His latest book, The Right Stuff, deals with the age of rockets, the early astronauts and the world of military flying. Published in September 1979, it is a critical and commercial success that has already hit the best-seller list.
A tall, slender 48-year-old transplanted Southerner with a rich baritone voice, Wolfe speaks softly, chooses his word carefully, and exhibits a kind of schoolboy bashfulness when discussing his own work. A New Yorker since 1962, he lives on the Upper East Side with his wife Sheila, the art director of Harper's magazine. On the day of our interview, Wolfe is wearing his customary one-button, swallow-tailed, yellow pin stripe suit, which he describes as "early Duke of Windsor."
Q: What made you decide to write this book?
A: Back in 1972, Rolling Stone asked me to go down to the Cape and cover Apollo 17. That was the last mission to the moon. … Somewhat to my surprise, I really became quite interested in the whole business of what's the makeup of someone who's willing to sit on top of a rocket and let you light the candle? And I ended up writing four stories for Rolling Stone in about a month. And I thought if I spent a couple of months in expanding them, I'd have a book. Well, it's now 1979 and here we are." (He laughs.) It was so difficult that I put it aside every opportunity I had. I wrote three other books in the meantime, to avoid working on it.
I ended up being more interested in the fraternity of flying than in space exploration. I found the reactions of people and flying conditions much more fascinating. So the book is really about the right stuff — the code of bravery that the pilots live by, and the mystical belief about what it takes to be a hot fighter jock, as the expression goes. I became interested in people like Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier back in 1947. When the seven Mercury astronauts were chosen, they were not the seven hottest test pilots in America, although they were presented as such at the time. The arrival of the astronauts as a type completely upset the competitive hierarchy of flying.
Flying has a competitive structure that's as hotly contested as the world of show business. And the egos are just as big — in fact, in a way, they're bigger. . … It's hard to top surgeons for sheer ego. I think surgeons are the most egotistical people on the face of the earth, but pilots usually make the playoffs: they're in there.
Q: Speaking of your other books: how do you manage to know all the hip phrases of the day? Do you spend a lot of time with teenagers?
A: At one time, people thought I was some sort of medium who hung around with children to pick up what young people were thinking and doing. Well, that interested me very much in the '60s, when suddenly young people were doing extraordinary things — things they had never done, which really boiled down to living lives that they controlled, sometimes in a communal way, going with their own styles, rather than imitating that of their elders. So it was fascinating. I made a point of learning about it.
Sometimes now I turn on the radio and I don't recognize a single song on the charts. Right now I have no idea what any of the top 20 singles are. And I have the feeling that it's probably not worth finding out, because we're now in a phase where we're just filling in the spaces of what was introduced by rock and the Beatles and the Grateful Dead and so on. There's nothing very new, I don't think. Maybe I'm wrong.
Q: How do you choose your clothes?