Have White Suit, Will Travel

Tom Wolfe Discusses His Journalistic Journeys Into American Culture

(CBS) 
"So, the next time I was invited to such a thing, I just shut up and just listened and just looked," Wolfe says.

Asked if he saw himself as a voyeur or a reporter, Wolfe replies laughing that, "I don't think there's any, I don't think you can separate, but you get, you get -- most voyeurs are stupid because they don't get paid for it."

In the film version of "The Bonfire of the Vanities," you get a sense of what Tom Wolfe sees. Most often, Wolfe appears fixated on class.

"It's not just about status. It's mainly about, about status," Wolfe says.

Perhaps it was status Wolfe was after when he played baseball as a teen in his hometown of Richmond, Va. where his father was an agronomist and his mother shared her appreciation for art. Although Wolfe had a passion for writing, baseball gave immediate results. He played for Washington and Lee University and after that, two years semi-pro.

"If I really analyze it, the main thing was to be a star," Wolfe says of baseball. "And I'm telling you, if I had been offered a class D baseball contract, I would have taken it rather than go to graduate school, which I did."

Wolfe earned a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale in 1956. Soon after, he found himself donning scuba gear once as a reporter for the Springfield Union, covering Caribbean dictators for the Washington Post and then joining the New York Herald Tribune.

It was around then Wolfe began to write in a style and manner that ignored journalism's conventions of the day. He got inside the mind of his subjects, borrowed short story techniques, extended dialogue, used exclamations points. And helped give birth to what came to be called "new journalism."

Which is around the time the white suit first appeared.

"I started wearing them by accident," Wolfe admits. "I was -- had just arrived in New York. So, anyway I bought this, I bought a white suit for the summer. Well all of a sudden in 1965, I had a book coming out. It was a collection of articles, "The Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" and I was still working as a daily reporter on the New York Herald Tribune. And people were coming to interview me. And I didn't -- I couldn't handle it. I didn't -- I was just tongue tied.

"Wait a minute. I'm supposed to be interviewing you," Wolfe says he thought to himself.