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

by Marc Weingarten

  Felker and Erpf decided to launch with a splash and held a breakfast party at the Four Seasons restaurant on Monday, April 1, a week before the publication date. Two hundred copies were distributed to press and local luminaries; Mayor John Lindsay spoke of the challenges of publishing a magazine that captured the pulse of the city. “The people here met that challenge once and now meet it again. We of the city are grateful today to salute the rebirth of the magazine … a magazine called New York.”

  But even as the city’s best and brightest were toasting the second coming of New York, managing editor Jack Nessel felt his palms getting sweaty, his pulse quickening. Monday was not a day to fritter away; the staff was already a day behind on the next issue. While Lindsay sang New York’s praises, an anxiety-ridden Nessel sneaked out to draft the production schedule.

  Felker’s star writers picked up where they had left off at the Trib. Jimmy Breslin hopped on the commuter train that travels from Grand Central Station to Connecticut and wrote about the Harlem tenement dwellers that black-loafered commuters passed by every day on their way home; Tom Wolfe dissected the class distinctions of New York accents; Gloria Steinem retraced the New York travels of Ho Chi Minh; Adam Smith described the latest trend to afflict Wall Street heavies, car phones. Back-of-the-book reviews by classical music critic Alan Rich, movie critic Judith Crist, and theater critic Harold Clurman rounded out the issue, as well as a crossword puzzle by Stephen Sondheim.

  “We were just trying to carry on the tradition of the magazine supplement by relying on the quality of writing we were offering,” said managing editor Jack Nessel, who, post-Tribune, was working at radio station KFPA in Berkeley when Felker recruited him as employee number one for the new magazine. “With writers like Breslin, Wolfe, and Gloria Steinem, we had the advantage of publishing a high level of journalism right off the bat.”

  But Felker and his staff quickly learned that the key to making New York a success was not a question of editorial transposition—retrofitting the old Trib blueprint onto the new glossy pages. The magazine would have to stand or fall on its own merits now, and a point of view was necessary to compel readers to pay for it every week. “The first year we were really stumbling,” said Milton Glaser. “We didn’t know how the hell to do it, and we were too indebted to the Sunday supplement. Just running beautiful pictures on the cover unrelated to the editorial product, that didn’t work. We needed cover stories that would grab readers by the lapel and say, ‘Read this!’”

  The magazine was starting up at a tumultuous time. On the day that the first New York hit the streets, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. There was no question that the magazine had to acknowledge the impact of King’s assassination on the city, but the second issue had already gone to press, and the third issue was in galleys. Felker knew that King’s death would send the biggest shock waves through the city’s most politically engaged African American community, so he dispatched Gloria Steinem to “get the hell up to Harlem and just talk to people.”

  Steinem stumbled upon a great stroke of luck: Mayor Lindsay, as it turned out, was going to conduct a walking tour of Harlem and the city’s other black neighborhoods. Steinem accompanied Lindsay as he talked to Harlem’s citizenry and local leaders, assuaging fears and tamping down the insurrectionary fervor that had already led to riots in other cities across the Northeast. Felker then seamlessly merged Steinem’s story with that of an African American freelancer named Lloyd Weaver, thereby providing perspectives from both uptown and downtown.

  The piece, “The City on the Eve of Destruction,” was an affecting and sharply etched examination of political crisis management as viewed from the perspective of a master conciliator. Steinem and Weaver started the piece with Lindsay taking in a play on Broadway, where he was alerted by an aide to the news of Dr. King’s death (“He thought: It’s stunning, it can’t be true; like Kennedy. He thought: A wild reaction, all over the country. He thought: And here”) Lindsay vowed to calm his constituents by meeting with them, listening and responding to their concerns (“Somebody just has to go up there, someone white just has to face that emotion and say that we’re sorry”). As Lindsay walked through the black neighborhoods of the city, Steinem and Weaver caught some of the tension in the air:

  Women stood with tears streaming down their faces. Groups gathered silently outside record shops where loudspeakers blared news of violence in other cities, or the speeches of Martin Luther King. Both were frequently drowned out by sirens—a fire had started a few blocks away—or by the staccato of police calls from a nearby squad car. Small packs of teenagers were hanging back, laughing uncertainly, waiting…. “Man,” said a big kid in an athletic jacket happily, “there’s gonna be white blood in the streets tonight.”

