Dan Wakefield - New York in the '50s

Brock Brower walked into the editor’s office one morning and said, “Harold, I need work.” Without skipping a beat, Hayes asked him, “Can you get on a plane to Los Angeles this afternoon?” The assignment that day was an interview with Peter Lorre, which not only turned into an Esquire profile of the actor, but served as the seed of inspiration for a marvelously funny, incisive novel Brock later wrote about a horror movie star, The Late, Great Creature .

“Harold and I hit it off right away,” Brock says, “maybe because he was from North Carolina and I’d been stationed there and knew about the place.” Brock had been at Fort Bragg writing guerrilla warfare manuals for the Special Forces—the Green Berets—and found time to write two pieces that he sent on spec to Esquire: a parody of a Paris Review interview with Shakespeare, and “A Lament for Old-Time Radio.” They were bought by Rust Hills, the magazine’s fiction and literary editor. When Brock got out of the Army and went to New York in 1958, Hills said, “You should meet Harold Hayes. He knows your wife.” It was Ann Montgomery Brower’s friend Howie, one of the boys upstairs, who had come down to Ann’s apartment for the pristine pajama parties back in the early days after college.

“I went in to see Harold,” Brock recalls, “and he said, ‘We have to get you a real good assignment.’ He offered me a chance to do a major piece they wanted to commission on Alger Hiss. Harold said, ‘We’re not going to solve the Hiss case. We don’t care if he’s innocent or guilty, but we want to know what’s happening to him now.’

“I did the first draft and Harold said, ‘There’s a year missing here. Who paid Hiss till he got his first job after he left jail?’ The suspicion of readers might be that he was being financed by Commies. I called Hiss’s lawyer, and Hiss called back and said, ‘I was living on unemployment.’ Harold made me be specific—every year of Hiss’s life had to be covered. And Harold was dead right. I talked to Hiss, to his son Tony, to the lawyers, to men he had been in government with and men he had been in prison with.

“I talked to Hiss at the Players Club, which I’d just joined, and when I took him there for lunch everyone wanted to know who I was. The place was buzzing with a kind of undertone of ‘Guess who’s here?’ Everyone was looking at us and Hiss was enjoying it—he liked being the villainous celebrity. He said I couldn’t quote him on anything, so I couldn’t take notes, but afterward I rushed back to the Players’ library and wrote down everything I could remember. I used it, but not in direct quotes in the piece. All of us learned to do that—we had no tape recorders then, and it put you into a kind of double or bifurcating mind-set. You had to ask the best question and also remember what he answered. I did it with indirect quotes like, ‘Hiss feels today …” I think I came out with about seventy-five percent of what he said. I was plenty proud of it, and Hiss didn’t challenge anything I said. He was surprised I was able to remember it all, and I said, ‘I went to law school too.’

“It took me three months to write the piece, during which we were very broke. I was paid $1,000 for it, their top price. I was freelancing then, but after that piece they hired me as a part-time editor.”

The article, “Hiss Without the Case,” came out in the December 1960 issue, and is still talked about today among writers who read it at the time. All the writers I knew were reading Esquire in those days, and I was especially drawn to the piece on Hiss because I’d met Brower in college. When my high school friend John Sigler came down from Dartmouth one weekend while I was at Columbia, I took him for beers at the West End. I told him I was working on the Spectator and taking courses with Van Doren, Trilling, and C. Wright Mills, and he said, “You’ve got to come to Dartmouth and meet my roommate. He’s interested in all the same stuff.”

Sigler’s roommate was a strong-jawed, all-American-looking intellectual named Brock Brower, a future Rhodes scholar who was editor of the Daily Dartmouth and, like me, a rabid fan of Scott Fitzgerald. We sat up all night drinking beer and talking about the relative merits of Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby , the New York Times and the Herald Tribune . Now here we both were, writing profiles for Esquire .

When I read “Hiss Without the Case,” I was surprised to learn that Alger Hiss, this once powerful Ivy League, New Deal aristocrat, now worked as “a salesman for a small line of stationery,” and I felt I had come to understand his odd situation, as Brock Brower left him at the end of the piece: “He shook hands and went off across lower Fifth Avenue—a tall man in a summer straw, with certainly no mince [a description from Whittaker Chambers] to his energetic walk—going after that most mundane of American goals, and the last one that anybody would think that Alger Hiss would end up in pursuit of: a customer.”

I ask Brock how he approached writing that piece, and he says, “I cared more about what was going on in the real world, but I wanted to write with the techniques of journalism and novels working together. I’d justify everything in a profile like the one on Hiss in two ways—that it was factual, and that it would evoke a character the way fiction does. I was very influenced by Dickens.”

Brock says Harold Hayes didn’t actually teach him any of these techniques but simply gave him the opportunity and the impetus to use them, and, most important, “There was a huge sense that I did it for this man. I stayed up all night in the office once to finish a piece for a deadline and forgot to call my family. My wife called my father, and he got the night watchman of the building to come and find me and have me call home.”

Gay Talese says of Hayes, “He was demanding and I had a strong desire to please him. He was a Marine, a southern minister’s son, and he had very severe standards. Harold had a way of making me feel at once that he was supportive, but there was a little fear in the relationship, and threat—he had to be satisfied, standards had to be met. He was only a couple of years older, but he was like a severe older brother. If I wrote fiction, he’d be the older brother in my story.

“Harold gave me the opportunity to be published the way I wrote it. At the New York Times then you didn’t own what you wrote, the copy desk did. I’d wait for the first edition to come out, leave at nine o’clock, buy a paper, and if they had mangled my copy, I’d call the desk from a phone booth around Times Square and say, ‘I want my name off it,’ and we’d have a big argument. At Esquire , what you wrote got printed the way you wrote it and was read the way you wrote it. I loved Harold more than any editor I ever had. I greatly missed his presence when he left Esquire , and I said I’d always work for him. I even did a piece for some tennis magazine when he was running CBS magazines.”

Hayes was vice president of CBS Publications from 1981 to 1984, having left Esquire in 1973 after a dispute with the owners. Harold became a magazine consultant and one of the originators and producers of the ABC News show “20/20,” and hired his Esquire writer Brock Brower to help him start the program. He wrote two books on ecology, The Last Place on Earth and Three Levels of Time , moved to Los Angeles to be editor of California magazine from 1984 to 1987, and was working on a new book when he died of a brain tumor in 1989 at age sixty-two.

Talese didn’t learn writing techniques from Hayes. His role models were writers he read in high school. “I wanted to be a writer more than a news reporter. I loved short stories, especially Maupassant. I wanted to write about real people the way a short story writer did, showing the person’s character. I clipped out of a collection a story called ‘The Jockey,’ by Carson McCullers, and I saved it. A jockey walks into a restaurant to have dinner, and his trainer and the owner of the horse berate him for eating too much, and the jockey walks away. I thought, I’d like to write that way, but why can’t I write that way about a real jockey? I wanted to write in the style of fiction but I didn’t want to change the names. I wanted to write short stories for newspapers.