It is near midnight on a desolate strip of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and Gay Talese has run out of gas. We are midway between his Manhattan town house and the dowdy seaside resort of Ocean City, New Jersey, where he grew up and where, when he was still a struggling writer, he paid $26,500 for a large red-shingled weekend house. His wife, Nan, is stretched out in the backseat of the Chrysler station wagon, with two yapping Australian terriers and a manuscript she is editing by flashlight. I am in the front seat with a reporter's notepad. We have arrived at a large Exxon station, according to plan, only to discover that all the pumps are being repaired. The Chrysler, which both speaks ("You are low on fuel'') and calculates, has advised us that we can go only another seventeen miles. Rising from the driver's seat, Gay, in two pieces of a $2,000 hand-tailored three-piece suit, enters the convenience store to see if the night manager can supply a little gas. He emerges instead with some directions to the nearest gas station. It is thirteen miles away. We should be able to make it.

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But somehow, as we drive off into the unlit night, we find ourselves on a road with none of the traffic signals the manager promised, and after five miles, fearing a breakdown in the middle of nowhere, we turn back. As we near the Exxon station, Gay's temper begins to boil over. Screeching into the station, he drives onto the gas-tank construction site, which has been blocked off with orange plastic cones. Bristling, stiffly erect, he strides toward the convenience store. Out of the rear seat floats Nan's fluty voice. "Gay, darling. Would you come talk to me for a minute, darling?'' Without looking back, Gay, even and measured, says, "It's all right.''

As her husband bounds up to the manager, Nan ruefully tells me that over the past few months she has adopted the routine of driving late to Ocean City, chatting with their elder daughter, Pamela, while Gay sleeps in the back. "I usually get gas early," she says. "I should have mentioned it." She is watching, a bit wary but totally composed, as Gay, tightly coiled with anger, stands face-to-face with the manager. "Goddamn it, you didn't do one goddamn thing to help us," he is saying. "You sent us down the wrong road. You put all our lives at risk. I'm going to call the police and see what they have to say." Not quite comprehending, the night manager is sputtering, "I told you which road. You wrote it down yourself. You wrote it wrong."

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"I'm sure he's right," Nan says with quiet good humor. "Gay is hopeless with directions. I should have gotten out of the car. "She is fumbling for an auto-towing-insurance card. She walks briskly to a pay telephone to start making calls.

However, in the end it is Gay who flags down a passing van and cajoles Norman, the young driver, into taking him to the closest station for a can of gas. During the forty-minute trip, Gay learns the young man's story, which he tells us later that night. Norman is twenty-seven and drives a forklift. In high school he was a star shortstop, so good that he won tryouts with the Toronto Blue Jays and the Chicago White Sox. "At the Blue Jays camp he just couldn't hit, he doesn't know why—he just couldn't seem to connect with the ball," Gay recounts, sadly shaking his head. "Then with the White Sox every ball took a bad bounce, and although he had made just two errors in the entire season, now in the training camp he couldn't hold on to the ball. But he's not bitter. He says, 'I guess it wasn't meant to be. ' " Gay repeats it slowly, wonderingly. "I guess it wasn't meant to be."

But before Gay delivers this story of another man's life, which he has composed reflexively in the bittersweet vein of Irwin Shaw or John O'Hara, he bids Norman farewell by peeling a hundred-dollar bill off the roll in his pocket. Norman's eyes widen and he protests that it is far too much. "Not too much for what you did, Norman," says Talese with courtly formality. "You're a good man, Norman."

It is 1:30 in the morning. The crisis is over. In the lurid overhead light of the station, Gay's gray-white hair glitters. His thin, hollowed-out face gleams gray-white, too, and his dark eyes bum. He leans toward me conspiratorially. I can see that in his mind he is writing my story—which is, after all, his story. The left side of his mouth crooks up in a knowing grin. "Scene!" he shouts hoarsely. "Scene! Scene!"

"He doesn't live the lives of these people, but he lives in their lives," says Nick Pileggi. "He absorbs their world like a sponge."

Gay Talese is a master at creating scenes. He won fame in the early 1960s by showing that a magazine writer—if he put in the hours and had the ear—could create the scenes rich in incident and dialogue that enliven fiction. Along with Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and other masters of what was dubbed ' 'the New Journalism, ' ' he made writing for Esquire or New York seem the most thrillingly contemporary thing that a young man could do.

A decade earlier it had been publishing stories in The New Yorker like Shaw or O'Hara. A decade later it would be shooting movies like Coppola or Scorsese.

