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• Mr. Talese's official site
• Excerpt from A Writer's Life
• Q & A with Mr. Talese

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Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome famed writer, Gay Talese, to this program. Along with names like Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, he is credited with bringing a fresh approach to non-fiction writing called "New Journalism" beginning in the 1960s. In 1965, he became a witness to history while covering the events in Selma, Alabama for the New York Times. More on that in a moment. His new book, a memoir in fact, is called "A Writer's Life." Mr. Talese, I'm honored to have you on this program, sir.

Gay Talese: I'm honored to be here. I'm a fan of yours.

Tavis: Well, I'm a fan of yours. Glad to have you on the program. Tonight I am only the second best dressed person on the show.

Talese: Well, I hope that doesn't make you feel too badly. You're doing all right, I think, on television (laughter).

Tavis: I appreciate that. So you have tailors in the family. I mean, for those who know you and know your work, you never see Mr. Talese without being as sharp as -

Talese: - Well, my father was born in Italy and was a tailor all his life and so were cousins of his and uncles of his. It was a family trade and I was almost about to be a tailor and I got a job at a newspaper. It was more fun. Tailoring is like writing, though. It's a solitary craft and you always stitch and I always stitch every word together and when it doesn't necessarily fit time, I'll rip it out and do it again. It's like tailoring. I write like a tailor.

Tavis: (Laughter) Are you ever bothered - this is a silly question, but I'm curious - are you ever bothered by writers who are in this profession today who show up for anything dressed any kind of way? Do you say that's their style and this is my style? No big deal?

Talese: Well, I feel that I dress up for the story and I think a story is a wonderful thing to dress up for. I mean, whether I was writing about the bridge construction guys which I did. I wrote about gangsters. I hung out with the mafia here - I mean in northern California, not here. The Bill Bonanno family in San Jose. And I've written about many other things that are not necessarily relevant to what I'm saying. But what I am saying is that I think that, when a person approaches a story, it is almost a kind of ceremonial occasion.

And if I'm dealing with people who are working people or dealing with people that own major corporations or I'm dealing with a foreign minister, though I have not, I'd still think that I'd present myself as one who is marking this as a special occasion because I think writing and telling the truth about people and also being responsible after it's published for being right, to be accurate - I believe strongly in that, as I know you do yourself - I think dressing up is not a bad thing for a story.

Tavis: Well, I feel honored then. You must have thought this conversation is important. Given how you came with a tie, you must have thought it was important, so I'll try to live up to that tonight (laughter).

Let me ask how you interpret - everybody else has their interpretation about what this "New Journalism" thing was that you and Capote and Thompson ushered in back in the 1960s. How do you view that labeling of what it is that you and others did?

Talese: Well, I think we all did it quite differently, but it came under the package of "New Journalism" and that's probably Tom Wolfe's fault or his - it's not his fault. I mean, he was a guy that always has a sense of what's about to happen and he has a way of writing it that makes it known to all of us because his style is dazzlingly interesting. Whether it was new, I don't know. But what I did was to try to tell a story. As you read short stories or you watch plays or you read novels, they're stories that are made up based perhaps on certain people or certain historical events, but the names aren't real.

What I wanted to do was write about ordinary people, which is what you get in fiction. I mean, Philip Roth writes great stories that are usually based on people that are not real names, and Truman Capote did write real. But mostly what we get from the Arthur Millers on the stage or stage writers, we get ordinary people projected on the story and made real to us, but we don't know their names.

Non-fiction writers, many of them who were on your show - Carl Bernstein, for example - will write about maybe notorious figures or famous figures, part of the Nixon administration, but Nixon, real name, probably a subject of five or ten biographies. Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt are real names.

But I wanted to write about the history of people that aren't newsworthy, are not historically identifiable, and I did this in the civil rights stories that I dealt with in the 1960s, construction workers who built the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge referred to before, great things done by people whose names are not on the steel towers of the bridge, people who create works of art that aren't necessarily known. I wanted to deal with the more obscure, the more overlooked, of the population.

Tavis: Let me go right to this text now, "A Writer's Life." It is - how do I put this - it is instructive for me when one of my producers - Carol, in this case - suggests to me that the guest I'm about to have on the program feels that this is the most important part of this text. So Carol suggests to me that Gay Talese believes that the most important piece of this book, "A Writer's Life," is his covering of the civil rights movement, his work in Selma.

So I want to go right to that particular piece because you think it's the most important part. Let's masticate on that. Let me start by asking, though, why it is you think that is the most important part of it. You've done so much. How do you suggest why this is the most important part?

Talese: All right. I have to be a little personal.

Tavis: Please do.

Talese: I told you I was a son of an Italian tailor. I didn't tell you that I was not the best student when I was in high school and later on in college.

