Where has Tom Wolfe been lately? It has been almost seven years since he burst into Esquire and the Herald Tribune with all those exclamation points and sound-affected sentences about custom cars in California and the Fifth Beatle and that time when Phil Spector made them stop the airplane and let him off because he knew—Spector knew!—it was going to crash. And it has been a year and a half since the publication—on the same day!!!—of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump House Gang, and that's a lot of low profile for the wunderkind of the New Journalism.
Wolfe's been around. He's been editing one book, writing another and —in those ice-cream suits and wild shirts of his—making the usual rounds of those Beautifully Peopled parties in New York. And thereby hangs the tale of his takeover last week of the entire issue of New York magazine with an article entitled "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's." Pop sociology is what it is all about—the sudden enthusiasm among the fun people to have their own Worst Enemies, Black Panthers, Grape Strikers and such, in for cocktails. Confrontation now! The party at Lenny's, of course, was that fund-raising seven-to-niner for the Panthers at the Park Avenue duplex of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein (dress informal). To Wolfe fans, the 20,000-plus word portrait of sophisticated slumming at home will be a classic. To his detractors —a category that must now include just about everyone at the Bernsteins' that night—it will be a scandal.
Spic and Span. As ever, Wolfe prefers fangs to hatchets. "The Panther women are trucking on into the Bernsteins' Chinese yellow duplex, amid the sconces, silver bowls full of white and lavender anemones, and uniformed servants serving drinks and Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts." Then down come the incisors. "But it's all right. They're white servants, not Claude and Maud, but South Americans. Obviously, if you are giving a party for the Black Panthers . . . you can't have a Negro butler and maid." But then Felicia Bernstein (Felicia Montealegre that was) is from Chile, with a real knack for finding nonblack Latin American servants, not only for herself but for her friends. "The Bernsteins are so generous about it," says Wolfe, "that people refer to them as 'the Spic and Span Employment Agency,' with an easygoing ethnic humor, of course."
Wolfe reverts to his Ph.D. (in American Studies, Yale) to explain what Radical Chic is all about. Publicity, he says, has been the traditional short cut for "New York's social parvenus" on their way to Society. And nowadays there's no publicity like social-conscience publicity, especially if it is black and beautiful. "What a relief it was socially in New York," writes Wolfe, "when the leadership seemed to shift from middle class to . . . funky I From A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Martin Luther King and James Farmer . . . to Stokely, Rap, LeRoi and Eldridge."