For much of the sixties, it was magazine writing, and Talese was at the head of the pack. ' 'I think there's no doubt that he was the most important journalist of the sixties in terms of the impact he had on reporters in city rooms all over the country," says Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam. "Everyone read what he wrote, especially in Esquire, and wanted to write like him."

Talese writes books now, and, except for the excerpts, he rarely appears in magazines. At least not as a writer. For as well as being an author of books, Talese is also— by virtue of his longevity, his success, and his talent for making real-life scenes—a celebrity. Many who can't name one of his books could identify him as a longtime regular at Elaine's, the uptown saloon that began as a hangout for ascending writers and rose with them to become (like the White Horse Tavern of the fifties) a place for tourists to gawk at the literary stars.

Talese is one of the recognizable personalities of New York, gliding through fashionable parties and restaurants in his conspicuously tailored suits. As icy as a prince in a Bronzino portrait, he is also a loyal and generous friend with a fondness for the grand gesture. At a publication party he gave at his East Sixty-first Street town house last November for Nancy Friday, who is the author of Women on Top and the wife of Wall Street Journal editor Norman Pearlstine, Talese moved unobtrusively through a crowd that included Tom Brokaw, Diane Von Furstenberg, Mort Zuckerman, and Robert Caro, blending shyness with pride in a manner that recalled Jay Gatsby (especially if you knew how many shirts were upstairs in his closet). Which is not to say that Talese is always so gracious. He can be cuttingly rude, disrupting dinners with the aplomb of a Park Avenue terrorist. "Out of boredom I just want to shock people—no, not shock them, but cause some conflict or scene," he says. "There are times I'm sending out trial balloons. I'm trying to change the atmosphere. I want it to be more personal, because if it isn't personal, it doesn't interest me."

As a writer, of course, Talese is usually alone, unseen by the outside world. This month he surfaces with Unto the Sons, an ambitious saga of the ItalianAmerican experience as refracted through the Talese family. Like most Italian immigrants, the Taleses came from the impoverished South. Unto the Sons alternates between Maida, the remote Calabrian village where Gay's father was bom, and Ocean City, the American town in which he settled. With centripetal force, Gay, an obsessive researcher, sucks in much more: everything from the Pennsylvania asbestos town where his grandfather (another immigrant from Maida) found employment to the subjugation of southern Italy by Napoleon's brother-in-law Joachim Murat, to the impact of the First and Second World Wars. Unto the Sons— the first of a projected trilogy for which Knopf has guaranteed Talese $7 million—is chockablock with information, most of which will be unfamiliar even to Italian-Americans.

For the first time, Talese has written a book that is not journalism. It is part memoir, part history, and part historical fiction. In it he even changes a few names (a cardinal sin in his earlier writings) and re-creates many scenes without the benefit of direct eyewitnesses. So Unto the Sons is a departure. Yet it is also in some sense a sequel, and one can understand how Talese came to write it only by recalling its predecessor. Although eleven years have elapsed since he last produced a book, the scent of Thy Neighbor's Wife still lingers, burning so acridly in Talese's nostrils that, for him, it might have come out yesterday. Shortly before publication, Thy Neighbor's Wife was sold to the movies for $2.5 million (a record until Scarlett recently ran off with $8 million), and the book went on to top the best-seller lists. It was, in short, a commercial triumph. It was also a personal and professional disaster, in which Talese the author was completely obscured by Talese the scene-maker. Beginning in 1973 with a piece by Aaron Latham in New York, Talese, who intended a serious study of obscenity and sexual liberation in America, was lampooned for his "research" (the word cried out for leering quotation marks) in massage parlors and sex clubs. He was a joke. And for those who, unbidden, took the side of his beautiful and apparently longsuffering wife, he was an ugly joke. "Everything went rotten for me after the movie sale," Talese says. "Yeah, it sold a lot of books, but it seemed like I became in the minds of many a disgusting person."

At the end of Thy Neighbor's Wife, Talese, who had been practically invisible in his previous writing, stepped onstage and joined a cast of characters embarked on extramarital sexual explorations. The book closes with him standing naked in a group of nudists near Ocean City, observed by a gaggle of binoculars-toting solid citizens just like the ones he had grown up with. All eyes were on the professional voyeur. He says that when he wrote about that moment, he determined what his next book must be: "It had taken me to a point where I could not turn back."

