James Rosen at National Review offers a look back at Tom Wolfe’s brilliant and funny takedown of composer Leonard Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers.
On January 14, 1970, Leonard Bernstein, the renowned composer and New York Philharmonic conductor, and his wife Felicia, the actress, philanthropist, and socialite, welcomed 80-odd guests to their 13-room duplex at 895 Park Avenue, one of the Upper East Side’s swankiest addresses, to raise money for an unlikely group: the Black Panthers, best known for mounting armed resistance to police — the pigs — and advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government.
A few weeks earlier, reporter Tom Wolfe of New York, a fledgling magazine, had dropped by the Harper’s office of his friend David Halberstam, also a reporter, and found him absent. Rather “nosily,” as Wolfe later admitted, he spotted on Halberstam’s desk an invitation to the party, handwritten by Felicia.
The Bernsteins and the Panthers! A hot property in literary circles — he had already dazzled reviewers and climbed bestseller lists with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) — Wolfe recognized at once that the artsy aristocrats and armed revolutionaries were “a match made on Donkey Island,” ripe for the serrated satire and pyrotechnic prose with which the Richmond native had already made his name. He used Halberstam’s phone to RSVP: “This is Tom Wolfe, and I accept.”
Upon arrival, Wolfe, already given to all-white suits, introduced himself to his hosts, whipped out his Easyrite stenographer’s notebook, and “quite openly” began taking notes. One of the gifts that powered Wolfe’s singular prose was :::blending in::: even when, by all rights, he should have been :::sticking out:::.
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A Master Observer's Timeless Ridicule of Radicalism | National Review
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