood more plainly by examining the ambitions and status games of influential artists, architects, critics, and patrons than by trying to comprehend their creations as personal miracles, a position that has been somewhat less than stupendously popular in the art world.

  As his career has matured, Wolfe’s aspirations as a cultural chronicler have been greatly enhanced by his ability to grasp, to digest, and to stimulate human interest in large, sometimes esoteric, subject areas usually thought to be the domain of art historians, sociobiologists, or other specialists. Few would have dared, as Wolfe does in The Painted Word, for example, to take on the whole bloody history of Modern Art and to offer a waggish, but devilishly shrewd, critique of how Modern Art came to serve fashion and theory instead of humankind; or, as in the scorching sequel, From Bauhaus to Our House, to deal with “what went wrong” during the past fifty years of American architecture.

  Wolfe’s unfailing wit and his faculty for selecting the truly memorable example are undoubtedly a part of this ability to assimilate, transform, and humanize his subject matter. “Yale had completed a building program of vast proportions,” he explains in From Bauhaus to Our House, “that had turned the campus into as close an approximation of Oxford and Cambridge as the mind of man could devise on short notice in southern Connecticut … For better or worse, Yale became the business barons’ vision of a luxurious collegium for the sons of the upper classes who would run the new American empire.” But when an addition was built for the Yale art gallery after the Second World War, “the building could scarcely have been distinguished from a Woolco discount store in a shopping center” and the interior “had the look of an underground parking garage.” And all this in the name of “unconcealed structure”—another instance for Wolfe of how mindless fashion and buzz-word aesthetic theory were allowed to undermine good sense and consistency of design—but also an instance of how Wolfe is able to concretize and persuade by skillful elaboration of the perfect example.

  Typically, as Wolfe unspools yard after yard of theory, he forces us to test it against our own understanding of the nature of things. And he compels us to ask questions: Why in the name of God should painting and architecture in our time have become so trivialized, so specialized, so uniform? Why would an accomplished, clever man want to give up his work and French-fry his brains and invest his earthly time tooling around the countryside in a psychedelic schoolbus? Why in the world would a normal, sane, healthy person want to risk his life on a day-to-day basis as a test pilot or an astronaut? Why do people behave as they do? How do we live? How should we live?

  Clearly, as Wolfe has grown in stature, he has become more interested in reform and more concerned about what he sees as “the wrong stuff” and “the right stuff.” At the heart of Bauhaus and The Painted Word is a straightforward wish to humanize art and architecture by showing how “the freight train of history”12 got off on the wrong track by the most ludicrous sort of historical coincidence. All of Wolfe’s recent books, and many of his earlier essays, are also parables offered as intellectual history. They show how political power and orthodoxy and fashion-mongering have often run roughshod over originality, virtue, fair play, exuberance, and panache. The moral would seem to be that those who succumb to the temptation to aspire to the merely fashionable, who thus sacrifice the noble impulse toward individual vision, may end up “succeeding” and thereby mucking up whole centuries. This failing, he seems to warn us, is so common that all of us should be on guard against it, lest we, too, be tempted to repeat it. Substance over surface, he proclaims, should be our guide—be alert to the frailties of human nature and pay attention to values that truly matter. Yet there is nothing self-righteous in Tom Wolfe’s moral stance, and it is so well disguised that the average reader often may be unaware that an implicit moral position is being assumed.

  After roughly twenty years of development—by combining the methodology of the journalist with his own special sense and sensibility—the young writer whose life was forever changed by one amazed afternoon at the Coliseum at the Hot Rod & Custom Car Show has gone on to become the most astute and popular social observer and cultural chronicler on his generation. If Tom Wolfe sometimes interprets the American scene with the apparent detachment and freedom from constraints of a visiting Martian, he remains a Martian with an enviable sense of humor, energy, and playfulness. If he is often the maverick skeptic among us, the ultimate “King-Has-No-Clothes-On” man of principle, he is a skeptic with the power of empathy. If, at times, he seems to be viewing his own culture like an anthropologist studying the strange habits of the Trobriand Islanders, he is an anthropologist with an ear for every kind of idiomatic speech, loaded language and the multiple meanings it contains, and a conviction about the value of skewering pretentiousness wherever it may be found. No other writer of our time has aspired to capture the fabled Spirit of the Age so fully and has succeeded so well.

  JOE DAVID BELLAMY

  NOTES

  1 Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), p. 39.

  2 Joe David Bellamy, The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1974), p. 80.

  3 Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 31.

  4 Wolfe, Journalism, p. 34.

  5 Wolfe, Journalism, p. 19.

  6 Wolfe, Journalism, p. 21.

  7 Wolfe, Journalism, p. 17.

  8 Thomas R. Edwards, “The Electric Indian,” Partisan Review, 3, 1969, p. 540.

  9 C. Hugh Holman, William Flint Thrall, and Addison Hibbard, A Handbook to Literature (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), p. 108.

