The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

Tom Wolfe is one of those writers who I learned a little bit about in journalism class in college but who I put off reading for decades. This was my loss, and I hope you don’t follow in my footsteps. Start reading him now – and start with this anthology.

While Wolfe wasn’t a sociologist, all of his writing contains lengthy passages containing minute, obsessive, clinical detail of his subjects’ dress, hairstyles, social interactions and speech patterns. These alternate with some surprisingly folky attitude and some almost Byzantine-like complex passages (which can be very difficult to follow if you are not a native English speaker with an extensive SAT-level vocabulary). The essays included here are among the earliest of Wolfe’s “New Journalism” style which, while nonfiction, are not too different from the style of his much later novels. Some of these essays age better than others (all were written in the early 1960s) as they almost universally focus on the pop culture of the day and some of that culture is now totally obscure to anyone who didn’t live through it. You’ve probably realized that I regard this volume as a bit challenging to get through, but it’s certainly worth it and is a very rewarding experience. (Wolfe did simplify matters considerably as his writing style evolved throughout this career).

The essays alternate in focus between low-brow culture (disk jockeys, hot rod culture, stock car racing, gossipy tabloid publishers) and high-brow culture (the modern art scene, high society socials). Wolfe’s sympathies are almost always with low-brow culture, which sometimes (but not always) allies himself with teenagers, but mostly with working-class midwesterners and Southerners. His high-brow writing is more obviously satirical in tone, and he has little patience for the comedies of manners that passed for etiquitte among New York City’s elite in the 1960s.

Most reviewers will single out “The Last American Hero” (an article about early NASCAR legend Junior Johnson) as the book’s high point. While that is indeed what I would agree is the best-written article here, I think the true heart of the book is “Girl of the Year” which shows an intersection between the youth culture one would think would have Wolfe’s sympathies, and the ritzy New York debutante culture that pops up in tabloids and fashion magazines before falling into obscurity. (It also has a hilarious, if unflattering, portrayal of the Rolling Stones).

Put in the effort to read this collection, and you will be rewarded with an increased vocabulary, a much better understanding of what early 1960s culture was like, and a great idea of where Tom Wolfe’s later explorations would take him. This collection is a true treasure.

Who better than author Tom Wolfe (yes, the “Bonfire” guy) to document the burgeoning 1960s counterculture? He turns routine articles into ironic-comic masterpieces worth reading a half-century on (has it really been that long?). His technique is central: a deft narrator’s voice to send-up the manners and mores present at the dawn of the youth culture. All along, he was explaining low culture to the high-culture elites of the time.

When I was in college, the heroes of the journalism department were Vietnam reporters David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, and the so-called “New Journalism” reporters: Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe. Today, the best known is Tom Wolfe, thanks to books like “The Right Stuff.” His first book was “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” published in 1965. It’s an anthology of his first magazine articles, that appeared in Esquire and other periodicals.

The magazine article that first attracted attention was “There goes [Vroom! Vroom!] That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” about the California custom car culture. At the time, Wolfe didn’t know a carburetor from a muffler, being a New Yorker without a car. However, a week in Southern California changed all that. And how. He quickly spotted the best and the brightest of the customizers was a goateed beatnik-type named “Big Daddy” Ed Roth. Roth’s cross-town rival George Barris built far more custom cars than Roth, but Roth was the wild visionary–highly-intelligent, articulate, and a little crazy. Wolfe wrote about Roth with insight and understanding that the trade magazines like “Hot Rod,” “Car Craft” and “Rod and Custom” apparently lacked.

It was the same thing with “The Last American Hero.” Wolfe went down to North Carolina, spent a week with good-old boy NASCAR driver Junior Johnson, and returned with an insight into Johnson and Southern-style stock car racing that completely eluded magazines that covered the sport, among them “Car and Driver,” and “Motor Trend.”

Wolfe wrote about fashion, too. In “The Secret Vice,” he told how Lyndon Johnson woke up one morning and realized that John Kennedy was not only smarter than he, but better dressed (“He dresses like some British ambassador”). Johnson zeroed in on the sleeve of Kennedy’s custom-made suits, and realized the button holes on the sleeve were real: they actually buttoned and unbuttoned. The buttons on the sleeve of Johnson’s off-the-rack Sears and Roebuck suits, on the other hand, were sewn on top of the fabric, like some decoration. Old Lyndon wanted real buttonholes! He flew to London (where Kennedy’s suits were custom-made), walked into the first tailor he could find, and said, “Make me a suit with real buttonholes! I want to look like a British ambassador!”

All the first great magazine articles are here, including “The Fifth Beatle” about brash New York DJ Murray the K, “The Peppermint Lounge” where the Beatles twisted the night away, “Loverboy of the Bourgeoise” about Cary Grant, “The Marvelous Mouth ” about Muhammad Ali, “The New Art Gallery Society,” “The Nanny Mafia” and on and on. Classics, everyone. And a delight to read–and reread. As one critic put it, “Tom Wolf is a (blankety-blank) joy.”

I’d read exerpts from this collection over the years; great to go to their source and read them in their original configuration. Probably the best view of mid-20th Century America extant.

Back in the ’70s when I was 18 this was a very exciting and relative book, 50 years later horribly dated not relevant to anything today not even as a history book and totally random was quite shocked it actually how bad it is.

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