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Complete archives for People

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As a feature writer for the Herald Tribune, he had recently visited the Hot Rod & Custom Car show at the Coliseum, but hadn't been completely happy with the piece he'd written.

"The thing was, I knew I had another story all the time, a bona fide story, the real story of the Hot Rod & Custom Car show, but I didn't know what to do with it," he wrote in the introduction to "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." "It was outside the system of ideas I was used to working with, even though I had been through the whole Ph.D. route at Yale, in American Studies and everything."

His sudden unemployment may have caused him to regret having turned down Yale's offer of a teaching position in 1956. But five years as a graduate student had given him, as he put it in the introduction to "The New Journalism," "a fierce and unnatural craving for something else entirely. Chicago, 1928, that was the general idea ... Drunken reporters out on the ledge of the News peeing into the Chicago River at dawn ... Nights down at the saloon listening to 'Back of the Yards' being sung by a baritone who was only a lonely blind bulldyke with lumps of milkglass for eyes ..."

So he had apprenticed as a reporter at the Springfield (Mass.) Union and then worked as a reporter and Latin American correspondent at the Washington Post, winning Washington Newspaper Guild awards but chafing under the Post system. As he told a Newsweek reporter, "I didn't subscribe to the theory that every documented sparrow that falls within our circulation area you have to write about."

His ambitions brought him to the Herald Tribune, where he hoped to further develop his style. But now with the strike on he needed work. Editor Byron Dobell of Esquire agreed to send Wolfe to California to write about the hot rod culture.

Wolfe was about to explode over America. He was about to appear in the heavens like a clean-shaven Jehovah throwing down electrically charged trochaic hammerlines of sheer ecstatic vision and pure hippie grace! Soon it would be: Wake up, America! Tom Wolfe is here! Banging on the dean's door with a dandy's cudgel in his ivory three-piece suit like a Mercury astronaut intubated with 50 centileters of Old Granddad, tearing through journalism's sleepy hollow of leather club chairs and Connecticut train schedules like a Virginia frat boy channeling Alexis de Tocqueville, yelling, "Wake up, you sleeping-beauty three-dot phone-fed so-called journalists dreaming of a publicist's underwear! Wake up you Rogaine revolutionaries and J. Crew flannel worshippers from your sleep of MFA sinecures with your Lands' End picnic baskets full to bursting with Harry and David organic fruits grown by nervous Northern California neo-botanists with great skin who in an honester age would have lined up outside Ye Olde Leeches and Bloodletting Parlor for the requisite Middle Ages pageboy and signed on for the Crusades! Wake up, everybody! Tom Wolfe is here!"

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. In this story we're telling it was still 1963 and the not-yet-famous, out-of-work Wolfe went to California for Esquire to check out the car scene and ran up a $750 tab at the Beverly Wilshire and came back to New York with copious notes but no story.

American-studies Ph.D. with X-ray eyes meets nitro Neanderthals squatting by the drag strip of our last frontier, discovers autonomous youth culture never before possible in the history of the world except now with unprecedented post-WWII world hegemony and unparalleled productive capacity!

But he can't write the darn thing.

Wolfe is down! Crawling toward the enemy pillbox like a "Sgt. Rock" G.I. with nothing left but the grit in his belly and the fire in his heart! He calls his editor at Esquire on the walkie talkie:

"Byron ... Sarge ... Can't ... finish ... article. Take ... my ... facts ... finish ... story."

"You can do it," Dobell says.

"Can't ... finish ... story," says Wolfe. "Here ... take ... my ... notes."

"OK, have it your way," Dobell tells him. Just type up the notes, and they'll have somebody else write it up. "I'll see you around Sports Afield-freelancer 5-cents-a-word part-time Yellow Cab-driving hell, boy!"

Wolfe starts typing a memo at 8 p.m.: "Dear Byron ..." By midnight he has 20 pages. He turns on WABC and starts listening to rock 'n' roll and keeps writing.

"I wrapped up the memorandum about 6:15 a.m., and by this time it was 49 pages long," he later wrote. "I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30 a.m. About 4 p.m. I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were striking out the 'Dear Byron' at the top of the memorandum and running the rest of it in the magazine."

"The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" became the title piece of Wolfe's first book, a collection of 22 magazine and newspaper pieces published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1965. In addition to the introduction that described how Esquire came to publish a "Dear Byron" memo as a piece of journalism, it contained such pieces as "The New Art Gallery Society," "The Nanny Mafia," "The Girl of the Year," "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!!" and "Why Doormen Hate Volkswagens." Taken together, the pieces encapsulated the themes, mannerisms and obsessions that would play out over the next 35 years, not only in his journalism but in his novels.

He started doing crazy stuff. He started one story about the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village like this: "Hai-ai-ai-ai- i-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- i-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- i-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- ai-aireeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

And this is how he started "Girl of the Year," about society "It" girl Jane Holzer at a Rolling Stones concert:

Bangs mains bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms eclair shanks elf boots ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them, these flaming little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the Academy of Music Theater underneath that vast old mouldering cherub dome up there -- aren't they super-marvelous!

He was appropriating the upper-class literary tools of fiction and poetry and using them to ornament his lower-class magazine and newspaper journalism. It was as though he was using the good silver to slop the hogs. In American literary culture, all hell broke loose.

Next page | Seldom has such backbiting bitchiness and voodoo malevolence been directed at any writer