The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (9 page)

By the time Bardot acquiesced, the interview seemed an afterthought. Morgan was more intrigued by the actress’s coy feints and parries, the way she made a game out of being unapproachable. “I had a hard time writing about Brigitte,” wrote Morgan in the introduction to a 1965 anthology of his work. “Totally lost in herself, she brought the logic of impersonality to its ultimate conclusion—absurdity.”

So instead, Morgan turned his Bardot quest into the subject of the story, making himself a character and leaving the formal interview out altogether.

Morgan earned a reputation for skillfully teasing out insights from recalcitrant interview subjects. When Felker assigned him a John Wayne profile for
Esquire
, Morgan had to cool his heels on a movie set for a week until Wayne agreed to talk to him, and then wound up writing a scathing portrait of a right-wing reactionary, wary of Kennedys and anti-American Hollywood subversives. For a profile of David Susskind called “Television’s Newest Spectacular,” Morgan observed a week in the life of the television producer as he skillfully negotiated his way through the worlds of television, theater, and film. Morgan structured the piece like a screenplay with the action prefaced by slug-lines, as in a shooting script:

Morgan sketched a portrait of a man as unrepentant about tailoring his product to meet the conservative demands of corporate sponsors, but who also fancied himself a patron of high culture, remaking Broadway plays with B-level actors for television. Susskind was infuriated by the story, which ran in the August 1960 issue of
Esquire
. The impresario had somehow obtained an advance copy of the magazine and called Morgan at home, telling him he needed a psychiatrist and vehemently denying that he had ever used the word
fink
in a quote that Morgan had attributed to him. After thirty minutes of ceaseless haranguing, Susskind finally asked Morgan, “Why did you do it to me? Don’t you see what it means? You’ve made it possible for the finks to get me!”

“I think Susskind thought I had fallen in love with him,” said Morgan. “I just thought he didn’t know who he was. The only thing David
ever wanted more than anything was for somebody to say that he was important. I didn’t hail him, and he wanted to be hailed.”

Morgan was Felker’s reclamation project, a frustrated novelist who had become
Esquire’s
best writer of profiles. Now the editor would turn the preeminent novelist of his generation into a magazine journalist. Felker’s first encounter with Norman Mailer transpired at the Five Spot on Fifty-second Street during a performance by pianist Thelonious Monk. “Mailer was with his wife, Adele, there had been some drinking going on, and they were fighting,” said Felker, who was friendly with the club’s owner and thus availed himself of the chance to sit with Mailer. “I mean, I had never seen such fighting. They were hitting each other.” It seemed an odd time to approach Mailer about writing for
Esquire
, but Felker took his best shot. After Adele stormed out of the club, leaving the two men, Felker asked Mailer, “Have you ever written about politics?” The 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles was approaching, and Felker asked if Mailer would like to cover it for
Esquire
.

Mailer had indeed written about politics for a brief time at the
Village Voice
, the weekly downtown New York paper that he had cofounded in 1958, and intermittently throughout his career. He made his fiction debut with the publication in 1948 of the World War II novel
The Naked and the Dead
, a book based on Mailer’s own wartime experiences in the Philippines, and it had launched him to the top of the
New York Times
best-seller list at the age of twenty-five.

That book had immediately established Mailer as a major American novelist, but his energies were too protean for fiction alone, and his reputation as an unorthodox polemicist was beginning to take hold. In his 1957 essay “The White Negro” Mailer introduced the concept of the existentialist hipster hero, living outside the normal constraints of society in order to avoid annihilation by social conformity, abiding by the code of the Negro (who had been bred into a culture of oppression and danger), adapting his jazz, his marijuana, even his urge toward knife-edged violence. The hipster had therefore “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for all practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.” The essay, which was published in Irving Howe’s
political quarterly
Dissent
, was discussed far more than it was actually read, but it turned Mailer into a lightning rod of controversy and a public intellectual.

In November 1959 Harold Hayes had purchased the serial rights to a chapter from Mailer’s book
Advertisements for Myself
. “The Mind of an Outlaw” was a lengthy analysis of the troubled origins of his Hollywood novel
The Deer Park
and Mailer’s struggles to write and publish it. Felker didn’t like the story much, finding it long-winded and self-indulgent, and had objected to Hayes’s suggestion that the magazine run it as a cover story. But
Advertisements for Myself
despite meager sales, became a touchstone for Mailer as a public persona. The book was a self-annotated anthology of novel excerpts, essays, poetry, and social observations, a kind of “greatest hits” of a still-young career. It was the interstitial writing that Mailer used to introduce the pieces, written in a hubristic, self-regarding tone, that attracted the most attention. Here was Mailer positioning himself as the supreme thinker of his generation, a philosopher-king whose Herculean talents and keen turn of mind would change the world, elevate the national dialogue, and, most important, cure what ailed America. “The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time,” Mailer wrote at the beginning of the book.

“I really think the watershed book was
Advertisements for Myself
Mailer would later say. “I thought that was, oddly enough, the first book written in what became my style. I never felt as if I had a style until that book. When I developed that style, for better or for worse, a lot of other forms opened to it.”

Surely, Felker surmised, this was a writer who could bring something intriguing to bear to the national political scene. And now that the political landscape was changing, with a young, dynamic senator from Massachusetts bringing an element of Hollywood glamour to the Democratic party, surely Mailer’s take on things would be provocative, perhaps even newsworthy.

