Playboy Interview: Gay Talese

She was completely nude, lying on her stomach in the desert sand, her legs spread wide, her long hair flowing in the wind, her head lilted back with her eyes closed. She seemed lost in private thoughts, remote from the world, reclining on this wind-swept dune in California near the Mexican border, adorned by nothing but her natural beauty.

Thus begins Gay Talese's epic book "Thy Neighbor's Wife." Scheduled for publication by Doubleday this month, it has already been sold to United Artists for $2,500,000, the highest price paid for the movie rights to a book in the history of publishing. The subject is sex in America, and, in the reportorial form that has come to be known as the non-fiction novel, Talese tells his version of the history of sexual mores in America, going back to the founding of the Puritan republic three centuries ago.

But the book primarily focuses on the more contemporary events of the "sexual revolution" in America since World War Two and on the public role and private sex lives of a host of characters who were influential in changing the ways Americans view sex. Some of Talese's highly personal portraits attempt to capture the sexual pioneers in mainstream, middle-class life. The life of Hugh Hefner and his founding of Playboy are told in detail. Talese also describes Alex Comfort watching couples and groups make love at Sandstone, a sexual retreat in Los Angeles, and then writing "The Joy of Sex." Some of the characters are farther out on the fringe of sexual attitudes: for example, Al Goldstein, the editor of Screw. In all, the book seems destined to head straight to the top of the bestseller lists and to become the most controversial publishing event of 1980. (See review, page 56.)

Talese is no stranger to controversy or to reporting the private moments of real people. As a New York Times reporter in the Fifties, through his finely etched portraits of politicians, sports stars and offbeat characters, he earned a reputation as a vivid writer on a newspaper not known for allowing its reporters much leeway in demonstrating their personal flair. In the early Sixties, Talese's longer and more ambitious profiles of celebrities earned him a reputation as a reporter who used novelistic techniques so skillfully that he became a celebrity in his own right as one of the leaders of what came to be called the New Journalism.

Talese's Esquire articles--on Joe DiMaggio, Peter O'Toole, Frank Sinatra et al.--were making a deep impression on journalists and critics all over the country. They became central to an inspired debate over the New Journalism and whether or not it was really new or legitimate--was this "objective" reporting or literary license?--or even journalism.

Then Talese took the plunge into the book-length nonfiction novel style in "The Bridge." He spent over a year living with the tough, gutsy bridge workers who constructed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and told the story of their lives--and of the death of one, who fell 350 feet from the cable. "The Bridge" went largely unnoticed by critics and public, but it was a minor classic in demonstrating how deeply--and subjectively--a reporter could involve himself in the lives of his subjects and bring the flesh and blood of real people to paper in a way that was usually expected only in novels. And it set the scene for Talese's three largest works, which have followed in the past 14 years.

"The Kingdom and the Power," which became a number-one best seller, took readers into the behind-the-scenes power struggles and personalities of the journalists and executives who run The New York Times. Then, in 1971, "Honor Thy Father," Talese's story of Bill Bonanno, the son of Mafia don Joe Bonanno, also became a number-one best seller.

Since 1971, however, Talese has written only one magazine article. Other than that, his name has appeared mainly in articles and gossip columns that gleefully chronicled the "research" he was doing in massage parlors, sex communes and the like. Married since 1959 and the father of two daughters, the 47-year-old writer became, increasingly, the target of titillating gossip--especially when the book's publication was postponed by five years. "Thy Neighbor's Wife" came to be known in publishing circles as "the most talked-about work in progress of the Seventies," as often as not spoken of with a wink about Talese's slow progress. But finally, in late 1979, Talese finished, and Esquire quickly ran two long excerpts about Hefner and Playboy. Well before anyone at Playboy had read the manuscript or had any idea of how much Talese dealt with Hefner and this magazine, the decision was made that this important work about sexual attitudes in America warranted a "Playboy Interview" with Talese. So we assigned Larry DuBois, one of our longtime contributors, who had conducted the 20th-anniversary-issue interview with Hefner in 1974, to do the Talese interview. DuBois' report:

"The first time I heard the name Gay Talese was in 1964. My professor in a college writing class, a rather aristocratic novelist who maintained a reserved distance from his students, burst into class one day carrying a copy of Esquire. With an enthusiasm he had refused to show before that day or after, he raved about an article he had just read. He had never read a piece of journalism, he said, quite like it. It used techniques previously reserved for novels to create scenes rich with detail and dramatic moments that revealed character from the subjective view of the author. It was not an objective listing of 'facts,' fleshed out with balanced quotes, pro and con--which was then the generally accepted format for feature-length articles. This journalist, the professor said, as if dazzled, had written an article as artistic as a John O'Hara short story. Then he sat down and spent the entire class time reading aloud Talese's article about boxer Floyd Patterson, 'The Loser.'

"Four years after I heard his name, in 1967, I met Talese. Since then, I've gotten to know him pretty well. On the surface. Gay Talese is a very controlled man. What he shows is his discipline. He is in perfect shape from several hours every week of highly competitive tennis. He will not set foot in public unless dressed impeccably in exquisitely tailored, European-cut clothes. He wears hats. His manners are Old World perfect and he speaks in cultivated sentences that avoid slang or profanity. He would never take off his jacket, roll up his sleeves, loosen his tie, loosen his tongue and ingratiate himself as 'one of the boys.' There is about him an air of dignity and intensity that commands respect from strangers, whether they encounter him on an elevator, at a gathering of the literary high and mighty or in a Midwest massage parlor. He is, in short, a striking character, who could understandably be seen, as he is by some, as totally contained, humorless and sure of himself to the point of arrogance.

"So much for appearances. Beneath the surface, Talese is a warm and friendly man with a quick and self-mocking sense of humor. Privately, he paints a picture of himself as struggling and self-doubting. He laughs easily and often about his inadequacies. He barely got into college and, sporting what he saw as 'the worst case of acne in the United States of America,' he barely got into the worst fraternity on campus. He studied journalism, but he can't remember the name of the honorary society, because it wouldn't let him in. The Army tried to turn him into a tank commander, but he was so mechanically inept he finished 68th out of a class of 69. He still uses the manual typewriter he bought 22 years ago, because electric typewriters intimidate him. 'The words want to come out too fast,' he says. But he keeps writing because it's the only thing he knows how to do. 'I couldn't be a businessman. I still count on my fingers. With good cause,' he says, 'do I regard myself as flawed.'

"His greatest gift is empathy. The people he interviews sense what his friends know, that he feels their vulnerabilities as keenly as they do because he is so aware of his own. No matter who you are, you don't spend much time with Talese without opening up to him in a way you would normally reserve for an old friend or a loved one--or a shrink. His wife, Nan, once said, 'Gay is happiest when he's asking questions.'

"Despite his success and fame--and now, to many, notoriety--Talese hasn't changed much in the past 13 years. He hangs out with the same old friends, spends as much time as possible at his homes--on Manhattan's Upper East Side and on the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey, where he grew up--with his wife and daughters. And he is as obsessed as ever with his writing. That's the one part of his life in which he defiantly claims greatness, the critics be damned.

"I think all that comes across in the interview. I caught him at a particularly low moment. He was on deadline, correcting the galleys of the book that had driven him for eight years, and he was feeling the psychological letdown of being finished, as well as fighting one of his usual bouts of writer's block on an almost laughably trivial assignment we discussed early on. He was worried about the impact of his book, not on his professional reputation--even though he was well aware that would come under attack--but on his wife and children.

"He was busy and harassed, but he came through like a champ. Almost every afternoon for nearly two weeks, he showed up at my hotel suite right on time and patiently answered every question I asked. Even though his remarks frequently dealt with sensitive and controversial matters, from his sex life and his marriage to his own view of his work, he never once asked me to turn off the tape recorder. I did not feel that I had to pull my punches because he was an old friend. On the contrary: I felt free to ask him questions and to challenge him in ways that would be difficult to do with someone I had just met--especially if that someone were the seemingly reserved, aloof Gay Talese.

"Here, as in his book, he is open to criticism from many different angles about the blunt, outspoken portrait he paints, but I know for sure that he believes what he says and, just as with his writing, he stands by it. Whatever one's view of his morality and his work, Gay Talese is a most uncommon man."

Playboy: Why did you call your book Thy Neighbor's Wife?

Talese: Because the book is about coveting, and the whole phrase is "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife." But I see America as an adulterous state, so it seemed to be an apt metaphor for dealing with sex in America. Coming out of my own Catholic past, filled with all its sexual taboos, so much of what I've written about has been exploring "sin."

Playboy: The book has certainly caused a commotion in publishing circles. Before publication, you've earned $4,000,000. Why do you think your book was worth $2,500,000 for the movie rights, more than any other book in history?

Talese: I don't even understand why Doubleday, the publisher, gave me a $600,000 advance before they had seen a word.

Playboy: No doubt because of the financial success of your earlier books. But why the movies?

Talese: I gather the movie people read the book and thought there were good scenes and good characters in it.

Playboy: Many books are written with good scenes and characters. Wasn't it the topic--sex in America--that sold it?

Talese: It's not the sex. It's the story that was so unusual. But I don't know anything about the movie business. I was amazed it got any movie sale. I wasn't expecting it at all.

Playboy: But why did they give you so much?

Talese: I wouldn't know. I couldn't have disputed any figure they decided to offer me. I saw that Truman Capote was just offered $500,000 for the movie rights to a magazine story. I don't know why they do those things. Maybe they thought the story about the two couples who started the sexual experiment known as Sandstone tells us where this country is going sexually. Those two couples are sort of showing us future sex in America. In their relationships and in sexual intercourse, they went beyond what most people would admit to having explored. Part of what they wanted to achieve was the elimination of jealousy and the double standard. It is possible that they are as much as a decade ahead of the Eighties. And, I should add, those people were very much a part of the middle class: They had regular employment, were legitimately married, had children--but they took that extra step into the future. So a movie made from the story of those people might be a pretty good indication of what millions of Americans are going to be doing, or trying to do, a generation from now. Is that possible? I don't know.

Playboy: Let's get some perspective: What were you trying to do with the book?

Talese: I wanted to do a book that had never been done before. I wanted it to be three things. One, a true story. This is a book that reports sexuality as it really happened between people who are alive and whose names I use. I wanted to report the bedroom. I wanted to report--not fictionalize and create, as a novelist might do. The bedroom has been traditionally out of bounds for the serious reporter. If there is anything pioneering about this book--and I think there is--it is that it uses real names. The events and even the sexual details are real, were actually described to me by the participants.

Two, I wanted to write about people who had influenced the redefinition of morality in America. I wanted to write about people who were responsible, to a greater or lesser degree, for fomenting this change, provoking it, inspiring it. And these people, although pioneers, were average, middle-class people.

Three, I wanted to tell, through those stories, the sexual and social history of America, going back to the founding of the Puritan republic. I describe, for instance, the Civil War period by focusing on Anthony Comstock, the original censor, who believed in protecting us from the evils of masturbation and pornography. I wanted to tie all my characters and their eras together to bring a sense of 300 years of American history into focus.

