Tom Wolfe had walked into the shabby wreckage of the Trib newsroom for the first time in 1962, looked around and thought, Yeah, I can beat these guys. “These guys” were the writers engaged in what he called the secret competition in “the main Tijuana bullring” for feature writers. In less than three years that would come true and, as Vanity Fair reported in 2015, soon he would become a cult figure. The white suit he purchased out of necessity—he had no suit, it was summer, all the paper’s writers wore suits, and white was what you wore in the summer back where he was from in Virginia—would become a trademark.
The Trib offices were at 230 West 41st Street and the fifth-floor newsroom was a collection of mismatched chairs—some with straight backs, others with half-broken backs, some on squeaky wheels, others on scarred legs. This could be a description of the collection of writers hunched over black Bakelite phones, already on their way to becoming antiques, many in white shirts, most with sleeves rolled up. Cigarette smoking was encouraged, it seemed.
The paper was the Darwinian result of the 1924 merger of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune (est. 1841) and James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald (est. 1835). The papers had been born at a time when the vying voices that came off the New York presses were as cacophonous as those of the twenty-first century’s digital battlers. Among them were Hearst’s New York Journal, Pulitzer’s New York World, Jarvis’s The New York Times. The Trib would survive for another 42-plus years.
By the time Wolfe walked in, envisioning that he would be the brightest star in the firmament, the firmament, it seemed, had already been home to everyone who was anyone in the press, from John Steinbeck, who worked as a newspaper reporter long before he became a Nobel prize winner, to Judith Crist. From Homer Bigart to Walter Kerr and Red Smith. Novelist, movie critic, war correspondent, theater critic, sportswriter, big names then at a good, solid, and unfailingly Republican newspaper. Though the writing could be bright and powerful, the paper was as dull and gray as the grimy newsroom.
By the time Breslin walked into the paper’s first-floor Rathskeller, a bar named Bleeck’s at 213 West 40th Street, he was carrying the reputation he was earning from his book on the Mets baseball team and the arrogance that had started to swell inside him to proportions that were inverse to his sense of insecurity.
Waiting inside was one of America’s richest men, John Hay Whitney—or Jock, as he was known—the proprietor of the paper that he had purchased in 1958 and intended to reshape in look and feel and make a home to vivid, intelligent, sharply honed journalism. He had read the book, he had the recommendation of the Mets’ owner, his sister, and he had a very thick checkbook.
“You can’t afford to pay me enough,” Breslin nonetheless dared. He met the paper’s editor, Jim Bellows, and of course he took the job. Soon enough he would be making more than $125,000 a year.
The personalities at the paper where Breslin and Wolfe intended to take on the world would become marquee names in news in their own right.
Dick Schaap: Schaap came to the paper as a sort of batman to General Breslin, who he began working for when he was fifteen and his general was twenty. He became a fabled City Editor. Then he surrendered that all-important helm and went and slid down into a broken chair where he began a career that would include writing or editing thirty-three books and winning six Emmy awards. He would memorialize himself later in a book he titled Dick Schaap as Told to Dick Schaap. The book, his IMDb entry notes, is in some ways a tribute to his habit of name dropping, containing 531 references to celebrities.
Don Forst: Forst was a son of the 1930s and the Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Jewish middle classes. An assistant City Editor and the husband of food critic Gael Greene, Forst later would claim to the author of a profile that he got into journalism because of a “pretty girl” at the enrollment table at the University of Vermont. While at that university, he exposed a student rite of performing in blackface. Later in life, when he was an Editor-in-Chief, but still a man who liked to break the furniture, he would ask his own City Editor to tape a particular picture of him to the underside of his top desk drawer, to be used if needed for his obituary. It featured Forst in bellbottom pants with a wide belt and a mop of brown hair. It very much looked as he looked during this era—a moment in time. He carried the mop of hair with the flip of a bang until the end, the way some men might wear a jacket that they purchased at the height of their powers.
Dick Wald: Wald, the paper’s final managing editor, was hardly shy. He had as a junior foreign correspondent taken on the paper’s editor-in-chief at a party the Whitneys hosted at the Paris Ritz. In a fight over coverage, he shouted down the innovative Editor, John Denson: “You don’t know how to edit.” According to Richard Kluger, the biographer of the Herald Tribune, the full charge was that John Denson diminished the role of his own correspondents by using wire copy that provided more sensational accounts of the news. Denson was the penultimate innovative editor at the paper, trying every magic trick he had to boost readership. The combative Wald was not fired for the outburst. The young man was already a favorite of Whitney, and they developed a lifelong friendship. Wald became the last living senior editor of the paper.
