Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing,
Speaker 1: My chance to talk with artists, policymakers and performers, to
Speaker 1: hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change
Speaker 1: their careers, what relationships influence their work. The best story
Speaker 1: Esquire Magazine ever published as titled Frank Sinatra has a Cold.
Speaker 1: That's according to Esquire itself back in two thousand three,
Speaker 1: selecting from its seventy year archive, which includes writers like
Speaker 1: Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, and f. Scott Fitzgerald, Gaytales wrote,
Speaker 1: Frank Sinatra has a Cold and many more articles along
Speaker 1: with several books. He sticks to the facts and tells
Speaker 1: layered compelling stories about the famous, the not so famous,
Speaker 1: and the infamous. Like mafia legend Bill Bonano, to Lea's
Speaker 1: spends an unconventionally long time with his subjects. It pays
Speaker 1: off with a depth and complexity hard to find in
Speaker 1: journalism today. For Gay to Lee is achieving this requires
Speaker 1: both instinct and skill. I think to a degree a
Speaker 1: kind of discipline can be taught about writing how a
Speaker 1: sentence should be clear, And you could certainly have some
Speaker 1: tutoring with regard to that, but I think writing and
Speaker 1: writers are of a breed that are. In the case
Speaker 1: of nonfiction, writers are driven by curiosity. In the case
Speaker 1: of fiction writers, playwrights, short story writers, essay is then
Speaker 1: creativity is involved. I'm in the category of nonfiction, and
Speaker 1: my way of working is to first to indulge my curiosity.
Speaker 1: I'm propelled by the notion of how do other people
Speaker 1: get through the day and night, and what are they
Speaker 1: like and how are they different from me. I'm always
Speaker 1: measuring myself, whether I'm interviewing Frank Sinata, Joda Maju, or
Speaker 1: some pigeon feeder on Lexington Avenue, Joe Banana, Joe Banano.
Speaker 1: I have a variety of subjects. I'm not an expert
Speaker 1: in anything. My range is is is very far reaching,
Speaker 1: not always profound. But I'm my curiosity is profound. It's
Speaker 1: far reaching, for sure. You started working at the Times
Speaker 1: in fifty three. I was a copy boy. I was
Speaker 1: born near Atlantic City. My father was an Italian born tailor,
Speaker 1: and my mother was at Brooklyn, born Italian who met
Speaker 1: this man, this tailor, and they settled there and I
Speaker 1: was born in ninety two. But I couldn't get into
Speaker 1: college because my grades were terrible. It was pretty good
Speaker 1: in high school journalism, but I wasn't good at anything else,
Speaker 1: including English. But my father was making suits for a
Speaker 1: man from Alabama doctor in our town, and he suggests
Speaker 1: they go to the versu of Alabama in one place
Speaker 1: that welcomed me because of the doctor's influence with a
Speaker 1: date of admission. And I had the best four years
Speaker 1: of my life in Alabama from forty nine and fifty three.
Speaker 1: Not a good football team. Was it like to be?
Speaker 1: What it was like? The kill from Jersey? And it
Speaker 1: was it was like being another immigrant. My father was
Speaker 1: an immigrant and I was an immigrant in a sense.
Speaker 1: Later on, when I got a job in the New
Speaker 1: York Times, I went down to Alabama to cover the
Speaker 1: civil rights March to Selma, March of nine six five
Speaker 1: Morton Luther, the Gig's famous march. It was interesting being
Speaker 1: an Italian born journalist born in New Jersey, but went
Speaker 1: to school Alabama and goes back as a reporter for
Speaker 1: the Times to help cover this the seventeen day march
Speaker 1: to Montgomery from Selma. So I saw a part of
Speaker 1: a history from different perspectives. Now you said that you
Speaker 1: are a nonfiction writer. What's true? And yet you were
Speaker 1: identified with a certain stripe of nonfiction, a contemporary nonfiction
Speaker 1: that people have called different names new journalism and stuff
Speaker 1: with you Wolf and some of his novels. How do
Speaker 1: you define? How do you define the different to what
Speaker 1: you do? What I do and what I always have
Speaker 1: been influenced by our fiction writers. As a boy, I
Speaker 1: didn't grow up and a home with a lot of books.
Speaker 1: You can imagine as an immigrant family, a tailor and
Speaker 1: then my mother's soul dresses. So I wasn't reared in
Speaker 1: the home of Virginia woolf. I was reared in the
Speaker 1: home of merchants. And it was a good training for
Speaker 1: a writer to be a reporter, to be because if
Speaker 1: you were a store person. My family has a store,
Speaker 1: and from the earliest age I was taught good manners.
Speaker 1: You must be courteous to the customer. Even though I
Speaker 1: didn't have a literary background, I did read some books,
Speaker 1: not many, but some. When I went to Alabama, I
Speaker 1: read Faulkner. I never heard of Faulkner until I went
Speaker 1: to Alabama. And I also started reading when I came
Speaker 1: to be a copy boy. I started reading the New Yorker,
Speaker 1: and I read short stories by Irwin Shaw, John Schiever, St.
