[soft music]
[man] How did you discover Tom Wolfe?
Um, I was, uh, maybe 12 or 13 years old.
That age.
Um, living in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Not a particularly literary place.
Didn't really know anybody who wrote books.
Didn't know anybody who knew anybody who wrote books.
Barely knew people who read books.
But my father was a big exception.
And, uh, he had a shelf of books,
and some of the books were by Tom Wolfe.
And I just--I don't know why,
I'll tell you why,
I grabbed the books off the shelf
'cause there might be something dirty in them.
I pulled down Radical Chic,
and I--you know, I really--
I was not a worldly kid.
I didn't know who Leonard Bernstein was,
I did not know what the Black Panthers were,
I really didn't have much sense of anything.
And nevertheless, I was rolling around on the floor
laughing with this thing.
And I do remember-- I had this--this sensation.
Someone wrote this book.
Up to that point, all the books I read,
I paid no attention to who had written them
or that they had been written by anybody.
Uh, I didn't think-- the Hardy Boys series,
I went through all 38 volumes.
It didn't occur to me that there was an author,
because the author really wasn't in your face
as a--as a personality.
And even though Tom
wasn't really talking about himself very much,
there was this, boom,
this personality comin' off the page.
And I remember wondering, "Who--who wrote this?"
You know, and I--you know, "Who's Tom Wolfe?"
[energetic rock music]
The book's cover indicates that the author is, in fact,
a bigger event than the book.
I don't find anything objectionable about that.
Is anyone likely to be bitterly upset
-at you over this... -[man] ...controversial...
-[man] ...cynical... -[man] ...devastating...
-[man] ...outlandish... -[woman] ...mean...
I don't know about that.
[man] His book has been called a masterpiece.
-Very revealing. -Witty.
-Powerful. -Complex.
-Shocking. -Brilliant.
It was absolutely fascinating.
[typewriter clicking]
[Tom Wolfe] If you wanna be a writer,
you've gotta stand in the middle of the track
to see how fast the train goes.
[man] It's just amazing the way life will open up
if you're just forced to go into somebody else's world.
[music stops]
[TV Host] Tom Wolfe is probably the most skillful writer
in America.
I mean by that that he can do more things with words
than anyone else.
[soft music]
[Tom Junod] Nobody is writing like Tom Wolfe today.
And nobody really has written like Tom Wolfe.
Every 43-year-old Cablevision linesman's out
on the disco floor with his red eyes beaming
through his walnut-shell eyelids,
dancing with his third wife or his new cookie
till the onset of dawn, a saline depletion.
And in this century,
the robust, full-blooded American century,
what do we have in the way of architecture?
There's like this reality that everybody's missing
that's a very persuasive version of reality
that's his reality.
Up against a love like this,
that first night on the disco floor.
She wore a pair of boxing trunks,
while leather punks and sado-zulus,
African queens, and painted lulus
paid her court.
I grow old the 1970s way.
[Niall] His books captured the moment
better than anything else.
[soft music]
Wolfe's writing fundamentally changed American literature.
[Tom Wolfe] It's really only Eng lit intellectuals
and Krishna groovies
who try to despise the machine in America.
The idea that we're trapped by machines
is a piece of 19th century romanticism
invented by marvelous old frauds
like Thoreau and William Morris.
He was a contradictory character.
You would never know from being with Tom Wolfe in person,
that same guy could write that way.
Such a polite person.
Such a well-mannered person.
With a pen in his hand, he could be a terrorist.
Tom Wolfe has written another book and mocked another icon.
To go after Leonard Bernstein and modern art in one lifetime
is to stretch the bounds of the First Amendment
beyond the point intended.
Why was that writing allowed to be so out there?
I wouldn't have the guts to write about people that way.
[Tom Junod] You know, I look at him as a role model,
but as an imperfect role model.
But I don't think that anybody else
took the chances that Tom Wolfe took,
not just stylistically but also morally.
[William] Is it correct to conclude
that you show a lack of compassion?
I don't--I really don't care whether--
I mean, it's not so much having or not having compassion.
I really see my role in anything of the sort,
and, in fact, I always have,
as--as to discover in some way.
The truth is always revolutionary.
[projector whirring]
[bright piano music]
[Alex] Wolfe had been a reporter,
first in Springfield and then with the Washington Post.
And came to New York to the Herald Tribune.
[Michael] Up to that point,
the newspaper does not encourage a distinctive voice
to sound unlike anybody else.
Here's today's front page story.
The Northeast District of Barbershop Quartets
is holding its annual convention
in Providence this weekend.
Welcome aboard once again, let's see what kind of weather,
and we're really having the weather these days,
I'll tell you.
[Gail] There was no sense of style.
Uh, everything had to be in the first paragraph.
Who, what, when, where, why.
And that was a constant in news stories.
Wolfe wanted to break out of that.
[Tom Wolfe] There was a neutral so-called objective voice
that journalists were expected to assume at that time.
And I had, frankly, found it absolutely boring.
[explosion]
[cash register chimes]
I did have a kind of a involuntary epiphanal moment
Late in '62, a newspaper strike began.
I was by now working for the New York Herald Tribune.
And I suddenly found myself out of a job.
I needed to make some money,
so I went over to Esquire Magazine
and sold them on the idea of a story on customized cars,
which at that time were being made
in very fanciful forms by teenagers in Los Angeles.
[engine revving]
So they said, "Okay, go on out to California
and do this story."
I remember checking into the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel,
and over the course of four weeks
running up this enormous bill.
And suddenly I found myself in this incredible world
of automobile expression that I didn't know existed,
and I really didn't feel capable to deal with.
I--I couldn't get the concepts straight
that I could use for it.
It was just something completely new.
[lights clicking]
[tires screeching]
I came back and I was gonna write this thing,
and Esquire had this big double-page
of color photography locked into the presses by this time,
and I simply couldn't write it.
And in those days, you had to print color in advance.
So we literally printed those pages.
[Tom Wolfe] I came back to New York
and found myself utterly blocked.
I could not write this story.
And I said, "Byron, I'm sorry,
I just have to drop the assignment."
And he says, "You can't do that."
We have to justify the color picture.
We need something to go up against that page.
[Tom Wolfe] He said it cost his father $10,000
to pull this thing off the presses,
we've gotta have a story, and if you can't write it,
you give us your notes
and we'll get some competent writer
to put them together.
So I sat down one night about 8:00,
and I started typing up--
I started typing up these notes.
The notes in the form of a memorandum...
"Dear Byron, the first place I saw..."
The first thing I saw...
[overlapping speaking]
Very flat, straight out...
As fast as I could do it...
Presentation of what I...
Humiliating...
And the first thing I knew,
is I started just recounting in sequence,
the thing began taking on a pattern in my mind.
It began falling into place,
and I began to see
exactly what I had been studying out there.
