The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (7 page)

The idea for
Esquire
came from a freelance artist named C. F. Peters, who walked into Smart’s offices one day with a drawing for
Apparel Arts
, one of the four fashion booklets Smart published. Before unwrapping the drawing, Peters mentioned in passing that one of his clients, clothier Rogers Peet, was wondering if Smart was thinking about producing more booklets, perhaps something that he could sell to his customers for a small fee. The Christmas season was coming up, and they could sure use the publicity.

Smart and Gingrich began pasting up fashion pages, trying to rethink a formula that they had milked, it seemed, in every conceivable permutation.
Fashion pages alone couldn’t carry a new title; they would need some editorial content to break it up. Smart began scribbling headlines on a piece of paper: “Gene Tunney on Boxing,” “Bobby Jones on Golf,” “Hemingway on Fishing.” The title—
Esquire, the Quarterly for Men—
came fairly quickly. The magazine would function as a kind of
Vanity Fair
with men’s fashion, and Smart would charge a premium price—50 cents— because if men were willing to pay $50 for a suit, they could certainly plunk down two quarters for his magazine.

But Ernest Hemingway? How would they attract writers of his stature to the magazine? As it turned out, Gingrich, an avid book collector, had been engaged in a correspondence with Hemingway for some time and had even sent him a few items of clothing. Now Gingrich had an offer of work for him, and Hemingway agreed. He would write pieces on the sporting life for
Esquire
at a rate that was agreeable to both parties.

Other writers followed in short order: John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Smart and Gingrich had positioned
Esquire
as a must-read for the male urban sophisticate. But
Esquire
was also, in Gingrich’s words, all about “the new leisure,” and that meant male fashion spreads and well-crafted lifestyle pieces about fly fishing and automobiles. It was a golden formula; by the end of 1937,
Esquire’s
circulation had risen to 675,000. When paper rationing hit the magazine publishing business during World War II, Gingrich figured out a novel way to get the War Production Board to give
Esquire
bigger paper allotments: print pinups for the boys on the front.
Esquire
thus became known as a literate skin magazine, but Gingrich and Smart didn’t care as long as circulation figures continued to escalate.

Esquire’s
winning mix of highbrow fiction, breezy reportage, and cheesecake collapsed after the war, when Gingrich retired at forty and handed over the editorial duties to Smart, who, despite his keen business acumen, was never the best judge of good writing. Under the clunky stewardship of new editor Frederic A. Birmingham, the magazine soon devolved into an unfocused mélange of breathless “amazing tales” pulp and dime-store detective fiction. Smart needed an infusion of new energy, and he convinced Gingrich, who had returned from temporary exile in Switzerland to edit a magazine called
Flair
one floor above
Esquire’s
offices at 488 Madison Avenue, to return to
Esquire
on any terms he wanted. That meant total creative autonomy, the chance to
once again mold the magazine in his image as both publisher and editor. Gingrich agreed, and the magazine was back on track.

Dave Smart died three months after hiring back Gingrich, leaving
Esquire’s
assets in the hands of his youngest surviving brother, John. Without Dave Smart’s steady hand, John, a publishing neophyte, wisely deferred to
Esquire
veteran Abe Blinder to run the magazine’s financial affairs. Fritz Bamberger, an Australian with a doctorate in philosophy, would serve as editorial consultant, installing a research department and a thorough fact-checking system.

Gingrich cleaned house in a hurry. He promoted Henry Wolf, an Austrian who had studied with legendary teacher and
Harper’s Bazaar
art director Alexey Brodovitch, to create a cleaner and bolder new look for the magazine. Gingrich also restored some of the magazine’s literary luster by bringing writers such as Hemingway back into the fold. He fired Birmingham and went on a hiring binge. What was needed, in Gingrich’s view, was young men with unlimited creative energy who could recruit new voices and imprint their vision on the magazine while still remaining true to the spirit of what he had built. He found three perfect candidates for the job, the trio that Gingrich referred to as “the Young Turks”: Clay Felker, Ralph Ginzburg, and Harold Hayes.

