The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (8 page)

Gingrich, for his part, kept himself at a remove from the power grabs that would occur after meetings. More often than not, the weekly editorial meetings were exercises in futility. It was often left for fiction editor Rust Hill to cast the deciding vote on which stories made the cut. When the subeditors decided, for the sake of propriety, to hold preliminary meetings prior to the official meeting, they nearly came to blows. The end result of this furious lunge for magazine space was a large pile of assigned but unpublished manuscripts.

Hayes and Felker’s battle for editorial control was a clash of temperments. Hayes was a somewhat shy and reticent personality who cultivated a hail-fellow-well-met conviviality in the office, often inviting fellow editors and writers into his office for drinks on Friday afternoon. Felker maintained a more flinty abrasiveness; his editorial approach was more hit-and-run. While no one ever denied his unparalleled ability to weed out story ideas from his own social calendar, he often deferred to his writers to carry the ball. Felker would get wildly enthusiastic about a story but then move on to the next idea before properly nurturing the
initial notion. “Follow-through was not something on which Felker placed a lot of emphasis,” said John Berendt. “He had an inquisitiveness about things that weren’t necessarily fully formed, which didn’t make him a great manager. His office was a complete mess. He never knew where anything was. But they both were geniuses, just in different ways. Harold was not the kind of guy to pick up after Felker, and vice versa.”

Felker’s temper turned off more than a few staff members. “Clay would fly off the handle, he would really scream,” said Berendt. “Harold didn’t scream, he just fired off blistering memos. If staff members came in late to work, he would just make them generate ten story ideas. Hayes had a kind of cold fury, where Felker would pop off.”

Even though Felker wasn’t the most rigorous line editor, he had a knack for story structure, for finding the lead of a story buried in the twentieth paragraph of a piece. “What Clay did was very mysterious to me,” said writer Patricia Bosworth, one of Felker’s many protegés. “He was very much a conceptualist, and it always worked so beautifully.”

Hayes was more inclined to take the long view with the magazine, generating a package of stories that would add up to a consistent tone and smooth editorial flow. “Harold’s mantra was always tone, tone, tone,” said Berendt. “Harold was much more methodical, but not quite as quixotic as Felker,” said former contributing writer Brock Brower. “Clay would get an idea, press for the execution of it, and be off on the next thing, while Harold would always chaperone a piece though. Gingrich loved it, of course, because it stimulated the hell out of choices for the magazine. Harold would have his list, Clay would knock it down, and vice versa. They hated each other in the best of all possible ways.”

Among the three editors, it became apparent in short order that Hayes and Felker were the hungier, more ambitious upstarts; thus, Ginzburg was the first to go. After he suggested that
Esquire
revert the rights of his erotica story to him in lieu of a pay raise, Ginzburg expanded the piece into a twenty-thousand-word essay and published it in book form with an introduction from drama critic George Jean Nathan.
Esquire
was uneasy about the enterprise from the start—they didn’t want one of their editors to be so closely associated with such an unseemly piece—and when Ginzburg went on Mike Wallace’s show
Nightbeat
to promote the book he was fired by John Smart. “I was
depressed,” said Ginzburg. “I thought I was doing some good work for the magazine, but the termination forced me to become my own publisher.” Ginzburg would sell three hundred thousand copies of
An Unhurried View of Erotica
, but he would pay a dear price for success by serving eight months in jail for violating federal obscenity laws.

Felker and Hayes remained locked in mortal combat, but the push and pull of their energies began to yield some creative dividends in
Esquire
during the early sixties. The magazine was inching away from the innocuous celebrity profiles and sporting-life features and moving toward venturesome territory. Like two political adversaries from different parties who agree on the issues but have to manufacture dissent in order to distinguish themselves, Felker and Hayes were of the same mind about the editorial direction of the magazine—namely, that
Esquire
had to move beyond transcribed interviews with expository filler, or the “pictured essays” that the magazine liked to run with titles such as “How to Tell a Rich Girl” and “Castles for Rent.” Gingrich was already making the magazine more of a repository for serious critical thought, hiring Dwight Macdonald to review films, Kingsley Amis to cover “art films,” and Dorothy Parker to critique the latest fiction. Felker brought his college buddy Peter Maas into the fold to write features, as well as sociologist Paul Goodman, whose 1960 book,
Growing Up Absurd
, had mapped the incipient rebellion against established values that would culminate in the 1960s counterculture. Quality fiction had remained a constant, with contributions from such luminaries as William Styron, John Cheever, and Robert Penn Warren.

But Felker and Hayes wanted to move in another direction with the magazine’s journalism. At Duke, Felker had trolled the library stacks in search of exciting precedents for him to follow at the
Chronicle
and came across Civil War-era back issues of the
New York Herald Tribune
, the great newspaper edited by the social reformist Horace Greeley.

“I spent the whole afternoon reading these things; I didn’t even realize where the time went, because they were so gripping,” said Felker. “They were written in a narrative structure. And I realized that they were so much more interesting than the newspaper stories I had grown up reading.” The stories, with their vivid descriptions of life in the trenches, changed Felker irrevocably. American journalism had to move in this direction; reporters should be meticulous and exacting when describing
events, have a novelist’s flair for language, and enliven their stories with headlong momentum.