[Jon Hamm] We were in the buried netherworld
of teenage California.
It was a hell of a show.
Sex, power, motion.
The main thing you notice is the color.
Tangerine-Flake.
Loud varoom, varoom motors.
Ossified semi-precious tangerine.
[soft music]
[Tom Wolfe] I ended up typing at top speed
for about eight or nine hours.
I wrote all night,
and by 6:30 in the morning,
I had a 49-page memorandum...
50 typewritten pages...
And I was about dead by that time.
I took this over to Esquire.
I just picked it all up and went to the Esquire office.
Turned it in about 9:00 in the morning,
went home to sleep.
And I got a call about 4:00 that afternoon
from Byron Dobell.
[telephone ringing]
-[receiver picks up] -It's a masterpiece.
This is unbelievable.
We'd never seen anything like this.
And I struck out the "Dear Byron"
and I struck out the parting words.
And we ran it.
[engine revving]
[energetic music]
[Jon Hamm] There Goes That Kandy-Kolored
Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
[engines revving]
And that made him famous.
[bright music]
[Michael] 18 months.
It takes 18 months between the time
Tom Wolfe is actually worried about having money
to being a cult figure in New York City.
All of a sudden, he's famous.
And it was the result of a single magazine article.
[mellow jazz music]
There are letters in the archives
from people writing in to the editors of Esquire
saying, "Who is this fellow?
Everybody's talking about him."
I think if you started to get a little famous
as a writer in the late '60s, early '70s in the United States,
you had some obligation to be a character.
You could be outrageous like Hunter Thompson.
[gunshot]
You could be pseudo Englishman
-like William F. Buckley. -[William] I don't deny it.
[Michael] You could stab your wife
-like Norman Mailer. -[Norman] That's true.
[Michael] And the white suit enabled people
to think of him as this great, unusual character.
What is the basic religious reason
for your always wearing that light-colored white suit?
[narrator] Tom Wolfe may be considered by some
to be every inch a dandy.
He stalks his East Side New York neighborhood
like an immaculate white Persian cat.
But he's neither Persian nor a New Yorker.
He's a transplanted Virginian.
What you wear in Richmond, Virginia,
in the summer is a white suit.
And he realized it made him interesting to people.
About seven years ago when I first came to New York,
I went into a tailor shop
and I saw some white silk tweed material
I thought was terrific,
so I figured I had to have a suit made.
So I had it made, and I was gonna wear it in the summer.
When I put it on, white silk tweed,
even if it's white, silk tweed is very hot,
so I--and I couldn't stand it.
So I started wearing it the next January.
Then I discovered an incredible thing,
which was that clothes
are an intensely powerful form of communication.
[pencil scribbling]
You can create a kind of other life in a uniform.
[quirky music]
[Alexandra] Growing up, I started to realize
that he wasn't like the other dads,
like he wore a big cape to school,
he wore a top hat, he had a pocket watch.
Everything was sort of that Southern sort of polite charm,
in a way.
[mellow music]
[Michael] He was raised in Richmond, Virginia,
in the 1930s and '40s and '50s.
He was probably the pride and joy of his parents
right from the beginning.
He would have been raised a stoic.
He would have been raised
someone who admired athletes and war heroes.
[baseball cracks]
[Tom Wolfe] When I was very young,
I decided that I wanted to be either a writer or an artist.
My mother encouraged me a lot in art.
And my father was a scientist,
He was editing a magazine called The Southern Planter.
And every week he would write an editorial or something
for the magazine.
And I thought that was quite magical.
He had a kind of quiet confidence.
And I think it's because he was rooted
in a way that very few writers are.
[projector whirring]
[Michael] His desire to protect the reputation of that world
is a powerful thing.
[energetic music]
[engine revving]
[Jon Hamm] The legend of Junior Johnson.
In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson,
who learns to drive by running whiskey for his father,
up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro,
in northwestern North Carolina,
and grows up to be a famous stock-car racing driver.
[energetic music]
As the motor thunder begins to lift up through him like a sigh
and his eyeballs glaze over
and his hands reach up and there,
riding the rim of the bowl,
forever rousing the good old boys,
hard-charging!
Up with the automobile into their America,
and to hell with arteriosclerotic old boys
trying to hold onto the whole pot
with arms of cotton seersucker.
Junior!
[dramatic music]
One of the mysteries of Tom Wolfe, to me,
is how he persuades all these people
who aren't particularly interested
in letting anyone into their lives,
much less some journalist,
into letting him into their lives.
[Junior] I thought he was a crank,
to tell you the honest truth.
Wool suit on,
and it was 101 temperature here.
It was just funny.
[engines revving]
[Alex] Not only did he capture
this little subculture of NASCAR
that had not been exposed to a national audience,
he was also describing this sort of great folklore hero.
Junior Johnson was the son of a bootlegger.
That's how he learned to drive.
He was driving moonshine around and getting chased by cops.
[Michael] What Wolfe does is he gets you feeling that
when you're watching Junior Johnson in a NASCAR race,
the cops are right behind you.
[tires screeching, vehicles clattering]
[camera bulb flashes]
[pensive music]
Wolfe does this over and again.
He takes something that's just a--
just a person, a character,
and he makes that character
stand for something much bigger.
He traces the origins of this sport
that is gripping America's imagination.
He tracks it to this man.
He's expressing between the lines
his deepest admiration for a character
that journalists don't normally admire.
[Alex] Junior Johnson said that that story
that Wolfe wrote about him helped change his life.
[engines revving]
[Tom Junod] You can't look at stock cars to this day
without thinking of Junior Johnson
and Tom Wolfe's take on that world.
He's drawing the attention of Blue America to Red America.
He's saying, "This is who we are."
It isn't just this thing
that's going on down in the South.
This is part of my culture.
It's American.
And I'm gonna show you what's great about it.
[solemn music]
[Michael] He has that sort of wonderful combination
of being a terrific, intrepid reporter
and then just this outrageous stylist.
[soft music]
He had a voice
and was able to express it.
And I think he found his voice as a writer,
telling his parents about himself in letters.
[Tom Wolfe] I ended up doing, really,
what a lot of us do in letters,
particularly when you're writing a letter
to somebody you feel very comfortable with,
someone you can unburden your soul to,
and you don't censor out all of the random remarks
that are running through your head.
You don't censor out the slang,
you don't censor out the exclamations.
Like you don't censor out the abrupt changes of thought.
[Gregory] He's enjoying himself as he writes,
and I think he wants his reader to enjoy themselves too.
[mellow music]
The reader's expecting some excitement
from a page of Tom Wolfe,
expecting some experimentation.
[Terry] He created a style
that was completely his own and unique.
You read a story in Esquire,
and it opens with the word hernia 57 times.
Hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia,
hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia.
[Ron] He tried to represent the sounds of what he was hearing.
[sputtering]
And all kinds of weird things that he's doing.
