For Wolfe, it was the best of all possible worlds. Not only did he have job security at the Tribune, but now he was making an impact on a national level, producing stories for the most talked-about magazine in America. He had never worked harder, but the six years Wolfe spent writing for both the Tribune and Esquire transformed him into a reporter-cum-cultural icon and produced some of the most vibrant journalism of the decade.
TOM WOLFE ON ACID
Tom Wolfe was juggling a monstrous schedule. Jim Bellows, Clay Felker (who had replaced Shelly Zalaznick as editor of New York), and Harold Hayes were tugging him every which way, and he willingly followed. After a few years of general assignment sloggery, he now had two prominent outlets that gave him a wide berth to write as he pleased. It came at a great time; everywhere Wolfe turned, he saw the old culture being plowed under and upended by new ways of living, thinking, playing. Wolfe was anxious to chronicle as much of it as he could—to write about all of it and become the authoritative voice of the decade’s new vanguard. That every reporter in New York wasn’t following suit was unfathomable to him.
In his features for the Tribune and Esquire, Wolfe cut a wide swath through the culture—the gambling rituals and psychiatric breakdowns of Las Vegas casino crawlers, new national pastimes such as drag racing on Long Island, teen cultural arbiters including popular radio DJ Murray the K and hipster habitué Baby Jane Holzer, and the “Nanny Mafia” of housekeepers among New York’s upper class.
For Esquire stories that took him out of town, Wolfe traveled on weekends and wrote at night. “What I spent on those trips was always more than I ever earned,” said Wolfe. “But the idea was to do more reporting than anyone had ever done before.”
In 1964, Esquire editor Bob Sherrill suggested that Wolfe head out to Wilkes-Barre, North Carolina, to interview stock car driver Junior Johnson, a colorful character whom Sherrill had first gotten wind of while working as a newspaper editor in Stanford, North Carolina. Johnson was a big deal in his home state, the subject of many local stories, but no one with Wolfe’s skill had tackled him yet. Wolfe, ditching his white suit for green tweed this time in order to blend in a bit, made “countless, I don’t know how many” trips to North Carolina, quietly insinuating himself with Johnson, a former bootlegger who had learned how to drive by keeping one step ahead of the feds. Wolfe had never worked harder on a story, but it was worth it. A 20,000-word epic, “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson, Yes!” was Wolfe’s exegesis of the good-ol’-boy South. It was world’s apart from the patrician South of his upbringing, but no less fascinating. Wolfe had done it again; coming into the subject cold, he had written the best magazine feature on stock car racing thus far.
In his Esquire story “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!” Wolfe portrayed the Nevada gambling mecca as a netherworld of sleep-deprived psychosis and temporary euphoria, bathed in the bright, eternal glow of its neon signs: “Boomerang Modern, Palette Curvilinear, Flash Gordon Ming-Alert Spiral, McDonald’s Hamburger Parabola, Mint Casino Elliptic, Miami Beach Kidney.” Wolfe panned across the diverse cross section of Vegas dwellers, stopping to admire the “buttocks décolletage” of certain Vegas women, whose “bikini-style shorts… cut across the round fatty masses of the buttocks rather than cupping them from below, so that the outer-lower edges of these fatty masses, or ‘cheeks,’ are exposed.” Here are the “old babes at the row upon row of slot machines,” their “hummocky shanks” packed into capri pants, with a “Dixie cup full of nickels or dimes in the left hand and an Iron Boy work glove on the right hand to keep the calluses from getting sore.” Wolfe leads the reader into the inner circles of Vegas hell, down into the county jail and the psychiatric ward of the county hospital, where those “who have taken the loop-the-loop and could not stand the centripity” come to heal themselves.
So eager was Wolfe to provide the definitive story on Vegas culture that his original draft was nearly twice as long as the final version that ran in the magazine; brevity was not his strong suit, and his stories often entailed massive paring and trimming.
