Wolfe was of two minds about the counterculture—writing admiring accounts of its lifestyle choices and artistic endeavors, yet criticizing its politics. Wolfe was amused by uptown matrons’ embrace of the more frivolous aspects of sixties culture, but that same impulse had no role in serious considerations of race and economic disparity. One couldn’t try on politics like a Pucci dress, only to discard it when it went out of fashion. “The left was on uncertain moral ground in those days,” he said. “The New Left really took over in New York, but their followers were often wishy-washy about their motives. I felt there was a lot of hypocrisy in the movement.”
A fund-raising party that Assemblyman Andrew Stein gave for striking California grape pickers on June 29, 1969, initially alerted Wolfe to these modish radical causes and their high-society partisans. The party, which spread far and wide over the lush expanse of Stein’s father’s Southampton beach estate, was a classic example of how New York’s glittering left courted the lumpen proletariat and their working-class problems, and transformed real issues into the chitchat of festive cocktail parties. “The party was held in what is whimsically known as a cottage—in the Newport sense of cottage,” said Wolfe in a prefatory note for “Radical Chic,” which ran in the June 8, 1970, issue.
It was all being done for the grape workers, at a time when the same group of people were doing little or nothing for Bedford-Stuyvesant or the Southeast Bronx. They would pick people 3,000 miles away who also had the advantage of being exotic because they were Latin, had a charismatic leader in Cesar Chavez, and wouldn’t come back next weekend and knock on the door….
The difference between the people who give this sort of party and those who don’t is the difference between people who insist on exoticism and romanticism (the grape workers, the Panthers, the Indians) and those who don’t. There are two levels of sincerity. They are sincere about the issue, and they want to help, but at the same time they feel quite sincerely about their social position. They want to keep things going on both tracks.
Wolfe had never addressed these misgivings at any great length in print, but the opportunity to observe one of these parties firsthand presented itself one afternoon in the spring of 1970, during a visit to his friend David Halberstam’s office at Harper’s. Wolfe happened to see an invitation on Halberstam’s desk for a fund-raiser that was to take place at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Park Avenue apartment. The event was to be given on behalf of the Panther Twenty-one, a group of Black Panthers who had been arrested on a charge of conspiring to blow up five New York department stores, New Haven railroad facilities, a police station, and the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Wolfe thought he might write a book about this new tendency toward downward nobility, but with Bernstein—the dashing maestro of the New York Philharmonic, a true New York icon—now casting his lot with the radical left, the story suddenly had a compelling and timely angle. Wolfe would make this party the focus of a New York story instead. He surreptitiously scribbled the RSVP number on the back of a Harper’s subscription card when Halberstam wasn’t looking.
The New York reporter was a conspicuous presence at Bernstein’s apartment that night, his white suit a studied contrast to the Panthers’ black turtlenecks and Leonard Bernstein’s all-black ensemble of sport coat and trousers. Felicia, too, was wearing a black cocktail dress, black being the de rigueur color of underclass solidarity. There were many luminaries in attendance, including New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, Barbara Walters, Otto Preminger, Sheldon Harnick, and Julie Belafonte. Wolfe wasn’t the only reporter in attendance; the New York Times’s Charlotte Curtis was also taking notes. But the presence of the press didn’t deter anyone in attendance from declaiming against the white power structure and its harassment of blacks in general, and the Panthers in particular.
Curtis’s story ran two days after the party. “There they were,” the Times reporter wrote, “the Black Panthers from the ghetto and the black and white liberals from the middle, upper-middle and upper classes studying one another cautiously over the expensive furnishings, the elaborate flower arrangements, the cocktails and the silver trays of canapés.” The following day, a Times editorial criticized Bernstein for “elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike.”
