The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (50 page)
Authors: Marc Weingarten
Tags: #Language Arts & Disciplines, #Literary, #Journalism, #Fiction, #Mailer; Norman - Criticism and Interpretation, #American, #Literary Criticism, #Wolfe; Tom - Criticism and Interpretation, #Didion; Joan - Criticism and Interpretation, #Biography & Autobiography, #American Prose Literature - 20th Century - History and Criticism, #General, #Capote; Truman - Criticism and Interpretation, #Reportage Literature; American - History and Criticism, #Journalism - United States - History - 20th Century
BOOK: The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
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9. HISTORY AS A NOVEL, THE NOVEL AS HISTORY
| | an ad signed by 149 draft-age men: Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975 (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1984), 20. |
| | On July 3, 1964 … a group of protesters: Ibid., 20. |
| | In 1967 the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation: Dana Adams Schmidt, “Sartre, at the ‘Tribunal,’ Terms Rusk a ‘Mediocre Functionary,’” New York Times , May 5, 1967. |
| | Background on Mailer, the VDC march, and the march on the Pentagon taken from Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985) and Mary V Dearborn, Mailer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) as well as interviews with David Dellinger, Edward de Grazia, Bob Kotlowitz, and Midge Decter. |
| | “embattled aging enfant terrible”: Willie Morris, New York Days (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 211. |
| | “Mailer has grown”: Manso, Mailer , 454. |
| Page 178 | “There had been all too many years”: Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (New York: Plume, 1994), 8. |
| | “helps you to think better”: Richard Copans and Stan Neumann, Mailer on Mailer , American Masters documentary (New York: Thirteen/WNET, Reciprocal Films, Films d’lci & France 2, 2000). |
| | “[L]isten, Lyndon Johnson”: Norman Mailer, The Time of Our Time (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 551. |
| | “He knew that by telling everyone”: Manso, Mailer , 408. |
| | “Three cheers, lads”: Ibid. |
| | “A Communist bureaucrat”: Mailer, The Time of Our Time , 553. |
| | “under the yoke”: Ibid., 540. |
| | “hit the longest ball in American letters”: Seymour Krim, “Norman Mailer, Get Out of My Head!” New York , April 21, 1969. |
| | “Moving from one activity to another”: Paul Carroll, “The Playboy Interview: Norman Mailer,” Playboy , January 1968. |
| | “transmute myself”: Norman Mailer, Pontifications (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 176. |
| | “Mailer received such news”: Mailer, Armies , 9. |
| | “Mitch, I’ll be there”: Ibid. |
| | “kind of up in the air”: Manso, Mailer , 45. |
| | “I pissed on the floor”: Mailer, Armies , 50. |
| | “He was forty-four years old”: Ibid., 78. |
| | “an obscene war”: Ibid., 79. |
| | “Picture then this mass”: Ibid., 108. |
| | “large and empty”: Ibid., 119. |
| | “You Jew bastard”: Ibid., 143. |
| | “In jail”: Ibid., 165. |
| | “He was being treated worse than anyone in jail”: Manso, Mailer , 458. |
| | “there was a part of me”: Manso, Mailer , 461. |
| | “in many ways a literary genius”: Morris, New York Days , 211. |
| | “one that would strike to the taproots”: Ibid., 214. |
| | “We just closed the deal”: Ibid., 214-15. |
| | Given the ambitious scope: Manso, Mailer , 463. |
| | “written in a towering depression”: Mailer, Pontifications , 152. |
| | “I remember thinking at the time”: Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing (New York: Random House, 2003), 99. |
| | “On the one hand …”: Mailer, Pontifications , 153. |
| | “true protagonist…”: Ibid., 153. |
| | “The kind of editing”: Manso, Mailer , 462. |
| | “It’s marvelous”: Morris, New York Days , 217. |
| | “What will my father think?”: Ibid., 219. |
| | “Mailer was a snob”: Mailer, Armies , 14. |
| | “Lowell looked most unhappy”: Ibid., 40. |
| | “Lowell’s talent was very large”: Ibid., 45. |
