The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (37 page)

Bernstein is getting played, a prize pawn in the Panthers’ media game, and he doesn’t like it a bit: “Who the hell was this Negro rising up from the piano and informing the world what an ass Leonard Bernstein was making of himself?” Actually, it was Wolfe who took it upon himself to announce to the world what an ass Bernstein and his guests were making of themselves. Here we find the Panthers mingling with the folks on the wrong side of the social ledger (“Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in
mayonnaise dabs … all of which … are being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons”) while Bernstein’s invited guests try to expiate their Jim Crow guilt with histrionic verbal displays of self-flagellation and vigorous assent for the Panthers’ anti-whitey rhetoric. Wolfe had hit the mother lode with Bernstein’s party; it threw all the “status contradictions and incongruities” of the privileged class into bold relief, and there was no other subject, in his view, that better explained the motivations of certain powerful New Yorkers.

As usual, Wolfe, notebook in hand, absorbed every last detail: how the Panthers’ Afros were authentic, “not the ones that have been shaped and trimmed like a topiary hedge and sprayed until they have a sheen like acrylic wall-to-wall—but like funky, natural, scraggly … wild”; how Felicia Bernstein greeted her black nationalist guests with “the same tilt of the head, the same perfect Mary Astor voice” with which she greeted her usual aprés-concert guests. The Bernsteins, it must be noted, employed South American domestic help, therefore ducking the embarrassment of exploiting the very people they wanted to empower. “Can one comprehend how perfect that is, given … the times?”

“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” was Wolfe’s most audacious hybrid yet—speculative fantasia, sociology lesson, and biting satire. Extended passages are devoted to wild riffs on the tortured inner lives of these well-intentioned liberals, who are prone to paroxysms of guilt about their exorbitant and extravagant lives, calibrating the right mix of “dignity without any overt class symbolism” for the Panthers’ sake. Wolfe traces this tendency to ennoble the oppressed classes back to the nineteenth century. It was then known as
nostalgie de la boue
, or “nostalgia for the mud,” when socialites in Regency England adopted the capes (the trucker’s caps of their day) and bold driving styles of the coach drivers and the “reckless new dance” of the middle class, the waltz.

“Radical Chic” hit New York’s chattering classes like a megaton bomb. Readers responded with both praise and criticism for Wolfe. Gloria Steinem and Jimmy Breslin felt that the piece cast a pall over fundraising in the city, creating a climate of fear for those who wanted to help worthy causes lest they become figures of ridicule. “I thought it was funny, but I was accused of putting up a big barrier to money for worthy causes,” said Wolfe. “The Bernsteins assumed that, since I was there, I
was sympathetic to their cause. It shocked some since I seemed to have a hip take on popular culture. Surely, I had to be on the Left somewhere! But I was quite prepared for the reaction, and quite pleased.”

Bernstein was incensed. He was not, he insisted, a supporter of the Black Panthers, but a defender of due process and the rule of law as it applied to those who had been accused of crimes. “As an American and as a Jew I know that freedom of religion and the freedom of the citizen go hand in hand,” Bernstein told his biographer Meryle Secrest. “Strike one and you have damaged the second.” Bernstein’s wife, who had thought to host the fund-raiser, was never again quite so public about her pet causes.

This was all just delicious icing to Felker. “Radical Chic” was the most talked-about article in the short history of
New York
, a piece whose title dissolved into the American vernacular, becoming a default phrase for pet causes of the rich and famous. In three years, Felker had not only resurrected
New York
but stamped it with his own thumbprint, turning his dream of owning a magazine that was inseparable from the life of the city into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

SAVAGE JOURNEYS

H
ell’s Angels
had accomplished exactly what Hunter Thompson had hoped, which was to make him famous enough to get steady freelance work. In three years, more than eight hundred thousand copies of the book had been sold in both hardcover and paperback.
Esquire
, which had reacted coldly to Thompson’s story solicitations in the past, ran an excerpt of the book in its January 1967 issue. But Thompson had yet to reap any significant financial windfall, which he blamed on his book’s publisher, Random House, and his editor, Jim Silberman. “In 1968, I had only seen ten thousand bucks from the book. I assumed Silberman and the others were ripping me off.” So he continued to hustle up work. The
New York Times
, a publication that had turned down Thompson when he applied for a job there a few years before, now wanted the writer to provide an analysis of the counterrevolution that was taking root in San Francisco; “The ‘Hashbury’ Is the Capital of the Hippies” ran in the Sunday magazine on May 14, 1967.

