Voyeur

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They couldn't hear me.

They couldn't see me.

But I could hear them and see them.

It's been a secret all these years.

It's been a secret for 47 years.

Nobody ever will be able to do what I did.

Yeah.

A lot of people

are gonna call me a pervert...

Peeping Tom.

I'm prepared for that.

But I have to tell somebody,

because I just didn't wanna die

and it be lost forever.

The beginning...

has to get the attention of the reader.

Page one, paragraph one, sentence one.

How do you begin?

I'd been a reporter

from the time I was 15.

I'm 80 now.

My life has pretty much been living

through other people's experiences,

and to be a very accurate chronicler.

An observer.

Watching other people. Listening.

I take my time,

and I am genuinely interested

in the people I'm writing about,

because there's something about them

that I feel I can identify with.

I live in a brownstone.

A small dot in a crowded block

on the east side of Manhattan.

I always dress very nicely.

Clothes make a difference.

My father was a tailor,

always beautifully dressed.

As a boy in my father's tailor shop,

I had clothes made for me.

My father was a prideful tailor.

I became a prideful journalist.

I have this converted wine cellar.

I call it a bunker.

The volume of material here represents

probably 50 years of research

propelled by endless curiosity.

With the flip of a page,

I can tell you who I was with,

who I had dinner with, where I was.

It's all there.

Look at this small type.

I have in my files, collected papers,

chronological through the year.

"Gay Talese, '53,

copy boy, New York Times."

Now we're into the '60s, '66.

This is where the Sinatra thing,

and Joe DiMaggio...

I have every article I ever wrote

and also the notes.

All this crap I keep.

Some of these boxes will testify

to the collecting of material

that later became a book, a magazine.

Everything is valuable.

Even when you don't write,

you've learned something.

Okay, well, I'm ready for a gin martini.

The story never ends.

The stories never die.

A lot of reporters think, you know,

when they leave the story, it's all over.

Sometimes it's just beginning.

I'm pursuing a story

about a man named Gerald Foos

who decided he wanted to buy a motel...

for the express purpose

of using it to watch everything

that was being done in private.

He could see what people were doing

in the privacy of their motel room,

looking down through this vent system that

gave him full access as he peers through,

watching in a crouched position.

Can't believe this story.

You can't make this up.

You can't make it up.

- Okay, do we start?

- We're rolling.

Hey, Gerald, when do you think

you actually became a voyeur?

I was brought up

in a very secluded sexual environment...

Yeah.

where my mom and dad

never told me anything about sex.

And I had to learn it on my own.

And I knew there was more to life...

and more to sex.

I just knew that it had to be more.

I had told Donna that I was a voyeur.

She says,

"Isn't that what they call a Peeping Tom?"

I says, "Yeah."

"But I call it voyeurism."

I says, "I wanna get a laboratory."

And she said, "What?"

And I said, "I wanna buy a laboratory."

I think I know how I'm gonna do it,

but it has to be absolutely foolproof

"insofar as anyone ever discovering it."

The street was basically built

for tourist travel.

That's the kind of people

that occupied the rooms.

Yeah.

I couldn't really find

what I was looking for,

and all of a sudden,

I came by the Manor House.

The Manor House Motel.

After I looked in that motel,

I fell in love with it

because it was exactly what I wanted.

Describe for us what the motel

looked like.

It had a high-pitched roof,

where I could walk down the middle.

And I figured that's where

I would build my observation platform.

- Right.

- Took about a year.

- Yeah.

- Because I didn't wanna make any mistakes.

I said, "I'll have to do

most of the construction",

because I don't want anybody to find out

what I'm doing."

When I'm thinking about this, I'm saying,

"Maybe a louver."

- Yeah.

- It's kind of a heating vent.

But my whole emphasis

was on absolutely private situation,

that they couldn't hear me,

they couldn't see me,

but I could hear them and see them.

You and Donna had been co-owners

until her death.

And the second marriage,

that woman, Anita Clark,

she filled in as adequately

as did your first wife.

What's amazing is you found two women

who were cooperative.

Maybe somebody might say

that was an act of God.

You see, I associate most things with God.

How powerful do you have to be

to create a universe?

I like to think of a supreme being.

He can do this...

and it vanishes.

It's gone.

I'm a natural person

to write about a voyeur,

because I'm a voyeur myself.

As a writer, I wanna be

inside their private lives.

I'm choosing

how we're gonna tell the story,

how we're gonna shade it,

color it, choreograph it.

And here is this weirdo,

taking it upon himself

to build this cathedral of sorts,

this little motel, a make-believe.

He thinks he's gonna see great things...

great sexual circus

every night of the week.

This relationship I had with him

starts with a letter.

I received this letter

on January 7th, 1980.

"Dear Mr. Talese,

since learning of your long-awaited study"

of coast-to-coast sex in America,

which will be included

in Thy Neighbor's Wife,

I feel I have information

that I could contribute to its contents,

"or to contents of future books."

This letter goes on.

Finally said, "If you're interested,

here's my address."

Surely, this was a kind of guy

I wanted to know more about.

I have so much respect for Gay.

We have a great relationship,

and a trusting relationship.

To me, he was like a god.

Mr. Talese is one of America's

proudest possessions.

As an author,

he wrote The Power and the Glory,

a story inside the New York Times.

You wrote the mafia book,

Honor Thy Father.

- How am I doing?

- It's correct.

Now you're back

with Thy Neighbor's Wife,

an eight-year study

of sexuality in America.

This will be the most talked about book

of the decade.

You were visiting

a place called Sandstone?

It's a nudist commune in Los Angeles.

You actually watched people

and all that stuff?

More than that. I mean...

You know the jokes you'll

face as you start the talk show rounds.

Starting here.

I became a resident writer

in a sexually free society.

We got to have sex with other people.

How did it affect

your sexual life at home?

Was it...

My wife was very unhappy,

as you can imagine.

We have daughters.

We're known in our community.

It seemed like I was doing

a reprehensible thing.

Say hello to Nan Talese. Mrs. Talese.

What I really minded

was the press about it.

And I wanted to protect

Catherine and Pamela,

and not have it hurt them.

I thought of myself at the front door,

with my arms just not letting them

into our house.

Is that about it for Gay's sex research?

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