Bernstein was furious, but the story blew over and all was forgotten—until Wolfe weighed in nearly five months later. It took five months, because Wolfe also wanted to cover the Andrew Stein party, do supplemental interviews, and include a brief history of New York society and its recurrent strain of paternalism toward the lower class. The final draft topped out at twenty-seven thousand words. “We gave Tom a wide berth because we knew it would be worth it in the end,” said Shelly Zalaznick. “He wasn’t a prima donna; Tom was always dancing as fast as he could. But that was Tom’s nature. He treated himself right.”
Felker decided that Wolfe’s novella-length feature would have the greatest impact if it ran in one gulp; the story took up the entire feature well of the June 8 issue. But it was Wolfe’s phrase “radical chic” that nailed the folly of the “elegant slummers” that Wolfe eviscerated in his story. Above Carl Fischer’s cover photo of three society matrons in their Yves Saint Laurent finery, their Black Power gloves raised in righteous defiance, was the cri de guerre, “Free Leonard Bernstein!” Inside, readers were confronted with a full-page portrait of Lenny and Felicia with Black Panther Don Cox, reclining on one of the Bernsteins’ chintz wingback chairs. Wolfe opened the piece with an imagined vision:
He could see himself, Leonard Bernstein, the egregio maestro, walking out on stage in white tie and tails in front of an orchestra. On one side of the conductor’s podium is a piano. On the other is a chair with a guitar leaning against it. He sits in the chair and picks up the guitar. A guitar! One of those half-witted instruments, like the accordion, that are made for the Learn-to-Play-in-Eight-Days E-Z Diagram 110-IQ_14-year-olds of Levittown! But there’s a reason. He has an anti-war message to deliver to this great starched white-throated audience in the symphony hall. He announces to them: “I love.” Just that. The effect is mortifying. All at once a Negro rises up from out of the curve of the grand piano and starts saying things like, “The audience is curiously embarrassed.” … Finally, Lenny gets off a heartfelt anti-war speech and exits.
Bernstein is getting played, a prize pawn in the Panthers’ media game, and he doesn’t like it a bit: “Who the hell was this Negro rising up from the piano and informing the world what an ass Leonard Bernstein was making of himself?” Actually, it was Wolfe who took it upon himself to announce to the world what an ass Bernstein and his guests were making of themselves. Here we find the Panthers mingling with the folks on the wrong side of the social ledger (“Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs … all of which … are being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons”) while Bernstein’s invited guests try to expiate their Jim Crow guilt with histrionic verbal displays of self-flagellation and vigorous assent for the Panthers’ anti-whitey rhetoric. Wolfe had hit the mother lode with Bernstein’s party; it threw all the “status contradictions and incongruities” of the privileged class into bold relief, and there was no other subject, in his view, that better explained the motivations of certain powerful New Yorkers.
As usual, Wolfe, notebook in hand, absorbed every last detail: how the Panthers’ Afros were authentic, “not the ones that have been shaped and trimmed like a topiary hedge and sprayed until they have a sheen like acrylic wall-to-wall—but like funky, natural, scraggly … wild”; how Felicia Bernstein greeted her black nationalist guests with “the same tilt of the head, the same perfect Mary Astor voice” with which she greeted her usual aprés-concert guests. The Bernsteins, it must be noted, employed South American domestic help, therefore ducking the embarrassment of exploiting the very people they wanted to empower. “Can one comprehend how perfect that
is, given … the times?”
“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” was Wolfe’s most audacious hybrid yet—speculative fantasia, sociology lesson, and biting satire. Extended passages are devoted to wild riffs on the tortured inner lives of these well-intentioned liberals, who are prone to paroxysms of guilt about their exorbitant and extravagant lives, calibrating the right mix of “dignity without any overt class symbolism” for the Panthers’ sake. Wolfe traces this tendency to ennoble the oppressed classes back to the nineteenth century. It was then known as nostalgie de la boue, or “nostalgia for the mud,” when socialites in Regency England adopted the capes (the trucker’s caps of their day) and bold driving styles of the coach drivers and the “reckless new dance” of the middle class, the waltz.
