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

by Marc Weingarten

  Gingrich cleaned house in a hurry. He promoted Henry Wolf, an Austrian who had studied with legendary teacher and Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, to create a cleaner and bolder new look for the magazine. Gingrich also restored some of the magazine’s literary luster by bringing writers such as Hemingway back into the fold. He fired Birmingham and went on a hiring binge. What was needed, in Gingrich’s view, was young men with unlimited creative energy who could recruit new voices and imprint their vision on the magazine while still remaining true to the spirit of what he had built. He found three perfect candidates for the job, the trio that Gingrich referred to as “the Young Turks”: Clay Felker, Ralph Ginzburg, and Harold Hayes.

  Harold Hayes’s and Clay Felker’s paths had first crossed years earlier, during their tenures as ambitious young college newspaper editors. In 1950 Felker organized a seminar on journalism at the Washington Hotel, near Duke’s campus, in Durham, North Carolina. Among those who showed up was Hayes, who made the two-hour trip from Wake Forest University to rub shoulders with the panel that Felker had assembled, which included the editor of the New York Daily News. But according to Felker, the two regarded each other skeptically, and barely talked. It was to set the tone for their subsequent professional relationship at Esquire, where Felker and Hayes battled for supremacy while they were shaping the most influential magazine of the 1960s.

  The men had much in common. The son of a Southern Baptist minister, Harold T P. Hayes was born in Elkin, North Carolina, and briefly lived in Beckley, West Virginia, until his family moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, when Harold was eleven. A fan of jazz music and all the great twentieth-century American novelists—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, James T Farrell, John Steinbeck—Hayes fancied himself a novelist in training, and wrote short fiction during high school and as an undergraduate at Wake Forest.

  Hayes was an indifferent student: “I floundered around for four or five years through a variety of courses, flunking some and passing enough to leave without total disgrace.” Shortly before graduating, Hayes endured a brief stint in the navy, where he was stationed at New-berry, South Carolina, and played trombone in the jazz band. Hayes enrolled in a short-story class and found to his delight that it brought him some academic approbation. Encouraged by his professor, Hayes joined The Student, Wake Forest’s literary magazine, where he became editor in short order. Hayes had found his métier, and he thrived at The Student— generating story ideas, working closely with the best writers on campus, making The Student one of the best college magazines in the South.

  Hayes returned to military duty during the Korean War, serving two years as an infantry officer in the Marine reserve in 1950 and 1951. Shortly before his discharge, Hayes traveled to New York seeking job opportunities in the magazine business. He wrangled a meeting with Pageant editor Harris Shevelson, who suggested that Hayes submit a critique of the magazine. Hayes’s detailed, astute memorandum impressed Shevelson enough to hire the young southerner as an assistant editor of the magazine, a kind of benign general-interest publication for those who might also subscribe to Reader’s Digest and Life.

  Years later, Hayes would look back upon his tenure at Pageant as a crucial apprenticeship. He had tremendous respect for the way Shevelson managed to pull together a quality magazine using limited financial resources. “His persistent refusal to accept an ordinary approach to conventional material caused his staff considerable discomfort,” Hayes wrote, “but managed, I believe, to improve the level of individual performance.” Hayes left Pageant in October 1954 and joined the staff of Tempo as a feature editor. During his off hours Hayes developed a concept for a new venture to be called Picture Week, a monthly news picture magazine. Working with a bare-bones staff, Hayes was given the go-ahead to start up the magazine, and it was here that he began to develop his taste for unconventional stories that would prick the prejudices of his readership and create a buzz. Among the stories Hayes assigned were “Twelve Southern Governors Answer the Question: When Will You Allow Negroes in Your Schools?” “The Appeal of the Exposé Magazine,” and “Perón Can Fall,” all of which were picked up by the wire services for national distribution.

