They say you should never meet your heroes because you’re bound to be disappointed. But that’s not always true. Let me tell you about the time I recently spent with the greatest magazine writer alive, Gay Talese.
“How nice to see you again, Joe,” he said graciously as he opened the door of his elegant town house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In truth, we barely know each other, having only met a handful of times over the years, usually at someone’s book party. Many years ago, he sent me a handwritten note congratulating me on a column of mine he liked back when I was at The New York Times. I still have it, and I still treasure it.
We were meeting at his home because, as he told me, “I don’t go out much anymore.” He continued, “I used to go to dinner parties or restaurants every night. I used to hang around all the usual places”—places like Elaine’s, the legendary haunt on 88th Street, where he could enjoy a good stiff martini and the company of the writers and editors who made it their joint for 50 years until it closed in 2011.
Talese is 93 now and needs a cane to get around. His angular face is handsome as ever, but his voice is a little creaky. Writing is difficult because he has Parkinson’s disease. He told me that his 92-year-old wife, Nan Talese, a legendary book editor whose writers included Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and George Plimpton, has a difficult time being on her feet for any length of time. “Every day I’m alive, I just want to stay at home so I can be with her,” he told me.