Speaker 1: Claire mckelloway was a nonfiction writer. A J. Leveling was
Speaker 1: a nonfiction writer, and Joe Mitchell was a nonfiction writer.
Speaker 1: And I read all these high level writers, particularly drawn
Speaker 1: to the fiction of John O'Hara and Erwin Shaw, who's
Speaker 1: not known now, but he's a beautiful writer, and he
Speaker 1: wrote great short stories. Uh the eight r and run
Speaker 1: about a college football player who would love with a young,
Speaker 1: beautiful blonde, and it tells the story Irwin Showa does.
Speaker 1: He didn't quite make it in the pros. He didn't
Speaker 1: make it, but he came to New York with his wife,
Speaker 1: who got to be a fashion editor one of the
Speaker 1: better magazines, and more successful the older she got, and
Speaker 1: he was less successful the older he got. Like many athletes,
Speaker 1: their life is in their twenties and after that it's
Speaker 1: a very much a question whether they have a future,
Speaker 1: have any life at all. I thought that story was
Speaker 1: so real and yet it was fiction. My first job
Speaker 1: as a report was in the sports department, So when
Speaker 1: I would meet Frank's at the Times, she started in
Speaker 1: the sports I did my first job as I got
Speaker 1: on the staff, which was was in the sports department,
Speaker 1: and I met people like Frank Gifford and but you know,
Speaker 1: the New York Giants for a good team. In those days,
Speaker 1: I wanted to be a practitioner of nonfiction meeting You
Speaker 1: cannot make it up, you cannot use your imagination, you
Speaker 1: cannot fake the facts. You have to write verifiably. Whatever
Speaker 1: you write, real names, real facts, so the reader can
Speaker 1: check you out. On the other hand, I wanted to
Speaker 1: be storytellers. So if you read my stories about maybe
Speaker 1: a football player or Floyd Patterson, or Joe Lewis Guy
Speaker 1: or Joe Lewis that I knew, or Muhammad Ali, and
Speaker 1: all these stories begin with scenes and the scenes setting
Speaker 1: I've learned from people like f Scott Fitzgerald. The great
Speaker 1: story that Fitzgerald wrote as every bit as good as
Speaker 1: as Great Gatsy. It's called Winter Dreams. I fell in
Speaker 1: love with that story. I fell in love with that
Speaker 1: girl that the Caddie fell in love with. And I
Speaker 1: wanted to bring to my stories, my little magazine pieces
Speaker 1: or my books later on, what the short story writers
Speaker 1: and the novelists brought to their dramatic rendering out of
Speaker 1: their imagination, and so I used my imagination, such as
Speaker 1: it was to sort of penetrate the personalities the private
Speaker 1: lives if I need be of other people. I had
Speaker 1: tremendous respect for people that I wrote about starting to
Speaker 1: get it as a boy in the store, where you
Speaker 1: respect the customer and you mind your manners, and you
Speaker 1: when you behave properly and your trust, courtesy and courtesy.
Speaker 1: That's something journalists don't have. They don't Well, we're gonna
Speaker 1: get to that how it's changed. But before you write books,
Speaker 1: or before you write the book about the times and
Speaker 1: you're in the sports, just give us an example of
Speaker 1: one of the first sports figures you interacted with and
Speaker 1: what that was like. I mean, someone that you first
Speaker 1: when I interacted with, what I call a very deep way,
Speaker 1: was the price fighter Floyd Patterson, who came up in
Speaker 1: the late nineteen fifties. He was articulate. Many great athletes
Speaker 1: are not articulate, but he was one. And more important,
Speaker 1: he was open to having other people enquire about his life.
Speaker 1: One of the first times I met him, he said,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm basically a coward. I just feel that
Speaker 1: boxing is way I can make a living. I don't
Speaker 1: know who else I would, but in my heart I'm
Speaker 1: filled with fear and fear of being humiliated. And then
Speaker 1: he told me that he didn't want to be spotted
Speaker 1: in public, particularly when he lost a fight. He had
Speaker 1: a fake mustache, fake wig, had some clothing he wore.
Speaker 1: He would masquerade, he would be or try to be
Speaker 1: somebody else. And this went on for six or seven years.
Speaker 1: But you know, getting to talk to people in moments
Speaker 1: when they are feeling humiliated and underachieving is very much
Speaker 1: something experienced by everybody, whether you're an actor, whether you're
Speaker 1: a plumber, whether you're defeated candidate for office, everybody has
Speaker 1: to know disappointment, a sense of rejection, defeat. It was
Speaker 1: a different time in terms of protecting them, wasn't It
Speaker 1: was a different time in terms of you weren't there
Speaker 1: to pull the covers on these people. We live in
Speaker 1: such tabloid times now we're writers regardless of their I mean,
Speaker 1: I even see like with publications like The Times itself,
Speaker 1: they can't help but have some kind of arms are
Speaker 1: reduction of you, and you know, some kind of psychoanalysis
Speaker 1: of you. They don't just write the facts. They don't
Speaker 1: what was it like back then, I never I never
Speaker 1: wrote about a person, and I've written about hundreds and
Speaker 1: hundreds of people that I couldn't go to see again.
