![]() Tom Wolfe: It was December of ’69, it must have been, that I learned about this party for the Black Panthers, in the following manner: I was at Harper’s magazine, waiting for my wife-to-be - who was the art director - to get a break so we could go to lunch. Storyboard: How did you get the idea for “Radical Chic”? ![]() My questions and comments are in blue, Wolfe’s responses in red. Wolfe envisioned it as a chapter in a “non-fiction novel,” but his “journalistic instinct overcame any literary instinct,” he told me. (Bernstein’s wife “ fled” a party rather than be in a room with Wolfe’s publisher.) At 25,000 words, “Radical Chic” filled a chunk of the magazine. We talked for four hours over two days about “Radical Chic,” his New York account of a January 1970 party that Leonard Bernstein held, at his Park Avenue duplex, for the Black Panthers. (The New York Times, whose Charlotte Curtis was in attendance, ran an account the next day.) It’s a delightfully scathing story, which pissed off more than a few New Yorkers. ![]() ![]() Tom Wolfe and I met twice, in his Upper East Side home, and to answer the inevitable question, no: He never wore a white suit. ![]()
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