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

by Marc Weingarten

  Felker knew he needed a sharper focus, a stronger point of view. The Voice and the Other were addressing readers who lived below Fourteenth Street; New York would have to be for Felker’s crowd, those who lived tightly circumscribed lives on the upper half of Manhattan island—the privileged class who worried about building a nest egg to pay for private school tuition and struggled to pay their maintenance fees on co-op apartments, as well as the class-conscious strivers who longed to be tuned in to the vertiginous uptown whirl. Outwardly, Felker intuited, his readers might empathize with the tragedy of the South Bronx, but really they were enamored of status and power, the fossil fuel of the most important city in America. “We don’t think of ourselves as a city magazine,” Felker told Newsweek. “We are an elite magazine in the business of setting standards and attacking the conventional wisdom in all areas.”

  New York’s new direction was announced with its January 6, 1969, cover story, “Going Private: Life in the Clean Machine.” Written by Julie Baumgold, a twenty-two-year-old former columnist for Women’s Wear Daily and a product of a private-school education, the story, which was Felker’s idea, dared to explicate in print what was already an open secret among the denizens of Manhattan’s white elite: the public school system in New York was a mess, and the path to success in the city went through its exclusionary private schools, which operated on fear and placed an untenable premium on social rank and fat bank accounts.

  Baumgold was something of a writing prodigy. She went to work for Fairchild Publications right out of college, where her self-assured and wickedly clever writing style attracted the attention of Marion Javits, the wife of Senator Jacob Javits and a close friend of Felker’s. Javits called up Felker, who hired Baumgold as an editorial assistant. “I was Clay’s pet, so he had a temper with me,” said Baumgold. “But he was also the person who completely found me and gave me great stories to write. He used to tell his writers, ’I’ll make you a star,’ but he really meant it with me. Clay demanded more from his favorites and rode them harder. He was always running after me, either because he was enthusiastic about something I had written or I hadn’t gotten my copy in on time.”

  Baumgold, like so many writers of her generation, had been influenced by Tom Wolfe. She read The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby in college and emulated Wolfe’s jazzy prose. “We were all influenced by Tom,” said Baumgold. “Reading him was good training to be a novelist.” Which meant that Baumgold was incapable of writing a straight piece of reportage. Baumgold wrote the private-school story in an ironically detached prose style that was Wolfe-like to the core.

  A wistful Republican malaise has settled over Mother Goose’s playground at East 72nd Street. Two young mamas, more Vogue than Red-book, rock spanky navy blue English prams. It is Wednesday, nurse’s day off. The jungle gym is hung with scions and siblings, their Indian Walk soles taunting the skies. Pretty toy boys. Little girls who curtsy. Nothing elaborate, the babe bob of breeding. The mamas are rocking around and talking in the fairy tale playground. They are on private schools. Only they do not say the word “private.” To them they are just plain schools. Assumptions of life. Spence versus Chapin. Trinity versus Collegiate. Buckley. Brearley. Maybe Dalton. But first the nurseries. Christ Church or Everett? The names flip from their tongues so easily. Those brief uncomplicated names. Nothing inspirational like Joan of Arc Junior High. Just the Trads (traditional schools) versus the Progs (progressives). And they love it. It’s the most fascinating thing to come along since orthodonture talk. Really everyone’s a Raving Expert. Now they are into how Bitsy’s boy was rejected at St. Bernard’s. They giggle over Maureen’s disaster at Chapin. But the Mother Goose malaise gets to them.

  Newsstand sales for the private schools issue went through the roof; publisher George Hirsch was incredulous. This wasn’t a story by Breslin, Steinem, or Wolfe, the writers who usually hit the long ball for the magazine. This was an education piece by an unknown. When Hirsch approached Tom Wolfe to get his theory as to why it had been such a smash hit, Wolfe laid it out for him: “Well, of course, George! It’s about status, and status is the number one concern of New Yorkers.”

  Felker had tapped into something essential about the city, and he knew it. Wolfe’s big subject—status anxiety and its manifestations-would be the organizing principle of the magazine. Manhattan’s inhabitants were obstinately proud to call themselves New Yorkers, but they were also urban survivalists; their self-preservation skills were a crucial test of their commitment to enduring the best city on the planet. New York would be a how-to guide for this white, upwardly mobile demographic segment.