  But Hayes’s daring editorial policy didn’t translate into healthy circulation numbers, and he and the entire staff were fired less than a year after launching the title. Pageant editor Laura Bergquist, who was friendly with Esquire publisher Arnold Gingrich, suggested that Gingrich interview Hayes as a possible editor. Armed with a portfolio book of the articles he had assigned for Picture Week and Pageant, Hayes impressed Gingrich, who put him in touch with Tom O’Connor, a friend of his from the Flair days. O’Connor hired Hayes to do some police reporting for a couple of small news digests he owned in Atlanta. For two years Hayes did the yeoman’s work of beat reporter but kept in touch with Gingrich, just in case something materialized at Esquire. When the news digests folded, Gingrich hired Hayes as an editorial assistant. “This time,” Gingrich wrote in his memoir, Nothing but People, “I took him in like the morning paper, knowing that in a southern liberal who was also a Marine reserve officer I had an extremely rare bird.” Hayes would be “an anvil for which I would have to find a few hammers.”

  Those hammers, as it turned out, would be Felker and Ginzburg. An old friend of Fred Birmingham’s, Ralph Ginzburg was a street-smart striver, a Brooklyn native who had engineered a meteoric rise in the publishing business. As an undergraduate at City College’s school of business, Ginzburg edited the B-school’s newspaper, The Ticker, and sold his first piece of writing, an article about Nathan’s hot dog stand on Coney Island, while still in college. At the age of twenty-three, Ginzburg was hired as Look’s circulation promotion director, overseeing a $2 million budget and a staff of ten. In 1957 he was given an assignment from Esquire, whose offices were just a couple of floors below Look’s. The article was called “An Unhurried View of Erotica” and described in graphic detail the erotic literature to be found in the rare-book rooms of the world’s greatest museums. Esquire never ran the story, but Fritz Bamberger was impressed with Ginzburg and hired him to be an articles editor.

  Ginzburg, however, thought he was getting Birmingham’s job as top editor; he didn’t realize he was taking a big pay cut from his Look job until after he had signed the contract. It would not be the first time the young editor felt he was getting the bum’s rush from Esquire. The same day he was hired, Felker was recruited to be features editor. Ginzburg would be Esquire’s articles editor, and Hayes the assistant to the publisher.

  Ginzburg was furious. Not only had he been misled about his job title, but now he would have to share his duties with another editor. With the ambitious Hayes thrown into the mix, Esquire suddenly roiled with furious turf battles. All three editors desperately courted Gingrich in an attempt to gain leverage, but the veteran publisher kept himself out of it. “Arnold’s removal from the heat of everyday editorial activity was accented by the physical distance of his office,” Hayes wrote in an unpublished memoir, “a good ways down the hall and nestled securely between the offices of the president and the chairman of the board.”

  Hayes, Ginzburg, and Felker were wary of each other and took pains not to make any rash decisions; one false move, after all, could compromise a potentially promising career at Esquire. To Hayes, Felker and Ginzburg were young opportunists, comfortable in the requisite uniform of corporate upward mobility: “They wore the same kind of clothes: button-down shirts, horn-rimmed glasses (it was a short glasses phase for Felker; he wore them the first few weeks and then never again) and Brooks Brothers suits.” In Hayes’s view, Ginzburg was crude and unimaginative; his primary skill involved drumming up provocative cover lines and then matching the headlines with celebrities, who would be paired with ghostwriters to “draft” their stories.

  Felker, on the other hand, was formidable competition. Hayes regarded him as an enterprising editor who was as sturdy as a starched collar, a gadfly with an abundance of intellectual energy and a special talent
for collecting important people like Mont Blanc pens. “Clay was always wildly enthusiastic about writers and ideas,” said John Berendt, a former editor at Esquire. “He could sniff out a developing story before anyone else. He was always out, going to parties, schmoozing, trying to match the right writers to the right stories. He had his finger on the pulse of things, just an amazing sixth sense about trends.”

  In his memoir Nothing but People, Gingrich referred to Felker as “our drinking editor, not because he had a more agile elbow that any of the rest of us, but simply because he was so party prone. Clay managed to get to more parties in a week than anybody else in a month. But in relation to the needs of the magazine at that moment he couldn’t have made a better investment of his time.”

  Ginzburg was thoroughly unimpressed by Felker. “Clay would swipe ideas away from me,” he said. “We would bat around ideas prior to meeting with Gingrich, then we’d go into the meeting and I’d pitch my idea. Gingrich would say, ‘Why are you pitching this to me? Clay already told me about it.’ I got on quickly to this. I played the game, but it was very ugly.” As for Hayes, “he was an amanuensis for Gingrich; he was no editor. He was extremely hard-driving and ambitious, though. He should have been the sales manager of US Steel. He had no ability whatsoever to come up with ideas.”

