New York in the '50s (46 page)

Each column came out like a short story, with scenes and dialogue—real dialogue—and ended with a kind of epiphany. He wrote a tragic piece on a Communist who committed suicide after being hunted down by the government, about a union boss betraying his men, and about Richard Nixon introducing Eisenhower at the Republican convention of 1956 (“at last he ceased his looting of the collected works of Jane Addams, and fell back to the shadows, and the real pro came on”). He described the birthday party the producer Mike Todd threw for himself at Madison Square Garden in 1957, when Sinatra didn't show up and the host left early: “How awful it must be to have scored a triumph and still to remember that you held a party for the kind of people who steal eight-month-old domestic champagne.”

A lot of new things were happening to encourage writers to use their best talents writing nonfiction, like the appearance of the
Village Voice
in 1955. The cofounder and original publisher, Ed Fancher, says, “We had a lot to do with the New Journalism, though we never really knew it. Our approach was that journalism should be
writing
instead of just news reporting. Dan Wolfe gave young writers who came here an opening when they couldn't get a foot in the door elsewhere.”

Jane Kramer, Jack Newfield, and Bill Manville were among the many who got their start at the
Voice
, while some who had already published elsewhere found a natural audience and home in its pages, like Nat Hentoff and Seymour Krim.

“We felt guilty we were unable to pay our writers, and in the beginning we were flabbergasted because so many writers loved us,” Fancher recalls. “It took us a long time to realize how badly writers were treated by editors. They liked us because we treated them with dignity and their stuff wasn't tampered with, without their approval.”

“The Article as Art” was a shocking idea when Norman Podhoretz wrote an essay about it in 1958. Podhoretz noted the irony that “we call everything that is not fiction or poetry ‘non-fiction,' as though whole ranges of human thought had only a negative existence,” and observed that “the novel is to us what drama was to the
Elizabethans and lyric poetry to the Romantics.… The aura of sanctity that used to attach to the idea of a poet has now floated over to rest on the head of the novelist.”

Yet Podhoretz found the essays of many novelists, like James Baldwin and Isaac Rosenfeld, more interesting than their fiction. (The same was said of Harvey Swados, which made him angry, as it did most novelists; they took it as a put-down.) He argued that imagination hadn't died in our time—it was chic then to claim that the novel was dead—but that it was channeled into, of all unlikely forms, the magazine article. He saw that many writers were finding it possible “to move around more freely and creatively within [that form] than within fiction or poetry.”

Podhoretz remembers being attacked for what he said: “Styron, Bellow, other novelists got pissed off. I took a lot of flack but never got credit. I really think it was revolutionary at the time—the term and talk of the New Journalism came later.”

Walter Goodman, who wrote for
The New Republic
and worked as an editor for
Redbook
and then
Playboy
, says, “Journalism was becoming hotter in the fifties. It had the appeal of fiction. The popular magazines had always been big fiction magazines, but suddenly people began reading magazines for nonfiction pieces. Goodman thinks
Redbook
's editors, himself included, were too conservative. “We were afraid our readers wouldn't get it, but
Esquire
readers were Hemingway readers, so they could understand this new kind of journalism. They responded to it, then everyone picked it up.”

“It's what everybody was doing,” Joan Didion says. “It started with James Agee, really.” Brock Brower, who was “doing it” in
Esquire
in 1960, tells me, “The idea was in the air and everyone I know was thinking this way too.” Norman Mailer was thinking this way when he wrote “The White Negro” in 1957 and the personal running commentary in
Advertisements for Myself
in 1959, around the time Seymour Krim wrote his gut-wrenching piece “The Insanity Bit,” for a little magazine called
Exodus
.

Whether it started with Agee or the columns of Murray Kempton, or was given a new orgasmic pump by Norman Mailer's “The White Negro,” or was unleashed in the pages of the
Village Voice
, this whole trend of quality writing, which was negatively known as non-fiction and later got promoted to the more hip category of the New
Journalism, came to full bloom around a particular editor and magazine in the late fifties and early sixties: Harold Hayes of
Esquire
.

