The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

by Marc Weingarten

  Capote never tape-recorded any conversations and never jotted anything down in a notebook during the entire six years it took for him to research the story. After each interview was complete, Capote would quickly retreat to his room at the Warren Hotel and type everything from memory and Lee’s notes, then file it and cross-reference it. “People who don’t understand the literary process are put off by notebooks,” Capote told Life in 1966. “And tape recorders are worse—they completely ruin the quality of the thing being felt or talked about. If you write down or tape what people say, it makes them feel inhibited and self-conscious. It makes them say what they think you expect them to say.” If Capote felt that he had missed some crucial information the first time around, he went back and interviewed the same subjects over and over again, until he had it right.

  Capote for years had claimed that he had taught himself to be his own tape recorder. As a memory exercise, he would have friends read or speak into a tape recorder as he listened; then he would quickly write down as accurately as possible what he had heard and compare it to the tape. Over time, Capote claimed, the differences between what was on the tape and what he had had written became negligible.

  Capote had to tread lightly when, a month after arriving in Kansas, two drifters named Dick Hickock and Perry Smith were arrested for the Clutter murders. Using his dispassionate and gently probing approach, Capote achieved a rapport with the killers that had eluded everyone working on the case. The writer spent hundreds of hours with the killers, who in turn used their jail quota of two letters a week to start a long correspondence with the writer. Capote kept them supplied with books, particularly the works of Thoreau and Santayana, which Perry favored, and they in turn filled him in on their backgrounds, their six weeks as fugitives, and the brutally clinical details of the murders. “It wasn’t a question of my liking Dick and Perry,” Capote recalled. “That’s like saying, ‘Do you like yourself?’ What mattered was that I knew them, as well as I know myself.”

  In March 1960, Smith and Hickock were sentenced to death for the Clutter murders, but Capote didn’t yet have his story. Three months of appeals would delay delivery of his manuscript to William Shawn at The New Yorker, but the wait was well worth it. On the eve of the execution, Perry and Hickock requested that Capote serve as an eyewitness. Thus the writer would be privy to the terminus of both his and the killers’ story—holding up cigarettes for the visibly shaking Perry and Hickock on the gallows, receiving a will from Perry that bequeathed all his possessions to the writer, hearing a final “Adios, amigo!” from Perry right before his neck was snapped by the state.

  Capote now had his ending, and he knew just how he wanted the story to play out. With such a great wealth of material, a mere by-the-numbers retelling of the story wouldn’t suffice; it was just a small-town murder, after all, nothing inherently special or unique about that. What Capote had in mind was a narrative that would burrow deep into the lives of everyone who was touched by the murder—not only the Clutters, but Perry and Hickock, Al Dewey and his team of detectives, the citizens of Holcomb and Garden City. Using John Hersey’s Hiroshima as a model, Capote would re-create the events using the omniscient voice of a novel—or, to use Capote’s memorable phrase, a “nonfiction novel.”

  “My theory,” said Capote, “is that you can take any subject and make it into a nonfiction novel. By that I don’t mean a historical or documentary novel—those are popular and interesting but impure genres, with neither the persuasiveness of fact nor thepoetic altitude of fiction. Lots of friends I’ve told these ideas to accuse me of failure of imagination. Ha! I tell them they’re the ones whose imaginations have failed, not me. What I’ve done is much harder than a conventional novel. You have to get away from your own particular vision of the world. Too many writers are mesmerized by their own navels. I’ve had that problem myself— which was one reason I wanted to do a book about a place absolutely new to me—one where the terrain, the accents and the people would all seem freshly minted.”

  Indeed, Capote was venturing into unknown territory for The New Yorker, writing about events that he hadn’t witnessed, dialogue that he received secondhand, interior monologues that required a fair amount of creative license on his part. Take as an example this passage from the first third of the book, when Al Dewey investigates the crime scene:

  During this visit Dewey paused at an upstairs window, his attention caught by something seen in the near distance—a scarecrow amid the wheat stubble. The scarecrow wore a man’s hunting-cap and a dress of weather-faded flowered calico. (Surely an old dress of Bonnie Clutter’s?) Wind frolicked the skirt and made the scarecrow sway-made it seem a creature forlornly dancing in the cold December field. And Dewey was somehow reminded of Marie’s dream. One recent morning she had served him a bungled breakfast of sugared eggs and salted coffee, then blamed it all on “a silly dream”—but a dream the power of daylight had not dispersed.

