Maggie's Farm

Tom Wolfe and I met twice, in his Upper East Side home, and to answer the inevitable question, no: He never wore a white suit. Dark blazer, dark pants, no hat.

We talked for four hours over two days about “Radical Chic,” his New York account of a January 1970 party that Leonard Bernstein held, at his Park Avenue duplex, for the Black Panthers. (The New York Times, whose Charlotte Curtis was in attendance, ran an account the next day.) It’s a delightfully scathing story, which pissed off more than a few New Yorkers. (Bernstein’s wife “fled” a party rather than be in a room with Wolfe’s publisher.) At 25,000 words, “Radical Chic” filled a chunk of the magazine. Wolfe envisioned it as a chapter in a “non-fiction novel,” but his “journalistic instinct overcame any literary instinct,” he told me. My questions and comments are in blue, Wolfe’s responses in red.

Storyboard: How did you get the idea for “Radical Chic”?

Tom Wolfe: It was December of ’69, it must have been, that I learned about this party for the Black Panthers, in the following manner: I was at Harper’s magazine, waiting for my wife-to-be — who was the art director — to get a break so we could go to lunch. And I just started wandering around — everybody was at lunch — poking my nose into other people’s business. And I was in David Halberstam’s office. There, on his desk, was an invitation to this party. And I said, “My God! 895 Park Avenue! That’s one of the greatest Park Avenue buildings.” And I said, “Somehow I have got to go to this thing.” So I copied down the phone number that was on the invitation to call to respond, and took a chance on it being a committee of some kind — which, in fact, in must have been, because there was a security check outside the door to Leonard Bernstein’s apartment. I mean, they put some big desks out there, so you couldn’t get by. There was no way you could sneak by. And my name was on the list, so no problem! And I immediately introduced myself to Felicia Bernstein and to Leonard Bernstein. I didn’t know them. I told them that I was from New York magazine.

Did they know who you were?

I don’t know. They didn’t fall all over themselves, if they did. Well, they might have known. I had done The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Didn’t they wonder why Halberstam didn’t show up?

They may have. But they really wondered why Homer Bigart hadn’t shown up. They expected Homer Bigart, the No. 1 foreign correspondent for the New York Times — he was the big shot of their political coverage — to come. Instead, they sent Charlotte Curtis, who was a good writer and everything, but she was the social editrix. They assumed if you were there, you were there for the Panthers.