Elizabeth Mitchell's Blog

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{“main-title”:{“component”:”hc_title”,”id”:”main-title”,”title”:””,”subtitle”:””,”title_content”:{“component”:”hc_title_empty”,”id”:”title-empty”}},”section_5ZtkF”:{“component”:”hc_section”,”id”:”section_5ZtkF”,”section_width”:””,”animation”:””,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:””,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”vertical_row”:””,”box_middle”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”section_content”:[{“component”:”hc_column”,”id”:”column_vtfQF”,”column_width”:”col-md-12″,”animation”:”fade-in”,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:”false”,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”main_content”:[{“component”:”hc_pt_post_informations”,”id”:”SCjkR”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”pageHead”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”post_type_slug”:””,”position”:”left”,”date”:false,”categories”:true,”author”:false,”share”:false},{“component”:”hc_title_tag”,”id”:”5ZtkF”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”text”:”Anita Hill’s Afterlife”,”tag”:”h1″},{“component”:”hc_title_tag”,”id”:”DI5Sx”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”publicationTitle”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”text”:”O Magazine”,”tag”:”h3″},{“component”:”hc_title_tag”,”id”:”UTyhl”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”publicationDate”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”text”:”July 2005″,”tag”:”h6″},{“component”:”hc_wp_editor”,”id”:”Xhugf”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”editor_content”:”As a teenager in Oklahoma, Anita Hill showed uncanny prescience in choosing a hero for the life that awaited her: Barbara Jordan, the outspoken 38-year-old congresswoman who captivated the nation when she forcefully defended the constitution during Richard Nixon’s impeachment proceedings. “I was watching the Watergate hearings, and I thought, This is the bravest woman—and she’s from Texas? Next door to me? This black woman is out there, and she’s a star in these hearings. She’s sitting with all these guys, and she’s definitely not a shrinking violet.” The image worked for Hill, Suddenly, she could envision how “you could be in the kind of skin that I was in, maybe even come from the same background, and make an impact on the world.””},{“component”:”hc_button”,”id”:”PGN6v”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”moreLink”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”icon”:””,”style”:”link”,”size”:””,”position”:”left”,”animation”:false,”text”:”Read more »”,”link_type”:”classic”,”lightbox_animation”:””,”caption”:””,”inner_caption”:false,”new_window”:false,”link”:”https://web.archive.org/web/201101222... hide”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”main_content”:[{“component”:”hc_column”,”id”:”column_fsOTS”,”column_width”:”col-md-2″,”animation”:””,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:””,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”main_content”:[{“component”:”hc_adv_image_box”,”id”:”d3cOz”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”image”:””,”icon”:””,”title”:””,”box_style”:”full_content”,”image_animation”:””,”hidden_content”:false,”thumb_size”:”large”,”button_text”:””,”button_style”:”link”,”button_dimensions”:””,”button_animation”:false,”extra_text”:””,”subtitle”:””,”text”:””,”link_type”:”classic”,”lightbox_animation”:””,”caption”:””,”inner_caption”:false,”new_window”:true,”link”:””,”link_content”:[],”lightbox_size”:””,”scrollbox”:false},{“component”:”hc_adv_image_box”,”id”:”YcyWS”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”image”:””,”icon”:””,”title”:””,”box_style”:”full_content”,”image_animation”:””,”hidden_content”:false,”thumb_size”:”large”,”button_text”:””,”button_style”:”link”,”button_dimensions”:””,”button_animation”:false,”extra_text”:””,”subtitle”:””,”text”:””,”link_type”:”classic”,”lightbox_animation”:””,”caption”:””,”inner_caption”:false,”new_window”:true,”link”:””,”link_content”:[],”lightbox_size”:””,”scrollbox”:false}]},{“component”:”hc_column”,”id”:”column_wp4oc”,”column_width”:”col-md-2″,”animation”:””,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:””,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”main_content”:[{“component”:”hc_adv_image_box”,”id”:”5icYb”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”image”:””,”icon”:””,”title”:””,”box_style”:”full_content”,”image_animation”:””,”hidden_content”:false,”thumb_size”:”large”,”button_text”:””,”button_style”:”link”,”button_dimensions”:””,”button_animation”:false,”extra_text”:””,”subtitle”:””,”text”:””,”link_type”:”classic”,”lightbox_animation”:””,”caption”:””,”inner_caption”:false,”new_window”:true,”link”:””,”link_content”:[],”lightbox_size”:””,”scrollbox”:false}]},{“component”:”hc_column”,”id”:”column_NpKeO”,”column_width”:”col-md-2″,”animation”:””,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:””,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”main_content”:[{“component”:”hc_adv_image_box”,”id”:”ab176″,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”image”:””,”icon”:””,”title”:””,”box_style”:”full_content”,”image_animation”:””,”hidden_content”:false,”thumb_size”:”large”,”button_text”:””,”button_style”:”link”,”button_dimensions”:””,”button_animation”:false,”extra_text”:””,”subtitle”:””,”text”:””,”link_type”:”classic”,”lightbox_animation”:””,”caption”:””,”inner_caption”:false,”new_window”:true,”link”:””,”link_content”:[],”lightbox_size”:””,”scrollbox”:false}]}]}],”section_settings”:””},”column_EkNvV”:{“id”:”column_EkNvV”,”main_content”:{“component”:”hc_adv_image_box”,”id”:”YcyWS”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”image”:””,”icon”:””,”title”:””,”box_style”:”full_content”,”image_animation”:””,”hidden_content”:false,”thumb_size”:”large”,”button_text”:””,”button_style”:”link”,”button_dimensions”:””,”button_animation”:false,”extra_text”:””,”subtitle”:””,”text”:””,”link_type”:”classic”,”lightbox_animation”:””,”caption”:””,”inner_caption”:false,”new_window”:true,”link”:””,”link_content”:[],”lightbox_size”:””,”scrollbox”:false}},”scripts”:{“lightbox”:”jquery.magnific-popup.min.js”},”css”:{“lightbox”:”scripts/magnific-popup.css”,”image_box”:”css/image-box.css”},”css_page”:””,”template_setting”:{“settings”:{“id”:”settings”}},”template_setting_top”:{},”page_setting”:{“settings”:[“lock-mode-off”]},”post_type_setting”:{“settings”:{“image”:””,”excerpt”:”[image error] As a teenager in Oklahoma, Anita Hill showed uncanny prescience in choosing a hero for the life that awaited her: Barbara Jordan, the outspoken 38-year-old congresswoman who captivated the nation when she forcefully defended the constitution during Richard Nixon’s impeachment proceedings. “I was watching the Watergate hearings, and I thought, This is the bravest woman—and she’s from Texas? Next door to me? This black woman is out there, and she’s a star in these hearings. She’s sitting with all these guys, and she’s definitely not a shrinking violet.” The image worked for Hill, Suddenly, she could envision how “you could be in the kind of skin that I was in, maybe even come from the same background, and make an impact on the world.””,”extra_1″:””,”extra_2″:””,”icon”:{“icon”:””,”icon_style”:””,”icon_image”:””}}}}