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But with Talese no paths are straight. He is a master divagator. In his conversation, which is marked by punctilious and unidiomatic locutions, he will wander so far from the original point that he will catch himself minutes later and say, "What the hell am I talking about?" His life is as paradoxically precise and digressive as his speech. Although he rigorously structures his daily routine from his muffin in the morning to his one Bombay martini at 8:30 P.M., he works painfully, spasmodically, and not always productively. During the last decade, he started and abandoned another book before Unto the Sons. He had an agonizing and irrevocable falling-out with his best friend. He reached a complex accommodation with his wife. And finally, having always written about other people with whom he could identify, he prepared to mark his sixtieth birthday, which falls this month, as the author of a book that is nakedly about himself.

I was olive-skinned in a freckle-faced town," Talese writes in Unto the Sons. Ocean City was a Methodist community, and its Catholic minority was Irish. The Taleses, and especially Gay's Italian-born father, Joseph, protruded as alien. Although Gay and his younger sister, Marian, thought of themselves as Americans, they weren't permitted to eat or dress like their classmates. Joseph Talese, who was a tailor, outfitted his son like a mannequin, in velvet-collared houndstooth jackets and little fedoras. "Having to dress well—that's pretty ridiculous when you're growing up, especially in a beach town," Gay says. Ridiculous, but also functional: dressing formally was a way of maintaining distance from people who might condescend. Talese grudgingly admits that some boys called him "dago" and "Wop." He still remembers the names of those boys. When he reported the humiliations to his father, Joseph Talese would sternly say, "These people are bums. They are going nowhere." The hand-tailored clothing that Gay has worn all his life is like a suit of armor he has inherited from his father. In the mirror-faced wall of closets in his retreat, the top floor of his Manhattan town house, he has twenty-six custom-made suits. There are another ten in the Ocean City house. He shudders at the idea of owning a pair of blue jeans.

Throughout his reporting career, Talese has been drawn to Italian-American subjects. Writing in Esquire about the hottempered, big-tipping, dapper Frank Sinatra or the painstakingly polite, fiercely proud, dapper Joe DiMaggio, Talese was in part writing about himself. Similarly, in Honor Thy Father he established a surprising rapport with the young mafioso Bill Bonanno because they had so much in common: like Bonanno, Talese felt himself only "a fractional American," unable to break from his immigrant father, and, also like Bonanno, he acted in his own household as "the dominant Sicilian male who did as he pleased, came and went as he wished."

Talese's talent as a reporter is to empathize with his subjects. His books are oblique tunnels of self-discovery. "He doesn't live the lives of these people, but he lives in their lives," says his first cousin the writer Nick Pileggi. "He absorbs their world like a sponge." He resembles an actor who, choosing a role in which he sees an aspect of himself, expands that aspect to fill his personality. He adopts the references and values of the people who are his subjects. He moves in so close that he loses all distance.

This was both his virtue and his failing at The New York Times. He joined the newspaper as a copyboy in 1953 and returned, after a two-year army stint, as a sports writer. "I didn't cover games, but I wrote about people who were athletes in a way that, at least on The New York Times, they hadn't been written about before," he says. "I was more interested in where they came from, in what they thought in between games—what the people were, not what their batting averages were." When he was reassigned to the city desk in 1959, he continued to focus on individuals and to experiment with the low-key lyrical sentences and transcribed dialogue his favorite short-story writers employed.

In his spare time, of which there was plenty, Talese wrote magazine pieces, both for The New York Times Magazine and for Esquire. He resisted hard-news assignments, wanting a regular column he couldn't get. In 1965 he told Abe Rosenthal, who was then metropolitan editor at the Times, that he was quitting. "I wish I could give you a column, but it's not my candy store," Rosenthal told him sorrowfully. He asked what the young reporter was going to do.

"Write a book," Talese answered.

"What on?"

"The New York Times."

He acted in his own household as "the dominant Sicilian male who did as he pleased, came and went as he wished."

"Who the hell wants to read a book about The New York Times?"

Rosenthal didn't understand that Talese would look at the institution of the Times the way he looked at everything: as a web of individuals. The Kingdom and the Power, an instant classic, founded a school of personality-oriented media books that continues to flourish. And it transformed Talese from a magazine writer into an author.

His next book was Honor Thy Father. (The title The Kingdom and the Power was invented by an Esquire editor, and Talese, whose earnestness is easily confused with pomposity, has held on to the conceit.) What makes Honor Thy Father extraordinary is that for much of the time that Talese was researching it Joe Bonanno was in hiding and his son Bill was the target of Mob hit men. "There's a wailful of Mafia books, but they've been about informers or former gangsters,'' says Pileggi, the author of Wiseguy. "Gay got one about a guy who was still operational. It was written at the same time Bill Bonanno was dodging bullets. It's amazing." Bill Bonanno would come to dinner or even baby-sit for the two Talese daughters, posting a couple of armed bodyguards downstairs. Getting closer and closer to his subject, Talese defended the Mafia as a provider of essential services to a hypocritical society. "If you want someone murdered, they'll do it for you," Talese's friend author A. E.

