Bonfire of the Vanities, a Sequel

When Tom Wolfe dramatized the Age of Greed in the 1980s, his novel satirizing the downfall of a Wall Street Master of the Universe was not taken as prophecy, but reality is overtaking his art.

Now David Brooks, the New York Times pop sociologist in residence, is declaring that "after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules.

"Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by...Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants" who "get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held."

Brooks exaggerates, of course, but the trend is undeniable. Automakers flying private jets to ask for government handouts, huge bonuses for Wall Street bunglers and $35,000 commodes for an executive washroom are inflaming a public beset by job losses, home foreclosures and shrinking retirement plans.

The automakers, no matter how badly they have mismanaged their industry, are still in the business of producing something to be used. Their Wall Street counterparts, on the other hand, have been engaged in making huge amounts of money by managing money, a set of skills that 21st century America has overvalued even more than running around an athletic field or making faces for a movie camera.

The traditional economy that depended on goods and professional services has receded into the background (even health care is dominated by not by healers but insurance company money manipulators).

In the dire days ahead, one consolation may be a true Bonfire of the Vanities, in which there is a return to valuing the work of those who build the structures of society and keep it going rather than the Masters of the Universe who play Monopoly with real money and destroy lives.

Clay Felker

The man was a sponge. Creating and editing New York Magazine, he soaked up the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and 1970s and gave it back to readers as a heady brew of New Journalism and cultural chic. Clay Felker, who died today at 82, was one of a kind.

Between jobs as a magazine editor, I wrote for him and witnessed the workings of his restless mind and insatiable curiosity. Visits to his office were a montage of people popping up at an open door with gossip, news and rumors and his prowls through the corridors, asking everyone who passed, "What's new? What's new?"

Magazine editors are unique among journalists in that they invent their readers. Rather than covering news over which they have no control, they fill their pages with whatever interests or obsesses them and, like magnets, draw the attention of those who find the results to their taste. Felker's contemporary, Harold Hayes of Esquire, called it delivering an attitude toward the world on a regular basis.

Between them, they gave birth to the New Journalism, which mirrored a new kind of politics with a new kind of reporting. In New York, Tom Wolfe wrote about Radical Chic and Gloria Steinem profiled the man who was moving into the White House in 1968 ("When Richard Nixon is alone in a room, is there anyone there?")

Almost single-handedly, Felker made journalism a subject of popular interest. Wolfe satirized the New Yorker, and everybody reported on the New York Times. Even I got into the act with a piece titled "The New York Times Discovers Sex" while writing about literary auctions ("What Am I Bid for Lyndon Johnson?"). Ralph Ginzburg going to jail for what he published ("The Punishment for Bad Taste Is Three Years") and the melodrama surrounding the death of the Saturday Review.

Writers became celebrities, and Felker nurtured their fame but stayed out of the spotlight himself. After he lost New York to Rupert Murdoch in 1977, he moved to California and tried to duplicate his success there, but LA was too shallow for his kind of in-depth reporting and he turned to teaching journalism.

I would see him for lunch out there every so often, and he was still asking, "What's new? What's new?"

Grand Old Man of the New Journalism

At 78, Tom Wolfe is being immortalized with the reissue of ten of his books in covers "designed to appeal to a new generation."

But before he is embalmed as a writer of satirical novels like "Bonfire of the Vanities," someone should remind readers how he helped change the face of American journalism and, in no small degree, politics.

In August 1966, a Tiffany-engraved invitation arrived in my mail to have cocktails and canapés in the Park Avenue duplex of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein to meet the Black Panthers. A sense of the ridiculous prompted me to decline.

But Tom Wolfe went, notebook in hand, and wrote "Radical Chic" for New York Magazine, a classic of the New Journalism that skewered the pretensions of upscale liberals parading their sympathy for the downtrodden in a setting of ostentatious luxury. ("The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny's duplex like a rogue hormone...These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three times too big...)

Along with Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Norman Mailer and others, Wolfe invented the New Journalism in the 1960s to open space for human expression in the growing thicket of corporate journalism.

Reporters became novelists, novelists morphed into reporters to break through the limits of who, what, when, where, why and how. Mailer's story of the march on the Pentagon to protest Vietnam filled an entire issue of Harper's and made newspaper and TV accounts look like tracts on whaling compared to "Moby Dick."

But it was Tom Wolfe who epitomized the best of I-witness journalism. Unlike imitators, he adhered to the traditional rules of reporting while using a fictional style to show what people did and why with an eye for the telling details. For better or worse, his influence is visible in magazine and newspaper reporting to this day.

Recently he sat down with editors of the New York Times Book Review and gave them an oral history of his part in inventing the New Journalism. Even if you disagree, as I do, with many of his social and political views, the Man in the White Suit is an historic and fascinating figure in 20th and 21st century American life.

Mailer

He wanted to write The Great American Novel but changed the face of journalism instead. He died today at 84, leaving behind a torrent of words and an outsized public persona.

Norman Mailer was the opposite of shy. At a cocktail party, drink in hand, in front of a TV camera and, above all, on the printed page, he poured out opinions and indelible impressions for half a century. An early collection of essays was aptly titled, "Advertisements for Myself."

His World War II novel, "The Naked and the Dead," made him famous but he will be remembered, along with Tom Wolfe, for the New Journalism of the 1960s. Coming to it from opposite directions, Wolfe, a reporter by trade, and Mailer the novelist created something as different from traditional journalism as "Moby Dick" is from a tract on whaling.

In 1968, Harper's turned over a full issue to Mailer's account of the Vietnam protest march on the Pentagon, which later as a book titled "Armies of the Dead" won both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The next year, after a beery lunch and boozy dinner with a few New Journalist friends, Mailer decided to run for Mayor of New York and, in a put-on campaign, drew over 40,000 votes.

A decade later, he won another Pulitzer for "The Executioner's Song," about the last year in the life of Gary Gilmore, a remorseless killer. In between and afterward, he wrote ambitious novels, feuded with Feminists, stabbed one of his wives and fathered nine children.

A contemporary of mine, he was the ultimate opposite in temperament. A year ago, on a documentary about Marilyn Monroe, I was interviewed about my experiences in working with and getting to know her in the 1950s, but much more of PBS' time was devoted to Mailer who never met her but whose fantasies had filled a book and were vividly fascinating.

He never wrote The Great American Novel, but he did change the way several generations of us see the world.