Speaker 1: I never had someone that wouldn't see me. In fact,
Speaker 1: my attitude was the story is never over. I could
Speaker 1: write about someone that's a performing athlete or performing an actor,
Speaker 1: and then ten years later and go back and see
Speaker 1: them again. I wrote about Petro Tool my favorite person,
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty three. Not long after who did Lawrence Arabia.
Speaker 1: I kept in touch with him for the next forty years.
Speaker 1: I believe that people, as long as they're alive, have
Speaker 1: more stories to tell. Just because you published an article
Speaker 1: in the New York Times or the New Yorker magazine
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that the story is over. It means your
Speaker 1: interest is over. But I never abated. I was always
Speaker 1: curious and continue to be affiliated with people I wrote
Speaker 1: about because I was sharing a part of my life
Speaker 1: for them when I was young and they were young.
Speaker 1: And as I've gotten older and they've gotten older, I
Speaker 1: wonder how did it turn out? And I can see
Speaker 1: in some of the public figures because you know what's happening,
Speaker 1: because they're occasionally still in print. But my curiosity is
Speaker 1: to write about them when their life is done. I mean,
Speaker 1: when I wrote about Joe to Mago, his career was done.
Speaker 1: I wrote about the ninety six he bitter, he was
Speaker 1: very suspiciousncious, very suspicious, and of course being married to
Speaker 1: Monroe compounded that suspicion of the press. Well, being a
Speaker 1: celebrity is a perilous experience in a way. You never
Speaker 1: have your life that you can feel is your own life,
Speaker 1: because it is so penetrated by the nosy noses and
Speaker 1: the aggressive and assaulting members of the media who could
Speaker 1: rip you up and ruin your life in a way
Speaker 1: that you can't make it up. When these characterizations, false
Speaker 1: as they may be, are established in print, there's not
Speaker 1: a lot you can do to change it. You might
Speaker 1: outlive it to it. There's no correction page on the
Speaker 1: correction the next day on page three, in a little
Speaker 1: paragraph at the bottom of the page. It's not going
Speaker 1: to amend things. It's not gonna make up for the
Speaker 1: disturbance of your own character. Were you still writing for
Speaker 1: you wrote Sinatra after you left the time, Yes, when
Speaker 1: you were doing a lot of essays for Esquire. That's right.
Speaker 1: I left the Times in the five after the Selma
Speaker 1: March that I told you about, and you wrote Kingdom
Speaker 1: in the Power Win three years later, see when I
Speaker 1: after you left. Yeah, when I was on the Times,
Speaker 1: I saw these guys who worked for the paper as stories.
Speaker 1: I thought sometimes they were much more interesting than the
Speaker 1: stories they were writing about about the outside. So when
Speaker 1: you're at the Times, what was the time slack? Then
Speaker 1: these characters. One of them was an obituary writer. I thought,
Speaker 1: what an eccentric character. This guy was named Old and
Speaker 1: Women and he was waiting for people to die. He
Speaker 1: was very interested in other people dying because that was
Speaker 1: his story. He kept alive. And they have their obituaries
Speaker 1: written here. And I focused my first when I quit
Speaker 1: the Times, I wanted to take these stories public. And
Speaker 1: the first thing I did for Restaurant when I left
Speaker 1: the paper in sixty five was to write a story
Speaker 1: called Mr. Bad News, which is this obituary guy in
Speaker 1: all the Women. The next thing I wanted to write
Speaker 1: about was a guy named Harrison Salisbury. He was a
Speaker 1: great corresponding. He was the guy that during the Vietnam War,
Speaker 1: without permission, in fact, against the policies of this government,
Speaker 1: went in Hanoi and found out that American bombers were
Speaker 1: pitting the hospital schools against what Lyndon Johnson's administration was
Speaker 1: telling us in n This was sixty six, the height
Speaker 1: of the North Vietnamese beginning to triumph in that war,
Speaker 1: and Salisbury penetrated that and wrote these stories and people
Speaker 1: hated him in this Country's a communist great man in
Speaker 1: my view. I wanted to write about him, and I
Speaker 1: did write about him, but but first the editors said,
Speaker 1: now you have to write about Sanctor. I said, I
Speaker 1: don't want to write about No, go do it. Go
Speaker 1: do it. So it's easy set up. Sanantra's press agent said,
Speaker 1: it's a cover story. You go out there and talk
Speaker 1: to you. Yeah, And he's doing this big NBC thing
Speaker 1: called Sinantra Man and his music. It's all set up.
Speaker 1: So I went out there the California and I was
Speaker 1: supposed to see Sinatra the next Monday. After I arrived
Speaker 1: and I called the press agent named Jim Mahoney said, Jim,
Speaker 1: I'm here, the Beverley will share. When are we going
Speaker 1: to see Mr? Sinatra? So? Oh, I'm sorry, he's got
Speaker 1: a cold. Oh okay, maybe a few days. Yeah, check me.