Wolfe was pushing his language deeper into whimsical metaphor. His sentences were being pulled and distended to the edge of prolixity, and he was using onomatopoeia; Wolfe’s pieces came with their own sound effects. The opening sentence of the Vegas story was a single word repeated 57 times: “Hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, HERNia, hernia …” a device meant to convey the running drone of the stick men at the craps tables. In his Junior Johnson story, Wolfe wrote “Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong!—gawdam!” to simulate the sound of Johnson’s car peeling out. In the lead paragraph for his story on Baby Jane Holzer, called “The Girl of the Year,” Wolfe discovered another effective technique, the run-on enumeration of fashion details:
Bangs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms éclair shanks elf books ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them, these flaming little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the Academy of Music Theater underneath that vast old mouldering cherub dome up there—aren’t they super-marvelous!
The publishing world was taking notice. In the winter of 1965, Lynn Nesbit, a twenty-five-year-old junior agent, contacted Wolfe about taking him on as a client. “Lynn called me out of the blue,” according to Wolfe, “and said, ‘Don’t you know you have a book here?’” Nesbit, who had started out as a secretary for leading agent Sterling Lord and thus came armed with a solid Rolodex, suggested to Wolfe that a collection of his stories might be something she could sell. “I was this fresh-faced girl from the Midwest, but Tom liked the fact that I was a straight shooter,” said Nesbit. “He was actually thinking about writing a novel at that time, but I loved his work, so he took a chance on me, I’m not sure why.”
Nesbit packaged the book of pieces along with Wolfe’s novel proposal and sold a two-book contract to editor Henry Robbins at Farrar, Straus and Giroux for a solid four-figure fee—much to the dismay of Clay Felker, who was working as an editorial consultant for Viking Press and felt proprietary toward Wolfe and his work, particularly since he had shepherded many of the pieces into publication. “Clay Felker didn’t talk to me for ten years because he didn’t get Tom’s first book,” said Nesbit. And Tom Guinzburg, the editor in chief of Viking, was so furious at Nesbit for not giving him the book that he refused to participate in the auction process that Nesbit had initiated.
Working with Robbins, Wolfe lightly edited a few pieces, then got back to the business of the novel. “Henry was a very sensitive literary person,” said Wolfe. “I was very grateful that he and [Farrar, Straus and Giroux cofounder] Roger Straus found some merit in a book of pieces. Quite a few publishers had said, ‘Look, you publish a real book and then we’ll publish this one afterwards.’”
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby was published in July 1965. Reviews were mixed. Joseph Epstein, writing in a New Republic review titled “Rococo and Roll,” called Wolfe an “intellectual slummer” who struck “a note of supreme reverse condescension” when writing about underclass bohos such as Holzer and the Twisters at New York’s Peppermint Lounge. Yet Epstein found his satirical jabs at New York status-mongers, such as the “glamorosi” in his story “The Big League Complex,” to be spot-on. Emile Capouya, writing in Saturday Review, found it “hard to be grateful for Mr. Wolfe’s industrious researches, his eye for the characteristic triviality, and his very lively style,” which is mostly “exclamatory and goes on too long.”
No matter; the book was an immediate hit. A month after its July publication, it had already gone into its fourth printing. The success of Kandy-Kolored, coupled with Wolfe’s savaging of The New Yorker in his Tribune stories, which ran in April of that year, made the writer the enfant terrible of American journalism, whose genteel disposition concealed a sharply subversive wit. Wolfe was being profiled in Time and
Newsweek, interviewed on network television, and feted at parties from Richmond, Virginia, to San Diego, California, where, Vogue pointed out, “he appeared in a white-on-white suit kissing the ladies’ hands.”
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby expanded Wolfe’s audience considerably. Now his pieces were being underlined and dogeared by college students who felt the writer was providing an important forum for voices and cultural trends that had not been given their proper due in the mainstream media. If not quite a countercultural spokesman, Wolfe was certainly in consonance with the incipient cultural sea change. But he had written over 150,000 words in fifteen months, in countless features for both the Tribune and Esquire, and he wanted to try his hand at a book-length project—if not the epic social realist novel that he longed to write, then an epic nonfiction project with a compelling narrative at its center. “I had enough pieces for another collection, but I didn’t want to keep turning out collections,” said Wolfe. “I held off on publishing another one until I could get a real book done.”
