Tom Wolfe on Ken Kesey, ‘The Right Stuff’ and New Journalim

You were 37 in 1967, a bit older than the counterculture. Did you feel a generation gap?
I just felt like a reporter. I actually loved the music at that time, Martha and the Vandellas and the Supremes. The music, to me, was like a second childhood. But all the rest, I was happy to leave for the children. Your techniques as a reporter have always been interesting. Rather than trying to blend in, you’d show up in a suit and not make any concessions to whatever subculture you were covering. I did a story on stock-car racing for Esquire, and I figured, “Well, it’s probably casual, it’s racing.” So I wore a green tweed suit and a blue button-down shirt and a black knit tie — that was very casual. I had on some brown suede shoes and a brown Borsalino. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Borsalinos, but it’s almost like a fur, a thick beaver. After about three days, Junior Johnson, the racer, said, “You know, I didn’t mean to say anything, but everyone’s asking me, ‘Who’s this little green man following you around?'” Once I realized I wasn’t even close to blending in, then I asked some of these questions I was dying to know the answer to, like, “What is an overhead cam?” People kept talking about overhead cams, and if you’re trying to fit in, it’s hard to ask basic questions. So I didn’t even attempt to try to fit in with [Ken] Kesey and the Pranksters. And ever since then, I’ve taken what I think of as the “man from Mars approach”: I’ve just arrived from Mars, I have no idea what you’re doing, but I’m very interested.

Before you started reporting on Kesey and the Pranksters, what was your relationship to drugs and the drug culture?
I didn’t know anything about it, particularly LSD. I was looking for a subject for my next book, and my then-editor showed me some letters written from Kesey to Larry McMurtry. These were fascinating letters, full of paranoia and actual police sightings — he was on the run in Mexico. And I got the bright idea of going down to Mexico to find him. But before I could make that trip, he was caught by the FBI in San Francisco, by pure accident. A car pool of FBI guys were driving down the Bayshore Freeway south of San Francisco, and they looked over, and here was this guy, pulling off a beard and mustache and a straw hat. It was a hot day, and the stuff was uncomfortable. One said, “That looks like Ken Kesey.” So they pulled him over, and he made a run for it. He’d been a great athlete, but he hadn’t been a great athlete for a couple of years. So they caught him, and I caught up with him in jail in Redwood City.

Was there a moment in any of these stories where you felt tempted to cross the line from observer to participant?
I must say, in covering Kesey and the Pranksters, there were these all-night sessions. They’d be taking drugs. I wouldn’t. And it would get very spiritual, and I remember many times, driving from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, where I was staying. It’s light out, rush hour’s just beginning, and I remember I would have this feeling like I had been in on something very spiritual, and all these poor ants out here going to work had missed out. But by the afternoon, I’d think, “What am I talking about?”

Your book The Right Stuff came out of a Rolling Stone assignment. How did that come about?
Jann had the idea of my going to the launch of Apollo 17, for the last trip to the moon in the Apollo program [in 1972]. His concept was that it would be quite a scene. And it was quite a scene. King Hussein of Jordan, who insisted on flying his own airplane — and he was such a bad pilot that people near the landing fields would take their children indoors — was there. And George Wallace. And a 135-year-old ex-slave — though I wonder how old he actually was — and Jonathan Winters, who was very big at that time. Ahmet Ertegun was waiting for the rocket to go off, and he was playing backgammon in the grass. It was all very funny. But I got interested in the astronauts. At night, you’d go out to where they would be launching from, and here would be this monster thirty-five-story rocket fueling up, and I remember saying, “Who in God’s name would sit up there?” They look like a little thimble up there on top of this enormous rocket. “Who would do this?” That was my basic question. So it ended up not being about the social scene at all, from the beginning. It was about the astronauts.