Speaker 1: But by the way, he said, Frank is feeling pretty
Speaker 1: bad because that damn cronkite on CBS. We understand he's
Speaker 1: doing something about Frank's allegric connection to mafia people. I said,
Speaker 1: I'm not doing that well. Anyway, Sinantra's lawyer would like
Speaker 1: to see you and maybe come to an agreement that
Speaker 1: maybe you could submit the piece before we pump. I said, Jim,
Speaker 1: I can't do that. You can't. I couldn't do it
Speaker 1: on the Times, I can't do it on escort, I
Speaker 1: can't do it anywhere. Sinatra's cold was a problem, but
Speaker 1: the real problem was they wanted to take the piece
Speaker 1: and do what I wanted. So I hung out there
Speaker 1: for six weeks. I never talked to you. Hung out
Speaker 1: there for six weeks, and what I was doing was
Speaker 1: talking to little people that worked with Snata. It might
Speaker 1: have been the woman who took care of his to
Speaker 1: pay his former valet his habit, Dasher on Rodeo drive,
Speaker 1: a guy named Dick, Carol Dick did that become Carol
Speaker 1: and Company? That's right, all these people and they gave
Speaker 1: me wonderful stories. And finally the press agency, are you
Speaker 1: still here? What are you doing, Frank, Maybe so, but
Speaker 1: it's a much better piece. So Frank sni as a
Speaker 1: cold was done by talking these people. But the reason
Speaker 1: I was so comfortable talking to minor characters is because
Speaker 1: I liked the secondary characters and I get to know
Speaker 1: them as the tailor shop and exactly the tailor shop
Speaker 1: was a great trading chat. And the tailor you're fitting
Speaker 1: people for a suit, and you know, I felt comfortable
Speaker 1: with ordinary people. And my parents are working ordinary people.
Speaker 1: So that worked out, and you get the story, even
Speaker 1: though you don't get Sinatra. You met him, ran into him.
Speaker 1: I saw him where, well, I saw him in a
Speaker 1: few places. I saw him and a bar and he
Speaker 1: got in a confrontation. Was some guy named Harlan Ellison
Speaker 1: who was a shooting pool. Santa was just being a
Speaker 1: little bit irritated, and he's and he lonely. He was
Speaker 1: fifty years old and he had been dating me and
Speaker 1: Pharaoh that and she wasn't around, and he had this
Speaker 1: cold and he's feeling lousy, and so I just caught
Speaker 1: that moment I described later on. I saw a Sinatra
Speaker 1: at a prize fight actually about how an Ali was
Speaker 1: fighting my friend Patterson and I called Patterson. I got
Speaker 1: tickets to the fight because I knew Sators going to
Speaker 1: be there, and of course he was there. What Sinator
Speaker 1: later on was with Dean Martin and Joey Bishop and
Speaker 1: and a few others went to the gambling in the casino.
Speaker 1: I watched them gamble. Later on they went to the show,
Speaker 1: and I just wrote a scene. In other words, I
Speaker 1: was observing Sinatra. I wasn't talking to him, but I
Speaker 1: was watching him. And he's had such an aura of
Speaker 1: glamor and drama about him. He might have a bad
Speaker 1: mood and to get in a fight with somebody, or
Speaker 1: he might be in a good mood, and he's giving
Speaker 1: people free dream A real magical man. And so you
Speaker 1: didn't a man haunted? Didn't you feel that some of
Speaker 1: these people you meet back then at the ats of
Speaker 1: this business, at the route. It was different being famous
Speaker 1: back then. But if you're extraordinarily talented, that goes for now,
Speaker 1: as in the era of Frank Sinatra's fame, or before,
Speaker 1: you're living up two expectations that cannot be long met.
Speaker 1: If you are a great performer, it could be a musician,
Speaker 1: it could be an opera singer, it could be We're
Speaker 1: not at the Tabaldi, it could be Frank Sinata. What
Speaker 1: you are at the height of your game, and you
Speaker 1: have to continue to perform at that high level, as
Speaker 1: supreme level. You're under constant pressure, stress, and the and
Speaker 1: the stress of the critics who are not in love
Speaker 1: with your success anymore. They're tired of his success. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna contribute to your destructions. They're tired of your success,
Speaker 1: and they are motivated by being destructive because they want
Speaker 1: to be affecting your life. And the only way they
Speaker 1: can do it is to target you to sink your
Speaker 1: floating vessel. And when you're at the top of your game,
Speaker 1: you not only gain a lot more fans, but you
Speaker 1: gain a lot more enemies. I mean to go on
Speaker 1: and on and on. So few can survive for so
Speaker 1: long when you're at the top. Gyales never met Sinatra,
Speaker 1: but after the singer died, he says he met Tina Sinatra,
Speaker 1: his daughter, and she told him she liked his article.
