So he had the story all along

New York —  AS he nursed his second gin martini of the night, minutes before dinner was served at Elaine’s, Gay Talese gently grabbed a friend’s arm and began outlining his idea for a new book: It would focus on working-class people behind the scenes, he said, the kind of people who aren’t celebrities but live fascinating lives. “Sounds great,” sportswriter Bill Madden answered. “So what’s the hook?” Talese looked offended, as if someone had stolen his drink when he wasn’t looking. “I don’t need a hook,” he said confidently. “I’ve never had to worry much about that.”

It was early in the evening, hours before the literary hangout would fill up, and visitors had already begun straggling by Talese’s table to greet him. The dapper, gray-haired man who looks younger than his 74 years was in his element -- shaking hands, trading wisecracks and flirting gallantly with the ladies on his right and left. When six large platters of grilled veal chops arrived -- Talese had ordered for all of his dining companions -- the friendly banter continued. And the drinks kept on coming.

With four consecutive bestsellers under his belt, the man whom David Halberstam once called “the most important nonfiction writer of his generation,” has reason to feel cocky. He’s just finished “A Writer’s Life” (Alfred A. Knopf), a semiautobiographical work spanning the last 60 years, and early reviews have been generally good.

But underneath his genial bravado, Talese has been a man deeply in need of reassurance. His latest book, due in 1995, was delivered 10 years late. During the last 13 years, he grew despondent that his work had no focus, lacked a compelling voice. He fretted that he had faded from view and would be forgotten. Time after time, his ideas about how to write the book -- or parts of it -- were shot down by editors. He worried that the publisher would lose patience with his delays.

In memos to himself, Talese was unforgiving: “Where are we going? Just completed no progress for one month!” he said in one note. Despairing, he confessed: “I continue asking myself, as I have before, what am I doing here? Where’s the story? What’s the point? Does it matter?” Echoing a writer’s worst fear in yet another memo, he asked himself: “When are you going to get back into print???”

“Gay was depressed for much of the time during the writing of this book,” said his wife, publisher Nan Talese, during an interview in her office at Doubleday, where she has had her own share of problems in recent months as the publisher of James Frey’s now discredited memoir “A Million Little Pieces.” “I’ve never seen him so troubled, so worried that he might have lost his way,” she added.

In the end, Talese found the narrative thread that had eluded him for years, offering in the bargain a revealing glimpse not only of his own life and times but of the wrenching self-doubts a writer sometimes endures.

As Talese has described it, “Writing is like driving in a tunnel with the lights out. You don’t really know where you’re going and it’s never a straight path.” Indeed, he has written a book about a book in search of itself -- and he was miserable for much of the journey. There are more visible lines of worry on his face than there were in 1992, when his last book, “Unto the Sons,” appeared. But Talese -- who was named after his immigrant grandfather, Gaetano Talese, a stonemason -- looked remarkably fit and upbeat as he opened the door of his four-story Manhattan town house on a recent afternoon. He was nattily attired, as usual, wearing a rust-colored tweed sport coat and matching vest, gray slacks, white shirt, yellow tie and handkerchief. His Italian shoes were custom-made.

Talese peppered his guest with questions about family and work and seemed genuinely interested in the answers. The direction of the conversation was forever shifting, just like his book. In the first 23 pages of “A Writer’s Life,” the author recalls his immigrant Italian father, he talks of his years as a sportswriter and describes his discovery that nonfiction authors could be as creative as any novelist. Finally, he begins what seems to be an extended story line:

As he watched the 1999 women’s World Cup soccer finale on television, a marathon that lasted several hours, Talese was struck by the plight of Liu Ying, the Chinese player who missed a crucial penalty kick, thus paving the way for an American victory over her team. Who was this obscure athlete, he wondered? And how would she handle the notoriety that would inevitably descend on her when she returned home?

“That was the real story,” he said. “I thought of myself as a young sportswriter and how I would have run into that locker room and told the story through her eyes.”

Over the next 400 pages, Talese weaves four additional stories in and out of a sprawling, often exhilarating autobiographical narrative, recounting his years as a student at the University of Alabama; his experiences as a reporter covering the civil rights movement; the bizarre and amusing history of a Manhattan building that has been home to 12 consecutive failed restaurants; and the continuing saga of Lorena Bobbitt, who sliced off her husband’s penis with an IKEA knife in a 1993 domestic dispute, claiming she was a victim of marital sex abuse.

“Did you know Lorena Bobbitt had an agent in Culver City?” he asked, with a look of wonder. “An agent! You cut off some guy’s wangerino and then you go to Hollywood and think you have a motion picture deal. This is America at its most insane.”

Although his book periodically touches on Talese’s life and times, it is not an autobiography. Readers get scattered glimpses of his parents, who ran an upscale women’s boutique; his childhood in Ocean City, N.J.; his early years as a journalist and his literary triumphs as the author of “The Kingdom and the Power” (1969), about the New York Times; “Honor Thy Father” (1971), about the American Mafia; “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” (1980), about American sexual behavior; and “Unto the Sons” (1992), about Italian immigration.

He also drops hints about the tricks a writer uses when a story gets elusive. Although Talese is still celebrated for his 1966 Esquire profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” many admirers of the piece have forgotten that the singer himself would not speak to Talese. So he produced a landmark piece of journalism about the gaggle of long-suffering staffers, drinking pals, goons and groupies who surrounded Sinatra.

“Ordinary life can be extraordinary,” said the author, who despite his elegant taste in fashion would rather kibitz with the doormen outside a Park Avenue building than chat up the swells inside. “If you spend time around such people and get to know them, get inside their hearts and they trust you, you wind up with an exceptional story about America.”

A legendary stickler for details and accuracy, Talese has no patience for nonfiction writers who cut corners or make up facts. He felt special pain during the recent Frey scandal, and although he refused to discuss the matter in any detail, he said his wife had been “maligned and abused” during the course of the story.

Talese said he worked hard to win the trust of those he wrote about in “A Writer’s Life.” But the question that tormented him was whether he could trust himself to pull the material together.

“Sonny Mehta [Knopf’s publisher] could have pulled my contract any time he wanted,” Talese said. “And you know, when you get older, they think, ‘He’s probably going to drop dead.’ I worried about not living long enough to finish the book.”

*

A writer’s lair

MUCH of the drama played out in the narrow, white stone town house, just off Park Avenue, where Talese has lived with his wife since 1958. As two Australian terriers barked wildly upstairs, he conducted an impromptu tour, traipsing up and down the stairs. He’s especially proud of the large, enclosed patio where he and Nan have thrown parties and receptions, most recently for Norman Mailer. The walls were filled with family photos -- including those of his now-grown daughters, Pamela and Catherine -- as well as paintings and prints. Books were spilling off the bookshelves on all four floors.

Although Talese has an upstairs office, he writes at a small desk in a long, narrow basement area called “the bunker.” He completes first drafts on notebook paper, then transfers them to typewritten notes and finally a computer. To his immediate right is a wall on which he has tacked all those memos he wrote to himself.

The room is quiet, with no telephone. Perfect, it would seem, for focused concentration. But the bunker is also a haven for procrastination. Talese doesn’t just stuff notes into boxes, he insists on decorating them, with black and white photos, color maps, and other pictures. He’ll waste hours tinkering with the filter for a faulty air conditioner; he’ll turn on a small TV and get lost in a baseball game. There’s a tiny alcove with a two-burner stove, teakettles and coffeepots, where he can eat meals undisturbed. A small table on the far side of the room holds bottles of Jack Daniel’s, Dewar’s, Smirnoff and Courvoisier. An entire wall is lined with Modern Library editions.

In 1992, just after “Unto the Sons” was published, Knopf expected Talese to deliver a sequel -- however he chose to define it -- within three years. At first, he believed the work would be easy, because it focused on America and he wouldn’t have to travel to Italy, as he did with his previous book. The deadline felt reasonable.

But his project bogged down almost immediately. Although he knew the book would focus on his life in some fashion, Talese had never written autobiography before. Indeed, his whole technique as a nonfiction writer was to combine meticulous reporting about other people with vivid, literary prose. He would spend years if need be to get beneath the glossy surface of a story. And he was a notorious perfectionist.

“Gay is not one of those writers who vomits on a page, then goes back and rewrites,” said author Ken Auletta. “He never moves on to a next sentence until he’s perfectly happy with one he’s written before. So he’ll struggle with the opening paragraph of a chapter for weeks. This is laborious, not to mention painful.”

*

Overcoming discouragement

TALESE had a feeling in his gut that major episodes of his life -- and stories on which he had embarked as a reporter -- belonged in the book. But it didn’t help that several editors discouraged him from pursuing the stories, whether as magazine pieces or dry runs for the book. He pitched the Chinese soccer idea to Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine, but there was no interest. He wrote a story about the Bobbitt case for the New Yorker, but editor Tina Brown killed the story when Talese was unable to get access to Lorena, writing instead about her husband, John.

“Dear, dear Gay,” she wrote, explaining her decision. “I have come to feel that we should really kiss off this penile saga and have you do something more rewarding.”

Casting about for a new angle, Talese decided to write about the waves of immigrants who had worked in 12 failed restaurants at 206 E. 61st St. in New York over several decades. But his longtime editor at Knopf, John Segal, said the idea didn’t sound very commercial. The publisher expected a bigger book from him.

The recurring problem, Nan Talese said, was that “Gay wanted to write about people who were losers, which can be quite eloquent. He has great instincts. But others would tell him, ‘No one wants to read about losers!’ ”

Another writer might have turned his rejected ideas into smaller-scale books and moved on. With his impressive track record, Talese could have been back in print years ago, if that’s what he wanted, said longtime friend and author Nick Pileggi.

“You don’t think he could have done a Bobbitt book?” Pileggi said. “He’d have been on every talk show. Katie Couric would be asking him deep questions. He would have been like 99% of the other writers out there. But that’s just not who he is.”

His frustrations mounted in August 1999, soon after the World Cup competition. But Talese suddenly found his stride -- and a new approach -- when he abruptly decided to fly to China several months later. He was in Frankfurt, Germany, preparing to return home, when he hit on the idea of chasing the soccer story once and for all.

The tale of Liu Ying, which takes up the last 55 pages of “A Writer’s Life,” thrusts the reader into a foreign, inhospitable world. Talese landed in Beijing with no official contacts. Even if he found his way to people in power, he wrote, who would believe that a 68-year-old American had come to China to write about a female soccer player?

“They don’t have a cult of personality, of the individual, in China,” said Nan Talese. “He was entering a culture in which our idea of celebrity just doesn’t exist.”

It may have been the biggest reportorial challenge of his life. Dressed in his cream-colored Italian suits and sporting a Panama hat, Talese was like Truman Capote in Kansas, a New York boulevardier entering a world suspicious of outsiders.

After months of persistent digging, he finally made contact with the soccer player. She had little to say about the soccer defeat and its impact on her, to his consternation. So he kept digging, until he found his way to her mother. She, quite unexpectedly, gave Talese the human story he wanted.

When Liu Ying missed the kick, her mother said she cried for her pain, and her daughter’s pain. She was embarrassed and didn’t want others to know how she felt. The next morning, a sobbing Liu Ying phoned home, saying, “It’s all my fault” over and over. Strangers came up to her sister on the street, criticizing Ying’s failure.

The family was devastated, and there was no Hollywood ending. Injuries ended Liu Ying’s career on China’s soccer team, and she now lives quietly near Beijing. She told Talese on the phone that, one day, she hopes to be a physical education teacher.

It was the end of the story for her, but a new beginning for the author. Buoyed by his experiences in China, he began to see how the disparate pieces of his puzzle might fit together. They all added up to a writer’s life -- the disappointments, dead ends, rejections and despair, the privileged glimpses into the mysteries of other people’s lives. With any luck, they added up to a good book as well.

“At some point, you get to a point of total frustration as a writer,” said Talese. “And so you have to go out and do something, even if you don’t know if it’s the correct thing to do. You just do it! Get out there! Forget whether it’s right or wrong. Just do it.”