Tom Wolfe: The 60 Minutes interview

sixty minutes rewind it's probably the most recognizable face in American letters Tom Wolfe the man in the white suit whose new novel a man in full became the best-selling book in America only two days after it went on sale like all of Wolf's work from his look at the astronauts and the right stuff to his look at New Yorkers behaving badly in bonfire of the vanities it is unsparing in it's brutally detailed description of American life Wolf's new book places Atlanta and the new southern aristocracy under his microscope one reviewer said of him he understands the human-animal like no one else a good man to talk to about the tone of our time at the end of the millennium every age has a certain moral tone and no matter how you try to lead your life you are going to be affected by that moral tone you don't have any choice we are heading towards the total eclipse of all values and I don't get me wrong as a writer and perfectly delighted for things to remain the way they are I mean that the human comedy has never been richer no this is not Tom Wolfe's living room though it would be completely in character it is the new Reading Room of the New York Public Library a fitting place for a man of many words he is conservative in his own life yet as he says he delights in the folly of everyone else no more than 35 years ago if any major public figure in the United States had gotten up to a microphone and said you know we should have in this country an institution known as the coed dorm and which downy nubile young things and young men in the season of the rising SAP she'll live together not only in the same building but along the same halls and using the same shower rooms well such a person who had been looked at as if his eyebrows have been eaten away by weevils all wonderful grist for the wolffian mill declining or just changing styles make for delicious confusion and the current trends but leads to so many bad marriages I mean the poor girl doesn't realize that can't tell whether the boy is the heir to a computer fortune or the second drummer in a rock band is because they all dress the old dress and the old taco light formal dress lives on usually on the backs of doormen and elevator men and New York the doorman looked like my 1870 Austrian army Colonels and and the and the tenants looked like refugees from a bad film does that displease your are you able to accept this as a constantly changing panorama for you personally it displeased me a great deal I think there's a real purpose to formality there's a real purpose to telling people how you expect to be treated no one defines himself more clearly than Tom Wolfe striving white suited in all seasons through the gritty streets of New York he appears to be some throwback perhaps to more man early days in fact he uses words like weapons as in his dissection of the ruling class in bonfire of the vanities you you wasp charity Barlow's sitting on your mounds of inherited money up in your co-opt with the 12-foot ceilings and you German Jewish finance seers who have finally made it into the same buildings there better to insulate yourself from the shtetl hordes what role do business leaders play in society business leaders I find actually plays very little role I think it would be wonderful if a business leaders would weigh in to not only political questions but moral questions right now they're afraid to do it you've said they appoint themselves or see to it or buy their way into cultural institutions that is the new religion for educated and well do people today any business leader who publicly announced his religious activity would be considered an idiot you just don't do that and what do you do now to prove your spiritual worthiness you try to become a member of the museum board you know it's the art museum that is that certifies your spiritual worthiness today at the age of 68 Tom Wolfe like his latest title is a man in full domestically content at the summit of a brilliant career life lived at a gentle measured pace personal correspondence written by hand in copper plate style making the simple business of opening a letter from him a small joy his word processor is rooted firmly out of cyberspace but with wolfy and Glee he relishes the newest of the new social theories there's a steady up that shows that not only are men genetically polygamous unable to be faithful they have nobody have no choice in the matter but women are genetically wired so that they will fall for rich or prominent men I used to think this was conniving on their part but but it's not this is a purely genetic process and and if they are you know if they're caught in the wrong place at the wrong time they can just say well look it wasn't me I'm just a lifeguard in the in the gene pool Wolf's own life is spectacularly private married to the same woman for 20 years to children now in their teens his own gene pool includes some strains of southern Gentry his youth was spent comfortably in Richmond Virginia his mother taught him about art his father inspired his interest in writing Woolf went to Yale earned a PhD and hoped on graduation to start the great American novel in the next month I'm writing obituaries in some town called Springfield Massachusetts and I never knew from day to day what kind of story I was going to be put on it made you realize it you can go up to total strangers and ask them questions did they you have no right to expect them to answer from the Springfield Union to every American reporters dream back then the New York Herald Tribune the writers paper he helped invent something called the New Journalism in which the reporters impressions became part of the story the 1970 report called radical chic was a landmark in excruciating detail he described a party thrown for the Black Panthers by Park Avenue liberals hmm these are nice little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts very tasty very subtle it's the way the dry sac eNOS of the nuts tiptoes up against the door saver of the cheese that's so nice so subtle well know what the Black Panthers eat here on the order of trail there is they're threatening jaundiced eye looking at every aspect every detail every color button the kind of napkins on the table and somehow making these what some might regard as extraneous details reveal the character of the sort of person who lives in that environment and I will confess to the occasional thrust of satire he wasn't the fly on the wall at the party he was a dapper and hungry wasp on the wall people looked at me with a kind of hostility they couldn't do anything about and why I found this enjoyable I can't tell you the story will continue after this clothes may not make the man but they go a long way in describing him meticulous is probably the work my impression of is writing up a little bit right there mr. Nicolosi his tailor would agree beautiful his since cover the full spectrum of white from cream to a lighter shade of pale and he does not apologize for his father well as Mark Twain once said he was someone who enjoyed white suits and he said one thing I would hate to be as conspicuous he says but I do want to be noticed noticed he is a new wolf book is both a cultural and social event the full New York literary industrial complex faithfully pays homage just the kind of party you'd want Tom wolf to cover the way he covered Upper East Side vanities or the macho world of astronauts in the right stuff speaking of which Tom wolf still seems too heavy in a man in fault is a sharp and acid as ever he was only 44 but already running too fat his head popped up out of his blazer and his polo shirt like a bubble his skin was pallid in pasty a few strands of hair the color of orange juice stains skinned back across his otherwise of all pate just over two years ago still riding a man in full it looked like Tom Wolfe was washed up for good a massive heart attack in bonfire of the vanities wolf could have been describing his own last gasp a man dying o mortality probably a heart attack to that deep fear lodged in the bosom of practically every man in the room the old arteries were clogging up and was that the way it would look which would be lying on the floor in some public place with a blue circle around your mouth and cloudy eyes there were half open and a hundred percent dead quintuple bypass surgery saved his life and changed it I think I will enjoy every moment a little a little more and if you count I want to ask you to do this your indestructible at heart but county many days you think you have left oh don't count how many days it has it's the rather grimly small that that number you know you tend to say thousands thousands it's quite humbling to know that despite all of your aspirations all of your dreams and all the talents you think you have you're made of clay as the stoic Epictetus used to say you're nothing but a piece of crockery and a quart of blood and it gives a whole other meaning to the word soul I think your soul is your relationships with other people and that's the part of you that really doesn't doesn't die and you suddenly begin to treasure those things that was my experience anyway in a way you never did before

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 38,674

Keywords: 60 Minutes, CBS News

Id: 8tW9RNE0gyQ

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2018