The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
Marc Weingarten
Three Rivers Press (2006)
Rating: ****
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Literary, Journalism, Fiction, Mailer; Norman - Criticism and Interpretation, American, Literary Criticism, Wolfe; Tom - Criticism and Interpretation, Didion; Joan - Criticism and Interpretation, Biography & Autobiography, American Prose Literature - 20th Century - History and Criticism, General, Capote; Truman - Criticism and Interpretation, Reportage Literature; American - History and Criticism, Journalism - United States - History - 20th Century
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Review
Advance Praise for The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight
“It’s always complicated to write about writing (and about writers), but Marc Weingarten does it effortlessly. Every character in The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight is compelling and necessary. If this book doesn’t make you want to be a journalist, nothing will.” —Chuck Klosterman, author of Killing Yourself to Live
“Well-researched, beautifully wrought—this is an addictively readable history of the revolution in American journalism.” —T. C. Boyle, author of Drop City
“Weingarten is a strong, fresh voice in contemporary cultural criticism.” —Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock
From the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
. . . In Cold Blood, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Armies of the Night . . .
Starting in 1965 and spanning a ten-year period, a group of writers including Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, and Michael Herr emerged and joined a few of their pioneering elders, including Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, to remake American letters. The perfect chroniclers of an age of frenzied cultural change, they were blessed with the insight that traditional tools of reporting would prove inadequate to tell the story of a nation manically hopscotching from hope to doom and back again—from war to rock, assassination to drugs, hippies to Yippies, Kennedy to the dark lord Nixon. Traditional just-the-facts reporting simply couldn’t provide a neat and symmetrical order to this chaos.
Marc Weingarten has interviewed many of the major players to provide a startling behind-the-scenes account of the rise and fall of the most revolutionary literary outpouring of the postwar era, set against the backdrop of some of the most turbulent—and significant—years in contemporary American life. These are the stories behind those stories, from Tom Wolfe’s white-suited adventures in the counterculture to Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-addled invention of gonzo to Michael Herr’s redefinition of war reporting in the hell of Vietnam. Weingarten also tells the deeper backstory, recounting the rich and surprising history of the editors and the magazines who made the movement possible, notably the three greatest editors of the era—Harold Hayes at Esquire, Clay Felker at New York, and Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. And finally Weingarten takes us through the demise of the New Journalists, a tragedy of hubris, miscalculation, and corporate menacing.
This is the story of perhaps the last great good time in American journalism, a time when writers didn’t just cover stories but immersed themselves in them, and when journalism didn’t just report America but reshaped it.
“Within a seven-year period, a group of writers emerged, seemingly out of nowhere—Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, Michael Herr—to impose some order on all of this American mayhem, each in his or her own distinctive manner (a few old hands, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, chipped in, as well). They came to tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldn’t, stories about the way life was being lived in the sixties and seventies and what it all meant to us. The stakes were high; deep fissures were rending the social fabric, the world was out of order. So they became our master explainers, our town criers, even our moral conscience—the New Journalists.” —from the Introduction
From the Hardcover edition.
For Lynn
Contents
INTRODUCTION
1 RADICAL LIT: SOME ROOTS OF A REVOLUTION
2 THE GREAT AMERICAN MAGAZINE
3 KING JAMES AND THE MAN IN THE ICE CREAM SUIT
4 TOM WOLFE ON ACID
5 THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
6 MADRAS OUTLAW
7 INTO THE ABYSS
8 HELL SUCKS
9 HISTORY AS A NOVEL, THE NOVEL AS HISTORY
10 THE KING OF NEW YORK
11 SAVAGE JOURNEYS
12 FUN WITH DICK AND GEORGE
13 VULGARIAN AT THE GATE
EPILOGUE AFTER THE BALL
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
“Maybe we should just blow up the New Yorker building.”
That was Jimmy Breslin talking. It was a story meeting, an electrical brainstorm to generate some provocative ideas for New York, the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune. Clay Felker, the magazine’s editor, had mentioned that the great literary magazine of his youth had gotten so dull lately, so deadly dull. “Look … we’re coming out once a week, right?” Felker told his staff, which included general assignment reporter Tom Wolfe, columnist Breslin, assistant editor Walter Stovall, and art director Peter Palazzo. “And The New Yorker comes out once a week. And we start out the week the same way they do, with blank paper and a supply of ink. Is there any reason why we can’t be as good as The New Yorker? Or better. They’re so damned boring.”
“Well, Clay,” Tom Wolfe suggested, “maybe we can do that. How about blowing up The New Yorker in New York?”
Bingo. Felker loved the idea, and it was timed perfectly. This year, 1965, was the fortieth anniversary of The New Yorker, and the magazine was going to throw a big party for itself at the St. Regis Hotel. Besides, it was payback time. Lillian Ross had zinged Wolfe in a March 16 Talk of the Town piece called “Red Mittens!” “Zonggggggggggg! Innnnnnnnn! Swinging!” Ross’s piece began. “They’re hot! They’re so far in that they’re coming out the other side. And they’re fed up to the gillies with teenagery.” It went on like that. The thirty-four-year-old reporter had been flattered and amused by the piece, but turnabout was fair play, after all.
