Free The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten

materialized at
Esquire
. When the news digests folded, Gingrich hired Hayes as an editorial assistant. “This time,” Gingrich wrote in his memoir,
Nothing but People
, “I took him in like the morning paper, knowing that in a southern liberal who was also a Marine reserve officer I had an extremely rare bird.” Hayes would be “an anvil for which I would have to find a few hammers.”
    Those hammers, as it turned out, would be Felker and Ginzburg. An old friend of Fred Birmingham’s, Ralph Ginzburg was a street-smart striver, a Brooklyn native who had engineered a meteoric rise in the publishing business. As an undergraduate at City College’s school of business, Ginzburg edited the B-school’s newspaper,
The Ticker
, and sold his first piece of writing, an article about Nathan’s hot dog stand on Coney Island, while still in college. At the age of twenty-three, Ginzburg was hired as
Look’s
circulation promotion director, overseeing a $2 million budget and a staff of ten. In 1957 he was given an assignment from
Esquire
, whose offices were just a couple of floors below
Look’s
. The article was called “An Unhurried View of Erotica” and described in graphic detail the erotic literature to be found in the rare-book rooms of the world’s greatest museums.
Esquire
never ran the story, but Fritz Bamberger was impressed with Ginzburg and hired him to be an articles editor.
    Ginzburg, however, thought he was getting Birmingham’s job as top editor; he didn’t realize he was taking a big pay cut from his
Look
job until after he had signed the contract. It would not be the first timethe young editor felt he was getting the bum’s rush from
Esquire
. The same day he was hired, Felker was recruited to be features editor. Ginzburg would be
Esquire’s
articles editor, and Hayes the assistant to the publisher.
    Ginzburg was furious. Not only had he been misled about his job title, but now he would have to share his duties with another editor. With the ambitious Hayes thrown into the mix,
Esquire
suddenly roiled with furious turf battles. All three editors desperately courted Gingrich in an attempt to gain leverage, but the veteran publisher kept himself out of it. “Arnold’s removal from the heat of everyday editorial activity was accented by the physical distance of his office,” Hayes wrote in an unpublished memoir, “a good ways down the hall and nestled securely between the offices of the president and the chairman of the board.”
    Hayes, Ginzburg, and Felker were wary of each other and took pains not to make any rash decisions; one false move, after all, could compromise a potentially promising career at
Esquire
. To Hayes, Felker and Ginzburg were young opportunists, comfortable in the requisite uniform of corporate upward mobility: “They wore the same kind of clothes: button-down shirts, horn-rimmed glasses (it was a short glasses phase for Felker; he wore them the first few weeks and then never again) and Brooks Brothers suits.” In Hayes’s view, Ginzburg was crude and unimaginative; his primary skill involved drumming up provocative cover lines and then matching the headlines with celebrities, who would be paired with ghostwriters to “draft” their stories.
    Felker, on the other hand, was formidable competition. Hayes regarded him as an enterprising editor who was as sturdy as a starched collar, a gadfly with an abundance of intellectual energy and a special talent for collecting important people like Mont Blanc pens. “Clay was always wildly enthusiastic about writers and ideas,” said John Berendt, a former editor at
Esquire
. “He could sniff out a developing story before anyone else. He was always out, going to parties, schmoozing, trying to match the right writers to the right stories. He had his finger on the pulse of things, just an amazing sixth sense about trends.”
    In his memoir
Nothing but People
, Gingrich referred to Felker as “our drinking editor, not because he had a more