Ironically, the first great journalist of the Felker-Hayes era to fit this description had been a Ginzburg recruit. Thomas B. Morgan, the son of second-generation Polish Jews, was reared in an unlettered household in Springfield, Illinois. Although his mother was a graduate of Purdue University, “I don’t think she read five books in her lifetime,” and Morgan’s father, a furniture salesman, hadn’t made it past the second grade. Inspired by a high school English teacher who encouraged him to write fiction, Morgan earned an English degree at Carleton College in North-field, Minnesota, before heading to New York in 1953 to find a job as a magazine editor in order to subsidize his fiction writing.

Morgan wrote eighteen letters to eighteen editors, but only one responded; Daniel Mich, the editor
of Look, Life’s
closest competitor in the “picture book” category. Morgan was hired as an associate editor, writing stories for the magazine on the side, and four years later was promoted to staff writer.

Morgan became
Look’s
young intrepid reporter, heading to locales as far-flung as Antarctica for stories. Morgan was eager to take on any idea that Mich tossed at him, and he was a quick learner, which made his stories ring with authority, even if they did adhere to
Look’s
pedestrian writing style, which stressed facts over flair. “The writing in
Look
was more or less ordinary journalism,” said Morgan. “But it was an unbelievable education for me. It taught me how to be a reporter.”

Morgan thrived at
Look
, but he had yet to write the novel he still felt he had in him. He quit his magazine job in 1957 to write two novels, but neither of them was published until years later, when Morgan had established himself as a freelance writer. Broke and casting about for magazine work, he knocked on the door of
Esquire
, which hired him to write picture captions and contribute stories.

Morgan found his true calling as a writer of profiles during his tenure at
Esquire
. Establishing a close collaborative relationship with Felker, Morgan was free to range across the landscape of public personalities, and wrote about whatever interested him at the moment. “Clay was just a great editor,” said Morgan. “If you had an idea and called him up, you didn’t have to go into a long dissertation about it, unlike Harold, who needed you to send a damn essay before he would approve an idea. Clay
would just say, ‘Okay, do it.’ And you were on your way.” Felker was attracted by the notion of smart celebrity profiles, if only because he knew
Esquire’s
readers would want to know about the private lives of public figures. But not puffery; he wanted Morgan to cut right to the bone and deconstruct these complex figures. “Clay was very commercial, but he wanted quality writing regardless of the subject matter,” said Morgan.

Greatly influenced by Lillian Ross and her Hemingway profile, Morgan structured his pieces like short stories, with individual scenes and ample swatches of dialogue that would run on for paragraphs at a time. His profiles of Nelson Rockefeller, Roy Cohn, Gary Cooper, Alf Landon, and Teddy Kennedy established him as a Felker favorite and one of
Esquire’s
masters of the personality profile.

Morgan’s 1959 profile of Sammy Davis Jr., “What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?” was Felker’s idea, suggested after the editor had seen the performer on the
Ed Sullivan Show
. “What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?” was a portrait of a man being tugged by two impulses—the desire of a black entertainer to make it in a white man’s world while maintaining some vestige of dignity. In Davis, Morgan saw a man working strenuously to assimilate himself into a world that clung tenaciously to Uncle Tom stereotypes:

Morgan, who never cracked open a notebook in Davis’s presence, stuck by him for seven days without a break: right after the nightclub act, when a euphoric but exhausted Davis feigned cordiality when greeting thirty or so well-wishing schmoozers while scheming with his agent
about the next movie project; at four in the morning, closing a nightclub by jamming informally with the house band; at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, plotting the after-show revelry (“Hey baby, call up Keely [Smith] and Louis [Prima] and tell them we’ll be over after our show tonight. And chicks. Chicks, we need”).

Morgan had a knack for retaining huge chunks of dialogue and detail in his head, which he would then frantically transcribe at the end of each session, so that he could re-create dialogue such as this without the benefit of a tape recorder:

With the requisite reporter’s tools out of sight, Davis shared confidences with Morgan, articulated insecurities to which no other reporter had ever been privy:

Esquire
had never run a profile as formally inventive or as revealing as “What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?” As a thwarted novelist, Morgan wanted to get as close as he could to the richness of fiction with his nonfiction, and in so doing he elevated his reportage into literature.

“Nobody had ever written serious pieces about entertainers at the time,” said Morgan. “I earned Sammy’s trust enough for him to open up to me about his life in a way that he hadn’t to any reporter. He spent the weekend fishing with me and my wife at our summer home in Long
Island, and I earned his trust that way. I had the feeling that he had never had a friend who was a journalist before.”

Morgan brought his careful observational prowess to
Look
in the winter of 1960 when the magazine assigned him to write a profile of Brigitte Bardot, the Parisian actress whose film …
And God Created Woman
had made her an international sex symbol four years earlier. Arriving for a noon appointment in Paris nearly five hours late, Bardot, accompanied by her husband, Jacques Charrier, opened their talk by asking Morgan, “Why are you here?”

“To see you.”

“I do not wish to do any more interviews. I cannot talk to you. Sorry.”

“But I’ve traveled all the way from New York to see you.”

“Sorry.”

Charrier told Morgan to wait in their apartment in the hopes that Bardot might change her mind. Morgan held a vigil for three days, catching only a fleeting glimpse of Bardot as she walked from one room to the next. He followed the couple to St. Tropez, practically stalking them to try to buttonhole the star for a formal talk. It took ten days before Bardot relented, but not until Morgan contrived a sob story about the enormous hotel bill he had run up at
Look’s
expense, and the fact that he would not get paid and might lose his job if he went back to New York empty-handed.