Playboy: But despite the scope you describe, the book's emphasis is primarily on events in the past 30 years.

Talese: We've seen the most radical change in sexual attitudes since World War Two. The war brought with it penicillin, which, of course, created a sexual freedom that had never existed in the history of the world. And the postwar era brought with it, among other things, less stringent censorship laws, Playboy, the pill. I wanted a big book that was set against the background of a changing America, an America that was very different in the Seventies from what it was in the Forties. I spent the first couple of years just traveling around America, looking for characters, like a Fellini looking around the countryside for faces and attitudes, for personal stories I could interlink into one big story about sexual change in this country.

Playboy: The story of your own personal search, to which you devoted the final chapter of your book, has already caused a lot of controversy. You participated in sexual communes, managed a massage parlor, had sex with some of the women you interviewed. You were the subject of magazine articles and gossip-column items that implied you had figured out a good scam to indulge in extramarital sex. How do you react to that?

Talese: Good scam figured out. Hardly! It wasn't true. It wasn't as glamorous as it might have seemed. The most difficult part of the work that I do is that I have to spend enormous amounts of time with people I may not have a lot in common with, and remain patient and interested. As the manager of a massage parlor, I would sit behind the desk and there might not be any business all afternoon, and I would be sitting around, talking to the masseuses, and I'm telling you, a lot of those masseuses were not exactly Susan Sontag. I spent more boring afternoons in massage parlors than anybody in the country. Much of the time, my research was uneventful, but the very mention of the word research became a reason for laughter among friends as well as others. At first, I accepted it with humor. But after a while, I didn't find it so funny. Because that is not why I wrote the book.

Playboy: Why did you write the book?

Talese: Because it was the most important story I saw in the Seventies, and it had not been written. The story of the sexual revolution--who effected it, why it happened--had never been written. It was the biggest story I knew of that any writer of nonfiction could deal with.

Playboy: Why did it take you so long?

Talese: When you are asking people to open up to you about the most intimate moments of their lives, you have to spend weeks, months, sometimes years developing that relationship and building their trust. What is hard for critics--who don't know about the art of interviewing--is how much people will tell you about themselves if they really trust you. Even many writers of nonfiction do not spend that much time with their sources. They simply do not have the patience to hang around. I'm among the few who have the patience to spend years getting to know my sources. The art of hanging out . . . boy, it's tough.

I was supposed to deliver the book in June of 1974. And I did not deliver it in June of 1974. By June of 1975, I had not written a word. I didn't even know what I was going to write or how much longer it was going to be before I said, "No more research." In 1976, I still had not started. In 1977, I started and began to get an idea of where I was going to go. In 1978, I was going a little better. And in 1979, I really started going.

Playboy: How did you feel about your lateness?

Talese: I missed the deadline by five years. I guess if you're going to miss a deadline, you might as well really miss it. It's amazing: Doubleday didn't harass me. But I was embarrassed. And I became angry at people who constantly asked me when the book was going to be finished. The publicity began almost as soon as I signed the contract, so everywhere I went, I got asked about it and I became ill-humored. I think more than anything else, I became angry at myself for not being able to deliver. It was grating on my nerves, partly because there are some fine writers who are fast. My friend David Halberstam is amazing. I don't know how he does it. He is a fast writer. Norman Mailer must be a fast writer. He's done about 14 books since I started this one, and the last one of his, about Gary Gilmore [The Executioner's Song], he did in about a year and a half and it's about 5000 pages long. Eventually, about 1976, I started lying a lot, saying, "It's going to be finished next month."

Playboy: What was your problem?

Talese: They talk about writer's block. I'm always blocked. Writer's block, for me, is a natural condition. A good day for me might be one paragraph. One paragraph I'd be thrilled. Because too often I come back with nothing. Of course, I throw paper away. I throw paper into the wastebasket. That's one thing I do well. And I keep putting more into the typewriter. I tried to put pressure on myself. I must turn out these pages, I'd think. I can't be so hung up on everything. But I have never written with ease. And I don't like what I write as I write it. I go through stages of a kind of self-loathing--no, not self-loathing but a kind of disappointment with everything I put on paper, because it could be better. I always think it can be better. For me to go through a page and finally to accept it as being worthy of publication, I have first to go through a kind of punishment, a flagellation. I feel that unless you suffer, it's no good. Anything that comes easily is unworthy of you. And that comes right back to those miserable Irish nuns I grew up with. I mean, guilt has been very much a part of my life, growing up as a Catholic where the ritual was very strict. Those Irish nuns were tough. Their philosophy was tough. Guilt, sacrifice and fear. It was guilt that you were not measuring up to what would get you to heaven. You were always going to be a loser because you were never going to make it. You were never good enough to get to heaven. That miserable Catholic upbringing must be a factor in the way I write, because it's . . . it's S/M writing. [Laughs] It is misery. You have to be punished all the time. Great work must be done with pain. There are athletes who learn to play with pain. I write with pain.

Playboy: After so much of a struggle, how does it feel to be finished?

Talese: I am really tired. I don't want to make too much of it, but you are seeing me now, in this condition, exhausted after eight years of work on this book, and I need time away. I need to get away from the routine of writing seven days a week. But I did something very foolish right after the $2,500,000 movie sale. I promised a friend at The New York Times that I would write a piece for him about two speed skaters who are part of the Olympic team, a brother and sister named Eric and Beth Heiden. They're the Donnie and Marie--Osmond. Osmondson, whatever it is--of speed skating. So instead of getting some time off. I was on the next plane to Wisconsin. At least, I felt, it is not about sex. It's different. I'll be in dairyland, where there are more cows than people, and I'm going to have time with two wholesome youths. Well, I have been blocked on that piece for four weeks and it is driving me crazy. I'm obligated to do it, but I am spent as a writer for now. I just do not have the energy. As I speak to you now, I have two more days before the deadline on this piece. And I am just. . . blocked.

Playboy: That's pretty funny: Famous author Gay Talese, brooding and blocked over a modest magazine article after he just banked $2,500,000 on the movie sale of his big book.

Talese: It is not very funny to me, because I've been on this thing for four weeks. I do have a magnificent lead, though. [Laughs] I describe ice. There are different kinds of ice. If the water is polluted, with a lot of iron and minerals in it, the ice is slow, it is coarse. There is a lot of texture to that ice. If you're doing 500 meters, you're going to be about two seconds slower than you would be if the water came from the pure stream of a mountain.

Playboy: What's your fee for that article?

Talese: Three hundred dollars.

Playboy: Let's see, that would be about $75 a week so far.

Talese: Very funny. And I had to buy a pair of leather boots, because it's so cold out there. They cost me $250 and they're already ruined! But enough of that miserable assignment. As silly as it may sound to you, and to anybody who reads this, the fact is that I gave my word to write that article, and so I have to do it, and do it as well as I possibly can, even though hardly anybody will read it, including, probably, the people who are featured in it.

Playboy: We'll be delving into some of the characters and stories in your book, but first we have to acknowledge the curiosity about your own story of writing the book. How, as many people have wondered, did you keep your marriage together during your eight years of famous research, exploring the world of sexuality?

Talese: People like myself who keep marriages together do it because we want those marriages to endure. Nan and I love each other. During the past 21 years, I have never felt any less in love with my wife. In fact, the reverse seems to be true. I'm more in love now; the love I feel for her has grown with time and she has remained throughout the marriage physically desirable to me. Now, if you say I'm not faithful to my wife sexually, I might say I'm faithful to her in a spiritual sense--but people would laugh so loud I wouldn't be able to stay on the stage for long. But it is true. When I am home, I am home, and even when I am away from home, I am home. The fact is, I remain faithful to Nan in that I choose this marriage over any other relationship or form of relationship.

Playboy: At any point in those eight years, did you feel threatened by falling in love with someone to the point of leaving your marriage?

Talese: A couple of times.

Playboy: So you were playing with dynamite.

Talese: Yes, I was. A couple of times I was very attracted, beyond just the sexual gratification and companionship and joy. I liked the person, wanted to spend time with her, was not eager to go back to New York and to my wife and the married life I had known since 1959. The marriage, which is now in its 21st year, has certainly been tested.

Playboy: Why did you always go back?

Talese: The reason I choose to remain married is that I recognize I am married to an extraordinary woman. Were she not, I don't see how I could have stayed married this long, because I've met some other women who are also exceptional, who helped me tremendously. But our marriage is based on many things. It is based, of course, on a mutual respect. In this case, you have two career people who share an appreciation of each other's work. She is a vice-president of Simon & Schuster, and she is the finest editor I have ever known. She has had a hand in every paragraph I have written in the past 20 years. I don't always like her criticism. In fact, I resent her criticism some of the time, but I always keep going back, because I know she's the best. If I pass her judgment, I am getting the best judgment I can get on my work.

We share a very private language, as any couple together a long time does, and we have all the years of shared experience, the good times and the bad, and those moments when you get really keen insight into the other person, and you like what you see. There was a moment, about 1962, when I thought we were going to die together, and I liked what I saw in her. We were driving on a mountain road in North Carolina in the winter, and I hit a patch of ice and the car started skating about 40 miles an hour straight for a drop-off of about 2000 feet. I thought, This is it. And I turned to Nan and she looked at me. She knew what was happening. We didn't say anything. I was looking at her face for signs of panic, or fear, or rage at me, or whatever one looks for when both of you know that you're out of control and you're seconds away from dying. And what I saw on her face was serenity. I saw calmness under pressure, a fearlessness of what was ahead. The fact that. I am speaking to you now is evidence that we didn't go over the cliff, but nothing in the past 18 years has happened to make me feel any less confident of her capacity to take pressure or to change how I felt about her at that moment.

Playboy: Why do you think Nan chose to remain married to a guy who----

Talese: I'm not really sure.

Playboy: Don't give us modesty.

Talese: I'm not going to give you modesty. She must love me. And I know she is aware of how much love I have for her. But I have often wondered about it. I have often asked myself why.

Playboy: Were you monogamous before you began researching this book?

Talese: No, before this book I was not living the life of a monogamous married man. I am not going to insult your intelligence by saying that I was monogamous, because I wasn't. I had never fallen out of love with Nan--it's been a constant love affair with this woman I am married to--but I have had a constant attraction for other women throughout the past 30 years. I find women endlessly attractive. I can find things in women who may not seem beautiful to others that are beautiful to me. I am endlessly in awe of women. I like women. I like liking women. I find the companionship of women exciting. My sense of curiosity about women is nearly limitless. I have this wonderment about women and it exists now for my own daughters, aged 15 and 12. I've been watching since they were infants the process of growing from girlhood to womanhood, and they're approaching that right now.

Playboy: How do you think your daughters, reading the book and the publicity about the book, are going to feel about their father's extramarital activities?