Tavis: But I read about it (laughter).

Talese: Okay. What I do well, they don't give you grades for. I mean, I'm very curious and I'm willing to spend a lot of time to try to understand other people, people who have a story that I'm sort of related to, but I'm not really the basis of the story, but I have the time and patience to do that. You don't get graded for that in school, the time and persistence, without being aggressive about it.

In 1949, I was seventeen, born in New Jersey, couldn't get into a college. My father, the tailor, made suits for some man who was a doctor in our little town of south Jersey, Ocean City. This doctor happened to be born in Birmingham. He settled in New Jersey and became a physician in this town. My father is making him a suit; we're fitting him for a suit, and said, "My Gay didn't get into any college." He said, "Well, I can get him in Alabama." "Oh, you can?" He said, "Yep, I know somebody down there." So that's how I went to the University of Alabama. The doctor made a phone call to some friend of his on the Admission Board of the college, and this was 1949 and I was seventeen.

So I got on a train in Philadelphia all the way down to what was essentially a foreign country. My father was from a foreign country. This was like immigration for me. I got to Alabama and didn't know anybody, of course. I got to be a freshman and I was on the lily white campus of the University of Alabama. I hardly ever saw a Black person. African American wasn't even part of the language then.

But I was also aware because I certainly was a reader of newspapers that there was a notorious Klan that was centered in Tuscaloosa, Alabama that was the chapter. That was like the state capital of the Klan. That's a college town. Tuscaloosa was the University of Alabama, just right next to it. Then I thought, you know, I remember a Klan in my New Jersey town. I was born in 1932 and about 1939 and prior to and during World War II, there were Klans in New Jersey.

It wasn't so central to Alabama and later. I know we're talking about Selma. But it was interesting that there was nobody on this campus that was other than white. Even people like me were marginally - I mean, Italians and the Greeks and the Jews, we were minorities. There were some minorities. There were minorities of Jewish fraternities back then.

Then I graduated - without honors - and I got a job with the New York Times pretty much like I got to be a college student. I happened to meet someone on the campus - talking about networking - who was related to a man named Turner Catledge who was born in Mississippi, but for a period of time became the managing editor of the New York Times. This guy I knew said, "Oh, my older uncle or cousin, you look him up." I looked him up and I got a job as a copy boy at the New York Times. This was in 1953, a few months after I graduated from college.

I went into the Army for a couple of years, went back to the New York Times, got a job as a reporter in time and, in 1965 - well, now I'm jumping, but we have to move a little bit - I got an assignment to go down to Selma as part of a group. I wasn't alone. Three reporters from the New York Times; hundreds of other reporters. But I was there on Bloody Sunday, which was March 7, 1965. I was going back to where I had already been, though. I mean, most of these reporters were flowing in. Selma was a place they'd maybe never heard of.

But way back when I was a student between 1949 and 1953, I had been all over Alabama and I now saw the center of the universe in terms of egalitarianism or the quest for egalitarianism, the quest for civil rights and any kind of rights as an American being drummed out on this little stage of what had used to be a plantation town. Selma was one of the great plantation towns of the civil rights era. Here's a hundred years later, back in 1865, there'd been a big battle in Selma.

This is historically important, say I, and on that day I'm going to the Edmund Pettis Bridge where the civil rights marchers were supposed to go over that bridge toward Montgomery where they were going to protest to George Wallace for a lack of voting rights, among other things. While I'm just sitting there with all these reporters standing on the side of the road, there's the Sheriff's posse, there's the Alabama State Police and here comes Andy Young - not Andy Young. John Lewis was first. Dr. King wasn't there that day. He would be the next day, but he wasn't there that day. This was Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965.

Then I saw the mayhem and I saw the gas and I saw the clubbing and all this stuff. There were the horses, the Sheriff's posse, just one chaotic moment in the tear gas of history of civil rights right there. I'm running and I get in my car and went to the hospital, but I saw something that I never really properly dealt with. I did my little story, you know. Journalism, race, race, eight hundred words, nine hundred words, the next day another nine hundred words. You don't really do anything but skim the surface, skim it, skim it. Sometimes a whole career is just skimming the surface if you stay in journalism too long.

But in my mind, I said I have to stay in touch with this story. Dressing up for the story? No, no. Staying in touch with the story, in this case. So I kept going back to that little town long after the civil rights bill was passed, long after we had made advancements, so to speak, long after Dr. King was killed, long after people stopped worrying about singing the song, "We Shall Overcome." It's like the parade went through and there's only one person that I remember from Bloody Sunday who still remained in 1990 and, in 2006, he's still there, and that's the main character of my book. Not big, again, the ordinary people.

