The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (11 page)

Hayes bought the piece and ran it near the front of the issue. It began, “New York is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building. The ants were probably carried up there by wind or birds, but nobody is sure; nobody in New York knows any more about the ants than they do about the panhandler who takes taxis to the Bowery; or the dapper man who picks trash out of Sixth Avenue trash cans.”

Esquire
paid $500 for “New York,” and it established Talese as a comer, someone for Hayes to watch. After writing a few more stories in the vein of “New York” and a profile of New York mobster Frank Costello—a piece that
Village Voice
writer Nat Hentoff had told Hayes was the best he had ever read in a national magazine—Talese was becoming a favorite of Hayes. “I liked the toughness of Hayes, because I was tough,” said Talese. His article fee was bumped to $850; Hayes felt that Talese had been invaluable in “forming a fairly specific
Esquire
point of view.” But Talese still had a full-time job at the
New York Times
, which kept him busy from 1 P.M. to 7:30 P.M. every weekday except Friday, which was his day off. He had to squeeze the
Esquire
work in between filing stories for the paper, which left him with very little time for anything else—that is, until the New York papers went on strike in December 1962, providing Talese with a short break from his job and a chance to devote his energies to a feature story Dobell had assigned him: a profile of Broadway director Joshua Logan.

Dobell felt that Logan had coasted too long on an inflated reputation; it was time to set the record straight on this peddler of meretricious clichés and overblown productions, who was now in rehearsals for
Tiger Tiger Burning Bright
, Peter Feibleman’s drama about African Americans in New Orleans. Dobell couldn’t figure out Talese; the two had fought over what Dobell felt were disparaging remarks made by Talese about Hayes, the man who had turned Talese into a magazine writer. But he knew that beneath Talese’s calm exterior there lurked “a bratty street kid” who would scrape and claw for a good story.

Talese, who had already staked out Logan during the premiere of his show
Mr. President
on October 22, was now free to observe to his heart’s content. “I am a reporter who is forever in search of the opening scene,” said Talese. “I never start writing until I have that scene, and then I become a man in search of a final scene. This all tends to take a lot of time.”

Talese made good use of his time, sitting in the back of the Booth Theater with a notebook on his knee (Talese never used a tape recorder for fear that he would become too dependent on it) and watching Logan fulminate, cajole, and stage-direct while his actors slowly melted down from the heat of their director’s temper tantrums. He spent days with Logan and the cast, recording all of their conversations, sparing no one. Then he blocked out all of the scenes on a large corkboard in his apartment, much like a film director uses a storyboard to direct the narrative
flow of his film. The scenes alone would dictate the direction of his story; Talese would leave himself out of it.

In the story, “The Soft Psyche of Joshua Logan,” Talese wrote of Logan’s emotional attachment to Feibleman’s play, how it reconnected him to his hardscrabble Mansfield, Louisiana, roots and the plantation where he was reared by a family of strong-willed females. Logan was identifying so strongly with the play, wrote Talese, that “it seemed he might be involved once again with Mansfield, the source of his old wounds and boyhood complexities; a trip, one might assume, that he could ill afford to make.” Logan had a lot riding on the play, mostly the need to keep himself financially afloat: “Though Logan earns in the neighborhood of $500,000 a year, it somehow seems barely enough and one evening after a hard day’s rehearsal of
Tiger
, Logan left the theatre and said, wearily, ‘I work for gardeners and psychiatrists.’”

The piece continued in this vein, with Logan constantly tweaking the play to his satisfaction, culminating in a screaming match with his female star, Claudia McNeil. Dobell and Hayes thought the story might be a little too revealing, perhaps even libelous, but when Talese read back the story to Logan, the director vouched for every word.

“The Soft Psyche of Joshua Logan” would be a benchmark story for Talese and
Esquire
. Talese had perfected the profile-as-short-story technique that he had been working toward for the past decade. As Lillian Ross had done with her John Huston piece, Talese wrote the article in scenes, but he added a layer of psychological complexity with his depiction of Logan, a self-made man whose track record as a Broadway King Midas, and the attendant pressure to produce a hit every time out, had coarsened him, turned him into something monstrous and crude.

Talese was catching Logan on the downward trajectory of his career; he was a once-dominant cultural icon who had lost his golden touch. Fallen characters fascinated Talese, because they had to function in a world that once revered them but now looked askance. It was only in defeat that a man revealed his true self to the world. That’s why boxers appealed to him. Talese had the corner on boxers at
Esquire;
as a
Times
reporter, he had profiled Jose Torres, Joe Louis, Ingemar Johansson, and Floyd Patterson. Talese had interviewed Patterson thirty-seven times, finding him to be unusually articulate, someone who could provide unique insights into his own psyche and the methodology of his technique. Talese had spent extended periods of time with Patterson at his
training camp in upstate New York, and he came to know Patterson as intimately as a family member. “I had become almost an interior figure in his life,” said Talese. “I was his second skin.”

