Voyeur

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?

It's not up to me. A person does what he feels is right to do.

I sold my soul, if you wanna put it that way. I don't care.

I wanted the story. I would've done anything for it.

I felt I had to do it. I had to go on the record.

I was there. I was participating.

I wasn't sitting in the press box with a press card around my naked body.

For me, it wasn't a big thing,

'cause I had always had this second sense of self.

I wanted the truth, and in this book, being a nonfiction writer, a reporter,

I got the truth.

How do you get the truth? You have to participate, to be there.

You can't listen to what people say. It's what they do.

In 1980...

I flew out to see him.

I wanted to be sure this guy wasn't lying to me.

As a guest of the voyeur, I was gonna be a companion of the voyeur.

I went up one night and did watch.

He said, "I'll take you up."

Through the utility room,

you go up to the ladder and you get to a landing.

You go back, and there's a locked door.

That's the door to the attic, and only he had the key.

We went inside. He then locked the door behind me.

You could see light coming up from certain spots.

You're hearing televisions.

Voices.

He leaned over in one spot where there was light...

and he pointed down,

and we looked upon a very good-looking couple engaged in oral sex.

He made a kind of sign like that.

I leaned closer and closer,

watching intently.

And then I felt a man's hand on my neck.

It was the voyeur who crawled around and pulled me up...

very quietly but firmly.

I looked at him.

And that damn tie of mine, my red silk tie,

was only a couple of feet from the head of the woman

giving a blow job to this guy on his bed.

Jesus!

He said, "You have to be careful with that tie."