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

editorial flow. “Harold’s mantra was always tone, tone, tone,” said Berendt. “Harold was much more methodical, but not quite as quixotic as Felker,” said former contributing writer Brock Brower. “Clay would get an idea, press for the execution of it, and be off on the next thing, while Harold would always chaperone a piece though. Gingrich loved it, of course, because it stimulated the hell out of choices for the magazine. Harold would have his list, Clay would knock it down, and vice versa. They hated each other in the best of all possible ways.”
    Among the three editors, it became apparent in short order that Hayes and Felker were the hungier, more ambitious upstarts; thus, Ginzburg was the first to go. After he suggested that
Esquire
revert the rights of his erotica story to him in lieu of a pay raise, Ginzburg expanded the piece into a twenty-thousand-word essay and published it in book form with an introduction from drama critic George Jean Nathan.
Esquire
was uneasy about the enterprise from the start—they didn’t want one of their editors to be so closely associated with such an unseemly piece—and when Ginzburg went on Mike Wallace’s show
Nightbeat
to promote the book he was fired by John Smart. “I wasdepressed,” said Ginzburg. “I thought I was doing some good work for the magazine, but the termination forced me to become my own publisher.” Ginzburg would sell three hundred thousand copies of
An Unhurried View of Erotica
, but he would pay a dear price for success by serving eight months in jail for violating federal obscenity laws.
    Felker and Hayes remained locked in mortal combat, but the push and pull of their energies began to yield some creative dividends in
Esquire
during the early sixties. The magazine was inching away from the innocuous celebrity profiles and sporting-life features and moving toward venturesome territory. Like two political adversaries from different parties who agree on the issues but have to manufacture dissent in order to distinguish themselves, Felker and Hayes were of the same mind about the editorial direction of the magazine—namely, that
Esquire
had to move beyond transcribed interviews with expository filler, or the “pictured essays” that the magazine liked to run with titles such as “How to Tell a Rich Girl” and “Castles for Rent.” Gingrich was already making the magazine more of a repository for serious critical thought, hiring Dwight Macdonald to review films, Kingsley Amis to cover “art films,” and Dorothy Parker to critique the latest fiction. Felker brought his college buddy Peter Maas into the fold to write features, as well as sociologist Paul Goodman, whose 1960 book,
Growing Up Absurd
, had mapped the incipient rebellion against established values that would culminate in the 1960s counterculture. Quality fiction had remained a constant, with contributions from such luminaries as William Styron, John Cheever, and Robert Penn Warren.
    But Felker and Hayes wanted to move in another direction with the magazine’s journalism. At Duke, Felker had trolled the library stacks in search of exciting precedents for him to follow at the
Chronicle
and came across Civil War-era back issues of the
New York Herald Tribune
, the great newspaper edited by the social reformist Horace Greeley.
    “I spent the whole afternoon reading these things; I didn’t even realize where the time went, because they were so gripping,” said Felker. “They were written in a narrative structure. And I realized that they were so much more interesting than the newspaper stories I had grown up reading.” The stories, with their vivid descriptions of life in the trenches, changed Felker irrevocably. American journalism had to move in this direction; reporters should be meticulous and exacting when describingevents, have a novelist’s flair for language, and enliven their stories with headlong momentum.
    Ironically, the first great journalist of the Felker-Hayes era