The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (14 page)

The story ends on Perry, alone with his thoughts in a hospital conference room:

With “A Death in Emergency Room One,” Breslin created a charged narrative by relating the facts of Perry’s experience as a real-time docudrama, using Perry’s point of view and an occasional, unobtrusive detail to provide dramatic shading. It was the best column Breslin had written for the
Trib
, but it also brought to a head a long-running debate among Breslin’s colleagues: had he papered over inconvenient facts and made up dialogue? “A Death in Emergency Room One” contained a number of niggling errors. Breslin had recorded the sequence of events incorrectly, for example. But even Perry himself had to admit that, despite Breslin’s sloppiness, he couldn’t have captured the story any better had he been present in the ER. “A guy’s weight, the name of his mother,” Breslin told
Newsweek
in 1963, “I’ll blow it every time. But when it comes to a major insight, I don’t think I miss very often.”

Over the next two days, the
Trib
ran two more Breslin stories, this time from Kennedy’s funeral in Washington, D.C.: “Everybody’s Crime,” in which the columnist observed dignitaries and citizen mourners as they passed by Kennedy’s coffin in the rotunda of the Capitol, and “It’s an Honor,” the story of Clifton Pollard, the man who dug Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. The second story developed as a result of Breslin becoming jittery amid the pomp of the presidential funeral, with its procession of world leaders and a bustling phalanx of international journalists. “I saw de Gaulle and Haile Selassie, who were great for the photographers, but I didn’t make a living writing about people like that,” said Breslin. Turning to his friend Art Buchwald, who was also covering the funeral, Breslin mentioned that he might ditch the funeral to interview the gravedigger. Buchwald thought that was a great idea, and Breslin left. “The story was about a dead body, after all,” Breslin said.

Once again, Breslin brought the national tragedy down to the capillary level, the working-class guy with the dirt on his khaki overalls who is summoned from his Sunday bacon and eggs to do his duty:

The country was in mourning, but a man still had to earn his pay. Breslin didn’t have to elaborate or moralize, throw in some obvious paragraph about the quiet dignity of Pollard and the pride of a job well done. It was all in the telling—the careful reconstruction of the scene, the halting cadence of the dialogue.

If Jimmy Breslin was the
Herald Tribune’s
foremost chronicler of the dispossessed and overlooked, then Tom Wolfe was the paper’s dazzling wordsmith of the decade’s emerging status class, the new 1960s youth culture and its mores. Breslin and Wolfe were working opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, but they shared the same uncanny flair for character and setting.

Wolfe, unlike Breslin, was not a product of New York, which was to his advantage; it gave him the gee-whiz enthusiasm of the outsider who found himself suddenly plunging headlong into a vibrant urban pageant. Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia, on March 2, 1931. His mother, Helen Perkins Hughes, was a landscape designer; his father, Thomas Wolfe Sr., was an agronomist, the director of a farmers’ cooperative, and a professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Wolfe senior was also the editor of the
Southern Planter
, a farm magazine with a literary bent. Tom Wolfe first became enamored of the writing life as he watched his father draft his farming articles in longhand, on yellow legal pads. “A couple of weeks later, there would be this nice, sparkling print in the magazine,” said Wolfe. “I just thought that was great.”

Tom Wolfe was reared in the Sherwood Park section of Richmond, an economically mixed neighborhood of academic types and working-class families. Wolfe’s house, which was located about a mile from a railroad yard, would often be visited by tramps looking for a handout; his mother always graciously obliged with homemade sandwiches. Despite
this, Wolfe looks back fondly on his childhood. “Even though it was the Depression when I was growing up, I was not very conscious of it,” said Wolfe. “Doctors called that the old oaken bucket delusion. You just screen out everything around you that’s unpleasant.” He attended public schools until the seventh grade, when his mother, an educated woman who had once aspired to a career in medicine, enrolled him in St. Christopher’s Day School, an Episcopal institution that educated the children of Richmond’s elite farming families. Hethrived there, becoming an honors student, chairman of the student council, and coeditor of the school paper. His column “The Bullpen” crackled with the earliest examples of Wolfe’s Roman-candle prose. For an article on the school’s men’s basketball team, Wolfe wrote that “different spectators have suggested motorcars, bicycles and rickshaws for keeping up with Coach Petey Jacob’s live-five.”

