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

by Marc Weingarten

  But what Felker failed to understand was that Burden was not in it for the money, and a high bid couldn’t salve his desire to become a media mogul. Murdoch instinctively understood that a few careful ego strokes would make Burden submissive to him, and so he offered him a job and a salary in the to-be-revamped New York magazine after Murdoch took over. “Clay could have been a bit more diplomatic with Burden, but he had no patience,” said former contributing writer Ken Auletta. “But that was one of his more endearing qualities—his inability to suffer any bullshit. I think Clay’s biggest mistake was inviting people on the board that would become his enemies.”

  Burden had already negotiated a deal with Murdoch to sell out to him for $8.25 a share while Felker, Graham, and Rohatyn sat on their hands in Graham’s Newsweek office on New Year’s Eve, waiting for Burden, who was vacationing in Sun Valley, Idaho, to ratify the verbal agreement they had hammered out the day before. Burden was skiing, Tufo told them, and couldn’t be reached. But there was no snow on the ground in Idaho, and Burden hadn’t purchased any lift tickets. Instead, he was waiting for Murdoch to arrive on his Gulfstream and hand Burden a check for $3.5 million to receive outright control of New York, New West, and the Village Voice.

  On New Year’s Day, Felker called his attorney, Reginald Duff, and told him to play his last remaining hand, the right-of-first-refusal clause that Burden had violated by going with Murdoch prior to fielding Felker’s offer. Judge Thomas P. Griesa agreed that Burden had not followed the terms of the clause and granted a temporary restraining order, enjoining the sale of the stock.

  While Murdoch’s money sat in an escrow account, Felker scrambled mightily for his company, marshaling every resource he could find, including the New York staff, who had sat on the sidelines while Murdoch and Felker jousted for their beloved magazine. The battle was joined; Felker’s earnest and pious loyalists versus the crass media colonizers, a battle that would play itself out in the press and on the local TV news, no less. New York magazine, which had sustained itself in lean times with stories that foregrounded scandal, was now the subject of tabloid headlines.

  A few New York contributors took the initiative to function as de facto mediators between the staff and the board of directors. Political writers Ken Auletta and Richard Reeves, who were practiced in the art of speaking truth to power, met with Patricof Bob Towbin, and Thomas Kempner, who assured Auletta and Reeves that they had the best interests of the magazine at heart and that they would be happy to meet with the staff during the next board meeting to try to clean up this mess. To Byron Dobell, the board’s overtures at reconciliation were just strategic maneuvers, and perhaps a way to assuage their guilt over going behind Felker’s back. If they retained Auletta and Reeves in an editorial capacity after Murdoch took over, then New York might not lose its editorial continuity or integrity.

  “I was tremendously loyal to Clay, and the board was the enemy,” said Dobell. “I just felt Auletta and Reeves shouldn’t dicker around with these people, as if they might stay on afterwards. It was terribly naive on their part.” Dobell’s skepticism was borne out on January 2, when Patricof and Kempner signed their stock over to Murdoch. Towbin followed soon after, and Murdoch had it all sewn up, at least until Judge Greisa’s final ruling on the temporary restraining order. “The investment bankers on my board sold me out,” said Felker, “and Murdoch was a prick.”

  About the only salutary thing that emerged from the takeover, according to Felker, was the tremendous display of solidarity that his staff demonstrated in the wake of the sale. “The troops really rallied when Murdoch made his move,” he said. “It was very heartening to me.”

  On the morning after Murdoch held a cocktail party in his Fifth Avenue apartment to celebrate his victory, 125 full-time staffers and freelancers gathered at New York’s office on Second Avenue. With Felker and Glaser tied up in meetings with lawyers, Byron Dobell read a prepared statement from their beleaguered leader. “Despite recent developments,” it read in part, “I intend to fight as hard as I can to keep what we have all built from being damaged.” It was meant to be a battle cry, but it had the desperate ring of an SOS.

