The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (16 page)

The notion for Wolfe’s next
Esquire
story was inspired by the annual car show at the New York Coliseum, in which numerous examples of the latest custom cars—or “Kustom Kars,” in West Coast insider’s parlance— from Los Angeles were on display. Wolfe, who was covering the show for the
Tribune
, was fascinated by the cars—tricked-out hot rods with exposed engines, bold graphics, blue- and red-flake paint jobs, designed by little-known customizers such as Dale Alexander, George Barris, and Ed Roth. “It’s the automobile that’s the most important story today,” Wolfe told
Saturday Review
in 1965. “The automobile dominates society. To incredible numbers of people, the automobile is a cult object.” Wolfe pitched
Esquire
on a piece on custom cars—he would fly to Los Angeles and observe the phenomenon in its natural element, then write a feature with far greater scope than even
New York
magazine could accommodate.

Wolfe was overwhelmed by what he saw in L.A. It was the efflorescence of what he had witnessed in small doses in New York—the youth movement writ large. At the Teen Fair, an annual event in Santa Monica that functioned as a kind of pop-cultural World’s Fair, produced by a few savvy businessmen, Wolfe witnessed the West Coast statuspheres—the surfers, the drag racers, the fruggers and twisters—converge on an event that combined rock music, teen product peddlers, and most important, the flamboyant custom cars of Barris, Roth, Von Dutch, and others. He went to Barris’s shop, Kustom City, in North Hollywood, where Barris showed him how the cars were manufactured and then painstakingly painted and airbrushed. “Wolfe spent many hours, many days with me. He even came over to the house and cooked dinner with my wife,” said Barris. “He wanted to know everything about the cars, and it was great for me, because of the publicity.”

Wolfe had an abundance of interview material, but he was flummoxed as to how he should organize it into a cohesive story. What he lacked was a thesis, a compelling through-line that could justify three thousand words. He knew that the custom car subculture was unprecedented, but what did it represent? For a week he sat in front of his typewriter in his studio apartment in Greenwich Village, waiting for inspiration to strike, watching TV and doing sit-ups to keep himself occupied.

A call from Wolfe to Byron Dobell put the
Esquire
editor on alert that a story might not materialize after all. The magazine’s art department
already had a color photo of a Barris car from the New York show in place, and the magazine’s production schedule dictated that stories with color art had to go to the printers first, before the rest of the issue.
Esquire’s
small budget couldn’t accommodate a rewrite man to fashion the story from Wolfe’s notes; if Wolfe couldn’t make it work, then Dobell would write a few paragraphs to accompany the picture, and that would be the story.

“I was anxious to get something,” said Dobell. “Wolfe always had difficulties with deadlines, but we were ready to roll without any text. I just asked him to tell me enough information so I could write the copy myself.”

Wolfe was panicked. Starting at eight o’clock one night, he sat down and began typing a memo to Dobell that described everything he had seen in L.A., from the moment he first laid eyes on Barris’s cars to the goings-on at the Teen Fair. Fueled on coffee (a habit he would kick a few years later) and an AM radio blaring Top 40 pop, Wolfe didn’t stop typing until six-fifteen the next morning; by that time, the memo had swelled to forty-nine typewritten pages. He walked to
Esquire’s
offices as soon as the place opened at nine-thirty, and turned in his memo to Dobell.

“I read it and thought, ‘Well, this is something new,’” said Dobell. “The story was there, even though Wolfe didn’t know it. I walked into Harold Hayes’s office and said, ‘Don’t worry, this is an astonishing piece.’ It was well worth all of the strain and nervousness.”

Dobell barely amended it, excising a few vernacular asides (“He had a lot of ‘for Christ sakes’ in there for some reason, little filler kind of things”) and crossing out the “Dear Byron” salutation at the top of the memo. The throat-clearing headline—“There goes (VAROOM! VAROOM!) that Kandy-Kolored (THPHHHHHH!) tangerine-flake streamline baby (RAHGHHHH!) around the bend (BRUMMMMM-MMMMMMMMMMM …)”—was editor David Newman’s.