Jim Bellows: The man who succeeded John Denson as Editor was unquestionably a gifted one, as summed up in the title of his autobiography, The Last Editor: How I Saved The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times from Dullness and Complacency. The title was cheeky, but not entirely tongue in cheek. Working at the Trib, the Washington Star, and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, his stewardship of these lower-circulation papers pushed the market leaders to be more creative. The title, it was quipped, also may have been the longest complete sentence ever composed by Bellows, whose gift was creating the atmosphere for success through vague, stuttering oracular half-phrases that encouraged massive confidence in the writers he hired.
Clay Felker: The man who would transform the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, New York, was, were you to believe Bellows’s facile sentence, hired because he was a man about town. He was one. He was also as gifted an editor as he was tall, handsome, and seductive. He was known for a booming tenor, he was described as “superhuman” in his animation, and he just happened within a few short years to completely change the face of American magazine journalism in the twentieth century. Felker loved to dance through the corridors of society and power. He loved the canapés of trends that he could turn into journalism. He had sharp cuffs, perfect collar points, and an amazing smile. He used them all. When they failed to win him the editorship of Esquire magazine and he lost the corporate in-fight, he took Bellows’s offer to come and help figure out how to bring life to a stale Sunday magazine.
There was a quiet man in the newsroom, too. His name was David Laventhol. He sniffled a lot. He would replace Schaap as city editor, he would be teased by Forst and Schaap for his lack of knowledge of New York and would take his sniffle with him and go on to become the publisher of the LA Times and the president of its parent Times Mirror Company.
He told one of his city editors once that it was the best job he ever had. He declined an offer to trade his stock options to get his old job back. He was busy, having helped give birth to the next great innovation in American newspapering, New York Newsday.
They of course saw themselves, collectively, as a hot burning sun that would shed heat and light on the world. They actually were reimagining a paper that already had shed plenty of light, if sometimes that light peeked out from its dull overall layout.
Trib alum Homer Bigart, who won two Pulitzers and was a brave and powerful frontline war correspondent, left for The New York Times in 1955. He summed up the paper’s effect on its inhabitants, according to Sam Roberts, who once had been a campus correspondent for the Trib:
When Homer Bigart, a famous World War II correspondent and another Trib alumnus who joined The Times, died in 1991, Clifton Daniel, a former Times managing editor, recalled: “It seemed to me that he always looked down on The Times, even when he worked there. Its main fault, in his eyes, was that it wasn’t the Trib.”
Sam, who recalled earning $20 as a campus correspondent at that paper, wrote this in March 2013, at the moment when the International Herald Tribune was to be renamed the International New York Times, ending the last vestige of what Greeley and Bennett had created. Bigart’s paper was The Paper, as Richard Kluger aptly titled his book on the Herald Tribune—as if it were the only one, even before all the innovations. A writer’s paper. A citizens’ paper. A democracy’s paper.
These “I”-minded newspaper reporters and editors were simply the new kids in town, brought in by Jock Whitney. Whitney, if any one person apart from the editors and reporters, deserves much of the credit for saving the Trib from complacency, and for highlighting the quality of its writers. It was, ultimately, his vision. Through his new editors and writers, he found new readers. He drank with his writers and pushed them to use their vocal cords. They did this even as the Trib headed toward that thing its linotype operators looked out for as they turned the words on the flimsy copy paper into the lead that would be inked and turned into the paper’s columns: -30-, the sign that a story was over.
John Hay Whitney, publisher and owner, had an ego on par with that of any of his editorial stars. He was one of the ten wealthiest men in the world. He romanced Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Bennett, Paulette Goddard, and Joan Crawford. But, it was said, his greatest love and the one on which he lavished the greatest attention was his newspaper.
He was a champion polo player. He made one of his homes on the Green Tree Estate on Long Island’s Gold Coast, had one ancestor on the Mayflower and another who arrived in America late, in 1635. He invested in Technicolor; contributed half the money, according to published accounts, to option Gone With The Wind; and with Benno Schmidt, Sr., founded the first venture capital fund. Jock Whitney also would turn out to be one of the best newspaper owners in US history.
He wasn’t quite hands-off. He had a vision. It was one of quality. He aggressively sought those who could help realize it. Then he did not meddle as his team executed it, even when his team and its antics riled members of the establishment to which he and his long list of private clubs firmly belonged.
Together they invented this thing later called “The New Journalism.” What they thought they were doing was taking a dull, if well-considered, newspaper and proving (as one of the paper’s advertising slogans said) that a good newspaper did not have to be dull. Every day they tried to put out a good, interesting newspaper. They were creative. They were aggressive. They were storytellers.
“I’ve already talked about the special brilliance of Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin,” Bellows said in his book. “They appealed to two different kinds of New Yorkers—Tom reached the avant-garde and the sophisticates. Jimmy reached the middle class and the people who didn’t have representation.
“Jimmy’s was visceral writing . . .”