| | “The hippies were there in great number”: Ibid., 91. |
| | “If it feels bad, it is bad”: Ibid., 25. |
| | “He had no sense”: Ibid., 68. |
| | “twenty generations of buried hopes”: Ibid., 34. |
| | “[T]he center of Christianity”: Ibid., 188. |
| Page 196 | “To have his name”: Ibid., 206. |
| | “not unlike the rare”: Ibid., 213. |
| | “Some promise of peace”: Ibid., 214. |
| | “All these people”: Morris, New York Days , 222. |
| | Armies of the Night reviews: Alan Trachtenberg, “Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon,” The Nation , May 27, 1968; Henry S. Resnik, “Hand on the Pulse of America,” Saturday Review , May 4, 1968; Alfred Kazin, “The Trouble He’s Seen,” New York Times , May 5, 1968. |
10. THE KING OF NEW YORK
| | For Clay Felker: Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 405. |
| | 83 percent of female readers:“About New York ,” publishing statement by George A. Hirsch, April 1968. From George Hirsch, personal archive. |
| | “I saw the impact of the magazine”: Stuart W. Little, “How to Start a Magazine,” Saturday Review , June 14, 1969. |
| | “The Beatles of illustration”: Seymour Chwast, Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004), 11. |
| | Background material for the founding of New York was drawn from the following sources: Gail Sheehy, “A Fistful of Dollars,” Rolling Stone , June 14, 1977; Little, “How to Start a Magazine”; interviews with Clay Felker, Jimmy Breslin, George Hirsch, Shelly Zalaznick, Milton Glaser, Pete Hamill, Gloria Steinem, and Tom Wolfe. |
| | sixty thousand subscribers: George A. Hirsch, “A Report from the Publisher,” from George Hirsch, private archive. |
| | “You get hooked on this city”:“About New York ,” editorial statement by Clay Felker. |
| | $1,250 for a black-and-white Page: Temporary rate sheet, 1969. From George Hirsch, personal archive. |
| | “The people here met that challenge”: Ruth A. Bower, “ New York Announces Spring Rate Increase,” press release, 11/7/69. From George Hirsch, personal archive. |
| | “Women stood with tears streaming down their faces”: Gloria Steinem and Lloyd Weaver, “The City on the Eve of Destruction,” New York , April 22, 1968. |
| | “Man, he only some itty-bit”: Ibid. |
| | “Ethel Kennedy knows life from bullets”: Gail Sheehy, “Ethel Kennedy and the Arithmetic of Life and Death,” New York , June 17, 1968. |
| | “Right at the start”; “Armed robbery isn’t a grin”: Jimmy Breslin, “‘Bonnie and Clyde’ Revisited,” New York , July 8, 1968. |
| | The idea had germinated at an after-hours story meeting: Manso, Mailer , 498. |
| | why Mailer was on the top of the ticket: Jimmy Breslin, “I Run to Win,” New York , May 5, 1969. |
| | “I wanted to make actions”: Steven Marcus, “Norman Mailer,” Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 3rd Series (New York: Penguin, 1979), 278. |
| | Background of the Mailer-Breslin campaign: Manso, Mailer; Peter Manso, ed., Running Against the Machine: The Mailer-Breslin Campaign (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1969). |
| Page 210 | “[T]he condition of the city of New York at this time”: Breslin, “I Run to Win.” |
| | “I’d piss on it”: Jimmy Breslin, I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 121. |
| | “After Norman Mailer and I finished”: Jimmy Breslin, “And Furthermore, I Promise,” New York , June 16, 1969. |
| | “A wistful Republican malaise”: Julie Baumgold, “Going Private: Life in the Clean Machine,” New York , January 6, 1969. |
| | “We’ll show you how”: New York ad, 1969. From George Hirsch, personal archive. |
| | “Writing is like performing”: Uncommon Clay: Notes on a Brilliant Career , program for the opening of the Felker Magazine Center at the University of California at Berkeley, 1994. |
| | “Women … tend to have a more personal point of view”:“Making It,” Newsweek , July 27, 1970. Unsigned. |
| | Upper-level trains carry: Gail Sheehy, “The Tunnel Inspector and the Belle of the Bar Car,” New York , April 29, 1968. |
