New York in the '50s (47 page)

Hayes was vice president of CBS Publications from 1981 to 1984, having left
Esquire
in 1973 after a dispute with the owners. Harold became a magazine consultant and one of the originators and producers of the ABC News show “20/20,” and hired his
Esquire
writer Brock Brower to help him start the program. He wrote two books on ecology,
The Last Place on Earth
and
Three Levels of Time
, moved to Los Angeles to be editor of
California
magazine from 1984 to 1987, and was working on a new book when he died of a brain tumor in 1989 at age sixty-two.

Talese didn't learn writing techniques from Hayes. His role models were writers he read in high school. “I wanted to be a writer more than a news reporter. I loved short stories, especially Maupassant. I wanted to write about real people the way a short story writer did, showing the person's character. I clipped out of a collection a story called ‘The Jockey,' by Carson McCullers, and I saved it. A jockey walks into a restaurant to have dinner, and his trainer and the owner of the horse berate him for eating too much, and the jockey walks away. I thought, I'd like to write that way, but why can't I write that way about a real jockey? I wanted to write in the style of fiction but I didn't want to change the names. I wanted to write short stories for newspapers.

“In '59 the
Times
assessed me as a good writer who needed more experience with hard news. If there was anything I had no interest in doing, it was hard news. They sent me to Albany to cover the state assembly and senate. I had to write about what bills were introduced. I hated it. I didn't know how to write it. It was formula journalism and I did it, but I didn't want my name on that stuff. I learned there was a rule that if your story wasn't longer than seven or eight paragraphs, you didn't get a byline. So I never wrote more than seven paragraphs.

“It only lasted a month. Before that I was a young star getting
bylines in my mid-twenties, after that I was out of favor. They sent me to purgatory, dayside obit, but I didn't write the big obits. Mine were of people like an executive at Gimbel's who died of a heart attack and was worth three paragraphs. There were twenty or thirty a day, and you had to call the funeral director and get the information and write.

“That's when I started writing for
Esquire
. I had plenty of time, and I could use the
Times
morgue and files for research. I even wrote a piece on Alden Whitman, the chief obit writer for the
Times
.

“My piece on Floyd Patterson in '62 was a turning point. I'd written about twenty-five pieces on him in the past for the
Times
, so I was free to fictionalize—not make things up but use fictional techniques—since I knew him so well. I saw how essential it is to know people you're writing about, have a feeling of their character.”

It was Talese's piece on Joe Louis that got Tom Wolfe to read
Esquire
and ask himself, What the hell is going on in magazine journalism that an article could sound almost like a short story?

When I first met Talese, at a party at Bill Cole's, he had already read my profile of Adam Clayton Powell in
Esquire
and I had read his Josh Logan and Floyd Patterson pieces, and toward the end of the party he asked if I'd like to join him and his wife, Nan, who was a rising young book editor, for a hamburger and beer at P. J. Clarke's. I was impressed not only with Talese's sharp mind and conversation but by the marvelously tailored suit and highly polished shoes he wore, a sartorial excellence of style that was a legacy of being the son of a tailor. He was a perfectionist, in his clothes and in his work.

Talese looked straight into your eyes, his own eyes like powerful x-ray instruments boring into your thoughts, recording everything you said and the gestures you made. Set below his eyes was a mouth in a sort of half smile, which I wasn't sure suggested reassurance, or maybe just amusement, or curiosity, or more likely all the above.

“How old are you?” he asked me, his eyes boring in, and when I told him he seemed to relax, moving back in his seat. “We're almost the same age,” he said. “I was afraid you were going to be younger—and doing the kind of pieces you're doing for
Esquire
.”

Talese wrote an article for
Esquire
about the
New York Times
that
he turned into the best-selling book
The Kingdom and the Power
, enabling him to leave the newspaper and give full time to his nonfiction articles and books. “It started with Harold's idea,” he said.

Harold Hayes wanted to devote a whole issue of
Esquire
to sports. “He called and wanted me to write the introduction,” Bill Buckley recalls. “Harold said, ‘You're my second choice. Mailer was my first but he turned it down, and I just want you to know that.' I said I knew nothing about sports, and he said, ‘That's why we want you.' I said I'd have to read all of the issue before I wrote the introduction, and he said that was impossible, since he wouldn't get the galleys until the night before he had to go to press with what I wrote. I said I'd stay up all night and read the galleys and then write the piece, that's the only way I'd do it, and he said O.K. It took guts for him to say yes, but he did.