This paper, then, was Jimmy Breslin’s spiritual home. It was the place where he was encouraged to tell the truth. It was a place where his repeated tantrums and outbursts were tolerated and where they grew. Where he became known in some circles as an enfant terrible. In the world Breslin wrote about, he more probably would have been known as a “juvie recidivist,” a young career criminal.
“I don’t think he lacked for ego . . . but other newspapers would never let anybody work that way . . . like Jimmy . . . because the results were always horrible . . . it required talent . . . you couldn’t just say, ‘write what you want,’ ” Tom Wolfe said.
“He was the greatest writer on deadline. And I see him . . . he was about 30 feet from where I sat and there would be these bowling balls with smoke coming out of him. He would always . . . and he got to a point where he would go up to the city desk and say, what have you got for me today, and if there was a story he thought was interesting he would take it, he won’t just do a column on the story. What Breslin wrote was ‘the story.’ ”
“Jimmy was a really good . . . he did five days a week—his column. These were reporting columns. I never remember him speaking off the top of his head—unless it was about his wife,” Wolfe told an interviewer.
“He would start the week with two or three good ideas . . . he said Thursday, ‘I was really sucking air,’ and he said ‘On Friday I would just open a vein and let it splash on the paper,’ ” said Wolfe. Like Breslin, Wolfe could steal with both hands and he did not credit Red Smith, the great sportswriter who also worked at the paper, with the phrase.
In a 1972 article in New York magazine (a magazine that arose out of the by-then long gone Herald’s Sunday magazine, helmed by Felker and midwifed by Breslin, who held the lofty title Vice President) titled “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe,” Wolfe explained this thing he, Breslin, Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese, Pete Hamill and Murray Kempton did this way:
I doubt if many of the aces I will be extolling in this story went into journalism with the faintest notion of creating a “new” journalism, a “higher” journalism, or even a mildly improved variety. I know they never dreamed that anything they were going to write for newspapers or magazines would wreak such evil havoc in the literary world . . . causing panic, dethroning the novel as the number one literary genre, starting the first new direction in American literature in half a century . . . Nevertheless, that is what has happened.
Wolfe wonderfully explains how these aces often went into feature writing as if they were checking into a motel on the way to that dream in the tournament of champions: The Great American Novel.
And yet in the early 1960s a curious new notion, just hot enough to inflame the ego, had begun to intrude into the tiny confines of the feature statusphere. It was in the nature of a discovery. This discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would . . . read like a novel. Like a novel, if you get the picture. This was the sincerest form of homage to The Novel and to those greats, the novelists, of course. Not even the journalists who pioneered in this direction doubted for a moment that the novelist was the reigning literary artist, now and forever. All they were asking for was the privilege of dressing up like him . . . until the day when they themselves would work up their nerve and go into the shack and try it for real . . . They were dreamers, all right, but one thing they never dreamed of. They never dreamed of the approaching irony. They never guessed for a minute that the work they would do over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature’s main event.
Wolfe goes on as only this master can do. He spells out his confidence in Gay Talese’s reporting in his account of Joe Louis growing older, and swats away all the protestations that these new journalists were “piping” their quotes, sucking them out of the opium pipes of their imagination. He singles out the columnists of old for having been good reporters turned as a reward by their editors into bad columnists who ingested The Times and then pundited out their words. And he goes on so beautifully and gets back to Breslin:
Breslin made a revolutionary discovery. He made the discovery that it was feasible for a columnist to leave the building . . . Breslin would go up to the City Editor and ask what stories and assignments were coming up, choose one, go out, leave the building, cover the story as a reporter, and write about it in his column. If the story were big enough, his column would start on page one instead of inside. As obvious as this system may sound, it was unheard of among newspaper columnists, whether local or national . . .
Breslin worked like a Turk. He would be out all day covering a story, come back in at 4 P.M. or so and sit down at a desk in the middle of the city room. It was quite a show. He was a good-looking Irishman with a lot of black hair and a great wrestler’s gut. When he sat down at his typewriter he hunched himself over into a shape like a bowling ball. He would start drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until vapor started drifting off his body. He looked like a bowling ball fueled with liquid oxygen. Thus fired up, he would start typing. I’ve never seen a man who could write so well against a daily deadline.
That was Wolfe on Breslin and New Journalism.
Breslin, as he preferred, was succinct and used no four- or five-syllable words. At various times he cited John O’Hara, Paul Gallico and others who were great storytellers. But he always got to the point: He said journalism had simply forgotten storytelling and he and Wolfe and Talese “We were first at bringing back the past.”
“The idea that he and Wolfe started something new makes Breslin shake with laughter,” Mike O’Neill, then Editor-in-Chief of the New York Daily News, wrote in 1984 in The World According to Breslin. “So it was typical of him to reject any credit for a new journalism which he said must have been developed about the same time as the typewriter . . . ‘But no one was doing it when I started. That’s why everyone thought it was new.’ ”