Harold came from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, went to college at Wake Forest, and never lost his southern accent in New York, but there was nothing slow or drawly about his way of working. He spoke—drawl and all—with a snappy quickness and force that conveyed an infectious enthusiasm. You automatically did your best and hardest work for Harold, and he always made it seem like fun.

Harold was having fun himself as he tossed ideas at you, listened to yours, told you what terrific writer he had just assigned to which unexpected story, tamped or lit or puffed or knocked ashes from his pipe, stood up and paced around his desk to show you a piece of innovative art work for the cover of the next issue.

Harold went to
Esquire
from
Coronet
in 1956 to be articles editor of the magazine when he was twenty-nine years old. He was named managing editor four years later, and editor in 1964. He had a boyish charm and exuberance, but it was anchored in a sense of authority and purpose. Gay Talese, one of the principal stars he developed, thought of Harold as an older brother, and so did we all, those of us five or so years his junior who did our first “big magazine” pieces for him, the group Talese was thinking of when he said of Harold, “He nurtured a whole generation of writers.”

Harold liked to wear bow ties and suspenders, and always looked sharp, though never a fashion plate. He was more like a natty newsman out of
The Front Page
, and he brought that air of old-fashioned daily newspaper excitement to the monthly magazine business.

I went to his office at eleven one morning to ask if he had an assignment for me. “Can you be on a plane for Dallas at four o'clock this afternoon?” he shot back. My blood began to race at the very question, picking up speed as I quickly computed how long it would take to throw a couple of shirts in a bag, grab my portable typewriter, cancel a date, and hail a cab to La Guardia or Idlewild.

“Damn right!” I said, watching his grin spread, and then I asked what the assignment was, what fast-breaking big story he was sending me to cover. “The Miss Teenage America contest,” he said, and we both broke out laughing because he had made it sound like the equivalent of the
Hindenburg
disaster or the Hungarian revolution.
But what the hell, it would be a blast, a great piece of cultural satire of the kind
Esquire
loved, and I hurried on my way.

I first wanted to write for
Esquire
when I saw some unconventional profiles by Thomas B. Morgan, and wrote the first of my own such pieces on Adam Clayton Powell in November 1959, followed by others on William Buckley, Robert Kennedy, John Dos Passos, and Billie Jean King, as well as a variety of Harold-like assignments on everything from “The Sophisticated Woman” to the latest in civil rights activism. I felt the freedom to experiment, go far out, do my best stuff, the brasher the better.

Brock Brower walked into the editor's office one morning and said, “Harold, I need work.” Without skipping a beat, Hayes asked him, “Can you get on a plane to Los Angeles this afternoon?” The assignment that day was an interview with Peter Lorre, which not only turned into an
Esquire
profile of the actor, but served as the seed of inspiration for a marvelously funny, incisive novel Brock later wrote about a horror movie star,
The Late, Great Creature
.

“Harold and I hit it off right away,” Brock says, “maybe because he was from North Carolina and I'd been stationed there and knew about the place.” Brock had been at Fort Bragg writing guerrilla warfare manuals for the Special Forces—the Green Berets—and found time to write two pieces that he sent on spec to
Esquire:
a parody of a
Paris Review
interview with Shakespeare, and “A Lament for Old-Time Radio.” They were bought by Rust Hills, the magazine's fiction and literary editor. When Brock got out of the Army and went to New York in 1958, Hills said, “You should meet Harold Hayes. He knows your wife.” It was Ann Montgomery Brower's friend Howie, one of the boys upstairs, who had come down to Ann's apartment for the pristine pajama parties back in the early days after college.

“I went in to see Harold,” Brock recalls, “and he said, ‘We have to get you a real good assignment.' He offered me a chance to do a major piece they wanted to commission on Alger Hiss. Harold said, ‘We're not going to solve the Hiss case. We don't care if he's innocent or guilty, but we want to know what's happening to him now.'

“I did the first draft and Harold said, ‘There's a year missing here. Who paid Hiss till he got his first job after he left jail?' The suspicion of readers might be that he was being financed by
Commies. I called Hiss's lawyer, and Hiss called back and said, ‘I was living on unemployment.' Harold made me be specific—every year of Hiss's life had to be covered. And Harold was dead right. I talked to Hiss, to his son Tony, to the lawyers, to men he had been in government with and men he had been in prison with.