{“main-title”:{“component”:”hc_title”,”id”:”main-title”,”title”:””,”subtitle”:””,”title_content”:{“component”:”hc_title_empty”,”id”:”title-empty”}},”section_5ZtkF”:{“component”:”hc_section”,”id”:”section_5ZtkF”,”section_width”:””,”animation”:””,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:””,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”vertical_row”:””,”box_middle”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”section_content”:[{“component”:”hc_column”,”id”:”column_vtfQF”,”column_width”:”col-md-12″,”animation”:”fade-in”,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:”false”,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”main_content”:[{“component”:”hc_pt_post_informations”,”id”:”SCjkR”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”pageHead”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”post_type_slug”:””,”position”:”left”,”date”:false,”categories”:true,”author”:false,”share”:false},{“component”:”hc_title_tag”,”id”:”5ZtkF”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”text”:”The Fearless Mrs. Goodwin: How New York’s First Female Police Detective Cracked the Crime of the Century”,”tag”:”h1″},{“component”:”hc_title_tag”,”id”:”DI5Sx”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”publicationTitle”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”text”:”Byliner”,”tag”:”h3″},{“component”:”hc_title_tag”,”id”:”UTyhl”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”publicationDate”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”text”:”August 2011″,”tag”:”h6″},{“component”:”hc_wp_editor”,”id”:”Xhugf”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”editor_content”:”\n\nON THE MORNING of February 15, 1912, a Thursday, George Schweitzer stepped out of his doorman’s office inside the French Renaissance lobby of America’s largest hotel, the Broadway Central, in New York City. The harsh winter sun was just slanting down East Third into Broadway, and hundreds of guests hurried in and out of the hotel’s doors. The massive American flags on each of the three Gothic towers hung slack against the winter sky.\n\nSchweitzer saw the taxicab driver, Geno Mantani, idling near his stand, still waiting for his employee Sam Lefkowitz to get back from uptown, where he was having a half dozen tires fixed.\n\n“Bank call. Go over there,” Schweitzer said, motioning to East River National, across the street.\n\nMantani got up on his box and set his machine into gear. He was an extremely lucky man. Between fifty and a hundred taxicab chauffeurs operated in the city, but he had been fortunate enough to contract for East River National’s business about a year before. That meant regular work….\n\nAt that point in New York’s history, the city was like a mark falling victim to the swindler’s graft, naive enough to hope for a metropolis that would contain its nearly five million citizens in peace, and canny enough to desire more—ever taller buildings, an infrastructure that might surpass the marvelous underground railroad that had been rattling beneath the town since 1904, and larger fortunes than even the Rockefellers could amass.\n\nThe years of brute crime in the city—the regular Five Points gang-style rioting, for instance—had passed back in the late 1800s. Banks might lose track of funds, but that was through the crisp forgery of a first-rate scratcher. Somehow the denizens of the metropolis believed that this island of Manhattan, and across the river the crystallizing Brooklyn fed by the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, could amass fortunes, house the downtrodden, hide away the Burney Blowers blasting cocaine up their noses through rubber hoses, and absorb those disparate lifestyles in relative tranquillity. While a wife might plunge a knife in her husband’s chest, or a jewelry store watch might get pinched, strangers for the most part would never harm strangers, institutions would never be touched by violence.”},{“component”:”hc_button”,”id”:”PGN6v”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”moreLink”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”icon”:””,”style”:”link”,”size”:””,”position”:”left”,”animation”:false,”text”:””,”link_type”:”classic”,”lightbox_animation”:””,”caption”:””,”inner_caption”:false,”new_window”:false,”link”:””,”link_content”:[],”lightbox_size”:””,”scrollbox”:false}]},{“component”:”hc_column”,”id”:”column_4aGNN”,”column_width”:”col-md-12″,”animation”:””,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:””,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”storeLinks”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”main_content”:[{“component”:”hc_column”,”id”:”column_NpKeO”,”column_width”:”col-md-2″,”animation”:””,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:””,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”main_content”:[{“component”:”hc_adv_image_box”,”id”:”ab176″,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”image”:”https://elizabethmitchell.info/wp-con...” ON THE MORNING of February 15, 1912, a Thursday, George Schweitzer stepped out of his doorman’s office inside the French Renaissance lobby of America’s largest hotel, the Broadway Central, in New York City. The harsh winter sun was just slanting down East Third into Broadway, and hundreds of guests hurried in and out of the hotel’s doors. The massive American flags on each of the three Gothic towers hung slack against the winter sky.”,”extra_1″:””,”extra_2″:””,”icon”:{“icon”:””,”icon_style”:””,”icon_image”:””}}}}