“Radical Chic” hit New York’s chattering classes like a megaton bomb. Readers responded with both praise and criticism for Wolfe. Gloria Steinem and Jimmy Breslin felt that the piece cast a pall over fundraising in the city, creating a climate of fear for those who wanted to help worthy causes lest they become figures of ridicule. “I thought it was funny, but I was accused of putting up a big barrier to money for worthy causes,” said Wolfe. “The Bernsteins assumed that, since I was there, I was sympathetic to their cause. It shocked some since I seemed to have a hip take on popular culture. Surely, I had to be on the Left somewhere! But I was quite prepared for the reaction, and quite pleased.”
Bernstein was incensed. He was not, he insisted, a supporter of the Black Panthers, but a defender of due process and the rule of law as it applied to those who had been accused of crimes. “As an American and as a Jew I know that freedom of religion and the freedom of the citizen go hand in hand,” Bernstein told his biographer Meryle Secrest. “Strike one and you have damaged the second.” Bernstein’s wife, who had thought to host the fund-raiser, was never again quite so public about her pet causes.
This was all just delicious icing to Felker. “Radical Chic” was the most talked-about article in the short history of New York, a piece whose title dissolved into the American vernacular, becoming a default phrase for pet causes of the rich and famous. In three years, Felker had not only resurrected New York but stamped it with his own thumbprint, turning his dream of owning a magazine that was inseparable from the life of the city into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
SAVAGE JOURNEYS
Hell’s Angels had accomplished exactly what Hunter Thompson had hoped, which was to make him famous enough to get steady freelance work. In three years, more than eight hundred thousand copies of the book had been sold in both hardcover and paperback. Esquire, which had reacted coldly to Thompson’s story solicitations in the past, ran an excerpt of the book in its January 1967 issue. But Thompson had yet to reap any significant financial windfall, which he blamed on his book’s publisher, Random House, and his editor, Jim Silberman. “In 1968, I had only seen ten thousand bucks from the book. I assumed Silberman and the others were ripping me off.” So he continued to hustle up work. The New York Times, a publication that had turned down Thompson when he applied for a job there a few years before, now wanted the writer to provide an analysis of the counterrevolution that was taking root in San Francisco; “The ‘Hashbury’ Is the Capital of the Hippies” ran in the Sunday magazine on May 14, 1967.
Pageant magazine assigned him an interview with Richard Nixon on the eve of the 1968 New Hampshire presidential primary, when the former vice president was trying to present himself as less abrasive and more solicitous toward the press. Thompson was unconvinced. “I suppose it’s only fair to say that this latest model might be different and maybe even better in some ways,” he wrote in the piece, “Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll.” “But as a customer, I wouldn’t touch it—except with a long cattle prod.”
All was not lost, however: Thompson found, much to his delight, that Nixon knew football as well as Thompson did, and the two whiled away time in Nixon’s limousine after a campaign appearance in Manchester, New Hampshire, discussing the upcoming Super Bowl matchup between Green Bay and Oakland. “Nixon had always claimed to be a big fan, but goddamn, the man really knew his stuff,” said Thompson. “Shit, you could actually start to believe that he was a human being for a minute there.”
Thompson no longer had to observe the reportorial proprieties of the mainstream press; he could just write stories as he saw fit, flinging barbs like nunchakus. If he wanted to disparage Nixon’s political comeback as a bunko game, he could. “It was an exciting and wide-open time for me,” said Thompson. “Shit, I always felt that I was right where I should be, and that’s extremely vital.”
Playboy magazine thought it had arranged the perfect marriage of subject and writer when it assigned Thompson to profile Jean-Claude Killy, the fair-haired French skier whose three gold medals at the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics had turned him into a household name in the States. Thompson went into the interview with an open mind, but when he met Killy in Chicago, he was appalled at how the skier was cheapening his own name for a quick buck. There was Killy and O. J. Simpson, pitching Chevrolet’s latest models at the auto show like Fuller brush salesmen. When Thompson berated Killy for selling out to corporate interests, Killy got defensive. “You don’t understand! You could never do what I’m doing! You sit there and smile, but you don’t know what it is! I am tired. Tired! I don’t care anymore—not on the inside or the outside! I don’t care what I say, what I think, but I have to keep doing it.”
Playboy wanted a harmless profile, but there was another story, a story larger than Killy, in fact. Thompson turned in an eleven-thousand-word portrait of a cipher, a selling machine running on autopilot, accountable only to his greed and the executives cutting his checks—in short, the poster boy for the new breed of media-engorged, money-mad celebrity: “He is a handsome middle-class French boy who trained hard and learned to ski so well that now his name is immensely saleable on the marketplace of a crazily inflated culture-economy that eats its heroes like hotdogs and honors them on about the same level.” Senior editor David Butler killed the piece; had he approved it, there was no chance the story would ever run. Hugh Hefner had been trying to land the Chevrolet account for the past five years, and he wasn’t about to run a story that alienated a potentially lucrative advertising client.
But Thompson knew the piece was a winner. He had successfully negotiated the space between “massive public opinion and taste and desires, and what people really say,” and he was determined to place the story somewhere. As it turned out, a new magazine was starting up, and, more important, it was being edited by someone Thompson knew personally. Warren Hinckle was a San Francisco native, the product of a strict Catholic school education whose inbred skepticism and reflexive chafing at authority (he once chided the school library for not subscribing to The Nation) suited him for a career as a journalist-provocateur. As an undergraduate at the University of San Francisco, Hinckle edited the college paper, the Daily Foghorn, often creating sensational news when there was none to report. Once, in search of a story to fill an empty news hole, he had an accomplice burn down a guardhouse on campus.
Hinckle’s Foghorn work had caught the eye of San Francisco Chronicle editor Scott Newhall, who was trying to reinvent the parochial newspaper as a vehicle for provocative writing. Newhall hired Hinckle as a general assignment reporter, but the writer hated the prosaic nature of daily beat reporting, the constant chasing after stories of little consequence. He left the Chronicle in order to open a public relations firm, but it failed miserably, and the tug of journalism pulled him back in.
Hinckle would find his true métier in the most unlikely of places, a Catholic reform quarterly founded by Edward Keating, whose wife was the heir to a vast San Francisco fortune. Ramparts was a liberal Catholic quarterly, a vehicle for Keating to challenge what he regarded as the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the Catholic Church. An early story written by Robert Scheer criticized New York archbishop Francis Cardinal Spellman for his vocal support of the Vietnam War—a story th
at was so untouchable that only Ramparts was willing to publish it.
Hinckle convinced Keating to hire him as executive editor, then proceeded to redirect the magazine’s editorial content. He hired Scheer, a former economics major from City College of New York and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, who had recently mounted an unsuccessful run for Congress, to be the magazine’s political editor, and proceeded to make Ramparts a debunker of received wisdom in any form, particularly as Vietnam became the wedge issue of the era. Ramparts published a series of explosive investigative pieces, most notably an article by Sol Stern that revealed a connection between the CIA and certain student organizations at Michigan State with links to South Vietnam, which led to a fumbling campaign by the intelligence agency to discredit the magazine with bribes, wiretapping, the works. Hinckle, however, was wise to all of this skullduggery, and the magazine didn’t back down from its story.
In a few short years, Hinckle had raised Ramparts’s profile considerably, but the magazine was hemorrhaging money too fast for the gains to make any appreciable difference. In the winter of 1970 Hinckle bailed out and moved to New York to start another publication, this time with a mandate to remain untethered from an outside publisher’s purse strings (Ramparts would continue to publish until 1975). Together with former advertising executive Howard Gossage and attorney and former New York Times reporter Sidney Zion, Hinckle raised $675,000 in a public stock offering, then plastered the check on the cover of the first issue of the magazine, called Scanlan’s. “Hinckle and Zion were a couple of shysters,” said illustrator Ralph Steadman, an early Scanlan’s contributor. “But they were good at what they did.”
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 28