When Hayes assigned Talese a profile of Patterson in the winter of 1963, the twenty-nine-year-old former heavyweight champ had recently been knocked out a second time by his bête noire, Sonny Liston, and he was suffering from a severe bout of postmatch depression. Talese met him at his training camp, as he had done in the past, and it didn’t take much prodding for Patterson to express feelings of failure and self-recrimination. In his article Talese presented Patterson as a loner, living in a desolate two-room apartment sixty miles from his family in Scars-dale, fighting with the demons that had haunted him in the weeks since Liston had KO’d him in the first round. The story was a first for Talese in that he would use large chunks of dialogue to tell his story; Patterson was so good at describing what it really felt like to be in the ring with Liston that Talese wasn’t inclined to embellish.

To Talese, Patterson seemed to be everything a professional boxer shouldn’t be: sensitive, contrite, his personality tinctured with regret and world-weariness. When Talese accompanied Patterson on his Cessna plane as the fighter flew to Scarsdale to discipline some white kids who had been taunting his seven-year-old daughter, he found that Patterson, who had threatened to level the kids with a left hook, could not do anything more than deliver a gentle rebuke to the kids.

Later, Talese sat with Patterson as he returned to that night with Liston in Vegas, gently guiding him deeper into the recesses of his memory. When he wrote the piece, he chose to render this section as a running monologue, and placed it in italics as a framing device to alert his readers that they were inside Patterson’s head:

No journalist had ever pierced the facade of an athlete this way before, had ever gotten this close to what it felt like to be a champion who now felt like a coward. But Talese had earned this access over countless hours of hang time with Patterson across seven years, and it paid dividends when it counted the most. “The Loser,” which ran in the March 1964 issue of
Esquire
, was a new high-water mark for the magazine, daringly innovative but suffused with empathy for its subject. Talese was now Hayes’s pet writer, and their relationship would reap even greater rewards as the sixties progressed.

Clay Felker was missing out on all the fun at
Esquire
, but he wasted little time in establishing a new beachhead for himself. He returned to his newspaper roots and jump-started the New Journalism in an unprecedented fashion.

KING JAMES AND THE MAN IN THE
ICE CREAM SUIT

B
y the time Arnold Gingrich showed Clay Felker the door, the editor was already plotting his next move, taking a consulting job at
Infinity
, a trade magazine for professional photographers, managing the film career of his wife, actress Pam Tiffin, and editing part time for Viking Press. He also unsuccessfully interviewed for a job at the
New York Herald Tribune
. The
Trib
was Felker’s kind of challenge, a historical institution that was he morrhaging money and readership and was looking for a fresh infusion of ideas to compete in the city’s crowded newspaper market. Before long, Felker would get his chance at the
Trib
and lead it into its last great era.

The
Herald Tribune’s
lineage was one of the most distinguished in all of American journalism. It was created by the merger of two venerable newspapers, the
New York Tribune
and the
New York Herald
, in 1924. In the nineteenth century, under the stewardship of editor Horace Greeley, the
Tribune
was a leading advocate of social reform. A member of the pro-business Whig party until its dissolution in the 1850s, Greeley became a vocal supporter of the Republican party and helped engineer Illinois senator Abe Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency in 1860. For the next eighty years, the
Tribune
continued to support Republican causes, advocating Wendell Willkie’s nomination against Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and championing Dwight Eisenhower’s two terms as president in the fifties.

In 1872, the year of Greeley’s death, the
Trib
was taken over by
Ogden Mills Reid, a former reporter for the
Cincinnati Gazette
and the managing editor under Greeley. Reid engineered his purchase of the paper with the help of Jay Gould, the notorious financier who cornered the silver market in August 1869. Thus began one of the great dynastic newspaper families; three generations of Reids would retain ownership of the paper for nearly a century.

A perpetual money-loser, the
New York Herald Tribune
was never a front-runner in the great New York newspaper wars of the early twentieth century, when as many as fifteen papers battled for readership, but its aggressive recruitment of great reporters made it a formidable editorial powerhouse. During World War II, correspondents Homer Bigart and Tex O’Reilly filed harrowing dispatches from the front lines from both the European and Pacific theaters; sports writers Red Smith and Grant-land Rice honed their snappy prose styles while working for the
Trib
, while critic Virgil Thomson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, critiqued classical music for the paper. Its news columnists were among the most widely read in the nation. Walter Lippmann, whom the Reids had poached from the
New York World
in 1927, was a Harvard graduate who had helped establish the
New Republic
as the leading periodical of the left before turning to newspaper work. Lippmann’s column “Today and Tomorrow,” which offered a pragmatic approach to national politics, was syndicated in a hundred newspapers, brought the
Trib
two Pulitzer Prizes, and ran for thirty years. During the postwar years Joseph and Stewart Alsop’s column, “Matter of Fact,” which was syndicated in 137 papers during its twelve-year run, warned of the imperialist evils of the Soviet Union as it cut a swath through Eastern Europe, and argued for a renewed commitment to strengthening the U.S. military to meet the new Communist threat.

Despite the quality of its editorial content, the
Tribune’s
financial health was constantly in flux. During World War II, there had been a significant increase in ad revenue, orchestrated by Ogden Reid’s wife, Helen Rogers Reid, and ad director William Robinson, but a newsstand price increase from a penny to a nickel in a quick-fix attempt to increase revenue in 1946 left the
Tribune
unable to boost its readership. When Robinson imposed a higher advertising rate, the
Tribune
found itself working from a position of weakness on both sides of the ledger. The
Trib
was charging three times as much for the same ad space as
the
New York Times
, yet it had only 57 percent of the latter’s circulation by 1950.