And the ellipses and the double colons.
I never figured out what that meant.
He called his use of punctuation a process of violating
the Geneva Conventions of the mind.
He wanted to approximate
what it felt like to be thinking.
[mellow music]
Just the way Tom put words together,
they seemed to glow.
It was as if it was another language.
The titles of things that were always being picked up,
like Radical Chic.
Good Ole' Boy.
The "Me" Decade.
Masters of the Universe.
The Right Stuff.
I mean, he could come up with these terms
which then just became common--
a common part of our language.
[Michael] It showed nonfiction writers
how much was possible in the form.
[mellow music]
-[gunfire] -[indistinct shouting]
[explosions]
[indistinct shouting]
-[aircraft zooming] -[explosion]
[Alex] You know, in the '60s,
culture's being sort of shaken on its head.
Journalists are rebelling against
what everyone else was rebelling against.
[camera whirring]
Wolfe, and that generation,
they're trying to capture a world
that seems to be going faster and faster.
[Gay] You felt that nothing was in your way
if you really wanted to do something big, courageous,
risk-taking, you could do it.
[Jon Hamm] Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon
in one hand, a cigarette in another,
stood in a dark corner of the bar
between two attractive but fading blondes
who sat waiting for him to say something.
[typewriter clicking]
[Michael] They were all trying to create
an excitement on the page,
and all the things that are changing in America,
it's reflected in kind of the way
the prose looks and sounds.
[Emily] You had Hunter S. Thompson
going to the Kentucky Derby.
Joan Didion going to San Francisco in 1968.
[Joan Didion] In this life,
all narrative was sentimental.
In this life,
all connections were equally meaningful
and equally senseless.
[Alex] The events of the world
were inspiring these young journalists.
It's like, you know what,
there's probably a different way to cover this.
[music intensifies]
[Michael] Wolfe creates this sort of pseudo movement.
New Journalism.
What is it and to what degree are you responsible for it?
In my mind, the New Journalism
is the use of every effective technique
known to prose in nonfiction.
I was gonna write a five or six page introduction
to a textbook on the subject of the New Journalism,
that's all it was gonna be.
And I found out when I wrote that thing
that plenty of my confreres in the field of nonfiction
were really upset.
I mean, Hunter Thompson writes him a note to say,
"Don't include me.
You've created this category for your own purposes,
but I'm not one of them," kind of thing.
[pencil scribbles]
[snorts]
[Alex] Sometimes it's interesting to go back
and see which one of these writers are friends,
who are enemies,
who are competitive with each other.
And one of the strangest pairings
is Wolfe and Hunter Thompson.
They seem on the surface to be so different,
and yet at the same time they were both dogged reporters,
they had the Southern thing in common...
They admired each other's writing.
They both could see that the other one
was really good at what he did.
-[indistinct speaking] -[tires squeal]
[Tom Wolfe] What is the speed limit here? 70.
-No, oh my God, it's 75. -[tires squeal]
Every time I saw him was unforgettable.
There's a passage in-- in his archives
where Wolfe is describing taking Hunter Thompson
to some trendy Manhattan restaurant.
Hunter Thompson gets there
with like a paper sack and says,
"I can clear this restaurant out in 20 seconds."
And it turns out to be like a marine alarm horn
that you send--that you push if your ship is going down.
It can be heard 20 nautical miles away.
And Hunter Thompson takes it out and hits it,
and the whole restaurant clears out.
[ship alarm blaring]
[Tom Wolfe] To this day, louder than any sound I have heard.
And then I realized that whenever I saw Hunter...
[gunshot]
...it was going to be not so much a meeting
or conversation as an event.
[indistinct speaking]
What are you doing, man?
[Alex] When Wolfe set out to write about Ken Kesey,
at some point he got in touch with Hunter Thompson
because he had admired Hunter Thompson's book
about the Hells Angels.
Hunter Thompson didn't feel like
he could really write about something
until he reported the shit out of it,
and that's exactly what he had in common with Tom Wolfe.
[rock music]
The commencement exercises for LSDU
will be held at Winterland on Monday night.
That's Halloween.
And, of course, the man who is going to be passing out
the diplomas is Ken Kesey.
Ken, what, um,
what's the theme of this commencement exercise?
Trip or treat.
[mellow music]
[Tom Wolfe] When I wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
one thing I worried about
was what my role was gonna be.
And if you're gonna continue to be a writer,
you can't become totally involved
'cause you rob yourself
of all perspective at that point.
[woman] That means in the case of the Merry Prankster Bus,
you were not dropping acid all the time.
[Tom Wolfe] No, I never did while I was with them.
Later on I did take LSD to--
just to write the book,
just to see what would happen,
which is really not the way to do it.
[mellow music]
But I found out through doing it
that the LSD experience is not a light show.
That's, by far, the least of it.
But occasionally I'll even sit in front of the typewriter
and close my eyes
and go into what I thought of as a kind of controlled trance
and try to actually feel in my nervous system
what they have gone through,
what I had seen them do,
or what I had been told about,
and then write it.
And I've never been an actor,
but I'm convinced this must be the process
that a method actor or almost any actor goes through.
[shimmering sound]
[Jon Hamm] The world was simply and sheerly divided
into "the aware,"
those who had the experience
of being vessels of the divine,
and a great mass of "the unaware,"
"the unmusical," "the unattuned."
The aware were never snobbish toward the unaware,
but, in fact, most of that great jellyfish blob
of straight souls looked like hopeless cases.
[energetic music]
[Gail] Tom migrated into writing books
from feature writing,
and he found out that that's a whole other way
to unmask a phenomenon.
He found himself involved with Ken Kesey,
Neal Cassady, and the Beats,
the beginning of the hippie culture.
[Gregory] In some ways he's very much progressive
in that he's very focused on those overlooked in society.
[Tom Wolfe] We're talking now about the rise
of the California hip life,
which is a life really based on what I call
the politics of pleasure.
As a result, you see some curious things happening.
They do what they feel like,
and a lot of people feel like taking--
taking these drugs.
[Emily] He's creating a mythology of the country
as he's writing,
and one that really endures.
[funk music]
It's this really all-encompassing vision
of the 1960s that was so perfect,
and LSD culture was still new
and people didn't know what to make of it.
And yet, he set the standard for how we think about it.
[mellow music]
[Ron] What struck me was the delight he takes
in these characters.
Not the approval,
that's something very different,
but the fact that he just enjoys how crazy they are
without falling in and becoming one of them.
People just wouldn't have done that.
There would have been a sense
that you had to be behind a wall
and you had to describe these things through glass,
whereas Tom was just out there with them,
listening to them, experiencing them,
and letting us see what he was feeling
as he experienced it.
He had a best-seller from his first book,
so he was launched.
[mellow music]
[Peter] The book itself reads like you're on some--
some crazy LSD trip that ends very badly.