{“main-title”:{“component”:”hc_title”,”id”:”main-title”,”title”:””,”subtitle”:””,”title_content”:{“component”:”hc_title_empty”,”id”:”title-empty”}},”section_5ZtkF”:{“component”:”hc_section”,”id”:”section_5ZtkF”,”section_width”:””,”animation”:””,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:””,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”vertical_row”:””,”box_middle”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”section_content”:[{“component”:”hc_column”,”id”:”column_vtfQF”,”column_width”:”col-md-12″,”animation”:”fade-in”,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:”false”,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”main_content”:[{“component”:”hc_pt_post_informations”,”id”:”SCjkR”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”pageHead”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”post_type_slug”:””,”position”:”left”,”date”:false,”categories”:true,”author”:false,”share”:false},{“component”:”hc_title_tag”,”id”:”5ZtkF”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”text”:”What they are saying about LIBERTY’S TORCH”,”tag”:”h1″},{“component”:”hc_title_tag”,”id”:”DI5Sx”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”publicationTitle”,”custom_css_styles”:”display:none;”,”text”:”O Magazine”,”tag”:”h3″},{“component”:”hc_title_tag”,”id”:”UTyhl”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”publicationDate”,”custom_css_styles”:”display:none;”,”text”:”October 2014″,”tag”:”h6″},{“component”:”hc_wp_editor”,”id”:”Xhugf”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”editor_content”:”\n\nAn O Magazine 15 Titles to Pick Up Now Selection, Summer 2014\n\n“Journalist Elizabeth Mitchell recounts the captivating story behind the familiar monument that readers may have assumed they knew everything about.” — New York Times\n\n“Liberty’s Torch reveals a statue with a storied past . . . Mitchell uses Liberty to reveal a pantheon of historic figures, including novelist Victor Hugo, engineer Gustave Eiffel and newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. The drama—or “great adventure,” to borrow from the subtitle—runs from the Pyramids of Egypt to the backrooms of Congress. . . . By explaining Liberty’s tortured history and resurrecting Bartholdi’s indomitable spirit, Mitchell has done a great service. This is narrative history, well told. It is history that connects us to our past and—hopefully—to our future.”— Los Angeles Times\n\n“Streamlined and well constructed. . . . Proceeding chronologically, the author divides her story into three parts (“The Idea,” “The Gamble,” “The Triumph”) and opens with just the right amount of initial biographical detail on the designer, bolstering her portrait with further historical background as the narrative warrants. . . . deft strokes and always apt, telling details. . . . Mitchell successfully conveys the enormity of the undertaking and the infuriating amount of bureaucracy and old-fashioned glad-handing required to finish the job. . . . In Bartholdi, Mitchell has found a fascinating character through which to view late-19th-century America, and she does readers a service by sifting fact from fiction in the creation of one our most beloved monuments.” — Boston Globe\n\n“A myth-busting story starring the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. Mitchell’s adjectives for him include crazy, driven, peevish and obnoxious. He rarely missed an opportunity to advance his own career, but Mitchell says he had “an incredible ability to soldier on” through a 15-year struggle. . . . Were it for not for Bartholdi, the statue probably would not have been built. In today’s world, Mitchell can’t imagine any single person driving such a massive undertaking.” — USA Today\n\n“Turns out that what you thought you knew about Lady Liberty is dead wrong. Learn the truth in this fascinating account of how a French sculptor armed with only an idea and a serious inability to take no for an answer built one of the most iconic monuments in history.” — O, the Oprah Magazine\n\n“Every American schoolchild learns the story: In a grand gesture representing their shared reverence for freedom, France presented to a grateful United States the imposing 305-foot Statue of Liberty. . . . Except, like all history, the story is a little more complicated than that. Elizabeth Mitchell takes us inside the statue’s history . . . Despite the statue’s iconic status in American culture, Bartholdi’s name probably does not spring into your mind as soon as you see its image. But Mitchell’s book does a fine job of retrieving him from the mists of history—and of recounting how long and hard he labored, not just artistically but financially and politically, to make the statue a reality. . . . Fascinating.” — Tampa Bay Times\n\n“Mitchell casts doubt on several myths about the genesis of and inspiration for Lady Liberty . . . Quite certain that the sculptor did not use his mother as the model for the statue’s face, Mitchell speculates that he may have had his deceased brother Charles in mind. And she suggests that there may be something to rumors, circulated at the time, that the body of Lady Liberty resembled Bartholdi’s paramour, later his wife.” — San Francisco Chronicle\n\n“The Statue of Liberty, which has stood at the entrance to New York’s harbor for more than a century and a quarter, is chiefly the work of a French sculptor named Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi . . . Mitchell tells the story of its construction . . . a good story.” — Washington Post\n\n“An absolutely brilliant and entertaining book—a delightful romp through a seemingly impossible history. It’s a bit amazing how much I didn’t know about the best-known statue in America, or its maker, Frédéric Bartholdi—a character so brazen and outrageous and charming that his life reads like a picaresque nineteenth-century novel. I delighted in every page.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Signature of All Things and Eat, Pray, Love\n\n“Filled with outlandish characters, fascinating tidbits and old world adventure, Liberty’s Torch is a rollicking read about one of America’s most beloved and, until now, misunderstood, icons.”  — Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette?\n\n“Is there any more globally recognizable American icon than the Statue of Liberty? Or any about which Americans know less? In Elizabeth Mitchell’s capable hands, the fascinating story of its quixotic creation—the mix of idealism and hustle, selflessness and selfishness, a crazy dream realized with breathtaking ingenuity—is a perfect parable for the moment mongrel America arose to become the world’s spectacular, improbable colossus.” — Kurt Andersen, author of True Believers\n\n“What we take for granted as a fait accompli was anything but, as we learn in this engrossing, witty, well-researched and surprising account of the Statue of Liberty’s bumpy path to glory. Mitchell does a beautiful job of breathing new life into a too-mythic tale, taking us behind the scenes to witness the hustling, chicanery, rivalries, back-stabbings, lies and disappointments that foreshadowed this eventually triumphant merger of patriotism, opportunism and the art world.” — Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and To Tell and Two Marriages\n\n“Elizabeth Mitchell is an inspired writer and Liberty’s Torch is a great book. While the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, is Mitchell’s colorful hero, a gallery of historical figures like Victor Hugo and Joseph Pulitzer make grand appearances. My takeaway from Liberty’s Torch is to be reminded that the Statue of Liberty is the most noble monument ever erected on American soil.” — Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University and author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America“},{“component”:”hc_column”,”id”:”column_HqIe6″,”column_width”:”col-md-12″,”animation”:””,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:””,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:”storeLinks”,”custom_css_styles”:””,”main_content”:[{“component”:”hc_column”,”id”:”column_ps5yl”,”column_width”:”col-md-2″,”animation”:””,”animation_time”:””,”timeline_animation”:””,”timeline_delay”:””,”timeline_order”:””,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”main_content”:[{“component”:”hc_adv_image_box”,”id”:”oCpvz”,”css_classes”:””,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”image”:”https://elizabethmitchell.info/wp-con... “,”custom_css_classes”:””,”custom_css_styles”:””,”image”:”https://elizabethmitchell.info/wp-con... Elizabeth Mitchell recounts the captivating story behind the familiar monument that readers may have assumed they knew everything about.” — New York Times”,”extra_1″:””,”extra_2″:””,”icon”:{“icon”:””,”icon_style”:””,”icon_image”:””}}}}