“I talked to Hiss at the Players Club, which I'd just joined, and when I took him there for lunch everyone wanted to know who
I
was. The place was buzzing with a kind of undertone of ‘Guess who's here?' Everyone was looking at us and Hiss was enjoying it—he liked being the villainous celebrity. He said I couldn't quote him on anything, so I couldn't take notes, but afterward I rushed back to the Players' library and wrote down everything I could remember. I used it, but not in direct quotes in the piece. All of us learned to do that—we had no tape recorders then, and it put you into a kind of double or bifurcating mind-set. You had to ask the best question and also remember what he answered. I did it with indirect quotes like, ‘Hiss feels today …” I think I came out with about seventy-five percent of what he said. I was plenty proud of it, and Hiss didn't challenge anything I said. He was surprised I was able to remember it all, and I said, ‘I went to law school too.'

“It took me three months to write the piece, during which we were very broke. I was paid $1,000 for it, their top price. I was freelancing then, but after that piece they hired me as a part-time editor.”

The article, “Hiss Without the Case,” came out in the December 1960 issue, and is still talked about today among writers who read it at the time. All the writers I knew were reading
Esquire
in those days, and I was especially drawn to the piece on Hiss because I'd met Brower in college. When my high school friend John Sigler came down from Dartmouth one weekend while I was at Columbia, I took him for beers at the West End. I told him I was working on the
Spectator
and taking courses with Van Doren, Trilling, and C. Wright Mills, and he said, “You've got to come to Dartmouth and meet my roommate. He's interested in all the same stuff.”

Sigler's roommate was a strong-jawed, all-American-looking intellectual named Brock Brower, a future Rhodes scholar who was editor of the
Daily Dartmouth
and, like me, a rabid fan of Scott Fitzgerald. We sat up all night drinking beer and talking about the relative
merits of
Tender Is the Night
and
The Great Gatsby
, the
New York Times
and the
Herald Tribune
. Now here we both were, writing profiles for
Esquire
.

When I read “Hiss Without the Case,” I was surprised to learn that Alger Hiss, this once powerful Ivy League, New Deal aristocrat, now worked as “a salesman for a small line of stationery,” and I felt I had come to understand his odd situation, as Brock Brower left him at the end of the piece: “He shook hands and went off across lower Fifth Avenue—a tall man in a summer straw, with certainly no mince [a description from Whittaker Chambers] to his energetic walk—going after that most mundane of American goals, and the last one that anybody would think that Alger Hiss would end up in pursuit of: a customer.”

I ask Brock how he approached writing that piece, and he says, “I cared more about what was going on in the real world, but I wanted to write with the techniques of journalism and novels working together. I'd justify everything in a profile like the one on Hiss in two ways—that it was factual, and that it would evoke a character the way fiction does. I was very influenced by Dickens.”

Brock says Harold Hayes didn't actually teach him any of these techniques but simply gave him the opportunity and the impetus to use them, and, most important, “There was a huge sense that I did it for this man. I stayed up all night in the office once to finish a piece for a deadline and forgot to call my family. My wife called my father, and he got the night watchman of the building to come and find me and have me call home.”

Gay Talese says of Hayes, “He was demanding and I had a strong desire to please him. He was a Marine, a southern minister's son, and he had very severe standards. Harold had a way of making me feel at once that he was supportive, but there was a little fear in the relationship, and threat—he had to be satisfied, standards had to be met. He was only a couple of years older, but he was like a severe older brother. If I wrote fiction, he'd be the older brother in my story.

“Harold gave me the opportunity to be published the way I wrote it. At the
New York Times
then you didn't own what you wrote, the copy desk did. I'd wait for the first edition to come out, leave at nine o'clock, buy a paper, and if they had mangled my copy, I'd call the
desk from a phone booth around Times Square and say, ‘I want my name off it,' and we'd have a big argument. At
Esquire
, what you wrote got printed the way you wrote it and was read the way you wrote it. I loved Harold more than any editor I ever had. I greatly missed his presence when he left
Esquire
, and I said I'd always work for him. I even did a piece for some tennis magazine when he was running CBS magazines.”