At Washington and Lee, a private university in Lexington, Virginia, Wolfe, who had consumed books such as Jack London’s
The Sea-Wolf
and L. Frank Baum’s
The Wizard of Oz
as a child, had dreams of becoming a great American novelist. His parents had a couple of Thomas Wolfe novels on their bookshelf, and young Tom was convinced that the author
of Look Homeward, Angel
was a relative and that he could carry on his namesake’s literary legacy. “My parents had the hardest time convincing me that I wasn’t related to that Wolfe,” he said. Wolfe wrote short stories when he wasn’t filing sports stories for the school’s paper and throwing curveballs for the school’s varsity baseball team. He dreamed of becoming a big-league ballplayer: “You got no applause for writing. Lots of it if you played games.” James T Farrell’s trilogy of Studs Lonigan novels had a profound influence on him; Wolfe was taken with the way Farrell used the raw material of a child’s life to create a riveting coming-of-age story, written in the novelist’s gritty, plainspoken prose. “Farrell got inside the minds of adolescents,” said Wolfe. “Nothing of note happens in the books—Studs just watches his contemporaries rising and sinking in life—but it’s riveting.” Wolfe would eventually master Farrell’s gift for writing convincing interior monologue, a talent that would serve him well at the
Trib
.

Wolfe was a solid student at Washington and Lee, but he kept his distance from the other students, mostly the rich sons and daughters of the southern gentry. “Tom was a bit of an oddball,” said Professor Marshall
Fishwick, Wolfe’s mentor in college. “He was much more intellectual than most of the students, who would come for a degree, rather than an education.”

Wolfe published two short stories in
Shenandoah
, the college literary magazine that he coedited, stories that were hammered out in George Foster’s weekly fiction seminars at the Dutch Inn pub off campus. It was in Foster’s seminars that Wolfe learned to absorb harsh criticism, but he also realized that the write-what-you-know mentality of fiction was not necessarily what he had inmind for his own career. It was Marshall Fishwick’s American studies course, which folded cultural, artistic, and sociological history into a kind of unified theory of American history, that radicalized Wolfe’s attitude about his own writing. He learned about William James’s pragmatism and Freud’s theories of the subconscious, and it opened him up to new ways of thinking. “The impulse behind American studies was not to accept the dogma of scholars, but to use your own scholarship, to develop a healthy skepticism about things,” said Fishwick. “Tom took that to heart. He wrote an early paper for me called ‘A Zooful of Zebras,’ which was about the lockstep conformity of academics. He was always very suspicious of that.”

Wolfe earned a doctorate in American studies at Yale, studying under brilliant mavericks such as Norman Holmes Pearson, writing poetry, and reading big-screen social fiction such as John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy. His dissertation was titled “The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942.” Wolfe was offered a job teaching history at a small midwestern liberal arts college, but instead he tried to gather material for novels by taking a job as a furniture mover for a trucking company in New Haven. “Jack London of all people was my model,” Wolfe said. “But I could see that the girls in the offices weren’t impressed. Believe me, there is no insight to be gathered from the life of the working-class milieu.”

Wolfe decided to pursue a career in journalism, if only because it would allow him to write steadily, without the uncertain financial vagaries of fiction writing. Wolfe wrote letters of introduction to 120 papers all over the country and received only one encouraging response, from the
Springfield Union
in Springfield, Massachusetts. “They hired me, mainly because they were curious about this guy with a Ph.D. from Yale who wanted to work on their paper,” said Wolfe.