  A subscription solicitation that ran in the magazine in early 1969 trumpeted New York’s attributes. “We’ll show you how to get a rent-controlled, semi-professional apartment, even though you’re not a semi-professional person,” the copy read. “We’ll tell you how to go about getting your kid into private school with confidence, even though you graduated from P.S. 165.” Previous issues had addressed status (the December 9, 1968, cover featured a white-collar beggar in a Burberry coat holding a tin cup and a sign that read I MAKE $80,000 A YEAR AND I’M BROKE), but now Felker would push it harder.

  “We thought of ideas as our subject matter,” said managing editor Jack Nessel. “People, to the extent that they embodied certain ideas, were interesting to us. Clay was really obsessed with the idea of power and who holds it. The power of influence and persuasion, of money, politics. That’s what our readers responded to.”

  The magazine’s content now squared with Tom Wolfe’s status-conscious sensibility; his writing and worldview infected everything like an editorial strain. Felker’s favorite writers—some of them Trib vets, but now mostly ambitious young cubs—made no claims to sober objectivity. It had always been Felker’s belief that the best journalism germinated from a unique point of view, especially the idiosyncratic high style that Wolfe handled so deftly. Well-crafted stories were of no use to him if they were dull. Writers who thought they had nailed their subject would get their manuscripts handed back to them with a directive from Felker to “put yourself in the story.”

  When actress and aspiring journalist Patricia Bosworth was struggling mightily with a story assignment for Felker, the editor told her to just draw on her theater experience: “Writing is like performing,” he told her, “except, when you write, you get to play all the parts.” Felker demanded fearlessness from his writers, a willingness to muck around with form and content in order to make the story jump off the page.

  Many of New York’s best writers, such as Baumgold, Sheehy, Nora Ephron, and Steinem recruit Jane O’Reilly, were women—much to Jimmy Breslin’s dismay. “Jimmy, when he was in another state of consciousness, often complained that New York had too many female writers,” said Gloria Steinem. “That changed over time, due to his wife.” At a time when female journalists were still trying to break out of the McCall’s-Redbook ghetto and write about serious issues for mainstream general-interest titles, Felker hired numerous female contributors to write on a wide variety of subjects. He hadn’t forgotten that his mother had given up a career in journalism to raise a family, something she regretted until the end of her life. “Women,” he said at the time, “tend to have a more personal point of view about things than men, and I’m looking for an individual viewpoint first.” There was a more practical reason as well; most men couldn’t afford to write regularly for New York’s abstemious rates, which topped out at $300 for feature stories.

  New York’s best female contributors were some of its boldest prose stylists. Gail Sheehy had been born and raised in Mamaroneck, an affluent New York suburb. The daughter of a successful advertising executive, Sheehy graduated with a B.S. degree from the University of Vermont in 1958 and worked briefly as a traveling home economist for J. C. Penney. After a short apprenticeship at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, where she worked as the fashion editor, Sheehy was hired by Jim Bellows at the Tribune.

  Sheehy’s first pi
ece for the magazine, “The Tunnel Inspector and the Belle of the Bar Car,” was a look at the white commuting class that converged on Grand Central Station every afternoon to disperse into the suburban diaspora. Unlike Breslin’s earlier piece, which focused on the business class’s willful ignorance of the poor neighborhoods they passed by in their trains every day, Sheehy’s piece was more like a comedy of manners. She structured it much as she would many of her best stories for the magazine—as a series of set pieces propelled by wry dialogue exchanges and an unerring eye for character-revealing detail. Above all, it laid bare the striations of class in New York, the socioeconomic taxonomy that was mother’s milk to Felker.

  Upper-level trains carry $100,000-plus incomes down to $12,500, and that’s probably the bartender. Golden men. In the summer they come off the trains with their cocoa panamas wrapped in rakish silk and consult the gold Omegas nestled in the golden foliage growing out of their tennis brown wrists. On rainy days they wash over Grand Central on a wave of beige poplin.