Talese: A lot of women friends have talked to me about their fathers, and I have often asked them what they knew about their fathers' private lives. The women who say they understand their fathers, who have maintained a close relationship with them, frequently say they have been aware of other women in their fathers' lives. They think none the less of their fathers for it. At least the women I've spoken to. And I hope that long after I am dead, if my daughters are asked about their father, they will say, "But we loved him very much, he was not a great source of embarrassment or pain. To anyone."

Playboy: How would you feel if you discovered that Nan was having an extramarital affair?

Talese: I don't think I would want to know about it. People say, "Aha, you're afraid." No. It's not that I'm afraid. It's just not for me to say what she does nor to judge what she does, and it's also not for me to know what she does. If I have any position, it would be that I don't want to know about it. Why? Because it has nothing to do with me, I hope. If it has something to do with me, I will surely find out about it, because she will tell me. Often when women confess their infidelities, it is because they want to have their husband act upon it and leave, because they don't know how to get out of the marriage. That's also true of men when they confess. I never confessed anything, until this book. That's one of the results of this book: It put me in a position where I felt I had to give interviews like this. I have not done this comfortably. I wish I didn't feel I had to do it.

Playboy: Why do you have to?

Talese: Because I've spent the past eight years convincing people that there is nothing wrong in acknowledging their infidelities and their sexual adventures. And, having managed to do that, then I felt I had to do the same thing. I was as honest as I could be writing about real people, so I had to be the same way about myself. I didn't do it happily. I don't like having to answer a lot of questions, since I am the father of two daughters. But there was no way I could avoid acknowledging for the record that I have not been a monogamous man. Was not before the book, was not certainly during the book, and I have to take my chances as to how people will judge my work because I admit what I do personally. And I'll take my chances.

Playboy: What about the chances in the marriage?

Talese: Obviously. I'll take my chances in the marriage, too.

Playboy: What about the chances you're taking with your daughters?

Talese: I have to take them. In admitting to you what I have, as a father--and a loving father, which may sound like a subjective remark, but let me indulge it--I have already run the risk of having children my daughters go to school with say to them that they have a bad man for a father. I don't know how this is going to affect them. If that sounds selfish or ill-advised, what can I say? I will just tell you that I was committed to doing this book. I wanted it to be as honest as I could make it and, in that case, I had to be honest about myself. But most people do not want to be honest about sex. People lie about sex. People lie about how they feel about sex, although often they don't know how they feel about sex. Many people are still embarrassed by any reference to sexuality. So this honesty brings me no pleasure. But this is what I had to do. I guess.

Playboy: With so much of a personal stake in this book, what is the message or over-all idea you're trying to get across?

Talese: If it were a simple book, there would be a simple message, and I could tell you about it in simple language, and I would get it right the first time. This is not that sort of book. It is not one dimensional. I'm not lecturing or posturing. I'm not espousing a cause. The book has no message, except, in a sense, it is an attempt to open people up to other people, to show them how other people live in private. If we knew the private lives of average people, we would see how extraordinary those lives are.

Playboy: But your book isn't about average people. Using your own description, you Wanted to write about sexual pioneers. Pioneers aren't average people.

Talese: I wanted the change in the sexual behavior of the middle class to be explored in this book, and the people in the book are people who were influential in bringing about those changes. Take Hugh Hefner. Definitely a pioneer. You could not write about the changes in sexual attitudes in America in the past 25 years without writing about Hefner. Yet he came from a typical background, raised by Methodist, middle-class parents in the Midwest, and his audience is definitely middle-class. He has not been publishing his magazine for a bunch of unusual people. The women who are photographed each month are middleclass. The girl next door really is the girl next door.

I also wrote about Alex Comfort. Alex Comfort is a major figure in the sexual revolution. But he is an average, middleclass person. Nobody ever heard of Alex Comfort until he wrote The Joy of Sex. That was a pioneering work that sold millions of copies. But the reason he is famous is that his work was sold to the middle class in Kroch's and Brentano's and stationery stores that a few years ago would not have touched a picture book depicting sexual acts. Comfort is famous because he was accepted by the middle class, by millions of average people.

Playboy: People like Comfort and Hefner may have come from typical backgrounds, but they have not lived average lives, and what they eventually did would be considered extraordinary by most people, not exactly representative of sex in America as it is practiced by the large majority of people.

Talese: I don't think the people in my book are so extreme. They may seem to some to be extreme because in public we are all normal people, living the normal lives of people. Our persona is to suggest that we are not extreme in our behavior. But I can tell you, after eight years of asking hundreds and hundreds of people about the most intimate moments of their private lives, that if you really knew the truth about people, a truth that few people would care to have known--not because it's so reprehensible, it's just private--we are all extremists about sex. Each in our own different way has a private, internal vision that is extreme, no matter what kind of manner we try to exhibit to our colleagues in the office, to our friends and associates and to the person we are married to or dating. The truth about our sexuality is always more extreme than we will admit.

So many millions of people in this country who are not thought of as being exhibitionist or adventurous or extreme, just average people who work in companies, as schoolteachers, piano instructors, charwomen in hotels, ordinary people you see in the streets and don't even look at twice--if you were privy to their private sexual lives, you would be amazed at how those lives are lived. I don't mean to suggest they are part of great orgiastic scenes. I'm just talking about the act of sex itself and the role it plays in their lives.

Playboy: Your book touches on the lives of so many people--from censors to lawyers to publishers to sexual experimenters--that we'll have to concentrate on just a few. To begin, tell us about the couple who started the Sandstone sexual retreat and why you feel they were important enough to have been one of the local points of the book.

Talese: Sandstone was started in 1967, when a man named John Williamson, a former space-program engineer at Cape Canaveral, bought a 15-acre property above Topanga Canyon in L.A. He and his wife, Barbara, along with another married couple, John and Judith Bullaro, began there the experimental sexual and living role that eventually embraced thousands of couples, many of them average, middle-class married people.

One of the purposes, if not the main purpose, of Williamson's experiment was to eliminate jealousy between the sexes. He was a student of Wilhelm Reich, one of whose theories was that society advances marriage as an institution that protects women but deprives them of their freedom. Williamson had an almost revolutionary attitude toward government, feeling that women were especially held back by generations of conditioning to be submissive to men and to accept a sexual double standard.

So Sandstone became a Reichian experiment, and within their private domain, women could be the sexual aggressors, women could have sex with anybody they wanted to. Nobody would put them down. Women could become as free as men. They didn't have to worry about sexual fidelity, or jealousy, or possessiveness. Williamson felt that if women could get over their sexual inhibitions and not seek their sense of selfworth through men, or what they perceived men's opinions of them to be, then women would be more influential in the society at large. And he saw that as a way of diminishing the establishment as he believed it was structured in the Sixties to produce warlike, aggressive and hypocritical decisions. Williamson believed that if women had more political power, we would not have had Vietnam.

Playboy: But your portrayal of him in the book is that of a man with considerable sexual power over women, a sort of Svengalilike character. A lot of women are going to say those are beautiful theories, obviously true, but designed as a clever rationale for him to be able to have sex with as many women as he wants. How do you react to that?

Talese: No doubt, some critics are going to believe that Williamson was creating a community in which he would thrive as the great sexual guru, the great resident rooster having the pick of all those adoring hens, and he would have a rollicking good time embellishing his hedonism with a lot of lofty slogans and ideals. But that is not true. Women were equal at Sandstone. I can testify to that. They were equal as I never saw women equal anywhere else in the U.S. On that little 15-acre plot of sexual freedom up there on the mountain, women had an equality not to be rivaled anywhere else in the country that I know of, even to this day. Williamson practiced what he preached. He and Barbara are still married and taking their lifestyle to other parts of the country. And I can tell you that there is no woman in America who has become more liberated from being possessed, inhibited, the target of jealousy or inequality of the sexes than Barbara Williamson.

Playboy: When did you first go to Sandstone?

Talese: It was 1971. Right away, what I noticed about groups of nude people was that they were very tranquil. Sitting on sofas, just talking, they were so tranquil that you would think they were stoned, but it has nothing to do with drugs. Drugs were prohibited at Sandstone. But, as I later discovered myself, being around people without your clothing mellows you out, for some reason. You become at peace with other people, in ways that I, at least, had never felt in gatherings of people with their clothes on.

Playboy: If Sandstone was so idyllic, why did the Williamsons sell it and leave in 1972?

Talese: Williamson thought he'd done everything he was going to do in L.A. He was restless with the real-estate boom that was moving into his previously secluded area. It was less private. And for four years, he had been the center of a very active sexual circle of friends. As what he called a change person, someone who used himself as an instrument of change in the lives of other people, he became so involved with so many others' personal lives that, as one of his colleagues put it, he almost overdosed on other people. He reached the point of saturation. He needed a change of venue. But he succeeded in bringing about the change he wanted far beyond even his own expectations, and beyond even the ambitions of so many people who make their living in any kind of change business, such as marriage therapy or psychiatry.

Playboy: What was it he succeeded in doing?

Talese: There are many, many people in this country whose sexual attitudes have been influenced by Sandstone. Alex Comfort is a good example. He had not yet written The Joy of Sex when he went to Sandstone. In More Joy, he writes a whole chapter about Sandstone, in which he gives it credit for having some influence on him. I don't believe he would credit Sandstone for his own ability to discover what is relevant, but there was no place where Comfort was going to have the opportunity to observe firsthand what he later wrote about so well. Sandstone allowed him to observe sexuality, and, as Comfort himself says in his book, there are very few places where we can observe sexuality. People are private about sexuality. Two people in a bedroom with the blinds down. That's sexuality, as we tend to know it. But at Sandstone, sexuality was openly practiced. There was a ballroom in the main house, something like a country club, with wall-to-wall carpeting, dim lighting, music and lots of mattresses. On party nights, you could find dozens of people in the act of making love in various ways, and in various numbers. Sometimes group sex, sometimes couples, sometimes threesomes, whatever, and I know, having been there many times--sometimes in the company of Alex Comfort--that you could see there human nature in ways you never could see it anywhere else. It was incomparable.

Playboy: For example?

Talese: Just take the most orthodox act of sex: the missionary position. Very few people in the U. S., as I speak to you now, even among this Playboy audience of 20,000,000, have ever seen another couple make love. How many Playboy readers have ever seen that? I'll bet hardly any. Movies, yes, but not in real life. At Sandstone, everybody had seen it. And two people making love, that's an extraordinary thing to see.

Playboy: What did the experience do for you?

Talese: It enlightens you in several ways. First, you see that there isn't any one way to make love. You see that there is such variety, first of all to the human body. You see how different men perform. I don't mean just watching a bunch of lancers pumping away in an endless display of energy, but how men go about pleasing women. Sometimes you would see men who weren't muscular, or maybe not handsome, but who had really nicely developed abilities to satisfy women. At Sandstone, I and a lot of other men were seeing other men's erections for the first time. Most men are almost totally unaware of other men's sexuality. Very few men ever see an erection on another man. We spend time in locker rooms, but we do not see erections, what men look like when they're sexually aroused. I don't mean just sixes of penises. I mean how much we really have in common. I think men could do a lot to ease whatever sexual anxieties they have about their adequacy or performance by experiencing something like Sandstone.