To me, that's his-- his greatest book.
He helped bring the new world into being.
[cash register chimes]
[soft music]
[Niall] The key to understanding Tom Wolfe
is to imagine this Southern, studious young man
leaving the South for Yale.
[Michael] He'd never really gotten out
of his little Southern bubble.
And he gets to Yale and all of a sudden
he realizes there are all these people
who kind of look down on the world he came from.
But he had such a deep love of where he was from
that he started to develop a mild contempt
for the people around him at Yale
who had a mild contempt of the world he came from.
He wrote a PhD thesis, in very Tom Wolfe-ian style,
in which he, from a vaguely right-wing perspective,
attacks a lot of famous left-wing writers.
And the professors, who are much more left-leaning,
are shocked.
They basically say this thesis is not suitable.
It's opinionated, the facts can't be checked.
You put yourself back in the mind frame
of somebody who spent five years at Yale
working on this paper.
I think he hated every moment of it.
[Alex] And he says I'm gonna tidy up this stuff
for these stupid fucks
and get my PhD and get out of here.
That is a kind of searing experience.
And I think it helps explain the vendetta
that Wolfe pursued against the intellectual left.
[soft music]
[Michael] And so Tom flees Yale as fast he can,
and he lands this job as a daily journalist
for the Springfield, Massachusetts, newspaper.
[Alex] Before the New Journalism era in New York,
Wolfe's a straight reporter.
He ended up getting into newspaper work
the old-fashioned way, he started from the bottom.
Covering fires and City Hall meetings,
and doing all of the routine things
that young reporters do as they work their way up.
[Tom Wolfe] I never knew from day to day
what kind of story I was gonna be put on.
It made you realize that you can go up to total strangers
and ask them questions that they--
you have no right to expect them to answer.
[man] There's a wonderful picture, 1958,
you and John F. Kennedy, a politician on the make,
and a newspaper reporter from The Springfield Union
on the make.
[Tom Wolfe] Kennedy, when I interviewed him,
was Senator Kennedy.
He had been asked to come to Springfield
to see if he could do something to keep the government
from getting rid of the armory.
The armory had become kind of redundant by now.
So he met with a group of Springfield business men
and the Springfield mayor.
And he was saying to them,
"Look, we've gotta be just like these Southern politicians,
these Southern senators and congressmen.
They just grab whatever they feel like,
and they'll make a gym for a university
and name it after themselves,
but that's the way you have to play the game
and that's what we have to do to save the armory."
At which point one of his aides said,
"Senator, uh, did you realize
that there's a reporter in the room?"
And that was me.
And he turned to me and he said,
"This is all off the record."
"Well, there's 25 Springfield business leaders here
and the mayor,
I don't see how I can keep it off the record."
And he says, "It's off the record."
Afterwards he came up to me and took me outside.
He said, "Look, I know your publisher,
I know your editor very well,
and I know they would never want
anything like this to appear in their paper
and jeopardize the future of the armory."
So I said--I said, "My hands are tied, I'm sorry.
It's--this is something that just happened
in front of a lot
of influential people in Springfield."
So I went ahead and wrote the story.
And about a week later, he complained to the editor
that I had violated an off-the-record embargo
and, in effect, kind of tried to get me fired.
But, fortunately, my editor was a Republican,
and he seemed to rather like me,
and so it didn't cost me.
But that's what we were talking about
in that picture.
[Alex] One thing that's important to remember
about Wolfe as he's trying to make a name for himself
is that he must have felt very much the outsider.
People on the outside looking in
have some sort of chip on their shoulder
that drives them.
So, Wolfe was not afraid to piss people off.
[Emily] I write for The New Yorker,
but I read Tiny Mummies! with some satisfaction,
which I'm a little embarrassed to admit.
[soft classical music]
He presents the magazine as this place
where it's so driven by its own legacy
and its nepotism and its elitism
that, how do I put it,
yeah, it's a mummy.
[laughs]
[Tom Junod] He was basically saying, you know,
it was a not a-- a place of the living
but rather a place of the dead.
The after-effect of what he's written is anger.
[Tom Junod] He was roundly attacked,
and he was attacked by The New Yorker
for the rest of his career.
I mean, they got fuckin' J. D. Salinger
to write a complaint piece.
[somber music]
[Christopher] You know, The New York establishment
never forgave him, really, for that.
[Tom Wolfe] I always think of Balzac's statement
when people were trying to find out
his political stance in his novels.
He would always say,
"I belong to the party of the opposition."
And so I can put that in his mouth,
it would sound pompous to say it today,
but it's really the way I feel.
He went after sacred cows.
He thought these were things and people and theories
that really needed to be taken down a peg or two.
This book called The Painted Word
is a mustache painted in broad daylight
on the Mona Lisa.
And some people are not going to forgive him ever.
Now he's written another book about architecture
that could be subtitled The Wrong Stuff.
And a lot of people,
especially architectural critics,
hate it.
[Alexandra] When he got bad reviews, I would say,
you know, "Dad, did you read that review? Are you upset?"
He was like, "No, of course I'm not upset."
And I'd say, "Why? That was--"
You know, "They were so nasty."
He said, "Well, you're nobody until somebody hates you."
You know, he sort of--
he just sort of brushed everything off like that.
He really made a lot of enemies,
but it didn't bother him.
He wasn't looking for approval.
[announcer] Here is Mr. Bernstein.
[applause]
[soft orchestral music]
[Tom Wolfe] One day I was at Harper's Magazine
waiting for my wife-to-be,
who was the art director at Harper's,
to take her to lunch.
And to kill the time,
I kept wandering around.
I went into the office of David Halberstam.
He wasn't there.
So I was looking at everything on his desk.
And, uh& -[laughter]
And here was an invitation by Leonard and Felicia Bernstein
to a party at 895 Park Avenue for the Black Panthers.
So, I couldn't resist it.
I had to get into that party somehow.
So... -[laughter]
There was a number to call if you accepted.
So I called up and I said,
"I'm Tom Wolfe and I accept."
[majestic orchestral music]
[Michael] By the time Tom Wolfe
is in Leonard Bernstein's apartment,
he is America's leading satirist,
so he is the most dangerous writer in America.
He's exactly who you don't invite to your dinner party.
A few years ago, Wolfe attended a party,
as you recall, at the apartment of Leonard Bernstein,
where the result was a 20,000-word piece
called Radical Chic.
[William] Which is about the famous party
that Leonard Bernstein gave to raise money
for the Black Panthers who had been indicted
for conspiring to bomb a few racist department stores
at Easter time.
Ten or twelve members of the Black Panther Party
in New York have already been arrested,
and others are being arrested, all by surprise.
The Black Panther Party is informing and calling on
all the peoples of the communities across the country
to scorn and denounce the action
of this capitalistic government's attempts
to try to destroy the Black Panther Party,
which has chapters and branches across the nation.
