American Experience; 1964; Interview with Gay Talese

So where were you in 1964, you were right here in New York City? I was in my ninth and final year of daily journalism. I had worked for the New York Times beginning in 1956, and I had left in the 65. So 1964 was the year before, and 1964 was a very interesting year for me and for the world I was covering as a reporter for the New York Times because it was a rather year of ambiguity. It was just a matter of months prior to the assassination of John Kennedy in November of 1963. And we had this new president about whom little was known, though he'd been in the Senate all those years. And much scorn was heaped upon him as with the very city of Dallas, which is interesting about Dallas.

It was demonized in the aftermath of the death of President Kennedy. And remains so today in ways oddly Memphis, the site of Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, and to say nothing Robert Kennedy and Los Angeles in the same year. Those two cities do not have any of the identity with the bloodshed and the sense of being a little bit on the low level of American consciousness in terms of conspiracy. The city of hate and the rise of conspiracy I think is in the aftermath of that initial shock of Dallas as the place where the President, the Eastern President, the Harvard President was killed. And some to even thought in those days, even though the Warren Commission refuted all of this report, that it might have well been the Texas Mafia or Lyndon Johnson's red

neck brigade did it. But it was the time 64 where you had skepticism of government. It would be get much worse as time went on. It would become increasingly a period of anti-establishment attitude in the press in academia. I think the man in the street. It was also a period when we see the beginning of many new things including music, I mean the rise of rolling stones. And the Beatles were already coming to be known in 64. But they hit in February of 64. Yeah. They were. They were. They did. But it wasn't a fat. It looked like a bit of fat. These mop-headed young guys from England. It was really also time when England became increasingly a capital of culture and music and the theater.

The angry young men was earlier, I know, but the idea of British theater, which much of what happened then, 64, we still see evolving today in 2003, 2013, excuse me, to. And so I was a reporter. I was working on The New York Times. I was also working for magazines and working for Esquire in my free time. That was one of the, and that was the period of The New Journalism. It should not be ignored entirely. That's 64, 63, you had a great editor at Esquire named Harold Hayes, H-A-Y-E-S. And it was for him that I and Tom Wolfe and later many others, Norman Maylor and Joan Didian and Nora Efron, we were all working for Harold Hayes on a free time from whatever our jobs were. I mean, Tom Wolfe was working on that Harold Tribune. I was on The New York Times, as I said. Nora Efron was working a lot of things she had been on The New York Post. And there was also another magazine, Harper's, that was in the forefront of this, Willie

Morris from the South, had taken over Harper's and David Halberstam and John Corey and Larry El King. Many others from the Old Texas Observer were working in New York, working for the New York Editorship of Harper's Magazine under Willie Morris himself was an author. Let me add that to that because you've covered so much ground right then that I want to kind of go back and take you through it a little bit. You were working for the Times, which he was not, I would guess, a kind of conventional corporation or conventional organization, but it still was a big organization. Looking at that place in 1964, what was it like to work and what if the culture feel like everybody's smoking all the time? I mean, we have someone going back to that moment, his maddening kind of era.

It was a bad money era and it was, you see today mostly because of the success of that very show, which focuses on the advertising period of that time. The same could be said, those same mad men and mad women could have been found in the New York Times City Room and the Herald Tribune and some of the other newspapers, two of them, three of them, tabloids at the time. But it was at the time as you suggest of drinking and smoking. When I first came on to the Times as a copyboy in 1953, having just graduated from the University of Alabama the year before, there were people who would drink in front of you in the city room. And I remember at night, it wasn't a rare occasion to find a man. I do remember clearly one of them with his head in a typewriter completely passed out. It was the time the drinking and journalism course comes from an earlier decade.

And in much later a period, it continued, there's a play this year on Broadway starring Tom Hanks called Lucky Guy. It has to do with a, it was a Nora Efron play, incidentally. Happy to do with the guy was in, like Michael Erie was a columnist for the New York News and the New York Post at various times. A lot of drinking in that. A lot of drinking in the business of journalism, except it got to be increasingly rare the New York Times. As we had a new editor come in in 1962, 1963 named AM Rosenthal, it was my boss, Abe Rosenthal. And he really was a more serious young reporter turned editor than had the previous editor been. But the times in those days was already the most powerful paper in the nation as it remains. And as it had been, from the period of World War II, when it surpassed the heraldabune because of its foreign coverage, because of the emphasis on expanding bureaus and limiting

news advertising, this is not about the New York Times, I know that, but there is one thing that's important to remember, when advertising became limited in terms of space paper ink limited, times cut down on accepting advertising to put more space toward the coverage of the news, particularly the foreign news, big point, raising circulation for the paper and continued endlessly after that. But in a sense, what I'm curious about is how the times reflected if you felt that it did exist a consensus in 1964, it was about to get upended. Or maybe it was in, in 1962, the period leading up to Kennedy's assassination work, there was just this feeling, or was that, that this is kind of the way America is, it's very simple. Well, it had a, certainly identified with a traditional stamp on the American culture. And it was the upholder of tradition, the New York Times.