Playboy: Why?

Talese: The first time, usually, for a man is disastrous. Before you go, you will be very excited about the idea of going to a so-called orgy. As you drive up the hill with your ladyfriend, you have marvelous fantasies about what it's going to be; but once you get there, you have to confront not your fantasy but the unusual presence of all those people who, you know in your heart, have nothing better to do than to watch you. You discover that you have difficulty maintaining an erection as a newcomer to this situation. The reason? That's open to as much or as many interpretations as you can conjure up. It's not the obvious reason, that you're afraid of not being well enough endowed. It's just a very awkward situation for men. You're under a lot of performance pressure, even though probably very few people in the room are aware of you, fewer still are looking and hardly anyone cares what you're doing. But you care! So, as sure as anything, you lose your erection. That is something almost every man goes through on his initial introduction to group sex. Then you come to realize it's a normal reaction, then you realize that you don't have to perform. That's a wonderfully liberating lesson in itself.

Playboy: How did the nudity affect the way you approached women?

Talese: It's a visual aphrodisiac. You're not just making eye contact: you're seeing a whole body, a whole female form. There are practicing nudists who would want you to believe that there is nothing sexual about nudity, that it is just a very healthy state, a natural state, and you don't see people in a sexual way, as you might if you saw them dressed or in a bikini. I don't believe that's true. You do see people who are nude as sexual creatures. What I found fascinating was that some people with their clothes off, particularly women, are much more attractive than with their clothes on. I'm talking about the average woman, not just the beautiful one. The naked female form is rarely unattractive when nude. There's something that's always exciting about it, and I'm not speaking here with a genital orientation. There's just something very lovely, very sensuous, very exciting about women in the nude.

Playboy: What struck you about seeing women not just in the nude but having sex?

Talese: When you watch women make love to men, you realize how much sexual energy some women have. They are capable of exhausting most men, and I mean the average woman, not some Linda Lovelace of Georgina Spelvin. And you see how free women are, how aggressive they can be, the incredible variety of ways women can perform oral sex. A place like Sandstone demonstrated beyond any debate that women are much more open to expression. Men are much more rigid and hesitant about doing anything that would question their masculinity. Almost all the threesomes would be two women and one man. Even men who are bisexual are much more inhibited in a group setting than women. Women are much freer.

Playboy: In your opinion, why is that?

Talese: Men are simply afraid to manifest any sign or emotion or behavior that might suggest a touch of homosexuality in their nature. Women are less afraid of being thought of as homosexual. I mean, they are not rigidly reared to prove that they are women. A little girl just grows up and automatically becomes a woman. A little boy grows up and does not automatically become a man. He has to prove it constantly, that he is worthy of being called a man, and one of the things that might cast doubt on that is if you seem to be physically fond of men. The mere act of touching another man in a gentle, caring way, stroking his back or gripping his arm--and certainly kissing, even on the cheek--could be a sign of homosexuality, and men dread that. They will be repelled by such acts and will back away from any drive to demonstrate that.

Playboy: What was your first experience with group sex like?

Talese: I was just like other men, very inhibited at first and much slower to respond than the woman I was with that night. She was a close friend who went with me to Sandstone. It was still new to both of us, but we met this other couple who were experienced members. They were married and lived nearby and they were very friendly. They approached us in a very genteel way and I was as attracted to his wife as he was to my friend. Before my friend or I knew what was happening, this man was seducing my friend--softly stroking her as we chatted--in the subtlest possible way. They invited us to go with them to a private bedroom in the main house and we went. Looking back, it sounds ridiculous and it's going to come of as ridiculous, but I thought we were only going off to talk some more. It was happening so fast I didn't even know it was happening until it did. This was a masterful couple. Very quickly, the four of us were on this bed and my friend was making love to him. That was a new experience! I mean, seeing another man make love to her.

I found it difficult to try to make love to his wife. I'm a person who likes to talk, to know something about the person. The love act is sun and physical, but I also like to accompany it with conversation, and I couldn't talk to her, because here was ibis guy I'd met only two hours before making love to my friend on this bouncing bed, and there I was with this very attractive woman I barely knew, trying to think of something to say and knowing that no matter what I said, it was ridiculous on that bouncing bed. I felt very awkward. I was interested in watching my friend make love to this guy, but that wasn't enough for me. I was sexually frustrated in that situation. I wanted to have a connection with this person, this other woman, but I could not make a connection with her. I just couldn't connect. There, On that bouncing bed. I finally said to her. "Let's get out of here. Let's go someplace else." When we were alone. I was able to have sex with her. It was most enjoyable. Then we went back and rejoined that man and my friend. And we all kind of embraced. It was very natural. What was interesting was that after the sex was over, we were very free. The anxiety, the curiosity, the pentup energy, whatever you want to say, had been released. It was discharged. Good riddance to it. And now, we were human beings together, without the barriers that so often sexual denial creates.

Once you get the sex over with, when you get past all the inhibitions, past all the Biblical preaching that goes back to the dark ages of our minds, then you're human and open and cheerful and free. You're young again, and innocent, and it's mirthful. And that night was wonderful. The four of us became a unit. Not just a sexual unit. We were more than that. We were human, divided by four. We were one. It was a good time. Wonderful. In all my travels as a writer, just a gazeteer from one end of the country to the other, nothing like that had ever happened to me before. Nor had I ever had that feeling before about a new friendship with a man. For the first time in my life, I had developed a friendship with a man through sex. And after that night, the four of us had sex several times and it was more relaxed, filled with laughter. It was a very gratifying experience.

Playboy: Elaborate a bit on what you mean by a friendship with another man.

Talese: For the first time in my life, a friendship was characterized by my touching another man. As I said, we men are taught to back away from any physical sign of male affection. Except in such rare centers of experience as Sandstone, where it was not only possible, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to touch a man through a sexual experience.

Playboy: Are you saying that you had a homosexual experience?

Talese: No, I'm not homosexual. I'm not bisexual. I have never had a sexual experience with a man. I'm merely suggesting that being as free and gentle with a man as I have been on occasions might be interpreted by other men who are fearful of being regarded as homosexuals, or who fear the fact of homosexuality, who want to eradicate it from the earth, who want to abolish it as a form of pleasure, that sort of man might have interpreted what I was doing as bordering on homosexuality. I wouldn't agree with that.

Playboy: But given your own male attitudes when you started, it must have forced you through some changes in your mind.

Talese: If it should have, it didn't. It was natural. I mean, the aftereffect--I didn't wake up the next day thinking. Oh, what did I do? What will he think of me? Not at all. Because I saw those people all the time. I felt a kinship with those men. And it was through women! Without the women, we never would have had the opportunity to feel it. But the next night you might be in some restaurant, having dinner with those same people. You have carried the friendship outside the sexual setting, and those friendships do extend into your larger social life that you and those people happen to share. I have now, all over this country, as a result of such experiences, a kind of relationship with many men, and women, too, that this society doesn't give us much opportunity to develop. It's a very nice feeling.

Playboy: What about your old male friends who haven't been willing to go through this kind of experimentation with you?

Talese: I have different categories of friends. My best friends are writers. They're Nicholas Pileggi, David Halberstam, A. E. Hotchner, Michael Arlen. I respect all of them. I like their work. I enjoy being with them. We go to Elaine's. P. J. Clarke's, we go to the ball game. We cheer one another on when our books are published and lament the terrible or stupid reviews we get. But not one of them has shared with me that kind of sexual experience I found so gratifying in California.

Playboy: Why do you think you were the one to seek out those experiences? Most men haven't felt compelled to go through what you went through.

Talese: Would my repressed background make me a likely candidate for what I did? More so than a person who was less repressed growing up?

Playboy: Perhaps.

Talese: Would it? All those years growing up? My yearning? No touching? Well, then I'm not going to argue with that. I can only attest to the fact that I found it liberating. I found it long overdue. I wish I had discovered it when I was younger. I wish I hadn't had to be 39. I wish I had been 29. But when I was 29, I still had a long way to go in overcoming my repressed childhood. Oh, was I repressed.

Playboy: Tell us about it.

Talese: The overly controlled family background is what I came from. Usually, you have either a strong father or a strong mother. I had both. I always knew where the direction was, because they were both pointing it out to me, and there were not a lot of side routes there. I was an altar boy. scared to death of those nuns and priests, growing up on the straight, rigid Catholic family road, and I followed that. All through parochial and high school, in this small town of Ocean City. New Jersey, my life seemed very grim. There weren't any options. Yet, within my mind, I had rich fantasies.

Playboy: What were they?

Talese: Through high school, Esther Williams was the star in my sex life. My fantasies of her kept me going on many dreary Saturday afternoons at the movies. She was the most lascivious creature I could imagine. She was wet all the time. She was always doing that wonderful backstroke and then getting out of the pool, dripping. I mean, if anyone ever had ravenous thoughts, it was what I had in mind for Esther Williams. It was so bad that I grew up thinking chlorine was an erotic scent. I constantly imagined being with Esther Williams in some chlorine-scented cabana.

But in real life, all I had was a little cheerleader I found so desirable and totally unapproachable. I just didn't think of myself as a serious prospect for an erotic experience. To paraphrase Mr. Marlon Brando, I was not a contender. I didn't, through high school, have any sexual experience. And I didn't have any fun any other way. I feel a very real sympathy for people who are not doing well, because so much of my early life was spent not doing well at all. I was not a good student. I was not a good athlete.

They were joyless years. If you grow up in a tiny resort town, which caters to seashore summertime activity, the nine months of the year that are not summer are really depressing. Everyone who came during the summer and had a good time is gone. Labor Day would arrive and the awnings in front of the summer houses came down, and the cars left and the beaches were closed up and the lifeguards went away and the rowboats were stored under the boardwalk with the canvas put on top of them. The merry-go-round stopped whirling and the boardwalk games were closed, their steel shutters up for the winter. That was the sign of the death of a season for me. It was also the beginning of school, which was another sign of gloom. From September through June, it was the dark ages for me in that town. Even now, at the age of 47, when the autumn comes, I get depressed and I remain depressed from practically Labor Day until June 22nd. I have been that way since I was about six. I didn't have any fun when I was growing up. I didn't even masturbate until I was 20.

Playboy: Why not?

Talese: I'm sure that many people didn't masturbate until maybe later than that. We just reach different stages of development at different times. There are people who fulfill themselves professionally at 25 and it's all downhill after that. There are people who sort of stop living at 35. They stop exploring. Their best times were when they were young. In my case, the best times were not when I was young. My best times are now. But you're asking me why. I don't know.

Still, with all I'm telling you that sounds grim and indicative of a man who knew little else but failure, there is one thing I didn't fail at. I was good at one thing. I could do something with a typewriter. I wrote for the school paper. I started interviewing people when I was 14. I'd wander around town and wonder about people. Is there a story here? Is there a story there? I was 15 when I got my first story published in a local newspaper.

