Michael Lewis has been compared to Tom Wolfe ever since Liar’s Poker was published on the heels of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and over the years he has actually managed to live up to the comparison – making himself through extraordinary effort and cunning into the nonfiction writer who is at once pathbreaking, popular, widely imitated, and effortlessly enjoyable to read.  

So when Lewis pays a visit to Wolfe – as he does in a story told in the new Vanity Fair – it’s as epochal as Bob Dylan’s visit to Woody Guthrie in 1960.

He goes by private plane, hopping from Martha’s Vineyard to the Hamptons – a status detail right out of the Wolfe playbook (and there actually is a playbook: the groundbreaking anthology The New Journalism, with Wolfe’s introduction).  He takes his 13-year-old daughter, a double for the boy who smuggled Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers out of his parents’ library in Louisiana.   But don’t get distracted by the set-up – the real achievement of the piece is in its reporting.  

A couple of years ago the New York Public Library opened its freshly acquired cache of Wolfe’s papers to “scholars.”  And in a city full of writers looking for a story, who is it but Michael Lewis – the busiest and best-paid of us all; the writer with the means to follow any story he likes, anywhere in the world – who actually takes the trouble to work through the archives and follow the path of correspondence whereby Wolfe turns himself from an ambitious but thwarted feature writer to a young grandmaster – all in the space of eighteen months.     

It’s an amazing story, told in alternating blocks of Wolfe’s wildstyle prose and Lewis’s more streamlined exuberance.   And it ends with a truly ace piece of reporting, which reveals – for the first time I am aware of – how Wolfe found his way into the story that became Radical Chic:

Then there’s this:

Mrs. Leonard Bernstein

requests the pleasure of your company

at 895 Park Avenue

on Wednesday January 14 at 5 o’clock

To meet and hear from the leaders of the Black Panther Party.

The invitation is right there, in one of the files stuffed with party invitations and thank-you notes and Christmas cards, without comment. Tom Wolfe is at this point the leading satirist of his age. That age appears intent on staging events for his benefit. He seems simply to stroll off Park Avenue in his white suit and into Leonard Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers, as if he belonged.

I now admit to him that I still wonder: How the hell did he get himself invited to Leonard Bernstein’s cocktail party? He smiles and surprises me again.

He’d gone to Harper’s magazine one day in late 1969, to pay a call on Sheila, then his girlfriend. Sheila was busy, and so he went looking around the offices, to see what he could see. He came upon the office of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam. Halberstam wasn’t in it. The door was open; Wolfe walked in. On top of a great pile on Halberstam’s desk he spotted an invitation—how could he not? It came from Mrs. Leonard Bernstein. He picked it up and read it … and had an idea … How could he not … These people … they had no idea … it was as if they were determined to insult the Gods … how could they not see themselves the way others would see them … all you would have to do is tell everyone in Richmond or anyplace else outside of a certain Manhattan zip code about this and the entire country would soon be collapsing in laughter … or outrage … but … really, when you think about it … laughing or screaming: does it even matter which?…. Oh God … This really is too good…. He called the number to R.S.V.P. “This is Tom Wolfe,” he said, “and I accept.” And they just take his name down, and he’s on the guest list. He never tells Halberstam what he’s done. He simply takes out a brand-new green steno notebook with the spirals on top and writes on the cover, in his new rococo script: “Panther Night at the Leonard Bernsteins.”

If you know the book, you’ll know why that story is so important, and if you don’t, Lewis’s piece is the best introduction you could hope for.

The photographs are extraordinary, too.