The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (17 page)

Nesbit packaged the book of pieces along with Wolfe’s novel proposal and sold a two-book contract to editor Henry Robbins at Farrar, Straus and Giroux for a solid four-figure fee—much to the dismay of Clay Felker, who was working as an editorial consultant for Viking Press and felt proprietary toward Wolfe and his work, particularly since he had shepherded many of the pieces into publication. “Clay Felker didn’t talk to me for ten years because he didn’t get Tom’s first book,” said Nesbit. And Tom Guinzburg, the editor in chief of Viking, was so furious at
Nesbit for not giving him the book that he refused to participate in the auction process that Nesbit had initiated.

Working with Robbins, Wolfe lightly edited a few pieces, then got back to the business of the novel. “Henry was a very sensitive literary person,” said Wolfe. “I was very grateful that he and [Farrar, Straus and Giroux cofounder] Roger Straus found some merit in a book of pieces. Quite a few publishers had said, ‘Look, you publish a real book and then we’ll publish this one afterwards.’”

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
was published in July 1965. Reviews were mixed. Joseph Epstein, writing in a
New Republic
review titled “Rococo and Roll,” called Wolfe an “intellectual slummer” who struck “a note of supreme reverse condescension” when writing about underclass bohos such as Holzer and the Twisters at New York’s Peppermint Lounge. Yet Epstein found his satirical jabs at New York status-mongers, such as the “glamorosi” in his story “The Big League Complex,” to be spot-on. Emile Capouya, writing in
Saturday Review
, found it “hard to be grateful for Mr. Wolfe’s industrious researches, his eye for the characteristic triviality, and his very lively style,” which is mostly “exclamatory and goes on too long.”

No matter; the book was an immediate hit. A month after its July publication, it had already gone into its fourth printing. The success of
Kandy-Kolored
, coupled with Wolfe’s savaging of
The New Yorker
in his
Tribune
stories, which ran in April of that year, made the writer the enfant terrible of American journalism, whose genteel disposition concealed a sharply subversive wit. Wolfe was being profiled in
Time
and
Newsweek
, interviewed on network television, and feted at parties from Richmond, Virginia, to San Diego, California, where,
Vogue
pointed out, “he appeared in a white-on-white suit kissing the ladies’ hands.”

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
expanded Wolfe’s audience considerably. Now his pieces were being underlined and dogeared by college students who felt the writer was providing an important forum for voices and cultural trends that had not been given their proper due in the mainstream media. If not quite a countercultural spokesman, Wolfe was certainly in consonance with the incipient cultural sea change. But he had written over 150,000 words in fifteen months, in countless features for both the
Tribune
and
Esquire
, and he wanted to try his hand at a book-length project—if not the epic social
realist novel that he longed to write, then an epic nonfiction project with a compelling narrative at its center. “I had enough pieces for another collection, but I didn’t want to keep turning out collections,” said Wolfe. “I held off on publishing another one until I could get a real book done.”

He found his book subject in July 1966, when he received a cache of letters from an anonymous sender. The letters, which were addressed to novelist Larry McMurtry, were written by author Ken Kesey, who had been busted for marijuana possession in April 1965 and again in January 1966 and had jumped bail to Mexico, where he was in exile. The letters had been passed along through the large network of Kesey’s friends and followers. Ed McClanahan, a writer and editor who had known Kesey when the two were in Wallace Stegner’s fiction writing class together at Stanford University, had sent the letters in the hope that Wolfe might want to write something about Kesey. “At the time,” said Wolfe, “Kesey felt, quite correctly, that if you’re in legal trouble, the bigger a celebrity you are, the better chance you’ll have of beating the rap.”

