Marc Weingarten - The Gang That Wouldnt Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

M aybe we should just blow up the New Yorker building.

That was Jimmy Breslin talking. It was a story meeting, an electrical brainstorm to generate some provocative ideas for New York, the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune. Clay Felker, the magazines editor, had mentioned that the great literary magazine of his youth had gotten so dull lately, so deadly dull. Look were coming out once a week, right? Felker told his staff, which included general assignment reporter Tom Wolfe, columnist Breslin, assistant editor Walter Stovall, and art director Peter Palazzo. And The New Yorker comes out once a week. And we start out the week the same way they do, with blank paper and a supply of ink. Is there any reason why we cant be as good as The New Yorker? Or better. Theyre so damned boring.

Well, Clay, Tom Wolfe suggested, maybe we can do that. How about blowing up The New Yorker in New York?

Bingo. Felker loved the idea, and it was timed perfectly. This year, 1965, was the fortieth anniversary of The New Yorker, and the magazine was going to throw a big party for itself at the St. Regis Hotel. Besides, it was payback time. Lillian Ross had zinged Wolfe in a March 16 Talk of the Town piece called Red Mittens! Zonggggggggggg! Innnnnnnnn! Swinging! Rosss piece began. Theyre hot! Theyre so far in that theyre coming out the other side. And theyre fed up to the gillies with teenagery. It went on like that. The thirty-four-year-old reporter had been flattered and amused by the piece, but turnabout was fair play, after all.

The culture of The New Yorker was shrouded in mystery, particularly its editor, William Shawn, who refused interviews and kept a profile so low that the witness protection program couldnt have provided deeper cover. Wolfe called Shawn for an interview anyway, and the editor strongly advised Wolfe to beg off the story: If we tell someone we want to do a profile and that person doesnt want to cooperate, we dont do the profile. We would expect you to extend us the same courtesy.

One night, while dining with a number of writers and editors at a West Village restaurant, Wolfe happened to find himself sitting across the table from Renata Adler, a New Yorker staff writer. Might she help him suss out details of Shawns life? But Adler acted quickly to close ranks around the magazine, and the Tribune reporter found himself hitting a lot of dead ends, promising leads that would just sputter out. But there were sources closer to home, as it turned out. Walt Stovalls wife, Charlayne Hunter, had been one of the first two black students to integrate the University of Georgia and was now working as a Talk of the Town reporter for The New Yorker. Wolfe didnt want to compromise her position at the magazine, so he delicately danced around the subject, prodding Hunter to solicit information without actually telling her what he was doing. She gave Wolfe a trove of great stories regarding The New Yorkers byzantine, cumbersome editing process. From a freelancer he picked up a choice anecdote about Shawns preference for using Coke bottles as ashtrays. He received a detailed description of Shawns apartment from a social acquaintance who had attended a dinner party there, and so on.

The best material was to be found at the magazines fortieth-anniversary party in the ballroom at the St. Regis Hotel. It was an invite-only affair, but no one stopped the New York reporter when he walked right in. Wolfe kept himself as inconspicuous as a man in a white suit can be, flitting around the edges of the party, keeping a close watch on Shawn.

By the time Wolfe sat down to write the article, he quickly realized that a straight-down-the-middle parody of The New Yorker would beget more of what the magazine offered: gray prose. Something thats dull is funny for about a page, said Wolfe. So I figured that I would treat them in a way that they would hate the mostlike the National Enquirer, something that would be totally inappropriate.

Using what Wolfe called his hyperbolic style, he wrote more than ten thousand words, far more than the originally proposed few thousand words. But Felker loved every word of it and showed it to the Tribunes editor, Jim Bellows, for his approval. Bellows, a two-fisted newspaperman who loved nothing more than to stir up controversy, flipped out. He might not have personally cared about the relative merits of The New Yorker, but he recognized a hot story when he saw one. Four days before the first installment hit the streets, Bellows messengered two copies of Wolfes piece to Shawn at The New Yorkers offices with a card that read With my compliments.

What the Tribune received in return for this gesture of good faith was a salvo. Shawn was incensed by this poisonous yellow journalism. He reeled off a letter to the Tribunes owner, Jock Whitney, calling the piece murderous and certainly libelous, and urged the Tribs distinguished publisher to literally stop the presses and pull the piece from the Sunday supplement. If the papers legal department did in fact have reason to believe that the story was legally actionable, Whitney would have to give serious thought to killing the story.

But Bellows would have none of it. He sent the letter in full to reporters at Time and Newsweek, then handed the story over to the copy-editing department. Let the boneyard at The New Yorker rattle; Wolfes story was going to run on Sunday.

Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Streets Land of the Walking Dead! screamed the headline in the April 11 issue of New York. Peter Palazzo ran an illustration of The New Yorkers monocled Victorian icon Eustace Tilley, but swathed him in a mummys shroud. They have a compulsion in the New Yorker offices, at 25 West Forty-Third Street, to put everything in writing, Wolfe wrote.

They have boys over there on the nineteenth and twentieth floors, the editorial offices, practically caroming off each otherbonk old bison heads!at the blind turns in the hallways because of the fantastic traffic in memos. They just call them boys. Boy, will you take this please Actually, a lot of them are old men with starched white collars with the points curling up a little, big lunch ties, button-up sweaters, and black basket-weave sack socks, and they are all over the place transporting these thousands of messages with their kindly old elder bison shuffles shoop-shooping along.

Wolfe explicated the magazines complex memo distribution system:

There are different colors for different unit tasks. Manuscripts are typed on maize-yellow bond, bud-green is for blah-blah-blah, fuchsia demure is for blah-blah-blah, Newsboy blue is for blah-blah-blah, and this great cerise, a kind of mild cherry red, is for urgent messages, immediate attention and everything. So here are these old elder bison messengers batting off each other in the halls, hustling cerise memos around about some story somebody is doing.

Wolfe characterized Shawn as an absentminded, passive-aggressive manager, his office a kind of horsehair-stuffing atmosphere of old carpeting and happy-shabby, baked-apple gentility. He made up words like