He found his book subject in July 1966, when he received a cache of letters from an anonymous sender. The letters, which were addressed to novelist Larry McMurtry, were written by author Ken Kesey, who had been busted for marijuana possession in April 1965 and again in January 1966 and had jumped bail to Mexico, where he was in exile. The letters had been passed along through the large network of Kesey’s friends and followers. Ed McClanahan, a writer and editor who had known Kesey when the two were in Wallace Stegner’s fiction writing class together at Stanford University, had sent the letters in the hope that Wolfe might want to write something about Kesey. “At the time,” said Wolfe, “Kesey felt, quite correctly, that if you’re in legal trouble, the bigger a celebrity you are, the better chance you’ll have of beating the rap.”
McClanahan had already tried once to get Kesey’s story out there. Fellow Stegner alumnus Robert Stone had been assigned to write a story on Kesey for Esquire, but the magazine had killed the piece, so McClanahan published it in a literary anthology he was coediting with Fred Nelson called One Lord, One Faith, One Cornbread. But that was a little magazine for a little audience. “I knew that Bob’s enterprise with Esquire had come a cropper ’cause they were too thickheaded to know what it was all about,” said McClanahan, who had obtained the McMurtry letters through Kesey’s lawyer, Paul Robertson, and felt they could be a great jumping-off point for a book. When Henry Robbins, who had signed McClanahan to a book contract, went to San Francisco to visit the writer in the summer of 1966, McClanahan suggested that Wolfe might be the perfect Boswell for Kesey. “I just thought Wolfe’s style just went with what Kesey was doing,” said McClanahan.
Wolfe was intrigued. The letters, he later wrote, were “wild and ironic … written like a cross between William Burroughs and George Ade telling of disguises, paranoia, running from cops, smoking joints and seeking satori in the rat lands of Mexico.” One Kesey letter provided some biographical background:
Once an athlete so valued he had been given the job of calling signals from the line and risen into contention for the nationwide amateur wrestling crown, now he didn’t know if he could do a dozen pushups. Once possessor of a phenomenal bank account and money waving from every hand, now it was all his poor wife could do to scrape together eight dollars to send as getaway money to Mexico. But a few years previous he had been listed in Who’s Who and asked to speak at such auspicious gatherings as the Wellesley Club in Dahla and now they wouldn’t even allow him to speak at a VDC [Vietnam Day Committee] gathering. What was it that had brought a man so high of promise to so low a state in so short a time? Well, the answer can be found in just one short word, my friends, in just one all-well-used syllable: “Dope!”
Wolfe was drawn in by the wild head-charge of Kesey’s writing, its vivacity and gallows humor. He knew very little about Kesey other than his book about corruption in a mental institution, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a huge best-seller in 1962, and the follow-up about an Oregon logging family, 1964’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Wolfe was a big fan of Cuckoo’s Nest—he could tell that Kesey had done his homework, New Journalism-style—but as it turned out, Kesey’s life story was every bit as intriguing.
Ken Kesey was raised on a farm that his father owned in Springfeld, Oregon. Like Tom Wolfe Sr., Fred Kesey operated a collective, the Eugene Farmers Cooperative, which he turned into one of the biggest dairy operations in the state. A strapping athlete with literary aspirations, eighteen-year-old Ken Kesey enrolled in the University of Oregon in 1953 and earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism. In 1959 he received a creative writing fellowship from Stanford to study with Wallace Stegner. Kesey wrote during the day and worked the night shift at a psychiatric hospital in nearby Menlo Park. He lived on Perry Lane, a small Palo Alto bohemian enclave adjacent to the Stanford golf course, where he discussed literature and politics with the group of artists and writers that had settled into the placid rhythms of the place.
His first exposure to hallucinogens occurred at the Menlo Park hospital when he volunteered to take part in experiments with LSD for scientific research. Kesey’s initiations into the world of psychoactive drugs and mental illness provided the raw material for Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey wrote sections of Cuckoo’s Nest while on peyote and LSD). The book’s allegory about institutionalized repression resonated with young readers, and the book made Kesey enough money to live comfortably and support his future endeavors. He purchased a plot of land in La Honda, a mountainous rural outpost near Stanford, and began an experiment in communal living with fellow Stanford alumni and various other friends and family members.