I was a failure at everything else except reporting. Whatever self-esteem I had came from that. But with all the modesty and self-effacement that's part of me--and all my self-doubt and recognition that self-doubt is good, to run scared is better, don't assume anything is going to work out, never count on anything unless it has already happened--there is also a part of my nature that is very vain and egotistical. I have a strong ego. Lord knows why. In my work, I am very egotistical. If my name is on something, it had better be good. I care a lot about my name on something. Because I want my standards of writing met, and it is hard to meet my standards. Maybe it's because seeing my name in print on what I had written was the only source of self-respect I had to cling to for so long.

When I was elevated to The New York Times's writing staff in 1955 and started to get my name in print regularly, sometimes the copy readers would change what I wrote. They changed what everybody wrote. But if they did it to me, I wanted my name off the story. You couldn't stand there and read over their shoulders to see if they were changing your lead, or your sentences, so I'd wait out on the street with Nan, whom I was dating then, until the first edition hit the newsstands about 10:15 at night. Then, if they'd changed anything, I'd call the head of the copy desk from a pay phone and say, "You changed my story, take my name off it." They'd get terribly angry, because they didn't want to go to all the trouble of resetting type.

Playboy: They must have thought you were a prima donna.

Talese: I was a prima donna! No question about it. Am a prima donna.

Playboy: Your years as a New York Times reporter remind us of the dictum of that newspaper's editor Abe Rosenthal. Since you obviously slept with some of the sources for Thy Neighbor's Wife, aren't you contradicting his statement that reporters who cover the circus shouldn't sleep with the elephants?

Talese: [Laughs] That's funny. But Abe's never written about the sex lives of the elephants.

Playboy: Are you sure that, having slept with your sources, your objectivity about them wasn't shaken?

Talese:What objectivity? It wasn't shaken because this is not a very objective book.

Playboy: But were you able to write about your sources truthfully?

Talese: Yes. Absolutely. After you've read the book, you certainly won't think I was compromised when you consider how I wrote about Judith Bullaro and Barbara Williamson.

Playboy: How did you manage to get the characters in the book who weren't public figures to sign releases?

Talese: That's most of the characters. You do not get a release right away. First you have to spend time building up trust with the people. Over the years I devoted to this book, much of the time was spent building relationships that people knew were not going to be violated and reassuring people of what I knew to be true: that the sex would be precisely described, but never in an exploitative way. From the beginning, there was a lot of handholding on my part. These people were really taking a chance. But they had read my earlier work and they knew from my record as a writer of books that I was not an exploitative writer. My reputation was good.

Playboy: How much control did those people have over what was published?

Talese: None. I had a researcher who tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim many of the interviews dealing with the most sensitive material, and I sent a copy of those transcripts to the people to amend or amplify. And if there was something, on reconsideration, they wanted to X out, they were welcome to do that, too. But they did not know how I would end up using the material. Those people trusted me. That means I had to respect and honor that trust. I did not want to take advantage of people by getting them to talk at times when they were expansive and then becoming inflexible with them later on, even if their lives had changed and I could bring great harm to them by publishing the stories they told me.

Playboy: How did you deal with the potential conflicts when someone who had confided in you might feel betrayed?

Talese: One good example is John Bullaro, who's certainly one of the main characters in the book. I wrote about the period of his life when he was married. But by the time I finished the book, he and his wife, Judith, were divorced. I had one very long scene in the book, which I think is one of the most sexual scenes I will ever write in my life. Oh, is that scene visual! It involves what it was like for Bullaro to see for the first time his wife make love to another man. It took place in a cabin at Big Bear Lake in California. It was a time when Bullaro was being honest about his infidelities with Barbara Williamson. Her husband, John, had befriended both Bullaro and his wife. They became a friendly foursome. Bullaro's wife had not had sex with Williamson, but her attraction to him was becoming more intense.

Then the four of them drove off together to spend a weekend at the lake. It was not preordained that they were going to have a mate-swapping situation, and certainly Bullaro had not faced his true feelings about his wife's becoming adulterous, even though he already was. But the reader almost knows that it's possible for her to do it even before we see them arrive at the cabin.

Later on in the evening, after dinner, after wine, the four of them are lounging around, the fire is burning, they're reminiscing, the four of them feeling very close as friends. Bullaro is talking about his early life in Chicago and he starts to describe a traumatic situation he lived through, and it upsets him and he cries. He excuses himself to go into his bedroom to be alone for a while. Barbara Williamson joins him, and she closes the door and proceeds to make love to him, even though his wife is in the other room with John. Then Bullaro falls asleep, and when he wakes up, he hears sounds coming from beyond the closed door in the living room. He describes how he walks out into the darkened room, the fire still going in the fireplace, there's this orange glow from the fireplace, and he sees this couple lying on the floor. The man is on top of the woman. The bodies are silhouetted and he can see them kind of glowing from the light of the fire. And Bullaro is fascinated. He has never seen two figures together sexually. Two nude figures. It's beautiful to him to behold.

At first, he is fascinated by the sight, excited. Then it occurs to him that the thighs of this woman wrapped around this man, these thighs and legs that are extended in the air, and the toes that are pointed toward the ceiling, and the pelvic motion of this woman, and the blonde hair, and the carriage and the buttocks being pressed back by this man making love to her are all familiar, and this man's penis is reflected in the light of the fire. He can see it, penetrating her like a red rivet. And suddenly, it hits him, rather remarkably in that it was belated, that his wife is in front of him, having sex with this other man. Suddenly, he is jolted to the realism of the moment and he just collapses. It was one of the worst moments of his life.

I described that experience in detail, and what it was like for Bullaro. Well, that was very much a scene that I did not want to remove from the book. I knew I had the facts right. I had four witnesses. I got that story from each of those four people. He'd already signed a release. There was nothing he could do if I went ahead and printed it without his permission. But I just had to read it to him. And I read that whole story over the telephone to John Bullaro. Just voluntarily did it.

Playboy: Why?

Talese: There were no precedents for what I was doing. No book in nonfiction had ever described sex as explicitly as this, and I felt that there was a chance that the people I interviewed at great length, spent weeks or months with over five, six, even eight years, might not have realized that I was going to put into the book things they'd told me about themselves. They might have felt that since such things had never appeared in non-fiction books before, they would not appear in a nonfiction book now. I wanted to make sure that they would not feel a sense of betrayal on my part toward them. There were some scenes, like that Bullaro scene, that were so intimate that I felt I owed the people--not that they expected it--at least a complete understanding of how I dealt with those sexual scenes in the book. Even though I took notes in front of them and in many cases had a researcher along with a tape recorder, it could have been that those people spoke so freely to me because they had never before read nonfiction that dealt with sex as intimately as I did.

Playboy: What would you have done if Bullaro had given you solid reasons why the publication of that scene now would harm his life and begged you not to publish it, even though he had long ago signed a release?

Talese: [Pause] I don't know. It didn't happen, I'm glad to say. But I don't know. He had read the transcripts of many of our interviews, so the material in the scene did not come as a complete surprise.

Playboy: How did he react when he heard the story?

Talese: First, he was impressed with the writing, which is the best thing he could have said to me. And he was moved by it. And it evoked memories of that disastrous moment. He felt again what he had felt then. What he told me was that it took him way back to emotions that he had all but forgotten and made him recognize the man he had been, the pangs of insecurity and jealousy he had felt. He was totally demeaned by the experience at the time, seeing his wife make love to another man. That's an experience very men have ever had to live through or been privy to. Nor would most men want to be, though both of the Bullaros later said the experience opened them up to communicating with each other and with other people.

Playboy: Let's return to some of the conclusions you draw in your book. What did your years of research tell you about women's sexuality and whether or not they have reacted in the same way as men to changing mores?

Talese: If women were more sexually aggressive, I'd like that more. I think women need to get more emotionally involved than men do to have sex. If fewer women were offended by men wanting to go to bed with them--on the contrary, if more women wanted to go to bed with men just for their own pleasure--I think it would be healthier for society.

Playboy: Claiming that women need more emotional involvement than men for recreational sex would be labeled by some a male-chauvinist statement.

Talese: I stand by that statement. If anyone challenges that fact--I'm presenting it as a fact, on the basis of the research I've done in the past eight years--that men are much more capable of recreational sex, the one-night stand, are much more eager for it, crave it more than women, if any woman or man wanted to challenge that, I would feel very comfortable with my position.

Playboy: Why do you claim women are less capable of enjoying casual sex?

Talese: Because the average woman does not want sex as a man does, on an impersonal level. Most women in America in 1980 are not interested, as men are, in one-night stands or even casual sex. I'm not saying that many women don't indulge in casual sex, I'm just talking about percentages, about numbers. On any given night, in any given city in America, there are going to be many more men who are interested in, craving, casual sex than there are women. So the percentages are against men. And the result of this uneven ratio between supply and demand is that in any city, at any time, you will find men looking and women looking away. And late at night, after dinner, you will find men alone, in cocktail lounges, on the streets, searching for the companionship of women and not finding it. And that's why you will find large numbers of men all over America going to prostitutes and massage parlors and peep shows and X-rated movies. And relying on the visual stimulation they get from men's magazines, masturbating to those pictures in hotels and motels at night, in lieu of the company of a woman. That goes on. That's the national pastime in this country, at least for the lonely man: masturbation. It is the biggest sport in town. Bigger than pro football. And it is a manifestation of male frustration. It is a sign of loneliness. Especially, it is a sign of loneliness of the man on the road. This is a country, of course, of men on the road, and there are not enough women who are going to make themselves available to have sex with those men. Women are just more personal about sex than men are.

Playboy: Is it also because men don't feel comfortable approaching strange women?

Talese: That's right. Most men probably feel awkward about having to be the pursuer. There are many men, I know, who would welcome women who are aggressors. I'm certainly one of those who would welcome aggressive women. It's a rare experience.

Playboy: Do you find it rare even in the world you've been traveling in the past eight years?

Talese: Yes. In that one sense, 1980 is not so different from 1950. It's still the men who ask and the women who say yes or no. It is still the men who risk rejection when trying to establish some connection with a woman. From the time he's an adolescent, a man gets accustomed to having to get up the nerve to ask, which is not always easy to do. Men grow up with a great familiarity with rejection. Women do not have that same experience.

Playboy: Do you believe that a woman's reluctance to have casual, impersonal sex is more the result of conditioning than of genetic differences?

Talese: I don't believe it's all conditioning. Conditioning, that's a Seventies word. I hope it fades in the Eighties. There is a difference about the way women regard sexuality and the way men do. Women are invaded sexually, and that will never change. A woman is literally invaded by a penis, and if the man is a stranger, an alien body, it won't be as pleasurable an act of intercourse for her. It's like the body itself; it rejects anything that is foreign. Whereas a man has a sense of detachment from his penis. He walks around with a stranger in his pants. He frequently names it. Lady Chatterley and her lover named his penis John Thomas. Or it's Rodney. Or Old Buford. I've heard all kinds of names.