  The nonunionized staff planned a work stoppage if Murdoch shanghaied the magazine from Felker. The indignation was rising to a hysterical pitch; it was all beginning to take on the tenor of a moral crusade. “Clay has been very good to me,” Dobell told the reporters who had amassed in the office’s dining room for a press conference. “I think of him as my brother—and sometimes he may be wrong—but I’ve always felt I needed Clay. That’s why the passion is so enormous. I want to save my brother.” Ken Auletta put a finer point on it: “We protest being treated like lumps of meat or widgets—being bartered and traded around.”

  But New York’s crew had no legal recourse, not a single bargaining chip, except their sweat equity. Felker was trying to appeal to the empathy of the board, but no one knew better than Murdoch that financial self-interest always trumped good intentions. “When push came to shove, the investors were interested in getting their money out,” said Glaser. “They behaved as one would expect them to behave. Clay thought he could make them see the importance of his journalistic crusade—that they would stay on board for the sake of the editorial product—but why in the world would anyone think that was gonna happen?”

  Despite Tom Kempner’s assurances that the writers would have a significant role in the board meeting that would formalize the stock sale that night, New York’s minions were confined to a holding room adjacent to the boardroom in labor negotiator Ted Kheel’s office. As staff members sipped from the half-gallon bottle of Chivas Regal that Kheel had provided, Auletta, Reeves, and writer Steven Brill decamped to the men’s room, only to find Murdoch sitting on the sink, briefing Towbin and Stanley Shuman on strategy. They all regarded each other nervously, then Murdoch and his crew ducked out uneasily without a word exchanged between them. Pious indignation would no longer suffice; the script was being written by Murdoch now.

  Felker and Glaser entered the boardroom at a little past seven o’clock to face their antagonists. Alan Patricof wasted little time in shifting the balance of power to Murdoch, proposing that Joan Glynn and James Q. Wilson, two Felker loyalists, be removed from the board, effective immediately. No sooner did Glynn and Wilson leave than Patricof conducted a roll-call vote for the removal of Kheel as company counsel. Towbin, Patricof, Tufo, Kempner, Bull, and Burden all raised their hands. Kheel was out. Felker and Glaser were poleaxed but did their level best to keep themselves in check.

  Now the coup de grâce was at hand, and Patricof was on a roll: “I now propose that we put two new members on the board.” Enter Murdoch and Shuman, who without ceremony seated themselves in the chairs vacated by Glynn and Wilson. The proxies were passed around the table, and the meeting was adjourned. The shareholders would now convene in private.

  After a short interval, Patricof entered the writers’ room and told Glaser that the board would now hear the grievances of the New York representatives. Brill, Dobell, Felker, Reeves, Auletta, and Glaser entered the boardroom and proceeded to lob verbal buckshot at their tormenters. It was the only weapon they had left.

  Dobell berated the board for dining out on Felker’s genius for years and then repaying him with a devastating betrayal. Towbin vociferously defended his behavior, telling Felker that he had called up Felix Rohatyn to get permission to sell his stock. “Bob,” Felker barked, “you’re a liar.” Ken Auletta wanted Towbin to explain why he had told Auletta he would be interested in doing business with the Washington Post and that he wouldn’t budge until he had met with the writers when in fact he had already initiated a deal with Murdoch. Towbin had no good answer for that.

  But it was Carter Burden who bore the brunt of Felker and Dobell’s ire. “Carter was presumably a man of civic virtue,” said Dobell. “I thought he should be particularly ashamed, because New York magazine was a boon for the city, and by selling to Murdoch, he wasn’t acting in the best intere
sts of the city.” At one point, Felker rose from his chair to address Burden, who all along had hoped that whoever owned the magazine would give him a proper title at the top of the masthead. “He [Murdoch] knows what you are,” he said. “An incompetent dilettante. No one is going to give you what you want—a tin hat marked ‘publisher.’”

  None of this seemed to faze Murdoch in the least. Even after Felker had browbeaten nearly everyone in the room, Murdoch calmly turned to him and said, “Clay, I think you’re an editorial genius. I want you to stay and run the magazine.”

  “I, like you,” Felker responded, “am a publisher.”

  Felker still had an ace in the hole, or so he thought: the right-of-first-refusal clause that Burden had abrogated. But Peter Tufo had spotted a loophole in the agreement. If the company showed an aggregate loss over four consecutive quarters, Felker’s right to purchase Burden’s shares would have expired on December 31, 1976. New West’s losses had seen to that. Game, set, and match, Murdoch.