  Sheehy became New York’s cultural anthropologist in residence, probing the inner lives of single mothers, speed addicts, and antiwar protesters, among other things. Her inside-out style of reportage made readers feel as if they were brushing up against their subjects, an intimacy achieved through a determination to leave nothing out.

  George Goodman was another Tribune veteran who became a star at the new New York. Writing under the pseudonym “Adam Smith,” Goodman’s knack for turning the dry-as-dust field of economics into humorous pieces would make him the most famous financial writer in the country.

  After attending Harvard and then Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, St. Louis native Goodman skipped out on his graduate thesis (the subject was how totalitarian governments use languages) in order to write fiction. Returning to New York, Goodman, who had taken Archibald MacLeish’s writing class at Harvard, felt reasonably sure he could make a living as a novelist. Much to his chagrin, he couldn’t. His first book, The Bubble Makers, received glowing reviews but sold poorly. Strapped for cash, Goodman enlisted in the Special Forces unit of the army in 1954, then wrote another novel about an expatriate in Paris that also sold meekly.

  Goodman had better luck with periodicals, nabbing a staff writing job with the weekly financial newspaper Barron’s in order to support his book projects. He eventually broke through with a novel by selling his book The Wheeler Dealers to the movies, then landed a job with Sam Steadman at Loeb, Rhoades as a junior fund manager.

  After selling two Talk of the Town pieces to The New Yorker, Goodman attracted the attention of Clay Felker at Esquire. When Felker left Esquire for the Herald Tribune, he brought Goodman with him to write a weekly column. After penning a scathing article about Motorola, Goodman got cold feet about using his own byline on the piece; it would compromise his good name as a fund manager, creating the appearance of a conflict of interest. Goodman suggested the pseudonym Procrustes, the conniving thief of Greek mythology, but none of the editors liked that, and when Goodman picked up the paper, he saw another byline had replaced it: “Adam Smith,” a name Shelly Zalaznick had come up with at the last minute. Goodman hated the name—another, far more esteemed economic theorist had already laid claim to it, and besides, it sounded corny to him. But it was a done deal.

  At New York, Goodman created a rogue’s gallery of Wall Street fund managers, brokers, speculators, and CEO fat cats—some of them real, others not—and spun fanciful stories that explained economic trends to New York’s readers without resorting to jargon. In “Notes on the Great Buying Panic,” Goodman’s first story for the new weekly, he introduced Poor Grenville, the manager of a “swinging” fund, and Grenville’s dilemma: how to spend $42 million of the fund’s money to avoid an imminent stock market collapse.

  With his tall, blond, Establishment looks Poor Grenville is a Hickey Freeman model or an ad for the Racquet Club, not poor. One of Poor Grenville’s great-grandmothers had a duck farm and part of the duck farm is still kicking around in the family. There aren’t many live ducks on it anymore, since the duck farm ran roughly from Madison Avenue east, bounded by, say, 59th Street and 80th Street.

  Goodman framed the entire story as a lunch-hour speculative selling frenzy in which Poor Grenville would unburden himself of his money while Adam Smith, ever the credulous outsider, watched the spectacle unfold. Numbers were of interest to Goodman only as they related to the unusual behavioral traits of those who controlled the numbers. From Breslin, Goodman acquired an acute feel for characterization; from Wolfe, he learned how to transform the foibles of the rich and powerful into arch satire.

  “Well, I think we all influenced each other,” said Goodman. “That Tom Wolfe piece, the one that started with ‘Hernia, hernia, hernia,’ that was a big influence on me. Tom really loosened the borders for all of us. New York was like a great varsity team, and we knew it, too.”

  Not that they got on too well at first. Goodman thought of Wolfe’s Savile Row getups as an elaborate put-on: “People didn’t wear white spats and white suits in New York.” Goodman was annoyed by Breslin’s abrasiveness and arrogance, and he thought Felker displayed passive-aggressive tendencies, even though he was the best editor he had ever written for. “Clay was not a good arbiter of arguments,” he said. “He would just let us fight it out.” During one such meeting, Goodman suggested that the magazine might explore politics in greater depth. To Wolfe, that was code for liberal politics; irate, he yelled, “Well, why don’t you just go work for the New Republic instead?”

