Radical Tom Wolfe

“Radical Wolfe” was the last film I expected to watch on a transcontinental flight back east last year.  Tom Wolfe died nearly six years ago, and airline movie selections rarely feature thoughtful documentaries about revolutionary literary figures.  Passengers want comfort-food entertainment to better digest crummy airline food.  Movie thrillers, rom-coms, and music videos offer what both parties seek – for airlines: quiet and pacified sardines; and for 300 passengers crammed in a tube: stimulating entertainment.

Six miles high on our flight to New York City, with earplugs in and eyes glued to the screen, I muscled through the staccato nature of wifi interruptus, a common airplane movie ailment of frozen screens and mid-scene glitches.  Still, I thoroughly enjoyed “Radical Wolfe,” a documentary that grew from Michael Lewis’ 2015 Vanity Fair article.  Lewis is a writer whose flame was lit by Tom Wolfe’s torch.

Tom Wolfe was a quiet southern gentleman, who with a younger sister grew up in a home of educated parents.  His father, Tom Sr. was editor of The Southern Planter, an influential agricultural magazine, and his mother, Helen was a landscaped designer.  Tom turned down Princeton University to attend Washington & Lee, where he majored in English and became sports editor of the college newspaper.  He played baseball advancing to a semi-professional team and earned a try-out with the New York Giants.  He was cut after three days.

Wolfe abandoned sports and next enrolled in Yale’s American Studies doctoral program.  After several years of research, Wolfe submitted his doctoral thesis exploring Communist influences on American writers during the 1930s, a subject he knowingly chose to provoke his mentors.  The thesis was savagely rejected, but after rewrites and toning down his florid style, it was accepted and a freshly-minted Dr. Tom entered the real world.

A series of lowly jobs in newspapers over five years eventually landed Wolfe a job at the Herald Tribune, a perennial second-place, we-try-harder competitor to the New York Times. Wolfe developed a special affection for his adopted Big Apple calling it, “pandemonium with a big grin on it.”  There he joined Clay Felker and a team of fresh writers like Jimmy Breslin who embarked on a common quest to make journalism livelier.  In their Sunday supplement, New York, the team produced the “hottest Sunday read in town.”  In America’s biggest metropolis, Wolfe discovered that cities are complex entities and far more than what any one person experiences.  Yet, there’s no way to fully grasp individuals without first understanding how people create their lives and construct their fabrications.  .

It was also in New York during the mid-1960s when Wolfe adopted the clothing style that set him apart from Wall Street bankers to Greenwich Village hippies.  He began wearing white suits that were traditionally worn only during the sultry days of summer.  But Tom Wolfe wore his custom-made, cream-colored suits year-round becoming the snowy-dressed dandy of the Big Apple.  White suits provided the protective armor that Wolfe hid behind when researching his stories.

New Journalism

Wolfe’s New Journalism was a set of writing techniques to lift nonfiction storytelling to an entertaining experience.  He was the maestro among fellow journalistic practitioners like Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese, George Plimpton, Joan Didion, and Rex Reed.  Wolfe explained the story-telling process of New Journalism during a 1987 Rolling Stone interview with Brant Mewborn.  “The first is scene-by-scene construction.  In other words, telling the entire story through a sequence of scenes rather than the simple historical narration.  Second is the use of real dialogue—the more the merrier.  The third, which is the least understood of the techniques, is the use of status details.  That is, noting articles of clothing, manners, the way people treat children, the way they treat servants, etc.  The fourth is the using point of view, which is depicting scenes through a particular pair of eyes.”

I can’t recall when Tom Wolfe first came into my life.  Like many in the late sixties, I heard the phrase “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” bandied about but knew nothing of Ken Kesey’s antics or his psychedelically-inspired Merry Pranksters. Nor was I aware of Wolfe’s send-up of the cocktail party where wealthy socialites joined a get-together with Black Panthers.  I came upon Wolfe while leafing through the pages of Rolling Stone where he wrote the first chapters about how test pilots became astronauts.   The magazine’s publisher, Jann Wenner urged him to start the story, that six years later became “The Right Stuff.”

One of Wolfe’s most controversial works, “Radical Chic” was written in 1970 after he attended a party Leonard Bernstein hosted to introduce New York society to the Black Panthers.  Wolfe’s entree to the party came when he noticed an invitation on David Halberstam’s desk.  He promptly called the RSVP number and announced, “This is Tom Wolfe, and I accept.”  He arrived at the Bernstein’s posh Park Avenue apartment and immediately sought out the party’s hosts, Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, to present himself.

