Read The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Online

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

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (50 page)

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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.
BOOK: The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
4.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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