And so, on a cool, leafy block off Third Avenue, another Upper East Side evening settled in: Tiny tots draped with Wilson tennis bags were returning home from school; the Dictograph alarm systems were as plentiful as ”no parking” signs. Behind one of the classically ornamented facades–the kind whose architecture says ”don`t touch me”–lurked Tom Wolfe: Great Observer, Debunker of Cultural Myths, Taste Arbiter for tout le monde.
But what`s this? Inside Casa Wolfe, a painted wooden bunny rabbit is stuck in the middle of a terra cotta planter. The haute WASP cream-colored walls are offset by a vaguely psychedelic orange, green and yellow patterned rug. Next to a rather prim living-room sofa, across from the brown Ultrasuede banquette, sit two contemporary lamps. Lucite lamps.
A door knocker in the shape of a wolf`s head–with a devil`s tail–hangs near Wolfe`s Italian futurist manual Underwood typewriter, which a mere week ago spewed forth the last page of ”The Bonfire of the Vanities,” which is being serialized, Victorian-style, in Rolling Stone magazine.
Not exactly the kind of designer interior one might expect from a man who has spent the last 20 years scrutinizing style (”What does one wear to these parties for the Panthers or the Young Lords or the grape workers? What does a woman wear?”–from ”Radical Chic”). But then, Wolfe has always teetered slightly on the brink of this world, slinging arrows at outrageous fortune and generally pumping irony.
He was at it again a few weeks ago in his hometown of Richmond, Va., where he spoke at the second annual Governor`s Awards for the Arts. Wolfe gets invited to such functions because, perhaps more than any writer of his generation, he is as much a living, breathing barometer of the culture as the subjects he writes about–custom cars (”The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”), Manhattan`s social elite (”Radical Chic”), Esalen (”The Me Decade”), the space program (”The Right Stuff”), modern architecture
(”From Bauhaus to Our House”).
Just how he ascended to this lofty position, which appears to at once flatter him and offend his Southern sensibilities, may be for future American- studies savants to say. But when one looks back on the Me-Mania of the 1970s and the ”whole crazed obscene uproarious Mammon-faced drug-soaked mau mau lust-oozing Sixties in America,” Wolfe, in all his pyrotechnic prose, was there.
”This is the Designer Decade,” he told the crowd in Richmond, positing, as is now his duty, a new theory for the `80s. ”We drink designer water, eat designer chocolates and do designer exercises to work off excess fat. . . .” ”Did you know that in San Francisco, they have designer salads?” he is saying now, Southern gentleman`s inflection as matter of fact as if he were talking about the weather.
In his Manhattan home, he is sitting on his Ultrasuede banquette, eating carrot cake and sipping grapefruit juice. He looks, as always, a tad frail. His skin is a distillation of white. Ever the dandy, he is dressed in his signature off-white double-breasted suit, neon-blue tie echoing neon-blue socks. The socks, which poke menacingly beneath his trousers, visually anchor his feet like a pair of lapis paperweights.
Although Wolfe is known for treating the English language as if it were some sort of cosmic hockey rink, in which dots, dashes, exclamation points and italics slap off the page like errant pucks, in person he is the quintessence of considered calm. Miss Manners would adore him.
”This may be the decade of plutography,” he opines, offering yet another theory. ”Pornography is the graphic depiction of the acts of prostitutes. Plutography is the graphic depiction of the acts of the rich.”
For more than a year now, Wolfe has been engaged in an act of plutography himself, writing ”The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
The last major American writer to publish a novel in serialization was Norman Mailer in the `60s. For Wolfe, not known for his speed as a writer, the biweekly deadlines have been ”absolute murder. These deadlines were coming . . . like waves . . . , one after another after another every two weeks. I couldn`t sleep. I`d go to bed and then 2 1/2 hours later my eyes would open up like . . . umbrellas. Like a pair of umbrellas! I couldn`t get them closed again.”
Wolfe`s goal has been to realistically portray, a la Victorian social novels, ”the high life and low life as they exist side by side in cities today.” So he contrasts the dark reaches of the Bronx with the ”takeover princes, perfume-franchise queens, gas tax-shelter kings . . . Cincinnati heiresses yearning to make the party-picture pages of W” and other motley individuals relentlessly accumulating wealth in New York, New York.
The ”hero,” Sherman McCoy, is a renowned author (”so I wouldn`t have to think”) who lives in a 12-room Park Avenue duplex. Like many who frequent 12-room Park Avenue duplexes, McCoy lives in dire fear of taking a wrong turn and ending up in the Bronx–which, of course, is exactly what happens.
Just what did Monsieur East Side know about the Bronx?
”It was kind of like the Arctic,” Wolfe muses. ”It was north of here . . ., and you couldn`t go there.”
But go he did, taking great pride in being one of the few reporters in the Bronx. Not that he ran around in his white suit or anything–”I did wear a suit”–but he spent six weeks learning the territory at the Bronx County Courthouse and area precincts with criminal lawyers.
The new kid on the block was monopolizing the turf until that fateful day when Bernhard Goetz decided to publicize the New York subway system.
”Suddenly, the place is crawling with press! People can`t sleep in the projects because these camera crews are knocking on their doors asking for a reaction to the Goetz case!”