The culture of The New Yorker was shrouded in mystery, particularly its editor, William Shawn, who refused interviews and kept a profile so low that the witness protection program couldn’t have provided deeper cover. Wolfe called Shawn for an interview anyway, and the editor strongly advised Wolfe to beg off the story: “If we tell someone we want to do a profile and that person doesn’t want to cooperate, we don’t do the profile. We would expect you to extend us the same courtesy.”
One night, while dining with a number of writers and editors at a West Village restaurant, Wolfe happened to find himself sitting across the table from Renata Adler, a New Yorker staff writer. Might she help him suss out details of Shawn’s life? But Adler acted quickly to close ranks around the magazine, and the Tribune reporter found himself hitting a lot of dead ends, promising leads that would just sputter out. But there were sources closer to home, as it turned out. Walt Stovall’s wife, Charlayne Hunter, had been one of the first two black students to integrate the University of Georgia and was now working as a Talk of the Town reporter for The New Yorker. Wolfe didn’t want to compromise her position
at the magazine, so he delicately danced around the subject, prodding Hunter to solicit information without actually telling her what he was doing. She gave Wolfe a trove of great stories regarding The New Yorker’s byzantine, cumbersome editing process. From a freelancer he picked up a choice anecdote about Shawn’s preference for using Coke bottles as ashtrays. He received a detailed description of Shawn’s apartment from a social acquaintance who had attended a dinner party there, and so on.
The best material was to be found at the magazine’s fortieth-anniversary party in the ballroom at the St. Regis Hotel. It was an invite-only affair, but no one stopped the New York reporter when he walked right in. Wolfe kept himself as inconspicuous as a man in a white suit can be, flitting around the edges of the party, keeping a close watch on Shawn.
By the time Wolfe sat down to write the article, he quickly realized that a straight-down-the-middle parody of The New Yorker would beget more of what the magazine offered: gray prose. “Something that’s dull is funny for about a page,” said Wolfe. “So I figured that I would treat them in a way that they would hate the most—like the National Enquirer, something that would be totally inappropriate.”
Using what Wolfe called his “hyperbolic style,” he wrote more than ten thousand words, far more than the originally proposed few thousand words. But Felker loved every word of it and showed it to the Tribune’s editor, Jim Bellows, for his approval. Bellows, a two-fisted newspaperman who loved nothing more than to stir up controversy, flipped out. He might not have personally cared about the relative merits of The New Yorker, but he recognized a hot story when he saw one. Four days before the first installment hit the streets, Bellows messengered two copies of Wolfe’s piece to Shawn at The New Yorker’s offices with a card that read “With my compliments.”
What the Tribune received in return for this gesture of good faith was a salvo. Shawn was incensed by this poisonous yellow journalism. He reeled off a letter to the Tribune’s owner, Jock Whitney, calling the piece “murderous” and “certainly libelous,” and urged the Trib’s distinguished publisher to literally stop the presses and pull the piece from the Sunday supplement. If the paper’s legal department did in fact have reason to believe that the story was legally actionable, Whitney would have to give serious thought to killing the story.
But Bellows would have none of it. He sent the letter in full to reporters at Time and Newsweek, then handed the story over to the copy-editing department. Let the boneyard at The New Yorker rattle; Wolfe’s story was going to run on Sunday.
“Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” screamed the headline in the April 11 issue of New York. Peter Palazzo ran an illustration of The New Yorker’s monocled Victorian icon Eustace Tilley, but swathed him in a mummy’s shroud. “They have a compulsion in the New Yorker offices, at 25 West Forty-Third Street, to put everything in writing,” Wolfe wrote.
They have boys over there on the nineteenth and twentieth floors, the editorial offices, practically caroming off each other—bonk old bison heads!—at the blind turns in the hallways because of the fantastic traffic in memos. They just call them boys. “Boy, will you take this please …” Actually, a lot of them are old men with starched white collars with the points curling up a little, “big lunch” ties, button-up sweaters, and black basket-weave sack socks, and they are all over the place transporting these thousands of messages with their kindly old elder bison shuffles shoop-shooping along.
Wolfe explicated the magazine’s complex memo distribution system:
There are different colors for different “unit tasks.” Manuscripts are typed on maize-yellow bond, bud-green is for blah-blah-blah, fuchsia demure is for blah-blah-blah, Newsboy blue is for blah-blah-blah, and this great cerise, a kind of mild cherry red, is for urgent messages, immediate attention and everything. So here are these old elder bison messengers batting off each other in the halls, hustling cerise memos around about some story somebody is doing.
