Willie Boy Was Here

By John Elson

TITLE: NEW YORK DAYS

AUTHOR: WILLIE MORRIS

PUBLISHER: LITTLE, BROWN; 396 PAGES; $24.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: Dewy-eyed, an ex-editor bloviates about his '60s.

Some people never recover from reading Tom Wolfe. Not the white-suited dandy who lit a bonfire under the vanities, but the big lug from Asheville, North Carolina, who said you can't go home again. Symptoms of the disease are truly terrible: a bloviation of the prose, with cliches clanging at irregular intervals; a golly-gee nostalgia for the glitz of Manhattan when one was , young, yearning and oh-so-talented; and, for a few, an incurable lust to strew names like sunflower seeds.

One victim of this affliction is Willie Morris of Yazoo City, Mississippi. In 1967, a mere 32, he became the youngest editor in chief ever of Harper's magazine. Full of himself and brimming with pep, Morris tried to aerate the old monthly, which was losing about $150,000 a year, by hiring a cadre of hard-drinking cronies that included John Corry, Marshall Frady and Larry L. King. When Morris wasn't schmoozing with the likes of John J. McCloy and Walter Lippmann at the veddy veddy Century Club, you might have found him boozing with other celebs at the chic East Side bistro Elaine's. For a time, Harper's became known as a "hot book," but it still lost money, and circulation had fallen. In 1971, after its absentee owners in Minneapolis, Minnesota, demanded a less radical focus, Morris angrily resigned, as did most of his staff.

Still dewy of eye, Morris looks back on "his" Harper's as a vanguard "in mirroring and interpreting and shaping the configurations of the nation." A calmer view is that the magazine scored some exceptional coups, like Seymour Hersh's expose of My Lai and Norman Mailer's "The Prisoner of Sex." But it also ran too many indulgently edited articles that dribbled on until reeled the mind. The author has chosen to look back on the '60s with a naif's sense of primitive awe, with the result that those laundry lists of the Big Feet he chatted up have all the reflective force of a Liz Smith column. In one bizarre passage, Morris fantasizes about showing Elvis Presley, whom he never met but imagined as a soul brother, around New York City -- brunch at the Four Seasons, dinner at Lutece, introducing him to Henry Kissinger at the Century -- and inviting him to write a monthly column for Harper's. It's hard to imagine anything more likely to have sent the King screaming back to Graceland.