  Shawn was skeptical of such fanciful speculative prose; how could Capote possibly know what Dewey had been thinking at that moment? Or anyone else’s thoughts, for that matter, especially those of the dead Clutters? In point of fact, Capote couldn’t vouch for the Clutters, but everything else panned out; the New Yorker fact checker found Capote to be the most accurate writer whom he had ever worked with.

  “There were inaccuracies, sure,” said Hope. “He had events happening in different locations and so forth, but none of that really bothered me. What bothered me was that he overplayed certain characters, such as Al Dewey, but I think that Al perhaps let himself be used by Truman in a sense.” Bill Brown thought that Capote’s portrayal of the Clutters was so off the mark as to be virtually unrecognizable.

  The 135,000-word story ran in four parts in four consecutive issues of The New Yorker beginning with the September 25, 1965, issue; the series was a hit, busting all previous sales records for the magazine. When Random House published it in book form as In Cold Blood, it heralded the arrival of a new form, what Capote called the “nonfiction novel,” and netted its author $2 million in paperback and film sales.

  Even after the story was published to great fanfare, William Shawn remained uncomfortable with the decision to run it in The New Yorker. For a magazine that prided itself on ironclad accuracy, there was too much unsubstantiated fact, too much fanciful speculation on Capote’s part. Many years later Shawn would still rue the day he gave the green light to Capote’s notion.

  THE GREAT AMERICAN MAGAZINE

  “Tiny Mummies” notwithstanding, there was a time when Clay Felker worshiped The New Yorker. In the forties, when Felker was in high school, The New Yorker was word-perfect, everything he could ever ask for in a magazine. The narrative nonfiction of Hersey, Ross, Liebling, and other New Yorker contributors represented the apex of creative journalism, the way good stories should be written. It was also a literary refuge from the local newspapers, which he found intellectually listless and uninspired. Growing up in Webster Groves, Missouri, an affluent bedroom suburb ten miles southwest of St. Louis, Felker had to make do with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a paper that had fallen mightily in the decades since former owner Joseph Pulitzer worked his magic. Felker, a baseball fan, stuck with the paper’s sports pages.

  Clay Schuette Felker was born on October 2, 1925 (for years he claimed it was 1928), and reared in a household with two University of Missouri journalism school graduates. Felker’s father, Carl, a nonpracticing lawyer, was the managing editor of the Sporting News, at that time exclusively a baseball magazine, as well as the editor of the Sporting Goods Dealer, a monthly trade publication. His mother was a former newspaper editor who had quit her career to raise her family. Felker wasted little time in establishing himself as a budding publisher, setting up his first newspaper at the age of eight—“the publishing equivalent of a lemonade stand,” he recalled.

  Felker’s earliest exposure to professional journalism came during high school, when he served as an informal apprentice at the Sporting News. He loved th
e way the paper’s words were converted into print by the Linotype machine, and the emphatic clank of the typewriter keys. Felker also accompanied his father to St. Louis Cardinals games, where he watched the city’s baseball writers frantically tap out their deadline stories in the press box in time for the morning edition. He buzzed on the energy of reporting, its frenetic industriousness, and he knew he wanted to make journalism his life’s work.

  Felker assumed that he would matriculate at the University of Missouri’s journalism school; three generations of Felkers had graduated from there. But his parents objected; journalism was not something that can be taught, they said, but was drawn from the raw material of life experience, and it was better to get a solid general education at a quality school. One day Carl came home bearing an armful of college catalogs and spread them before his son. Clay regarded them for a while, then chose the Duke catalog—mainly because it had the most graphically pleasing layout.

