Gay Talese lives in a four-floor brownstone on New York’s Upper East Side that he bought for $175,000 in 1973. He has lived in at least some part of the building since 1958. “Change nothing,” he reflected in 2011. “Let the world come to you.”
On 7 January, nine and a half years after I first asked Talese for an interview, I finally came to him. His wife, Nan, 91 – for many years a powerful book editor at Random House who published Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and Antonia Fraser – was bed-ridden upstairs. Talese, 93, dressed in a light shirt and tie under a rust-coloured windowpane waistcoat and jacket, poured out two whiskies for me and a friend of mine, and later took us downstairs to the basement flat in which he still works.
He has a new book out, a collection of his journalism, Gay Talese’s New York: A Town Without Time. But another, bigger book looms over his life, one he has been putting together for 20 years. It’s on his marriage, and it has arguably been due ever since he published, in 1980, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, in which he came out as an adulterer in the name of art and journalism. It documented his many investigations into the sexual revolution, ranging as they did from “getting head from an NYU student”, as he put it in a 1973 profile, to living as a nudist and working in a massage parlour. The book was duly eviscerated by critics. (Talese sold the film rights for $2.5m, a then record sum.)
“When I think just of the life that I lived – the freedom I had, the freedom I took, the freedom I got away with – it’s amazing,” he told me. “My relationships with women were never one-night stands. They’d go on for years. My knowledge as a man came from people not from books, from pillow talk, a love affair.”
The set-up worked for him. “I couldn’t imagine exchanging Nan for anybody,” he said of the mother of his two daughters, “but I also couldn’t find in Nan the answer to everything. I never was totally contented as a person, as a married man, as a father, as a journalist, as anything.” The more surprising thing is that it worked for Nan. Talese began on his portrait of a marriage in the mid-2000s, wanting to figure out why an “intelligent, accomplished, financially independent woman”, as he put it in a 2008 interview, chose to stay with him after she had been “humiliated in print, embarrassed like Hillary Clinton was embarrassed”.
Thy Neighbor’s Wife was Talese’s fourth book, a decade in the making. His previous two works of reported non-fiction had established his star. The Kingdom and the Power (1969) scrutinised the institution that scrutinised everybody else: the New York Times. (Talese started his career there as a copy boy in 1953.) Honor Thy Father (1971) followed. It offered readers The Godfather for real, Talese having won seven years’ of access to the son of the Bonanno crime family by befriending him in a New York courtroom in 1965.
He left judgement for others. His aim was to stick around and hang out, to embed himself in other lives and depict them thoroughly. He was part of a wave of journalists who had begun to do this in magazines in the 1960s: from his friend Tom Wolfe to Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion. They looked to combine the rigour of reporting with the techniques of fiction: scenes, dialogue, point of view, telling detail. Their experiments in form and style soon made them the apex predators of the literary game.
That, at least, was how Wolfe liked to think of them all. Writing in New York Magazine in 1972, he credited Talese with writing the piece that inspired him and set off the movement: a 1962 profile of the boxer Joe Louis in Esquire headlined “The King as a Middle-aged Man”. “What inna namea Christ is this,” Wolfe remembered asking himself with envy as he read it.
Talese’s article began with an intimate back-and-forth between Louis and his wife at Los Angeles airport, a stream of conversation full of character and feeling. It read, Wolfe realised, like a short story. “My instinctive, defensive reaction,” Wolfe reflected, “was that the man had piped it, as the saying went… winged it, made up the dialogue… Christ, maybe he made up whole scenes.”
Talese had written only what he’d either witnessed or been told, but he didn’t use a tape recorder, or even at times a pen. “If I was interviewing you, I wouldn’t make notes,” he told me. “I’m not interested so much in what you say, but the atmosphere in which you say it. I’m looking for scenes: ‘Harry Lambert arrives with his fiancée [I’d brought my girlfriend], who’s masquerading as a journalist, but she’s really here to make sure he gets to the right address at the right time.’ I go home after I see you, and I type out my notes. I give a kind of word picture of the day. I re-create it.”
That method was enough for the New Journalists, as it was for readers: very little published today is read as avidly as their work was in the Sixties and Seventies, and still is now. “Journalism, which is supposed to be of the day, is in my case something that could live for 50 years. Why? Craft. My father was a tailor. I have clothes that are 60 years old. The buttons don’t fall off, the stitches don’t come apart. They’re made with affection and attention to detail and idealism. I believe in that. If you adhere to that with real faith, what you do will have a long, long life.”
But journalistic mores have changed. It’s no longer acceptable to smoke the night away with Marlon Brando in a Japanese hotel room, as Capote did in 1957, and reimagine the entire evening from memory thereafter. (Capote claimed to possess perfect recall.) Movie stars also don’t tend to let journalists into their hotel rooms late at night anymore, at least not to write about them.
Talese flew to multiple cities to roam with Peter O’Toole for a profile, and spent six weeks shadowing Frank Sinatra, the subject of his most famous piece, “Frank Sinatra has a Cold”, which ran in Esquire. “The tape recorder hurt,” Talese thinks. “It didn’t hurt the Q&A, but the Q&A is not really the art form for non-fiction. Hanging out is.” Too much journalism, as Talese once put it, now reads like “talk radio on paper”. But the market has moved on, and in many cases dispensed with the written word entirely. The filmed Q&A is the journalistic form of the day.
Talese and Nan briefly separated in all but name after Thy Neighbor’s Wife. She went to London for work. He went to Italy, falling in with a young American woman and living openly with her in Rome. Their marriage was a mess, he says, for about 18 months.