Speaker 1: Tales asked if her father had ever read it. He
Speaker 1: probably did, she said, but he'd never admitted. I'm Alec
Speaker 1: Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. Take a
Speaker 1: listen to our archive more in depth conversations with artists, policymakers,
Speaker 1: and performers like Debbie Reynolds. We discovered we have something
Speaker 1: in common. I'm Aries, I'm born April Fool's Day. I
Speaker 1: just had my just Aries is very stubborn, but very
Speaker 1: really good person. I mean, I don't think that there's
Speaker 1: a bad bone in the body other than our temper.
Speaker 1: That I you're known for your temper. But it's not true, right,
Speaker 1: it's just if the process making up things. You know,
Speaker 1: go to Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec
Speaker 1: Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. In the
Speaker 1: early eighties, one book found its way onto almost every
Speaker 1: shelf in the country. Gay to Lees is thy Neighbor's Wife,
Speaker 1: explored the uncharted territory of the hidden sex lives of Americans.
Speaker 1: Ten years earlier, to Lees wrote about another subject previously underreported.
Speaker 1: His book, Honor Thy Father, dove deep into the powerful
Speaker 1: and very secretive Bonano crime family. Tales got the famously
Speaker 1: press averse Bill Bonano to speak with such honesty and
Speaker 1: introspection the Time magazine labeled to Lees the golden retriever
Speaker 1: of personalized journalism. His first conversation with Bill was years
Speaker 1: in the making. Well, I met him in my final
Speaker 1: year of the New York Times, but I told you
Speaker 1: one of the last stories. In addition, the Selma story
Speaker 1: was the cover of the indictment of a Banano father
Speaker 1: and son in federal court in Laura, Manhattan, and I
Speaker 1: met him briefly through his lawyer. Bill Banana was my age.
Speaker 1: I knew his father was born in Sicily. My father,
Speaker 1: Jil Banana, was born in Sicily. My father was born
Speaker 1: in Calabria, close to Sicilians. So when I was at
Speaker 1: a reporter, I went to Bill Banana during a recession
Speaker 1: in the hearing in federal court, and I saw his
Speaker 1: lawyer named Albert Krieger, and I said, Mr Krueger, this
Speaker 1: is your client, Mr Banano, who's my age. Incidentally, someday
Speaker 1: I like to write about him. And Krieger said, no comment,
Speaker 1: no comment. I said, I'm not looking for a comment,
Speaker 1: I'm looking for his story. So but someday, it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean this year, next year, next sometime, because sometime this
Speaker 1: guy is gonna die, your client, Mr Bill Banana, and
Speaker 1: billber I was looking at me saying nothing. Half smiling,
Speaker 1: and I said, somebody's gonna die. Hope it's not with
Speaker 1: a bullet. But if he dies, his obituary is gonna
Speaker 1: come from information of the Justice Apartment, the the the
Speaker 1: cops are going to write the story. And so no comment,
Speaker 1: no comment. I was okay. I kept writing and calling
Speaker 1: him for the next year and a half sixties seven.
Speaker 1: Mr Banano his lawyer, Albert Krueger, the younger Banana. Mr Banana,
Speaker 1: will have dinner with you as long as off the record.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely off. There He took me to some Johnny
Speaker 1: johnson as a steakhouse near the u N run by
Speaker 1: mafia guys. So the lawyer, Crieger and Bill Bonano and
Speaker 1: I three of us had dinner, had a steak, had
Speaker 1: a drink, and I said, what about your family? He said, well,
Speaker 1: they live at East Medow, Long Island. I said, I
Speaker 1: have two young daughters. You have daughters. Why don't we
Speaker 1: have dinner sometime? So Bill, but as well, Okay, you
Speaker 1: can come to my house, bring your wife and bring
Speaker 1: East Meadow. And my wife went to a convent school.
Speaker 1: She's in Manhattanville graduate. My wife is and the wife
Speaker 1: of Bill Bonano was also a convent educated girl. So
Speaker 1: the two women, the the Irish Ganana Hern who married
Speaker 1: gay to Lee, and our two daughters, Katherine and Pamela.
Speaker 1: When in my little t RP sports car way out
Speaker 1: to East Meadow and there were these big cattle accident
Speaker 1: apart duct Tida Banano's house and he sees me pulling
Speaker 1: in with his car. He welcomes us. We had dinner
Speaker 1: and we met the bodyguards and all that stuff. On
Speaker 1: the way out, he said, you know it's dangerous driving
Speaker 1: that car with those children. He says, I said, oh,
Speaker 1: I like, we love the car. Next day I get
Speaker 1: a call he says, noise the thinking about your car.
Speaker 1: I have a Cadillact for you. Oh no, I don't want.
