The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (36 page)

After selling two Talk of the Town pieces to
The New Yorker
, Goodman attracted the attention of Clay Felker at
Esquire
. When Felker left
Esquire
for the
Herald Tribune
, he brought Goodman with him to write a weekly column. After penning a scathing article about Motorola, Goodman got cold feet about using his own byline on the piece; it would compromise his good name as a fund manager, creating the appearance of a conflict of interest. Goodman suggested the pseudonym Procrustes, the conniving thief of Greek mythology, but none of the editors liked that, and when Goodman picked up the paper, he saw another byline had replaced it: “Adam Smith,” a name Shelly Zalaznick had come up with at the last minute. Goodman hated the name—another, far more esteemed economic theorist had already laid claim to it, and besides, it sounded corny to him. But it was a done deal.

At
New York
, Goodman created a rogue’s gallery of Wall Street fund managers, brokers, speculators, and CEO fat cats—some of them real, others not—and spun fanciful stories that explained economic trends to New York’s readers without resorting to jargon. In “Notes on the Great Buying Panic,” Goodman’s first story for the new weekly, he introduced Poor Grenville, the manager of a “swinging” fund, and Grenville’s dilemma: how to spend $42 million of the fund’s money to avoid an imminent stock market collapse.

Goodman framed the entire story as a lunch-hour speculative selling frenzy in which Poor Grenville would unburden himself of his money while Adam Smith, ever the credulous outsider, watched the spectacle unfold. Numbers were of interest to Goodman only as they related to the unusual behavioral traits of those who controlled the numbers. From Breslin, Goodman acquired an acute feel for characterization; from Wolfe, he learned how to transform the foibles of the rich and powerful into arch satire.

“Well, I think we all influenced each other,” said Goodman. “That Tom Wolfe piece, the one that started with ‘Hernia, hernia, hernia,’ that was a big influence on me. Tom really loosened the borders for all of us.
New York
was like a great varsity team, and we knew it, too.”

Not that they got on too well at first. Goodman thought of Wolfe’s Savile Row getups as an elaborate put-on: “People didn’t wear white spats and white suits in New York.” Goodman was annoyed by Breslin’s abrasiveness and arrogance, and he thought Felker displayed passive-aggressive tendencies, even though he was the best editor he had ever written for. “Clay was not a good arbiter of arguments,” he said. “He would just let us fight it out.” During one such meeting, Goodman suggested that the magazine might explore politics in greater depth. To Wolfe, that was code for
liberal
politics; irate, he yelled, “Well, why don’t you just go work for the
New Republic
instead?”

New York’s
office quarters did little to alleviate the tension. The cramped, 2,400-square-foot space, in which editors and writers worked with their desks jammed up against each other in some cases, was too cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer, the result of a constantly malfunctioning thermostat. “I sat in a puddle for two years because the radiator leaked,” said Byron Dobell, who became a senior editor at
New York
in 1972. “I had to lay down newspapers so my shoes didn’t get soaked.” The gutters were never cleaned out, and eventually the entire office flooded during a rainstorm. Dobell had to come in on a Saturday to haul away the waterlogged magazines that had been destroyed in the basement. “It was a repellent mess of crap,” he said.

Felker had one of two enclosed offices, but when he realized that yelling directives down the hallway would work more efficiently if he was actually
working
in the hallway, he moved his desk and turned his office into a conference room. The magazine was woefully understaffed from the start. Secretaries doubled as proofreaders and factcheckers, and no one ever went home early. “It was exhilarating, but it was really hard,” said Jack Nessel. “We were always one step away from disaster.” Most of the magazine’s star writers were chronic deadline truants. Gail Sheehy was always late with her copy, as was Wolfe. Breslin would personally call the magazine’s printer in order to determine exactly how long he could push back his drop-dead deadline. When Breslin finally consented to hand-deliver a manuscript, George Hirsch could hear him huffing and puffing up the stairs with Fat Thomas in tow, muttering expletives under his breath, along with an occasional “Why doesn’t this fucking building have an elevator?” Despite his tardiness, Breslin demanded instant feedback from his editors. “Thirty seconds after turning a story in, he would ask me, ‘Is it all right?’” said Shelly Zalaznick. “He was always eager to get it just right.”

By mid-1969,
New York
was hitting its stride. Although the magazine had lost $2.1 million during the first year, Felker and Erpf had gone back for another round of financing with a public offering as Aeneid Equities, Inc., raising an additional $2 million, and the advertising revenue was starting to roll in. The magazine’s circulation was 145,000 in August 1969, and 587 pages of ads had brought in $723,000 for the year. There was a compelling reason:
New York
had forged a distinct identity as a regional magazine. It had become an essential crib sheet for Manhattan
snobs who would never cop to their parochialism. Felker and his staff struck a judicious balance between edgy service features (such as food critic Gael Greene’s survey of the best Mafia restaurants in town); opinionated local political coverage from Steinem, Breslin, and Peter Maas; and insightful pop sociological reportage from Wolfe, Julie Baumgold, and Gail Sheehy.

The magazine didn’t look like any other publication on the newsstand, either. The playfully savage illustrations of Edward Sorel and Bob Grossman quickly became the magazine’s visual trademark, while Milton Glaser created a spare and elegant template for the editorial content. Glaser loved to leave some breathing room on a page; where others might gratuitously fill in a page of copy with busy imagery, Glaser and his associate art director, Walter Bernard, weren’t afraid to leave in a large, vacant expanse, usually on the top third of the page. “Clay and Milton would have fights about leaving in so much blank space,” said Jack Nessel. “Milton would eventually assuage Clay by telling him that ‘we’ve got to let the story breathe,’ that kind of thing.”

By its third year of existence, Felker and his staff had succeeded in capturing the mad, scrambling ambition and creative energy of the most vital city in America between its covers every week. For the magazine’s loyal readers,
New York
caught the gestalt of the city better than anything else. “Clay saw New York as Ambition City,” said Tom Wolfe. “The excitement came from the collision of ambitious people. Status fascinated Clay.”

Wolfe’s attitude was more ambivalent. While New York City was the world’s proving ground of power and privilege and thus supplied endless story ideas for him, he was disenchanted with the appropriation of radical politics by the city’s liberal elite. The New Left, which had done so much to push the cause of civil rights into the foreground in the early sixties, had now, as he saw it, congealed into a faddish emblem of protest, an excuse for slumming activists to feel virtuous about their righteous indignation. But it was a codependent relationship. By embracing liberals in positions of power and influence, the leaders of the New New Left, which included the Yippies and the Black Panthers, received funding and media attention, while their newly converted supplicants could rub elbows with genuine insurrectionaries.

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.

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: