The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (48 page)

AFTER THE BALL

A
fter Rupert Murdoch’s palace coup, Clay Felker brushed himself off and started over again.

Ironically, he ventured back to
Esquire
, the magazine that had unceremoniously shoved him aside fifteen years earlier. But so much had changed since then. Harold Hayes, who had turned
Esquire
into the greatest American general-interest magazine of the 1960s, had left in 1973 after a dispute with the chairman of the board, John Smart. The magazine’s management had decided, without Hayes’s consent, that
Esquire
would use market testing in attempt to shore up its sagging bottom line, and perhaps even replace George Lois’s covers with more obvious designs of their own choosing. Management wanted a harder sell, with multiple cover lines instead of those single, pithy cover lines that Lois and the editors had perfected over the years. In short, they were looking for a sexier, more appealing package that would sacrifice panache for ham-handed commercialism. Hayes wasn’t having it, and on April 5, he turned in his letter of resignation to the board. (Hayes died of a brain tumor in 1989.)

Without Hayes’s steady hand, the vitality seemed to drain out of
Esquire
. The magazine lost focus and market share, losing roughly $5 million from 1975 to 1977. In August 1977 Felker acquired the magazine with an investment from Vere Harmsworth, Viscount Rothemere, chairman of the British publishing giant Associated Newspapers, and recruited his old partner Milton Glaser to work by his side.

But Felker’s editorial instincts, once so sure and sharp during his
New
York
tenure, abandoned him. A fatal decision to increase the magazine’s frequency from monthly to biweekly left the magazine drowning in more red ink, and in May 1979 the majority interest of
Esquire
was sold to two thirty-something Tennesseans named Christopher Whittle and Phillip Moffitt.

From there, Felker had a cup of coffee or two at various publications (the
Daily News, Manhattan Inc., Adweek, U.S. News & World Report)
, tried his hand at an alternative newsweekly called the
East Side Express
that he sold in 1984, and even worked as a producer at Twentieth Century Fox for a brief time in the early 1980s. But the Felker era was, for all intents and purposes, a past-tense phenomenon.

The same year that Felker lost
New York
to Murdoch, Jann Wenner moved
Rolling Stone
from San Francisco to New York, thus irrevocably altering what Hunter Thompson called “a hub of great journalism. My attitude at the time was, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But Jann took his life so far in another direction that he destroyed the shining monument to himself that he had built.”

From 1967 to 1977,
Rolling Stone
featured movie stars on seventeen covers. From 1977 to 1979, it had twenty-two such cover stories. Thompson continued to contribute to the magazine, but none of his subsequent work, which varied wildly in quality, could match the greatness or the impact of the first two
Fear and Loathing
sagas (one exception being “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat,” Thompson’s encomium for his friend Oscar Zeta Acosta, who vanished mysteriously in Mazatlán, Mexico, in June 1974).

Nineteen seventy-seven was also the year that George Lucas’s
Star Wars
was released, an event that landed the film’s cast on the cover of
Rolling Stone
in August. A covenant, it seemed, had been struck between Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and magazines would now become press organs for movie stars. Stories shrank, and so did ideas. Puff pieces were no longer discouraged by scrupulous editors; they were career builders for magazine writers now, and big draws for advertisers.

It just got ugly in the 1970s for New Journalism, a process that was hastened by the decline of general-interest magazines. So what happened? Television, mostly, which siphoned away readers and ad dollars, turned celebrity culture into a growth industry and ensured the end of big tent magazines such as
Life
, the
Saturday Evening Post
, and
Collier’s
—magazines that had published Mailer, Didion, Hersey, and many others.
Esquire, New York
, and
Rolling Stone
were no longer must-reads for an engaged readership that couldn’t wait for the next issue to arrive in their mailboxes, eager to find out what Wolfe, Talese, Thompson, and the rest had in store for them. As the seventies drew to a close, so too did the last golden era of American journalism.

But there was also a sense of psychic exhaustion, that the great stories had all been told and there was nothing left to write about. The last American troops pulled out of Saigon in 1975; mainstream culture had thoroughly colonized the counterculture, and women’s lib just wasn’t sexy enough for male journalists to cover with the same rigor and passion that they reserved for wars.

New Journalism as Wolfe envisioned it—as the great literary movement of the postwar era—died a long time ago, but its influence is everywhere. Once a rear-guard rebellion, its tenets are so accepted now that they’ve become virtually invisible. The art of narrative storytelling is alive and well; it’s just more diffuse now, spread out across books, magazines, newspapers, and the Web.

There are great immersive reporters such as Ted Conover, who posed as a corrections officer in Sing Sing prison and wrote an award-winning book about it called
Newjack
. Jon Krakauer accompanied a mountaineering expedition to Mount Everest on assignment from
Outside
magazine and produced a narrative nonfiction classic,
Into Thin Air
. Barbara Ehrenreich posed as a domestic laborer and told the hard-luck stories of her fellow workers in
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
.

Other best-selling books such as
The Orchid Thief, Random Family, Moneyball, American Ground
—riveting stories buttressed by meticulous reporting, full-bodied character development, and flat-out great writing-are the children of
Dispatches, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
, and
Armies of the Night
. The director of New York University’s magazine journalism program, Robert S. Boynton, interviewed the authors of these and other recent nonfiction classics for a 2005 book called
The New New Journalism
.

With the exception of Jimmy Breslin, who continued to write a weekly column until retiring from newspaper work in November 2004, New Journalism’s greatest practitioners moved on to other pursuits. Tom Wolfe virtually gave up journalism to devote himself to novels such as
The Bonfire of the Vanities
and
I Am Charlotte Simmons
. Michael Herr has published only three smallish titles in the years since
Dispatches
. Since publishing
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
, his 1980 book about sexual mores in
America, Gay Talese has written only one other book
(Unto the Sons
, a multigenerational saga of his own family) and has spent ten years working on the next one. A collection of his magazine pieces called
The Gay Talese Reader
was published in 2003. It is essential reading. John Sack continued to traverse the globe for stories about the Chinese Mafia, the Holocaust, and the My Lai massacre until his death from cancer in 2004. Joan Didion remains a giant of journalism and continues to produce stunning work.

Norman Mailer also retreated from print journalism but didn’t give up the practice entirely.
The Executioner’s Song
, his epic about Utah killer Gary Gilmore, was the end result of hundreds of hours of interviews conducted by the writer and his partner, Lawrence Schiller.
The Executioner’s Song
won Mailer his second Pulitzer prize in 1980.

As the years wore on, Hunter S. Thompson continued to fitfully produce good work, particularly during his brief run in the mid-1980s as a columnist for the
San Francisco Examiner
, when he inveighed against the evils of Reagan-era villains such as George H. W. Bush, Oliver Stone, Jim Bakker, Ed Meese, and the Gipper himself. By the late 1990s, Thompson’s output had slowed considerably. He was no longer writing consistently for any print publications; instead there was a sports column for
ESPN.com
that was really a wide-open forum for whatever was on Thompson’s mind come deadline’s eve. Despite some occasionally hilarious and insightful pieces, it seemed an odd place for Thompson to land. Some claim that he was too strung out on drugs to produce another significant book; others claimed he was just letting his legacy speak for itself and leaving the present to younger people.

Thompson loved to talk about his salad days, but there was a wistful, almost rueful catch in his voice when the past was discussed. Two years before fatally shooting himself on February 20, 2005, he summed it all up thusly:

INTRODUCTION

1. RADICAL LIT: SOME ROOTS OF A REVOLUTION

2. THE GREAT AMERICAN MAGAZINE

3. KING JAMES AND THE MAN IN THE ICE CREAM SUIT