The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (5 page)

“Come In, Lassie!” was to provide the model for every subsequent Ross story of the next half century. “‘Come In, Lassie!’ taught me how
to watch and wait for the interactions of my characters,” wrote Ross in 2002. “I learned how to set the stage with facts, find the essential characters and their dialogue, and Go!” In 1950, Ross used the same technique for a
New Yorker
profile of Ernest Hemingway called “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” Ross provided a real-time account of two days spent with Hemingway in New York City—dining with the writer and his wife in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, shopping for a jacket, looking at cherished paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By not sanitizing her prose or “cleaning up” her quotes—a common practice among journalists who want their subjects to sound more articulate than they are—Ross stripped away layers of myth to reveal a willful eccentric enamored of both boxing and beluga caviar, whipsawing between mannered cultivation and crude machismo.

His dialogue is a strange patois in which articles and verbs are dropped (Ross later referred to it as his “joke Indian language”), baseball metaphors are liberally applied, and flashes of insight into his creative process are judiciously revealed (“The test of a book is how much good stuff you can throw away”). Ross is a presence, but she keeps herself in the shadows of the narrative; her writing is pure, Hemingwayesque stage direction that pushes Hemingway’s compelling monologues into the foreground. Ross achieved a drawing room intimacy with Hemingway, a casual rapport and candor, that no reporter had ever been able to pull off. What’s most remarkable about Ross’s interviewing technique is that she considers tape recorders anathema and relies on her memory and extensive note taking in her 3 × 5-inch spiral Claire Fontaine notebooks to record dialogue. Considering the peculiarities of Hemingway’s speech and the prolix nature of his sentences, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” is a remarkable triumph of transcription.

“How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” was received with a mixture of perplexity and revulsion by some
New Yorker
readers when it ran in the May 13, 1950, issue. Ross had simply recorded what she saw and heard, and she was pilloried for it. In a preface to the Modern Library edition of the profile, Ross theorized that readers “didn’t like Hemingway to be Hemingway. They wanted him to be somebody else—probably themselves.” Ross also claims that Hemingway loved the profile and defended Ross against her critics. In a series of letters written to Ross after the piece was published, he reassured her that she had done an admirable
job (“About our old piece—the hell with them!”). Perhaps Ross, in her own nonjudgmental fashion, had moved a little too close to the truth.

Although “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” benefits from Ross’s desire to simply get it all down without embellishment, the story suffers from an amorphous structure; in her determination to not change in any way the shape of her raw material, Ross lets the story trail off unsatisfyingly. For her next assignment, a profile of the film director John Huston, Ross didn’t have such problems.

At a time when the inner workings of Hollywood filmmaking were still a mystery to the general public, Ross had full access to one of the great directors as he adapted Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel,
The Red Badge of Courage
, for MGM. She was friendly with Huston, and that would open any and all doors for her in California (Ross never had any compunction about cultivating friendships with her story subjects, perhaps because she was not the muckraking type). As Ross began soaking up information in story meetings and observing the production on Huston’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley, it became apparent that her story was something else entirely: a primer on how a film really gets made in Hollywood. “As I spent time with the characters involved in the making of the picture,” Ross wrote in her memoir
Here but Not Here
, “I became more and more excited about their relationships with one another, the development of the action, the drama of the story. It was like a novel unraveling right in front of me.”

In a letter to Shawn, Ross remarked, “Huston as a person is almost too interesting to be true—he’s complicated, funny, colorful, lonely, generous, crazy, driven, talented and outside of the conventional pattern of Hollywood, yet drawn and held by it, and the people in the business are attracted to and held by him.” Ross suggested that the story be written like a novel: “I don’t know whether this sort of thing has ever been done before, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t try to do a fact piece in novel form, or maybe a novel in fact form.”

As Ross continued to observe, the story coalesced in her mind. She would focus on four main characters: Huston, MGM vice president in charge of production Dore Schary, producer Gottfried Reinhardt, and studio head Louis B. Mayer, and present their story as a microcosm of the way things got done in Hollywood. It was a propitious time to undertake such a writing project, as the old studio system was about to
crumble and television would soon challenge film’s hegemony as the country’s leading entertainment medium.

Ross was excited about the story, which she felt seemed to be unfolding for her benefit alone. Her subjects were comfortable around her, so much so that they answered just about every question she posed to them. During her first meeting with Gottfried Reinhardt, the producer explained the nature of Hollywood’s office hierarchy: “I’m on the first floor, Dore Schary is two floors up, right over me. L.B. is also two floors up. I have a washbasin but no shower in my office. Dore has a shower but no bathtub. L.B. has a shower
and
a bathtub.”

