The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (50 page)
Authors: Marc Weingarten
Tags: #Language Arts & Disciplines, #Literary, #Journalism, #Fiction, #Mailer; Norman - Criticism and Interpretation, #American, #Literary Criticism, #Wolfe; Tom - Criticism and Interpretation, #Didion; Joan - Criticism and Interpretation, #Biography & Autobiography, #American Prose Literature - 20th Century - History and Criticism, #General, #Capote; Truman - Criticism and Interpretation, #Reportage Literature; American - History and Criticism, #Journalism - United States - History - 20th Century
BOOK: The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
2.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
9. HISTORY AS A NOVEL, THE NOVEL AS HISTORY
| | an ad signed by 149 draft-age men: Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975 (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1984), 20. |
| | On July 3, 1964 … a group of protesters: Ibid., 20. |
| | In 1967 the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation: Dana Adams Schmidt, “Sartre, at the ‘Tribunal,’ Terms Rusk a ‘Mediocre Functionary,’” New York Times , May 5, 1967. |
| | Background on Mailer, the VDC march, and the march on the Pentagon taken from Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985) and Mary V Dearborn, Mailer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) as well as interviews with David Dellinger, Edward de Grazia, Bob Kotlowitz, and Midge Decter. |
| | “embattled aging enfant terrible”: Willie Morris, New York Days (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 211. |
| | “Mailer has grown”: Manso, Mailer , 454. |
| Page 178 | “There had been all too many years”: Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (New York: Plume, 1994), 8. |
| | “helps you to think better”: Richard Copans and Stan Neumann, Mailer on Mailer , American Masters documentary (New York: Thirteen/WNET, Reciprocal Films, Films d’lci & France 2, 2000). |
| | “[L]isten, Lyndon Johnson”: Norman Mailer, The Time of Our Time (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 551. |
| | “He knew that by telling everyone”: Manso, Mailer , 408. |
| | “Three cheers, lads”: Ibid. |
| | “A Communist bureaucrat”: Mailer, The Time of Our Time , 553. |
| | “under the yoke”: Ibid., 540. |
| | “hit the longest ball in American letters”: Seymour Krim, “Norman Mailer, Get Out of My Head!” New York , April 21, 1969. |
| | “Moving from one activity to another”: Paul Carroll, “The Playboy Interview: Norman Mailer,” Playboy , January 1968. |
| | “transmute myself”: Norman Mailer, Pontifications (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 176. |
| | “Mailer received such news”: Mailer, Armies , 9. |
| | “Mitch, I’ll be there”: Ibid. |
| | “kind of up in the air”: Manso, Mailer , 45. |
| | “I pissed on the floor”: Mailer, Armies , 50. |
| | “He was forty-four years old”: Ibid., 78. |
| | “an obscene war”: Ibid., 79. |
| | “Picture then this mass”: Ibid., 108. |
| | “large and empty”: Ibid., 119. |
| | “You Jew bastard”: Ibid., 143. |
| | “In jail”: Ibid., 165. |
| | “He was being treated worse than anyone in jail”: Manso, Mailer , 458. |
| | “there was a part of me”: Manso, Mailer , 461. |
| | “in many ways a literary genius”: Morris, New York Days , 211. |
| | “one that would strike to the taproots”: Ibid., 214. |
| | “We just closed the deal”: Ibid., 214-15. |
| | Given the ambitious scope: Manso, Mailer , 463. |
| | “written in a towering depression”: Mailer, Pontifications , 152. |
| | “I remember thinking at the time”: Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing (New York: Random House, 2003), 99. |
| | “On the one hand …”: Mailer, Pontifications , 153. |
| | “true protagonist…”: Ibid., 153. |
| | “The kind of editing”: Manso, Mailer , 462. |
| | “It’s marvelous”: Morris, New York Days , 217. |
| | “What will my father think?”: Ibid., 219. |
| | “Mailer was a snob”: Mailer, Armies , 14. |
| | “Lowell looked most unhappy”: Ibid., 40. |
| | “Lowell’s talent was very large”: Ibid., 45. |
| | “The hippies were there in great number”: Ibid., 91. |
| | “If it feels bad, it is bad”: Ibid., 25. |
| | “He had no sense”: Ibid., 68. |