Other relationships in his life fell apart then, too. He clashed with his closest friend, the journalist David Halberstam, after Halberstam wrote a book on the American car industry despite Talese having spent a year trailing Lee Iacocca, the president of Chrysler, for a book of his own. Talese was losing interest in Iacocca, but he couldn’t believe Halberstam would disregard his nominal right to the story. They didn’t speak for 11 years.
In her Vanity Fair Diaries, Tina Brown recounts meeting Talese at dinner shortly after his fall, in 1984. “Find me a better magazine writer in this new generation than I am,” he barked. But Talese, brilliant as he was, didn’t publish another book until 1992. He turned to memoir then, and again in 2006. He didn’t write a book that looked outward until 2016, when he was 84.
Talese’s ability as a writer never faded: he was still turning out exquisite profiles (of Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett) in the New Yorker in the 2010s, six decades after his first byline. And his place in the annals of journalism had already been secured when his risked his marriage and his standing in 1980. But Thy Neighbor’s Wife cast a shadow that still hangs over him: “I exposed myself,” he said. He maintains that “Thy Neighbor’s Wife is a hell of a book. It has beautiful scenes in it.”
The subsequent portrait of his marriage has been due since at least 2011. It will include at least 65 pictures of him and Nan, one for each year since 1959, along with a handful of pages describing “how we got along that year”. Talese has kept an assiduous record of their relationship, although he fears that the letters they wrote to each other elide deeper truths. “I believe that the letters are false. I’m writing about my feelings about her, and I know they’re not true. I know that they were true that moment I wrote it, but they weren’t true ten minutes later. I know that the history refutes what I wrote.”
“There are times I wonder who she was seeing,” Talese said, noting in passing an affair he had with Romy Schneider in Vienna in 1963 while he was writing a piece on Otto Preminger for Esquire. He recounts one occasion where he couldn’t find Nan, eventually locating her at the home of Paul Theroux, an author of hers. It was 11pm. Nan told him they were working late. “I thought, fine, with my history, I can’t complain. You never know, and my notes will not reflect this side of her story, but I always wonder about it.”
We turned to politics. Talese knew Donald Trump. They were both “graduates of George Steinbrenner’s box”, he said, referring to the former owner of the Yankees who died in 2010. Trump used to leave games early and give Talese a lift home. He claimed to have read his books. Talese thinks Steinbrenner – a “very commandeering, autocratic man” – was “a father of sorts to Trump”. He also sees a surprising affinity between Trump’s demotic understanding and his own.
“I really believe that he caught, as I did as a writer, the sensibility of the underclass.” Trump was “the son of the boss”, Talese conceded, but “when you’re dealing with people who pour concrete or lay bricks, you learn their way of life, which those Yale and Harvard guys who work in the State Department can’t ever do”.
Talese now thinks Trump is “one of the most remarkable men alive”. He was in awe of his response to being shot. “He was fighting the Secret Service. Courageous people caught that. The plumber caught it, the taxi driver caught it, the guy that worked at a barber shop – everybody caught that male behaviour at his best. It’s John Wayne in real life. It’s Clint f**king Eastwood.”
Nominally a Democrat, Talese despises the modern iteration of the party for its “duplicity [and] hypocrisy”, which he dates back to Lyndon B Johnson and Vietnam. He sees hypocrisy in the social elite he is surrounded by in Manhattan, many of them friends. “This neighbourhood you’re in now is as racist as anything in the Deep South back in 1920. But we don’t write about racism in New York, about real estate, and the control of where people live and how they live. I still don’t have a black neighbour. No one will touch that story.”
He is equally caustic about the journalistic generation that has replaced his. “Journalists in my time,” he aid, “were lower-middle class. We were outside looking in.” Journalists today are of one class with the powerful. “They were at school with them. They swam in the same f**king pool… Democrats all hate Trump, but they are so out of touch, this generation.”
Being a journalist was for Talese like being an actor. “I wanted to play their part, wear their robes, eat their meals, think their thoughts,” he said of his subjects. “What is it like to be them? How do they see it? Journalists don’t do that now. Now there’s one point of view.”
His empathy extends to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, whose fears and desires he sees as being shared by their people. “If I’m Russian, I don’t want Nato, a puppet of America, next door to me,” he said. “What are we doing in Taiwan? It’s none of our business. You’re provoking the Chinese people. You don’t see that in the New York Times.”
His take on Putin’s rule is provocative. “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a bunch of [Bernie] Madoffs took over that country. They ripped off that country for about six, seven years until Putin straightened it out a little bit. What he’s done is give pride to the Russian people.” Talese’s sympathy for Russia is not unusual for men who lived through the Second World War. “We showed up late, and they suffered,” he said of America and its erstwhile’ enemy. “Russia deserves to be left alone.”
If his politics no longer accord with his milieu, his tastes still do. He “reads the New Yorker with admiration every week” and respects David Remnick, its indefatigable editor. “You write him an email, you get a reply. A lot of people at the New Yorker don’t have good manners,” he said, remembering staff he took out to dinner who never wrote back. “I never let a letter or email go by without an answer.”
I can attest to that. I first emailed Talese hoping to meet him in 2015. (He replied, offering dates and providing his address.) Reading his 2008 Paris Review interview one night at university had made me want to be a magazine writer. He was the first journalist I’d encountered who spoke of their work like it was art. In Britain, a feature was often a piece assigned on the day to fill space, and read like one. Talese spoke of capturing reality in well-wrung prose as if it was holy.
“You’re part of a prideful enterprise,” Gay Talese told me as we left. “There’s less lying in journalism than anything else in the world. Journalists lie a little bit, but not as much as everybody else. It’s an honourable profession. Dress up for it.”
[See also: Steve Rosenberg: the last man in Moscow]
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This article appears in the 23 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Divide and Conquer