And John Kennedy made a remark about steel men during a strike. And he called those men, SOBs, I'm only paraphrasing and maybe not fully what JFK said, but it's in my dad always, my father always told me these guys are SOBs and I didn't know it till now or something. Well, the times didn't use son of a bitch, I mean, they'd be very, when it came to language, even this is the period of Lenny Bruce, it was a period when we see language being opened up, if not entirely supported by a more liberal law, although even that was true, the laws were becoming more liberal with regard to free expression. That goes back in a Supreme Court case of 1957 called Roth versus USA, but beyond that, newspapers such as the Times, and particularly the Times, would be very careful on how people could be quoted and slang was very much curtailed and certainly anything bordering on bad taste and language was censored. There was the establishment paper, I was working for the establishment paper, so there were

certain things that I couldn't expect to see in print, even if I heard them in terms of dialogue or slang or curse words or whatever. How did that happen? So, if you extrapolate that out to the culture that the Times was, I suppose you could say a reflection of at the time. It was reflection, there were times. The Times was a reflection of a family, don't forget, it was a family institution, remains so today. Right, but I'm not a fan. Okay. So much for what I do. Okay, let's get off that. Let's just say as just the culture of the world that you grew up in, I'm kind of curious about the look and the feel and the texture of society in 1964, just broadly speaking, like the kind of parties you would give to the kind of cars you would drive. You were always known to be a very sharp dresser, but the average person was out there. People dressed up. I think there was still in 1964, as again, the television series Mad Men does reflect this.

It was a suit and tie era, until Kennedy, it was a hat era too, forget the Fedora that my father wore, and that I, incidentally, is still wear, was not in favor after Kennedy, maybe because he had wonderful hair, ceased wearing a Fedora hat. So the picture of the great final suit, to Gregory Peck and the cover of it, wearing a hat. That was out in 1962, 61 with the president, Kennedy. And with his death, there was still, there was still much of the Kennedy atmosphere in Camelot, the resentment towards Johnson was much of the rising from the disgruntlement of the Harvard and Yale educated people who controlled Washington. And now they had this big cracker coming in from Texas to be the president. And there was not an easy entrance, as you well know, from Johnson's own writing and from the reporting from that period.

So there was a change in a tire, a change in the political voice. It was when Johnson brought in 64, was he introduced the war on poverty. There was not much of a war going on in foreign affairs yet. Vietnam had yet to make its way into the big headlines. So the war on poverty brought with it a kind of new sentiment toward helping domestic Americans who were down on their luck or certainly down on their purse. And civil rights, however, by 64, wasn't so evident, although we had in the city of New York, which I know most about, because I was a city of report, I was never faring corresponding. The city of New York had already rumbling with considerable vibration in Harlem and other parts of Brooklyn, where black people dominated the population. It was the time when Malcolm X was certainly making a big impression.

It was the time when the black panthers were in the news. It was time when James Baldwin, the most literary of black voices alive at that time, was warning, including the New Yorker magazine audience about the fire next time, which he excerpted in the New Yorker prior to his book, prior to the book that was called The Fire Next Time. It was really an extension of the New Yorker essay. He was saying to even the liberals in places such as New York, we're not happy. What you're doing is not enough, granted we have Johnson's sentiment, sentiments expressed to try and bring a more egalitarian society into the forefront of American life. But it wasn't working. And even I, in the New York Times, had a colleague reporter named Junius Griffin, who wrote for The New York Times and wrote a series of articles called The Black Brotherhood. They were going to come down from Harlem and they were going to attack Manhattan.

He was in the paper, it didn't happen, and some people said it was exaggerated, and the editor I mentioned before, A. M. Rosenthal, A. M. Rosenthal, was much attacked for having published that piece, which they said was fake. Well this reporter, Griffin, never acknowledged it being fake. He had sources in Harlem, and this black brotherhood was going to attack the city. We're going to have, so the prognosis of Baldwin would be realized, but it never was realized. But it was certainly true enough to say that there were the beginnings of riots and sometimes actual riots in Harlem. Well you were in August when Harlem basically went up in flames, it must have been totally unnerving. Well I was up there. I had been to Harlem many times, mostly in the early 60s I went up because it was a black Renaissance evoking the period of Harlem in the 1920s and 30s.