It was such a pleasure serving as a consultant on this HBO documentary about the Statue of Liberty, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. I remember picking up a call a few years ago out of the blue from Diane von Furstenberg who said, “You’ve gotten me into a lot of trouble.” She had read Liberty’s Torch and realized she wanted to be part of the story. She went on to create the Liberty Museum and executive produce and star in this documentary. Watch if you want to feel good about the people who share this nation. And my favorite part: to be reminded that something is kitsch when the emotion behind it is too big for the object.

http://www.hbo.com/video/documentaries/liberty-mother-of-exiles/videos0/trailer

Elizabeth Mitchell has edited books for publication, consulted on screenplays and treatments, coached book proposal writing, and edited white papers. She was executive editor of George, having started with the magazine as a senior editor before George’s launch in 1995. Prior to that, she worked as features editor at SPIN.

Here are links to a few of her book editing projects:

Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability – Designing for Abundance, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, forward by President Bill Clinton.

The Right Words at the Right Time, by Marlo Thomas.

Domestic Affairs, a novel by Bridget Siegel.

Who knows what Strom Thurmond had against the Beatles, but the senator from South Carolina certainly knew how to make John Lennon’s life miserable. On Feb. 4, 1972, the 69-year-old, anti–Civil Rights agitator wrote a few lines to Attorney General John Mitchell and President Richard Nixon’s aide, William Timmons, which would end up threatening Lennon with deportation and entangling him in legal limbo for almost four years.

“This appears to me to be an important matter, and I think it would be well for it to be considered at the highest level,” Thurmond wrote. “As I can see, many headaches might be avoided if appropriate action can be taken in time.”

Thurmond attached a one-page Senate Internal Security Subcommittee report explaining that Lennon appeared to be a threat to Republican interests, particularly their desire to re-nominate Nixon at the San Diego convention that coming summer. Citing a New York Times article and an unidentified informant, the report explained that Lennon was friendly with various left-leaning political activists, including Yippie leader Jerry Rubin. The leftists had gathered in New York and discussed the possibility of Lennon appearing at concerts on college campuses to promote voter registration, marijuana legalization and bus trips to the Republican convention for throngs of willing protesters.

In reality, while Lennon, then 31, spoke his mind about many political issues, he always felt that, as a British citizen, he shouldn’t endorse or attack individual U.S. candidates, says his friend, photographer Bob Gruen. Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono strove never to be negative. “They weren’t anti-war. They were pro-peace,” Gruen says. “They weren’t against a politician, they were for voting.”

NOWHERE MAN Lennon, who had recently turned 34, had much on his mind when he boarded the ferry to Liberty Island. He was estranged from wife Yoko Ono, and embroiled in costly legal disputes with his former Beatles bandmates.

NOWHERE MAN Lennon, who had recently turned 34, had much on his mind when he boarded the ferry to Liberty Island. He was estranged from wife Yoko Ono, and embroiled in costly legal disputes with his former Beatles bandmates. (© BOB GRUEN / WWW.BOBGRUEN.COM)

Gruen recalls that Lennon recounted listening to Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden hashing out radical plots while Allen Ginsberg sat in the corner, cross-legged, ringing little Indian bells and chanting ommm . “John told me, ‘Ginsberg was the only one who made sense,’ ” Gruen says, laughing.