Speaker 1: But it's dangerous what you're doing. I said, listen, you
Speaker 1: you live with your danger. I live in line, don't
Speaker 1: worry about my way became friends. Took me two years
Speaker 1: and finally, in nineteen seventy, he said, I'm going to
Speaker 1: talk to you for the record, finally and I went
Speaker 1: over there. He what do you think changed? He was,
Speaker 1: I'll tell it was going to change. In nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: he'd been indicted for credit card fraud. He took a
Speaker 1: stolen one of somebody took a card, and he was
Speaker 1: running up a lot of bills, and they sent him
Speaker 1: four years to go to Terminal Island in California where
Speaker 1: he was going to go. In fact, they sent him
Speaker 1: to jail. And his roommate was G. Gordon Liddy was
Speaker 1: in a cell of Bill Bernannig Liddy who was in
Speaker 1: the Watergate story. The only guy that had any integrity
Speaker 1: and didn't route on the president was Lydia. So he
Speaker 1: got along with Bill Bernano very very well. But he
Speaker 1: understood Omerta. Yeah, I understood. So I became friendly with that.
Speaker 1: I lived and he then was temporarily living in outside
Speaker 1: of San Francis, go place near San Jose called California,
Speaker 1: and I met his wife and I hung around there
Speaker 1: for a whole year before he went to jail for
Speaker 1: four years. That's where he did the story. And the
Speaker 1: story was really in a way it indicated something in
Speaker 1: the Sopranos approach to the story. I was interested in
Speaker 1: family life, the wife, the children, and it was preordained
Speaker 1: he would go into that business because of his father
Speaker 1: or not. It was it was, it was, and why
Speaker 1: not Salzburger and went into the business because it was
Speaker 1: a value business. Okay, Gates at least didn't become a
Speaker 1: tailor because it wasn't much of a business. Of My
Speaker 1: father was Ralph Lauren. I might have worked Ralph Lauren,
Speaker 1: you know, but I didn't, so I didn't become a tailor.
Speaker 1: That Bill Banana would follow us absolutely. But when that
Speaker 1: book came out, I made a fortune. I sold it
Speaker 1: all over the world. I had a movie deal with CBS.
Speaker 1: I made about a million dollars and more to come.
Speaker 1: And I set up with my lawyer a trust fund
Speaker 1: and educational trust fund, and I had put my two
Speaker 1: daughters to his college. And the four Banano kids why
Speaker 1: I'm at him, were six and seven eight years so
Speaker 1: I them through college my lawyer, and one of them
Speaker 1: became a doctor. And none of them became gangsters. So
Speaker 1: we broke the mafia cycle. And uh. And that was
Speaker 1: my big humanitarian achievement. Now let's talk about your other
Speaker 1: humanitarian achievement, which in the several years, I'd run into
Speaker 1: you in New York at events, and I'd see you
Speaker 1: out there. I'd run into you any lanes, you know,
Speaker 1: every now and then you know, you're so splendidly turned out,
Speaker 1: and you're such a gentleman. And so I honestly look
Speaker 1: at the book thy neighbor's wife, and I think this
Speaker 1: is just another function of your curiosity. And do you
Speaker 1: sit down when you write a book like that and say,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start doing some research and the research lead
Speaker 1: you down these different alleyways and byways, and you just
Speaker 1: keep going and saying this is my job. Did you
Speaker 1: stop along the way and say, I gotta think about this. Well,
Speaker 1: let me tell the way it started. First of all,
Speaker 1: I was reared as a Roman Catholic, and I because
Speaker 1: of how old I am, I came out of the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. I'm really a product of post World War
Speaker 1: two Catholicism. I was taught in my little town with
Speaker 1: a very few Catholics, some Irish and little parish. I
Speaker 1: was an older boy. I was one of the few
Speaker 1: Italians in that parish. We had a strict code of behaviors.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't masturbate, you shouldn't read filthy literature. You go
Speaker 1: to Mass and you had the Catholic index. I was
Speaker 1: warned not to read this, not to look at this
Speaker 1: evil thoughts. All that when I come of age after
Speaker 1: college and go to become a copy boy. The whole
Speaker 1: policy with regard to morality was changing, and in the
Speaker 1: nineties sixties spent the period of Vietnam War, the Hippies,
Speaker 1: the sexual sexual Revolution, and so I was married at
Speaker 1: the time when I had these two daughters, and one
Speaker 1: night my wife and I went to P. J. Clarks
Speaker 1: was eleven o'clock walking up Lexington Avenue. We live in
Speaker 1: the sixties, and I saw this sign on on a
Speaker 1: building on fifty eight and Lexington across some blooming Deals
Speaker 1: said live nude models. I couldn't believe the sign, and
Speaker 1: I said the nanny Bloomingdale across from blooming Live nude Models.
Speaker 1: I said, let's go and check it out. So don't
Speaker 1: you go, you go. I'm see you at home. I
Speaker 1: grew up there and they're closing this and the guy says,
Speaker 1: what is this live nude models. It's just so when
Speaker 1: your wife said you go, you go, you go, she
Speaker 1: didn't care. Now she said, I don't want to go up.