When white Harlem, we had a white Harlem, I mean people going up there and going to the Cotton Club, even though the black entertainers were unable to go in such clubs except as entertainers, not as customers. But I went many times in 62, 60, even wrote some pieces for Esquire about Harlem at night. But in 64, I wouldn't go to Harlem at night. I was one day, so you wrote some pieces for Esquire? I wrote pieces in 63 and 62 for Esquire having to do with nightlife, the jazz clubs of Harlem. And then what happened in 64? 64 is when we had, I guess, organized protest and the organizations such as the NAACP and the Corps, and I don't know if stick was in on it, but we had these organizations which

were no longer accepting of the conditions such as they were or perceived as they were. We had active protest and I was once in the afternoon, sent a cover march on 25th Street in Harlem and broke into a riot and I was there, I had my police press tag around my neck like, well, no one will touch me. And then a man who's the head of Corps, James Farmer, James Farmer said, you come here, I said, I'm coming. It's come here, you're going to get killed, you're going to get killed, are you serious? No, no, please, please come with us. And he and two or three other men from this organization, all but does grab me and took me into a storefront because they were to remind me, there was guns in this neighborhood and they were shooting and I didn't know, I wasn't aware of it because sometimes when you're in a credit journal, especially in the New York Times, you think you're bulletproof,

you think you're on a saleable, you think you're going to be able to do what you want to do and let life go on around you, even if it's chaos, and it's not going to pinch upon your particular person, not true, said Mr. Foreman from Corps. So I was just an example, I remember, I think it was Farmer. Yeah, there was a James Farmer, as a James Farmer, I know them. Could we say James Farmer? And then I remember, in August, there were actual riots all around. That's right, that's right. And I remember in the latter part of 64, as we were approaching the holiday season, I had an assignment to call people up and see how they were going to spend New Year's Eve, and I called it a number of New Yorkers, prominent people, the world of the arts, politics, and sports, et cetera. And I called Malcolm X, I had his number, because I'd interviewed him a couple of times. And he said something to the effect, what are you doing, Mr. Malcolm X on New Year's

Eve? I'm staying home, something like I'm staying home, and I'm contemplating the disasters ahead in the coming year. Well, they're coming here, he would mark his own death, he would be dead in 65, and in Holland by, and as yet, not undetermined assassin, though there was one man arrested and I covered the arrest of that other guy. I've heard that the man who was arrested has evidence didn't do it. No, that's right, but I'm not sure I can recall who was ever moved. Why did Malcolm X represent, I mean, you had Freedom Summer going on, and in the Democratic Convention, they won't see the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and Fannie Lou Hamer goes on TV, says I'm sick and tired, being sick and tired, and my question America, and all of these things. He represented Malcolm X represented the first villainous, black civil rights celebrity.

Villainous. He wasn't Martin Luther King or some of those people who marched with King or who marched with organizations that were considered responsible, such as the NAACP Corps and other organizations. No, this was a singular man at odds with the black Muslims, a man whose very features were severe, serious menacing. He didn't cut into the establishment, he didn't give pleasant speeches to the press. He was like, in a way, although more threatening way, like Al Sharpton would be in a coming time, Sharpton also being a black celebrity of a kind of doer or threatening nature, anti-establishment analysis, surprising how times have changed, and the life of Sharpton, he could run for

commerce and be president of the American Society of Gardeners. But those days, though, Malcolm X represented fear for the white establishment. We're going to interview George Lois in May, and one of his covers in 64 was a glouring sonny-listen wearing a Santa's hat. I knew him. He was incredibly controversial. Even though I was a general assignment reporter, I went to different areas, and sports was one of the areas I spent a lot of time pushing myself in terms of acquiring assignments. Because my earliest origins as a journalist in New York were the sports department in New York Times. That was way back in 1956.

So I kept in touch with whoever was in sports, be it the Yankees or the Boxers or Basketball or whatever. So I knew Liszt, and I wrote about Liszt, and in 1963 and 1964, he was rising as almost like Malcolm X and Ruth. That kind of, he wasn't certainly in the tradition of another black fighter of prominence, named Floyd Patterson, who was a heavyweight champion for a while, but not a great champion because he wasn't really a heavyweight to begin with. He was a light heavyweight. He was only 190-some pounds, and that is fullest, and not the menacing figure of the 225-pound Liszt and soon to become champion himself, Muhammad Ali, who was also a very big man. So I knew Liszt, and I remember how Liszt wanted to take the crown away from Floyd Patterson. Floyd Patterson was, oh, you could accuse him, as Liszt did, of being an Uncle Tom, kind of guy.

