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

agile elbow that any of the rest of us, but simply because he was so party prone. Clay managed to get to more parties in a week than anybody else in a month. But in relationto the needs of the magazine at that moment he couldn’t have made a better investment of his time.”
    Ginzburg was thoroughly unimpressed by Felker. “Clay would swipe ideas away from me,” he said. “We would bat around ideas prior to meeting with Gingrich, then we’d go into the meeting and I’d pitch my idea. Gingrich would say, ‘Why are you pitching this to me? Clay already told me about it.’ I got on quickly to this. I played the game, but it was very ugly.” As for Hayes, “he was an amanuensis for Gingrich; he was no editor. He was extremely hard-driving and ambitious, though. He should have been the sales manager of US Steel. He had no ability whatsoever to come up with ideas.”
    With Henry Wolf temporarily setting up shop in the vacant editor in chief’s office, the three subeditors fervently jockeyed for the top position. Editorial meetings, which were held each Friday afternoon in Gingrich’s office, became claw-and-scratch confrontations, with no clear consensus emerging as to which stories would ultimately make it into the magazine. The stories were supposed to be ratified by a vote between the three senior editors, fiction editor Rust Hills, and copy editor Dave Solomon, but according to Gingrich, it all came down to “a test of lung power, to see who could shout everybody else down.”
    Gingrich, for his part, kept himself at a remove from the power grabs that would occur after meetings. More often than not, the weekly editorial meetings were exercises in futility. It was often left for fiction editor Rust Hill to cast the deciding vote on which stories made the cut. When the subeditors decided, for the sake of propriety, to hold preliminary meetings prior to the official meeting, they nearly came to blows. The end result of this furious lunge for magazine space was a large pile of assigned but unpublished manuscripts.
    Hayes and Felker’s battle for editorial control was a clash of temperments. Hayes was a somewhat shy and reticent personality who cultivated a hail-fellow-well-met conviviality in the office, often inviting fellow editors and writers into his office for drinks on Friday afternoon. Felker maintained a more flinty abrasiveness; his editorial approach was more hit-and-run. While no one ever denied his unparalleled ability to weed out story ideas from his own social calendar, he often deferred to his writers to carry the ball. Felker would get wildly enthusiastic about a story but then move on to the next idea before properly nurturing theinitial notion. “Follow-through was not something on which Felker placed a lot of emphasis,” said John Berendt. “He had an inquisitiveness about things that weren’t necessarily fully formed, which didn’t make him a great manager. His office was a complete mess. He never knew where anything was. But they both were geniuses, just in different ways. Harold was not the kind of guy to pick up after Felker, and vice versa.”
    Felker’s temper turned off more than a few staff members. “Clay would fly off the handle, he would really scream,” said Berendt. “Harold didn’t scream, he just fired off blistering memos. If staff members came in late to work, he would just make them generate ten story ideas. Hayes had a kind of cold fury, where Felker would pop off.”
    Even though Felker wasn’t the most rigorous line editor, he had a knack for story structure, for finding the lead of a story buried in the twentieth paragraph of a piece. “What Clay did was very mysterious to me,” said writer Patricia Bosworth, one of Felker’s many protegés. “He was very much a conceptualist, and it always worked so beautifully.”
    Hayes was more inclined to take the long view with the magazine, generating a package of stories that would add up to a consistent tone and smooth