In order to lower all those raised eyebrows, Talese has spent the past decade immersed in a weighty act of contrition. The result is Unto the Sons, a book that places him back squarely in the bosom of his family.
Unto the Sons is a 635-page historical saga of the Talese clan's migration from the toe of the Italian boot to the heart of American letters. Furthermore, it is an attempt to reconcile the wildly diverse roots of a former altar boy who has become a stylish exhibitionist and an unapologetic sybarite. It is an affectionate ode to a past that he fled. The son of isolated Italian Catholics living in rigidly Methodist Ocean City, N.J., Talese was doubly ostracized as a boy, since even the Catholic minority in town was Irish. He grew up wearing perfect suits sewn by his tailor father—feeling like a tiny mannequin. "This is the first time that the public will see the man I married," says his wife, Nan. "The sensitive soul who hides behind the stiff formality."
"You will not catch me without a necktie," says the 60-year-old author, who has peculiar and unvarying work habits. He writes first in longhand on yellow pads, then copies at his electric typewriter while wearing one of his 64 $2,000 custom-made three-piece suits with a silk paisley handkerchief draped from the breast pocket. His manner is so aloof that even friends mistake it for arrogance. "He comes from a different time," says his cousin Nick (Wiseguy) Pileggi. "His manner and style is of the 19th century."
It has been 12 years since Talese's last book, but his track record is such that his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, has ordered a first printing of 200,000 copies. Sons is a main selection of the Book of the Month Club—and the first book of three that will fulfill Talese's $7 million contract. The reviews so far have been respectful, if not exactly enthusiastic. Most reviewers agree that the book, though sometimes mired in detail, provides a compelling glimpse of immigrant experience. "As usual with Mr. Talese's books, the narrative weaves back and forth in time and space, looping flashbacks within flashbacks and spinning reveries within reveries," wrote an admiring Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times
It was at the Times that Talese began his career. He calls his 1959-65 stint as a feature writer there "the only truly happy time of my life. The city room, with its sympathetic, neurotic souls all bitching together was wonderful therapy." He wept when he left, but he soon became famous for his contributions to the New Journalism, reporting with all the drama and color—and some of the license—of fiction. His lush magazine portraits of Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio and heavyweight champ Joe Louis influenced a generation of writers, including Tom Wolfe. Talese became rich writing seamless books on the history of the Times (The Kingdom and the Power, 1969) and of a Mafia family (Honor Thy Father, 1971), followed by the steamy Thy Neighbor's Wife.
After the reaction to Wife, with all the attendant gossip about his admitted affairs, he was crushed. "I knew that the book was good. I didn't expect this backlash," he says. In 1981, in order to plunge into something solid, he decided to write a biography of Chrysler chairman and fellow Italian-American Lee Iacocca. But after spending a year with his subject, he grew disillusioned.
"There was the matter of the air bags," he says. "I sat in on meetings in which Iacocca denounced the air bags as a waste of money. Later he took credit for pushing them. After that I couldn't do the book." (Iacocca was unavailable for comment.)
And so, in March 1982, he gave it up. "Besides, I really wanted to write about the family I had avoided," says Talese.
He started by returning to Ocean City, an island community founded by-abstinent Methodists 20 miles south of Atlantic City, where his father, Joseph, settled in 1922. Talese retraced the family odyssey from the town of Maida in Southern Italy. He talked for hours with such relatives as his cousin Antonio Cristiani, a Paris-based designer who once employed Emanuel Ungaro. Cristiani, who died in 1989 before the book was completed, provided stories about the Talese uncles and cousins who fought in both world wars. (To Talese's father's anguish, they fought against the Allies in World War II.) Gradually the threads of the family history began coming together. "They were really cowards, running away from poverty," Talese says of the immigrants. "They were brave to take such chances—gamblers—but I don't think I would have left."
The insular nature of Southern Italian towns, far from cosmopolitan Rome and steeped in superstition, explained for Talese his family's provincial attitudes. "Never educate your children beyond yourself" was a saying in Maida. "Trust no one but family" was a rule to live by. "This is why Southern Italians, like Mario Cuomo [Governor of New York], only trust relatives," he says.
In his own youth Talese was branded "dago," and "wop," and it was a relief in 1949 when he left Ocean City and went to the University of Alabama, which he liked because it was far away. "I was never a good student," he says. "Too busy daydreaming or watching. From my earliest days I wanted to become a journalist to escape that town." After two years in the Army, where he served as a public relations officer, he landed a job at The New York Times.
He has escaped and he has succeeded, and he remains drawn to stories of triumph pulled from defeat. Now, having fallen from literary grace with Thy Neighbor's Wife, he hopes that Sons will be both a critical comeback and a popular winner. The likelihood of the latter worries him. "There's very little sex in this book...," he says fretfully.
Not that there weren't a few dalliances during the research phase. (There was one with a translator, another with a diplomat.) "All friends, all people I trust," he says ardently, dismissing charges that he is recklessly promiscuous. His behavior now, he says, is more cautious than in the riotous days when he attended Sandstone, the experimental nudist colony in California. There, he admits, "I did everything you can imagine with everyone."
"But he called me every night and told me everything," says Nan, 58, a dark, slender woman from New York's affluent Westchester County by way of white-glove Manhattanville College. They were introduced by friends in 1957 and married in Rome two years later. "There have been some very hard times," concedes Gay. "Especially after the last book."
A talented editor who has her own eponymous publishing imprint at Doubleday, Nan believes that Gay's talent outranks all other considerations in their lives. She says that "he has to get close to his subject" and understands the implications. They are both convinced that their marriage will endure in spite of its testing of conventions.
"I love my wife," says Talese. "It is a very physical relationship. Very physical. And often. This very day!"
Nevertheless there are moments when Nan's Irish Catholic reticence will surface. "Gay is a little too public with our lives," she says.
Quick though he is to part with privacy, Talese is nervous about how his public perceives him. At Marymount Manhattan College for his first public reading from Unto the Sons, he paces the stage, calculating the distance between himself and his audience—in feet as well as in cultural style. And as he begins to read of the lonely childhood years he spent gazing at Atlantic City in the distance, his voice takes on a tremulous quality:
I was olive-skinned in a freckle-faced town, and I felt unrelated even to my parents, especially my father, who was indeed a foreigner—an unusual man in dress and manner, to whom I bore no physical resemblance and with whom I could never identify.
His aloof mother, Catherine, now 85, seemed powerful and alien:
Once, during my preschool days, I put my hand inside the pocket of her coat.... I felt her hand, gently but firmly, remove my own.
So painful are some of the passages that the audience winces. But Gay speaks later of his childhood with detachment and forgiveness—though he has not yet let his 88-year-old father, Joseph, whom he interviewed 60 times, read the book. "He'll like it.... There are things in it which he may find painful.... He won't understand. . . . He'll hate it," Talese says. This internal revisionism is a perfectionist's quirk, a gyroscopic correction he makes after every utterance. No sooner has he ventured an opinion than he issues a counterargument. This is why his books appear so infrequently.
Having triumphed over an astringent childhood, Talese now lives like a duke in a four-story New York City brownstone off Park Avenue. The rooms are fragrant with flowers and bracketed by bookcases. There is a deck where he once played paddle tennis with his daughters, Pamela, 27, an art student who lives on the second floor, and Catherine, 24, a landscape photographer now living in San Francisco.
There is a conscious, almost perverse duality to Gay's daily routine, which is carried out with clockwork precision. In the mornings he is the disciplined soldier. He awakens at 7 and retreats to his monk's cell in the basement. The room has no phones, no television, only his color-coded files. There he takes his breakfast, which never varies—bran cereal, coffee and fruit. And he furtively smokes cigarettes as he writes, rewrites and arranges his typewritten pages on a wall and studies them through binoculars. (He is already at work on a sequel to Sons.) "There is something important about how it looks," he says. In the afternoon he plays a hard-hitting but joyless set of tennis at the chic midtown Vertical Club. ("He has to win," says Nan.) In the evenings he and Nan frequently eat at the Upper East Side literary salon, Elaine's, where he drinks exactly 1½ vodka martinis. Then they float between the endless parties, openings and screenings available to a couple who belong to the celebrity set.
The old childhood memories linger, but a soft reconciliation has occurred over the years. His only sibling, Marian, 56, who runs an art gallery in Ocean City, says that she always knew her brother had talent; she could hear him typing through the night.
His father was not always certain. "When he told me he wanted to go to college, I went to the newspaper editor," says Joseph. "I ask him, 'Should I let him go?' He tells me, 'If Gay was my son, I'd sell my house to send him to college.' " Joseph smiles almost sadly. "But he would have made a great tailor," he says.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