McClanahan had already tried once to get Kesey’s story out there. Fellow Stegner alumnus Robert Stone had been assigned to write a story on Kesey for
Esquire
, but the magazine had killed the piece, so McClanahan published it in a literary anthology he was coediting with Fred Nelson called
One Lord, One Faith, One Cornbread
. But that was a little magazine for a little audience. “I knew that Bob’s enterprise with
Esquire
had come a cropper ’cause they were too thickheaded to know what it was all about,” said McClanahan, who had obtained the McMurtry letters through Kesey’s lawyer, Paul Robertson, and felt they could be a great jumping-off point for a book. When Henry Robbins, who had signed McClanahan to a book contract, went to San Francisco to visit the writer in the summer of 1966, McClanahan suggested that Wolfe might be the perfect Boswell for Kesey. “I just thought Wolfe’s style just went with what Kesey was doing,” said McClanahan.

Wolfe was intrigued. The letters, he later wrote, were “wild and ironic … written like a cross between William Burroughs and George Ade telling of disguises, paranoia, running from cops, smoking joints and seeking
satori
in the rat lands of Mexico.” One Kesey letter provided some biographical background:

Wolfe was drawn in by the wild head-charge of Kesey’s writing, its vivacity and gallows humor. He knew very little about Kesey other than his book about corruption in a mental institution,
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, a huge best-seller in 1962, and the follow-up about an Oregon logging family, 1964’s
Sometimes a Great Notion
. Wolfe was a big fan of
Cuckoo’s Nest—he
could tell that Kesey had done his homework, New Journalism-style—but as it turned out, Kesey’s life story was every bit as intriguing.

Ken Kesey was raised on a farm that his father owned in Springfeld, Oregon. Like Tom Wolfe Sr., Fred Kesey operated a collective, the Eugene Farmers Cooperative, which he turned into one of the biggest dairy operations in the state. A strapping athlete with literary aspirations, eighteen-year-old Ken Kesey enrolled in the University of Oregon in 1953 and earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism. In 1959 he received a creative writing fellowship from Stanford to study with Wallace Stegner. Kesey wrote during the day and worked the night shift at a psychiatric hospital in nearby Menlo Park. He lived on Perry Lane, a small Palo Alto bohemian enclave adjacent to the Stanford golf course, where he discussed literature and politics with the group of artists and writers that had settled into the placid rhythms of the place.

His first exposure to hallucinogens occurred at the Menlo Park hospital when he volunteered to take part in experiments with LSD for scientific research. Kesey’s initiations into the world of psychoactive drugs
and mental illness provided the raw material for
Cuckoo’s Nest
(Kesey wrote sections of
Cuckoo’s Nest
while on peyote and LSD). The book’s allegory about institutionalized repression resonated with young readers, and the book made Kesey enough money to live comfortably and support his future endeavors. He purchased a plot of land in La Honda, a mountainous rural outpost near Stanford, and began an experiment in communal living with fellow Stanford alumni and various other friends and family members.

The group would become known as the Merry Pranksters, with Kesey presiding over it all like a benign pasha. Meals were taken together, women were shared, and drugs were consumed in prodigious quantities. It was Kesey’s firm belief that LSD was a portal to a higher consciousness; the Pranksters proselytized the good word with a series of Acid Tests that transpired all over northern and central California. Using an arsenal of bright, colorful electric lights, Day-Glo paint, and amplified music, Kesey and the Pranksters created a warmly communal atmosphere in which initiates would drop acid and burrow deep into their inner selves. This was the path to a new age of enlightenment, Kesey was convinced. “When they tripped, Kesey’s instructions were, ‘Whatever you are on your trip, that’s who you truly are,’” said Wolfe. “If someone did something strange, or had a breakdown, that was their trip.”

Wolfe wasn’t so sure, but Kesey was a fascinating figure engaged, Wolfe felt, in no less than the founding of a secular religion. “At the time, I didn’t know of the word
hippie
,” said Wolfe. “The press saw the potential of these people, but they used terms like
acidhead
. To me,
acid-head
sounded like a corrosive battery. There was also the name
hippie-dippie
, which brought to mind Christlike Renaissance figures.” Kesey appealed to Wolfe’s sense of fun and adventure, of forging new lifestyles from the effluvia of pop culture. “Unlike Timothy Leary, Kesey was influenced by comic books,” said Wolfe. “He dressed in military outfits, used Day-Glo paint and acid rock as tools. Leary felt it was enough to just sit in your ashram and meditate. Kesey wanted people to move off of dead center. If you didn’t do that, you were dead.”