Pageant
magazine assigned him an interview with Richard Nixon on the eve of the 1968 New Hampshire presidential primary, when the former vice president was trying to present himself as less abrasive and more solicitous toward the press. Thompson was unconvinced. “I suppose it’s only fair to say that this latest model might be different and maybe even better in some ways,” he wrote in the piece, “Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll.” “But as a customer, I wouldn’t touch it—except with a long cattle prod.”

All was not lost, however: Thompson found, much to his delight, that Nixon knew football as well as Thompson did, and the two whiled away time in Nixon’s limousine after a campaign appearance in Manchester, New Hampshire, discussing the upcoming Super Bowl matchup between Green Bay and Oakland. “Nixon had always claimed to be a big fan, but goddamn, the man really knew his stuff,” said Thompson. “Shit, you could actually start to believe that he was a human being for a minute there.”

Thompson no longer had to observe the reportorial proprieties of the mainstream press; he could just write stories as he saw fit, flinging barbs like nunchakus. If he wanted to disparage Nixon’s political comeback as a bunko game, he could. “It was an exciting and wide-open time for me,” said Thompson. “Shit, I always felt that I was right where I should be, and that’s extremely vital.”

Playboy
magazine thought it had arranged the perfect marriage of subject and writer when it assigned Thompson to profile Jean-Claude Killy, the fair-haired French skier whose three gold medals at the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics had turned him into a household name in the States. Thompson went into the interview with an open mind, but when he met Killy in Chicago, he was appalled at how the skier was cheapening his own name for a quick buck. There was Killy and O. J. Simpson, pitching Chevrolet’s latest models at the auto show like Fuller brush salesmen. When Thompson berated Killy for selling out to corporate interests, Killy got defensive. “You don’t understand! You could never do what I’m doing! You sit there and smile, but you don’t know what it is! I am tired. Tired! I don’t care anymore—not on the inside or the outside! I don’t care what I say, what I think,
but I have to keep doing it
.”

Playboy
wanted a harmless profile, but there was another story, a story larger than Killy, in fact. Thompson turned in an eleven-thousand-word portrait of a cipher, a selling machine running on autopilot, accountable only to his greed and the executives cutting his checks—in short, the poster boy for the new breed of media-engorged, money-mad celebrity: “He is a handsome middle-class French boy who trained hard and learned to ski so well that now his name is immensely saleable on the marketplace of a crazily inflated culture-economy that eats its heroes like hotdogs and honors them on about the same level.” Senior editor David
Butler killed the piece; had he approved it, there was no chance the story would ever run. Hugh Hefner had been trying to land the Chevrolet account for the past five years, and he wasn’t about to run a story that alienated a potentially lucrative advertising client.

But Thompson knew the piece was a winner. He had successfully negotiated the space between “massive public opinion and taste and desires, and what people really say,” and he was determined to place the story somewhere. As it turned out, a new magazine was starting up, and, more important, it was being edited by someone Thompson knew personally. Warren Hinckle was a San Francisco native, the product of a strict Catholic school education whose inbred skepticism and reflexive chafing at authority (he once chided the school library for not subscribing to
The Nation)
suited him for a career as a journalist-provocateur. As an undergraduate at the University of San Francisco, Hinckle edited the college paper, the
Daily Foghorn
, often creating sensational news when there was none to report. Once, in search of a story to fill an empty news hole, he had an accomplice burn down a guardhouse on campus.