The white hope, even though he was black, sonny, I'm talking about Floyd Patterson. And his manager, a very coy man named Customado, didn't want to make a fight because he was trying to point out that Liszt had a criminal record, Liszt, and was a draft Dodger, you know, they demonized Liszt to try to dodge that fight because even Demado knew there was not much of a chance of his young charge, Floyd Patterson, to stand very long against this guy in the ring. So that was one thing, but it was so interesting, is that when Muhammad Ali got a fight with Liszt, nobody I knew, even those sages of the boxing ring who were sports writers of long-standing and presumably knew who really had talent as a heavyweight fighter, no one believed that Muhammad Ali or Cassius Clay, as he was still called, had a chance against Liszt.

What a surprise that was. And what it was, Clay is so interesting, he represents such a white America, didn't know what to make of this guy. So he's the first, probably since two or three decades before, when we have a black man with a strong political attitude that he expresses. People like Joe Lewis or the white fighters, Rocky Marciano, or whoever we're talking about, would always be speaking only as price fighters, never going beyond the preview of being an athlete and certainly not commenting upon international events or political affairs of the moment. What made him Muhammad Ali so special is his presumption to having a voice outside the ring and power what he surely did outside the ring. He would not have himself limited to that somewhat isolated role of being an athlete.

Very few people in any sport, I mean, you can't imagine Ted Williams and Joe Dimacho saying that against the war, even in later days, Mickey Mantle, Roger Barrett, they didn't open their mouths. In price fighting, I don't remember anybody opening their mouths about foreign policy or about the Vietnam war period, but he did, and boy, what a costum, the willingness to fight or the capacity to fight because his license was revoked for a couple of years. I knew Betty for Dan, and I would later know, or at least to a degree know, other feminists,

I knew Gloria Steinem very well, but Susan Brown Miller, people that were more militant and more unfriendly toward men, I knew them as well. But Betty for Dan was a likable person. I met her and many times had dinner in her presence. At the home of a fellow journalist who worked for the Herald Tribune, it was a sportswriter who started my time as a Roger Khan. He wrote a famous book called The Boys of Summer about the Brooklyn Dodgers, and he was a close friend and his wife, and Betty for Dan was often there on the Sunday dinners in Riverside Drive where Roger Khan's apartment was, and my wife and I would go. And I was always glad to see Betty for Dan.

She was like a Jewish mother. She liked men. She didn't feel the world was stacked against her. She didn't have a persecution complex. She was right. Even tempered and friendly, but also, obviously, a woman with strong views and the capacity to articulate them and the pro style to get it across on paper. I was really surprised to tell you the truth, that her book resonated as it did. I mean, I heard her talking about that book long before she wrote it, or long before she was published. It was amazing. And what was also quite nice about her is you liked, even if you weren't in sympathy with the so-called feminist movement as it was defined in 64, personalized by herself, you thought, well, that's wonderful. She's, you know, she, I mean, Steinem, you would have disagreements with because she was so, though she was beautiful, physically, she could be a little icy and a little pompous and ponderous.

Later on, the Susan Brown Miller's of the World against our will was her most famous book against the rape and the definition of rape. Because, um, was less, was less the kind of person you could come to like and would pick up if she was a hitchhiker on Madison Avenue. Um. But, but what wasn't there for Dan in that year that was under the surface, but was about to just explode? She, she had a way of reaching women who hadn't much thought about themselves coming out of that period when the woman's place was less in, in the workspace, but in the home. Women, more traditional women who took pride in being mothers and didn't have to express themselves in, in a job, and it was also an understanding that they would be supported by their men financially. But the grievance in them and the inner, inner discontent of women had not been reached by anyone prior to, to, um, Betty for Dan because I, I believe that it's important that

she was not good looking. I think Betty for Dan's appeal partly, visually, was she looked like an unhappy housewife. She wasn't because of these dinner parties that I would, I would see her. She was a very cheerful person. But if she wasn't smiling and wasn't prepared to appeal to people, she just, you looked at her and she looked like an unhappy woman. I mean, she, you look photographed. She's not attractive and she was not young, was like, you know, glorious dino, it was, it was a fashion model if she wanted to be and was a bunny and, and she was a playboy bunny and getting to write about the, the awfulness of playboy empire and you, you have to yourself. But Betty for Dan was every woman, every woman in the suburbs who wasn't so happy about her life, but didn't know what, what, what option she had. And for Dan told them such women, the life could be better even for you.

