Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

Despite this genesis narrative for artistic nonfiction, some did acknowledge the contributions of yellow journalism in general and stunt reporters specifically, though only in the most oblique and slighting ways. To reviewer Sol Yurick, Capote’s interviews with convicts sounded familiar. Yurick wrote that In Cold Blood, rather than representing a new field, was “in the best tradition of newspaper sob sisterism wedding to Southern Gothic prose.” Even the title, he said, is nothing more than “sensational headline imagery.” Both descriptions are meant as insults.

While “objective journalism” had been promoted by journalism programs as the answer to the intimate, subjective accounts of the stunt reporters, this, too, was being questioned by the New Journalists. Hunter S. Thompson, who roared onto the literary stage in drugfueled, formally explosive reporting on being beaten up by motorcycle gangs and infiltrating an antidrug conference in Las Vegas while on LSD, was lauded as inventor of “gonzo journalism”—another new style. He protested vehemently against the idea of objectivity, writing in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, “Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.” Thompson also commented on New Journalism, the form Wolfe claimed to have pioneered, “The only reason Wolfe seems ‘new’ is because William Randolph Hearst bent the spine of American journalism very badly when it was just getting started.”

The traditional account of the genesis of investigative journalism and creative nonfiction obscures not only contributions of 1890s reporters but also innovative works like Zora Neale Hurston’s 1935 Mules and Men. Hurston, who trained as an anthropologist at Barnard, learned the tools of objectivity. Then she turned what she termed the “spy-glass” of her discipline on her own community, the predominantly Black town of Eatonville, Florida, where she had grown up. In the introduction she wrote, “I hurried back to Eatonville because I knew that the town was full of material and that I could get it without hurt, harm or danger.” Stressing that her subjects would tell her truths they would never reveal to an outsider, she studied her hometown, starting by drinking a concoction that made the top of her head fly off and cadging an invitation to a party. The story she told was personal, revealing of town and self. No one else could have gained access or told the tale.

Maybe all claims of minting new literary genres require a certain truncation of the past. But skipping the work of female nineteenth-century reporters is a particularly dramatic oversight. So many of these supposed recent literary breakthroughs can trace their roots all the way back to seeds shoveled into the soil by Bly, Black, Nelson, Swan, Valesh, and Wells. Even at the most ragged edges of the genre, there is no more experimental personal essay than the listing of causes of lynching in Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s A Red Record: “Hanged for stealing hogs,” “Lynched because they were saucy,” “Lynched for no offense.” It goes on and on.

Undercover experimentation is ongoing, even as knowledge of the original stunt reporters has faded. For aspiring journalists in the twentieth and even the twenty-first centuries, like those in the nineteenth, it continues to be a way in. And it continues to pose challenges in terms of value and respect.

In 1963, as a freelance writer seeking to gain a foothold in the field, Gloria Steinem responded to an ad seeking “pretty and personable” women between twenty-one and twenty-four. The ad promised glamour, travel, and $200 to $300 a week for those selected to portray that iconic image of 1960s sex appeal—a Playboy Bunny.

In a shorthand, diary-like narration, she charted the development of Marie Catherine Ochs (a pseudonym taken from a family name) and her experience at the Playboy Club. Using a lighthearted tone, she picked apart the subtle humiliations that made up the Playboy universe. On her way to apply, a building guard clucked at her, “Here bunny, bunny, bunny.” At the job interview, when she offered to talk about Ochs’s past, so carefully created, the Bunny Mother told her: “We don’t like our girls to have any background.” A mandatory doctor visit included testing for venereal disease.

As earlier stunt reporters did, Steinem added up the cost to the employees of this allegedly lucrative job: $2.50 per day for costume cleaning, $5 for tights, $8.14 for false eyelashes, three quarters of an inch long. The advertised salary was impossible to reach.

When the piece came out in Show magazine, under the title “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” Steinem at first regretted it. She was striving to launch a literary career, and the image of her in long ears and a bunny tail overshadowed all her other work, including an article she was particularly proud of about the development of the contraceptive pill. In 1960s culture, like the 1890s, presenting as the wrong kind of woman carried risks. You could be sexy or significant, have a body or a brain. This story and the photos put her on the wrong side of the divide. (A divide that she had internalized. She wrote later: “Though I identified emotionally with other women, including the Bunnies I worked with, I had been educated to believe that my only chance for seriousness lay in proving my difference from them.”) Male reporters leered. An assignment to investigate the United States Information Agency was given to someone else. Instead, editors suggested she disguise herself as a call girl and report on prostitution. A Playboy Club fan made repeated, obscene phone calls. The decision seemed like a career-ending mistake.

But, over time, Steinem’s opinion changed. “Eventually, dawning feminism made me understand that reporting about the phony glamour of exploitative employment practices of the Playboy Club was a useful thing to do. Posing as a call