Thurmond’s note, however, had its desired effect. It climbed a few links up the chain of command, and by the end of February, an Immigration and Naturalization Service letter appeared under the door of Lennon and Yoko’s apartment telling them they had until March 15 to leave the country.

According to the INS, Lennon was an “excludable alien.” In 1968, a police drug squad had conducted a warrantless search of his London flat and found a half ounce of hashish. Lennon claimed he hadn’t known the hash was there and, in fact, had swept the apartment three weeks earlier on a tipoff that the squad would be coming. (Since Jimi Hendrix had been a previous tenant he left nothing to chance.) He and Ono had even gotten a friend in the police force to pre-search the place to make sure they were clear. But the raiding officers discovered the stash in a pair of binoculars, found in an untouched box of possessions that had been moved from his previous residence. Lennon pleaded guilty and paid a 150-pound fine. The charge, he thought, was behind him.

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Now it made him excludable under a provision against individuals convicted of marijuana possession. He would go on to spend large amounts of money, time and words in his battle to remain in New York, and on Oct. 30, 1974, he and Gruen created an image that would make his case succinctly.

Speaking of his adopted country as a guest on Tom Snyder’s talk show in April 1975, Lennon said, “I love the place. I like to be here. I’ve got a lot of friends here, and it’s where I want to be, Statue of Liberty…welcome.”

***

Bob Gruen has lived at the Westbeth Artists Community, the subsidized-housing complex in Manhattan’s West Village, since 1970. Visiting him there requires a wormhole-like journey to the past that takes you down surreally long hallways, up an elevator and down a flight of stairs. His apartment is packed with so much reminiscence, it could serve as a toddler’s alphabet teaching tool: Bugle, beads, Bowie, boas, buttons, Blondie. Cartoon, Clash, couch, CDs.…

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Concert posters mosaic the walls. Rows of filing cabinets are marked with labels such as LED ZEPPELIN and PUNK SELECTIONS. To the left is a kitchen disguised as a storage space and, near it, the door to the bathroom, where Gruen used to develop prints. The place would seem large if left empty, but nearly five decades of professional success strain the seams with contact sheets of outtakes, negatives, color prints, black and whites, contrast variations: all to secure a career’s worth of perfect photographic moments, in this case, the one-sixtieth of a second that John Lennon posed beneath the Statue of Liberty and flashed the peace sign.

The son of a Hungarian immigrant mother who, ironically, was also an immigration lawyer, Gruen, 71, has the worn, happy look of a man who has enjoyed a lot of encores. His coronet of white-gray hair frames lucid blue eyes. He has a comedian’s delivery and a core confidence, which is probably why music gods such as Ike and Tina Turner, David Johansen, Joe Strummer, Joey Ramone and Debbie Harry liked to hang out here. Lennon used to kick back in the same place where the newer couch lives now.

As an official photographer to Lennon and Ono (who at the time of the Liberty photo was estranged from her husband), he was allowed near total access to the duo, in exchange for unique images that might be used when record companies or media outlets called. He would take the pictures for free and get paid when the image landed on a record cover or in a promotional campaign.

Gruen first met Lennon and Ono backstage at the Apollo Theater in December 1971, at a benefit concert for families of prisoners injured at Attica. Gruen started taking snapshots in a scrum of four or five other fans. While watching the cube flashes popping, Lennon said, “Everyone is always taking pictures. Why do we never see these photos? What happens to them?”

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Gruen volunteered that he lived around the corner from Lennon’s Bank Street apartment and would deliver his once they were developed.

“You live around the corner?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, slip them under my door.”

When Gruen dropped by with the prints, Jerry Rubin answered, which shocked Gruen, since he had only seen the radical in the midst of riots. He asked Rubin to pass the pictures to Lennon, rather than delivering them personally. This lack of pushiness impressed Lennon and Ono, who later asked him to be their photographer, sealing the deal by saying they wanted to “know him.” Before long, a deep bond was forged between the photographer and his subjects/employers.

Scrolling back to that day in 1974, Gruen recalls proposing the idea of the Statue of Liberty portrait during a recording session for “Rock n’ Roll,” Lennon’s album of oldies covers. Gruen’s intention for this photo was not commercial; he intended the shot to spark deeper support for Lennon. “To me, the case was urgently important,” Gruen says.

Lennon liked the idea immediately. Returning from the studio on Oct. 29, Gruen dropped Lennon off at his apartment. Lennon told him, “See you tomorrow. Bring your eyes.”

***

This was one of the last months of the infamous period known as Lennon’s “lost weekend,” when Ono sent her husband packing with their 22-year-old assistant, May Pang, and encouraged them to become romantic. Lennon had burned up L.A. on back-and-forth trips for six months, over-imbibing and over-indulging with Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon and their Hollywood pals, and had come back to New York with Pang in the spring for a return to tranquility.

Pang recalls that Lennon was constantly worried about the deportation battle. “He did not want to leave. He loved this country so much,” she says. “The fact that they let in musicians who had done worse things than him really hurt him. He thought, ‘I’m being singled out.’ And he was.” He couldn’t risk immediate deportation by traveling overseas, so he sacrificed visits to friends and family and resolved to stay and fight.

When Gruen arrived at Lennon and Pang’s apartment on E. 52nd Street for their Liberty excursion, Lennon was wearing his favorite black coat, black scarf and black sweater. Gruen appreciated the formality and seriousness of the fashion choice and, as an added benefit, the clothes wouldn’t distract from the image’s simplicity.