Wolfe decided he would go to Mexico City for the
Tribune
, hang out with Kesey, and file a story for
New York
about the author’s eight months as a fugitive. But by the time Wolfe had booked his plane ticket, Kesey was already back in the States. Attempting to sneak across the border
from Mexico, he had been arrested on the Bayshore Freeway south of San Francisco by the FBI. Wolfe decamped to the San Mateo county jail in Redwood City, California, where Kesey was being held pending his release on $35,000 bail.

At the jail Wolfe encountered a scene “like the stage door at the Music Box Theatre,” with a colorful clutch of Kesey supporters sitting vigil in the waiting room, throwing the I Ching or silently praying. After haggling with the prison guards, Wolfe, accompanied by Ed McClanahan, was granted a ten-minute visit with Kesey. Although they were separated by thick plate glass, Wolfe was taken by the sheer mass and bulk of Kesey, his “thick wrists and forearms” and his “big neck with a pair of sternocleido-mastoid muscles that [rose] up out of the prison work shirt like a couple of dock ropes.” Wolfe frantically flung questions at Kesey about some statements he had made in the local press about moving “beyond acid,” and Kesey, through the lo-fi crackle of the phone, told him that “it’s time to graduate from what’s been going on, to something else.” When Wolfe asked him why he had publicly announced his retirement from writing, Kesey told him, “I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.”

Wolfe was drawn into Kesey’s force field, taken in by the “strange up-country charisma” of the man. He traveled with some of the Merry Pranksters to an old pie factory on the ground floor of an abandoned hotel on Harriet Street in San Francisco, where they awaited their leader’s return. Wolfe, wearing his white suit and wielding a reporter’s notepad, witnessed men and women wandering around the vast space in white overalls with patches fashioned from American flags. Theatrical scaffolding lined the walls, with blankets filling in for curtains; there were mattresses strewn everywhere, and a school bus sat in the center of the warehouse, painted in a striking array of Day-Glo colors, “like a cross between Fernand Léger and Dr. Strange.” Next to the bus, some Pranksters were painting a sign that read ACID TEST GRADUATION. Off to one side was Neal Cassady, the protagonist (as Dean Moriarty) of Jack Kerouac’s 1950 novel
On the Road
and a Beat Generation icon, repeatedly flipping a sledgehammer in the air and dextrously catching it by the handle.

Three days later Kesey, who was out of jail on bail raised by his old Perry Lane friends, arrived to a hero’s welcome and barely registered the
fact that Wolfe was in his midst, which was only to the writer’s advantage: he could observe Kesey and the Pranksters’ exploits without getting in the way. “We were beyond being freaked out by appearances,” said George Walker, a Merry Prankster and one of Kesey’s most trusted confidants at the time. “Tom was this very patrician guy who I don’t think ever got down to shirtsleeves the whole time he was with us, but we were too busy with our own stuff to pay any attention to him.”

Even for a group as willfully unconventional as the Merry Pranksters, it made for a bizarre tableau—a dandy among the heads. Wolfe observed the Prankster preparations for something called the Acid Test Graduation, accompanying Pranksters George Walker, Kesey’s former Stanford colleague Ken Babbs, and others on bus trips to Kesey’s compound in La Honda. “Despite the skepticism I brought here,” Wolfe would later write, “
I
am suddenly experiencing
their
feeling. I am sure of it. I feel like I am onto something the outside world, the world I came from, could not possibly comprehend, and it
is
a metaphor, the whole scene, ancient and vast.” The Pranksters were a true mystic brotherhood, “only in poor old Formica polyethylene 1960s America without a grain of desert sand or a shred of palm leaf or a morsel of manna wilderness breadfruit overhead, picking up vibrations from Ampex tapes and a juggled Williams Lok-Hed sledge hammer, hooking down mathematical lab drugs, LSD-25, IT-290, DMT, instead of soma water.”