Speaker 1: She did care, but she didn't care. She knew that
Speaker 1: I was a very curious guy, essentially reporter who liked
Speaker 1: to indulge my curious. You're open for anything. Absolutely true,
Speaker 1: And the guy said this massage part it's clothes. Come
Speaker 1: back tomorrow. Next day I went back. I was amazed.
Speaker 1: A massage, Parlar. What's that? They gave you a book.
Speaker 1: There were five or six photographs of different women rom one,
Speaker 1: room two, room three, one four in each and he says,
Speaker 1: a thirty bucks for massage. I just said, okay. I
Speaker 1: picked somebody and they go to room three and some
Speaker 1: young woman, articketed woman comes in with a Southern accent.
Speaker 1: She says, take your clothes off, and I said, this
Speaker 1: is a massage you're giving me? Yes, yes, take your
Speaker 1: clothes up. Looking clothes off. She took her top off,
Speaker 1: but she was wearing a little mini skirt and said
Speaker 1: that you have a southern accent. Yes, where are you
Speaker 1: from Alabama? She's want of Alabama. She could not care less.
Speaker 1: Hurry up, I say, you knew her be reunited. What
Speaker 1: it was and what they do? Masturbate you? Incredible to
Speaker 1: masturbates you for thirty dollars. And I was listening while
Speaker 1: being masturbated and enjoying it. I was also had my ear.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering who is this girl? She told me she
Speaker 1: was working at going to school a hunter in the
Speaker 1: daytime and working the massage party in the latter afternoons.
Speaker 1: She was a college educated person. I later on found
Speaker 1: out there over college girls and this massage collars. I
Speaker 1: was amazed at college girls. I shot a movie in
Speaker 1: a bar in New Orleans and all the strippers in
Speaker 1: the bar. We rented a bar and they hired these
Speaker 1: women that were real strippers. And I talked to this
Speaker 1: one girl, you know, as they say, cut and she
Speaker 1: put the bathroom on and she sit down and smoke
Speaker 1: a cigarette. I said, what do you do? She said,
Speaker 1: I'm going to Tulane and never in years. And that
Speaker 1: was true. So I thought to myself, while enjoying the
Speaker 1: process and being massaged to orgasm, no doubt I'm participating fully.
Speaker 1: At the second time, my second head is there's a
Speaker 1: story here. Who is this girl? Who are these women?
Speaker 1: This is nineteen seventy three, seventy four, seventy five, so
Speaker 1: different from the altar boy or the young journalists that
Speaker 1: I was in. Nine people my age I was then
Speaker 1: in my thirties are coming to places like this and
Speaker 1: coming to this place indeed, and the young women are
Speaker 1: not the downtrodden hooker or the little African American drug
Speaker 1: addic junky street. Uh, they're educated people, and they're educated
Speaker 1: in a way that is not so prohibited, that is
Speaker 1: not so restrictive, that is not so catholic guilt mentality.
Speaker 1: You can't do this, you can't do that. But you
Speaker 1: don't think that they were doing this as a or
Speaker 1: do you believe they were doing this as some form
Speaker 1: of sexual self expression? Were they people who were they
Speaker 1: were making money, they were paying the way through exploited
Speaker 1: But the point was they weren't being exploited. They were
Speaker 1: exploiting the men like me. But I was both typical
Speaker 1: of the male clientele. At the same time, as I said,
Speaker 1: I have a bit of a split personality. I'm also curious.
Speaker 1: I'm never without having a sense of what I'm doing,
Speaker 1: who I'm doing with. I'm never fully engaged. You're doing
Speaker 1: and you're watching a lawyer, I am truly a lawyer.
Speaker 1: From the massage parlor near blooming Deals, where does it
Speaker 1: go from there? I go to the massage parlers and
Speaker 1: I finally I go to a person who runs a
Speaker 1: massage back, can I manage one? So I managed a
Speaker 1: massage Polar for six months. Anybody in your life know
Speaker 1: you're doing this? I told my wife. Of course. In fact,
Speaker 1: my wife was working at Random House. She's been and
Speaker 1: she's still. And of course they had when you tell
Speaker 1: a Random House editor, who's your wife? She was, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go, right, I'm gonna go run on the not
Speaker 1: go to a massage parlor or even if I got
Speaker 1: some kind of a jones for a while, where I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go. If I'm gonna go run one, what did
Speaker 1: she say? You told it was for a book. Don't forget.
Speaker 1: She had mafia gangsters in her house before, and we
Speaker 1: had bodyguard. Somebody tells me she preferred the mafia gangsters
Speaker 1: Tosagay mafia people more moral. But you know, but I said,
Speaker 1: I think there's a story here. There was a story there,
Speaker 1: and I wanted her to come up. The Random House
Speaker 1: building with them was fifty third and third Avenue. My
Speaker 1: massage Polar was fifty four Street and third Avenue. I said, said,
Speaker 1: come on up, I want you to meet some But
Speaker 1: at that time I knew the massus is by name.