Lennon also wore a pin with the words LISTEN TO THIS BUTTON framing a cropped picture Gruen had taken of Lennon’s eyes. The pin was the detritus from a commercial campaign for Lennon’s most recent album “Walls & Bridges,” which was meant to include a billboard in Los Angeles that would “play” the whole album. Unfortunately, L.A. said no to singing billboards.

Pang had grown up in Harlem and Spanish Harlem, but she had never been to visit the statue. Now she and Lennon hoped to get a chance to go into the crown.

They drove down through Manhattan in Gruen’s car. New York was a hair’s breadth from bankruptcy at the time, which happened to echo Gruen’s own financial status. A bottle of Paisano wine went for $1 and a slice of pizza for a quarter, and you could live on that most of the day. Lennon roamed the city relatively undisturbed. He would call Gruen to meet him at a bar and when, after a few hours, the place started filling with fans summoned by other fans spreading the word by pay phone, they would simply move to another club and buy hours of peace again.

Polaroid of Bob Gruen and John Lennon in front of Statue of Liberty, NYC. October 30, 1974. © Bob Gruen / www.bobgruen.com

(© BOB GRUEN / WWW.BOBGRUEN.COM)

Not Released (NR)

(LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY IMAGES)

INSTANT KARMA Bob Gruen and John Lennon pose for a Polaroid snap in front of Statue of Liberty on Oct. 30, 1974, the day they made the now-famous images. Gruen (at right) in recent times.

As they got out of the car at Battery Park, Lennon pointed up to the Financial District skyscrapers. “I bet I’m paying rent in all these places,” he told Gruen.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I have so many lawyers…” Lennon joked. He was fighting with his American manager Allen Klein at the time. He was more than three years into his legal struggle to break up the Beatles. And overriding all this was the time spent wrangling deportation, which had now exceeded two years. “The funny thing about lawyers,” Lennon continued, “is we go to meet them and they have a modest, regular office and we go back six months later for another meeting and they have a big impressive office and my picture’s on the wall.”

The reality was that Lennon’s sizeable personal wealth was stuck an ocean away while he waited for his U.S. residency, and his business income sat in receivership, awaiting resolution of his battle with Klein and the dissolution of the Beatles. Gruen recalls walking a late-night street with Lennon when a fan spotted him and did a triple take.

“You know, you look just like John Lennon?” the man said.

“I wish I had his money,” Lennon quipped, his standard deflection, which at that particular moment, had the virtue of being absolutely true.

***

This wasn’t Lennon’s first brush with Liberty. He had included a Liberty postcard in the 1972 album art for Lennon’s and the Plastic Ono Band’s “Some Time in New York City,” with a raised power fist replacing the hand holding the torch. Six years earlier, Paul McCartney and Lennon had circled Liberty Island for their first Apple Records board meeting.

BUTTON UP Lennon wore his favorite black coat and a pin from the promotional campaign for his most recent album.

BUTTON UP Lennon wore his favorite black coat and a pin from the promotional campaign for his most recent album. (© BOB GRUEN / WWW.BOBGRUEN.COM)

As Gruen bought their ferry tickets, a returning boat pulled in, which, oddly enough, happened to be packed with teenage girls. When they spotted Lennon, they immediately began shrieking. Lennon hushed them, promising, “If you stop yelling, I will sign for everybody.” He dashed off the signatures fast enough that the trio was able to catch that next boat.

Arriving on the island, they encountered an off-duty park ranger named Angel who joined them on their mission to snap the image that scores of tourists had taken countless times before — though in this case it was a world-famous British tourist who needed to be back in the studio by 4 p.m.

Nowadays, no one would take a celebrity to a photo-shoot site without visiting days ahead with a stand-in, for the lighting, the correct angle. On that October day, armed with two Nikon F cameras, one loaded with black-and-white and the other with Ektachrome daylight film, Gruen was surprised by the challenge of trying to include both the 5-foot-11 Lennon and 305-foot Liberty in the same frame. “You can only back up so far because it’s an island,” he points out, and he didn’t want the distortion of a wide angle. Given the cloud cover, Gruen used a flash, and since film costs money and developing costs time, he took only 28 black-and-white frames and two rolls — about 70 images — in color.

In one pose, John Lennon held up a Bic lighter, imitating the Statue. Hand on hip, hand down. Gruen liked when Lennon flashed the peace sign, because to him it looked like Lennon promising the government he would be good.As Gruen took pictures, Pang noticed security guards with earpieces starting to watch them. “I think we better go,” she warned. They regretfully hurried off the island, having failed to experience that thrill of going to the crown. “To see New York at its finest, for what this Liberty stood for…,” she says of those days in the’70s. “If you could stand up there and look out and say, ‘So this is my city.’ Nothing could beat that. What a magnificent view that would be. The closest we ever got was to be on that island.”

Later, in the darkroom, Gruen considered removing a KEEP OFF GRASS sign that wound up in the lower-right side of the frame. Gruen usually tried to avoid excess words in his images, but the sign’s accidental admonition proved to be too perfect. After all, it was ostensibly the disputed six-year-old cannabis-possession charge that the government was using to try to boot Lennon out of the country.

***

Chillingly, years later, Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, remembered the Statue of Liberty photo as being on the cover of a paperback about Lennon he’d found at a library in Hawaii, the book that sparked his psychotic rage. When Chapman first visited New York to plot his crime, he thought he might jump from the crown to end his life, since no one had ever attempted such a spectacular suicide, and the notoriety, which he so desperately sought, would be about equal, he thought, to that gained by murdering Lennon.