Wolfe characterized Shawn as an absentminded, passive-aggressive manager, his office a “kind of horsehair-stuffing atmosphere of old carpeting … and happy-shabby, baked-apple gentility.” He made up words like prestigeful and used sentence fragments such as “William Shawn–editor of one of the most powerful magazines in America. The Man. Nobody Knows.”
The second story, “Lost in the Whichy Thickets,” ran the following Sunday and was even more audacious. Here Wolfe had the temerity to question the value of the magazine’s literary worth:
The New Yorker comes out once a week, it has overwhelming cultural prestige, it pays top prices to writers—and for forty years it has maintained a strikingly low level of literary achievement. Esquire comes out only once a month, yet it has completely outclassed The New Yorker in literary contribution even during its cheesecake days…
In both form and content, the two stories were a frontal attack on the battlements of an august institution. Shawn was a funeral director, his writers the walking dead, his staffers “tiny mummies.”
Felker’s instincts were right on the money. The indignant letters poured in from the unknown and the famous alike—Muriel Spark, Richard Rovere, Ved Mehta, E. B. White, even the notoriously elusive J. D. Salinger.
“At first I found all the attention quite frightening,” said Wolfe thirty-eight years later. “Here I was, this general assignment reporter making $130 a week, which even in those days was very sad, and all these big names were coming down on my head. Clay was rocked, too.”
According to Wolfe, Shawn hired a lawyer to tail the Tribune reporter, hoping to catch him in some damning, libelous act. When Wolfe agreed to be interviewed about the controversy by radio personality Tex McCrary, he spotted a mysterious suited figure in the front row of McCrary’s audience, writing everything down in a little black notebook.
Dwight Macdonald, one of America’s most prominent postwar intellectuals and a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1951, wrote a thirteen-thousand-word counterattack that ran in two issues of the New York Review of Books and methodically refuted Wolfe’s two stories. (Felker had originally offered to run Macdonald’s pieces in the Trib, but Macdonald declined—“why print it in the Trib and keep their pot boiling?”)
The first piece was called “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine,” in which Macdonald skewered Wolfe’s style of writing as being “a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction. Entertainment rather than information is the aim of its producers, and the hope of its consumers.” Macdonald went on:
The genre originated in Esquire but it now appears most flamboyantly in the New York Herald Tribune, which used to be a staidly respectable newspaper but has been driven by chronic deficits—and by a competitive squeeze between the respectable, and profitable, Times, and the less substantial but also profitable News—into some very unstaid antics. Dick Schaap is one of the Trib’s parajournalists. “David Dubinsky began yelling, which means he was happy,” he begins an account of a recent political meeting. Another is Jimmy Breslin, the tough-guy-with-heart-of-schmaltz bard of the little man and the big celeb…. But the king of the cats is, of course, Tom Wolfe, an Esquire alumnus who writes mostly for the Trib’s Sunday magazine, New York, which is edited by a former Esquire editor, Clay Felker, with whom his writer-editor relationship is practically symbiotic.
Macdonald went on to attack Wolfe’s mannerist style, skewer his penchant for “elaboration rather than development,” and speculate that “Wolfe will not be read with pleasure, or at all, years from now, and perhaps not even next year.” In the second piece, Macdonald really laid into Wolfe. He dismissed the reporter’s two New Yorker stories outright: “their ideas bogus, their information largely misinformation, their facts often non-facts and the style which they were communicated to the reader neither orderly nor meaningful.”
“Well, I passed it off lightly,” said Wolfe of Macdonald’s criticism, “b
ut I wasn’t happy about it. Macdonald was a good writer and he understood the art of attack, but I tried to act as if I didn’t care.” Did Wolfe harbor ambitions to one day be published in The New Yorker? “I didn’t think that way. It never occurred to me that The New Yorker would want anything of mine, because my approach was so different than theirs.”
“Tiny Mummies” brought into the open what had been hiding in plain sight for a few years now, which was the widening rift between traditional reporters and the “parajournalists” of whom Macdonald had so witheringly and disparagingly written. As the de facto ringleader of this irreverent bunch, as well as the writer with the biggest cojones, Wolfe was most vulnerable to attack. But as it turned out, the decade’s most exciting developments in reporting would bear Wolfe’s imprint far more than The New Yorker’s.
Wolfe and many of his contemporaries recognized, some earlier than most, one salient fact of life in the sixties: the traditional tools of reporting would be inadequate to chronicle the tremendous cultural and social changes of the era. War, assassination, rock, drugs, hippies, Yippies, Nixon: how could a traditional just-the-facts reporter dare to provide a neat and symmetrical order to such chaos? Many of them couldn’t and didn’t. Witness Time’s and Newsweek’s clumsy mishandling of the hippie movement, or the embarrassing countercultural appropriations of broadcast journalism (Dan Rather reporting from Vietnam in a Nehru jacket, to name just one egregious example).
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