| | “twenty generations of buried hopes”: Ibid., 34. |
| | “[T]he center of Christianity”: Ibid., 188. |
| Page 196 | “To have his name”: Ibid., 206. |
| | “not unlike the rare”: Ibid., 213. |
| | “Some promise of peace”: Ibid., 214. |
| | “All these people”: Morris, New York Days , 222. |
| | Armies of the Night reviews: Alan Trachtenberg, “Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon,” The Nation , May 27, 1968; Henry S. Resnik, “Hand on the Pulse of America,” Saturday Review , May 4, 1968; Alfred Kazin, “The Trouble He’s Seen,” New York Times , May 5, 1968. |
10. THE KING OF NEW YORK
| | For Clay Felker: Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 405. |
| | 83 percent of female readers:“About New York ,” publishing statement by George A. Hirsch, April 1968. From George Hirsch, personal archive. |
| | “I saw the impact of the magazine”: Stuart W. Little, “How to Start a Magazine,” Saturday Review , June 14, 1969. |
| | “The Beatles of illustration”: Seymour Chwast, Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004), 11. |
| | Background material for the founding of New York was drawn from the following sources: Gail Sheehy, “A Fistful of Dollars,” Rolling Stone , June 14, 1977; Little, “How to Start a Magazine”; interviews with Clay Felker, Jimmy Breslin, George Hirsch, Shelly Zalaznick, Milton Glaser, Pete Hamill, Gloria Steinem, and Tom Wolfe. |
| | sixty thousand subscribers: George A. Hirsch, “A Report from the Publisher,” from George Hirsch, private archive. |
| | “You get hooked on this city”:“About New York ,” editorial statement by Clay Felker. |
| | $1,250 for a black-and-white Page: Temporary rate sheet, 1969. From George Hirsch, personal archive. |
| | “The people here met that challenge”: Ruth A. Bower, “ New York Announces Spring Rate Increase,” press release, 11/7/69. From George Hirsch, personal archive. |
| | “Women stood with tears streaming down their faces”: Gloria Steinem and Lloyd Weaver, “The City on the Eve of Destruction,” New York , April 22, 1968. |
| | “Man, he only some itty-bit”: Ibid. |
| | “Ethel Kennedy knows life from bullets”: Gail Sheehy, “Ethel Kennedy and the Arithmetic of Life and Death,” New York , June 17, 1968. |
| | “Right at the start”; “Armed robbery isn’t a grin”: Jimmy Breslin, “‘Bonnie and Clyde’ Revisited,” New York , July 8, 1968. |
| | The idea had germinated at an after-hours story meeting: Manso, Mailer , 498. |
| | why Mailer was on the top of the ticket: Jimmy Breslin, “I Run to Win,” New York , May 5, 1969. |
| | “I wanted to make actions”: Steven Marcus, “Norman Mailer,” Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 3rd Series (New York: Penguin, 1979), 278. |
| | Background of the Mailer-Breslin campaign: Manso, Mailer; Peter Manso, ed., Running Against the Machine: The Mailer-Breslin Campaign (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1969). |
| Page 210 | “[T]he condition of the city of New York at this time”: Breslin, “I Run to Win.” |
| | “I’d piss on it”: Jimmy Breslin, I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 121. |
| | “After Norman Mailer and I finished”: Jimmy Breslin, “And Furthermore, I Promise,” New York , June 16, 1969. |
| | “A wistful Republican malaise”: Julie Baumgold, “Going Private: Life in the Clean Machine,” New York , January 6, 1969. |
| | “We’ll show you how”: New York ad, 1969. From George Hirsch, personal archive. |
| | “Writing is like performing”: Uncommon Clay: Notes on a Brilliant Career , program for the opening of the Felker Magazine Center at the University of California at Berkeley, 1994. |
| | “Women … tend to have a more personal point of view”:“Making It,” Newsweek , July 27, 1970. Unsigned. |
| | Upper-level trains carry: Gail Sheehy, “The Tunnel Inspector and the Belle of the Bar Car,” New York , April 29, 1968. |
| | With his tall, blond Establishment looks: Adam Smith, “Notes on the Great Buying Panic,” New York , May 6, 1968. |
| | The magazine’s circulation was 145,000: Confidential memo from George Hirsch to New York staff. From George Hirsch, personal archive. |
| | “The party was held”: Tom Wolfe, prefatory note to“Radical Chic,” New York , June 8, 1970. |