Hotchner recalls him saying. "If you can't get a loan, they provide one."

Talese began to see the entire world through the eyes of an embattled gangster. "If you were talking about fireflies in Iceland," says Nan, "he would bring in the Mafia."

As Talese considered what book to begin next, he lighted on a topic with even more personal significance than the filial relationship of an Italian-American to his immigrant father. He chose a subject that connected directly to the sin-burdened Ocean City altar boy who didn't even masturbate until he left home for college, to the dutiful son who sensed that "there was this erotic life going on in parked cars and behind sofas that I was not partaking in." He would write, he decided, about the sexual frustrations of white heterosexual American men who were entering mid-life in a declared Age of Sexual Liberation.

He told his wife that if she felt the book would endanger their marriage he would not undertake it. She told him he was being silly.

Talese had never wanted to get married. In 1957, when he was a Times sportswriter, he was introduced to Nan Aheam, a recent graduate of Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. Like many well-bred girls in the fifties, she was working at respectable jobs until she found a husband. In Gay she saw a handsome young man with a passion for books and a single-minded ambition to be a writer. He had little in common with the boys who had escorted her to Princeton games and to the Stork Club and to the Westchester Cotillion, at which she had made her debut. Those boys would be lawyers and bankers like her father, a handsome man who wore three-piece suits and consoled himself with alcohol. Her father paid attention only when she talked to him of philosophy or literature. She had majored in those subjects at Manhattanville.

For Gay, this dark-haired young woman with enormous green eyes might have been Judy Jones in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams," a short story he loved so much that he had typed it out to see how it was constructed. Fitzgerald's protagonist was, like Gay, a tradesman's son in a summer resort, for whom the cultured, classy, glamorous Judy Jones was the incarnation of every youthful dream. So for Gay was Nan Aheam. After an initial lunch date at Toots Shor, during which Nan concluded he was more full of himself than anyone she had ever met, they hit it off. They had been dating for about a year when Nan, unable to get a commitment from Gay on whether he would be working over the Fourth of July weekend, went off with another boy and some friends to Maine. When she returned, she called Gay at the Times. His voice was icy. Leaving work, she went over immediately to see him. "I'm terribly sorry," he told her, "but I can't spend my time worrying about competing with other young men. I have my work to do here. If you want to see me, you're going to have to be there for me."

Nan decided it was worth it. However, as she proceeded to refuse dates with the eligible young men of Rye, her parents wondered when she would announce her engagement. She had a portrait taken at Bachrach, which won her another six months. But two years went by, and Gay had not indicated any readiness to marry.

In May 1959, The New York Times Magazine dispatched Talese to Rome to write about the Via Veneto. Back in New York, Nan wrote him moony letters until he cabled her to come join him. With great animation, Nan, at fifty-eight still a beautiful, wideeyed postdeb, tells me what happened next.

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"On the way to lunch I went to Alitalia and booked the ticket for the next day," she remembers. "I called Mummy and Daddy and said, 'Can I have dinner with you tonight?' Which was a strange thing to ask. Of course, they said yes. I was just doing it one step at a time. I told them that I had received a cable from Gay asking me to marry him. It was totally untrue, a bald-faced lie. Mummy said, 'No, you have to be married here with the family.' I think I wept and carried on. I know I did. My mother said, 'You don't know what it's like to live with a writer. You weren't brought up for it.' But my father said, 'Go ahead.'

"The next morning I called Gay's parents very early and asked would they please send Gay's baptismal certificate to the Times bureau in Rome—we were getting married. I was making this all up out of whole cloth. And I never do things like this, I promise you. ... I then asked at Random House to take a week off. I had only been there three months. I was very shy. We wore white gloves in those days. Whenever anyone in my area would use a four-letter word, they would say, 'Sorry, Nan.' When they asked why I wanted the week off, I told them I was getting married. I was burning all my bridges.

"That afternoon my mother came in and during lunch we went shopping for my trousseau. There was so much logistics involved that there wasn't time for reflection. On the plane that night, the man next to me, just making conversation, said, 'Where are you going?' I said to Rome. He said, 'Why?' I said, 'To get married.' And for the first time, I thought, Holy good night—what have I done?"