The main problem that men have today, in 1980, as they did long before I was born in 1932, is that they still have a difficult time finding women to have sex with. If women were freer sexually and more interested in just enjoying sex, and used men as instruments for their pleasure, I think men would like that role and would not be, as some people tell us they'd be, offended by it or intimidated by it or lose their erections because of it. We are told by many that when a woman becomes aggressive, a man runs. I'm sure there are men who will. But I'm sure there are a lot of men who hate to always have to be the aggressor. Men feel awkward. But today we get a picture of women resenting men coming on to them, yet men coming on to them anyway, and it's become a kind of political issue. In that sense, women are not very different than women were 100 years ago.

Playboy: And yet you've written a book that is, at least in part, about women who are more aggressive----

Talese: It's mostly about women who are in love, except for the masseuses, which was mercenary sex----

Playboy: All the women at Sandstone were in love?

Talese: It was recreational sex at Sandstone. You're quite right about that. Recreational sex was one of the principles there.

Playboy: Then would you say those women had to overcome their biology?

Talese: Lenny Bruce had a line: "Does she, does she, does she, does she?" He was expressing the idea that men are there to beg and women are there to say no, and that women are using their sexual gifts, bestowing them on the winner, the guy who behaves most properly.

Playboy: Exactly, But you've written a book about some women who don't do that. The question still is: Do you really believe the differences are innate?

Talese: Do you mean is it innate of men to want to have sex and of women to say no?

Playboy: Yes. What do you believe in your heart of hearts?

Talese: I believe that women, generally speaking--with the exception of the 5000 of them who are going to send letters saying this is wrong--are quite different from men, in that they are more restrictive, more restrained, less interested in sex for the sake of sex. I am not quoting Erica Jong as one of the great thinkers of our time, but I agree with her when she said that sex is in the mind--especially for women.

Playboy: You're still not addressing the question. Are you saying women are born with some kind of will-you-respect-me genes? Or is it societal conditioning?

Talese: I think the difference is innate. It is in women's very nature. Sex researchers would support me statistically when I say that women are not as orgasmic, at least when they're with men. Coupled with men, women frequently do not have orgasms. Men nearly always have orgasms, unless there's some dysfunction. I love that Seventies word, dysfunction. Whoever invented dysfunction? Women, in order to enjoy sex, have to have feelings for the man.

Playboy: Why do you believe that's the case?

Talese: One reason is justifiable: the fear factor. Women are fearful of strange men. Women are still--and justifiably, I should add--concerned for their own welfare when in the presence of a strange man. They can never know if they might become among the unlucky few who end up like the heroine of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Secondly, impersonal sex is not as physically pleasurable to women as it is to men. Women are not so easily orgasmic with men as men are with women.

I also think women are not as visual about sex as men are. They have to have more attraction than just liking the looks of a man. Men can look across the lobby of a hotel, or the beach, or the park, or a bar, any public place, and find themselves visually attracted to a woman. Just as men are visually attracted to photographs of women. The magazine racks of America, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, are filled with men's magazines featuring naked women, and men are visually aroused by those photographs of strange women. But women, generally speaking, are not attracted to men visually to the point of being sexually aroused. A woman is not going to be sexually aroused to the point of masturbation by pictures of strange men without clothes on. In my interviews with numerous women about their masturbatory fantasies, I rarely heard a woman say she'd ever masturbated to a photograph of a nude man, no matter how attractive he was. It is just not in the nature of women.

Playboy: What did the women you spoke with have as fantasies?

Talese: They tended to masturbate to vaguely defined images or a husband or lover or someone they felt close to. It might be some very erotic situation in which they were being pursued, or were in an aggressive role, but they hardly ever had in mind any specific stranger. They would not, as I said, be looking at a picture of a man they did not know personally.

Playboy: Given all you've just said about your views of the differing natures of men and women, couldn't women argue that the sexual revolution was about nothing more than a bunch of guys, such as Williamson at Sandstone, figuring out good ways to get laid a lot?

Talese: It's a fair comment that Williamson used Sandstone as a way to get laid. But we all are doing that right now, in our own ways. Men set up incredibly elaborate structures to get themselves laid. Now, what does it say about men? It suggests we can't get as much as we need. We can't get enough variety! It's true, isn't it? Why don't we just settle down and stay happily married and be faithful to our wives who are, after all, probably better lovers to us than the women we pick up?

Playboy: Why don't we?

Talese: It's in the nature of man. It's in the nature of the beast. It points to the fact that we need a lot of women. We need these fixes. Sex fixes. We're junkies.

Playboy: Some men aren't. Some men learn to control their lust.

Talese: Yes, some men don't have the drive. Some men truly don't need women. They just don't have that particular kind of energy directed that particular way. I don't believe, however, that men who deny themselves women, because they consider sex either sinful or a waste of time, use that energy more constructively than lustier men. I think what they're doing is practicing a philosophy of denial that restricts people and controls them. Catholic priests, by their example of denial, are supposed to keep in line the flock who might otherwise do differently; the flock lives in fear of falling out of grace into a state of guilt by sexual sinning. As you can probably tell, I drifted away from the Church a long time ago.

Playboy: And yet some readers may feel that the influence of those Irish nuns is still with you, that there is a sort of "wages of sin" tone in which the characters are ultimately punished for their transgressions. How do you react to that?

Talese: It is not a joy-of-sex book, that is true. It is a series of complex stories about complex characters and the baffling, troubling, exciting, sometimes painful role of sex in their lives. It is not a simple book. You take Sophie's Choice, which is the great novel of last year. What is it about? You talk to six critics and you'll get six versions. It's a novel. It's about many things. It's an artistic achievement. My book is an artistic achievement in nonfiction. That's what it is to me.

Playboy: But would you agree that there's a grimness about the ends some of your characters come to?

Talese: No. I think there are people in the book who are grim, as there are people in novels who are grim. I write about some men, like Anthony Comstock, who wanted to eradicate any expression that is flagrantly physical. But there are also people in the book who enjoy life, who, to use a Playboy expression, have a lust for life. Hefner is one of those. Sally Binford, one of the women I describe at Sandstone, is a very exciting and fulfilled individual. John Williamson is such a man. As I said before, his wife is probably one of the most liberated women in the United States.

Playboy: We were thinking of someone like the Williamsons' friend John Bullaro, who seems to have paid a price for his sexual experimentation. When his story starts, he is a successful young businessman, and when we leave him, he is broke, he doesn't have a job, he doesn't have his wife--

Talese: And he's happy! For the first time in his life, he's happy. I saw him about a month and a half ago. He's in L.A. He lives with a lovely lady. They live a wonderfully free life, sexually and otherwise. He's become an expert in outdoor survival--which he began learning as a result of his friendships at Sandstone. He has gone from selling protection against fear, which is what the insurance business is about, to teaching risk, and how to be at peace with, risk, and how to survive risk. He teaches survival courses. I'm sure he doesn't even buy insurance anymore.

Playboy: Yet at the end of his story, you describe him as being "alone, jobless, without a sense of hope." Isn't the reader going to be left with the feeling that this man lost everything because of his sexual explorations?

Talese: No, I don't believe I would interpret it that way. He gambled and lost what? He lost the capacity to lie and to fear he was going to lose his job because his superiors might discover he was having an extramarital affair with Barbara, who sold insurance for the same company. He starts off as a man living a sexual lie, afraid that if he is caught, his job is in jeopardy. In a way, the job, which was his badge of respectability then, was his yoke. Years later, he has lost that job, but he is glad he has.

Playboy: You say that he's a happy man now, leading a much freer life as a result of his experiments in sexual openness, so why did you end his story at a period of his life when he was "without a sense of hope"?

Talese: I don't know if I had him ending without a sense of hope. There is more about him in the last chapter that shows that his marriage became an open marriage.

Playboy: But then it dissolves. We're being persistent because this is an important point. You are trying to write a book that makes people feel that sexual openness and honesty is a good thing, yet one of the main characters starts out living conventionally, then experiments with more openness, and when his story concludes, he is alone and without a sense of hope. Why?

Talese: That's reading it wrong. That's focusing on something that I don't think is at all the picture of the man Bullaro in the book. Bullaro discovered a different life he was able to adapt to. You begin with him as a straight insurance salesman, a worried man. By the end, he has gone through traumatic experiences, no question about that. And his marriage did break up. But in breaking up that marriage, he was a freer man, not a happier man, necessarily, but a more fulfilled man, a less worried man.

Playboy: "Without a sense of hope"?

Talese: I don't believe that's right.

Playboy: We're quoting from the manuscript.

Talese: Well, look, you can quote one line out of a book and say "Without a sense of hope," and that does not say a damned thing to me about that character. I don't think that character comes off without a sense of hope. And I know for a fact that he has been very revived by his new experiences. I saw it myself.

Playboy: OK. When Bullaro looks back on that tumultuous period of his life you wrote about, when he has changed from the clandestinely adulterous married businessman to the man on the fringes of sexual experimentation who lost everything he had before, how does he feel about it?

Talese: When he reads what I wrote, he recognizes that person he was at the beginning, and he has great sympathy and empathy for that character he was, but he's glad he's no longer that person. There are parts of that person, of course, still with him today, but he thinks he's taken the best of the character I wrote about--from the Sixties and early Seventies--with him into the Eighties. And those parts of him that were exciting to him back then, but undeveloped, he has explored and developed--his willingness to take risk, to move outside conventional circumstances, to not need the security of a large corporation.

Bullaro is about 47 now, my age, and when I picked up his story in the mid-Sixties, when he was in his early 30s, he was a corporation man out of the Eisenhower years. His goal then was to be a major figure in the insurance business, and he was on his way to achieving it. He was willing to live within the limitations of that life for the greater reward of being a corporate property. Now he doesn't want any of that. There's nothing less appealing to him than the idea of being an anonymous gray-suited executive with some big corporation. I think Bullaro is going to touch a lot of men. He was a Fifties man who put himself through some dramatic changes and who feels at the beginning of the Eighties that time hasn't left him behind.

Playboy: You mentioned Hefner as an example of a sexual pioneer who is a happy man. From your own recent conversations with him, however, you know he's not particularly happy with the portrait you drew of him. Do you feel you might have focused too much on Hefner's private sex life and not enough on his role in the sexual revolution?

Talese: Hefner is one of the most influential men in the United States in the mid-20th Century, no question about it, and the book does credit to his contribution, through his uniqueness as an editor and his courage as an individual. The achievements of Playboy as an institution in influencing the postwar generation are well noted. In his reaction to the excerpts about him that appeared in Esquire, he said there was too much emphasis on his private life, his indefatigable quest for sexual adventures with new young women. But the fact is that he does have an extraordinary amount of energy for those sorts of new experiences. He is one of the few multimillionaires in the country who really have fun. I can tell you, he does have fun in his real life. And that's part of him that I think I captured in the book, Hugh Hefner having fun. It has been suggested by other writers that his fun-loving image was just a creation of Playboy's Publicity Department, that he is really a lonely man. In some magazine articles, he was portrayed as a man who didn't even like women. In a few cases, it was even suggested he was homosexual. Or that he was a dispassionate or disenchanted man. I mean, so many people want to believe he has not had a good time. But he has, and I portrayed that.

