The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [81]
So really, what you’re seeing on television via the wire services is just getting smaller and smaller. It’s really very sad. I don’t know how much corruption there is at the local level, but there’s never been a better time in the century for there to be corruption in local government, because the press is not gonna spot it.
Television, which has the money to do the reporting, has gotten away so beautifully without doing it that it’s not about to start. You talk to these guys and they’ll say, “Well, they sent me from Beirut to Teheran, and I had forty-five minutes to get briefed on the situation.” What they should say is, “I read the AP copy.” Just try to think of the last major scoop, to use that old term, that was broken on television. They can do a set event. And that’s what television is actually best at. In fact, it’d be a service to the country if television news operations were shut down totally and they only broadcast hearings, press conferences and hockey games. That would be television news. At least the public would not have the false impression that it’s getting news coverage.
I believe it was in the ‘New Republic’ that Mitch Tuchman wrote that the reason you turned against liberals is that you were rejected by the white-shoe crowd at Yale.
Yeah, he wrote that after The Painted Word. All I ever did was write about the world we inhabit, the world of culture, with a capital C, and journalism and the arts and so on, with exactly the same tone that I wrote about everything else. With exactly the same reverence that the people who screamed the most would have written about life in a small American town or in the business world or in professional sports, which is to say with no reverence at all, which is as it should be. And these days, if you mock the prevailing fashion in the world of the arts or journalism, you’re called a conservative. Which is just another term for a heretic.
Have you always been a real clothes horse, really careful about clothes?
The first time I remember being interested at all in clothes was after I saw The Kiss of Death [1947] with Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo. That was his first big role, he was the villain; Victor Mature was the hero. It was a gangster movie. I was at Washington and Lee, and there was a custom, I guess you’d call it, of conventional dress. It was an all-male school, and everyone had to wear a conventional jacket and tie. I guess I just wanted to put a spin on the custom without transgressing the rules, so I decided on these dark shirts.
Style, men’s clothing, has very rigid presumptions about it, and if you really experiment, suddenly you’re out of the ball game. You could certainly cut a striking figure by wearing a royal blue caftan everywhere you go, but you would remove yourself from most transactions of life. So if you want to have any fun with it, it really has to be rather marginal. But the interesting thing is that marginal things seem outrageous at first.
I also think I was the only person on campus who wore a hat. And I know I was the only person who carried an umbrella every day. When I got to my next stop, Yale graduate school, I fell into great confusion, because the grad school was full of genuinely eccentric people, and to try to be eccentric in the midst of a zoo full of eccentrics was a lost cause. The currency was debased. At the same time, it was no use trying to dress very conventionally because there was a whole campus full of undergraduates who were dressed very conventionally.
Finally, when I got to Washington, I started having clothes made because I discovered a traveling British tailor. There were actually several who advertised in the back pages of the Manchester Guardian air-mail edition. They would set up shop in a hotel room. The samples used to always be on top of the bureau. You’d go look at all these samples