His name is J.L. Chestnut, Jr. J.L. Chestnut, Jr. was born in Selma. He could not go to college in Alabama. He went to Howard in Washington. He came back to Selma and became the first attorney in Selma. Today he's the largest attorney in all of Alabama, but he was a pioneer and he also witnessed with Bingham. I didn't know him that well, but he was one of the witnesses of Bloody Sunday. He was advising Dr. King during that time.

I wrote my whole story through this man who was a native son of Selma. A success story in one sense and a sad story in another sense because we have not as Americans achieved the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King. I know we played it on television, "I Have a Dream," but let's face it. We do not have fulfillment of King's vision of America. Nobody knows it better than Mr. Chestnut. I wanted to have him as a personality of endurance, of hope, strength, subject of bigotry, racism, but he's a great character.

Tavis: You know, the irony of this for me, Mr. Talese, is that in this book you also are very frank and very forthright about admitting your own personal shortcomings.

Talese: Right.

Tavis: Maybe that's not the best word. You're the writer here.

Talese: No, you're right.

Tavis: Where race is concerned, tell me honestly -

Talese: Okay. Four years on an Alabama campus, racism was part of the policy. It wasn't like some little thing that was done behind the scenes. It was up front. I never had a social conscience during the whole time I was in college, meaning I didn't even - this was 1949 to 1953. Granted, nothing was very mobilized with regard to the issue of segregation. Yes, there was something. Brown vs. Board of Education. There was certainly protesting here and there. Hell, I mean, in Scottsboro, Alabama, it was in the 1930s.

I don't want to belabor a point, but I want to make the point that I was not a man who had anything on my mind, as many college students even now or then, except getting through the class and not worrying about your brother, even knowing who your brothers are. It was just the idea of self-centeredness. I plead guilty to that. I was like most of Americans maybe even today. I mean, let's not dwell off your subject. I want to stay on your subject, but it is true that is pervasive and it is widespread what we're talking about.

However, Selma gave me an opportunity when I went back to see with a bit more wisdom than I had possessed when I was first a student at the University of Alabama. You'll also know that not only Selma, but Alabama during the period of George Wallace tried to prevent any kind of African Americans going there and that famous Autherine Lucy case happened in 1953, which is well before Selma in 1965. Tuscaloosa and Selma are separated by that sixty miles, but all of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia.

But parts of the north, Chicago and Martin Luther King after Selma goes up to Mayor Daly in Chicago. We know he was not - to paraphrase, left Rumsfeld with flowers. They didn't greet us with open arms like in Iraq today. So we have a hypocritical America saying, oh, the devils are in Selma. Yes, they are. They still are, but they're also in New York, they're in Chicago, they're in Washington. But I wanted to tell the story, but also reflect the larger hypocrisy that prevails in America and I think that's here.

Tavis: Speaking of that latter point, let me take you back to the text, to the story that you share about your conversation in a New York hotel room with George Wallace, speaking of hypocrisy. Share that story with me.

Talese: Well, this is before the march. Now I did see George Wallace in 1962, but he was the governor and he was going to be on "Meet the Press." I saw him before because I knew his public relations guy, his press agent, Bill Jones. I went to school with him in Alabama. I said, "Bill, I want to talk to the governor." We went to the Pierre Hotel which is on 5th Avenue, one of the more elegant hotels in New York. There was the Governor of Alabama in a suite up there on the 18th floor.

I go to see the governor and he was very cordial. I'd never met him before. He went over and got me some coffee out of the machine and all these aides were around him and we sat like we're sitting right now. I said something like, "Governor Wallace, why is it that you will not sanction the presence at our alma mater?" He graduated some years before me, our alma mater, the University of Alabama. He said, "You're talking about racism in Alabama? You got racism in your town here." He said, "Look out this window. We overlook beautiful Central Park." On the east side of Central Park, 5th Avenue, going up town, row upon row of doormen here and elevator buildings. He said, "There's not a Black person." Negro was the word in those days.

I said, "You know, I've been living in this neighborhood since I first came to New York to work for the New York Times which was in 1956 after the Army and I've never had a neighbor who's Black." You know I'm speaking to you now in 2006. I do not have a neighbor in New York City in my neighborhood, which is not far from that Pierre Hotel - my neighborhood is Lexington Avenue and Park Avenue in the east sixties - I don't have a neighbor today. I don't have a neighbor today.

It's indicative of what I think is pervasive through the great Beverly Hills, that bastion of liberal tolerance and the great movie stars that are always out there in the march. If there was a march in Selma, there'd be half of Hollywood down there singing the songs, but that's all public posturing. In our neighborhood, in our private dwellings and in the dwellings within our sense of sensibility about all the people, there are a lot of zeros across the board. A lot of people are not showing up.