He made no secret of the fact he was collecting notes for a story.  He carried a green steno spiral notebook upon which in bold block letters he’d written, Panther Night at Leonard Bernstein’s.  It was only after he told readers of New York Magazine what he had seen and heard that critics attacked its accuracy. When one of the guests claimed he recorded the affair on a hidden tape recorder, Wolfe was overjoyed.  He hadn’t recorded the event but knew his note-taking must have been precise and accurate if fellow guests falsely believed he did.  The story raised his profile.  But I didn’t read it till a dozen years later.

The Purple Decades

I didn’t fully fall in love with Wolfe and his kaleidoscopic writing style until release of “The Purple Decades,” his greatest hits collection of early works in the Sixties right up until the time of its 1982 release.  That sampling inspired me to read more Tom Wolfe, so I paced through his earlier books.

Two years later Rolling Stone began publishing chapters for his first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Wolfe had frequently bemoaned the decline of American fiction so decided to show the literary world how to capture the vibrancy of New York, the world’s most dynamic city.  In a letter to Wenner, Wolfe proposed submitting serial installments much like how Charles Dickens published many of his novels – in popular magazines. It would be modeled on William Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair.”  From July 1984 to August 1985, each biweekly issue of Rolling Stone arrived in my mailbox with a new chapter that I immediately inhaled.  Wolfe found the pressure of deadlines provided the motivation he hoped for.  He was right, and this reader was hooked.

Back in the Sixties, Wolfe began noticing subcultures of ordinary people who were rarely mentioned in mainstream culture.  His role as a white-suited sociologist allowed Wolfe to blend into these tight social groups, like the custom car crowd from which he produced “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” or the San Diego surfers from which he wrote “The Pump House Gang.”  “What struck me,” he noted, “was how so many people have found such novel ways of extending their ego way out on the best terms available, namely their own.”  Each subculture devised its own hierarchical status structure. For custom car owners it might be the most inventive creation, or for surfers who best epitomized beach culture.

When asked why he wrote, Tom Wolfe usually answered he enjoyed exploring how people sought status in their lives. “I think every living moment of a human being’s life, unless the person is starving or in immediate danger of death, is controlled by a concern for status.”  He developed this theory after studying Max Weber, a German sociologist who wrote the essay, “Class, Status, and Party.”  Wolfe refined Weber’s insights into what he termed the ‘Statusphere.’ He explained people were not competing for prestige with all of society.  Instead, they pursued rank and status within a narrow sphere of their own making, typically friends, co-workers, fellow hobbyists, or other social frameworks where close companionship is found. Most people regard their personal Statusphere as better than all others.

The Human Comedy has never been richer.

The collective insights from status-seeking surveillance fueled his first novel, “The Bonfire of Vanities,” a blast of oxygenated air that captured the social milieu of Manhattan in the 1980s. Wolfe’s characters were composites discovered during years of careful observation and months of research into their lusts and livelihoods.  The novel was phenomenally successful generating $15 million in gross sales, the equivalent of $40 million today.  And what a book it was, Wolfe chuckled, “to produce a movie so bad that it lost nearly $100 million dollars.”  As Tom Wolfe wryly observed about his own bestseller, “The human comedy has never been richer.”

After “Bonfire of the Vanities” elevated Tom Wolfe to the top of the country’s authors, his 1998 follow-up novel, “A Man in Full” landed him on the cover of Time Magazine.  He was now the most famous writer in America.  His publisher was so confident of the book’s sales that more than a million copies were printed before anyone had read a single word.  The story was set in Georgia with a cast of characters, both black and white from all castes of Atlanta’s social and economic classes.  It was a huge success but drew critical reviews from staid authors pushed aside by Wolfe’s popularity.

Particularly aggrieved were John Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer who entered the fracas attacking the novel as “entertainment, not literature.”  Still, Wolfe had the last laugh, amusingly skewering his assailants in a spirited and mocking counter-punch titled, “My Three Stooges.”  The novelist John Gregory Dunne summed up the kerfuffle best, “Wolfe had the capacity to drive otherwise sane and sensible people clear around the bend.”

Wolfe was regularly accused of everything from ignorance to arrogance.  One critic termed Wolfe “the most dangerous writer in America and the one person you don’t invite to your party.”  When asked why some critics despised him, Wolfe responded that he simply pulled away the status-seeking veil for all to see.  He continued, “Intellectuals aren’t used to being written about. When they aren’t taken seriously and become part of the human comedy, they have a tendency to squeal like weenies over an open fire.”  Gay Talese, a fellow New Journalism writer explained some of the contempt directed Wolfe’s way, “Here was a writer who stuck his neck out, criticizing fiction writers and their work.  Then he goes ahead and writes a best-selling novel. He knows he will get killed critically because everyone in the literary establishment will have it in for him.”