  The writers depict Lindsay as a self-possessed mediator throwing down barricades and breaking up potential conflagrations, but mostly providing solace to an enraged and confused citizenry.

  “Man, he only some itty-bit shorter than Wilt the Stilt!”

  “He ain’t never gonna get killed, because we like him.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Lindsay, we love you.”

  He got back in his car, smiling.

  “I didn’t interview Lindsay for the piece,” said Steinem. “The idea was to be a fly on the wall, a technique that I admired in the work of Lillian Ross.” The story would become the first in a series of personality-observed stories that Steinem wrote for the magazine; over the next few years, she would turn her shrewd reporter’s gaze to Eugene McCarthy, President Nixon, and football-star-turned-movie-star Jim Brown. “New York magazine in general allowed me to bring together my writing and my interest in politics—which had been more difficult before that because women reporters had a tougher time getting political assignments,” said Steinem.

  Eight weeks after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, on June 5, Robert Kennedy was killed in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, moments after addressing a crowd of supporters who had cheered the news of his victory in the California primary. Gail Sheehy, a gifted young writer whom Felker had wrested from Eugenia Sheppard’s women’s pages at the Tribune to write for New York, was already working on an Ethel Kennedy profile for the magazine when RFK was killed. Now the piece would be refashioned as a meditation on RFK’s widow and “the arithmetic of life and death.”

  Ethel Kennedy knows life from bullets and airplanes and maternity beds. She has brought life into the world ten times and has watched it go out violently seven times from close range. Now it is eight.

  The piece, “Ethel Kennedy and the Arithmetic of Life and Death,” was Sheehy’s first cover story for New York; she would eventually write fifty stories for the magazine over the next nine years, making her the most prolific feature writer of the Clay Felker era.

  Jimmy Breslin was also in L.A. the week of Robert Kennedy’s death, writing about gun control for New York. Breslin had heard that Los Angeles had an abundance of storefronts selling .45 Magnums and automatic rifles like Florsheim penny loafers, and he wanted to see it for himself. On June 4 he was driven by Bert Prelutsky, a Los Angeles Times writer whom he had met through Jim Bellows, to a gun store in Fullerton, a mom-and-pop operation owned by a moonlighting working-class couple who hoped to make the store their full-time business, if only they could get their hands on some good Smith & Wessons. The next day, Kennedy was killed.

  Breslin returned to New York enraged and disconsolate, and he wanted real answers. The biggest movie in the country that week was Bonnie and Clyde, a film that he found objectionable, a Hollywood gloss on violence. Written by former Esquire staffers David Newman and Robert Benton and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, it was a stylish meditation on the notorious bank robbers, and Breslin wondered if that film’s success wasn’t somehow linked to certain cavalier attitudes about guns in America. If Hollywood could turn killers such as Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker into sex symbols, were Americans
somehow inured to the real ramifications of guns? Accompanied by his friend and occasional driver Fat Thomas, Breslin took in Bonnie and Clyde one more time to give it a fair shake. Maybe there had been some nuances in the story or subtext that he had missed the first time around. Breslin had never thought of himself as a particularly sophisticated moviegoer, anyway.

  A second viewing only confirmed his judgment that the film was a pretty picture about pretty criminals, a myth. The story that Breslin filed was ostensibly a critique of the film, but it was really an impassioned polemic against firearms and a plea for federally sanctioned gun control laws.

  Right at the start, Warren Beatty, who plays Clyde Barrow, was standing on the street corner and he pulled out a pistol and showed it to Faye Dunaway, who plays Bonnie Parker. She began to run her hand on the black barrel of the pistol. Run her hand on it lovingly.

  “That’s a lot more than a pistol right now,” I said.

  “She gets one of them jammed into her back, she don’t go around petting it, I guarantee her that,” Fat Thomas said.