Tavis: Let me ask you, to that point. This is so fascinating to me. Given that you are such a wonderful and articulate purveyor of this thing called American life, as evidenced by your historic career here, what are we not getting? I mean, the racial paradigm has shifted, as we all know. It's no longer a black and white construct as it was in the setting of this book, when you were a student at Alabama. It's no longer a white and black construct. The racial paradigm has shifted. We now live, as you know, in the most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever.

To your point, in 2006, we got white folk, respectfully, who still don't get it where race is concerned. Should I give up hope that that will ever happen? And, if I shouldn't give up hope, tell me why I should remain hopeful about it.

Talese: The reason I think you should remain hopeful about it - I'm hopeful about it. I'm seventy-four, so I have a few more years to have this hope, I hope (laughter) - but, no, what I think is that we're now in a kind of stalemate. It's many years since the civil rights march, but I think we're in a period now where the opportunities, no question about it, are more abundantly affordable and abundantly available to the Black American, the African American, and I don't think there is integration here now.

I don't think I'm talking to you in a time of integration. It's 2006. But I think these people who are getting the better educations than they did during their grandfather or grandmother's time and certainly in their mother's time even are being slowly assimilated in ways that are making the white folk comfortable. Not right away. They're not now. They say, "Affirmative action, we don't want that. Any quotas, we don't want any of this."

But I think that we have enough of this awareness of the African American as part of the partnership of America today that goes beyond the damn sitcoms where you see half of them are Black. Your Black superstars are all on television, whether it's you with your great show, whether it's some performing athlete, whether it's a politician rising in the Senate. But I do believe that off the set away from celebrity and camera, there is a more comfortable relationship going on that hasn't reached its fruition yet. It'll take another generation.

Tavis: Let me challenge you in that respect.

Talese: Go ahead.

Tavis: You may very well be right about that. I wouldn't argue your premise. I guess what I would take exception to, respectfully, is this notion that what you just suggested speaks to Black people doing their part to help make America as good as its promise so that we are taking advantage of educational opportunities, etc., etc. But we're putting in the hard work. Black people and other people of color are doing their part to make America a nation as good as its promise.

What your example leaves out for me, unless I'm missing something here, is that don't mean that white folk are changing. So you guys are getting more comfortable with us coming into your neighborhoods, you're getting more comfortable with us coming into your schools, so more of us show up and you become more comfortable -

Talese: - I disagree with you with all due respect, as they used to say, when they don't mean it (laughter). I do think they're more comfortable. Look, I hate correctness. I hate that, but I don't entirely hate it because when I was a kid growing up in my hometown, I was called a Wop, I was called a Dago, I was called doing time with Mussolini. We were Italians. We were the Palestinians of the time. We were the real lower level, lower than the shanty Irish. We were the worst.

Tavis: Now they get paid for it on "The Sopranos."

Talese: Oh, yeah, I know that. No one calls me a Wop. No one uses the "N" word. If you do, you're in real trouble. That wasn't true when I was a kid being called a Dago. It's wonderfully true now. I'm not called a Dago anymore. I mean, I kind of outgrew it because my generation got lost and now it's maybe "Sopranos" and at least the best gangsters around. But, no, let me be serious.

I think that, in this post correct period which we are not quite there yet, we're going to be more comfortable with one another. We're not going to have what Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass wanted. It's never going to be full. The only way it would be - and this is maybe what you don't want to discuss or hear - but I think we have to be more sexually involved. "Oh, you can't have that." I think you have to have that.

I wrote in this book about an interracial marriage in, of all places, Selma where a beautiful blonde white woman left her husband for a Black man who was running a funeral. This was not Chestnut, but somebody else. Boy, that caused such problems. One of the editors of the New York Times who had this photograph of the wedding, this Black editor, nullified that picture in the Times because it was an affront to his idea of what egalitarianism is about. It's very dangerous, but James Baldwin dealt with this. You know, a great essay of Baldwin - not essay, but a comment about "I don't have to marry your sister" or something like that. It's a complicated thing.

Tavis: Well, we need to do another show. We will do another show.

Talese: Tomorrow (laughter).

Tavis: (Laughter) We will do another show about it, to your point. Right quick in twenty seconds, that is happening though? We are seeing that whole Tiger Woods commercial. "I'm Tiger Woods." I mean, everybody is more sexually integrated than before and maybe that's the answer.

Talese: I'm afraid it is going to be the answer and I think it's got to be the answer because there's no other answer. You have to be comfortable. You have to have a shared concern. You have to have children. You have to be part of the inner establishment of the establishment.

Tavis: As it should be. That will be last word for this program that Mr. Talese has. "A Writer's Life," his new book. I haven't done justice to it at all in this thirty-minute conversation. Pick it up and check it out for yourself. An honor to have you here.

Talese: I'm pleased too. Thank you.

Tavis: Thank you, sir. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. I'll see you back here next time, though, on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.