“Later I wrote a piece called ‘The Politics of Truman Capote,' and Harold said, ‘You can't say he has no politics if politics is in the title.' With two or three pieces I wrote, he'd say, ‘This is what's missing,' and he'd put his finger on it.”

Norman Mailer tells of his own experience with Hayes as editorial diagnostician: “He could put his finger on what was wrong. He was a very good editor. He was like a doctor poking his finger in a part of your body, like poking very unhealthy tissue, and he did it so it hurt, the place where he poked really hurt.” Mailer is the only one of Hayes's frequent contributors I talked with who looks back with any negative reflection: “He was very cold, at least to me. You wrote a wonderful piece and he barely acknowledged it. If he thought he could make a good cover by making fun of you, he'd do it—like when he put a picture of me on Germaine Greer's lap on the cover of
Esquire
. I invited him to a fistfight with me over that. He wrote back and said, ‘I don't box, how about tennis?'” Mailer didn't take up that challenge.

The magazine work that Norman Podhoretz recognized as art in the fifties came to its full flowering as a new genre in
Esquire
with the work of Tom Wolfe, beginning with his classic breakthrough piece on custom cars in 1963, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” The literary phenomenon known as the New Journalism was dubbed “para-journalism” by Dwight Macdonald,
but no such criticism could stop its spreading, into the signature magazine of the sixties,
Rolling Stone
, and eventually into all magazines (Joan Didion even broke the moldy style of
The Saturday Evening Post
with such pieces as “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”). The practice even moved into newspapers, those bastions of what Wolfe calls “totem journalism,” with writers like Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill bringing their own talents to the kind of artful reporting Murray Kempton began.

Wolfe, who became the spokesman and the star practitioner of the method, said when Harold Hayes died in 1989: “He was one of the great editors. Under him,
Esquire
was the red-hot center of magazine journalism. There was such an excitement about experimenting in nonfiction, it made people want to extend themselves for Harold.”

All these writers extended the limits of the nonfiction medium, making it more expansive, exciting, entertaining, and fulfilling, both for writer and reader. The New Journalism was part of a confluence of historic forces, a growing trend that probably would have sprung up sooner or later, but if it got its name and fame in the sixties, like so many other movements that shaped our time, it started in the fifties.

I loved writing journalistic pieces and profiles for Harold Hayes and
Esquire
, but I hadn't given up on fiction. One night I had a dream in the form of a novel. It began with a title page, and then a story unfolded, not as words on a page but as characters moving and talking as they would in a novel. The story had a rather simple but convincing plot, with a beginning, middle, and end, and when it was finished, a page appeared that said “The End” and the book was closed, the dream was over.

I woke up exhilarated, hurriedly got dressed, and went out and sat on a bench in Sheridan Square as the dawn came. I felt refreshed and affirmed, confident I would write my novel, though I didn't know when. I knew the story I dreamed was not the one I would write, but was rather a sign or symbol of it, as if my own unconscious—or spirit, I might now say—were telling me, “I have it in me.” I knew, in a deeper way than anyone else's words or opinions could persuade me, I would do it.

ELEVEN

Graduating to the Five Spot

Except for a few hip girls I knew, who admitted to a strange, aberrational passion for a greasy-haired guy who shimmied his hips on stage while he sang, we thought Elvis Presley was for hoods. Elvis the Pelvis in his blue suede shoes—a joke, a crude idol for guys who gunned the motors of souped-up cars and their girls with beehive hairdos and toreador pants so tight they seemed to be painted on the skin. We were too cool and smart for that. We listened to real love songs: Frank Sinatra's “In the Wee Small Hours,” Joni James doing “Let There Be Love,” and June Christy's “Something Cool.” Our serious music was jazz. That was the music we listened to for inspiration, meditation, nurturing the soul. New York was, of course, its capital.