  With Henry Wolf temporarily setting up shop in the vacant editor in chief’s office, the three subeditors fervently jockeyed for the top position. Editorial meetings, which were held each Friday afternoon in Gingrich’s office, became claw-and-scratch confrontations, with no clear consensus emerging as to which stories would ultimately make it into the magazine. The stories were supposed to be ratified by a vote between the three senior editors, fiction editor Rust Hills, and copy editor Dave Solomon, but according to Gingrich, it all came down to “a test of lung power, to see who could shout everybody else down.”

  Gingrich, for his part, kept himself at a remove from the power grabs that would occur after meetings. More often than not, the weekly editorial meetings were exercises in futility. It was often left for fiction editor Rust Hill to cast the deciding vote on which stories made the cut. When the subeditors decided, for the sake of propriety, to hold preliminary meetings prior to the official meeting, they nearly came to blows. The end result of this furious lunge for magazine space was a large pile of assigned but unpublished manuscripts.

  Hayes and Felker’s battle for editorial control was a clash of temperments. Hayes was a somewhat shy and reticent personality who cultivated a hail-fellow-well-met conviviality in the office, often inviting fellow editors and writers into his office for drinks on Friday afternoon. Felker maintained a more flinty abrasiveness; his editorial approach was more hit-and-run. While no one ever denied his unparalleled ability to weed out story ideas from his own social calendar, he often deferred to his writers to carry the ball. Felker would get wildly enthusiastic about a story but then move on to the next idea before properly nurturing the initial notion. “Follow-through was not something on which Felker placed a lot of emphasis,” said John Berendt. “He had an inquisitiveness about things that weren’t necessarily fully formed, which didn’t make him a great manager. His office was a complete mess. He never knew where anything was. But they both were geniuses, just in different ways. Harold was not the kind of guy to pick up after Felker, and vice versa.”

  Felker’s temper turned off more than a few staff members. “Clay would fly off the handle, he would really scream,” said Berendt. “Harold didn’t scream, he just fired off blistering memos. If staff members came in late to work, he would just make them generate ten story ideas. Hayes had a kind of cold fury, where Felker would pop off.”

  Even though Felker wasn’t the most rigorous line editor, he had a knack for story structure, for finding the lead of a story buried in the twentieth paragraph of a piece. “What Clay did was very mysterious to me,” said writer Patricia Bosworth, one of Felker’s many protegés. “He was very much a conceptualist, and it always worked so beautifully.”

  Hayes was more inclined to take the long view with the magazine, generating a package of stories that would add up to a consistent tone and smooth editorial flow. “Harold’s mantra was always tone, tone, tone,” said Berendt. “Harold was much more methodical, but not quite as quixotic as Felker,” said former contributing writer Brock Brower. “Clay would get an idea, press for the execution of it, and be off on the next thing, while Harold would always chaperone a piece though. Gingrich loved it, of course, because it stimulated the hell out of choices for the magazine. Harold would have his list, Clay would knock it down, and vice versa. They hated each other in the best of all possible ways.”

  Among the three editors, it became apparent in short order that Hayes and Felker were the hungier, more ambitious upstarts; thus, Ginzburg was the first to go. After he suggested that Esquire revert the rights of his erotica story to him in lieu of a pay raise, Ginzburg expanded the piece into a twenty-thousand-word essay and published it in book form with an introduction from drama critic George Jean Nathan. Esquire was uneasy about the enterprise from the start—they didn’t want one of their editors to be so closely associated with such an unseemly piece—and when Ginzburg went on Mike Wallace’s show Nightbeat to promote the book he was fired by John Smart. “I was depressed,” said Ginzburg. “I thought I was doing some good work for the magazine, but the termination forced me to become my own publisher.” Ginzburg would sell three hundred thousand copies of An Unhurried View of Erotica, but he would pay a dear price for success by serving eight months in jail for violating federal obscenity laws.