Harold Hayes’s and Clay Felker’s paths had first crossed years earlier, during their tenures as ambitious young college newspaper editors. In 1950 Felker organized a seminar on journalism at the Washington Hotel, near Duke’s campus, in Durham, North Carolina. Among those who showed up was Hayes, who made the two-hour trip from Wake Forest University to rub shoulders with the panel that Felker had assembled, which included the editor of the New York
Daily News
. But according to Felker, the two regarded each other skeptically, and barely talked. It was to set the tone for their subsequent professional relationship at
Esquire
, where Felker and Hayes battled for supremacy while they were shaping the most influential magazine of the 1960s.

The men had much in common. The son of a Southern Baptist minister, Harold T P. Hayes was born in Elkin, North Carolina, and briefly lived in Beckley, West Virginia, until his family moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, when Harold was eleven. A fan of jazz music and all the great twentieth-century American novelists—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, James T Farrell, John Steinbeck—Hayes fancied himself a
novelist in training, and wrote short fiction during high school and as an undergraduate at Wake Forest.

Hayes was an indifferent student: “I floundered around for four or five years through a variety of courses, flunking some and passing enough to leave without total disgrace.” Shortly before graduating, Hayes endured a brief stint in the navy, where he was stationed at New-berry, South Carolina, and played trombone in the jazz band. Hayes enrolled in a short-story class and found to his delight that it brought him some academic approbation. Encouraged by his professor, Hayes joined
The Student
, Wake Forest’s literary magazine, where he became editor in short order. Hayes had found his métier, and he thrived at
The Student—
generating story ideas, working closely with the best writers on campus, making
The Student
one of the best college magazines in the South.

Hayes returned to military duty during the Korean War, serving two years as an infantry officer in the Marine reserve in 1950 and 1951. Shortly before his discharge, Hayes traveled to New York seeking job opportunities in the magazine business. He wrangled a meeting with
Pageant
editor Harris Shevelson, who suggested that Hayes submit a critique of the magazine. Hayes’s detailed, astute memorandum impressed Shevelson enough to hire the young southerner as an assistant editor of the magazine, a kind of benign general-interest publication for those who might also subscribe to
Reader’s Digest
and
Life
.

Years later, Hayes would look back upon his tenure at
Pageant
as a crucial apprenticeship. He had tremendous respect for the way Shevelson managed to pull together a quality magazine using limited financial resources. “His persistent refusal to accept an ordinary approach to conventional material caused his staff considerable discomfort,” Hayes wrote, “but managed, I believe, to improve the level of individual performance.” Hayes left
Pageant
in October 1954 and joined the staff of
Tempo
as a feature editor. During his off hours Hayes developed a concept for a new venture to be called
Picture Week
, a monthly news picture magazine. Working with a bare-bones staff, Hayes was given the go-ahead to start up the magazine, and it was here that he began to develop his taste for unconventional stories that would prick the prejudices of his readership and create a buzz. Among the stories Hayes assigned were “Twelve Southern Governors Answer the Question: When Will You
Allow Negroes in Your Schools?” “The Appeal of the Exposé Magazine,” and “Perón Can Fall,” all of which were picked up by the wire services for national distribution.

But Hayes’s daring editorial policy didn’t translate into healthy circulation numbers, and he and the entire staff were fired less than a year after launching the title.
Pageant
editor Laura Bergquist, who was friendly with
Esquire
publisher Arnold Gingrich, suggested that Gingrich interview Hayes as a possible editor. Armed with a portfolio book of the articles he had assigned for
Picture Week
and
Pageant
, Hayes impressed Gingrich, who put him in touch with Tom O’Connor, a friend of his from the
Flair
days. O’Connor hired Hayes to do some police reporting for a couple of small news digests he owned in Atlanta. For two years Hayes did the yeoman’s work of beat reporter but kept in touch with Gingrich, just in case something materialized at
Esquire
. When the news digests folded, Gingrich hired Hayes as an editorial assistant. “This time,” Gingrich wrote in his memoir,
Nothing but People
, “I took him in like the morning paper, knowing that in a southern liberal who was also a Marine reserve officer I had an extremely rare bird.” Hayes would be “an anvil for which I would have to find a few hammers.”