Playboy: But do you think you underestimated the importance of The Playboy Philosophy, which he wrote in the early Sixties and which is barely noted in the book?

Talese: Again, I don't agree. I'm one of the few people who read that Philosophy three times. I know that Philosophy. So much of what he wrote in that important series did find its way into the book, but the book does not always quote The Playboy Philosophy, because some of Hefner's attitudes and research were similar to my own. We both researched ecclesiastical law. We both dealt with America in the 17th and 18th centuries, from the founding of the Puritan republic. I was very cognizant of his Philosophy. I don't think I ignored it. But realize that this is not a book about Hefner and Playboy. This book deals with the history of the country sexually since the 1700s.

Look: This is an unauthorized book. This is not a book that seeks the approval of the people I am writing about. There have been other unauthorized books about Hefner and Playboy--one by Thomas Weyr and one by Frank Brady, for instance. Hefner was critical of both of them. The writing I did about everyone in this book, Hefner included, was as honest as I could make it. I talked to everyone I could talk to, in Hefner's case, his mother and father, his former wife, Mildred, his children, many people who worked for Playboy during its first 25 years. And Hefner made himself accessible to me. He's a wonderful interview subject, never dodged tough questions, and the times I picked up information about him from other people, even when he was not as forthcoming as they were, he confirmed things for me. I've written about many powerful and famous people in the media, and some of them are the worst about allowing themselves to be interviewed, the way they expect other public figures to sit for it. But not Hefner. He preaches openness, and he practiced it for me. He preaches the First Amendment, and he practiced it here.

He does not agree with parts of the portrait I painted of him in the book. But I don't see why he should have to agree. Nor do I necessarily want him to agree. This book is my point of view. Hefner has a different point of view. When he writes his autobiography, that will be from his viewpoint, not mine.

Playboy: But how do you know for sure that your portrayal of him and the other characters in the book is accurate?

Talese: I'm a portrait painter and I paint my portraits with words. Any portrait painter relies on his own sense of color, his own perceptions, but if you believe in what you do, you believe in your essence of truth about that person you have portrayed. However, when the person reads about himself, when the great moment of unveiling takes place, with a Churchill or a President or whomever, it is frequently the case that he does not like the portrait. So the option is to break up the portrait, throw it out, not hang it on the wall.

As I said, Hefner is not going to agree with my assessment of him. I'm not going to agree with Playboy's assessment of me, through this interview. We are trying to get as close as we can to what we feel, to what we represent. And we hope we are going to be able to live with the portraits we attempt to paint. I know I can live with mine. I have been interviewing people for 34 years and I suggest to you that it is an indefinable art that can get me into the lives of other people and have them trust me with their lives, with their most private selves, and that, finally, they know I will not violate that trust. I'm not saying that I am always going to portray a picture that they are going to be comfortable looking at. But I add that after they have pondered that portrait, they come to terms with it, they accept it. They won't always like it, but they will accept it as true enough for them to say, "Yes, that is me, that is who I am, or who I was at the time Talese was writing about. He caught a part of my life." That has happened again and again. There are very few people I have written about who do not talk to me today. I have made very few enemies among those who have confided in me. And yet I've never been censored by them or failed to fully express what I felt about them.

Playboy: How is the reader to know that the portraits you have created of Hefner and the others from eyewitness accounts are factually accurate? Especially since different eyewitnesses will present different versions of the same story.

Talese: That's right. Yes.

Playboy: So aren't you faced with the problem of Rashomon? Do you ask four people to tell the same story they all took part in and get the truth? Or four different truths, with you left as the arbiter?

Talese: Just as a director will choose which camera angle best portrays emotion, you have a number of cameras going on at the same time, all focusing on the same scene but from different angles. There is no one way to look at any one individual.

Playboy: But the question is--

Talese: Who's right?

Playboy: Yes. Commenting and interpreting is one thing, but you're also asking them to be reporters of themselves. The question is, how does a reader of the book know these people are factually accurate reporters of themselves?

Talese: Your instincts as a reporter and the experience you have reporting tends to give you guidance about which sources are to be trusted and which are not.

Playboy: But let's take your big scene in which Bullaro is watching his wife make love to Williamson. What if the four witnesses to that night gave you four sets of facts? One said the fireplace was over here, the other said the fireplace was over there. One said the rug was red, another said it was blue and someone else said there was no rug. We're back to Rashomon. How do you know what the truth was?

Talese: I have a reputation that I think is very good. I wrote a book about The New York Times and, in that, I was writing about hundreds of reporters, editors, copy editors, journalists. I wrote the history of the Times going back more than 100 years, and I certainly dealt in detail with the contemporary history of the Times that all those journalists knew about. They had lived it. When that book was published, there were no complaints about the accuracy of what I wrote, even though I was writing about what all those hundreds of journalists were privy to themselves. I think that speaks for itself about my facts. In Thy Neighbor's Wife, there will naturally be differences of opinion about whether or not I made the right choice in believing one person's point of view as opposed to someone else's.

Playboy: Did you use any stories based on the account of only one person?

Talese: I'm glad you brought that up. The answer is no. If somebody told me that a certain event had happened, I had to be able to confirm it somewhere else or I wouldn't use the story. There's nothing in the book, sexual or otherwise, on which I am running the risk of its being called a falsehood or factually wrong. I'm not nervous about that. I am secure in this sense: I have written as truly as I can write what took place. There is nothing I have exaggerated, wittingly or unwittingly. I don't think that is necessary. I think that life is so fantastic that the challenge is to find out what happened and to describe truly what happened. You do not have to embellish. Because the truth itself is fantastic. It gets back to what we discussed earlier, about what is extraordinary or exceptional. I say that the most average life, if you can just get to the truth of it, is extraordinary. If you can just get to be a part of the audience of human nature, and if you can have a press box right on the edge of human nature, and see it and understand it and describe it and interpret it, then you will have a truly remarkable book.

Playboy: Are you ready for the controversy that's coming when Thy Neighbor's Wife is published?

Talese: I have no idea what's going to happen when the book comes out.

Playboy: We could make a good guess.

Talese: Then you tell me.

Playboy: Some people will love it, but some people will hate it. It is going to get some very bad reviews. After eight years of work, how are you going to react to that?

Talese: It is a great book. And that's all that's important. It is a great book. But the critics are not going to find it a great book.

Playboy: Why not?

Talese: First of all, it's about sex, and they're going to be uncomfortable with that. Sex is a subject that everyone thinks he knows everything about, or at least he has very strong attitudes about. A strong point of view. And sex cuts very deeply into people's own personal lives, maybe more deeply than anything else. So, in some cases, the book is not going to be reviewed as a book, necessarily. It is going to be an excuse for many people to justify the way they interpret morality. Those people might condemn me for presenting a number of immoral people in a favorable light, because I'm writing at least in part about people who are behaving unconventionally in bedrooms, who are allegedly defying community standards with regard to sexual behavior. I might be seen as humanizing people who a number of others would like to see in prison--eternally. That was a criticism, incidentally, of my Mafia book [Honor Thy Father]. Many people thought I made the Mafia family, the Bonanno family, too human. But they were human. They are human. I didn't make them out to be the monsters some people want Mafia members to look like. But if the reviews of certain critics, a Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a John Leonard or a Wilfrid Sheed, are negative, I can live with that, because I've had those bad reviews before on other books. That's not a problem for me. All they'll be saying is that they don't like the book. Well, I don't like their reviews. And I also know that this book is written better than they could do it. It's a beautifully written book. So I'm my own critic. I believe more in my own judgment as to what is good writing, and what are important books, than in any of those critics I mentioned.

Playboy: Why do you believe this is an important book?

Talese: As a work of nonfiction, it is pioneering because, for the first time, it reports what really happens in bedrooms, what really happens in the most private moments of real people's lives, and it stands behind the reporting. It presents the real names. It gives you information you can verify.

Playboy: Why is it important, in terms of literature, for readers to know what happens in the bedrooms of real people? Why is that more important than, say, realistically drawn fictional characters?

Talese: It tells you more about human nature. There are people who say we don't want to know more about human nature. We certainly don't want to know more about our sexual nature. There's too much sex, sex, sex in the world today, they say, we have gone too far. They want to contain, control, censor, restrict, edit out, dim down, lower the shades and enough of this openness. There was too much of this, they contend, in the Sixties and the Seventies, let us alone and stop, no more. I don't have that point of view. I am still exploring as a writer in new forms.

Playboy: But why was it so important that the characters be real people? As Ken Kesey once said about novels, some things are true even if they never happened.

Talese: True, maybe, but not real. If I had used composite characters, or even just changed the names, it wouldn't have been real.

Playboy: That will be one of the criticisms, that you invaded those people's privacy.

Talese: It is an invasion of privacy. The book is an invasion of privacy, no question about it. Those people became pioneers when they gave me releases to write about them. They allowed me to invade their privacy. Some people who read it will say, "This is disgusting, invading their privacy," but the people I wrote about won't say that, and that is what counts. Those people who are afraid of invading other people's privacy should not read my book.

Playboy: Do you think you're vulnerable to the criticism that you wrote only as a reporter telling a series of dramatic stories without understanding and conveying the deeper philosophical meaning of those stories?

Talese: Wrong. The characters are described, are understood, are understood in their historical time, and the historical time of the 20th Century is reflected against the background of the 19th Century. If the book were what you described, I could have done it in six months

Playboy: Earlier, you said some of the main characters in your book represented "future sex." If they do, indeed, what might that mean for the readers of this interview--or the readers of the book ten years from now--about what they can expect in their own futures?

Talese: They will see what the lives of their children will be like sexually and, were the readers younger, their own lives as mature people; that is, a more egalitarian sexual society, where women are free to be, as I said earlier, as good as men or as bad as men.

Playboy: What do you mean, as bad as men?

Talese: In terms of indiscretions, in terms of promiscuity, without being judged by the double standard, without being called immoral women for doing what men have always tried to do. And there are definitely two standards of behavior for the sexes. Men are more or less pardoned, at least by other men, for being unfaithful or, if they're not married, for being promiscuous. Whereas until now, if a woman has been promiscuous, she has been judged much more harshly, by men and women both. But Barbara Williamson, who is one of the characters who might be indicative of future sex, knows as much or more liberty than any woman in America. She can be as aggressive, or promiscuous, or chaste, as any woman without worrying that her neighbors or her husband will think badly of her. When this book comes out, she is going to be discovered as one who really represents a liberated female.

Playboy: Barbara is a married woman who has engaged in extramarital sex, though without hiding it from her husband. At least some of the more uptight critics are going to take your book--and you--to task for condoning, or advocating, extramarital sex, which they would argue leads to a high divorce rate.