You don't have to pass it on your shoulder. Don't think in the future tense sense of your daughter doing better than you or for you about you. What about you? And for Dan's appeal immediately was, was, was beyond what, what younger woman, there's also don't forget the cause of pollen was around the same time. The Helen Gurley Brown, before the feminine mystique, wrote about sex and single girl. And there again was appealing to young women, those young women who were out of the house, so were working in offices, who were dressing up, part of what was left over from the, from the non advertising world of mad men. I mean, this, this was the period when women were out there and drinking and having sex outside of the office, sometimes in the office. But for Dan's women were really, I think, more of these, of the traditional women, the women who, whose youth had been, who'd passed them by, who weren't into wearing good clothes or trying to be glamorous, working at it.

And they, they were the forgotten element of the post-World or two period. And, and for Dan caught that. And, do you think, what you said, if they don't have to pass this on to their daughters, they can have it now. There's this sense, there's this individualism, one of the things that's driving the culture at this time. I mean, SDS, the youth movement, they're all saying, even the free speech with the girl saying, now, now. Well, yeah, and there's also, one of the things that happened in 64 actually started in 63. But 64, it started to catch on. Was a fat woman in New York, an ex-waitress, and an ex-perfume purveyor at the old, astro hotel pharmacy on 43rd Street on Broadway, Elaine Kaufman by name. Elaine Kaufman starts her career as a restaurant owner in 1963, 64. She started in 63 with her own in place, but by 64, she started getting customers.

And that would go on for the next 40 some years. And this is a woman, like a free Dan character, but a very fat woman, once she had the money to buy dresses, she bought very expensive and very large size gowns. But she became a financial success, Elaine Kaufman, in something that one thought of a servitude as cooking and serving tables, ex-waitress, in this period of free Dan and the feminine mystique, you don't associate the two, but Elaine Kaufman, whose death a couple of years ago was largely, it was greatly covered up to the national press. And she was known internationally too, because her restaurant was the most famous restaurant in New York. More famous than 21, more famous than the Sir, I mean in terms of celebrity, celebrity culture, the literary culture, the political culture, they all mixed around the tables of Elaine's.

And it started in 64, 63. Interesting. What was your take on the civil rights struggles in the South? You didn't go down South, cover that, you were in war. I did, no I did go to. You see, I was a student from 1949 to 1953 to the University of Alabama. I don't come from Alabama, I come from a town south of Atlantic City called Ocean City, New Jersey, a speech community founded by Methodist ministers. The main street of our town was called Wesley Avenue and Asbury Avenue, both named after prominent Methodist ministers. I'm an Italian American by origin, but a product of Protestant society on the speech resort called Ocean City. 1949, I graduated from high school in that town and I couldn't get into any college close to home because my grades weren't so great, but my father knew somebody, the father was

a tail and he made suits for a man, the prominent man in our physical community, the medical community, a doctor in town called Aldrich Crow. And Dr. Crow said he could get me into Alabama, as my father was wondering what, how I could I get into a college. So in 1949, I began four years as a student. During that time, of course, in the deep south, there were no black students, it was a long way off before that would happen. But in my graduating year, 53, when I came to New York, it got a job as a copy board of the New York Times, I kept in touch with all the people that I'd come to know during my four years as a student. And by 1960s, when the south was then going to be challenged with regard to its segregation policies on campuses, as well as in other aspects of public life, I was a reporter who started covered some of that and I'd go down to Alabama.

I went down to Alabama to cover the University of Alabama, which, as you know, with George Wallace's president, tried to keep black people out of the college, I had long graduated and not with a bunch of social conscience because there wasn't much of a social conscience in New York or New Jersey to forget the south. I mean, we're talking about Northerners. There wasn't much of a social conscience in 1954 when I got out. It happened in the 60s. What was standing in the schoolhouse door? Wallace was standing in schoolhouse, or trying to keep, first, Arthur Mane J. Lucy was the first woman to try to break the collar line at my college. In 1965, before the March, by Martin Luther King from the Selma to Montgomery, which led to the Civil Rights Voting Act being passed during the Lyndon Johnson administration, ironically leading to the election of our president Obama, if you think in those terms. And I do.

But Alabama, I covered Martin Luther King's March on Selma. I was there in Selma on the occasion of Bloody Sunday, March 7th in 1965. I saw people who were in the police force of Selma and the state troopers of Selma. And some journalists were covering from the south. In some cases, they were my old classmates. So I could see, as a journalist, from New York Times visiting upon that big story with several dozen reporters from the north. But I could see it from also from the southern point of view. And while this was, of course, a racist point of view, I was, I think, wise enough, and broad thinking enough to know that the racist point of view existed in Miami and Manhattan in Montana and Malibu. I mean, it wasn't, yes, it was focused on Selma at that time. And Selma became the center of racism in terms of being personified as such.