When she got off the plane, she saw Gay in the lounge, his dark head buried in his sleeve, the image of dejection. He sensed what was about to happen. "To me, marriage meant living a boring, predictable life," he explains. "My parents' home was too stable." But over long walks in the Borghese Gardens—"like a prelude to prison," Nan recalls—he said he would give it a try. If it failed, Nan would receive no alimony. Although Nan had told their parents they were to be married in a church, Gay refused. A civil wedding was arranged by one of Talese's heroes, Irwin Shaw, whom he had met once in Paris and happened to run into in Rome. Shaw threw them a party afterward. For a young writer who traced his lineage from Fitzgerald through Shaw, the auguries seemed right.

A telephone call from Nan's mother in Rye to their Rome hotel was the initial upset. Susan Aheam had learned from a Times wedding notice about the civil ceremony. Outraged, she told Nan that a wedding outside the church was invalid. Nan began to cry. Gay grabbed the phone and told his mother-in-law not to interfere. "Who do you think you are?" she replied.

It was a fateful remark. The newlyweds did have the Aheams over to dinner in their shabby apartment (a third-floor room in the house that Gay and Nan would acquire in 1974 for $175,000). But that was the last time Gay would see them. "I think I felt challenged in a serious way," he says. "I knew I had to break that relationship." When their daughters were bom, Nan visited Rye with them by herself. She was a traditional wife who had snared an unconventional husband. "I knew when we got married that I was going to go along on his journey," she says. "I had, in Hemingway's term, 'signed on.' Our lives would take the direction that Gay wanted them to take."

Gay wanted Nan to work. Suggesting that she enter publishing, since she read books all the time anyway, he had arranged her job interview at Random House. She always assured him that if he ever asked her to quit she would. "I really did everything I could to please him," she says. "I wanted to make sure that the path was clear for him to do his work. I took it on myself to run interference for him in the world, because the little things will upset him."

Once, they were heading off for a weekend in Gay's 1957 Triumph sports car and he ran a stop sign in Central Park. A policeman pulled them over and asked, "Didn't you see the stop sign?" "Of course I didn't see it," Gay replied. "If I had seen the stop sign, I would have stopped." As Gay searched for the registration, Nan, having just renewed it, knew he wouldn't find it. "Gay, darling," she murmured, "it's on our fireplace mantel." He turned to her and said, "What? You're telling me that the registration is on the mantel?" He got out of the car, slammed the door, and declared, "Officer, you can have it all. Keep my car, my license, my wife—everything. I'm leaving. ' ' He started walking away. The policeman, alarmed, called him back, pleading, "All right, all right, just go on." Gradually, Talese became disenchanted with the project. "When you get to a certain age, being under the umbrella of these powerful, powerful people gets a little wearing," Nick Pileggi says. "Gay was no longer small enough to fit under that umbrella." Talese says that while part of him, rubbed raw after Thy Neighbor's Wife, wanted to use Iacocca as a shield, another part was shoving Iacocca out of the way so that he could write the chronicle of his own life. Then there was his distaste for the business world. The reporter who had found so much to admire in the Mafia and the sex industry was repelled by the businessmen who surrounded Iacocca. Although he had invested months of research, Talese was wavering on his commitment when he got a phone call from David Halberstam, whom he considered his closest friend. Halberstam said he thought they might have a problem. He hadn't realized Talese was writing about Iacocca until he read about it in the press. Halberstam was planning to write next on the decline of the American automobile industry. He would want to talk to Iacocca himself. Talese was stunned.

He was an artist who was tripped up by everyday life. She was the wife who smoothed the way. That was the situation in 1973, when he began managing a massage parlor two blocks from Nan's office, engaging in open infidelities, and talking about all of it to curious and exploitive members of the press.

Gay went about researching sex in America with the same blinkered intensity with which he had pursued the Times and the Mafia. His friends had occasionally been bored by his monomania. Now, as he clinically quizzed women he barely knew about their sexual habits while his own wife chatted coolly at the other end of the table, they became embarrassed as well. "Everybody got tired of talking about blowjobs at dinner," says David Halberstam. "It was a long period. For ten years it was all he would talk about." One evening, Talese and A. E. Hotchner and their wives attended a formal dinner at the East Side home of an investment banker. With mounting alarm, Hotchner noticed Gay in animated conversation with the women on both sides of him. "What we're discussing is masturbation," Gay announced. He had been reporting the results of a recent study on the percentage of men and women who masturbate; the women were skeptical. "Let's go around the table and everyone say whether you masturbate or not," Talese proposed. Hotchner tried to call it off, or—a compromise—to hand out secret ballots. No. Gay insisted on polling the table, and almost everyone replied.