Wolfe was a general assignment reporter, sometimes working on five
stories at the same time, covering the police beat on weekends, then commandeering the night desk, which would give him a $5 bonus on his $55-a-week paycheck. It was an invaluable apprenticeship—for the first time, Wolfe was exposed to the political and cultural machinations of a multiethnic community—but Wolfe was eager to make it in a major city. Delighted by the exciting portrayals of newspaper life to be found in films such as Lewis Milestone’s
The Front Page
, he hungered for the competition and adrenaline rush of urban newspaper work, where reporters from four different papers might battle it out for a scoop. In 1959 Wolfe took a pay cut and landed a job at the
Washington Post
, working the city desk.

Wolfe chafed at the
Posts
institutionalized, regimented approach to news gathering. “It was very much like an insurance office, with gray metal desks all lined up,” said Wolfe. “You couldn’t eat at your desk, and at one point, they even tried to ban smoking, but everyone just started climbing the walls.” As a cub reporter, Wolfe was beholden to his editors, who tended to assign standard-issue stories to him, which he would then embellish out of sheer boredom, turning crime blotter items into rococo flights of fancy. One time when Wolfe was on night rewrite, a job that required him to write stories from facts fed to him by police reporters, he got a call from the
Post’s
Les Whitten about a homeless man in the Adams Morgan district who had been shot by a cop—the kind of two-paragraph story that might get buried in the paper. Wolfe pumped Whitten for information: Was the man’s head in the gutter? What was the location of the bullet holes? From this, Wolfe fashioned a story that was pure Raymond Chandler, with a dramatic flourish about the five bullets in the man’s chest forming the perfect shape of a heart.

Among his fellow reporters, Wolfe gained a reputation as a major talent who refused to abide by the
Posts
assembly-line methods; he was constitutionally incapable of feeding the maw with merely serviceable copy. “The
Post
wanted everybody to march in lockstep, and Tom simply couldn’t do it,” said Whitten, who sat three desks away from Wolfe. Most days Wolfe could be found at his desk, leisurely reading the New York
Daily News
while editors Ben Gilbert and Alfred Friendly stewed and waited for the writer to turn in a story, which would invariably come in too late to run in the first edition. “A lot of us were delighted by that, because we didn’t have the effrontery to do it,” said Whitten. “We admired his fuck-all attitude.”

Wolfe eventually branched out into international news, writing a long feature on Castro’s newly hatched Cuban revolution “because none of the other writers felt like going to Cuba.” Armed with a portfolio of presentable articles, Wolfe sent off a scrapbook of his clippings to the
Tribune’s
Buddy Weiss in late 1961. He was hired on the spot at $9,000 a year as a replacement for departing reporter Lewis Lapham. Wolfe’s supercharged copy, Weiss reasoned, was a fitting compliment to the
Tribune’s
high-definition prose style. After a liquid lunch with John Denson at Toots Shor’s, where the
Tribune’s
editor made Wolfe pound five drinks at the bar, Wolfe realized that he had made the great leap into the world’s capital of newsprint, and he could hardly believe his good fortune. “This must be the place!” Wolfe wrote a decade later. “I looked out across the city room of the
Herald Tribune
, 100 moldering yards south of Times Square, with a feeling of amazed bohemian bliss…. Either this is the real world, Tom, or there is no real world.”

Wolfe may have stood out from the crowd at his previous two jobs, but he was running up against some formidable competition at the
Trib
. There was Breslin, but also Charles Portis, a gifted general-assignment reporter and fellow southerner from Arkansas who filed some of the era’s best newspaper pieces on the civil rights movement, and Dick Schaap, who had quit his job as the city editor of the paper to write features. Portis and Wolfe would later become friendly when the two worked on the rewrite desk, much to the dismay of rewrite editor Inky Blackman, who felt the two writers bantered too much during lulls. There was also Sanche de Gramont, a French count who won a Pulitzer Prize on the rewrite bank while covering the death of Metropolitan Opera singer Leonard Warren, who in the autumn of 1960 had collapsed from a heart attack in midperformance. De Gramont, who changed his name to Ted Morgan, would later become an acclaimed biographer of Winston Churchill and Somerset Maugham, among others.