"Newspapers," he says, "have a very defined sense of news. "It would have been so easy to write a novel," he says. He wanted to tackle it the way a reporter would. He was onto a big story, although at the time it was an unformed idea - a little monad floating around in the grit of New York City. That one evening of seemingly tawdry titillation made him realize how radically middle-class morality had changed since he was a boy growing up in Ocean City, N.J., during WWII. Talese thought it would be fascinating to get people to bring sex out into the open. That contact developed into a book, "Honor Thy Father."
He convinced Bonanno that it was okay to talk to reporters and get things out in the open. He was a reporter, an infinitely curious guy who had once walked up to Mafioso Joe Bonanno in a courtroom corridor. "I couldn't believe," he says, "that it was so out in the open." Look, I spent eight years of my life on this."īack in 1971, Talese was walking home with his wife when he spied a red neon sign that proclaimed: LIVE NUDE MODELS. The better your writing gets, the more you should be paid. Fifteen years ago I was getting $500 from Esquire for a piece. "A picture of Ryan O'Neal? Why not me or Tom Wolfe? I don't mind selling my writing. He's not at all embarrassed by the cover, he says. There flanked by two of Hefner's bunnies whispering seductively into his ear, is Gay Talese starting out the world, looking like a man who has seen it all. This time it's a chapter about Hugh Hefner's journey into sexual fantasy, published in the November issue of Esquire. In 1975 Esquire printed the book's opening chapter about two of the peripheral characters: pinup girl Diane Webber and a Chicago man who fantasized about her, and the way their sense of morality changed as they became more involved in their own sexuality.įour years later, Talese's public has finally been fed another morsel. The book even flashes back to a mid-19th-century religious group that literally heeded the biblical advice "love thy neighbor."įor eight years gossip columnists have titillated the public with reports of Talese's own sexual exploits in the course of his research. Along the way their destinies become intertwined with Hugh Hefner and countless other peripheral characters in search of sexual freedom.
There are four central figures: an insurance executive and his mistress, and an aerospace engineer who left his job and started the sex club Sandstone with his wife. It would be uncharacteristic for him to sign praises to hot millions.Ī curious literary world has waited an excessively long time for the publication of "Thy Neighbor's Wife," a 600-page narrative of real characters with real names whose relationships suggest that middle-class American morality is indeed in upheaveal. If his tales form a latter-day Decameron, the saga of his new book seems starkly at odds with his painstaking method of gathering detail.
#DIANE WEBBER NUDE PINUPS MOVIE#
For the evening he is Middle America glued to the almighty common denominator of culture, looking not at all like the sort of man who last week sold the movie rights to his sixth book for a record-shattering $2.5 million. His feet are up on the coffee table, the old gray pants riding up to the calf, showing plenty of the white socks under the brown slippers. He merely mumbles: "You've got to hit Palmer early if you're going to win."
He doesn't flinch when Doug DeCinces grabs Dave Parker's hot shot to third and throws him out at first, stealing two runs from Pittsburgh. He is rooting for the Pirates, if this tense sense of detached obsession can be called rooting. Omar Moreno is on third, Tim Foli on second, Talese in a chair, studying the action, his right hand resting on the side of his face. The Tube is casting its phosphorescent glow. Top of the first Tuesday night in Gay Talese's New York living room.
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