About politics, Wolfe said he belonged to the party of opposition and found enemies on both sides of the partisan divide.  But Wolfe didn’t care and quipped, “You’re nobody till somebody hates you.”  He shrugged off flak explaining, “It usually means that I’ve been unorthodox in some way.  I haven’t gone along with the reigning intellectual line.”   When accused of being cynical, racist, and elitist, Wolfe struck back.  “That’s nonsense. I throw the challenge to them: if you think (my writing) is false, go out and do what I did.  Get beyond the cocoon of your apartment and take a look.”

Wolfe has regularly been called America’s leading satirist but always rejected the title.  He emphasized his point was not to satirize, but to detail how people think and act, as he discovered through detailed reporting.  Others found his work transformative. Larry Dietz, a friend and editor observed, “What Tom did with words is what French Impressionists did with color.”

He also cared deeply about freedom of expression.  Some voices in the documentary film suggest that Tom Wolfe might not be published today because he regularly pissed off too many people.  Today’s culture is filled with armies of the righteous, anxious to be offended and wear their moral indignation like a Technicolor dream coat of wounded pride.  But Marshall McLuhan, who Wolfe chronicled in a 1965 essay, issued the best rejoinder, “Moral indignation is the technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.”

In 1996, Tom Wolfe suffered a heart attack that required quintuple bypass surgery.  He was humbled to discover that he too was made of clay. He survived the incident and wrote another five books and numerous magazine articles before dying in May 2018 from an infection.  Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. is buried at Hollywood Cemetery in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia.

He was Tom Wolfe! 

Grandiose, courageous, skilled, and humorous, Wolfe was filled with vim, vigor, vinegar, and vitality.  In death, his work may be neglected, but Wolfe is so good he will no doubt be rediscovered again and again by future generations. He inspired me to read critically and write lavishly.  Though I haven’t one percent of Tom’s skills, like Wolfe, I arise each day thanking God for having been born in the greatest country and the greatest time in the history of the world.

After you finally realize the collective WE are fertile grounds in the Human Comedy, that he so meticulously detailed, take a moment to recite a prayerful thank you for Tom Wolfe and his 88 years of life.  He was unique and unprecedented, a jewel and a gem, a writer like no other, who makes us laugh, and I miss him dearly.  So this essay is my heartfelt “thank you” to a man who first entertained and eventually inspired me to go out into this great big kettle of comic stew and find interesting things to write about.   For there’s no writer more interesting than Tom Wolfe.

Postscript: Two degrees of separation

A decade before his death, my glamorous sister Danica was invited to a tony dinner party at the home of Tom and Meredith Brokaw in their Upper East Side Manhattan apartment.  She walked into a gathering of perhaps 15 guests and spotted Tom dressed in his signature white suit.  “Oh my gosh,” she thought, “My brother should be here.”  Danica knew of my love for Wolfe and could only hope she might speak with him.  It got much better than that.  As the guests were seated at three round dinner tables, she found herself between Tom Wolfe and Diane von Furstenberg, the Belgian fashion designer best known for developing the wrap dress.  The evening proceeded with Danica’s attention raptly fixed on Tom’s every utterance.

At the party’s end, she rushed home and called me to deliver her star sighting and recite everything he’d said.  I didn’t have the presence of mind to write it down and neither did she.  During their conversation, she related my admiration for his work and bragged that I’d read every one of his books.  She boldly asked if he would be so kind as to autograph a copy if it were mailed. He said of course, and Danica secured his address to execute the favor.

I was thrilled with the offer and began thinking about which book to send.  While contemplating my good luck, I became acutely aware of what I was really doing.  What would Tom Wolfe’s finely scripted autograph on the facing page of a book even mean?  Would I casually, while entertaining friends pull it from the bookshelf, open the cover, and reap the astonished envy all present? And by doing so imbue myself with some superior status for possessing such an item?  That I owned a book that upon my death might fetch an extra $10 from a collector, assuming my heirs even looked inside the cover?  Wouldn’t I be reveling in the personal vanity that my literary hero had so expertly exposed in his essays and novels?

The decision came easily, I wouldn’t do it.  Why?  I was embarrassed to exhibit such a personal vanity by trading on the celebrity of an author who warned me against that very trait.  Instead, I quietly sat down and read the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity . . . there is nothing new under the sun.”