  New York’s office quarters did little to alleviate the tension. The cramped, 2,400-square-foot space, in which editors and writers worked with their desks jammed up against each other in some cases, was too cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer, the result of a constantly malfunctioning thermostat. “I sat in a puddle for two years because the radiator leaked,” said Byron Dobell, who became a senior editor at New York in 1972. “I had to lay down newspapers so my shoes didn’t get soaked.” The gutters were never cleaned out, and eventually the entire office flooded during a rainstorm. Dobell had to come in on a Saturday to haul away the waterlogged magazines that had been destroyed in the basement. “It was a repellent mess of crap,” he said.

  Felker had one of two enclosed offices, but when he realized that yelling directives down the hallway would work more efficiently if he was actually working in the hallway, he moved his desk and turned his office into a conference room. The magazine was woefully understaffed from the start. Secretaries doubled as proofreaders and factcheckers, and no one ever went home early. “It was exhilarating, but it was really hard,” said Jack Nessel. “We were always one step away from disaster.” Most of the magazine’s star writers were chronic deadline truants. Gail Sheehy was always late with her copy, as was Wolfe. Breslin would personally call the magazine’s printer in order to determine exactly how long he could push back his drop-dead deadline. When Breslin finally consented to hand-deliver a manuscript, George Hirsch could hear him huffing and puffing up the stairs with Fat Thomas in tow, muttering expletives under his breath, along with an occasional “Why doesn’t this fucking building have an elevator?” Despite his tardiness, Breslin demanded instant feedback from his editors. “Thirty seconds after turning a story in, he would ask me, ‘Is it all right?’” said Shelly Zalaznick. “He was always eager to get it just right.”

  By mid-1969, New York was hitting its stride. Although the magazine had lost $2.1 million during the first year, Felker and Erpf had gone back for another round of financing with a public offering as Aeneid Equities, Inc., raising an additional $2 million, and the advertising revenue was starting to roll in. The magazine’s circulation was 145,000 in August 1969, and 587 pages of ads had brought in $723,000 for the year. There was a compelling reason: New York had forged a distinct identity as a regional magazine. It had become an essential crib sheet for Manhattan snobs who would never cop to their parochialism. Felker and his staff struck a judicious balance between edgy ser
vice features (such as food critic Gael Greene’s survey of the best Mafia restaurants in town); opinionated local political coverage from Steinem, Breslin, and Peter Maas; and insightful pop sociological reportage from Wolfe, Julie Baumgold, and Gail Sheehy.

  The magazine didn’t look like any other publication on the newsstand, either. The playfully savage illustrations of Edward Sorel and Bob Grossman quickly became the magazine’s visual trademark, while Milton Glaser created a spare and elegant template for the editorial content. Glaser loved to leave some breathing room on a page; where others might gratuitously fill in a page of copy with busy imagery, Glaser and his associate art director, Walter Bernard, weren’t afraid to leave in a large, vacant expanse, usually on the top third of the page. “Clay and Milton would have fights about leaving in so much blank space,” said Jack Nessel. “Milton would eventually assuage Clay by telling him that ‘we’ve got to let the story breathe,’ that kind of thing.”

  By its third year of existence, Felker and his staff had succeeded in capturing the mad, scrambling ambition and creative energy of the most vital city in America between its covers every week. For the magazine’s loyal readers, New York caught the gestalt of the city better than anything else. “Clay saw New York as Ambition City,” said Tom Wolfe. “The excitement came from the collision of ambitious people. Status fascinated Clay.”

  Wolfe’s attitude was more ambivalent. While New York City was the world’s proving ground of power and privilege and thus supplied endless story ideas for him, he was disenchanted with the appropriation of radical politics by the city’s liberal elite. The New Left, which had done so much to push the cause of civil rights into the foreground in the early sixties, had now, as he saw it, congealed into a faddish emblem of protest, an excuse for slumming activists to feel virtuous about their righteous indignation. But it was a codependent relationship. By embracing liberals in positions of power and influence, the leaders of the New New Left, which included the Yippies and the Black Panthers, received funding and media attention, while their newly converted supplicants could rub elbows with genuine insurrectionaries.