Eccentric View

Working hard to enhance its reputation for publishing the unexpected, Esquire was not inclined to entrust its convention coverage to conventional reporters. The magazine may never again be able to field as odd a team of reporters as the threesome it sent to Chicago: Novelist William Burroughs, French Novelist and Playwright Jean Genet, and Satirist Terry Southern. They were joined on arrival by Poet Allen Ginsberg, who was in town to observe.

Almost instinctively, the four began their work with a pilgrimage to the hippie encampment in Lincoln Park. It was mutual love at first sight. Hippies fondled Ginsberg's black beard and flowing tresses; Genet showered dollar bills on the hippies and received a hippie ring in return. "They are so beautiful; they are such angels," he murmured. The convention that the four were supposed to be covering was less to their taste. "Boring and unoriginal" snapped Genet. So he and his colleagues decided to return to the idyllic delights of Lincoln Park, only to run into a clash with police. A flying bottle narrowly missed Burroughs' head. Genet, who looks like one of Santa Claus' elves, was almost clubbed by a cop before he calmed his would-be assailant with a beatific smile.

Obsessed with Dogs. The foursome split into twosomes. Ginsberg and Genet held hands in Esquire cars and wandered rhapsodically among the hippies; Burroughs and Southern spent their happiest hours in the dark, cool interiors of various bars, where they were joined by Southern's girlfriend. But as becomes participant-journalists, they showed up at all the proper rebellious places. At the un-birthday party thrown for Lyndon Johnson by the hippies in the Chicago Coliseum, they matched animalistic descriptions of the cops. Burroughs called them "vicious dogs," and asked: "Is there not a municipal ordinance requesting that vicious dogs be muzzled and controlled?" Genet thought a better description was "mad dogs, who for the past 150 years have done the same thing, with even greater brutality, to the blacks." Improving on even this literary eloquence, Southern found the "dog-cop image quite apt, but in my view there is also a salient strain of swine in the character of those who drove the young people out of Lincoln Park. Swine, or perhaps the hated mandrill."

Ginsberg was going to read some free verse that he had composed for the occasion, but he had lost his voice after too much chanting. So he let one of the Fugs read it for him: "All is poetry, the political convention's fake images, mobilizes conspiring with reason to demonstrate America unconscious, hippies chanting Om, the first word of the universe under cloudy new moon light and brilliant sun."

No Time for Marching. Next day, all four were on hand for the skirmishes at Grant Park in front of the Hilton Hotel. Ginsberg had recovered his voice enough to croak and urge the hippies to avoid overexcitement. He proposed combatting the cops with the Hindu charm word Om. Caught off guard, the cops even warmed up to Ginsberg, who, after all, was trying to cool the hippies. "Look after yourself," said a plainclothesman. "There are some wild people in the park today."

Unmolested and little heard from all week was another novelist-turned-journalist, Norman Mailer, who was in town for Harper's. At the Grant Park rally, Mailer explained his uncharacteristic silence. "I'm a little sick about all this and also a little mad, but I've got a deadline on a long piece and I'm not going to go out and march and get arrested. I just came here to salute you all."

At least somebody was writing.

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