  Felker and Hayes remained locked in mortal combat, but the push and pull of their energies began to yield some creative dividends in Esquire during the early sixties. The magazine was inching away from the innocuous celebrity profiles and sporting-life features and moving toward venturesome territory. Like two political adversaries from different parties who agree on the issues but have to manufacture dissent in order to distinguish themselves, Felker and Hayes were of the same mind about the editorial direction of the magazine—namely, that Esquire had to move beyond transcribed interviews with expository filler, or the “pictured essays” that the magazine liked to run with titles such as “How to Tell a Rich Girl” and “Castles for Rent.” Gingrich was already making the magazine more of a repository for serious critical thought, hiring Dwight Macdonald to review films, Kingsley Amis to cover “art films,” and Dorothy Parker to critique the latest fiction. Felker brought his college buddy Peter Maas into the fold to write features, as well as sociologist Paul Goodman, whose 1960 book, Growing Up Absurd, had mapped the incipient rebellion against established values that would culminate in the 1960s counterculture. Quality fiction had remained a constant, with contributions from such luminaries as William Styron, John Cheever, and Robert Penn Warren.

  But Felker and Hayes wanted to move in another direction with the magazine’s journalism. At Duke, Felker had trolled the library stacks in search of exciting precedents for him to follow at the Chronicle and came across Civil War-era back issues of the New York Herald Tribune, the great newspaper edited by the social reformist Horace Greeley.

  “I spent the whole afternoon reading these things; I didn’t even realize where the time went, because they were so gripping,” said Felker. “They were written in a narrative structure. And I realized that they were so much more interesting than the newspaper stories I had grown up reading.” The stories, with their vivid descriptions of life in the trenches, changed Felker irrevocably. American journalism had to move in this direction; reporters should be meticulous and exacting when describing events, have a novelist’s flair for language, and enliven their stories with headlong momentum.

  Ironically, the first great journalist of the Felker-Hayes era to fit this description had been a Ginzburg recruit. Thomas B. Morgan, the son of second-generation Polish Jews, was reared in an unlettered household in Springfield, Illinois. Although his mother was a graduate of Purdue Univers
ity, “I don’t think she read five books in her lifetime,” and Morgan’s father, a furniture salesman, hadn’t made it past the second grade. Inspired by a high school English teacher who encouraged him to write fiction, Morgan earned an English degree at Carleton College in North-field, Minnesota, before heading to New York in 1953 to find a job as a magazine editor in order to subsidize his fiction writing.

  Morgan wrote eighteen letters to eighteen editors, but only one responded; Daniel Mich, the editor of Look, Life’s closest competitor in the “picture book” category. Morgan was hired as an associate editor, writing stories for the magazine on the side, and four years later was promoted to staff writer.

  Morgan became Look’s young intrepid reporter, heading to locales as far-flung as Antarctica for stories. Morgan was eager to take on any idea that Mich tossed at him, and he was a quick learner, which made his stories ring with authority, even if they did adhere to Look’s pedestrian writing style, which stressed facts over flair. “The writing in Look was more or less ordinary journalism,” said Morgan. “But it was an unbelievable education for me. It taught me how to be a reporter.”

  Morgan thrived at Look, but he had yet to write the novel he still felt he had in him. He quit his magazine job in 1957 to write two novels, but neither of them was published until years later, when Morgan had established himself as a freelance writer. Broke and casting about for magazine work, he knocked on the door of Esquire, which hired him to write picture captions and contribute stories.

  Morgan found his true calling as a writer of profiles during his tenure at Esquire. Establishing a close collaborative relationship with Felker, Morgan was free to range across the landscape of public personalities, and wrote about whatever interested him at the moment. “Clay was just a great editor,” said Morgan. “If you had an idea and called him up, you didn’t have to go into a long dissertation about it, unlike Harold, who needed you to send a damn essay before he would approve an idea. Clay would just say, ‘Okay, do it.’ And you were on your way.” Felker was attracted by the notion of smart celebrity profiles, if only because he knew Esquire’s readers would want to know about the private lives of public figures. But not puffery; he wanted Morgan to cut right to the bone and deconstruct these complex figures. “Clay was very commercial, but he wanted quality writing regardless of the subject matter,” said Morgan.