  The staff made good on their vow to walk out en masse when Murdoch took over, but Felker wanted to make sure that New York’s new owner at least protected the jobs of some of the senior members of the staff, and Murdoch complied, offering two-year guaranteed contracts for ten staffers as well as the top editors of New York, New West, and the Voice. In exchange, Murdoch’s lawyers released Felker from a non-compete clause in his contract that would have prevented him from working for or starting up any other publication in New York or Los Angeles, or any other national title. Murdoch also agreed to pay his $70,000 legal bill and gave him a year to pay off $250,000 in company debt.

  After the contracts were drafted and all the papers were signed, Felker and Glaser made their way back to the office on Second Avenue, but the staff had gathered at a restaurant across the street, a few of them holding out the faint hope that Felker had pulled off a miracle. Instead, the scene took on the pallor of an Irish wake. In a cracking voice, Felker told his troops that “Rupert Murdoch’s ideas about friendship, about publishing and about people are very different than mine. He should know that he is breaking up a family, and he does so at his peril.”

  No one was left to put out that week’s issue of New York. Byron Dobell, who was offered Felker’s job, resigned instead, while Ken Auletta demanded that his name be removed from New York’s masthead effective immediately. All of the other top editors and Glaser followed Auletta’s lead. It was left to Murdoch and a few News Ltd. directors to finish production. Murdoch edited some movie listings, while men in three-piece suits who had never before seen a galley page pasted up layouts and line-edited stories.

  When the smoke cleared, Felker made $750,000 on the sale; Burden came away with $4 million. James Brady, a News Ltd. vice president, took over as editor in chief of New York. Murdoch promptly fired Village Voice editor Marianne Partridge, then recanted over the vehement protestations of the paper’s staff.

  When Felker walked out after the final staff meeting onto Second Avenue, a phalanx of reporters was waiting for him. He tried to elbow his way through the scrum, but the TV cameras had him in their crosshairs. “I haven’t been thinking about what I’m going to do next,” Felker said. “I’m a journalist and that’s what my life is.”

  Someone asked, “What kind of day was today for you?”

  “A terrible day. It’s also the best day of my life.”

  “Why is it the best day?”

  “Because of the support and the love these people have shown me.”

  And then Clay Felker, who had cowed politicians and made society matrons blush, openly wept.

  AFTER THE BALL

  After Rupert Murdoch’s palace coup, Clay Felker brushed himself off and started over again.

  Ironically, he ventured back to Esquire, the magazine that had unceremoniously shoved him aside fifteen years earlier. But so much had changed since then. Harold Hayes, who had turned Esquire into the greatest American general-interest magazine of the 1960s, had left in 1973 after a dispute with the chairman of the board, John Smart. The magazine’s management had decided, without Hayes’s consent, that Esquire would use market testing in attempt to shore up its sagging bottom line, and perhaps even replace George Lois’s covers with more obvious designs of their own choosing. Management wanted a harder sell, with multiple cover lines instead of those single, pithy cover lines that Lois and the editors had perfected over the years. In short, they were looking for a sexier, more appealing package that would sacrifice panache for ham-handed commercialism. Hayes wasn’t having it, and on April 5, he turned in his letter of resignation to the board. (Hayes died of a brain tumor in 1989.)

  Without Hayes’s steady hand, the vitality seemed to drain out of Esquire. The magazine lost focus and market share, losing roughly $5 million from 1975 to 1977. In August 1977 Felker acquired the magazine with an investment from Vere Harmsworth, Viscount Rothemere, chairman of the British publishing giant Associated Newspapers, and recruited his old partner Milton Glaser to work by his side.

  But Felker’s editorial instincts, once so sure and sharp during his New York tenure, abandoned him. A fatal decision to increase the magazine’s frequency from monthly to biweekly left the magazine drowning in more red ink, and in May 1979 the majority interest of Esquire was sold to two thirty-something Tennesseans named Christopher Whittle and Phillip Moffitt.

