The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (35 page)

As Mailer’s platform evolved, it began to resemble an odd mélange of old-fashioned populism, radical progressivism, and Thoreau-like civility. Foremost among Mailer’s ideas was the notion of bureaucratic emancipation. New York City should declare statehood, which would allow a new charter to be written that would create autonomous zones in the city, giving people greater control over their own neighborhoods. Private automobiles would be banned and day care centers would be built, methadone would be plentiful for the heroin addicts who needed it, and the quality of life in the city would acquire a simpler, more humane cast.

Mailer’s common touch was more adroit than anyone could have fathomed. At a Brooklyn College forum, one student wanted to know how Mailer would handle an act of God such as a blizzard. What, he asked, would Mailer do if there was a big snowstorm and he was the mayor? “Sir,” Mailer replied with a poker face, “I’d piss on it.”

When the campaign got down to the business of retail politics, Mailer discovered that he wasn’t half bad at it, and the city’s citizenry seemed to respond to him favorably. His fame was a nonstarter anyway: a poll had determined that more than half the city’s citizens didn’t know who he was.

As the team was soon to discover, volatile mavericks aren’t good at building constituencies, and Mailer’s intemperance did irrevocable damage to the campaign. A disastrous town-hall-style meeting at the Village Gate nightclub, in which a drunk Mailer sprayed epithets at his supporters like buckshot, became a fatal body blow when Sidney Zion wrote about it for the
New York Times
.

Tensions between Breslin and Mailer increased at the campaign slogged on. Breslin didn’t have the fortitude to adhere to a rigorous schedule of appearances, and Mailer was often left in the lurch. To say that Mailer’s chances were slim would be understating it—when the votes were finally tallied, he barely mustered thirty-seven thousand votes, coming in fourth in a field of five. (Incumbent mayor Lindsay was reelected.) The final result, for Breslin, was more welcome relief than a disappointment. “After Norman Mailer and I finished seven weeks of a mayoralty campaign adjudged unlikely, I still came away nervous and depressed by what I had seen of my city,” Breslin wrote in
New York
. “So when the business of the Democratic primary was over, I migrated naturally to a barand found it fine sport, and then to another bar, which was even better, and I then plunged entirely into the toy world. Important things became Mutchie’s face falling into a plate of spaghetti at 3 A.M., and Joe Bushkin playing the piano, and the horse Johnny Rotz was supposed to be on the next day. News bulletins were the score of the Mets game and Joe Namath’s troubles.”

A year after its rebirth,
New York
hadn’t lost a beat. Wolfe, Breslin, and the rest were contributing the same high level of journalism to the
magazine, but there were growing pains that needed to be addressed. The magazine’s lively mix of politics, culture, and lifestyle coverage was strong, but not distinguished enough to stand apart from the other two weekly newspapers in town, the
Village Voice
and the
East Village Other
.

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.

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 piece 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.

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.