A thesis had emerged from the accretion of detail that Wolfe had recorded in the memo, namely, that custom cars represented an overlooked episode in contemporary art history, the convergence of postwar prosperity with a new, ritualized formalism that wasn’t beholden to, or even cognizant of, anything that had preceded it. “I don’t mind observing,” Wolfe wrote in the story, “that it is this same combination—money
plus slavish devotion to form—that accounts for Versailles or St. Mark’s Square.”

“My definition of art is anything that you can take out of its natural environment and regard as something that’s beautiful and significant unto itself,” said Wolfe. “Customized cars were art, with those exposed motors and shiny chrome parts.” In the story Wolfe made grand claims for custom cars as high art on a par with the works of Brancusi, Dalï, and Mondrian—perhaps even more significant. He called the Teen Fair a “Plato’s
Republic
for teenagers” and wrote that the cars meant more “to these kids than architecture did in Europe’s great formal century, say 1750 to 1850. They are freedom, style, sex, power, motion, color—everything is right there.” Wolfe framed Barris and Ed Roth, the other major customizer in L.A., as outsider artists working under the cultural radar. “They’re like Easter Islanders,” Wolfe wrote of their custom cars. “Suddenly you come upon the astonishing objects, and then you have to figure out how they got there and why they’re there.”

Everywhere he looked on the streets of Los Angeles, Wolfe found vernacular art. The city’s buildings were “shaped not like rectangles but like trapezoids, from the way the roofs slant up from the back and the plate-glass fronts slant out as if they’re going to pitch forward on the sidewalk and throw up.” Here was a New York-based writer giving serious consideration to West Coast culture in all of its magnificently gaudy (as in Gaudi) splendor. For
Esquire
, a magazine that regarded New York as the epicenter of just about everything, Wolfe’s story was a revelation, evidence of life on the other side of the country.

“When I started writing in what became known as my style, I was trying to capture the newness and excitement of the West Coast thing,” said Wolfe. “It’s where all the exciting youth styles were coming from. They certainly weren’t coming from New York. Everything I was writing about was new to the East Coast.”

Hayes loved it, but Felker wasn’t pleased that Wolfe was moonlighting for
Esquire
when he should have been writing his longer features exclusively for
New York
. Once again, Hayes and Felker found themselves at loggerheads, with Wolfe in the middle. “None of us were really pleased with the arrangement, especially Clay,” said Shelly Zalaznick. “I hated the idea of Tom working for others, but it was something that Tom had worked out with Bellows, and so we really couldn’t do anything about it.”

For Wolfe, it was the best of all possible worlds. Not only did he have job security at the
Tribune
, but now he was making an impact on a national level, producing stories for the most talked-about magazine in America. He had never worked harder, but the six years Wolfe spent writing for both the
Tribune
and
Esquire
transformed him into a reporter-cum-cultural icon and produced some of the most vibrant journalism of the decade.

TOM WOLFE ON ACID

T
om Wolfe was juggling a monstrous schedule. Jim Bellows, Clay Felker (who had replaced Shelly Zalaznick as editor of
New York
), and Harold Hayes were tugging him every which way, and he willingly followed. After a few years of general assignment sloggery, he now had two prominent outlets that gave him a wide berth to write as he pleased. It came at a great time; everywhere Wolfe turned, he saw the old culture being plowed under and upended by new ways of living, thinking, playing. Wolfe was anxious to chronicle as much of it as he could—to write about all of it and become the authoritative voice of the decade’s new vanguard. That every reporter in New York wasn’t following suit was unfathomable to him.

In his features for the
Tribune
and
Esquire
, Wolfe cut a wide swath through the culture—the gambling rituals and psychiatric breakdowns of Las Vegas casino crawlers, new national pastimes such as drag racing on Long Island, teen cultural arbiters including popular radio DJ Murray the K and hipster habitué Baby Jane Holzer, and the “Nanny Mafia” of housekeepers among New York’s upper class.

