So much has been said over the years about Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” that it’s tough to know where to begin summing it up. Though it was not exactly the first wow story that New York ran — that honor goes to Barbara Goldsmith’s profile of Warhol superstar Viva, which nearly put us out of business in our fourth week of publication. But Wolfe’s story had it all: wealth and power encountering difficult questions of race and class and righteousness, with Leonard Bernstein, one of the most famous people in New York City, at its center. This magazine was literally made to cover such scenes, and still is. A mere three weeks ago, Reeves Wiedeman’s extraordinary profile of Bill Ackman got into some of the same territory, although Ackman’s belief system seems pretty different from Lenny’s.

For the uninitiated: In 1970, the Black Panther Party was a big presence on the radical end of the civil-rights movement, and its members, unlike many such groups, were not committed to nonviolence. To a lot of white people, at least, they looked and sounded like terrorists, although some of that stance was more posture than actual threat, and quite a bit of their work was directed toward community service in underserved neighborhoods, opening health clinics and providing free breakfast to children. Their public image, however much it may have been moderated behind the scenes, was inarguably threatening. And here came Leonard Bernstein, music director of the New York Philharmonic, the popularizing emperor of American high culture, the essence of what we’d now call the liberal elite, inviting a few dozen close friends to his apartment at 895 Park Avenue to raise for the Panthers, a few of whom attended. (Or rather his wife, Felicia, did; she was hosting.) It was as custom-made for Tom Wolfe, continuing his series of observations on the American coastal elite and its markers of status and class, as those famous white suits he wore. Wolfe freely told the story of how he ended up there, and you can read it in this oral history I compiled after his death. That story also samples the absolutely nuclear response the story elicited from the Bernstein family, their friends, and the Black Panthers, all of whom felt they had been played for fools. A member of the Panthers, asked for comment on Wolfe the next year, responded, “You mean that dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that fascist disgusting thing in New York Magazine?”

Wolfe’s own politics don’t emerge in the story, at least not explicitly. (Decades later, he revealed himself to be a George W. Bush voter, so take from that what you will.) His disdain does, of course, and the overtone of the whole thing is “Can you believe this?” The rich white folks get it harder than the Panthers do. Don Cox, the Black Panther co-host who was the group’s weapons expert, is portrayed in a couple of spots as a man who is trying not to roll his eyes during cringey encounters. Such as when Lenny …

Of course, some people saw this all as a cheap shot. “Radical Chic” is mighty funny, and it’s a little mean — maybe a beat too mean. Whatever you think about the Black Panther Party’s methods, and about the antisemitic views that existed among some members of the Black Power movement, it was an organization trying to break the back of white supremacy. After it was published, Don Cox, who had told the room, “Some people think that we are racist, because the news media find it useful to create that impression in order to support the power structure,” had his low opinion of the press confirmed, and how. He insisted to the end of his life — the latter part of which he spent in France, where he’d fled to avoid a trial — that the well-off folks at Lenny’s were concerned and sincere. “It was those media freaks and that bloodsucking Tom Wolfe,” he said, who were “part of the machinery that tried to ridiculize it.” The Bernstein family is still wounded by the story, and who could blame them? Jamie, the Bernsteins’ oldest daughter, has said that her parents were never quite the same thereafter. And it came out later on that Bernstein was, owing to his interest in radical politics, the subject of FBI surveillance and, perhaps, operations to discredit him. The Nixon White House appreciated Wolfe’s story plenty, and wrote to tell him so.

But “Radical Chic” is also, inarguably, a masterpiece of observation and reporting — both at the party itself and then on the outside afterward — and a spectacular piece of pure writing. Three paragraphs in, the reader is almost driven to say “Who is this guy?” (The answer comes, pithily, from Kurt Vonnegut, who in a 1965 review of Wolfe’s first book categorized him as “a genius who will do anything to get attention.”) One can — and I do — appreciate this story in a love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin way. It’s also, at this distance, a uniquely rich portrait of the revolutionary ’60s and early ’70s, when this sort of cultural collision was still new and there were not yet crisis-PR firms that could smother the flames the next day.

Which makes it all the more surprising that this vivid, epic, memorable, defining scene didn’t make it into Maestro, the Bradley Cooper biopic that has a shot at a few Oscars next week. It’s a good guess that Cooper decided to omit it because Lenny’s family has participated in the film, and he didn’t want to re-enact such a sore spot. You’ll have to read it and envision Bradley-as-Lenny, calling in the guests from the kitchen and saying, “I dig it,” on your own.

P.S. Let us know what you think of this subscriber-only newsletter. Reach us at [email protected].

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to a friend. If someone forwarded this to you, you can sign up here. To discover more subscriber-only newsletters, click here. For more from our archives, follow us on Instagram at @oldnymag.