That wasn`t the nascent novelist`s only collision with reality.
”A character I introduce early in the book–I swear this was outlined in the spring of `84–is on the subway. He`s surrounded by four young men. They put their hands in their pockets, but they don`t produce a weapon. In my version, they say, `Give me a quarter.` Then, `How about $5?` Then, `How about $20?` Then, `How about all you`ve got?` Unlike Bernhard Goetz, my man does not pull out a revolver and shoot somebody; he caves in and gives them all his money. And he feels so mortified, he becomes this . . . trembling wretch!
”Well, before I can get that written, what happens but the Goetz case?
Now, how can I offer this incident as the explanation (for his character`s behavior)? They`d say, `The poor guy, he has no imagination, he just reads the newspaper!”`
The treachery doesn`t end there. In the book, Sherman McCoy runs over a young black from the Bronx named Henry Lamb. There materializes ”a lawyer who was well-known in the `60s and `70s for defending radicals. We were about to learn that he files this huge civil suit.” Enter the real-life William Kunstler. ”Only he had a better imagination than I did,” Wolfe says. ”He files a suit for $50 million. Mine was for 25.
”It all reminded me of something Malcolm Muggeridge had said in 1959, when he was editor of Punch. He wanted to put out the funniest issue Punch ever had, so he decided to do a mock itinerary of Khrushchev`s first visit to the U.S., using Disneyland as the first stop. The issue was on the presses when the actual itinerary was released. Well, Washington was first on the list, Disneyland second, and Muggeridge said, ”We live in a generation where it is no longer possible to be funny.”`
But ”The Bonfire of the Vanities” is, among other things, funny. And sad. It is as much a story about the criminal justice system and ethnic politics as it is about vanity. The racial attitudes of everyone from an Irish defense lawyer to a Jewish entrepreneur who has made a fortune running Arabian charter flights to Mecca are turned into Wolfekabobs.
Nevertheless, Wolfe calls the book, tentatively set for publication next spring, ”not possible to characterize politically.” He has often been accused of being a neo-conservative, to which he replies: ”Liberalism is the etiquette of the intellectual classes. To be called `conservative` is to be considered rude.”
Some might find characters such as Sherman McCoy, who describes the Bronx as ”the Congo,” rude, at best, but Wolfe insists he treats everyone equally. He admires and would love to be compared to the 19th-Century French author Emile Zola, who, though committed to causes, strove to maintain objectivity in his writing.
In his heart of hearts, Wolfe remains, first and foremost, a reporter. Nonfiction is the hardest thing you can do, he says, because of the reporting, which has ”got to be right. No matter what they say about the New Journalism, it`s got to be right.”
Raised in Richmond, where his father was the editor of the Southern Planter journal, he grew up, ”like most people,” wanting to be a writer. He studied English literature at Washington & Lee, got a doctorate in American studies at Yale in 1957, then worked for the Springfield (Mass.) Union, the only one of 53 papers that offered him a job (Springfield figures in the novel as the hometown of Sherman McCoy).
In 1959, he joined the staff of the Washington Post, where, according to one Post writer, ”his career took a stunning plunge from Latin American correspondent to covering sewer hearings in Virginia.”
He arrived in New York in 1962 and settled into a $125-a-month efficiency in Greenwich Village ”with exposed kitchens and views of air-conditioning duct moss that hung down like an effluvium.” Writing for the New York Herald Tribune`s Sunday magazine, considered the birthplace of New Journalism, he soon became a Famous Writer and moved to the East Side, near his current place –shared with magazine-designer wife Sheila and daughter Alexandra, who`s nearly 5.
These days, Wolfe is so much the East Sider that he can barely stroll down Park Avenue without running into other Famous Writers or people who bound up to him, eyes dilating, and say, ”I met you at the Whitneys`!”
This business of designers–and our current lust for things designed, be they interiors or blue jeans–interests him greatly. ”It`s quite analogous to the spread of golf and tennis in the 1950s, which became popular precisely because they were identified with the rich,” he says.
Naturally, he has given some thought to the ”Y word.” ”The interesting thing about the idea of yuppies,” he says, ”is that, if you`re talking about young people who come to cities with ambition, well, they`ve always been with us, especially in New York. In the early `50s, there was a very aggressive machismo about businesses like advertising. The fact that you were bilking people . . . well, it had a kind of cutthroat glamour to it! On Wall Street, you were making a killing. You glorified it. Making a killing! There was a lot of yea-saying about one`s rapacious nature.
”That came to a screeching halt, or worse, in the `60s. There was this constant apologizing. One might take pride in working in money markets, but you didn`t bring it up too much. And bonds! Bonds used to be–well, they were not only for your dummies, but your lifeless dummies. Now, being a bond trader is quite a macho thing to do. And we`re back to this theory of the early `50s or middle `20s in our willingness to exhibit greed and ambition.”
Be assured that Wolfe has plutographic ambitions of his own far beyond anything described in ”The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
A plaster frieze of Third Avenue it will be, to hang magnificently from his own living-room ceiling, plaster arms and heads sticking out in high relief. It will depict the roller-skaters ”who put on such a great show in the spring” and people waiting in Third Avenue bus lines.
Not to mention ”the women with the seams of their jeans sma