[William] I should like to begin by asking Mr. Wolfe
whether he thinks, on second thought,
that he behaved insouciantly
toward the plight of the Panthers.
-Insouciantly? -Yes.
[chuckles]
[Jon Hamm] Mm, these are nice.
Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts.
Very tasty, very subtle.
It's the way the dry sackiness of the nuts
tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese
that is so nice, so subtle.
Wonder what the Black Panthers eat here
on the hors d'oeuvres trail?
Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels
wrapped in crushed nuts this way,
and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs,
and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi?
For example, does that huge Black Panther
there in the hallway,
the one shaking hands with Felicia Bernstein herself,
the one with the black leather coat and the dark glasses
and the absolutely unbelievable Afro,
Fuzzy Wuzzy-scale, in fact,
is he, a Black Panther,
going on to pick up a Roquefort cheese morsel
rolled in crushed nuts from off the tray,
and just pop it down the gullet
without so much as missing a beat
of Felicia's perfect Mary Astor voice.
[majestic classical music]
[Tom Wolfe] You cannot say that the Bernsteins
or the other people who have given parties like this
are insincere.
They do care about the great work,
they do care about the Black Panthers,
and they even care about the ocelots, uh,
and the Somali leopards,
although they tend to lump them all together.
In January 1970,
when the party at Leonard Bernstein happened,
I was in prison.
I was part of the Panther 21 case.
Our bail was set at $100,000.
We always maintained that that wasn't a bail,
it was a ransom.
And in February of 1970,
I was released as a result of that fundraiser.
And then I saw this article came out
kind of labeling what was going on
as "radical chic,"
as kind of, like, this pretentious fad.
The broad reaction in the Panther Party was that,
you know, "This dude is trippin'."
[protesters singing]
It kinda put a derisive label
on good work that was happening,
and it wasn't good work just because
people were contributing money.
It was good work because
consciousness was being raised
around injustices that were happening in our society.
And I think that that article
was trivializing what we were doing,
and the Bernstein family felt this betrayal.
[Gay] He could write about people.
That was so searing and so unsettling, I'm sure,
for those who were written about.
Old Tom Wolfe would pick them like you'd pick a balloon
with his little sharp pointed pen.
And the question is
is whether he crossed the line in that story
into, you know, into cruelty.
[majestic classical music]
[Jon Hamm] As more than one person in this room knows,
Lenny treasures the art of conversation.
He treasures it,
monopolizes it,
conglomerates it
like a Jay Gould,
an Onassis.
A cornfield of conversation.
The Great Interrupter,
the Village Explainer,
the champion of Mental Jotto,
the Free Analyst,
Mr. Let's Find Out.
No breathers allowed until every human brain
is reduced finely to a clump of dried seaweed
inside a burnt-out husk
and collapses,
implodes in one last crunch
of terminal boredom.
[majestic classical music]
He didn't give us a thought
to how his words might be hurtful
to the people he was making fun of.
And I just feel like you have to remember,
if you're a journalist,
how your words can affect people.
[Tom Junod] Tom Wolfe makes the Bernsteins look ridiculous
in that particular piece,
and I think that probably stuck with him forever.
I'm a consumer of that story.
I love that story.
I can see where it would have been painful
to be in a different position with that story.
[Tom Wolfe] I think you can't afford to be
constantly wringing your hands
over the impact of what you're doing,
whether you're talking about the impact
on the individuals that you're writing about
or the impact on the issues that are involved--
in this case, support for radical groups
in the late 1960s.
I was heavily criticized after that
for drying up fundraising for these radical groups
among wealthy socialites in New York.
Well, whether I did or I didn't,
I don't think you can worry about that.
I think if you start worrying about that,
you're no longer writing;
you're involved in public relations.
[Gay] If you read Tom Wolfe,
and you--in my case, not only read Tom Wolfe
but know Tom Wolfe,
they're different people,
totally different people.
[audience applauding]
[man] As much as Tom Wolfe is a public figure,
the private man is an enigma.
Home is New York,
where he is married with two kids.
[Gail] A lot of readers wouldn't think of Tom Wolfe
necessarily as a soft-hearted man.
He was also a man who could cut a man in pieces
with a single sentence.
But with those he cared about,
he was one of the most thoughtful people I know.
Tom was a very quiet,
very courteous Southern gentleman
in private.
He was a real family man.
[Tom Wolfe] I delivered some piece at Esquire.
We're talking about it when the doors cracked open,
and I look out the door
and I said, "Who's that girl in a snakeskin dress?"
And they said, "Oh, that's Sheila Berger
who works in our Art Department."
[mellow music]
And, well, we've been married to this day.
Isn't that a romantic story?
Thank you, thank you.
[chuckles]
He never looked at another woman
besides his wife.
She was basically a nice Jewish girl
from Long Island.
A very serious woman, a very bright woman.
She was sort of his in-house editor.
Sheila's the perfect wife.
[mellow music]
[Tom Wolfe] I have a son named Tommy,
and, uh, my daughter, Alexandra.
He was--his--he was always so close to his parents.
I mean, he really believed in family.
[Michael] My sense was
he never dragged his family into his professional life.
And I get a sense he didn't drag
his professional life into his family.
He was private.
You know, I think that white suit,
that white suit was this suit of armor.
He didn't really want the world to know him.
He wanted to know the world.
It was a one-way relationship.
[ethereal music]
[Tom Wolfe] I was sent by Rolling Stone magazine
down to Cape Canaveral
to do a story on the launch of Apollo 17,
it was the last mission to the Moon.
Just do a story on the scene there
and all the crazy things that were going on.
And suddenly, I just began asking myself,
"What is the makeup of these people who are
willing to sit on top of a rocket
and let somebody light the candle?
-[man] The fuse, yeah. -The fuse, yeah.
[Mission Control countdown] Thirty seconds and counting.
Astronauts report it feels good.
Two minutes, twenty-five seconds.
Twenty seconds and counting.
[unintelligible transmission]
All engines running.
[explosive roaring]
Liftoff!
We have a liftoff.
Thirty-two minutes past the hour.
[Tom Wolfe] One of the most exciting parts
of the little voyage of discovery that I was on
was to find out the truth.
[ethereal music]
I was gonna spend two months writing it
and bring a book out in the fall of 1973.
I then began to find out
how little I knew about any of it.
[pensive music]
[Alex] For most of the '70s,
that's the book that he worked on.
And he really struggled
and labored with getting the story together.
As a matter of fact, he was at a loss.
Wolfe, when he wrote, was a bundle of anxiety.
He was capable of thinking,
"I'll never write another good word again,"
and just suffering all by himself.
The process of writing,
which some people describe as a joy...
-Mm-hm. -...has never been a joy to me.
It's agony,
and it is like having arthritis.
It hurts a little every day,
and every day, when you wake up,
it's in the back of your mind
that you've gotta put your feet in the stocks...