Thirty-six years after that fateful night, Chapman’s vicious act still leaves Gruen in tears. “It’s the stupidest thing that ever could be,” he says of the uselessness of his friend being killed.

That December of 1980, Gruen had been photographing Lennon and Ono’s recording sessions for “Milk and Honey,” their companion album to “Double Fantasy.” Usually, Gruen drove them home since they preferred the normalcy to the limousine. That unforgettable Monday, Gruen was printing the photos from their session two days before.

FOR THE RECORD Gruen was granted near total access to Lennon and Ono; the images he provided made for an enduring glimpse of the rocker, in what would be the final decade of his life. (LEO LA VALLE/EPA)

When he had spoken with Lennon in the studio, his friend was elated. The new album was near completion. Then they would start making videos, rehearse and, by April, would embark on a world tour, with Gruen along for the adventure. They would eat at their favorite Tokyo restaurants. They would meet world leaders. Gruen hurried through the developing so he could get to Lennon and Ono in the studio by 1 a.m., when they usually departed. But the recording machinery at the studio glitched that night, and Lennon and Ono had no choice but to conclude early.

Gruen recalls his doorman buzzing him around 11 p.m., telling him to turn on the radio. “Lennon’s been shot,” the doorman said.

Gruen first assumed his friend had fallen victim to the crack epidemic then ruling the city. Lennon never carried money, so maybe he had gotten mugged and the addict had shot him in the leg, or arm. “Shot isn’t dead,” Gruen recalls thinking, clinging to that slim hope.

Then, a former colleague phoned. He reported that he had seen blood everywhere on the TV. “Lennon’s dead,” he confirmed.

“I kind of sank to the ground,” Gruen says. As he lay on the floor, all the plans he and his friend had delighted in, ended in an instant. He started obsessing over hypothetical events that would haunt him for years: If he had gotten to the studio earlier, he would have convinced Ono and Lennon to go out to eat, like they always did, maybe at the Russian Tea Room. Waiting for Lennon to return home, the assassin would ultimately have succumbed to the December cold and given up. Or Gruen would have driven his injured friend to the hospital faster than medical care could reach him.

The phone rang as Gruen lay motionless. It kept ringing, then stopped, and would ring again. He lay there. And then another call. It occurred to him what the ringing meant: The whole world was watching. He was the photographer. It was his job to make Lennon look good. He crawled to his filing cabinets, in the very space where he works today, and began pulling pictures.

Pang recalls hearing the news on the radio at a friend’s and rushing back to her home. She telephoned David Bowie, who had been a good friend to Pang and Lennon. The singer was out on a date, but his assistant told Pang to come to his apartment immediately. She recalled being there when Bowie careered out of the elevator, unhinged by grief, crying and screaming in disbelief. They huddled by the television through the night, trying to make sense: “Who was this person?”

Returning home, she found the city in mourning. “It was the first time I ever heard New York be so quiet. On every level,” Pang remembers. “On the bus. No one was talking. And you saw the headlines.”

Gruen says that Ono later talked about the importance of the flag carrier in a crusade. When the one holding the flag gets shot, somebody has to pick up the flag and keep going. “He was holding a pretty big flag,” Gruen says, “but fortunately a lot of people have come behind him and we keep going. Yoko’s doing the lion’s share.”

John Lennon on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, NYC. October 30, 1974. © Bob Gruen/www.bobgruen.com

(© BOB GRUEN / WWW.BOBGRUEN.COM)

John Lennon posing at the Statue of Liberty, NYC. October 30, 1974. © Bob Gruen/www.bobgruen.com

(© BOB GRUEN / WWW.BOBGRUEN.COM)

PITCH-PERFECT Gruen snapped about 28 black-and-white frames and 70 in color. He considered removing the sign at Lennon’s feet, but couldn’t resist the accidental irony of its admonition.

Liberty carried the torch across the Atlantic, to shine on what was then the world’s only healthy democracy. Like Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who created the Statue of Liberty from his own inspiration and industry, Gruen invented those images of Lennon and the Statue of Liberty and holds the copyright. Like Bartholdi, Gruen has to some extent lost control of those rights. Bartholdi gave up his battle against the advertisers, postcard makers, and figurine forgers who stole the image immediately. Gruen says he tries to track its usage, yet he can’t help but be thrilled that people like it. He visited the Statue a few years ago and watched the multitudes of visitors striking the Lennon pose. “It’s the price of making something world-famous,” Gruen says. “It’s now part of the world.”

When the 29-year-old photographer took the photo in 1974, the image was meant to reflect the deportation struggle, but since Lennon’s death, it has taken on new meaning. “Now it’s a picture of two symbols of freedom. To me, Lennon represents personal freedom,” he says. Gruen considers it his unique accomplishment that he got those icons of personal freedom in the same place. For one-sixtieth of a second.

Pang remembers Lennon’s reaction when he realized that Thurmond and the government had been campaigning against him and had caused his years of suffering. “I remember John saying, ‘Can you believe they are afraid of me?’ That amazed him.”

Two days before John Lennon’s 35th birthday in 1975, federal Judge Irving Kaufman rejected the government’s deportation appeal. The judge threw out the case because deportation was not meant to be a punitive act; “moral culpability” mattered in the marijuana-possession charge, and Lennon did not appear to know he had marijuana on the premises. But Kaufman added remarks about the deeper meaning of the deportation attempt: “If in our 200 years of independence, we have in some measure realized our ideals, it is in large part because we have always found a place for those committed to the spirit of liberty and willing to help implement it,” Kaufman wrote in his decision. “Lennon’s four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in this American dream.”

A recurring series on iconic scenes from the city’s storied culture.