| | With his tall, blond Establishment looks: Adam Smith, “Notes on the Great Buying Panic,” New York , May 6, 1968. |
| | The magazine’s circulation was 145,000: Confidential memo from George Hirsch to New York staff. From George Hirsch, personal archive. |
| | “The party was held”: Tom Wolfe, prefatory note to“Radical Chic,” New York , June 8, 1970. |
| | “There they were”: Charlotte Curtis, “Black Panther Party Is Debated at the Bernsteins’,” New York Times , January 15, 1970. |
| | a Times editorial: New York Times , January 16, 1970. |
| | “He could see himself, Leonard Bernstein” and all subsequent quotes: Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” New York , June 8, 1970. |
| | “As an American and as a Jew”: Meryle Secrest, Leonard Bernstein: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 323. |
11. SAVAGE JOURNEYS
| | “I suppose it’s only fair”: Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 1979), 191-92. |
| | “You don’t understand!”: Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt , 79. |
| | “He is a handsome middle-class French boy”:“The Temptation of Jean-Claude Killy,” Ibid., 95. |
| | “Here is the Killy piece”: Letter from Thompson to Hinckle, in Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist: The Gonzo Letters, Volume II, 1968-1976 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 222. |
| | “a conspiracy of anemic masturbators”: Ibid., 223. |
| | “socio-philosophical flashbacks”: Ibid., 296. |
| | “In a narrow Southern society”:“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt , 31. |
| | “Not much energy in these faces”: Ibid., 34. |
| | “I’m ready for anything , by God!”: Ibid., 25. |
| Page 234 | “What riot?”: Ibid., 25. |
| | “It’s a shitty article”: Letter from Thompson to Bill Cardoso, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 295. |
| | “Dear Hunter”: Tom Wolfe to Thompson, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 335. |
| | “with the perhaps fading exception”: Thompson to Wolfe, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 338. |
| | “writing copy for [Ford Motor Company] pamphlets”: Thompson to Jim Silberman, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 261. |
| | “I wish I could explain the delay”: Thompson to Jim Silberman, in Thompson, Fear and Loating in America , 258. |
| | “a very contemporary novel”: Letter from Hunter Thompson to Jim Silberman, January 13, 1970, Ibid., 267. |
| | “semi-fictional”: Letter from Hunter Thompson to Jim Silberman, January 13, 1970, Ibid., 268. |
| | Biographical material for Jann Wenner taken from Robert Sam Anson, Gone Crazy and Back Again: The Rise and Fall of the Rolling Stone Generation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981). |
| | “I think psychedelic drugs”: Ilan Stavans, Bandido: The Death and Resurrection of Oscar“Zeta” Acosta (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 47. |
| | “I recognized in Oscar”: Yvette C. Doss, “The Lost Legend of the Real Dr. Gonzo,” Los Angeles Times , June 5, 1998. |
| | “Your call was the key to a massive freak-out”: Thompson to Tom Vanderschmidt, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 376. |
| | “Kerouac taught me”: Douglas Brinkley, “The Art of Journalism I: Hunter S. Thompson,” Paris Review , Fall 2000, 55. |
| | One morning: Lucian K. Truscott IV:“Fear and Earning,” New York Times , February 25, 2005. |
| | “We were somewhere around Barstow”: Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 3. |
| | “a classic affirmation”: Ibid., 18. |
| | “cluster of grey rectangles”: Ibid., 22. |
| | “burned out and long gone”: Ibid., 23. |
| | “Their sound system”: Ibid., 138. |
| | “All those pathetically eager acid freaks”: Ibid., 178. |
| | “What I was trying to get at”: Thompson to Tom Wolfe, April 20, 1971, Fear and Loathing in America , 375. |
| | “I think the thing to do is for you”: Thompson to Wenner, in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America , 392. |
| | “I’ve been mistaken for American Indian”: Stavans, Bandido , 103. |
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