-Mm-hm. -...and make yourself sit there
and turn out something.
[Gail] I mean, Tom was in distress.
How do you write a story for three years and then,
you haven't gotten the right stuff,
and go on for another four years,
and also feed your family,
and, you know, have a life?
The way he carried himself.
It goes back to his Southern roots.
[Tom Wolfe] I am protective of my Southern upbringing,
and this leads to a kind of irrational attachment
to certain figures.
Somehow, that person, in your mind,
is a champion of what you believe in.
[Michael] The Right Stuff was straight up,
"I love these people.
I know these people, these people are me.
They're small-town boys from the South."
That's the way he kind of thought of them
in the first place, I think.
And, uh, he drops all that.
[ominous music]
[Alex] Wolfe goes back and really starts to focus
on the idea of status
really being at the heart of
what The Right Stuff is about.
[Michael] What ends up being special about the story
is this disconnect between
what the public perceived the astronauts' job as
and what was actually going on there.
It's about the upheaval
in the status structure of fighter pilots
when all of a sudden they're in this capsule
that's controlled by technocrats
and they don't actually fly anything.
Uh, where you plannin' on puttin' a window?
Window? There's no window!
[dynamic rock music]
[breathing heavily]
[indistinct shout]
[soft roaring]
[Jon Hamm] The Right Stuff was not bravery
in the simple sense of being willing
to risk your life.
You were a lab animal sealed in a pod.
Is anyone, um, likely to be bitterly upset at you
over this book?
You've had a way of making a few enemies along the way.
[Tom Brokaw] You let the air out of these heroes.
You brought 'em back down to earth, so to speak,
the astronauts.
Was there any resentment about that?
[Tom Wolfe] I have two stereotypes:
They're either flying saints
or else they were robots.
And in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
[Jon Hamm] The girls had been turning up at Pancho's
in amazing numbers.
They were moist labial piping little birds
who had somehow learned
that at this strange place in the Mojave Desert
lived the hottest young pilots in the world.
It completed the picture of pilot Heaven:
flying and drinking,
drinking and driving,
driving and balling.
The pilots began calling the old Fly-Inn Dude Ranch
Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club.
And there you have it.
It completely changed
the way people saw the astronauts.
You find, no; actually,
this other thing is going on
that is the story.
And the movie delivers that message
in a different way.
[majestic music]
The world premiere of the movie The Right Stuff
in Washington today
had just about everything except
Charles Lindbergh and Betsy Ross.
Famed test pilot Chuck Yeager and 11 other pilots
staged a fly-by of old, military, and antique planes.
What did Yeager think of the movie?
Story's real good and it pretty well tells
what happened, and the comradeship
of the guys, and so on.
[suspenseful music]
[applause, cheering]
[majestic music]
The winner is&
Bill Conti, for The Right Stuff.
Jay Boekelheide for The Right Stuff.
The Right Stuff.
Glenn Farr, Lisa Fruchtman,
Stephen A. Rotter, Douglas Stewart, Tom Roff
for The Right Stuff.
[majestic music]
[Tom Brokaw] Very briefly,
what's the next subject for Tom Wolfe?
I'm thinking of a kind of
a Vanity Fair book about New York.
[Phil Collins, "Sussudio"]
♪ There's a girl that's been on my mind ♪
♪ All the time, Sussudio ♪
[Tom Wolfe] These trading rooms are wild,
and you hear this ungodly roar.
And so, I follow the sound
and I reach this enormous room,
and here are 200 to 300 young men,
sweating profusely at 8:30 in the morning
with half-moons under their armpits,
gesturing like maniacs,
swearing in a language,
I think it was Army Creole.
This was the sound of young white men
baying for money on the bond market.
[indistinct chatter]
Before he published fiction,
he wrote essays critical of fiction.
In writing this novel,
I am a novelist but also a journalist.
That was one of the important points
I wanted to prove, which was that
the approach to the novel today
should be journalistic.
[dramatic music]
[Tom Wolfe] I had been spouting off
about how great we non-fiction writers were
and how mediocre the novelists were,
so I did a rather rash thing
and I decided to try a whole new genre.
[Ron] No one else made that transition
from journalism to fiction as dramatically as he did.
Wolfe is being accused of everything
from ignorance to arrogance.
He wants to make himself look
like the smartest guy in the room.
It looks as if Tom Wolfe said
to the other male American novelists,
"Mine is bigger than yours."
I thought, "Boy, they're gonna kill him.
They're gonna say his novel--
I don't care if it's better than War and Peace--
they're gonna say it's terrible."
I wanted to show that we are in a period
in which a great many people are driven by, really,
this carnival of prosperity.
Let's go, let's go!
Calm down, Rawlie.
Let's not get overexcited.
-Yes, Sherman, I'm sorry. -Calm, cool, collated.
Let's not lose our composure
over a few hundred million dollars.
Jesus Christ, Sherman, you must be made of ice.
[mellow music]
[Bruce Willis] "Suddenly, through the crowd, he saw her."
Excuse me.
[Bruce Willis] "He followed her through the room,
past the grinning faces full of boiling teeth,
past the conversational bouquets,
past the impeccably emaciated ladies of society,
the social x-ray women."
[dramatic music]
[suspenseful music]
[Michael] He seemed to be describing exactly
New York as it was,
and it wasn't any fiction at all.
When I was writing that book,
it was with a spirit of wonderment.
I was saying, "Look at these people!
Look at what they're doing!
Look at that one! Look at that one!"
And it was only after I'd finished and read it over
that I see that there is a cumulative effect
that leads to a novel without a hero.
[pensive music]
Large cities in the U.S.,
and I daresay anywhere in the world,
you look around and you don't see
lots of heroes,
lots of giants of principle.
That is the nature of the metropolis.
Vanity operating on all sides.
And I've seen it in the '80s
go right from Wall Street to the South Bronx,
where I did a lot of my research.
[tense music]
[Ron] What he wants us to see is that
cities are big, complex things.
They're not just what you experience
on your level.
You get a sense of this great ladder
of American culture that we're all on,
moving up and down all the time.
[Terry] He'd already taken the fiction writer's tools
and, you know, twisted them out.
He was now taking journalism
and torqueing it back into fiction.
[Peter] It's an exaggerated version of New York City
but that somehow captures the essence more accurately
than a--than an accurate version would.
Not only did he go into writing novels,
he wrote a very controversial novel.
You have no idea how controversial it was
because of the way it portrayed African Americans.
[Niall] Unlike most writers from the United States,
Wolfe was unafraid to confront the great taboo of race.
[soft, grim music]
[Jon Hamm] "All at once, Sherman was aware of the figure
approaching him on the sidewalk.
In the wet, black shadows
of the townhouses and the trees,
even from 50 feet away in the darkness,
he could tell.