  Gun stores and Hollywood movies didn’t engender violence, Breslin wrote, but they made guns fetish objects for losers.

  Armed robbery isn’t a grin. It really isn’t. Armed robbery is this old woman on Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on the floor behind the counter of her husband’s tailor shop clawing at the three bare-armed cops from the emergency squad who are trying to stuff her 72-year-old husband into a body bag. He is dead from three bullets in the head over a $10 stickup….

  You see, the movie is all about playing with things. Playing with yourself, really. And it is in tune with the times, Bonnie and Clyde is. We are not a violent society. This is actually a society of jerks and for some of them the gun has got everything to do with it.

  Pieces such as “Bonnie and Clyde Revisited,” which interwove elements of personal reflection, impassioned polemic, and reportage, made Breslin New York’s social conscience. “Breslin was such a natural that I began to think of him as a phony, but he wasn’t,” said former New York senior editor Shelly Zalaznick, another Trib alumnus Felker hired for the new magazine. “He wasn’t a patrician trying to act like a regular Joe. He really was the guy he wrote about.”

  In the winter of 1969, Breslin and Norman Mailer made a quixotic bid for public office. The idea had germinated at an after-hours story meeting with Felker, Peter Maas, Gloria Steinem, and Jimmy Breslin. Felker had pointed to Jimmy Breslin and said, “You should run for mayor. We can get a story out of it, maybe a series of stories.” Breslin wasn’t against the idea in principle—he truly believed that he could cure the ailing city by empowering the working class—but he was a writer, not a politician. He had seen too much backroom blood sport, too much nasty chicanery in that world. But the momentum toward a run was already snowballing. Jack Newfield, a political columnist for the Village Voice, had endorsed a Breslin-Mailer ticket on a local radio show, with Mailer running as a mayoral candidate and Breslin vying for the job of City Council president. When Newfield broke the news to Breslin over coffee, Breslin laughed at the absurdity of it, then wondered why Mailer was on the top of the ticket.

  Mailer had floated the notion of running for mayor prior to the 1960 mayoral campaign but then, three days before he was to officially announce his candidacy, he stabbed his then-wife, Adele. “I wanted to make actions rather than effect sentiments,” he said in a 1963 Paris Review interview. “But I’ve come to the middle-aged conclusion that I’m probably better as a writer than a man of action.”

  Mailer, of course, was the writer as man of action, and although he had written what was widely acknowledged as the definitive account of leftist politics in the age of Vietnam with The Armies of the Night, political office would give him a chance to ratify reforms that he had thus far only written about, to clear the decks of noxious corruption and start anew. The popular mayor John Lindsay was suddenly vulnerable after a series of punishing snowstorms had virtually immobilized the city, and the field of potential candidates, which included city controller Mario Procaccino and Bronx borough president Herman Badillo, was not insurmountable. There was perhaps an opening for a social theorist of the people to stake his claim.

  Mailer wasn’t quite sure of the enterprise himself at the start, and never settled into the avuncular comfort zone of a seasoned pol, for whom “a love of handshakes is equal to a writer’s love of language.” But all Clay Felker cared about was the fact that he had the inside scoop and a great cover grabber for New York.

  A convocation of informal advisors gathered in Mailer’s Columbia Heights brownstone in late March to determine the feasibility of a Mailer candidacy. Among those present were New York writers Peter Maas and Gloria Steinem, Village Voice writer Jack Newfield, Pete Hamill, Jerry Rubin, boxer and Mailer confidant Jose Torres, and Breslin. Mailer quickly learned a crucial lesson of politics: appeasement of one faction leads to alienation of another. Many wanted Breslin to join Mailer on the ticket as a candidate for City Council president, citing his empathy with the working class that resided outside Manhattan’s zone of exclusion, but others rejected the idea. Mailer’s candidacy might siphon crucial votes away from Badillo: a rising minority star, a favorite among the city’s liberal elite, and a friend of Torres.

  Mailer wanted Breslin on his team; Mailer could handle the cocktail party fund-raisers and the media ops, but he needed Breslin to stump for him in places such as Queens and Staten Island, the populist leavening Mailer’s lofty rhetoric with common street sense.