But I knew it wasn't. But it was certainly bad enough in Selma. But we could find remnants of this elsewhere in the country. And when Martin Luther King went to Chicago that same year, and we were talking about 65, he was met. The Martin Luther King was no hero in Mayor Daley, Chicago, either. No, I think some of the racism he encountered there was as intense as anywhere else. You know, it gets hidden ahead with the brick. That's well said. Yeah. I'm going to talk about. I knew what you were interested in that the workman in 64 who left the Vertson of Bridge Project went to work in World Trade Center. That's a little bit out of your fear of influence. Well, as a long digression, I don't think we can probably do it, but I'm interested in the junk. I'm talking about junk skyscrapers. Like do we have junk food, junk culture?

I thought the World Trade Center was junk construction. And so it was said to me by more than one man who worked on it as one of these steel workers. But that's another program, maybe. But you spent a lot of 64 covering the building in the Vertson of Narrows. I did. I spent, yeah, most of the, I must have read about 20 stories about that for the times during that period. And wrote a book later. How do you see that project fitting into a maybe a dozen in our construct? Well, there was some erasism in a lot of erasism in this period of civil rights, the writing Harlem. There was also erasism in the America and the white unions, including the construction of the Vertson of Narrows Bridge. There was, I mean, there's erasism all over New York up to that year. I mean, there's erasism all over New York.

Not only in places we know Jackson, Mississippi, Selma, Alabama, you know, places of Tennessee during the sit-ins earlier when John Lewis made his entrance into activism. But the building of the Vertson of Narrows Bridge had, and its union tried to keep and succeeded to a degree in keeping black people out of that hard-headed occupation. The unions were allowed by, of course, the tradition, the people from the tribes along the St. Lawrence River built the world, built the Empire State Building and the Grandfather's time, built the George Washington Bridge in the 1930s, and as many of the children from such construction workers from the Indian, the Mohawk Reservation in Canada and along the St. Lawrence River. And large numbers built the Vertson of Narrows Bridge, which was completed in 1964. And it was interesting to me, though, I kept in touch with some of those builders and after they finished that big construction job, which took four years, they moved over

to the Building of the World Trade Center. And when that one tumbling down in 2001, I talked to some of them and I said, well, we're not surprised. It fell down an hour, sort of piece of junk. What do you mean? Because the difference between the kind of construction work we did with the Vertson of Bridgital Stale Forever and could have survived any kind of Torres Plains hitting the towers. So what we built beginning in 1964 in Lower Manhattan, the World Trade Center, it's junk. It's like a bird cage or two bird cages. And one guy said the reason it was so frails, because the steel was so thin, because they had no foundation within those two towers, because they wanted to rent, they wanted nothing to be in the way of the floor space for rental. It was a commercial enterprise to begin with. Most money you could maximize is what they wanted and what they got was a piece of junk. So I thought it was like a junk culture piece of architecture and no more than just junk food.

I got, before the towers fell, I'd be saying, I talked to an architect and he said that among the architectural community, they used to joke that the twin towers were the boxes that the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building came in. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. The Beatles arrived. I covered when you first heard the Beatles. I didn't pay much attention when I first heard the Beatles. I saw the, I mean so many of us think we saw at Sullivan's show. I think I saw it, but who knows, it's so many times in your mind there was a vision of being, of seeing something and you really just got it because two days later you saw pictures and then you always thought you saw it, but you didn't see it. I think I saw it. What did I think? I didn't think it would be anything but a fad, I mean, you know, television promotes the life of movements that sometimes are fads and sometimes they take whole. And I didn't know that the Beatles would take whole.

I was, of course, grew up in the era of Sinatra and the era of Bing Crosby and the big band and Benny Goodman. So I had a rather fixed idea of what good music was and I couldn't quite understand the words that the Beatles were singing. It wasn't necessarily important to understand the words. There's more to be said than just what you get precisely from the lyrics, but it certainly was a movement and I was, I was by 64. I covered an era of times had me cover the Beatles arrival in the Paramount and I remember the Paramount as being the place where Sinatra made his big appearance way back in the 1940s. He sang in the Paramount, 43rd Street and Broadway. The building is still there. And there were the Beatles and the mobs were around them were not only young people that was a lot of, of New York's Gentile Cafe Society were at that too and I wrote about that. So they were making their Beatles, I mean, were making their crossover into the, into

the, to the jet-setters and the trend-setters of the more fluent classes who would be club people, who would go to, who would have dinner at 21 and be found attending charity balls and black and black tie, but here some of those same people were watching this group from London who were about to affect the world. So and then soon to be followed by the beat, by the Rolling Stones and and and insist. But no one would have in 64 had the imagination, I think, to, to allow for the fact that this group, the Rolling Stones or the Beatles, would live on to the 21st century. And in the case of the Rolling Stones to be performing well into the second decade of the 21st century, it's just astonishing how they would live so long, living the life they did and the and the wretched life on the road and being so self-adulgent as a group. You would think with all the whiskey and wine and drugs and women, they would have had