| | “There they were”: Charlotte Curtis, “Black Panther Party Is Debated at the Bernsteins’,” New York Times , January 15, 1970. |
| | a Times editorial: New York Times , January 16, 1970. |
| | “He could see himself, Leonard Bernstein” and all subsequent quotes: Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” New York , June 8, 1970. |
| | “As an American and as a Jew”: Meryle Secrest, Leonard Bernstein: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 323. |
11. SAVAGE JOURNEYS
| | “I suppose it’s only fair”: Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 1979), 191-92. |
| | “You don’t understand!”: Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt , 79. |
| | “He is a handsome middle-class French boy”:“The Temptation of Jean-Claude Killy,” Ibid., 95. |
| | “Here is the Killy piece”: Letter from Thompson to Hinckle, in Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist: The Gonzo Letters, Volume II, 1968-1976 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 222. |
| | “a conspiracy of anemic masturbators”: Ibid., 223. |
| | “socio-philosophical flashbacks”: Ibid., 296. |
| | “In a narrow Southern society”:“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt , 31. |
| | “Not much energy in these faces”: Ibid., 34. |
| | “I’m ready for anything , by God!”: Ibid., 25. |
| Page 234 | “What riot?”: Ibid., 25. |
| | “It’s a shitty article”: Letter from Thompson to Bill Cardoso, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 295. |
| | “Dear Hunter”: Tom Wolfe to Thompson, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 335. |
| | “with the perhaps fading exception”: Thompson to Wolfe, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 338. |
| | “writing copy for [Ford Motor Company] pamphlets”: Thompson to Jim Silberman, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 261. |
| | “I wish I could explain the delay”: Thompson to Jim Silberman, in Thompson, Fear and Loating in America , 258. |
| | “a very contemporary novel”: Letter from Hunter Thompson to Jim Silberman, January 13, 1970, Ibid., 267. |
| | “semi-fictional”: Letter from Hunter Thompson to Jim Silberman, January 13, 1970, Ibid., 268. |
| | Biographical material for Jann Wenner taken from Robert Sam Anson, Gone Crazy and Back Again: The Rise and Fall of the Rolling Stone Generation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981). |
| | “I think psychedelic drugs”: Ilan Stavans, Bandido: The Death and Resurrection of Oscar“Zeta” Acosta (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 47. |
| | “I recognized in Oscar”: Yvette C. Doss, “The Lost Legend of the Real Dr. Gonzo,” Los Angeles Times , June 5, 1998. |
| | “Your call was the key to a massive freak-out”: Thompson to Tom Vanderschmidt, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 376. |
| | “Kerouac taught me”: Douglas Brinkley, “The Art of Journalism I: Hunter S. Thompson,” Paris Review , Fall 2000, 55. |
| | One morning: Lucian K. Truscott IV:“Fear and Earning,” New York Times , February 25, 2005. |
| | “We were somewhere around Barstow”: Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 3. |
| | “a classic affirmation”: Ibid., 18. |
| | “cluster of grey rectangles”: Ibid., 22. |
| | “burned out and long gone”: Ibid., 23. |
| | “Their sound system”: Ibid., 138. |
| | “All those pathetically eager acid freaks”: Ibid., 178. |
| | “What I was trying to get at”: Thompson to Tom Wolfe, April 20, 1971, Fear and Loathing in America , 375. |
| | “I think the thing to do is for you”: Thompson to Wenner, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 392. |
| | “I’ve been mistaken for American Indian”: Stavans, Bandido , 103. |
Other books
The Empty Throne (The Warrior Chronicles, Book 8) by Cornwell, Bernard
Fair Fight by Anna Freeman
The Bully Book by Eric Kahn Gale
Officer Jones by Derek Ciccone
Domino Falls by Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due
Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker
Hard: A Military Stepbrother Romance by Swann, Lara
Chosen at Nightfall (A Shadow Falls Novel) by Hunter, C. C.
Unbreak My Heart 03 - Unwrapped Hearts by K-lee Klein
Cuffed & Collared by Samantha Cayto