It was that deep worry that lives in the base of the skull
of every resident south of 96th Street:
the Black youth,
tall, rangy, wearing white sneakers."
[Jamal] I have problems with the portrayals,
especially of stuff that was going on
in the Black community and the interaction between,
you know, Black and white communities in that time.
Some narrative and character problems
for me in that writing.
[funky music]
[reporter] "Despite his devastating portrait
of the city and its people,
many New Yorkers say his novel has defined their city
as no other has."
When it came out,
it was kind of like front-page news.
It felt like everybody was reading it.
I can remember it myself.
Special segment tonight:
Tom Wolfe, the dandy with the sharp eye
and the unerring feel for the phrase.
America's pre-eminent writer of nonfiction
has just taken his first plunge into the world of the novel.
His first novel, right here, entitled...
"The Bonfire of the Vanities."
[Reporter] "The novel's highly favorable reviews
match its staggering sales figures.
His publisher says Wolfe will make
$3 million, maybe $4 million."
Now, you sold the rights of this thing off
for huge sums of money, I'm guessing, big dough.
Was this your biggest film sale to date?
-Yes. -Yeah, I would think so.
-By a long ways. -Good for you.
People are always saying, "Aren't you afraid
they're going to ruin your book?"
A worse thing can happen,
and that is if the movie is better.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
I have a feeling about this one.
I don't know, I think it would take
a great deal of effort on their part
to make it better than this book, you know?
I don't think that's gonna happen.
Thank you.
Just drive! Just drive!
Damn! Open the door!
-Hey! -Arggh!
Get away, get away, get away, get away!
[music ends abruptly]
What the hell happened
with Bonfire of the Vanities?
Well, it's almost the classic Hollywood story
in that I had a movie
that had a kind of a large budget.
So I thought, "Well, how am I gonna make this
big, kind of expansive Bonfire of the Vanities?"
Consequently,
I completely violated the text of the book.
[Tom Wolfe] It was so bad, that, uh...
[audience laughter]
...I think it's lost about $97 million, $98 million.
[applause]
[TV correspondent] Tom Wolfe,
probably the best-known writer in the country,
is drawing standing room only audiences these days.
With his super-eclectic writing style
and that wardrobe of custom-tailored white suits,
who is this--this dandy?
[melodramatic music]
By that point in time, everybody knew who he was.
[Alex Trebek] Found in a 1970 Tom Wolfe book title,
"What is a radical?"
And that is the correct response.
It's Tom Wolfe!
He uses more exclamation points
than any other major American writer.
It's true!
[shutter-like snapping sound]
[Tom] Given the amazing success that he had,
I think that it impacted him negatively.
[woman] You've, uh, spent much of your career
looking at the personal lives of other people.
I was wondering if you've had a chance
to have any personal life,
or if it's--your life has been your work.
When I look at my personal life,
sometimes, I feel very, very sad.
Working, or making believe that I'm working,
or finding ways to avoid working,
and that's really about the only thing
that I tend to do.
[typewriter keys clacking]
Tom was such a unique individual.
I wondered how fame shaped him.
[Michael] Wolfe gets trapped
by this persona that he created.
The obligation to be a character
as well as just a writer
is a bad business.
He was such a performer.
He was not just Tom Wolfe.
He was playing Tom Wolfe.
[Gay] He said this:
"When I walk in a room,
I want to be noticed."
All of that was the facade of being Tom Wolfe.
He must have felt it as an obligation
to be a personality.
When he wasn't really a personality.
It created certain pressures in his existence
he never fully resolved.
Now let's welcome...
...one of the most talked-about and one of the most brilliant...
-Fascinating... -Influential...
...American writers of his generation.
Here now is Tom Wolfe.
[pastiche of male voices saying "Tom Wolfe"]
[male host] Tom Wolfe, ladies and gentlemen.
[audience cheering, applauding]
[eerie music stops abruptly]
[indistinct remarks]
[soft breathing, medical equipment beeping]
[dark music]
[faint sound of heartbeat]
[man] Well, I remember being stunned to hear
that he had had a heart attack.
[medical equipment beeping]
[woman] His father had a heart attack
and died at the same age.
[medical equipment beeping, muffled voice speaking]
[man] A quintuple bypass event is a reminder of mortality.
[Tom Wolfe] I had a, shall I say,
soul-jolting experience having a heart attack
and having a quintuple bypass
and all of the emotional trauma that can follow
that sort of operation.
He did, as many people who have open-heart surgery do,
he did go into a depression for a while.
You sank into a depression.
-[Tom Wolfe] I did. -A depression!
[somber music]
[Tom Wolfe] After the bypass operation,
you're thinking sort of, "My God,
I'm so mortal, it's not funny any longer."
I felt so bad.
I'd never had a depression before.
Uh, I called up a friend of mine,
Paul McHugh, who's the head of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins.
Tom was very concerned about how the depression
and the coronary disease
might deprive him of the very things
that made him the writer he was.
[solemn music]
[Tom Wolfe] He would call me at least once a day,
and many times, five and six times a day,
according to how I seemed to be doing.
[Paul] I wanted to help him become
the kind of person he was.
He himself wondered whether he could make it back.
[solemn music]
[Tom Wolfe] Count how many days you think you have left.
It's grimly small that--that number.
It's quite humbling, um,
to know that despite all of your aspirations,
and all of your dreams,
and all of the talents you think you have,
uh, you're made of clay.
[upbeat, jazzy music]
[cameras' shutters snapping]
[indistinct chatter, laughter]
No matter what you're confronted with,
including death,
you are going to be affected.
I've experienced some rather nice changes.
[reporter] A Man in Full became the bestselling book in America
only two days after it went on sale.
Wolfe's new book places Atlanta
and the new Southern aristocracy
under his microscope.
It took 11 years to write this book.
-I'm afraid so. -And now, 742 pages later...
I figured I'd better make it long.
There were lines around the block
at bookstores in Atlanta.
There were stories in The New York Times
about the lines around the block
in the bookstores in Atlanta,
'cause no one had ever seen one before.
A Man in Full was the biggest novel
of my life at that time.
Remember, it's a finalist for the National Book Award
even before it's published.
It was on the bestseller list for weeks.
Tom was the most famous writer in the United States,
'cause he got all this publicity.
[Morley Safer] A new Wolfe book
is both a cultural and social event.
[Tom Wolfe] "It was Friday evening,
and the Master of Turpentine, Charlie Croker,
was presiding over dinner
at the burled Tupelo maple table
that Ronald Vine, the decorator,
had devised for the gun room.
He was only 44 but already running to fat.
His head popped up out of his blazer
and his polo shirt like a bubble.
His skin was pallid and pasty.
A few strands of hair the color of orange juice stains
skimmed back across his otherwise-bald pate."
We're heading towards a total eclipse of all values.
Now, don't get me wrong.
As a writer,
I'm perfectly delighted
for things to remain the way they are.