  10 Tom Wolfe, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 145.

  11 Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), p. 82.

  12 Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 17.

  BOB & SPIKE

  a

  Look! She beckons! With those deep high-class black eyes! Here at a dinner party in Alfred Barr’s apartment, in a room full of men who get their shirts hand-laundered at 90 cents a shirt by Forziati on East 74th Street and women who start getting ready for dinner with, first off, a little hair action at 4 p.m. by Kenneth on East 54th Street—here in this room she beckons. Liza, Liza Parkinson, Mrs. Bliss Parkinson, president of the Museum of Modern Art, daughter of Cornelius Bliss, niece of Lillie P. Bliss, who was one of the founders of the museum, sister of Anthony Bliss, the president of the Metropolitan Opera Association—Liza, the very embodiment of all that is most social, high class, Protestant tree-of-life and embossed-watermark-writing-paper in this whole art world social thing—Liza beckons to Spike. And Spike catches Bob’s eye across the room. And Bob gives Spike the high sign. Go, girl, go. This is the moment—beckoning black eyes!—

  Bob and Spike—Spike—when Bob, Robert Scull, America’s most famous collector of p
op and other avant-garde art, first met his wife, Ethel, Ethel Redner of West 86th Street, on a blind date back in 1943, he said to himself, “Ethel, what a terrible name.” So he called her Spike. Spike’s family had some dough, but Bob and Spike were so broke that they were living in one room on West 56th Street with a Murphy bed. They got a $12 membership in the Museum of Modern Art, three blocks away, on West 53rd Street, and used the museum, the garden, the restaurant and everything, as their living room, to entertain guests in. Is that irony or isn’t it? Bob got very interested in the art there and started a phantom art collection, writing down the names of pictures he wished he had, on a piece of shirt cardboard in his wallet. In 1947 or 1948 Bob started in the New York taxicab business, which was a very rough business at that time, full of—well, don’t ask. Half the guys were rejects from the Mafia shape-up for hotel house dicks. But Bob started making money, and the rest is history. He started actually buying pictures himself. He had to put up with a lot of ridicule and everything, like the time in 1959 when he bought Jasper Johns’s beer cans, two cans of Ballantine Ale, as a matter of fact, but everybody called them the beer cans, and the magazines and newspapers came around to take pictures, and he was very proud about buying Jap’s beer cans. Would you believe they were only making fun of him? Yeah! Kids used to come to his kids in school and say, “Hey, is your old man the nut who bought the beer cans?” But he kept on collecting, and pretty soon Robert Scull became synonymous with pop art, and Bob and Spike are just getting in tight with the very social Museum of Modern Art crowd and finally here is the big dinner in Alfred’s apartment—Alfred Barr is the curator of the Museum of Modern Art—

  Here amid the crystal and the silver asparagus holders and the Forziati ironing jobs are people the magnitude of Liza and Philip—that’s Philip Johnson, the architect, socialite and art savant—and Bob and Spike are looking great. Bob, who is 49, is just emerging, sartorially, from the 57th Street Biggie phase. The 57th Street Biggie look is the look of the men in New York who are in their 40s or 50s and the money is starting to come in and their hair is thinning in the crown but they comb it straight back like the real studs of the American business world do, like Lyndon Johnson does, as a matter of fact. They are getting an opulent plumpness about them, not fat exactly, and they don’t have double chins, just sort of a great smooth tan fullness in the jowls set off by some good Sulka shirt work and a little Countess Mara in the necktie and a suit from Frank Brothers and a wife with apricot-colored hair—they all have wives with apricot-colored hair for some reason—and they take the Christmas cruise on the S.S. France. Only Spike didn’t go the apricot-hair route. She has already graduated to the big time in fashion. She is slender and quite pretty. Her hair, which is mostly kind of pineapple blond, is great, and Kenneth does it. Her dresses come from St. Laurent, Dior, Chanel, Courrèges, Mainbocher, Cardin, Ken Scott, you name it. And she didn’t like the Christmas cruise on the S.S. France. All the women came to the breakfast table wearing furs and enough diamonds to sink the boat. Spike took to her stateroom and wouldn’t come out.

  Finally—the moment arrives. Bob and Spike are both eating with the Continental style they now use, holding the fork in the left hand and the knife in the right. Liza Parkinson beckons, motions to Spike to come aside so she can talk to her. Those deep dark aristocratic eyes—she is the whole thing in the whole social thing of the art world—and Bob gives Spike the high sign, and right away, without having to say a word to each other, Bob and Spike both figure the same thing. This is the moment. Liza is going to say to Spike something like, Could you serve on this board or whatever, or could we get yours and Bob’s advice on this or that vital project, or, at the very least, would you come to such-and-such a dinner—you know, something that will symbolize the fact that Robert and Ethel Scull are now in the inner circle of the whole thing—and Liza draws Ethel aside and then Liza—regal eyes!—pops the question—

  Afterwards, when Spike comes back, Bob can hardly wait.