  Amazingly, for a ticket that had two of the city’s best-known writers, no local press bothered to cover the story of the campaign at the outset. Only the Village Voice and New York deigned to take the Mailer-Breslin run seriously—New York being the in-house media organ for the campaign, with Breslin reporting on the action as it transpired. Photographer Dan Wynn snapped a shot of the candidates and Clay Felker ran it on the cover of the May 5 issue of New York with the headline “Mailer-Breslin Seriously?” The answer could be found inside. “I Run to Win,” screamed the headline of Breslin’s story:

  [T]he condition of the city of New York at this time reminds me of the middleweight champion fight between the late Marcel Cerdan and Tony Zale…. There were no marks to show what was happening. But Tony Zale was coming apart from the punches that did not leave any marks and at the end of the eleventh round Tony was along the ropes and Cerdan stepped back and Tony crumbled and he was on the floor, looking out into the night air, his face unmarked, his body dead, his career gone. In New York today, the face of the city, Manhattan, is proud and glittering. But Manhattan is not the city … and it is down in the neighborhoods, down in the schools that are in the neighborhoods, where this city is cut and slashed and bleeding from someplace deep inside.

  As Mailer’s platform evolved, it began to resemble an odd mélange of old-fashioned populism, radical progressivism, and Thoreau-like civility. Foremost among Mailer’s ideas was the notion of bureaucratic emancipation. New York City should declare statehood, which would allow a new charter to be written that would create autonomous zones in the city, giving people greater control over their own neighborhoods. Private automobiles would be banned and day care centers would be built, methadone would be plentiful for the heroin addicts who needed it, and the quality of life in the city would acquire a simpler, more humane cast.

  Mailer’s common touch was more adroit than anyone could have fathomed. At a Brooklyn College forum, one student wanted to know how Mailer would handle an act of God such as a blizzard. What, he asked, would Mailer do if there was a big snowstorm and he was the mayor? “Sir,” Mailer replied with a poker face, “I’d piss on it.”

  When the campaign got down to the business of retail politics, Mailer discovered that he wasn’t half bad at it, and the city’s citizenry seemed to respond to him favorably. His fame was a nonstarter anyway: a poll had determined that more than half the city’s citizens didn’t know who he was.

  As the team was soon to
discover, volatile mavericks aren’t good at building constituencies, and Mailer’s intemperance did irrevocable damage to the campaign. A disastrous town-hall-style meeting at the Village Gate nightclub, in which a drunk Mailer sprayed epithets at his supporters like buckshot, became a fatal body blow when Sidney Zion wrote about it for the New York Times.

  Tensions between Breslin and Mailer increased at the campaign slogged on. Breslin didn’t have the fortitude to adhere to a rigorous schedule of appearances, and Mailer was often left in the lurch. To say that Mailer’s chances were slim would be understating it—when the votes were finally tallied, he barely mustered thirty-seven thousand votes, coming in fourth in a field of five. (Incumbent mayor Lindsay was reelected.) The final result, for Breslin, was more welcome relief than a disappointment. “After Norman Mailer and I finished seven weeks of a mayoralty campaign adjudged unlikely, I still came away nervous and depressed by what I had seen of my city,” Breslin wrote in New York. “So when the business of the Democratic primary was over, I migrated naturally to a barand found it fine sport, and then to another bar, which was even better, and I then plunged entirely into the toy world. Important things became Mutchie’s face falling into a plate of spaghetti at 3 A.M., and Joe Bushkin playing the piano, and the horse Johnny Rotz was supposed to be on the next day. News bulletins were the score of the Mets game and Joe Namath’s troubles.”

  A year after its rebirth, New York hadn’t lost a beat. Wolfe, Breslin, and the rest were contributing the same high level of journalism to the magazine, but there were growing pains that needed to be addressed. The magazine’s lively mix of politics, culture, and lifestyle coverage was strong, but not distinguished enough to stand apart from the other two weekly newspapers in town, the Village Voice and the East Village Other.