Teaser

One evening early in 1971, as Author Gay Gaetano Galante Septimo Talese (The Kingdom and the Power, Honor Thy Father) was walking home from a Manhattan restaurant with his wife, he spotted a sign on a Lexington Avenue third-floor window: LIVE NUDE MODELS. That was when Talese, a lapsed Catholic of conventionally moralistic upbringing, suddenly realized that the sexual revolution had landed almost literally at his doorstep. Next day he walked back alone for his first massage-parlor massage.

That rubdown was inspiration--and the initial field research--for a projected 800-page magnum opus on sex, a work that Talese hoped would do for Eros what his earlier books had done for the New York Times and the Mafia. Instead, it has become perhaps the most famous unwritten volume in publishing history. Four years and a thousand orgasms later, not a word of Talese's vast researches has appeared in print.

Not, that is, until now. This week Esquire will publish a 9,000-word chunk from Talese's as yet untitled and still unfinished book. The excerpt is about a girlie photo, the man who has carried on a masturbatory affair with that picture since 1957, and the California model who posed for it. Talese found the man, Harold Rubin, now 35 and a Chicago porn merchant, by wandering into his sex shop; he eventually learned of his obsession and finally located the model, Diane Webber, now a Malibu, Calif., housewife and belly-dance instructor. (The two have never met.) He interviewed the pair and their families more than a dozen times, and recounts the sexual histories of all in the smooth, detailed prose at which Talese excels. "I got people to talk because I care and I'm interested," he says. "I wanted to see how people get through their days and nights."

One of the main characters of the book will be the self-described "participating observer" himself. Talese, now 43 and not visibly tired, will detail his experiences of managing two massage parlors at once ("I was very good at it"), frequenting fleshpots across the U.S. and Europe, sitting through porno films and sex-therapy sessions, frolicking in nudist camps, joining in group sex and otherwise living out the genitalian fantasies of millions--all in the name of journalism. "A writer cannot write from the sidelines," he says. "It's my own life story. I'm holding nothing back."

Not that there would be that much left to hide. He has already been described in a nude health-spa romp in New York magazine; Esquire has reported, among other brief encounters, his coupling with the ex-wife of a sex-magazine editor. Talese promises to tell in the book about his surprisingly tranquil domestic life. His wife Nan, a stunningly attractive senior editor at the Manhattan book publishing house of Simon

& Schuster, married Talese in 1959, when he was an obscure New York Times reporter. They live with their two daughters in an East Side townhouse. Nan has said she was pained at the descriptions of her husband's infidelities, but insists that their marriage has not suffered. "People think they know something about us," she says. "They don't."

Talese plans to publish further installments in Esquire and perhaps other magazines coming months. "I make my own deadlines," he says. Indeed he does. Until his editors at Doubleday read this month's Esquire piece, they will not have seen a word from Talese. Doubleday has put up $ 1.2 million, half of which he has already collected, for the sex opus plus a future book.

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