The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten Page A
Authors: Marc Weingarten
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism, American, Language Arts & Disciplines, Journalism, Mailer; Norman - Criticism and Interpretation, Wolfe; Tom - Criticism and Interpretation, Didion; Joan - Criticism and Interpretation, American Prose Literature - 20th Century - History and Criticism, Capote; Truman - Criticism and Interpretation, Reportage Literature; American - History and Criticism, Journalism - United States - History - 20th Century
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reporting over think pieces and enjoyed the work of such dependable contributors as political correspondent Richard Rovere and Tom Morgan, whose Susskind piece “put my hair on end.” As for Mailer, Dobell found him brilliant but long-winded: “He took his metaphysical insights to be God’s truth.”
Now that Hayes was securely in command, he had a few new writers he wanted to give a try. One of them, Gay Talese, was a
New York Times
reporter who was eager to spread his wings, push himself beyond the two- to three-column limitations of general assignment work, and really expand a story as far as it was willing to go.
The son of southern Italian immigrants, Gaetano “Gay” Talese was born on February 7, 1932, in Ocean City, New Jersey, near Atlantic City. Ocean City in the 1930s was a polyglot town where Irish coexisted with Italians, Catholics with Methodists, but there was little cultural common ground, and so little ethnic archipelagos formed. Talese was reared as an Italian Catholic, but he attended an Irish Catholic school. His father, Joseph, was a tailor and the owner of a dry cleaning business who dressed elegantly even for breakfast, thus bringing “the rakish fashion of the Continental boulevardier to the comparatively continent men of the south Jersey shore.” His mother, Catherine, a stylish and fastidious but emotionally distant matriarch, ran a dress shop under the Taleses’ apartment.
Talese at an early age was steeped in the sartorial codes of class and the ways in which wardrobe can connote sophistication; he dressed himself in suits and ties as early as high school. Thus he was cast out as a snob, reinforcing his own feelings of cultural isolation. “I was olive-skinned in a freckle-faced town,” Talese wrote in his 1992 book
Unto the Sons
, “and I felt unrelated even to my parents, especially my father, who was indeed a foreigner—an unusual man in dress and manner, to whom I bore no physical resemblance and with whom I could never identify.”
“My father was a miserable man during World War II,” said Talese in an interview. “His brothers were in the neo-fascist army in Italy, but my father had a strong sense of patriotism. He joined a citizens’ committee of patrolmen who looked out for enemy ships along the Jersey shore at night.” Talese remained aloof from his volatile father during his childhood. “My father was a total prick all day long, but he’d go to restaurants with his friends and he’d be very happy.”
Joseph ensured that his son, an indifferent student at best, made it all the way though parochial school by not charging the priests for dry cleaning their vestments; in exchange, Gay would get promoted to the next grade with an administrative nudge.
Sports saved his miserable childhood. Talese played baseball on his high school team and assiduously followed the fortunes of the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Giants in the city’s tabloid newspapers. That’s when Talese became addicted to newsprint. At fifteen, Talese began covering his baseball team for the local paper, the
Ocean City Sentinel Ledger
. After only seven articles, Talese’s assignment was expanded when he wasgiven a column to cover general high school news for the paper. Talese’s “High School Highlights” ranged across any number of topics, making it a kind of running commentary on the New Jersey enclave’s academic life. Talese was free to write what he pleased, and he discovered that he could file quickly on tight deadlines. From 1947 to 1949 Talese wrote over three hundred columns.
He barely made it through high school academically, and so undistinguished was his academic record that even the principal advised against college. He was rejected by every local university, and all hope for higher education seemed lost until the family doctor pulled a few strings and got young Gay into his alma mater, the University of Alabama. But Talese could see the way clear to a path now; there was no
Now that Hayes was securely in command, he had a few new writers he wanted to give a try. One of them, Gay Talese, was a
New York Times
reporter who was eager to spread his wings, push himself beyond the two- to three-column limitations of general assignment work, and really expand a story as far as it was willing to go.
The son of southern Italian immigrants, Gaetano “Gay” Talese was born on February 7, 1932, in Ocean City, New Jersey, near Atlantic City. Ocean City in the 1930s was a polyglot town where Irish coexisted with Italians, Catholics with Methodists, but there was little cultural common ground, and so little ethnic archipelagos formed. Talese was reared as an Italian Catholic, but he attended an Irish Catholic school. His father, Joseph, was a tailor and the owner of a dry cleaning business who dressed elegantly even for breakfast, thus bringing “the rakish fashion of the Continental boulevardier to the comparatively continent men of the south Jersey shore.” His mother, Catherine, a stylish and fastidious but emotionally distant matriarch, ran a dress shop under the Taleses’ apartment.
Talese at an early age was steeped in the sartorial codes of class and the ways in which wardrobe can connote sophistication; he dressed himself in suits and ties as early as high school. Thus he was cast out as a snob, reinforcing his own feelings of cultural isolation. “I was olive-skinned in a freckle-faced town,” Talese wrote in his 1992 book
Unto the Sons
, “and I felt unrelated even to my parents, especially my father, who was indeed a foreigner—an unusual man in dress and manner, to whom I bore no physical resemblance and with whom I could never identify.”
“My father was a miserable man during World War II,” said Talese in an interview. “His brothers were in the neo-fascist army in Italy, but my father had a strong sense of patriotism. He joined a citizens’ committee of patrolmen who looked out for enemy ships along the Jersey shore at night.” Talese remained aloof from his volatile father during his childhood. “My father was a total prick all day long, but he’d go to restaurants with his friends and he’d be very happy.”
Joseph ensured that his son, an indifferent student at best, made it all the way though parochial school by not charging the priests for dry cleaning their vestments; in exchange, Gay would get promoted to the next grade with an administrative nudge.
Sports saved his miserable childhood. Talese played baseball on his high school team and assiduously followed the fortunes of the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Giants in the city’s tabloid newspapers. That’s when Talese became addicted to newsprint. At fifteen, Talese began covering his baseball team for the local paper, the
Ocean City Sentinel Ledger
. After only seven articles, Talese’s assignment was expanded when he wasgiven a column to cover general high school news for the paper. Talese’s “High School Highlights” ranged across any number of topics, making it a kind of running commentary on the New Jersey enclave’s academic life. Talese was free to write what he pleased, and he discovered that he could file quickly on tight deadlines. From 1947 to 1949 Talese wrote over three hundred columns.
He barely made it through high school academically, and so undistinguished was his academic record that even the principal advised against college. He was rejected by every local university, and all hope for higher education seemed lost until the family doctor pulled a few strings and got young Gay into his alma mater, the University of Alabama. But Talese could see the way clear to a path now; there was no
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