  Felker entered Duke as a freshman in 1942 and made a beeline for the school newspaper, the Chronicle, where he landed a job as a reporter. In 1943 he enlisted in the navy, pulling double duty as the sports editor and contributing writer for the navy paper, the Blue Jacket. In 1946, a year after the war’s end, Felker returned to Duke and eventually assumed the editorial duties of the Chronicle. He imposed his will on the paper, increasing the frequency from weekly to twice weekly and taking on stories that had national import. In 1948 Walter Reuther, the powerful head of the United Auto Workers union, was shot in the right arm in an assassination attempt by an unknown assailant and taken to Duke University Hospital for treatment. Reuther’s hospital room was sealed off from the press; no one could get near him. But Felker wanted that interview desperately. He recruited fellow student Peter Maas, the editor of Duke’s humor magazine, Duke and Duchess, and an occasional Chronicle contributor, to get in there somehow and land the scoop of the century. But how to do it? Felker found a pile of textbooks sitting on a desk and handed them to Maas. “You’ll walk into the hospital with these books, and they’ll think you’re a student,” he told Maas.

  The plan worked. Maas walked in without a hitch and found Reuther in an unguarded room, willing to talk. Maas got his interview, which was picked up by the Associated Press, and Felker’s reputation as a ballsy newspaper editor spread to other campuses. “Oh man, when Felker and Maas got that Reuther interview, we all knew about it,” said Robert Sherrill, who was writing articles for Wake Forest University’s paper The Student at the time and would eventually work beside Felker at Esquire. “That became a legendary story among college newspaper writers.”

  The trajectory toward professional glory was gracefully arcing upward, but Felker’s career at Duke was jeopardized by a missed curfew. In the fall of 1948 he was kicked out of school for staying out too late with his girlfriend, Leslie Blatt, and found himself prematurely thrust into the marketplace.

  Which turned out to be salutary, because it allowed Felker to get some real-world experience. Newly married to Blatt and scrambling for work, he found a job through a friend as a statistician for the New York Giants baseball team, where he and Blatt double-dated with the team’s star, Bobby Thomson. Felker also wrote stories for papers that didn’t have a traveling correspondent to cover the team, and he contributed to the Sporting News, writing the first major story about a young minor-league phenom named Willie Mays. Felker found that he was comfortable among baseball players; he radiated self-confidence and easy charm, and he found that it opened doors for him, endeared him to those in positions of power.

  Felker eventually returned to Duke in 1950 and graduated the following year, eager to conquer New York. In 1952 Felker was hired at Life as a sportswriter. There was little substantive work at first; Felker’s job mainly involved gathering stories for other staffers to write. But he got his big break by virtue of a scoop. Felker managed to obtain the Brooklyn Dodgers’ scouting report on the New York Yankees, which contained a smoking gun: Joe DiMaggio’s throwing arm was shot, he could no longer throw anyone out at home. The Yankees never forgave him, but Life was mightily appreciative. Felker was now writing features, among them a long profile of Casey Stengel that he expanded into a book called Casey Stengel’s Secret in 1961.

  Felker thrived in Time-Life’s buttoned-down culture. “There was a high degree of professionalism at Time-Life,” he said. “The morale was unbelievable.” He socialized comfortably with the executives at Time-Life; even Henry Luce became a tennis partner and an occasional guest at Giants games. “Luce was an amazing man,” said Felker. “One day he told me, ‘You have to have a mission when you’re publishing, otherwise you have nothing.’ I took that to heart.” A competent reporter, Felker quickly discovered that he had a greater aptitude for editing. “I enjoyed writing, but it wasn’t my real ability,” he said. Felker was really more of an idea man, someone who could generate countless story ideas and concepts for new magazines. He was a brilliant listener above all, collecting tidbits on cocktail napkins and eliciting information from dinner companions that could be used in editorial meetings. Life put him to work on special projects, such as an issue on the new moneyed class that he put together with four other editors. Felker also began to develop an idea for another magazine, which he called “a New Yorker with pictures.” “The New Yorker at that time was the biggest bore in the world,” he said. “So formulaic.” Felker wrote a memo to Luce outlining his idea, and even worked up a dummy issue with the magazine’s art department, but nothing came of it. Felker also worked on the prototype for what became Sports Illustrated, receiving a crash course in magazine start-ups that he would apply a few years down the line.