Or take a smaller dinner, this one at Elaine's to toast Susan Cheever's novel Looking for Work, which Nan had published. Gay zeroed in on Times movie critic Janet Maslin, whose then boyfriend, Ben Sonnenberg, a victim of multiple sclerosis, walked with canes. Once it was established that Sonnenberg couldn't get to Elaine's in the snow, Talese confronted Maslin. What was it like to have sex with a cripple? She wouldn't reply. Talese rephrased the question, again and again and again. When Susan Colgan, a friend of Cheever's, tried to deflect him, he turned on her. In a rage, Colgan retreated to the bathroom to compose herself. "Gone off to the ladies' room to cry?" he asked when she came back.

What was Nan thinking? She would never say. Research aside, Gay was clearly rebelling against his Catholic upbringing. Was he also attacking his wife? Gay's mother was an emotionally remote woman who would not react to him: in Unto the Sons he describes how once, as a toddler, he placed his hand in her pocket for greater intimacy, only to have her firmly and wordlessly remove it. His wife, no matter how outrageously he behaved, stayed just as cool. "I do think he would probably have done the book a lot faster if I had stormed out," Nan says. "I don't react in an emotional way very often. I don't lose my temper. I think Gay would have relished a blowup. I couldn't do it." She concentrated on her daughters: "I don't think the marriage would have survived six months at that time without children." And she left Random House, where Gay had placed her, for Simon & Schuster, a house he thought (correctly) was not right for her. Instead of a job she could drop at Gay's request, she now had a career. No longer was her primary identity as Gay's wife. "I think when one is exploring the world of liberated sexuality, one doesn't need a wife," she says. "I felt unnecessary as Gay's wife." She emphasized her middle initial, "A.," as if to remind people that she was an Aheam before she was a Talese. "If I were only Gay's wife and he was behaving that way, I would be crushed," she reflects.

The rumbling of hostile press, which had from the start made Gay feel that he was "writing this book in Macy's window," crescendoed with jackhammer force upon the publication of Thy Neighbor's Wife in early 1980. Reviews scrutinized the author more than the book, branding him a despicable husband and father. "Being the focus of all that media attention, that glare, is just horrible," Nan says. "You become objects for other people to toss around. You become a media toy." Ironically, the bad publicity that derailed Gay's career propelled hers. "As a result of being the wife in Thy Neighbor's Wife, Nan became famous," Gay says. "These days fame and notoriety are the same thing. Her career shot up. She became the victim star." Nan went from Simon & Schuster to Houghton Mifflin, eventually rising to editor in chief and publisher, before settling at Doubleday with her own imprint (her authors include Pat Conroy, Margaret Atwood, and Ian McEwan).

But Gay felt abandoned and alone. In line to succeed Jerzy Kosinski as president of PEN, he saw his candidacy scuttled by the artillery that preceded the book's appearance. Even more painful, of all the people he knew, only Pete Hamill telephoned to offer sympathy—and Hamill wasn't even a close friend. "It isolated me," Talese says. "Not me and Nan. Me. She was as supportive as I guess she could be, but I was alone." They had no allies, in large part because the ugly commentary concentrated on their marriage, a marriage that even their intimates found baffling. It was as if the press had put the marriage on trial, and the Taleses' friends, appalled by Gay's insistence on making public what other men do discreetly, feared being caught in the middle. "The things being written were just awful, but no one said anything to us," Nan recalls. "It was like being burned at a pillar and everyone walking by and nobody saying anything."

This was the atmosphere in which Talese contemplated his next book. His defiant side wanted to do something "even more disgusting," as he puts it: the story of a motel owner and voyeur who keeps a detailed chronicle of other people's sexual behavior. Nan told him he was out of his mind. Thinking a portrait of an ItalianAmerican would be more respectable, he considered DiMaggio and Sinatra, but neither man would sit for it. His next idea was the Yankees. Attending games in owner George Steinbrenner's box, he met Lee Iacocca, who seemed to offer the solution. Over the next several months, Iacocca allowed Talese to travel with him, attend meetings, and stay in his Bloomfield Hills house. Talese envisioned a book with the Italian-American entrepreneur in the foreground and the turmoil of the automobile industry finely drawn behind.

