As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1979 book The Right Stuff, the American press up to the early 1960s had the tone of “The Victorian Gent,” telling Rolling Stone at the time, “I say Victorian gentleman, because it’s he who was the constant hypocrite, who insisted on public manifestations of morality that he would never insist upon privately in his own life. And I think that one tends to do that on a newspaper.”
Wolfe was the spearhead of a movement he called “the New Journalism” to radically change that. Five years after his death at age 88, he is finally the subject of a brisk 76-minute-long documentary titled Radical Wolfe, directed by Richard Dewey. Wolfe says in the new documentary that, “The New Journalism is the use of every effective technique in nonfiction.” The result was, from about 1965 to 1980, an explosion of nonfiction journalism from the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Michael Herr, and Joan Didion, each of whose writing style was anything but Victorian.
In the 1970s, he took a 1972 article he was assigned by Rolling Stone, covering the last moon landing, and scaled the concept up massively to produce 1979’s The Right Stuff, his look at Chuck Yeager and the original Mercury astronauts. Because of the amount of reporting and interviewing he believed the project required, he ended up publishing three books in the interim to improve his cashflow, two of which were anthologies of his magazine articles, and one was a completely new work, The Painted Word, his 1975 full-on assault on the absurdities of modern art. (Wolfe would perform a similar demolition of modern architecture in 1981 with From Bauhaus to Our House.)
In the 1980s, Wolfe did a complete 180-degree turn, and brought all of his skills at reportage into fiction, with his look at life at very top and bottom of Manhattan, The Bonfire of the Vanities. Written after extensive reporting on Wall Street and in the Bronx, Bonfire established Wolfe as a hugely popular novelist, and he would publish only one more non-fiction book and one more anthology of his articles before his death in 2018 at age 88.
Someone from the younger generation who was influenced by Wolfe’s New Journalism is Michael Lewis, whose 2015 Vanity Fair article on Wolfe forms Radical Wolfe’s outline. He appears on-camera throughout the documentary, interspersed with the voice of Jon Hamm, who reads (with a somewhat aloof and distant tone) key passages from Wolfe’s articles and books, and of course, plenty of footage of Wolfe, who while a quiet and thoughtful man, reveled in the attention the near-omnipresent white suit brought him, even if the image and branding seemed to dramatically outpace him by the 1990s.
That Party at Lenny’s
One of the few dissenting voices in the documentary comes from Jamal Joseph, former Black Panther now a professor at Columbia University, who strongly objects to how Wolfe portrayed the Black Panthers in his classic 1970 New York magazine article Radical Chic, and how he portrayed race relations in The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987. But Joseph was no shrinking violet in the 1970s, Bruce Bawer writes in his review of Radical Wolfe in the American Spectator:
Dewey does devote ample time to Wolfe’s classic 1970 essay “Radical Chic,” about Leonard Bernstein’s Jan. 14 fundraising party for the Black Panthers — which Wolfe brilliantly immortalized as the ultimate example of foolish rich people coddling barbarians who were out to destroy them. But I confess that I absolutely hate the way that Dewey handles this episode. For some reason, he considers it appropriate to challenge Wolfe’s take on Bernstein’s party. We’re told that Wolfe, by writing “Radical Chic,” “crossed the line … into cruelty” and was “hurtful.” Hogwash. All he did was report on what he witnessed — and what he witnessed that evening was utterly abominable.
Dewey actually interviews Jamal Joseph, a former Black Panther who is identified onscreen as a professor at Columbia University. Joseph says that he “was released as a result of that fundraiser” and accuses Wolfe of “trivializing” and putting “a derisive label” on the Bernsteins’ party, which, he says, “was good work because consciousness was being raised.” Dewey provides no pushback against this nonsense. A more responsible filmmaker would have made it crystal clear that the Black Panthers were murderous terrorists, would have mentioned that Joseph spent six years in Leavenworth, and would have noted that Joseph’s faculty position, far from being evidence (as is implied here) that he’s cleaned up his act, is one more example (Angela Davis and Bill Ayers being others) of the obscene welcome given to violent left-wing thugs by top universities in the 1970s and thereafter.
“Tom Wolfe,” somebody complains in this film, “makes the Bernsteins look ridiculous.” No, they made themselves look ridiculous — and far worse.
Wolfe himself told George Neumayr of the American Spectator in 2005, that “what I wrote about the Black Panthers at Leonard Bernstein’s was taken as a reactionary gesture, but I had no political motive. I just thought it was a scream, because it was so illogical by all ordinary thinking. To think that somebody living in an absolutely stunning duplex on Park Avenue could be having in all these guys who were saying, ‘We will take everything away from you if we get the chance,’ which is what their program spelled out, was the funniest thing I had ever witnessed.”