  “What did she say?”

  “Are you all set?” says Spike.

  “Yeah—”

  “You sure your heart’s O.K.?”

  “Yeah—”

  “She said, ‘Ethel, would you mind telling me who does your hair?’”

  Who does your hair?

  “Well—what did you say to that?”

  “I told her.”

  “Then what did she say?”

  “She said would I ask him if he could do hers.”

  “That’s all she said?”

  “No. She wanted to know how much it was.”

  Well, there it is. It is just an incident, but it gives an idea of what Bob and Spike are up against in this whole art world thing. Bob does everything right, better than right, in fact. He rises out of the Lower East Side and its psychological affiliates, the Bronx and Long Island, to an eight-room apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the park and a summer place in East Hampton. He amasses a collection of pop art and op art and primary art, in fact, everything since abstract expressionism, that is actually better than the Museum of Modern Art’s in that area. Like a lot of ambitious guys who had to take the night-school route, he studies his field very thoroughly, talks to the artists themselves for hours on end, until he probably knows more about pop art and post-pop art than anybody in the country except for Leo Castelli, Ivan Karp, Henry Geldzahler and a couple of others. He probably knows a lot more about it than Alfred Barr. Yet what do they want from Bob and Ethel Scull at the Museum of Modern Art? They want $1,000 a year so they can be on the International Council and they want Ethel to help organize a party—and where does she get her hair done?

  Who needs that? This season Robert and Ethel Scull are transferring their backing from the Museum of Modern Art to the Whitney. All right, the whole art world is not going to flip over backward like Charlie Brown in the comic strip over this, but it’s a sign of this whole social thing in the art world that nobody knows anything about. They can talk about modern art and contemporary art all they want. But it’s the same old social thing that’s been going on in art for a hundred years, the flutey bitones of the Protestant cultural establishment, and—

  But then Spike looks at Bob, and Bob looks at Spike and he shrugs and wraps his clavicles up around his head and breaks into a smile, in a primordial gesture of the New York streets, the What Are You Gonna Do Shrug, and he says:

  “Spike, you know what my philosophy is? My philosophy is, Enjoy.”

  Enjoy! So a few things aren’t panning out here at the top of the ladder. The main thing is that you’re up here. Right? That is one thing nobody ever seems to understand about people who go through something like the Lower East Side—West Bronx route and make it in New York. A few slights, a few disappointments, a little sniggering along the way—you’re going to cut your throat over that? The main thing is that Robert and Ethel Scull are one of the great social success stories of New York since World War II.

  In eighteen years they have made it all the way, or practically all the way, from point zero—up from the Lower East Side, the West Bronx, up from that point just eighteen years ago when Bob Scull was a nobody, a 31-year-old businessman whose business had gone down the chute and he and Spike woke up every morning in that Murphy bed, to … Today. Today they have made it to the greatest address in New York, Fifth Avenue across from Central Park, and not just in terms of money, but right into that whole world of opening nights and the parties they write about in the papers, chauffeurs who are practically one of the family, apartments where the lobby and the doorman look so great you feel like you have to dress up to step on the sidewalk or you’re letting down the building, esoteric New York day schools for the younger children and boarding schools for the older ones, lunches at La Grenouille where expensive matrons in Chanel suits have two bloody marys and smile—teeth!—at tailored young men with names like Freddy, Ferdi and Tug, petite plaques on the exhibition wall that say “from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull,” photographs in the
women’s magazines in court-photographer Shah and Farah Diba poses, fashion stories in which they say that this new madras wool gabardine coat is on the backs of Mrs. William Paley, Mrs. Palmer Dixon, Mrs. Samuel Pryor Reed and Mrs. Robert C. Scull, and a social set in which Chester is Chester Beatty who owns the diamond mines, and Nicole is Nicole Alphand the wife of the former French ambassador, and Bob is Robert Kintner the former chairman of NBC, Susan is Susan Stein the heiress, Alex is Alex Liberman the editorial director of Vogue, Marina is Marina Consort the wife of Prince Michael of Greece, Jap is Jasper Johns the painter, Dean is Dean Acheson, Sammy is Sammy Davis, Ave is Averell Harriman, Andy is Andy Warhol, Lady Bird is Lady Bird—All right! People are getting shot and blown up in Vietnam. China is a restless giant. The black ghettos are brandishing the fist of liberation. God has gone and died. And yet what Bob and Spike have done, made it, is still the only name of the game in New York. What is more, they have made it the way people dream of making it in New York; namely, right now. The hell with just making the money and setting things up for your children and waiting for the reflected glory of it when your daughter at Wellesley, the bird-song genius, gets invited up for a weekend in the country at the Detergent King’s in North Egremont.