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Over the next few months, Talese and Halberstam tried to negotiate a compromise that would save their friendship. In truth, the friendship was already sick if not dead; otherwise, neither man could have been amazed to find out what book the other was preparing. Halberstam, recently remarried and a new father, no longer required such a close male friend. Talese, for his part, sensed that Halberstam was drawing back from the noxious mix of lucre and notoriety of Thy Neighbor's Wife. A competitiveness that always bubbled dangerously had now risen to the surface. The two men planned to talk in December 1981. That month David's older brother, Michael, was killed in a burglary. The writers' dispute was put on hold until the following March, when Halberstam returned to New York. They had a series of tortured conversations. They have barely spoken to each other since. Talese, who beneath the mannerisms is (in Halberstam's words) "a sweet and generous guy," still mourns. "Sometimes the friendship between two men can be like a love affair," Talese says. "It was that intense. . . . It's probably my fault that we haven't really spoken since, because I know that it can never be the same and I don't want it to be less than what it was."

When Bantam Books suggested to Iacocca that he write his own story with a ghostwriter, Talese took the opportunity to bow out of the project. (Iacocca's book went on to be a record best-seller.) No longer working on a book and feeling more isolated than ever, Gay grew surly and depressed. He was talking about a family history, but he couldn't take the leap. At the end of 1982, Nan announced that she would be traveling on business to London the following May and asked, "Is that convenient?" He never replied. She resolved to go anyway. "Gay was so miserable," she says. "He was trying to destroy everything we had at that time. I knew if I was going to leave, it would force him to move. Sure enough, at the end of April, he said, 'I'm going to Italy.' Gay doesn't like to be left behind. He wants to be the one who leaves." After Nan arrived in London, Gay joined her from Rome for a weekend that was happy enough until a trivial incident caused him to explode. When Nan urged him to be reasonable, he turned to her and said, "You never asked permission." By going to London without clearance and flouting the pretense that Gay set the rules, she had broken an unspoken law of more than twenty years of marriage. "I knew I had to move away from the pressure of his unhappiness," she explains. "That was the beginning of my becoming an independent person."

During his research, which kept him away from home more than ever, Gay formed romantic attachments with a translator and with other women in Rome. "Nan and I have both had relationships with members of the opposite sex that have been enriching and that we will not deny or be embarrassed about," he says. "We have both a life together and a life separate." Nan, while less forthright about her own extramarital involvements, concedes the importance of at least one male friendship in getting her through the rough years when she was viewed as the silent martyr. Although some people who know them well wonder why they have stayed together, this is no show marriage. Each can please and wound the other like nobody else.

At the end of 1986, feeling that he could not make progress on the book unless he found a quiet haven outside New York, Gay asked Nan if she would move with him to Ocean City. It is not her favorite place. They settled instead on Taormina, a seaside town in Sicily, finding in a weekend of house hunting a charming medieval villa. During their three months abroad, Nan would perform her administrative and editorial duties through the mail and a daily three P.M. telephone call to Houghton Mifflin. Taormina was idyllic. Nan picked oranges off the trees and squeezed them for juice. Gay, establishing the schedule he requires, worked in the mornings and evenings and played tennis in the middle of the day. Nan might have realized something was amiss when she caught herself packing a month before their departure. A more worrisome tip-off was a painful right arm that, by the time they left, was close to paralyzed. On the way back to New York, they stopped in Rome and had a delicious dinner. In the middle of it, Nan said, "I just want you to know that I have never been so unhappy in my life."

Gay was lacerated. He had been so absorbed in his work that he had had no idea. Instead of being sorry, he was angry. He felt trapped. Nan's career required him to be in New York, and the hectic life there made him miserable. In the fall of 1987, his hair began to turn white and wiry. He went to see a specialist, who asked, "Did you undergo a trauma about six months ago?"

Nan's rebellion had proceeded as covertly as any of the southern-Italian Resistance movements that Talese had studied. For Gay their stay in Sicily was not only an opportunity to push ahead on the book but also a way to restore the time of their youth, when Nan was so awestruck by her talented husband that she found fulfillment in his shadow. Nan saw it as an attempt to revoke her hard-won independence. "After Taormina I answered back," Nan says. "I felt I had been suffocated. I was in danger of losing my own life." In New York they could not even be civil to each other. She thought he was trying to control her. He thought she was resisting him on everything. "I was afraid of being under his thumb," she says, "and he was shocked that I was unhappy." They went together to see psychiatrist Dr. Peter Neubauer, and recounted their versions of the Taormina sojourn. It was as if they had not been in the same place. Although Gay had begun seeing Neubauer to deal with his own unhappiness before the trip, it was Nan who started going to him now to secure her place outside Gay's vortex. Gay returned to Neubauer the following fall, but concluded he wasn't benefiting from it. When Nan asked the psychiatrist, Neubauer said that Gay was right. "He comes in and tells me about Cavour and the unification of Italy," Neubauer told her. "He's writing his own therapy."