I mean, the human comedy has never been richer.
I thought A Man in Full was magnificent.
I mean, there are scenes in that
where they're just spectacular.
Very complex, very funny, very moving.
Huge characters, huge scenes.
[Tom Wolfe] There is no way to understand individuals
without understanding the society around them.
So it sold a gazillion copies,
but it got trashed by all kinds of famous writers.
Talk about creating a furor.
You--you've been in a bit of a catfight
with John Irving, Norman Mailer, and John Updike.
It has gotten nasty with you guys.
This, actually, from my point of view,
it's kind of been fun.
Wolfe's novel had a kind of whipped-up,
overblown quality.
I guess if I resent anything,
I kind of resented the time it took me to read
A Man in Full.
Tom Wolfe called John Irving, John Updike, and myself
"the Three Stooges."
[man] If we had a copy of any Tom Wolfe book here,
I could read you a sentence that would make me gag.
I don't know what it would do to you,
but it would make me gag.
If I were teaching fucking freshman English,
I couldn't read that sentence
and not just carve it all up.
They just didn't like the fact
that this book, A Man in Full,
had sold 1.4 million copies in hardcover.
You know, that couldn't be literature
if it--if it sold that much.
But I tell you, literary spats are fun.
It makes you realize you're alive in the morning.
[bright music]
[keys clacking]
He just kept going.
[Christopher] No one turns out masterpiece after masterpiece,
and I think that's probably
a sad realization for great writers.
But what's noble about it is that they go on,
they are writers to the end.
I think there was bound to be a problem
with big, long books after a certain point
in the age of weapons of mass distraction.
And the books became less impactful
with each novel.
Whatever's taking place is taking place,
and America's paying attention to it
how America pays attention to it.
And nobody was reading Tom Wolfe.
[Christopher] His last two novels,
one was on sexual harassment on a college campus.
I cannot believe I'm seeing the sophisticated Tom Wolfe.
It's like, "There are children living in sin!"
Well, I'm afraid-- I'm afraid I was.
[wistful music]
He thought he could make up for the 50 years
between him and the people he was writing about
with a lot of anthropology
and a lot of research and journalism.
But it felt really phony.
You know, he clearly was just so excited
to be able to use these words like "dormcest" and "sexiled."
With every new novel,
it became a little bit less successful,
a little bit less esteemed.
But, you know, he was still a writer who said things
that people had not yet said.
[Niall] Very few other people wrote about the academic world,
or indeed, more generally about American society,
with that kind of clarity of vision.
Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood,
I don't think they're his best works.
But they say that a genius hits a target
no one else can see.
And I think Back to Blood,
which is on the subject of immigration,
it speaks to Tom's, you know, fundamental prescience.
He had his finger on the nation's pulse.
At 85, the white-suited Tom Wolfe is still
stalking big game,
but this book is a bit different,
a history lesson mixed with a return
to his roots in journalism.
In his latest book,
Wolfe argues speech, not evolution,
is responsible for humanity's highest achievements.
He skewers the man who introduced evolution
to the masses, Charles Darwin,
along with famed linguist Noam Chomsky.
If you look at everything he's written,
every book bothered somebody,
and that's what's good about it.
[soft music]
He wasn't afraid of the controversy.
He said, "If that's the way the facts are,
that's the way I'm gonna tell the story."
It is bold and, I think, some would say very dangerous
to say that Darwinism and evolution is a myth.
Well, I think a lot of people are gonna agree with me!
[pensive music]
[Michael] He sat in a very uncomfortable intersection
between red America, blue America, left and right.
He avoided being too closely identified
with any kind of political ideology.
[Tom Wolfe] I've never backed the Democratic Party
or the Republican Party.
Sure, I'm...
There are certain things I do care about politically.
I care tremendously about freedom of expression.
I will always be willing
to do what I can to preserve that,
which I think, fortunately,
there is still great freedom of expression
in the United States.
[pensive music]
[Christopher] I think it would be a lot harder
for Tom Wolfe to do what he did now.
It's almost impossible for someone to do
what Tom Wolfe did in our society today.
It's been impossible, I would say,
for probably close to 40 years.
[Michael] Any of the places
that Tom Wolfe published for in his heyday
would not be able to publish pieces by him today,
because he would just piss too many people off.
[Jeff] Is this the last book?
To be honest, I have only five more planned.
Uh&
[chuckling]
One is coming up,
it's on political correctness.
Which I think is the funniest subject
in a long time.
[Michael] The strange thing in is his life
is that while, every now and then,
someone would challenge him in a review
on political grounds,
most of the New York literary establishment
just loved him.
They loved him personally,
they loved what he wrote,
and they kind of thought
whatever his political views were
as beside the point,
and I kinda think they were.
I'm 86,
and you lose your friends.
They die,
or they're unable to come out.
They're confined because of their illness.
And I remember when Tom was not moving very well.
This elegant man would later on,
because of the curvature of his spine,
the illness that he had
in the last few years of his life,
it never seemed to make an impression on him
in a negative way.
[pensive music]
Junior Johnson!
As I live and breathe.
Tom Wolfe!
How you been gettin' along?
Well, not badly, not badly.
-I'm still vertical. -Right.
-That's half the battle. -That's true, that's true.
He was one tough motherfucker.
Whatever he had to do, he would do it.
Great sense of self.
He was Tom Wolfe.
[soft music]
Author and journalist Tom Wolfe
has died at a hospital here in New York.
[newscaster speaking German]
[newscaster speaking French]
[newscaster speaking Spanish]
[contemplative music]
[Ron] We just don't have figures like that anymore.
There are no journalists that huge anymore.
What he did was just fundamentally different
because of how grandiose he was.
[Alexandra] I think that he should be remembered
not only for his work and the books that he wrote
but for his courage.
I think Tom Wolfe's novels will last
and will be rediscovered at some point.
They'll go through a phase of neglect.
But because they're so good
and because they actually capture
American society so well,
future generations will come back to them
and find them much more illuminating.
Not only did he inspire me
before I even thought I wanted to be a writer,
um, once I became a writer,
uh...he was a touchstone for me.
[soft music]
[Tom Wolfe] I think your soul
is your relationships with other people.
And that's the part of you
that really doesn't-- doesn't die,
and you suddenly begin to treasure those things
in a way you never did before.
-Come--come have a seat. -Okay.
And this is, I think these--
How you doin' over there?
[Morley Safer] Well, no; it's very interesting.
He was kinder to me than he had to be,
and kinda sweet-natured.
Easy to be with.
In all the years I represented him,
we never had an unkind word.
He was a real gentleman.
I watched him over, oh, almost 60 years.
And I watched him as a fan,
I watched him as a friend,
and I always watched him
with a sense of wonder and amazement
that he could be all these things.
Thank you very much.
[applause]
[soft music]
[mellow, jazzy music]
[old-timey piano music]