Talese: More marriages are broken up by the guilt over sex than by the sex itself. If you are able to have extramarital relationships that are pleasurable, then you can bring pleasure from them back to your marriage. But if you can't find those relationships pleasurable, if they cause you to bring guilt back to your marriage, or if you can't keep them to yourself--they should be private--then....

Playboy:You haven't kept them private.

Talese: That's one thing the book has done for me, and I don't think it's a favor. I've dealt with the most intimate acts in people's lives, so I have to explain how I was privy to all that went on. Was I sitting in some press box, watching those people? Or was I in the ballroom at Sandstone? Well, I was in the ballroom at Sandstone some of the time, not sitting on the side lines, as a lot of cautious reporters would like their audience--and their wives and families--to believe.

I fear the book may not be read as a whole work, but rather will be filtered through all the static, all the smoke screen, all the excitement and bombast and prejudicial viewpoints and fear that people have with regard to sex. There is much very real irrationality that attends the subject. I believe this book probably won't be read in the way I would like to have it read for many years. It will have to settle in and maybe be accepted in 1990 for what I intended it to be in 1980. To a degree, that's true of other things I've written. When my book on The New York Times came out, all the reviews were gossiping about the power struggle going on between the New York office and the Washington bureau that I described in the last part of the book. The book was reissued in quality paperback in 1979, and ten years after it was published, people are reading it as I wanted it to be read. Probably, that is what is going to happen here.

Playboy: All right, what are you going to do for the next eight years?

Talese: I'm going to take my first vacation since 1971. Nan and I are going straight to John Gardiner's tennis ranch in Arizona and play tennis for a week; then I'm going to Italy with my father for a while. I've had a great story in my family that I've never told, with a series of rich characters. They include my father, grandfather, aunts, uncles and cousins--a family that has lived in Italy for hundreds of years. There's even a town south of Naples, in the region both of my parents' ancestors came from, called Talese.

Playboy: What are you looking for?

Talese: I'm just looking for a story. My father is a very unusual man, and I want to go back with him and have him help me check some things out, lead me to certain places and people I've heard about all my life. I want to write about my father as an immigrant, as the last of a generation who came to this country after World War One.

I've done some work on this already. I wrote what will be the beginning about ten years ago. I started it ten years ago! Funny, it started as a novel. But I wouldn't want to write a novel now.

Playboy: Why?

Talese: Because I'm beyond that. You can now do with nonfiction things you never could have done before. Nonfiction as an art form has opened up to where it has all the possibilities of fiction. People are willing to talk about themselves, so there's no reason to hide behind fictional characters when you can base your story on real people. And I've opened myself up in this book enough that I'm really open for the next one. There's nothing left I need to hide.

Playboy: Are you saying that you're doing a higher art form than novelists?

Talese: People who do nonfiction well are doing an art form as high as fiction. And the people who are doing it well are working harder than most novelists.

Playboy: A lot of novelists and literary critics are going to challenge that statement.

Talese: I think the literary critics are committed to a more traditional form of art, the novel. They're unaware of the art of nonfiction. But I certainly consider myself an artist. I have no modesty about what I do, and I feel that I work harder at this art form than most novelists do at the fictional form, by and large. There are some notable exceptions, like William Styron, who writes on a grand theme, and John Fowles, my favorite writer in England.

Playboy: How do you think your own future work is going to be affected by these sudden millions from Thy Neighbor's Wife?

Talese: I read in the newspapers that I've already made $4,000,000 out of this book before it's even published. And it's true. But I read that as if it is someone else who is making that $4,000,000. I don't relate to it at all. I haven't bought anything. I haven't changed anything. Look at this watch--it's an old Bulova that somebody left behind in Ocean City years ago, and my mother gave it to me. I used to have a wonderful Cartier gold watch, but somebody stole it out of my tennis locker about a year ago. I thought after the movie sale. I'll replace that watch. But with the price of gold now, it would have cost about $2000, so I didn't. I'm still wearing this battered old self-winding watch.

Playboy: Why?

Talese: I guess I do not crave material things. And I get attached to what I have. I do not want to change. I still live in the same homes in New York and Ocean City that I have for many, many years. I still have my old 1957 Triumph 3, and I really love that car. I really love old things that are made to last and that have served me well. I still use the same old Olivetti manual typewriter that I've written on for 22 years. So I'm sorry that watch was stolen from me. But it was. And it is unnecessary to replace it. And I haven't.

Playboy: What are your indulgences with money?

Talese: I like tipping. [Laughs] I've always liked tipping, because I've always liked waiters and restaurants. I'm not a gourmet, but I like the idea of restaurants. They trust you to pay them after you've consumed their product. It's the only business where they do that. Can you imagine buying a movie ticket on your way out of the theater?

Playboy: No. But tipping surely isn't what you regard as your biggest indulgence with money.

Talese: I don't think I have any real indulgences with money. I spend a lot of money on clothes, if you want to call that an indulgence. But I have pride in my appearance. I like to wear well-crafted clothing, just as I aspire to writing well-crafted words. I have pride in myself, in the way I appear in a room or the way I appear in print.

Playboy: Earlier today, when the tape recorder was off, you mentioned that you have misgivings about giving interviews about the book and your private life. Why is that?

Talese: Because there's nothing to be gained in the sense that people understand gained. If you are a married man and a family man and you deal publicly with your private sexual life, you gain nothing. Even this interview is a no-win situation.

Playboy: Why did you agree to do it?

Talese: I guess I agreed to do it for the experience. Maybe just to see what it really is like to talk to a reporter about what has been locked in my mind all these years.

Playboy: Are you sorry you agreed to do it?

Talese: In a way, I am. I agreed to do it, and I have done it, and now we are getting to the final twirls of this tape. It is going around the final times. I'm not certain it was a good idea. It probably would be better to leave more to the imagination of readers. If you're a writer, your life should be represented through your writing, and I did that, to a degree, in the book. Wiser men than myself said long ago that if you want to be a writer, write, but don't talk about your writing. So, I admit it, I am feeling a little bit of trepidation about being interviewed.

Playboy: Is Nan going to tell her side of the story to the press?

Talese: I don't know. That's her decision.

Playboy: How would you feel if she did, telling the world about her private life after the book is published? Doing the same thing you're doing, in other words.

Talese: I certainly think she would have every right to do that.

Playboy: But would you feel the same way about her?

Talese: Of course, I would think. But perhaps this will affect our marriage. I don't know. I don't know how any of this will turn out, because we're dealing with a subject that is, in this country at this time . . . explosive.

Playboy: Does that mean there is still another serious test coming for your marriage when the book is published and all the publicity is generated about your personal behavior?

Talese: I would think so. If I acknowledged to Nan privately that I lived as a nudist at Sandstone and participated in group sex, or had sexual relations with women at massage parlors, she might accept it with understanding, or she might be piqued. It is, however, something quite different to mention it in a national magazine, in writing, that will be seen by her sisters and brothers and nephews and nieces, her employer, her fellow editors, the writers she edits, the wives of the writers she edits, the agents of the writers she edits, all the people who are a part of the book industry she's been involved with. They are all going to react to this in various ways.

One way is: "Here is a man who does not have the good taste to keep his private life private." They'll say that. Or, on the contrary, they may argue, "Here is a man who is boasting of his infidelities." And that's what I really hate to hear. Nothing is further from the truth. But it's the way I'll be interpreted. I would like to be private about my private life, but what I was doing in this book precluded that. I had to put myself under the same spotlight I put on the characters I wrote about; otherwise, I would be called a hypocrite.

Playboy: Why is it so important to avoid being called a hypocrite that you're willing to risk your marriage?

Talese: I think I'd have to undergo psychiatry, which I never have done, to understand that. But you're right about my fear of being a hypocrite. I think it has something to do with my strict upbringing, with being an altar boy close to the Church, and how shattered I was early in life as I discovered that the priests and the nuns and the people close to them were hypocrites. I just don't want to be like my background. I want to get away from that. I want to believe that I am willing to risk anything as long as I can stay away from the kind of background that shaped me, that was based on the appearance of morality but loaded with hypocrisy. I guess it is in my nature to want to break out of my nature.

Playboy: Even if the price for that might be losing your marriage?

Talese: I hope I won't have to pay the price. But I'm willing to pay the price, whatever it is. I was willing to pay the price during the eight years I wrote this book. And I've risked the price before. On the book about the Mafia, I could have been shot. I was traveling with gangsters who were knocking one another off in the famous Bonanno war. I was hanging around with Bill Bonanno, and when I was driving with him in his cars in Brooklyn with no card in my hatband saying press, please do not shoot, I took my chances. I took my chances with The Bridge. I walked across those steel cables in the high wind and I drove up to Canada with those Indian bridge workers at 109 miles an hour while they drank Chivas Regal. I risked my physical safety on The Bridge. I risked it on the Mafia book. My personal life is on the line with this one.

Playboy: What is it about a book with your name on it that makes it worth taking that kind of risk? Why are those books so important to you?

Talese: [Pause] They represent the totality of my experience, my drive, my very worth.

Playboy: Those books define your worth?

Talese: Yes, they do. In my personal life, certainly there is much that I am willing to apologize for the next day. But not in my work. I never apologize for the work I do. That is deliberate, very carefully crafted, done with love and care. I have never been ashamed of anything I have written. Success is marvelous, but all I'm really committed to is writing well. I find no comfort in money. I've never gotten any satisfaction from anything except feeling that what I did was very good. There's no Crack-Up here. Fitzgerald was looking for false gods. Success to him was like something out of the movies. I'm a realist. I'm not at all concerned with the mythology of fame and success but with the real soul of success and the bitterness of attaining it and the heartbreak in not attaining it.

I hate impermanence. I am obsessed with writing that is going to last. I am against that which is merely fashionable. People get tired of old clothing, old Presidents. I want to cut through all that transient frivolity and create, as a cabinetmaker does, something that is going to outlive me. I want to construct substantial, timeless books that will survive. Why? Why does a man want to protect what he treasures? Why does he want to bequeath it, invest it wisely, hammer it into monuments? Because he doesn't want to die, that's why. It's because he's so goddamn vain that his vanity extends beyond his death. And because he was very, very proud of his life.

"I see America as an adulterous state, so 'Thy Neighbor's Wife' seemed to be an apt metaphor for dealing with sex in America."

"I missed the deadline by five years. I guess if you're going to miss a deadline, you might as well really miss it."

"Guilt has been very much a part of my life. Those Irish nuns were tough. Their philosophy was tough. Guilt, sacrifice and fear."

"On that little 15-acre plot of sexual freedom up there on the mountain, women had an equality not to be rivaled anywhere else in the country."

"At Sandstone, I and a lot of other men were seeing other men's erections for the first time. Most men are almost totally unaware of other men's sexuality."

"Suddenly, it hits him, that his wife is in front of him, having sex with this other man. Suddenly, he is jolted to the realism of the moment and he just, collapses."

"People who do nonfiction well are doing an art form as high as fiction. And the people who are doing it well are working harder than most novelists."

"In my personal life, certainly there is much that I am willing to apologize for the next day. But not in my work. I never apologize for the work I do."