Mailer welcomed the opportunity to expand his literary palette in the relatively untested waters of nonfiction, and Felker would give him his head, allowing him to write whatever, and however, he saw fit.
Esquire
would pay Mailer $3,500 for the piece; Felker would accompany Mailer to L.A. and introduce him to the right people.

As it turned out, Mailer didn’t need Felker’s help. His notoriety preceded him, and his Hollywood contacts, most notably Shelley Winters, whom he had met in the early fifties while adapting
The Naked and the Dead
as a screenplay, got him into all the best cocktail parties. It was, for the most part, politics as usual. Mailer had always been wary of Washington—all of those drab, unimaginative representatives setting the national agenda for the rest of us—but in Kennedy, he glimpsed the spark of something new. Not exactly a pinstriped insurrectionary, but perhaps someone who could reclaim some of the country’s vibrancy. Peering over the balcony one night from his hotel room at the Biltmore, Mailer spotted Kennedy arriving via motorcade.

Mailer saw at once what Kennedy’s election might mean for the country—a move toward some great reawakening of the American soul. “Eisenhower’s eight years,” he wrote, “has been the triumph of the corporation. A tasteless, sexless, odorless sanctity in architecture, manners, modes, styles has been the result.” Kennedy could unleash the “subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires” that had lain dormant during the two Eisenhower terms, reigniting the human potential that had been tamped down for so long. In his piece, which Mailer called “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Mailer linked Kennedy’s ascendance to the great American creed of unbridled adventure, virtue, and self-actualization; Kennedy’s election could start a mission in earnest for the new frontier, returning America to its first principles.

It was perhaps too simplistic a dialectic to accept at face value; even Mailer was aware of that. But Mailer was canny enough to leaven his enthusiasm with a cold shot or two of skepticism; he didn’t want the piece to read like Kennedy campaign boosterism. John F. Kennedy, after
all, was the product of a smooth and efficient political machine whose patriarch, Joe Kennedy, had a criminal past. Was one witnessing “the fortitude of a superior sensitivity” or “the detachment of a man who was not quite real to himself”? Even Mailer couldn’t say for sure.

It’s Mailer’s fresh combination of a reporter’s detatchment with a novelist’s vision—his ability to hold his subject up to the light and examine that person from every angle—that makes “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” the most insightful magazine article of the Kennedy era. The sheer intellectual expansiveness of the piece, coupled with Mailer’s penchant for capturing the mood of the room with a few deft strokes, gives it the layered heft of great psychological fiction. His descriptions of the convention floor (“If one still smells the faint echo of a carnival, it is regurgitated by the senses into the fouler cud of a death gas one must rid oneself of”), Los Angeles (“a kingdom of stucco, the playground for mass men—one has the feeling it was built by television sets giving orders to men”), Lyndon Johnson (“When he smiled, the corners of his mouth squeezed gloom; when he was pious, his eyes twinkled irony”), and other aspects of the convention are first-rate, but his analysis of Kennedy and the social forces that conspired to make him a viable candidate—the link between Kennedy and the enduring American myths—was something new altogether. Certainly no other reporter had recognized so early the potential for a cultural renaissance with Kennedy in the White House, while at the same time openly acknowledging the potential dangers of a country submitting too readily to a seductive personality cult. The value of the piece is in Mailer’s ability to hold those two opposing ideas in equipoise.

“Superman Comes to the Supermarket” was a new hybrid—think piece, personality profile, and polemic. It was unmistakably journalism, but a newspaper editor would be hard-pressed to place it. Years later, when the term “New Journalism” became commonplace, Mailer admitted that “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” fell squarely into that rubric of creative reportage. What Mailer had contributed to the form, in his view, was an “enormously personalized journalism in which the character of the narrator was one of the elements in the way the reader would finally assess the experience. I had felt that I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time.”

Felker loved the piece; Hayes and Gingrich had strong reservations. Never a fan of Mailer’s to begin with, Gingrich considered scrapping the story, which he considered the scattershot jottings of an otherwise gifted writer. The magazine had reserved sixteen pages in the feature well for the story, and the issue had to be shipped to the printer by the end of August to make the newsstands on October 15. Felker, Hayes, and Gingrich fought it out for days, until it came down to the wire. “We had three hours to go before we shipped the magazine to the printers,” said Felker. “Gingrich kept insisting it was the worst piece of dreck he had ever read, and I kept insisting otherwise.” Felker eventually prevailed, and the story made it, albeit with one minor change, courtesy of Gingrich, who changed the title to “Superman Comes to the Supermart” without Mailer’s consent.

That two-letter change from “Supermarket” to “Supermart” nearly sabotaged
Esquire’s
working relationship with Mailer for good. Mailer was furious when he saw it and fired off a letter to the editor, which was published in the January 1961 issue. Felker tried to mollify the writer, but to no avail. “Mailer for some reason thought that we hated the story,” Felker recalled. “He just went bananas.” Mailer stopped writing for the magazine for nearly two years.

Regardless of the title change, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” had a seismic effect on American journalism. Pete Hamill, at the time a young reporter for the
New York Post
, could sense a sea change among his colleagues at the paper. “I could actually feel the impact of that piece in the city room at the
Post
,” he said. “All the young guys were going, ‘Holy shit, what the hell is this?’ He just took the form and exploded it, and showed writers that there were other possibilities.” Mailer knew that the story was good, perhaps even epochal, and he would devote more energy to journalism than to fiction over the next four decades.