Behind Enemy Lines
As fellow Instapundit contributor John Tierney asks about Wolfe at City Journal, “How Did He Get Away With It?” How did he smuggle conservative ideas behind far-left enemy lines at New York and Rolling Stone magazines and onto the talk shows hosted by liberals such as Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Dick Cavett? Tierney writes:
So how did he prevail? One answer in the film is that it was a different era. The national media weren’t so polarized. Newspapers and television networks still depended on advertising to Republicans; magazine editors and book publishers weren’t terrified of their woke staffs. Talk-show hosts still aimed for a bipartisan audience and invited authors to sit on their couches, as shown in the footage of Wolfe doing star turns as Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin, and David Letterman sang his praises.
Another answer is that Wolfe was politically deft. He championed conservative notions of patriotism and morality, but avoided partisan politics, which he considered a boring backwater. (His editor at the Washington Post was amazed that, unlike the other reporters, he had no ambition to cover the White House and Capitol Hill.)
Wolfe told an interviewer in 1980 that he was astounded that Hunter S. Thompson would waste his time writing about politics:
I think writing about politics was probably one of the biggest mistakes Hunter ever made. I believe he is interested in it, which astounds me. I think his gifts, which are tremendous, are wasted on American politics, except possibly an event, like Watergate—which he didn’t write about, I don’t think. Because this country is so stable politically. It really is an extremely stable country…That’s why I’m not too concerned with who wins in 1980.
In October of 2012, while promoting what would be his last novel, Back to Blood, which focused on immigration, which has since become a hot button issue for many Americans, he told USA Today:
He defines himself as “one of the most democratic — with a small D — persons in the land.” As far back as he recalls, he has voted for the winning presidential candidate — Republicans, including George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and Democrats, including Obama in 2008 and Bill Clinton in 1996 — with one exception. In 1992, he says he voted for George H.W. Bush, who lost to Clinton.
“I’m not saying I always made the right choice,” he adds, and won’t disclose his vote next month, quoting Orwell: “It’s impossible to enjoy — the key word is enjoy — the writings of someone who you take political issue with.”
That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake White-Suited Streamline Dandy
Radical Wolfe ticks most of the boxes of Wolfe’s career, with vignettes that will be quite familiar to serious Wolfe-holics (like, err, me). How the first article in what we now know as Wolfe’s style came to be, when during the 1962-’63 New York newspaper strike, in order to make some money Wolfe sold Esquire on the idea of his covering the world of car customizers and hot rodders. But after going out to California and spending a month interviewing young men in the world of hot rodding. But back in New York, when it came to actually write the article, Wolfe blocked.
Unfortunately, Esquire had already spent thousands of dollars on double-page full color photos of the cars for the magazine, and couldn’t afford to cancel the article. So, his editor, Byron Dobell, told him to write up his notes and he’d assign the story to another writer. Wolfe wrote fifty pages of notes for over eight hours and submitted 50 pages worth of notes. Dobell deleted the “Dear Byron” opening and the “Sorry for the trouble. Yours truly, Tom” ending, and otherwise published the “letter” as is. “It’s a masterpiece. This is unbelievable. We’ve never seen anything like this,” Dubell says in Radical Wolfe.
The article, with the somber, subdued title of “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)…” was immensely popular with Esquire’s readers and Wolfe’s star began to rapidly ascend. Because Wolfe was such a disciplined interviewee, and repeated the old stories over and over, with almost always the same words each time, the director wisely overlaps duplicate lines of Wolfe telling this story multiple times.
The story of how the white suit became Wolfe’s famous trademark is also dealt with, of course. As Wolfe told C-Span’s Brian Lamb in December of 2004:
Wolfe: I finally got a job in New York as a reporter. I had been on two previous papers [including] the Washington Post. I finally got this job; it was June of 1962. Summer was coming on. Those days, a reporter had to wear a jacket and a tie. Today, reporters all look like they’re waiting in a soup kitchen line. I had only two jackets to my name.
So I went into a store, and I bought a white suit for the summer, which in Richmond, Virginia, where I grew up, was not an odd thing. But it was made of some heavy material, silk tweed. And I couldn’t wear it in the summer. So, I started wearing it about this time of year. It was conventionally cut, but it was white. And this annoyed people no end. Now I why I enjoyed that, I don’t know. But it made getting dressed in the morning a lot more fun than it had been.
Then finally, I wrote a book – or rather I published a collection, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. I was not used to being interviewed. I was used to interviewing other people. I was speechless. And I really didn’t say very much, but all the articles would say what an interesting man, he wears white suits. So, it took the place of a personality for many years.
Lamb: How many of them do you have?
Wolfe: I used to have a lot of them. I’ve got about 22 now.
While the documentary does a serviceable and enjoyable job of hitting the highlights of Wolfe’s lengthy career and his legendary idiosyncrasies, it’s at a serious disadvantage covering Wolfe’s actual prose. As with the movie versions of The Right Stuff and (especially) The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe’s ultra-caffeinated writing style, while a joy to read, is impossible to capture on film, even, in the case of Radical Wolfe, with Don Draper himself pitching in. (Perhaps the documentary makers thought they needed someone known for playing a Manhattan transplant with his own sartorial splendor to read Wolfe’s writing.) But at least Radical Wolfe will help get Wolfe’s writing and ideas back into the limelight. Lord knows a nation that’s nowhere near as stable as it was in 1980 could use them.
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