a wonderful heart attack somewhere in 1979 and be in a mausoleum. But here they are, still playing the Rolling Stones and the Beatles or, you know, live in all cases, but their music is alive, as is synonymous music incidentally. So you didn't, you didn't cover the, I guess they played Chase Stadium, but that's probably not their first trip. They come back, I think, to do that, not in 64, I don't think. Before, one of it, no, I didn't cut the, I covered the Yankees in 64, I sold to CBS. That's a, that leads to a dark era for the, for the, as a Red Sox fan, it was one of great eras for me. Well, I knew the guy that CBS name was Mike Burke, he was a veteran of World War II. I think it was a paratrooper and he was president of CBS and he took over the Yankees. I remember him.

I knew him because I had a friend named Erwin Shaw who was a very famous novelist. There was a pal of Mike Burke's. I went to Yankee Games in the box seat of Mr. Burke, but it was the beginning of the bad, bad years of the Yankees and that would not be changed until George Steinbrenner whose favorite figure was probably George Pattern, so the, the era of Steinbrenner changed all that, but that didn't come to 73. You, you're such a finely detailed observer of things. Just wondering if you can cast your mind back to the texture of the society and what it felt like in 64, more people throw what they wore. Well, the period of 64, I knew on two levels, one, my personal life, and how I lived it in public or in private, and the second thing was my professional life.

My professional life in 64 was centered within the city room of the New York Times, and within the city room of the New York Times, there was, as there would not be now, freedom sexually in ways you would not imagine would have been the case as you look from 2013-2014 back on the 1960s. In 64, there were countless interracial and heterosexual men and women affairs. There was interracial sex in the New York Times, which was pretty big in those days. I remember a black reporter and a white woman who was working on a copy desk. I remember a managing editor having a sexual relationship, a married managing editor having a sexual relationship with one of the reporters, women reporters who was a few rows downward I was.

I remember in the afternoons, while news was being covered, two or three in the afternoon, after reporters had filed their stories, the first edition closed at seven o'clock. Men and women on the staff would go to a neighboring hotel and have a little matinee sex, and then come back at five o'clock, six o'clock to see if there were any revisions needed on their stories. I mean, it was incredible that the New York Times, which had, as its owning family, the Solzberger family, and had as the great queen of the New York Times, a woman named Effigene Solzberger, who was the wife of a man who had been the publisher Arthur Hayes-Solzberger, and she was the daughter of the man who really was the giant of the New York Times, Adolf Ox. He died in 1935, only had one child, Effigene. She married the man who would be the publisher, and she was the mother of the man who would be the publisher. She's the grandmother of the man. The Solzberger is like a dynastic, like the Habsburg dynasty running the New York Times, with a certain, because she presciivized it, Effigene, a certain tradition, kind of a Victorian

manner. She was almost like a Margaret Thatcher. She always liked a queen Victoria. She was amazing, Effigene. Having said that, her husband was a bit of a lethario. He had a movie star girlfriend that he would have sex with in the very building on the top floor. This is 64, I'm talking about, and 64, and outside the building, the stories that I covered, were stories where sexuality hadn't reached where it would be in the 70s when we had the so-called sexual revolution. But we had, we were reporting on life as if it was dominated by decorum. But we were aware of life, and the rampant sexual way that I described the city room. The President of the United States was dead, but he was certainly John Kennedy, I'm referring to, hey, I had a freeze, we knew about his affairs, because we had Washington reporters tell

us that they were aware of it, but we never reported upon it. We never reported upon much of what we knew, because there was a certain standard within journalism those days. Maybe it was just protecting men some of those days, because men in those days dominated the desks that were to determine what was published, what was not published, what was within newspapers, and within networks, and within the movies. What happened to make we, consumers of the news, more aware of the news in ways of personal life, didn't happen for the decade, and that happened because more women got into journalism and get into editorial roles and get out of law schools that would not want to have the double standard perpetuated anymore, but why was the 64-period, was still a period of the double standard, and a period when in journalism, it was still a voice club in a sense, so we would not dwell upon the editor having sex with a young woman on