Conscious of a margin that separated him from his friends and his wife, Talese in Unto the Sons explored the ethnic heritage that had for as long as he could remember made him feel different, but which, he was discovering, connected him to a great tradition. He now regards his whole life in an Italian light. For instance, he says his decade at The New York Times was his happiest period, because the Times was a village like Maida, but it was a village that he, like his father and his father's father, felt an irresistible urge to flee. This mode of analysis is seductive, for Talese does seem very Italian. His style of dress would fit in perfectly on the Via Condotti. He believes in la bella figura, putting on a good face. He is so fastidious that he brings an extra shirt to the gym so he can change between the bicycle and the weight machines. Like a pious Italian, he gives money to every beggar whose palm crosses his path. He tips everyone. His delight in children and distaste for dogs, his fondness for large groups ("Nothing makes Gay happier than a table for ten," says Pileggi), his need to know and be known by the maitre d', his pursuit of women and his pack of male friends—all of it is right out of southern Italy.

What may be most southern-Italian about Talese is his allegiance to the principle of hard work, his belief that, as Pileggi says, "if you hit the rail two hundred times every day, eventually the railroad gets to Pottstown." The secret of Talese's classic magazine pieces was the way he went back again and again, waiting for the perfect scene, when any other reporter would have declared the job done. His standards have not slackened. With some of the money from the movie sale of Thy Neighbor's Wife, he excavated a space he calls "the bunker" beneath his town house. Undistracted by windows or telephones, he uses pens and papers of all colors to storyboard his books like movies. His files brim with reams of superfluous research. When it comes time to write, he weighs each word, consulting a thesaurus to see if another word might work better. There is nothing natural about his writing. He is a craftsman, cutting the sentences, sewing them into paragraphs, and stitching the paragraphs together as his father would tailor a suit. He used to pin the pages of a chapter to one wall and stand back with binoculars to scan the sweep of the narrative. Now Nan, returning home from her workday, reads him his day's work aloud.

One night over dinner I remarked to Talese that many of the modem writers he admires—Shaw, O'Hara, John Cheever— did their best work in short stories but, striving for more, devoted their later careers to novels that fell short. Could it be that Talese too would be remembered more for the early magazine pieces than for these books that have cost him so much effort? He pounced. "My book The Kingdom and the Power is the best thing that will ever be written on journalism," he said. "No one comes near it. There's a richness in that book, and in Thy Neighbor's Wife. These books teach you things and bring you into different worlds. The Frank Sinatra piece is something that I dashed off with my left hand. I'm not saying I don't think it's good, but you can't compare it to the books. I'm not modest when it comes to my work. I have an arrogance about what is going to last. I think there are sprinters and marathon runners. I'm a marathon runner. A magazine piece is a sprint. The real test is the big book.

. . . For eight or ten years you have to be willing to become unknown, not to publish, to quit, to die, and take a chance that you'll be a bust."

Although he no longer writes magazine pieces, Talese still has opinions about them. In late November he accepted an invitation to speak to a journalism class at New York University. In a cream-colored vest, brown herringbone sports jacket, and red tie, he stood ramrod-straight and answered students' questions. When one asked him how sportswriting has changed since the days when he plied the craft, Talese told the story of Norman the forklift driver who didn't make the cut. This, he said, is a story he would like to have written. It ties in to the other sports profiles he has done, pieces that these collegiate novices have studied: of DiMaggio, Joe Louis, and Floyd Patterson, all in the twilight of their careers. "There's a tremendous sadness," Talese said. "It is a cruel market and a cruel business. Sportswriters don't tell you about that."

And then his mind went soaring over the landscape of his own career, and he jumped without warning, as he often does these days, into autobiography. For his subject is no longer the Times or the Mafia or sex. It is himself. "I don't want to be cut," he told these students. "I don't want to drop into obscurity. I want to write about something with lasting appeal. So you can't write about today's news. I write about the bittersweet of success, how it isn't what you think it is, about the emptiness in the echo of the cheering. It relates to my own life. I—" Then he stammered, realizing that he couldn't for the life of him recall the question that had set him off. He shook his head. Obsessively, irrepressibly, he was doing with his own life what he had done with the lives of hundreds of people, famous and obscure. He was turning it into a story.