Tom Wolfe's "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby"

Tom Wolfe had a serious case of writer's block.  And he had a deadline to keep.  Finally, he decided to simply type up his notes and send them to the editor of Esquire who would give the assignment to another writer.  Tom sat down at his typewriter and, several coffee cups later, he typed his last word. He delivered his 49 pages of notes to Esquire.  The editor simply stroked out "Dear Byron" and published the essay as is.  The result was "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby".

In the 1960's, the car culture was alive and well in California.  Whereas in previous decades, the automobile had been a vehicle to get its occupants from Point A to Point B, by the middle of the decade, it had become much more than that.  It was a symbol of success, of which there was much in Los Angeles.  It also fulfilled the need for speed:  drag racing was all the rage.

Wolfe travelled to Los Angeles -- to the city of the "scorched boulevards", boutiques, bowling alleys, skating rinks and taco drive-ins -- to experience the culture.  What he found was a culture that, rather than worshipping giant heads as the Easter Islanders did, they worshipped cars.  Los Angeles youth would meet at something new called the Teen Fair.  They would arrive in their custom cars at what resembled amusement parks.  A hully gully band blasted music, all electrified, from a high platform. Young women, wearing tight slacks and bouffant hairdoes, danced the bird, the hully gully and the shampoo.

What stood out about these teenagers was their uniformity, as Wolfe explained:

"[If] you watched anything at this fair very long, you kept noticing the same thing.  These kids are absolutely maniacal about form.  They are practically maniacal about it.  For example, the dancers: none of them ever smiled.  They stared at each other's legs and feet, concentrating to do them exactly right.  And all the bouffant kids all had form, wild form, but form with rigid standards, one gathers. Even the boys.  Their dress was prosaic -- Levi's, Slim Jims, sport shirts, T shirts, polo shirts, but the form was consistent -- a stovepipe silhouette.  And they all had the same hairstyle...They were all wonderful slaves to form." (http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1292219.files/Week%208/Kandy%20Kolored%20by%20Tom%20Wolfe.pdf)

Booths lined the perimeter of the grounds of the Teen Fair, hocking items like shoes, guitars, and of course, cars.  Wolfe talked to reps from the Ford Motor Company.  Ford was attempting to corner the market on this new "teenage lifestyle".  As Wolfe maintained:  "If Ford can get them hooked on Fords now, after the kids are married they'll buy new Fords."

These weren't just any Fords, though.  They were part of the Ford Custom Car Caravan.  Customizing was the new trend in California.  An autobody man took the original body of a car and chopped and channeled it.  He jacked up the back end.  He streamlined it.  He added lots of chrome.  And he likely repainted it.  Gone were the days of Henry Ford who said that you could order your Ford in any colour, as long as it was black.

That is where the custom car designers came in.  Wolfe talked to the owner of Kustom City.  He showed the writer around his shop.  At Kustom City, the owner didn't create cars, he created "objets d'arts".  He mixed "krazy kolors" which represented the rebelliousness of the new teen culture:  orange, purple, yellow and violet.   His cars made a statement.  And he didn't just make cars for teens.  His famous customers included Jayne Mansfield, Elvis Presley and Liberace.  In 1957, the custom car owner started hearing from the Detroit auto companies.  They wanted to know what teenagers were going for.  However, he admitted they were limited:  they had to "design a car for the farmer in Kansas and the hotdog in Hollywood".

Cars are no longer the status symbols they once were.  We have said goodbye to the streamlined cars, to the muscle cars, to the custom cars, to the gas guzzlers.  Cars have become, once again, vehicles to get us from Point A to Point B.

http://www.theampalcreative.com/2011/12/kandy-kolored-tangerine-flake-streamline-baby/

Gay Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"

"Sinatra with a cold is like Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel -- only worse." (Gay Talese)

It is one of the most famous pieces of magazine journalism ever.  Gay Talese, who had worked for the New York Times, wanted to try his hand at magazines.  His task?  To write six stories in the space of one year for Esquire magazine, the Vanity Fair of the 1960's.  With suitcase in hand, he flew to Los Angeles to interview the music legend, Frank Sinatra.  The problem was, the 50-year-old Sinatra was bound and determined not to speak to reporters:  he was tired of the relentless questions about his current love, a 20-year-old named Mia Farrow; he was tired of the endless queries about his Mafia connections; he was tired of the movie he was shooting; and to top it all off, he had a cold.  

But Gay Talese was up for a challenge.  For the next three months, he followed Sinatra to every corner of Hollywood and Las Vegas.  He pursued the singer's entourage of 75, gaining glimpses into the private man.  He did what needed to be done to get the scoop.  The result was a brilliant essay written in the "New Journalism" style.  Esquire called it "a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction".  Blogger Maria Henson explained:  "The 15,000 word story is as finely crafted as Sinatra's (and Talese's) custom-tailored suits."  Here is an excerpt from the article that everyone was talking about in April of 1966:

"Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel -- only worse.  For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability.  A Sinatra with a cold, can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy."  

(http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/esq1003-oct-sinatra-rev/)

Esquire magazine cover for April of 1966 courtesy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sinatra_Has_a_Cold.

Note:  For more about this style of essay writing, read Tom Wolfe's The New Journalism (http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Journalism-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0060471832).