the staff, willing, it was certainly not without consent, but I'm really saying it was a rampant time, a time of rescue, a time of rest-scality. If you, I think we've got to wrap up, but if you look bad, it's time of fashion, too. You haven't touched it. People dress better. They cease to do so with the rise of the civil rights and anti-war movement. That's where you change style in terms of dress. That's when, was during the period, when we had student protesting the war from Columbia Harvard or around, because there was conscription, that's why they were so involved, because they would be drafted, unlike now with this volunteer army. Nobody cares about what goes on in warfare, except if it affects people you were married

to or people you're related to. But the period of the 1964 period, people were very careful in how they were dressed. They go to an office, you just see in madmen, the New York Times people dress the same way. A reporter would not go in an assignment without a jacket and tie. Editors would certainly never be in the office without their jackets on. And they weren't even slung over the back of a chair, reporters would take their jackets off and hang them on the back of the chair in front of their type, or they'd be typing maybe in their shirts and with their ties loosened. But when they walked out the building and had an interview with a mayor or interview with some utility leader or some ball manager, even the sports writers are fairly well dressed. Now of course, the soul changed and all changed because in that period of the youth movement in the wake of the Vietnam protests and the civil rights protests, which pervaded the best campuses on even the affluent class that sent their kids to Harvard, Yale and Stanford,

the professors started dressing down like their students. They wanted to identify with youth and revolt and personality change and the drug culture as well. And so since then, we have declined in how one dresses, except interestingly, interestingly even now in the second decade of the 21st century. On television, your anchorman still wear jackets and ties. So far as I've been able to notice, it's interesting, it's not part of 64, but it is interesting than 64, we have some of what was then originally conformed to dress in public anchorman. And what the CBS, Mr. Cronkite or the people on ABC or NBC, John Schanzler, whoever, he frankly, they still, your anchorman today, are still with jacket and tie, Brian Williams

and the rest of them. Yeah, except now there's Katie Couric or one of these women who's an anchor. So that's pretty remarkable. That's true. They had some people on television covering the news in a serious way, like the woman covered the United Nations friend, B.C., whose name escapes me. But I remember she was, anyway, no more said there. Yeah. So last question, why do you think, to the degree that we talked about, 64 represents a kind of a hinge moment in our culture? Because it was in the aftermath of the death, violently committed on the most glamorous men of our political lifetime. I mean, I was just astonished when I'd watched John Kennedy at a news conference on television. And when the television show was over, this was in the city of the turn, the television,

we were so impressed with what a glamorous, what a handsome, what a young, what a wonderful looking man. We don't care about his public. And then when he did, he ended it with his death so quickly that our imaginations remained with us as how wonderfully he was. Had he had a full term, or God worked two terms, he would have been destroyed. He would have not been Mr. Kamalot anymore. But because he died within a short term, and with all the unanswered questions unanswered forever, whether he would have got us out of Vietnam, whether he would have done this, so everything would be falling on the next president, the whole King, Mr. Johnson. And he was just, well, all good things he did, civil rights most particularly, would be a victim of the war in Vietnam. And even though in 68, when he decided not to run again, he was trying to fit in with

his long hair, it's interesting how he was trying to look like the Beatles in a way. I never saw a president change his hairstyle so much as Johnson from assuming the role of president with the death of Kennedy and then look at him in Chicago in 68 when he decided not to run what he looked like. And later on, it's even more ridiculous looking in terms of being like a little Texas hippie. But the 60s, it didn't happen yet, it was about to happen. And what was about to happen was protest against all that we live with a certain sense of acceptance in 64, meaning, meaning racism, racism was all over New York in 64. We don't have to look at the little Selma for that example, but we did look to Selma, but it was going on in Harlem and still does. In 64, we still had unhappy women. Of course, they would become be identified, thanks to Betty for Dan. We had living in the closet, people in the New York Times included, we had homosexual

editors, homosexual writers, homosexual, probably advertising guys and could be part of madmen in our building on 43rd Street, the old New York Times building between 229 and West 43rd, had everything within that 14th story building going on in terms of sex and drugs and gambling and organized crime, which we had bookmakers in the building, we had gangsters running the trucks that ran the New York Times around town, the teamsters union. Everything in that building was going on, including Prudery, as represented by the woman who was the mother of the ownership, effigy and Solzberger, all of that within the building. And all of what we reported in those days wasn't quite going to be in the big headlines that would be true in the late 60s and early 70s as the war became, the protest against the war became more pervasive as we became more aware of the racial problems that even with the Civil Rights Voting Act wasn't going to be solved, I mean, it was all, it was turmoil.

It was on the cusp of the turmoil time, 64. It was just the clouds were forming, but the storms hadn't yet maturated to the point where we were all aware of how we were going to be drenched and sometimes we're going to be altered by this storm that was coming up. Great, that's two, thirty seconds of what we call room tone, just for gay tillies starting out. Okay, thank you.