For
Esquire
stories that took him out of town, Wolfe traveled on weekends and wrote at night. “What I spent on those trips was always more than I ever earned,” said Wolfe. “But the idea was to do more reporting than anyone had ever done before.”

In 1964,
Esquire
editor Bob Sherrill suggested that Wolfe head out to Wilkes-Barre, North Carolina, to interview stock car driver Junior
Johnson, a colorful character whom Sherrill had first gotten wind of while working as a newspaper editor in Stanford, North Carolina. Johnson was a big deal in his home state, the subject of many local stories, but no one with Wolfe’s skill had tackled him yet. Wolfe, ditching his white suit for green tweed this time in order to blend in a bit, made “countless, I don’t know how many” trips to North Carolina, quietly insinuating himself with Johnson, a former bootlegger who had learned how to drive by keeping one step ahead of the feds. Wolfe had never worked harder on a story, but it was worth it. A 20,000-word epic, “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson, Yes!” was Wolfe’s exegesis of the good-ol’-boy South. It was world’s apart from the patrician South of his upbringing, but no less fascinating. Wolfe had done it again; coming into the subject cold, he had written the best magazine feature on stock car racing thus far.

In his
Esquire
story “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!” Wolfe portrayed the Nevada gambling mecca as a netherworld of sleep-deprived psychosis and temporary euphoria, bathed in the bright, eternal glow of its neon signs: “Boomerang Modern, Palette Curvilinear, Flash Gordon Ming-Alert Spiral, McDonald’s Hamburger Parabola, Mint Casino Elliptic, Miami Beach Kidney.” Wolfe panned across the diverse cross section of Vegas dwellers, stopping to admire the “buttocks décolletage” of certain Vegas women, whose “bikini-style shorts… cut across the round fatty masses of the buttocks rather than cupping them from below, so that the outer-lower edges of these fatty masses, or ‘cheeks,’ are exposed.” Here are the “old babes at the row upon row of slot machines,” their “hummocky shanks” packed into capri pants, with a “Dixie cup full of nickels or dimes in the left hand and an Iron Boy work glove on the right hand to keep the calluses from getting sore.” Wolfe leads the reader into the inner circles of Vegas hell, down into the county jail and the psychiatric ward of the county hospital, where those “who have taken the loop-the-loop and could not stand the centripity” come to heal themselves.

So eager was Wolfe to provide the definitive story on Vegas culture that his original draft was nearly twice as long as the final version that ran in the magazine; brevity was not his strong suit, and his stories often entailed massive paring and trimming.

Wolfe was pushing his language deeper into whimsical metaphor. His
sentences were being pulled and distended to the edge of prolixity, and he was using onomatopoeia; Wolfe’s pieces came with their own sound effects. The opening sentence of the Vegas story was a single word repeated 57 times: “Hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, HERNia, hernia …” a device meant to convey the running drone of the stick men at the craps tables. In his Junior Johnson story, Wolfe wrote “Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong!—gawdam!” to simulate the sound of Johnson’s car peeling out. In the lead paragraph for his story on Baby Jane Holzer, called “The Girl of the Year,” Wolfe discovered another effective technique, the run-on enumeration of fashion details:

The publishing world was taking notice. In the winter of 1965, Lynn Nesbit, a twenty-five-year-old junior agent, contacted Wolfe about taking him on as a client. “Lynn called me out of the blue,” according to Wolfe, “and said, ‘Don’t you know you have a book here?’” Nesbit, who had started out as a secretary for leading agent Sterling Lord and thus came armed with a solid Rolodex, suggested to Wolfe that a collection of his stories might be something she could sell. “I was this fresh-faced girl from the Midwest, but Tom liked the fact that I was a straight shooter,” said Nesbit. “He was actually thinking about writing a novel at that time, but I loved his work, so he took a chance on me, I’m not sure why.”