An unrelenting winter and circumstance dictated a most uncustomary form of interview with Gay Talese: a phone call. Another ice storm in New York kept Talese in his Upper East Side townhouse, where he first occupied a bachelor pad as a New York Times reporter at 26 and then bought the whole property with his wife, Nan, by 1973, when he was a writer – and subject – at Esquire. On a January late afternoon, when the call arrived, Talese was pushing 95, and I was in Pennsylvania, laid up on crutches and recovering from a knee injury. There was no time for a serendipiter’s journey.