Those hammers, as it turned out, would be Felker and Ginzburg. An old friend of Fred Birmingham’s, Ralph Ginzburg was a street-smart striver, a Brooklyn native who had engineered a meteoric rise in the publishing business. As an undergraduate at City College’s school of business, Ginzburg edited the B-school’s newspaper,
The Ticker
, and sold his first piece of writing, an article about Nathan’s hot dog stand on Coney Island, while still in college. At the age of twenty-three, Ginzburg was hired as
Look’s
circulation promotion director, overseeing a $2 million budget and a staff of ten. In 1957 he was given an assignment from
Esquire
, whose offices were just a couple of floors below
Look’s
. The article was called “An Unhurried View of Erotica” and described in graphic detail the erotic literature to be found in the rare-book rooms of the world’s greatest museums.
Esquire
never ran the story, but Fritz Bamberger was impressed with Ginzburg and hired him to be an articles editor.

Ginzburg, however, thought he was getting Birmingham’s job as top editor; he didn’t realize he was taking a big pay cut from his
Look
job until after he had signed the contract. It would not be the first time
the young editor felt he was getting the bum’s rush from
Esquire
. The same day he was hired, Felker was recruited to be features editor. Ginzburg would be
Esquire’s
articles editor, and Hayes the assistant to the publisher.

Ginzburg was furious. Not only had he been misled about his job title, but now he would have to share his duties with another editor. With the ambitious Hayes thrown into the mix,
Esquire
suddenly roiled with furious turf battles. All three editors desperately courted Gingrich in an attempt to gain leverage, but the veteran publisher kept himself out of it. “Arnold’s removal from the heat of everyday editorial activity was accented by the physical distance of his office,” Hayes wrote in an unpublished memoir, “a good ways down the hall and nestled securely between the offices of the president and the chairman of the board.”

Hayes, Ginzburg, and Felker were wary of each other and took pains not to make any rash decisions; one false move, after all, could compromise a potentially promising career at
Esquire
. To Hayes, Felker and Ginzburg were young opportunists, comfortable in the requisite uniform of corporate upward mobility: “They wore the same kind of clothes: button-down shirts, horn-rimmed glasses (it was a short glasses phase for Felker; he wore them the first few weeks and then never again) and Brooks Brothers suits.” In Hayes’s view, Ginzburg was crude and unimaginative; his primary skill involved drumming up provocative cover lines and then matching the headlines with celebrities, who would be paired with ghostwriters to “draft” their stories.

Felker, on the other hand, was formidable competition. Hayes regarded him as an enterprising editor who was as sturdy as a starched collar, a gadfly with an abundance of intellectual energy and a special talent for collecting important people like Mont Blanc pens. “Clay was always wildly enthusiastic about writers and ideas,” said John Berendt, a former editor at
Esquire
. “He could sniff out a developing story before anyone else. He was always out, going to parties, schmoozing, trying to match the right writers to the right stories. He had his finger on the pulse of things, just an amazing sixth sense about trends.”

In his memoir
Nothing but People
, Gingrich referred to Felker as “our drinking editor, not because he had a more agile elbow that any of the rest of us, but simply because he was so party prone. Clay managed to get to more parties in a week than anybody else in a month. But in relation
to the needs of the magazine at that moment he couldn’t have made a better investment of his time.”

Ginzburg was thoroughly unimpressed by Felker. “Clay would swipe ideas away from me,” he said. “We would bat around ideas prior to meeting with Gingrich, then we’d go into the meeting and I’d pitch my idea. Gingrich would say, ‘Why are you pitching this to me? Clay already told me about it.’ I got on quickly to this. I played the game, but it was very ugly.” As for Hayes, “he was an amanuensis for Gingrich; he was no editor. He was extremely hard-driving and ambitious, though. He should have been the sales manager of US Steel. He had no ability whatsoever to come up with ideas.”

With Henry Wolf temporarily setting up shop in the vacant editor in chief’s office, the three subeditors fervently jockeyed for the top position. Editorial meetings, which were held each Friday afternoon in Gingrich’s office, became claw-and-scratch confrontations, with no clear consensus emerging as to which stories would ultimately make it into the magazine. The stories were supposed to be ratified by a vote between the three senior editors, fiction editor Rust Hills, and copy editor Dave Solomon, but according to Gingrich, it all came down to “a test of lung power, to see who could shout everybody else down.”