“mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice,” begins an scene in Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” published in New York Magazine’s issue of June 8, 1970. He was talking about the Roquefort hors d’oeuvre rolled in nuts, which were indeed nice, but what was going on that night was flat-out spectacular. Wolfe had crashed a fund-raiser at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s apartment, and there he found the cream of New York’s cultural elite making small talk with, and donating to, the Black Panthers. Within days, the party became notorious; weeks later, after many, many drafts, Wolfe published his 25,000-word, high-proof social comedy about the collision of cultures. The party chatter, which Wolfe took down in shorthand rather than with a tape recorder, constitutes a large portion of the story.
Which…