The group would become known as the Merry Pranksters, with Kesey presiding over it all like a benign pasha. Meals were taken together, women were shared, and drugs were consumed in prodigious quantities. It was Kesey’s firm belief that LSD was a portal to a higher consciousness; the Pranksters proselytized the good word with a series of Acid Tests that transpired all over northern and central California. Using an arsenal of bright, colorful electric lights, Day-Glo paint, and amplified music, Kesey and the Pranksters created a warmly communal atmosphere in which initiates would drop acid and burrow deep into their inner selves. This was the path to a new age of enlightenment, Kesey was convinced. “When they tripped, Kesey’s instructions were, ‘Whatever you are on your trip, that’s who you truly are,’” said Wolfe. “If someone did something strange, or had a breakdown, that was their trip.”
Wolfe wasn’t so sure, but Kesey was a fascinating figure engaged, Wolfe felt, in no less than the founding of a secular religion. “At the time, I didn’t know of the word hippie,” said Wolfe. “The press saw the potential of these people, but they used terms like acidhead. To me, acid-head sounded like a corrosive battery. There was also the name hippie-dippie, which brought to mind Christlike Renaissance figures.” Kesey appealed to Wolfe’s sense of fun and adventure, of forging new lifestyles from the effluvia of pop culture. “Unlike Timothy Leary, Kesey was influenced by comic books,” said Wolfe. “He dressed in military outfits, used Day-Glo paint and acid rock as tools. Leary felt it was enough to just sit in your ashram and meditate. Kesey wanted people to move off of dead center. If you didn’t do that, you were dead.”
Wolfe decided he would go to Mexico City for the Tribune, hang out with Kesey, and file a story for New York about the author’s eight months as a fugitive. But by the time Wolfe had booked his plane ticket, Kesey was already back in the States. Attempting to sneak across the border from Mexico, he had been arrested on the Bayshore Freeway south of San Francisco by the FBI. Wolfe decamped to the San Mateo county jail in Redwood City, California, where Kesey was being held pending his release on $35,000 bail.
At the jail Wolfe encountered a scene “like the stage door at the Music Box Theatre,” with a colorful clutch of Kesey supporters sitting vigil in the waiting room, throwing the I Ching or silently praying. After haggling with the prison guards, Wolfe, accompanied by Ed McClanahan, was
granted a ten-minute visit with Kesey. Although they were separated by thick plate glass, Wolfe was taken by the sheer mass and bulk of Kesey, his “thick wrists and forearms” and his “big neck with a pair of sternocleido-mastoid muscles that [rose] up out of the prison work shirt like a couple of dock ropes.” Wolfe frantically flung questions at Kesey about some statements he had made in the local press about moving “beyond acid,” and Kesey, through the lo-fi crackle of the phone, told him that “it’s time to graduate from what’s been going on, to something else.” When Wolfe asked him why he had publicly announced his retirement from writing, Kesey told him, “I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.”
Wolfe was drawn into Kesey’s force field, taken in by the “strange up-country charisma” of the man. He traveled with some of the Merry Pranksters to an old pie factory on the ground floor of an abandoned hotel on Harriet Street in San Francisco, where they awaited their leader’s return. Wolfe, wearing his white suit and wielding a reporter’s notepad, witnessed men and women wandering around the vast space in white overalls with patches fashioned from American flags. Theatrical scaffolding lined the walls, with blankets filling in for curtains; there were mattresses strewn everywhere, and a school bus sat in the center of the warehouse, painted in a striking array of Day-Glo colors, “like a cross between Fernand Léger and Dr. Strange.” Next to the bus, some Pranksters were painting a sign that read ACID TEST GRADUATION. Off to one side was Neal Cassady, the protagonist (as Dean Moriarty) of Jack Kerouac’s 1950 novel On the Road and a Beat Generation icon, repeatedly flipping a sledgehammer in the air and dextrously catching it by the handle.
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 13