We started out listening to Dixieland in high school, and when I first came to Columbia my friends from back home who were going to college in the East would meet me in New York and we'd go out to hear the music. Sally Green would commute down from Vassar, and Pete “Esty” Estabrook would train it up from Penn and Tommy Evans from Princeton (a few times the adventurous Joe “the Fox” Hartley would even make it all the way from Purdue in his ancient Buick, which looked like a gangster's getaway car). We'd go to Jimmy Ryan's on 52nd Street, or the Metropole on Broadway near Times Square, where I heard Philly Joe Jones play drums and Red
Allen on trumpet, the music blasting out to the street. We'd go downtown to the Stuyvesant Casino, where you got big pitchers of beer and watched the musicians play in front of a full-length mirror, the whole place bright, or to the Central Plaza, and at Nick's in the Village there was Phil Napoleon and Miff Mole, and best of all, way down on West 3rd Street, a small, dim club that was Eddie Condon's.

Eddie himself circulated around the room, his dark hair slicked back, immaculate, sporting a neat bow tie, a sharp guy out of some George Raft movie of the thirties, and on stage was Pee Wee Russell, fondling the clarinet and looking as gentle as Wild Bill Davison looked tough, the way he blew a cornet out of the side of his mouth when they did the Dixieland classics and sometimes Eddie would join them on guitar. One night Esty Estabrook had enough whiskey sours in him to have the guts to summon Mr. Condon himself to our table (“Hey Eddie!”), but Eddie simply looked at us—a couple of whiskey-soured college kids—and moved on.

Rousing as it was, how many times could you listen to the Dixieland repertoire? How many times could the saints come marching in, and the muskrat ramble, and Bill Bailey be summoned home? As Bruce Jay Friedman said of the made-up World War II battles in the adventure magazines he edited in the fifties, you can't keep storming Anzio every month. It was fun, it stirred the blood, and created immediate festivity, party time, forget your troubles, come on get happy! But after four years of high school and four more of college, the Dixieland standards began to take on the familiarity of “On, Wisconsin” and “High Above Cayuga's Waters.”

It began to seem old-fashioned, which had once been part of its charm, but then these cool sounds began blowing in from the West Coast. There was a brand-new shrine I made a pilgrimage to during the summer of 1953, the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, where this guy who reminded me of a jazz version of James Dean was playing a soft, sexy trumpet and whispering love songs like “My Funny Valentine.” His name was Chet Baker, and suddenly all my friends and I had his records and played them to our prospective girlfriends, hoping they would be as stirred as we were by the sexiness of this cool new sound. After the girl had yawned and gone home, successfully resisting not only your charms but Chet's, you
had another drink and played Baker again, imagining the next girl, the real one who'd fulfill all your fantasies, the kind of girl Chet himself must have played and sung to when he did those amazingly muted (and all the more lustful for being so) numbers like “Love Letters.”

But there was a sound that was even more hip than Chet's right here in New York, more adventurous and surprising and just as romantic—so poignant, in fact, that it inspired the British theater critic Kenneth Tynan (one of the first literary appreciators of J. D. Salinger) to call the man who made it, Miles Davis, a “musical lonely hearts club.”

I went to hear—and
see
, for his presence was as cool and impressive as his music—Miles Davis at Birdland, that anonymous-looking cellar downstairs on Broadway where Charlie Parker himself played, and where Bud Powell, J. J. Johnson, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and jazz buffs from Europe went first when they came to New York. I got to hear Miles Davis down in my own neighborhood too, at the Village Vanguard, and I bought and played his records late into innumerable nights, on Jones Street and West 13th and East 12th and practically wore out his album
Sketches of Spain
.

Everyone I knew had bullfight posters on their walls at some time during the decade, and went through a phase of heavy listening to flamenco music (the
cante hondo
, the “deep song,” surely was the wail of our own desire). We were preparing for the obligatory pilgrimage to Spain—I made mine with Ivan Gold in 1958—under the influence of our generation's papa, Hemingway. We wanted to see, if not the running of the bulls at Pamplona, at least a
corrida
or so. We wanted to take in the other hallowed sights of that land as well, cities I thought of as being the literary property of certain writers and artists: Orwell's Barcelona, Lorca's Seville, El Greco's Toledo. One of our bibles was Hemingway's youthful handbook
Death in the Afternoon
, which gave us literary advice (“write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after”) and also the legends of the ghosts of the twenties (“we never will ride back from Toledo in the dark, washing the dust out with Fundador, nor will there be that week of what happened in the night that July in Madrid”). To translate the essence of all that mythology—so central to our generation's imagination—into modern
jazz, our own time's music, was simply an act of instinctive genius that Miles Davis performed in
Sketches of Spain
.