  From there, Felker had a cup of coffee or two at various publications (the Daily News, Manhattan Inc., Adweek, U.S. News & World Report), tried his hand at an alternative newsweekly called the East Side Express that he sold in 1984, and even worked as a producer at Twentieth Century Fox for a brief time in the early 1980s. But the Felker era was, for all intents and purposes, a past-tense phenomenon.

  The same year that Felker lost New York to Murdoch, Jann Wenner moved Rolling Stone from San Francisco to New York, thus irrevocably altering what Hunter Thompson called “a hub of great journalism. My attitude at the time was, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But Jann took his life so far in another direction that he destroyed the shining monument to himself that he had built.”

  From 1967 to 1977, Rolling Stone featured movie stars on seventeen covers. From 1977 to 1979, it had twenty-two such cover stories. Thompson continued to contribute to the magazine, but none of his subsequent work, which varied wildly in quality, could match the greatness or the impact of the first two Fear and Loathing sagas (one exception being “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat,” Thompson’s encomium for his friend Oscar Zeta Acosta, who vanished mysteriously in Mazatlán, Mexico, in June 1974).

  Nineteen seventy-seven was also the year that George Lucas’s Star Wars was released, an event that landed the film’s cast on the cover of Rolling Stone in August. A covenant, it seemed, had been struck between Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and magazines would now become press organs for movie stars. Stories shrank, and so did ideas. Puff pieces were no longer discouraged by scrupulous editors; they were career builders for magazine writers now, and big draws for advertisers.

  It just got ugly in the 1970s for New Journalism, a process that was hastened by the decline of general-interest magazines. So what happened? Television, mostly, which siphoned away readers and ad dollars, turned celebrity culture into a growth industry and ensured the end of big tent magazines such as Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and Collier’s—magazines that had published Mailer, Didion, Hersey, and many others. Esquire, New York, and Rolling Stone were no longer must-reads for an engaged readership that couldn’t wait for the next issue to arrive in their mailboxes, eager to find out what Wolfe, Talese, Thompson, and the rest had in store for them. As the seventies drew to a close, so too did the last golden era of American journalism.

  But there was also a sense of psychic exhaustion, that the great stories had all been told and there was nothing left to write about. The last American troops pulled out of Saigon in 1975; mainstream culture had thoroughly colonized the counterculture, and women’s lib just wasn’t sexy enough for male journalists to co
ver with the same rigor and passion that they reserved for wars.

  New Journalism as Wolfe envisioned it—as the great literary movement of the postwar era—died a long time ago, but its influence is everywhere. Once a rear-guard rebellion, its tenets are so accepted now that they’ve become virtually invisible. The art of narrative storytelling is alive and well; it’s just more diffuse now, spread out across books, magazines, newspapers, and the Web.

  There are great immersive reporters such as Ted Conover, who posed as a corrections officer in Sing Sing prison and wrote an award-winning book about it called Newjack. Jon Krakauer accompanied a mountaineering expedition to Mount Everest on assignment from Outside magazine and produced a narrative nonfiction classic, Into Thin Air. Barbara Ehrenreich posed as a domestic laborer and told the hard-luck stories of her fellow workers in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

  Other best-selling books such as The Orchid Thief, Random Family, Moneyball, American Ground—riveting stories buttressed by meticulous reporting, full-bodied character development, and flat-out great writing-are the children of Dispatches, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and Armies of the Night. The director of New York University’s magazine journalism program, Robert S. Boynton, interviewed the authors of these and other recent nonfiction classics for a 2005 book called The New New Journalism.

  With the exception of Jimmy Breslin, who continued to write a weekly column until retiring from newspaper work in November 2004, New Journalism’s greatest practitioners moved on to other pursuits. Tom Wolfe virtually gave up journalism to devote himself to novels such as The Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons. Michael Herr has published only three smallish titles in the years since Dispatches. Since publishing Thy Neighbor’s Wife, his 1980 book about sexual mores in America, Gay Talese has written only one other book (Unto the Sons, a multigenerational saga of his own family) and has spent ten years working on the next one. A collection of his magazine pieces called The Gay Talese Reader was published in 2003. It is essential reading. John Sack continued to traverse the globe for stories about the Chinese Mafia, the Holocaust, and the My Lai massacre until his death from cancer in 2004. Joan Didion remains a giant of journalism and continues to produce stunning work.