  When Peter Maas turned down an editor’s job at Esquire, he suggested that his old college friend Felker apply for it.

  Although Esquire was no longer the cultural arbiter it had been in the 1930s, it was still a title that carried considerable cachet. The magazine was cofounded in 1933 by Arnold Gingrich and Chicago entrepreneur Dave Smart, who made his money producing display posters for retailers and something called Getting On, an eight-page leaflet about money management that savings banks passed along to their customers.

  The idea for Esquire came from a freelance artist named C. F. Peters, who walked into Smart’s offices one day with a drawing for Apparel Arts, one of the four fashion booklets Smart published. Before unwrapping the drawing, Peters mentioned in passing that one of his clients, clothier Rogers Peet, was wondering if Smart was thinking about producing more booklets, perhaps something that he could sell to his customers for a small fee. The Christmas season was coming up, and they could sure use the publicity.

  Smart and Gingrich began pasting up fashion pages, trying to rethink a formula that they had milked, it seemed, in every conceivable permutation. Fashion pages alone couldn’t carry a new title; they would need some editorial content to break it up. Smart began scribbling headlines on a piece of paper: “Gene Tunney on Boxing,” “Bobby Jones on Golf,” “Hemingway on Fishing.” The title—Esquire, the Quarterly for Men— came fairly quickly. The magazine would function as a kind of Vanity Fair with men’s fashion, and Smart would charge a premium price—50 cents— because if men were willing to pay $50 for a suit, they could certainly plunk down two quarters for his magazine.

  But Ernest Hemingway? How would they attract writers of his stature to the magazine? As it turned out, Gingrich, an avid book collector, had been engaged in a correspondence with Hemingway for some time and had even sent him a few items of clothing. Now Gingrich had an offer of work for him, and Hemingway agreed. He would write pieces on the sporting life for Esquire at a rate that was agreeable to both parties.

  Other writers followed in short order: John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Smart and Gingrich had positioned Esquire as a must-read for the male urban sophisticate. But Esquire was also, in Gingrich’s words, all about “the new leisure,” and that meant male fashion spreads and well-crafted lifestyle pieces about fly fishing and automobiles. It w
as a golden formula; by the end of 1937, Esquire’s circulation had risen to 675,000. When paper rationing hit the magazine publishing business during World War II, Gingrich figured out a novel way to get the War Production Board to give Esquire bigger paper allotments: print pinups for the boys on the front. Esquire thus became known as a literate skin magazine, but Gingrich and Smart didn’t care as long as circulation figures continued to escalate.

  Esquire’s winning mix of highbrow fiction, breezy reportage, and cheesecake collapsed after the war, when Gingrich retired at forty and handed over the editorial duties to Smart, who, despite his keen business acumen, was never the best judge of good writing. Under the clunky stewardship of new editor Frederic A. Birmingham, the magazine soon devolved into an unfocused mélange of breathless “amazing tales” pulp and dime-store detective fiction. Smart needed an infusion of new energy, and he convinced Gingrich, who had returned from temporary exile in Switzerland to edit a magazine called Flair one floor above Esquire’s offices at 488 Madison Avenue, to return to Esquire on any terms he wanted. That meant total creative autonomy, the chance to once again mold the magazine in his image as both publisher and editor. Gingrich agreed, and the magazine was back on track.

  Dave Smart died three months after hiring back Gingrich, leaving Esquire’s assets in the hands of his youngest surviving brother, John. Without Dave Smart’s steady hand, John, a publishing neophyte, wisely deferred to Esquire veteran Abe Blinder to run the magazine’s financial affairs. Fritz Bamberger, an Australian with a doctorate in philosophy, would serve as editorial consultant, installing a research department and a thorough fact-checking system.