Hinckle’s
Foghorn
work had caught the eye of
San Francisco Chronicle
editor Scott Newhall, who was trying to reinvent the parochial newspaper as a vehicle for provocative writing. Newhall hired Hinckle as a general assignment reporter, but the writer hated the prosaic nature of daily beat reporting, the constant chasing after stories of little consequence. He left the
Chronicle
in order to open a public relations firm, but it failed miserably, and the tug of journalism pulled him back in.

Hinckle would find his true métier in the most unlikely of places, a Catholic reform quarterly founded by Edward Keating, whose wife was the heir to a vast San Francisco fortune.
Ramparts
was a liberal Catholic quarterly, a vehicle for Keating to challenge what he regarded as the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the Catholic Church. An early story written by Robert Scheer criticized New York archbishop Francis Cardinal Spellman for his vocal support of the Vietnam War—a story that was so untouchable that only
Ramparts
was willing to publish it.

Hinckle convinced Keating to hire him as executive editor, then proceeded to redirect the magazine’s editorial content. He hired Scheer, a former economics major from City College of New York and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, who had recently mounted an unsuccessful run for Congress, to be the magazine’s political editor, and
proceeded to make
Ramparts
a debunker of received wisdom in any form, particularly as Vietnam became the wedge issue of the era.
Ramparts
published a series of explosive investigative pieces, most notably an article by Sol Stern that revealed a connection between the CIA and certain student organizations at Michigan State with links to South Vietnam, which led to a fumbling campaign by the intelligence agency to discredit the magazine with bribes, wiretapping, the works. Hinckle, however, was wise to all of this skullduggery, and the magazine didn’t back down from its story.

In a few short years, Hinckle had raised
Ramparts’s
profile considerably, but the magazine was hemorrhaging money too fast for the gains to make any appreciable difference. In the winter of 1970 Hinckle bailed out and moved to New York to start another publication, this time with a mandate to remain untethered from an outside publisher’s purse strings
(Ramparts
would continue to publish until 1975). Together with former advertising executive Howard Gossage and attorney and former
New York Times
reporter Sidney Zion, Hinckle raised $675,000 in a public stock offering, then plastered the check on the cover of the first issue of the magazine, called
Scanlan’s
. “Hinckle and Zion were a couple of shysters,” said illustrator Ralph Steadman, an early
Scanlan’s
contributor. “But they were good at what they did.”

Scanlan’s
improved and refined upon
Ramparts’s
editorial blend of rigorous investigative pieces and sharp cultural criticism. Such august bylines as Richard Severo, Auberon Waugh, Joseph Kahn, and Murray Kempton graced its first issue; so did Hunter S. Thompson.

Thompson and Hinckle had met three years earlier, in the offices of
Ramparts
. Hinckle, who read
Hell’s Angels
in galleys, invited Thompson up to the magazine’s North Beach offices for an informal meeting. The two proceeded to tie one on at Vanessi’s, a local bar and regular
Ramparts
watering hole. When they returned to the office a few hours later, the magazine’s in-house spider monkey, Henry Luce, had dug into Thompson’s stash of pills in his knapsack and rampaged through the halls of the building, wide-eyed and hopped on a toxic pharmacological cocktail.

Now, three years later, Thompson was looking for a home for his Jean-Claude Killy story. “Here is the Killy piece,” he wrote to Hinckle in a December 6, 1969, cover letter accompanying his only extant copy of the manuscript, Xeroxed on puke-orange paper that rendered the type
barely legible. “Some people dig it for the word-action; others hate it for the style and tone. The editors of
Playboy
really despised it: Their edit/memos ranged from ‘This is a good
Esquire
piece’ to ‘Thompson’s ugly, stupid arrogance is an insult to everything we stand for.’” Never in his ten-year career as a freelancer, Thompson wrote, had he been “shit on so totally” by a publication, which in his estimation was nothing but “a conspiracy of anemic masturbators.” Although Thompson invited Hinckle to edit and amend the story at his discretion, he nonetheless had a list of things he preferred to have Hinckle leave alone—a list that included virtually every paragraph.