Speaker 1: I was taking the lunch, I was getting them to
Speaker 1: keep notes for me. I was doing so your days
Speaker 1: as a customer over, that's right, right, But the only
Speaker 1: reason I know these people was because I was a
Speaker 1: customer and I cultivated Their association with me was someone
Speaker 1: once you worked, once you worked to the massage part
Speaker 1: of you had the willpower to not stick your straw
Speaker 1: and the punch bowl there you there were no more.
Speaker 1: That's right. I graduated, so so to speak from being
Speaker 1: a consumer to being a management being, that's right. And
Speaker 1: I was keeping notes, and I was cultivating the girls,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to use their names. My idea for
Speaker 1: a book was to have it in a massage pollar.
Speaker 1: The two generations, the people like me, the customer and
Speaker 1: the mail cust sneeking in for a little, you know,
Speaker 1: when getting getting your oil change, and about fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: for thirty bucks, and the women, being of a different generation,
Speaker 1: very liberated to do this for money and not feel guilty.
Speaker 1: They were, They weren't victim. Does it doesn't end with
Speaker 1: the massage parlor phase. The book goes on the go.
Speaker 1: But here's what happened. I finally got the characters that
Speaker 1: would give me their name, and then I invited my
Speaker 1: masseus and her boyfriend home to dinner with my wife,
Speaker 1: and what happened was the boyfriend hit on my wife,
Speaker 1: who was cooking dinners crazy and the Masseus got mad,
Speaker 1: and my wife said, this is the end of it.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be associated with your research. But
Speaker 1: I lost the masseus for my story. She got very angry.
Speaker 1: So then I went to California and I heard about
Speaker 1: this place called Sandstone. It's a club of nudie. It's
Speaker 1: a beautiful mansion on the top of his canyon. And
Speaker 1: I was amazed that I made my whole story there.
Speaker 1: I became a nudist. This guy that wears three piece suits,
Speaker 1: son of a tailor, becomes a nudist. Were there? I
Speaker 1: was there six months, six months, and I would come
Speaker 1: back and for I meet my wife sometimes we meet
Speaker 1: in Chicago, Happy. She completely knew what you were doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't know about it, and she wasn't happy. Journey
Speaker 1: the marriage survival. When I was getting publicity, one time
Speaker 1: an article in New York magazine, an Evening in the
Speaker 1: Nude with Gate to Lisa, a devastating piece and my
Speaker 1: devasiting piece about you. Yeah, this crazy sex pervert. I
Speaker 1: was a pervert. Really for a period maybe two or
Speaker 1: three years. But I went through it and I got
Speaker 1: a book out of it. One of the sad things
Speaker 1: about it. I took the book seriously and it's a
Speaker 1: serious book. But I became known by that book primarily.
Speaker 1: And you think it overshadowed your other books? Oh, clearly
Speaker 1: did that upset you? It did then, but then in
Speaker 1: recent years it has been recognized as a serious book. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you think writing has changed for people? Like when
Speaker 1: you when you when you look at Roth, when you
Speaker 1: look at your contemporaries achieve or uptick and all these men.
Speaker 1: Do you think that those people, uh, people can have
Speaker 1: careers like them again now or is it the same
Speaker 1: as my business where you just can't have those careers anymore.
Speaker 1: They were of their time. I don't think it was
Speaker 1: ever easy. You can still do it now. What has
Speaker 1: hurt my line of work is the tape recorder. I
Speaker 1: don't use the tape recorder. I hang around with people.
Speaker 1: I'm not necessarily to use shirtboards. I use shirtboards and
Speaker 1: you round off the corner so they fit in your
Speaker 1: have a little package. I wish we have we had televisions.
Speaker 1: I have these things here. I'll leave someone, but there
Speaker 1: are good writers now. You see most of the good
Speaker 1: writers now are in the New Yorker. But there are
Speaker 1: not enough magazines that will support writing that requires traveling
Speaker 1: in order to write well. Sometimes you have to experiences
Speaker 1: on site research. You have to travel. You can't do
Speaker 1: it through Google. You have to get off your get
Speaker 1: on the train, and get on a plane, go somewhere,
Speaker 1: and that runs an expense account, so the cost of
Speaker 1: But big magazines a vanity Fair will support you if
Speaker 1: you have a hot subject, whereas the New Yorker will
Speaker 1: support you. And you could just not necessarily be writing
Speaker 1: about a major movie star, but you can be writing
Speaker 1: about some ordinary person if it's a good enough story.
Speaker 1: But it's very hard, but it always was hard, so
Speaker 1: I don't think it's the end of an era. I
Speaker 1: still think that there are young people that care about
Speaker 1: writing and can write well, and we'll have the patience
Speaker 1: and dedication to do the research. You have to do
Speaker 1: the research. There's no shortcuts. It's no shortcuts. You can
Speaker 1: read gay to Liza's story about retracing his steps across
Speaker 1: the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma fifty years after the march,
Speaker 1: along with his original account from nineteen sixty five at
Speaker 1: the New York Times website him Alec Baldwin, and you're
Speaker 1: listening to Here's the Thing, M.