The production was complicated, with large-scale battle sequences involving hundreds of extras. The trick was to bring the film in on budget and thus prevent Mayer, who had objected to the film from the very beginning, from meddling with the final product. After one battle sequence had been shot in Chico, Ross overheard the following conversation:

As the production progressed, an inevitable clash between art and commerce emerged. Mayer wanted to add narration to clarify the protagonist’s thoughts. Huston didn’t budge. When the film was finally completed, it tested poorly in two sneak previews, and Mayer felt he had been vindicated. During a meeting with MGM producer Arthur Freed, Mayer makes an impassioned pitch for good old-fashioned escapism:

Mayer then proceeds to tell a bizarre story about a female critic-turned-screenwriter who used to knock MGM’s films:

Ross learned the true lesson of filmmaking as a collaborative art: those who pay the bills have the last word. When
The Red Badge of Courage
was finally released, it had been bowdlerized and watered down, beaten back into some gray area between art film and war picture. But Ross still needed an interview with the man who had green-lighted the film: MGM president Nicholas B. Schenck, who was based in New York. He could provide her with an ending, give her some kind of postmortem on the project. When Ross returned to the city, Shawn insisted that she stake Schenck out in the lobby of MGM’s offices at 1540 Broadway-arrive at 8 A.M., and then wait for as long as it took for Schenk to show up. Schenk materialized on Ross’s first try, pulling up in a stretch limousine. Ross introduced herself and explained the nature of her project, and asked if Mr. Schenk could spare a little time. Schenck didn’t hesitate
and, accompanied by his press agent, Howard Dietz, escorted Ross into his office:

Ross’s story, “Production Number 1512,” ran in five issues of
The New Yorker
, beginning with the May 24, 1952, issue. When it was published in book form as
Picture
the following year, it was hailed as a breakthrough, a meticulously rendered chronicle of realpolitik within Hollywood’s corridors of power. Ernest Hemingway called it “much better than most novels.” It was the most novelistic book-length piece of journalism since
Down and Out in Paris and London
, leavened by Ross’s light and lucid prose, her elucidation of character through description, and the dialogue-heavy interactions between the main players.

When novelist Truman Capote traveled to Garden City, Kansas, in November 1959 at the behest of
The New Yorker
to investigate the murder of Holcomb wheat farmer Herbert Clutter, his wife, and two of his children, he had to piece together a story that had only two living witnesses, as it turned out—the murderers themselves.

Capote at first refused to camouflage himself within the local milieu, to meld seamlessly into the sleepy rhythms of the midwestern town. In his sport jacket and bow tie, his epicene features set off by a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, Capote was every inch the northeastern bon
vivant-cum-bookish nerd. No one recognized him or his work; of the entire population of Holcomb, only two high school teachers had ever read any of his books. Many of his interview subjects asked to see his credentials, which turned out to be a single letter he obtained from the president of Kansas State University. Capote, whose work had taken him all over Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean, felt like an alien. “It was as strange to me,” he said at the time, “as if I’d gone to Peking.”

“Truman was a little out of his element,” said Bill Brown, the former editor of the
Garden City Telegram
, whom Capote enlisted to help him track down interview sources. “The first time I met him, he walked in in a fur-lined women’s coat and hung out a limp hand. But while I think a lot of people may have laughed behind his back, they were cooperative with him.”

As Capote investigated the mystery of the Clutter murder, he became an informal assistant to Alvin Dewey, the Kansas detective in charge of the case, as they both tried to piece together the motives behind the murders. Working with his friend Nelle Harper Lee, who functioned as Capote’s stenographer, Capote traversed the state, lending an empathetic ear to everyone who would consent to talk to him.

“Harper was a genuinely friendly person, and if people were put off by Truman, they felt they could talk to her,” said Herb Clutter’s former attorney, Clifford Hope, who became the executor of the Clutter estate. “If someone would be talking to Truman, Harper would be behind him, taking notes, getting everything down on paper.”

Capote never tape-recorded any conversations and never jotted anything down in a notebook during the entire six years it took for him to research the story. After each interview was complete, Capote would quickly retreat to his room at the Warren Hotel and type everything from memory and Lee’s notes, then file it and cross-reference it. “People who don’t understand the literary process are put off by notebooks,” Capote told
Life
in 1966. “And tape recorders are worse—they completely ruin the quality of the thing being felt or talked about. If you write down or tape what people say, it makes them feel inhibited and self-conscious. It makes them say what they think you
expect
them to say.” If Capote felt that he had missed some crucial information the first time around, he went back and interviewed the same subjects over and over again, until he had it right.

Capote for years had claimed that he had taught himself to be his own tape recorder. As a memory exercise, he would have friends read or speak into a tape recorder as he listened; then he would quickly write down as accurately as possible what he had heard and compare it to the tape. Over time, Capote claimed, the differences between what was on the tape and what he had had written became negligible.

Capote had to tread lightly when, a month after arriving in Kansas, two drifters named Dick Hickock and Perry Smith were arrested for the Clutter murders. Using his dispassionate and gently probing approach, Capote achieved a rapport with the killers that had eluded everyone working on the case. The writer spent hundreds of hours with the killers, who in turn used their jail quota of two letters a week to start a long correspondence with the writer. Capote kept them supplied with books, particularly the works of Thoreau and Santayana, which Perry favored, and they in turn filled him in on their backgrounds, their six weeks as fugitives, and the brutally clinical details of the murders. “It wasn’t a question of my
liking
Dick and Perry,” Capote recalled. “That’s like saying, ‘Do you like yourself?’ What mattered was that I
knew
them, as well as I know myself.”