The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (15 page)

Wolfe was entranced by all the talent in that enormous, clattering, smoke-filled room, with its exposed “electrical conduits, water pipes, steam pipes, effluvium ducts, sprinkler systems all of it dangling and grunting from the ceiling,” the walls painted in “industrial sludge … that grim distemper of pigment and filth.” It was one “big pie factory, a landlord’s dream,” and Wolfe breathed it in lovingly. The southern initiate had found his Valhalla. “I still get a terrific kick out of riding down
Park Avenue in a cab at 2:30 in the morning and seeing the glass buildings all around,” said Wolfe in 1974. “I have a real cornball attitude towards [New York].”

Wolfe stood out from the rolled-up-sleeve culture of the
Tribune
in more ways than one. At Washington and Lee, he had begun to wear custom-tailored three-piece suits with pocket squares and extra-wide ties—“Tom Sawyer drawn by Beardsley,” one wag would later write. It was a look Wolfe cultivated in part because his father had dressed that way, and also because it set him apart in a respectably eccentric manner. “I didn’t have any other minor vices,” said Wolfe. “I didn’t belong to a club, I didn’t play tennis or golf or take vacations. My wardrobe budget was the kind of money you spend on a hobby.” Wolfe got his suits custom-made by a traveling employee of the esteemed Savile Row tailor Hicks and Sons for $212. Now he was reporting for work at the
Trib
in those threads, and it sent a little tremor of speculation throughout the city room. Who was this guy, anyway?

“I think the thing that really annoyed people was the nipped-in waist,” Wolfe said. “That seemed unpatriotic, a real affectation. But my contention is that all men are fashion-conscious; they just want to fit in. I could have attracted more attention to myself—I could have worn a dashiki, for example—but I wanted to be in the game. The important thing was, I wanted them to say, ‘Who in the name of God does he think he is?’”

From the start, Wolfe’s stories for the
Trib
were written in his hyperactive style. Even for a paper that encouraged fanciful departures from the usual gray reportorial formula, Wolfe’s approach stood out. It didn’t matter what the story was about; Wolfe would Wolfeorize it. In a two-column throwaway piece about bad winter weather, Wolfe described a “mean, low-down cold streak, made up of practically every foul blow in the book.” In another early story, Wolfe wrote about frat boys, “with eyes that looked like poached eggs engraved with a road map of West Virginia, those guys who were trying to stumble, stagger, fall down, grope, heave, lurch, list and tetter their way through the lines of an aria called ‘Dirty Lil.’”

Another early story, which ran on April 13, 1962, reported on a rent strike by New York University students, and the activities of some of the protesting students:

The salient facts of the story weren’t Wolfe’s primary concern, although he always had them all in place; the idea was to set the scene with an accretion of peculiar details that other reporters might find tangential, but which were in fact crucial to the event in question—and to Wolfe’s meticulously constructed mise-en-scéne. “I learned that from Gay Talese, who was very good at reporting a story until you had the little things that helped bring the big things to life,” said Wolfe. “You just had to be around, hang out.”

Wolfe might hold off on the expository “nut graph” until the middle of the piece and forcefully guide the reader into the story from some other starting point, pulling back slowly to reveal the true subject. Wolfe’s language was something else entirely, a vivid Technicolor vernacular that had editors scratching their heads and fellow
Tribune
writers wondering just what the hell he was doing. In Wolfe’s stories, the East River was “chilled hogwash,” paperback books were “white-meat slabs of revelation and culture,” Grand Central Station was “the glamour depot of the East.” The florid language was in part derived from Wolfe’s love of southern patois, the rich, honeyed speech patterns of Virginia’s native sons and daughters. But he also loved the gossip sheets and pulp magazines of his youth, the slangy prose of
Confidential
and
True Detective
magazines, with their playful double entendres, lurid metaphors, and adjectival sprees.

His main literary influence was a school of Russian avant-garde writers he had read at Yale called the Serapion Brothers, who came of age during the 1920s and were thus under pressure to produce agitprop for Stalin. Instead, they rebelled against literary conformity and pledged anethic of absolute freedom from doctrine, state-sponsored or otherwise. The movement’s leader, Eugene Zamiatin, was a brash and formally brilliant satirist, a naval engineer who also wrote plays, short stories, and novels. His major work,
We
, which was published in 1929, was a savage indictment of Soviet collectivist groupthink that presaged Orwell’s
1984
. But it was Zamiatin’s prose that had a profound impact on Wolfe’s work—the way he broke up sentences with ellipses in order to mimic nonlinear thought, and liberally used exclamation points. Wolfe’s habit of writing stories in the historical present—a conceit that would become a trademark of his
Esquire
stories—was picked up from a popular biography of Napoleon by Polish writer Emil Ludwig that was published in the States in 1925. Wolfe became enamored of Ludwig’s style as an eight-year-old, transcribing passages from Ludwig’s book into his own heavily plagiarized biography of Napoleon.

He folded all of it into his articles—anything to avoid sounding like the “usual non-fiction narrator with a hush in my voice, like a radio announcer at a tennis match.”

Jim Bellows worked him ragged, but Wolfe chafed at the space restrictions he was given in the daily paper. Not all of the subject matter was that interesting, either—writing stories about the new baggage carts at Grand Central or the increase in liquor tax wasn’t going to rock the city to its foundations. He needed an outlet such as the one the
Times’s
Gay Talese had with
Esquire
, and he wouldn’t have to look very far to find it.

Today’s Living
, the magazine supplement of the
Trib’s
Sunday edition, had been an Achilles’ heel for years, but Bellows was open to new ideas. Working with editor Shelly Zalaznick and Clay Felker, Bellows mapped out some basic ideas for the magazine, which would be renamed
New York
. Each week Breslin and Wolfe would contribute a story. A staff of arts columnists, including classical music critic Alan Rich, film critic Judith Crist, and theater critic Walter Kerr, would be featured in the Lively Arts section. Design editor Peter Palazzo would create a classy template that would give the entire Sunday paper a nice lift. And, just to make sure everyone at least rifled through it, the TV listings would go in the back of the book.

Clay Felker, working closely with Shelly Zalaznick as an editorial consultant, orchestrated Tom Wolfe’s transition from workaday general assignment reporter to magazine feature writer. “It’s rare to find someone with real insight into good ideas, but Clay had the ability to match the right writer up with the story,” said Zalaznick. Given Bellows’s directive to come up with stories for Wolfe, Felker thought the reporter might be interested in a piece on the mad moneyed oglers who swarmed the art galleries every Saturday afternoon on Madison Avenue, the city’s high-end
retail artery. A shade over three thousand words long, “The Saturday Route” was the longest story Wolfe had filed for the
Trib
, and it started a run of pieces in which Wolfe observed the rituals of Manhattan’s cultural tribes with a mixture of gentle mockery and the bemused wonder of a Virginia transplant:

Cinched in by the two-column stories he was filing for the paper, Wolfe’s style took off like Air Force One in
New York
. Wolfe and Felker became the paper’s trend spotters, with Wolfe filing stories on subjects that the
Trib
never would have taken seriously before: record producer Phil Spector, the Peppermint Lounge nightclub, stock car racing on Long Island. Two days a week, he was cranking out straight news stories as a general assignment reporter; the other three days were blocked off for a fifteen-hundred-word feature to run in
New York
. “Tom once told me that his body had taken more of a beating from writing than from playing baseball,” said Elaine Dundy, a writer who dated Wolfe during the
Tribune
era.

In the
Trib
newsroom, opinion was divided as to whether the Virginian was a brilliant talent or just a facile trickster, a careerist with a marketing hook. Some, such as Jimmy Breslin, respected Wolfe as a dogged reporter who worked as hard as anyone to get his stories. “Everyone
would make such a fuss about his clothes, but I knew he was a serious reporter, someone who did the legwork,” he said. Others, including city reporter Dave Burgin, didn’t understand what the fuss was about. “I didn’t get it myself,” said Burgin, who commiserated with a number of
Trib
writers who thought the paper’s “Manhattan fop” was getting too much attention from Bellows. “Some guys were insanely jealous of him,” said Burgin. “But no one, not even Bellows, could get him to take the punctuation out. I remember one guy, a business writer, told me, ‘If I thought an exclamation point or two would get me a raise, I would have done it a long time ago.’”

Wolfe was fascinated by the insurgency of urban youth, largely because he felt it was the story of the decade, and he had the territory all to himself. “When I reached New York in the sixties, I couldn’t believe the scene I saw spread out before me,” Wolfe wrote in the
New Journalism
anthology. “New York was pandemonium with a big grin on.”

What fascinated Wolfe were the myriad ways in which people with money were carving out new ways of living—novel approaches to leisure time, new choices in music, fashion, and film, and most important, new approaches to flaunting status. For Wolfe, New York was one big collection of “statuspheres,” each with its own rules of engagement and hierarchies based on fame, style, and infamy, rather than archaic notions of an established social order. “When great fame—the certification of status—is available without great property,” Wolfe wrote in the introduction to
The Pump House Gang
, his 1965 anthology, “it is very bad news for the old idea of a class structure. In New York … it is done for, but no one has bothered to announce its death.”

As a southern outsider trying to carve his own niche in New York’s hotly competitive newspaper world, the notion of self-made status appealed to Wolfe. “Wolfe is a kind of aristocrat, but he doesn’t admit it,” said Gay Talese. “He’s southern gentry, but he’s a classy man. The best manners I’ve ever seen. There is a combativeness about him, but Tom never spoke ill of anyone.”

Esquire
editor Byron Dobell had spotted a story that Wolfe had written, about the 1962 gubernatorial campaign between Nelson Rockefeller and district attorney Robert Morgenthau, and contacted him about writing pieces for the magazine. His first published piece for
Esquire
, a profile of heavyweight contender Cassius Clay called “The Marvelous
Mouth” that ran in the October 1963 issue, was trouble from the start. Clay wanted
Esquire
to pay him for the interview. Harold Hayes rejected that idea outright: most subjects were proud and honored to be interviewed by
Esquire
. Clay didn’t want honor; he wanted cash. Hayes finally agreed to pay Clay $150—$50 when he met with Wolfe, $50 during the second interview, and $50 when Wolfe’s time with him was completed.

During Wolfe’s first meeting with Clay, which took place at the Americana Hotel in Times Square, Wolfe noticed that the champ wore the call letters of the New York radio station WNEW on his black tie—a small endorsement deal that paid him $150. Clay begged Wolfe not to mention it in his article. “As it turned out, the Louisville syndicate that handled Clay didn’t want him to have any money, so he wouldn’t wind up like so many boxers, with big entourages and distractions,” said Wolfe.

Clay had so many reservations about Wolfe’s questions that the formal sit-down interview was virtually useless. Wolfe soon realized that he would get his story by observing Clay in his element—the Gay Talese technique of “just hanging out.” Trailing Clay to the Metropole Café, where the fighter was swarmed by goggle-eyed fans, Wolfe took notice of the quiet grace and dignity of the fighter, the unflappable cool. At one point the reporter noticed a white man, “obviously a Southerner from the way he talked,” requesting an autograph: