Gay Talese Tells Alec Baldwin About Sinatra's Cold

Published May 26, 2015, 4:00 AM

When Gay Talese couldn't land an interview with Frank Sinatra, he wrote the profile instead by talking to Sinatra's tailor, stylist, valet, and other secondary characters in the pop star's world. The resulting piece for Esquire magazine, "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold," is a classic of New Journalism, which Talese helped pioneer.

"I wanted to be a storyteller," he tells host Alec Baldwin. "I used my imagination to penetrate the personalities, the private lives, of other people."

For more than six decades, those people have included mafia crime bosses, civil activists, literati, prizefighters—and innumerable "normal" characters, with their own secret desires, triumphs, and failings.

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policymakers and performers, to hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influence their work. The best story Esquire Magazine ever published as titled Frank Sinatra has a Cold. That's according to Esquire itself back in two thousand three, selecting from its seventy year archive, which includes writers like Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, and f. Scott Fitzgerald, Gaytales wrote, Frank Sinatra has a Cold and many more articles along with several books. He sticks to the facts and tells layered compelling stories about the famous, the not so famous, and the infamous. Like mafia legend Bill Bonano, to Lea's spends an unconventionally long time with his subjects. It pays off with a depth and complexity hard to find in journalism today. For Gay to Lee is achieving this requires both instinct and skill. I think to a degree a kind of discipline can be taught about writing how a sentence should be clear, And you could certainly have some tutoring with regard to that, but I think writing and writers are of a breed that are. In the case of nonfiction, writers are driven by curiosity. In the case of fiction writers, playwrights, short story writers, essay is then creativity is involved. I'm in the category of nonfiction, and my way of working is to first to indulge my curiosity. I'm propelled by the notion of how do other people get through the day and night, and what are they like and how are they different from me. I'm always measuring myself, whether I'm interviewing Frank Sinata, Joda Maju, or some pigeon feeder on Lexington Avenue, Joe Banana, Joe Banano. I have a variety of subjects. I'm not an expert in anything. My range is is is very far reaching, not always profound. But I'm my curiosity is profound. It's far reaching, for sure. You started working at the Times in fifty three. I was a copy boy. I was born near Atlantic City. My father was an Italian born tailor, and my mother was at Brooklyn, born Italian who met this man, this tailor, and they settled there and I was born in ninety two. But I couldn't get into college because my grades were terrible. It was pretty good in high school journalism, but I wasn't good at anything else, including English. But my father was making suits for a man from Alabama doctor in our town, and he suggests they go to the versu of Alabama in one place that welcomed me because of the doctor's influence with a date of admission. And I had the best four years of my life in Alabama from forty nine and fifty three. Not a good football team. Was it like to be? What it was like? The kill from Jersey? And it was it was like being another immigrant. My father was an immigrant and I was an immigrant in a sense. Later on, when I got a job in the New York Times, I went down to Alabama to cover the civil rights March to Selma, March of nine six five Morton Luther, the Gig's famous march. It was interesting being an Italian born journalist born in New Jersey, but went to school Alabama and goes back as a reporter for the Times to help cover this the seventeen day march to Montgomery from Selma. So I saw a part of a history from different perspectives. Now you said that you are a nonfiction writer. What's true? And yet you were identified with a certain stripe of nonfiction, a contemporary nonfiction that people have called different names new journalism and stuff with you Wolf and some of his novels. How do you define? How do you define the different to what you do? What I do and what I always have been influenced by our fiction writers. As a boy, I didn't grow up and a home with a lot of books. You can imagine as an immigrant family, a tailor and then my mother's soul dresses. So I wasn't reared in the home of Virginia woolf. I was reared in the home of merchants. And it was a good training for a writer to be a reporter, to be because if you were a store person. My family has a store, and from the earliest age I was taught good manners. You must be courteous to the customer. Even though I didn't have a literary background, I did read some books, not many, but some. When I went to Alabama, I read Faulkner. I never heard of Faulkner until I went to Alabama. And I also started reading when I came to be a copy boy. I started reading the New Yorker, and I read short stories by Irwin Shaw, John Schiever, St. Claire mckelloway was a nonfiction writer. A J. Leveling was a nonfiction writer, and Joe Mitchell was a nonfiction writer. And I read all these high level writers, particularly drawn to the fiction of John O'Hara and Erwin Shaw, who's not known now, but he's a beautiful writer, and he wrote great short stories. Uh the eight r and run about a college football player who would love with a young, beautiful blonde, and it tells the story Irwin Showa does. He didn't quite make it in the pros. He didn't make it, but he came to New York with his wife, who got to be a fashion editor one of the better magazines, and more successful the older she got, and he was less successful the older he got. Like many athletes, their life is in their twenties and after that it's a very much a question whether they have a future, have any life at all. I thought that story was so real and yet it was fiction. My first job as a report was in the sports department, So when I would meet Frank's at the Times, she started in the sports I did my first job as I got on the staff, which was was in the sports department, and I met people like Frank Gifford and but you know, the New York Giants for a good team. In those days, I wanted to be a practitioner of nonfiction meeting You cannot make it up, you cannot use your imagination, you cannot fake the facts. You have to write verifiably. Whatever you write, real names, real facts, so the reader can check you out. On the other hand, I wanted to be storytellers. So if you read my stories about maybe a football player or Floyd Patterson, or Joe Lewis Guy or Joe Lewis that I knew, or Muhammad Ali, and all these stories begin with scenes and the scenes setting I've learned from people like f Scott Fitzgerald. The great story that Fitzgerald wrote as every bit as good as as Great Gatsy. It's called Winter Dreams. I fell in love with that story. I fell in love with that girl that the Caddie fell in love with. And I wanted to bring to my stories, my little magazine pieces or my books later on, what the short story writers and the novelists brought to their dramatic rendering out of their imagination, and so I used my imagination, such as it was to sort of penetrate the personalities the private lives if I need be of other people. I had tremendous respect for people that I wrote about starting to get it as a boy in the store, where you respect the customer and you mind your manners, and you when you behave properly and your trust, courtesy and courtesy. That's something journalists don't have. They don't Well, we're gonna get to that how it's changed. But before you write books, or before you write the book about the times and you're in the sports, just give us an example of one of the first sports figures you interacted with and what that was like. I mean, someone that you first when I interacted with, what I call a very deep way, was the price fighter Floyd Patterson, who came up in the late nineteen fifties. He was articulate. Many great athletes are not articulate, but he was one. And more important, he was open to having other people enquire about his life. One of the first times I met him, he said, you know, I'm basically a coward. I just feel that boxing is way I can make a living. I don't know who else I would, but in my heart I'm filled with fear and fear of being humiliated. And then he told me that he didn't want to be spotted in public, particularly when he lost a fight. He had a fake mustache, fake wig, had some clothing he wore. He would masquerade, he would be or try to be somebody else. And this went on for six or seven years. But you know, getting to talk to people in moments when they are feeling humiliated and underachieving is very much something experienced by everybody, whether you're an actor, whether you're a plumber, whether you're defeated candidate for office, everybody has to know disappointment, a sense of rejection, defeat. It was a different time in terms of protecting them, wasn't It was a different time in terms of you weren't there to pull the covers on these people. We live in such tabloid times now we're writers regardless of their I mean, I even see like with publications like The Times itself, they can't help but have some kind of arms are reduction of you, and you know, some kind of psychoanalysis of you. They don't just write the facts. They don't what was it like back then, I never I never wrote about a person, and I've written about hundreds and hundreds of people that I couldn't go to see again. I never had someone that wouldn't see me. In fact, my attitude was the story is never over. I could write about someone that's a performing athlete or performing an actor, and then ten years later and go back and see them again. I wrote about Petro Tool my favorite person, in nineteen sixty three. Not long after who did Lawrence Arabia. I kept in touch with him for the next forty years. I believe that people, as long as they're alive, have more stories to tell. Just because you published an article in the New York Times or the New Yorker magazine doesn't mean that the story is over. It means your interest is over. But I never abated. I was always curious and continue to be affiliated with people I wrote about because I was sharing a part of my life for them when I was young and they were young. And as I've gotten older and they've gotten older, I wonder how did it turn out? And I can see in some of the public figures because you know what's happening, because they're occasionally still in print. But my curiosity is to write about them when their life is done. I mean, when I wrote about Joe to Mago, his career was done. I wrote about the ninety six he bitter, he was very suspiciousncious, very suspicious, and of course being married to Monroe compounded that suspicion of the press. Well, being a celebrity is a perilous experience in a way. You never have your life that you can feel is your own life, because it is so penetrated by the nosy noses and the aggressive and assaulting members of the media who could rip you up and ruin your life in a way that you can't make it up. When these characterizations, false as they may be, are established in print, there's not a lot you can do to change it. You might outlive it to it. There's no correction page on the correction the next day on page three, in a little paragraph at the bottom of the page. It's not going to amend things. It's not gonna make up for the disturbance of your own character. Were you still writing for you wrote Sinatra after you left the time, Yes, when you were doing a lot of essays for Esquire. That's right. I left the Times in the five after the Selma March that I told you about, and you wrote Kingdom in the Power Win three years later, see when I after you left. Yeah, when I was on the Times, I saw these guys who worked for the paper as stories. I thought sometimes they were much more interesting than the stories they were writing about about the outside. So when you're at the Times, what was the time slack? Then these characters. One of them was an obituary writer. I thought, what an eccentric character. This guy was named Old and Women and he was waiting for people to die. He was very interested in other people dying because that was his story. He kept alive. And they have their obituaries written here. And I focused my first when I quit the Times, I wanted to take these stories public. And the first thing I did for Restaurant when I left the paper in sixty five was to write a story called Mr. Bad News, which is this obituary guy in all the Women. The next thing I wanted to write about was a guy named Harrison Salisbury. He was a great corresponding. He was the guy that during the Vietnam War, without permission, in fact, against the policies of this government, went in Hanoi and found out that American bombers were pitting the hospital schools against what Lyndon Johnson's administration was telling us in n This was sixty six, the height of the North Vietnamese beginning to triumph in that war, and Salisbury penetrated that and wrote these stories and people hated him in this Country's a communist great man in my view. I wanted to write about him, and I did write about him, but but first the editors said, now you have to write about Sanctor. I said, I don't want to write about No, go do it. Go do it. So it's easy set up. Sanantra's press agent said, it's a cover story. You go out there and talk to you. Yeah, And he's doing this big NBC thing called Sinantra Man and his music. It's all set up. So I went out there the California and I was supposed to see Sinatra the next Monday. After I arrived and I called the press agent named Jim Mahoney said, Jim, I'm here, the Beverley will share. When are we going to see Mr? Sinatra? So? Oh, I'm sorry, he's got a cold. Oh okay, maybe a few days. Yeah, check me. But by the way, he said, Frank is feeling pretty bad because that damn cronkite on CBS. We understand he's doing something about Frank's allegric connection to mafia people. I said, I'm not doing that well. Anyway, Sinantra's lawyer would like to see you and maybe come to an agreement that maybe you could submit the piece before we pump. I said, Jim, I can't do that. You can't. I couldn't do it on the Times, I can't do it on escort, I can't do it anywhere. Sinatra's cold was a problem, but the real problem was they wanted to take the piece and do what I wanted. So I hung out there for six weeks. I never talked to you. Hung out there for six weeks, and what I was doing was talking to little people that worked with Snata. It might have been the woman who took care of his to pay his former valet his habit, Dasher on Rodeo drive, a guy named Dick, Carol Dick did that become Carol and Company? That's right, all these people and they gave me wonderful stories. And finally the press agency, are you still here? What are you doing, Frank, Maybe so, but it's a much better piece. So Frank sni as a cold was done by talking these people. But the reason I was so comfortable talking to minor characters is because I liked the secondary characters and I get to know them as the tailor shop and exactly the tailor shop was a great trading chat. And the tailor you're fitting people for a suit, and you know, I felt comfortable with ordinary people. And my parents are working ordinary people. So that worked out, and you get the story, even though you don't get Sinatra. You met him, ran into him. I saw him where, well, I saw him in a few places. I saw him and a bar and he got in a confrontation. Was some guy named Harlan Ellison who was a shooting pool. Santa was just being a little bit irritated, and he's and he lonely. He was fifty years old and he had been dating me and Pharaoh that and she wasn't around, and he had this cold and he's feeling lousy, and so I just caught that moment I described later on. I saw a Sinatra at a prize fight actually about how an Ali was fighting my friend Patterson and I called Patterson. I got tickets to the fight because I knew Sators going to be there, and of course he was there. What Sinator later on was with Dean Martin and Joey Bishop and and a few others went to the gambling in the casino. I watched them gamble. Later on they went to the show, and I just wrote a scene. In other words, I was observing Sinatra. I wasn't talking to him, but I was watching him. And he's had such an aura of glamor and drama about him. He might have a bad mood and to get in a fight with somebody, or he might be in a good mood, and he's giving people free dream A real magical man. And so you didn't a man haunted? Didn't you feel that some of these people you meet back then at the ats of this business, at the route. It was different being famous back then. But if you're extraordinarily talented, that goes for now, as in the era of Frank Sinatra's fame, or before, you're living up two expectations that cannot be long met. If you are a great performer, it could be a musician, it could be an opera singer, it could be We're not at the Tabaldi, it could be Frank Sinata. What you are at the height of your game, and you have to continue to perform at that high level, as supreme level. You're under constant pressure, stress, and the and the stress of the critics who are not in love with your success anymore. They're tired of his success. I'm gonna contribute to your destructions. They're tired of your success, and they are motivated by being destructive because they want to be affecting your life. And the only way they can do it is to target you to sink your floating vessel. And when you're at the top of your game, you not only gain a lot more fans, but you gain a lot more enemies. I mean to go on and on and on. So few can survive for so long when you're at the top. Gyales never met Sinatra, but after the singer died, he says he met Tina Sinatra, his daughter, and she told him she liked his article. Tales asked if her father had ever read it. He probably did, she said, but he'd never admitted. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. Take a listen to our archive more in depth conversations with artists, policymakers, and performers like Debbie Reynolds. We discovered we have something in common. I'm Aries, I'm born April Fool's Day. I just had my just Aries is very stubborn, but very really good person. I mean, I don't think that there's a bad bone in the body other than our temper. That I you're known for your temper. But it's not true, right, it's just if the process making up things. You know, go to Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. In the early eighties, one book found its way onto almost every shelf in the country. Gay to Lees is thy Neighbor's Wife, explored the uncharted territory of the hidden sex lives of Americans. Ten years earlier, to Lees wrote about another subject previously underreported. His book, Honor Thy Father, dove deep into the powerful and very secretive Bonano crime family. Tales got the famously press averse Bill Bonano to speak with such honesty and introspection the Time magazine labeled to Lees the golden retriever of personalized journalism. His first conversation with Bill was years in the making. Well, I met him in my final year of the New York Times, but I told you one of the last stories. In addition, the Selma story was the cover of the indictment of a Banano father and son in federal court in Laura, Manhattan, and I met him briefly through his lawyer. Bill Banana was my age. I knew his father was born in Sicily. My father, Jil Banana, was born in Sicily. My father was born in Calabria, close to Sicilians. So when I was at a reporter, I went to Bill Banana during a recession in the hearing in federal court, and I saw his lawyer named Albert Krieger, and I said, Mr Krueger, this is your client, Mr Banano, who's my age. Incidentally, someday I like to write about him. And Krieger said, no comment, no comment. I said, I'm not looking for a comment, I'm looking for his story. So but someday, it doesn't mean this year, next year, next sometime, because sometime this guy is gonna die, your client, Mr Bill Banana, and billber I was looking at me saying nothing. Half smiling, and I said, somebody's gonna die. Hope it's not with a bullet. But if he dies, his obituary is gonna come from information of the Justice Apartment, the the the cops are going to write the story. And so no comment, no comment. I was okay. I kept writing and calling him for the next year and a half sixties seven. Mr Banano his lawyer, Albert Krueger, the younger Banana. Mr Banana, will have dinner with you as long as off the record. It's absolutely off. There He took me to some Johnny johnson as a steakhouse near the u N run by mafia guys. So the lawyer, Crieger and Bill Bonano and I three of us had dinner, had a steak, had a drink, and I said, what about your family? He said, well, they live at East Medow, Long Island. I said, I have two young daughters. You have daughters. Why don't we have dinner sometime? So Bill, but as well, Okay, you can come to my house, bring your wife and bring East Meadow. And my wife went to a convent school. She's in Manhattanville graduate. My wife is and the wife of Bill Bonano was also a convent educated girl. So the two women, the the Irish Ganana Hern who married gay to Lee, and our two daughters, Katherine and Pamela. When in my little t RP sports car way out to East Meadow and there were these big cattle accident apart duct Tida Banano's house and he sees me pulling in with his car. He welcomes us. We had dinner and we met the bodyguards and all that stuff. On the way out, he said, you know it's dangerous driving that car with those children. He says, I said, oh, I like, we love the car. Next day I get a call he says, noise the thinking about your car. I have a Cadillact for you. Oh no, I don't want. But it's dangerous what you're doing. I said, listen, you you live with your danger. I live in line, don't worry about my way became friends. Took me two years and finally, in nineteen seventy, he said, I'm going to talk to you for the record, finally and I went over there. He what do you think changed? He was, I'll tell it was going to change. In nineteen seventy, he'd been indicted for credit card fraud. He took a stolen one of somebody took a card, and he was running up a lot of bills, and they sent him four years to go to Terminal Island in California where he was going to go. In fact, they sent him to jail. And his roommate was G. Gordon Liddy was in a cell of Bill Bernannig Liddy who was in the Watergate story. The only guy that had any integrity and didn't route on the president was Lydia. So he got along with Bill Bernano very very well. But he understood Omerta. Yeah, I understood. So I became friendly with that. I lived and he then was temporarily living in outside of San Francis, go place near San Jose called California, and I met his wife and I hung around there for a whole year before he went to jail for four years. That's where he did the story. And the story was really in a way it indicated something in the Sopranos approach to the story. I was interested in family life, the wife, the children, and it was preordained he would go into that business because of his father or not. It was it was, it was, and why not Salzburger and went into the business because it was a value business. Okay, Gates at least didn't become a tailor because it wasn't much of a business. Of My father was Ralph Lauren. I might have worked Ralph Lauren, you know, but I didn't, so I didn't become a tailor. That Bill Banana would follow us absolutely. But when that book came out, I made a fortune. I sold it all over the world. I had a movie deal with CBS. I made about a million dollars and more to come. And I set up with my lawyer a trust fund and educational trust fund, and I had put my two daughters to his college. And the four Banano kids why I'm at him, were six and seven eight years so I them through college my lawyer, and one of them became a doctor. And none of them became gangsters. So we broke the mafia cycle. And uh. And that was my big humanitarian achievement. Now let's talk about your other humanitarian achievement, which in the several years, I'd run into you in New York at events, and I'd see you out there. I'd run into you any lanes, you know, every now and then you know, you're so splendidly turned out, and you're such a gentleman. And so I honestly look at the book thy neighbor's wife, and I think this is just another function of your curiosity. And do you sit down when you write a book like that and say, I'm gonna start doing some research and the research lead you down these different alleyways and byways, and you just keep going and saying this is my job. Did you stop along the way and say, I gotta think about this. Well, let me tell the way it started. First of all, I was reared as a Roman Catholic, and I because of how old I am, I came out of the nineteen fifties. I'm really a product of post World War two Catholicism. I was taught in my little town with a very few Catholics, some Irish and little parish. I was an older boy. I was one of the few Italians in that parish. We had a strict code of behaviors. You shouldn't masturbate, you shouldn't read filthy literature. You go to Mass and you had the Catholic index. I was warned not to read this, not to look at this evil thoughts. All that when I come of age after college and go to become a copy boy. The whole policy with regard to morality was changing, and in the nineties sixties spent the period of Vietnam War, the Hippies, the sexual sexual Revolution, and so I was married at the time when I had these two daughters, and one night my wife and I went to P. J. Clarks was eleven o'clock walking up Lexington Avenue. We live in the sixties, and I saw this sign on on a building on fifty eight and Lexington across some blooming Deals said live nude models. I couldn't believe the sign, and I said the nanny Bloomingdale across from blooming Live nude Models. I said, let's go and check it out. So don't you go, you go. I'm see you at home. I grew up there and they're closing this and the guy says, what is this live nude models. It's just so when your wife said you go, you go, you go, she didn't care. Now she said, I don't want to go up. She did care, but she didn't care. She knew that I was a very curious guy, essentially reporter who liked to indulge my curious. You're open for anything. Absolutely true, And the guy said this massage part it's clothes. Come back tomorrow. Next day I went back. I was amazed. A massage, Parlar. What's that? They gave you a book. There were five or six photographs of different women rom one, room two, room three, one four in each and he says, a thirty bucks for massage. I just said, okay. I picked somebody and they go to room three and some young woman, articketed woman comes in with a Southern accent. She says, take your clothes off, and I said, this is a massage you're giving me? Yes, yes, take your clothes up. Looking clothes off. She took her top off, but she was wearing a little mini skirt and said that you have a southern accent. Yes, where are you from Alabama? She's want of Alabama. She could not care less. Hurry up, I say, you knew her be reunited. What it was and what they do? Masturbate you? Incredible to masturbates you for thirty dollars. And I was listening while being masturbated and enjoying it. I was also had my ear. I'm wondering who is this girl? She told me she was working at going to school a hunter in the daytime and working the massage party in the latter afternoons. She was a college educated person. I later on found out there over college girls and this massage collars. I was amazed at college girls. I shot a movie in a bar in New Orleans and all the strippers in the bar. We rented a bar and they hired these women that were real strippers. And I talked to this one girl, you know, as they say, cut and she put the bathroom on and she sit down and smoke a cigarette. I said, what do you do? She said, I'm going to Tulane and never in years. And that was true. So I thought to myself, while enjoying the process and being massaged to orgasm, no doubt I'm participating fully. At the second time, my second head is there's a story here. Who is this girl? Who are these women? This is nineteen seventy three, seventy four, seventy five, so different from the altar boy or the young journalists that I was in. Nine people my age I was then in my thirties are coming to places like this and coming to this place indeed, and the young women are not the downtrodden hooker or the little African American drug addic junky street. Uh, they're educated people, and they're educated in a way that is not so prohibited, that is not so restrictive, that is not so catholic guilt mentality. You can't do this, you can't do that. But you don't think that they were doing this as a or do you believe they were doing this as some form of sexual self expression? Were they people who were they were making money, they were paying the way through exploited But the point was they weren't being exploited. They were exploiting the men like me. But I was both typical of the male clientele. At the same time, as I said, I have a bit of a split personality. I'm also curious. I'm never without having a sense of what I'm doing, who I'm doing with. I'm never fully engaged. You're doing and you're watching a lawyer, I am truly a lawyer. From the massage parlor near blooming Deals, where does it go from there? I go to the massage parlers and I finally I go to a person who runs a massage back, can I manage one? So I managed a massage Polar for six months. Anybody in your life know you're doing this? I told my wife. Of course. In fact, my wife was working at Random House. She's been and she's still. And of course they had when you tell a Random House editor, who's your wife? She was, I'm gonna go, right, I'm gonna go run on the not go to a massage parlor or even if I got some kind of a jones for a while, where I'm gonna go. If I'm gonna go run one, what did she say? You told it was for a book. Don't forget. She had mafia gangsters in her house before, and we had bodyguard. Somebody tells me she preferred the mafia gangsters Tosagay mafia people more moral. But you know, but I said, I think there's a story here. There was a story there, and I wanted her to come up. The Random House building with them was fifty third and third Avenue. My massage Polar was fifty four Street and third Avenue. I said, said, come on up, I want you to meet some But at that time I knew the massus is by name. I was taking the lunch, I was getting them to keep notes for me. I was doing so your days as a customer over, that's right, right, But the only reason I know these people was because I was a customer and I cultivated Their association with me was someone once you worked, once you worked to the massage part of you had the willpower to not stick your straw and the punch bowl there you there were no more. That's right. I graduated, so so to speak from being a consumer to being a management being, that's right. And I was keeping notes, and I was cultivating the girls, and I wanted to use their names. My idea for a book was to have it in a massage pollar. The two generations, the people like me, the customer and the mail cust sneeking in for a little, you know, when getting getting your oil change, and about fifteen minutes for thirty bucks, and the women, being of a different generation, very liberated to do this for money and not feel guilty. They were, They weren't victim. Does it doesn't end with the massage parlor phase. The book goes on the go. But here's what happened. I finally got the characters that would give me their name, and then I invited my masseus and her boyfriend home to dinner with my wife, and what happened was the boyfriend hit on my wife, who was cooking dinners crazy and the Masseus got mad, and my wife said, this is the end of it. I don't want to be associated with your research. But I lost the masseus for my story. She got very angry. So then I went to California and I heard about this place called Sandstone. It's a club of nudie. It's a beautiful mansion on the top of his canyon. And I was amazed that I made my whole story there. I became a nudist. This guy that wears three piece suits, son of a tailor, becomes a nudist. Were there? I was there six months, six months, and I would come back and for I meet my wife sometimes we meet in Chicago, Happy. She completely knew what you were doing. Yeah, I didn't know about it, and she wasn't happy. Journey the marriage survival. When I was getting publicity, one time an article in New York magazine, an Evening in the Nude with Gate to Lisa, a devastating piece and my devasiting piece about you. Yeah, this crazy sex pervert. I was a pervert. Really for a period maybe two or three years. But I went through it and I got a book out of it. One of the sad things about it. I took the book seriously and it's a serious book. But I became known by that book primarily. And you think it overshadowed your other books? Oh, clearly did that upset you? It did then, but then in recent years it has been recognized as a serious book. Yeah. Do you think writing has changed for people? Like when you when you when you look at Roth, when you look at your contemporaries achieve or uptick and all these men. Do you think that those people, uh, people can have careers like them again now or is it the same as my business where you just can't have those careers anymore. They were of their time. I don't think it was ever easy. You can still do it now. What has hurt my line of work is the tape recorder. I don't use the tape recorder. I hang around with people. I'm not necessarily to use shirtboards. I use shirtboards and you round off the corner so they fit in your have a little package. I wish we have we had televisions. I have these things here. I'll leave someone, but there are good writers now. You see most of the good writers now are in the New Yorker. But there are not enough magazines that will support writing that requires traveling in order to write well. Sometimes you have to experiences on site research. You have to travel. You can't do it through Google. You have to get off your get on the train, and get on a plane, go somewhere, and that runs an expense account, so the cost of But big magazines a vanity Fair will support you if you have a hot subject, whereas the New Yorker will support you. And you could just not necessarily be writing about a major movie star, but you can be writing about some ordinary person if it's a good enough story. But it's very hard, but it always was hard, so I don't think it's the end of an era. I still think that there are young people that care about writing and can write well, and we'll have the patience and dedication to do the research. You have to do the research. There's no shortcuts. It's no shortcuts. You can read gay to Liza's story about retracing his steps across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma fifty years after the march, along with his original account from nineteen sixty five at the New York Times website him Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing, M.

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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