Of all the stories and sides of Leonard Bernstein that Bradley Cooper decided to leave out of “Maestro,” the most infamous is surely the “Radical Chic” episode. In 1970, a New York magazine cover story, written byand entitled “Radical Chic,” spent 20,000 words describing, in delectable you-are-there detail, a party thrown by Lenny and his wife, Felicia, at their Park Avenue apartment in order to raise funds for the Black Panthers.
The documentary is full of photographs and film footage of Wolfe, and we see how vital his look was to the Wolfe mystique. I don’t just mean the famous white suit, with its roots in the Richmond, VA, of his youth. The look began with his face — strikingly handsome, all rakish charm and amusement, with those slightly pursed lips set off by a long sweep of light-brown hair that was total Southern gentleman yet edged him, in a funny way, right into the counterculture.
By the time he was done reporting it, he was still struggling to get a handle on the subject. Esquire needed to print the color pages of the article in advance , and Wolfe says, “I came back to New York and found myself utterly blocked. I could not write this story.” He wanted to drop the assignment, but the story was locked in; it would have cost $5,000 to $10,000 to pull it.
The truth was more complicated. He spent most of the 1970s working on “The Right Stuff,” figuring out how to write it, how to capture the heroism of the astronauts and, at the same time, touch something more humane and dimensional beneath. In this section, Wolfe compares being a writer to having arthritis — waking up, each day, with a small pain, and that pain is the question nagging at the back of your mind, about whether you’ll be able to do it again: not just write but write.