SHE BELONGS TO ME Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo channeled the essence of young love when they snuggled on a Greenwich Village street for a photo that would become an instant classic.

If you walk along Jones Street in Greenwich Village, facing W. Fourth Street with Bleecker Street at your back, you’ll find yourself in the exact spot where Bob Dylan was captured on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” in 1963. To experience it like Dylan did, you should go in the fading light of a February afternoon, dirty slush on the streets and a VW van parked against the curb. You should wear a suede jacket, too thin for the cold, and have your first real love braced against your arm. Around the corner, your $60-a-month apartment should await you, where you sometimes write songs — some to this first love on your arm — songs that would make you legendary the world over.

The photograph from “Freewheelin’ ” captures Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan at a time when they lived on the cheap, wearing thrift-store or handmade clothes, mining second-hand book and record stores, slipping into neighborhood theaters and clubs easily accessed by friends with power over guest lists. Just around the corner on Sixth Avenue and Bleecker Street, Zito’s bakery gave out free hot bread to night owls. Grit mixed with glamour. A little farther on and to the east, a butcher on Bleecker and Thompson offered chickens for slaughter, then boiled them free of feathers. Four blocks north, the House of Detention prisoners yelled and catcalled from their exercise roof.

Rotolo and Dylan were 19 and 21, respectively, when Don Hunstein snapped the now-legendary photo, and while the image didn’t represent a seismic shift in folk-record iconography, its personal pulse remains intense. Rotolo was not a hired model. No one prepped hair and makeup. They walked down the street toward a Columbia Records staff photographer Dylan knew and liked, and who had shot him in the studio when he recorded his first album, “Bob Dylan,” in 1961, as well as that record’s cover. Thirty-year-old Billy James, Dylan’s Columbia publicist (the only “suit” Dylan is said to have trusted) looked on, there just for the fun of it.

The truth of first love remains frozen in this photo — ironic, as it was taken in an age of lies. For starters, Dylan was hiding his past and his real name. Until 1989, Rotolo would never publicly reveal that her parents were Communists. Rotolo and Dylan lived together, a situation they kept hidden from her suspicious mother. So much subterfuge, but not in this image.

***

Dylan met Rotolo backstage a year and a half earlier, in July 1961, during a 12-hour live folk radio broadcast at Riverside Church. “Meeting her was like stepping into the tales of 1,001 Arabian nights,” he wrote in his memoir “Chronicles: Volume One.” “She had a smile that could light up a street full of people and was extremely lively, had a particular type of voluptuousness.” He wrote he “could feel her vibe thirty miles away.”

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Rotolo was deep for a teenager. A red-diaper baby, she put herself through art school by working odd jobs in theaters and at CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and, at the time, house-sitting in her aunt’s West Village apartment. She had spent large portions of her life wandering the pages of books, and was fine-tuned by tragedy: Her father had died only recently, and she had just weathered a life-threatening car accident. When she fell for Dylan it was because she came to understand, as she explained to Dylan’s biographer Robert Shelton, “how frighteningly sharp he was.”

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY The Gaslight Cafe on McDougal Street in The Village, a magnet for beat poets when it opened in 1958, became a launchpad for Dylan and other drivers of the 1960s folk scene.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY The Gaslight Cafe on McDougal Street in The Village, a magnet for beat poets when it opened in 1958, became a launchpad for Dylan and other drivers of the 1960s folk scene. (CHARLES PAYNE)

They became a closed circle of two. “He was eccentric,” says folk singer Sylvia Tyson, who knew Dylan almost from his arrival in New York City, and befriended Rotolo because she contrasted so sharply with the groupies on the folk scene. “But he was eccentric in the contrived way that very young people get into, to try to make themselves interesting.”

At the beginning of their relationship, Dylan bunked on the couch of any friend or acquaintance who would have him. “Before Suze, he basically was hitting on girls because he needed a place to sleep,” Tyson recalls. But signing to Columbia less than two months after they met brought cash, and Dylan found them a home — a two-room apartment on the third floor of a four-story walk-up at 161 West Fourth Street.

Until November, when she would turn 18, Rotolo couldn’t legally live with him, but they entwined their lives. In the Village’s crooked streets, they grazed some of the estimated 50 neighborhood coffee houses, for improv or original plays, or 15-minute folk sets, from noon to the small hours. They would hit the Village Vanguard for jazz, still in operation today. Or for folk, Gaslight or Gerde’s Folk City or Village Gate, all now closed. A chummy band of fellow artists would be feasting on the inspiration at these venues. She even attended the recording sessions for his first album.

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As Rotolo wrote in her vivid memoir, “A Freewheelin’ Time,” Dylan was a shape-shifter from the first, whether to make himself unaccountable, or as an amusement, or as a goose to creativity. While no one in the Village at the time cared about people’s pasts, only their ability to fully occupy the present, Dylan hid that he was Robert Zimmerman, born in Duluth, Minn., even from Rotolo. An article in the New York Mirror about the Riverside Church show on the day they met reports that “Bob Dylan of Gallup, N.M., played the guitar and harmonica simultaneously, and with rural gusto.” He even told Rotolo he had been abandoned in that state and joined a traveling circus. A few months into their relationship, she learned the truth when he drunkenly stumbled coming into their apartment and his wallet and draft card fell to the floor.

***

Ten months after they met, Rotolo changed the course of music history: by leaving Dylan.

When she set out for Europe on June 9, 1962, she thought she was simply off for the summer to study art in Perugia. But as soon as the boat set sail, she felt stunned, watching him recede. She tried to evoke his ghost by teaching a fellow passenger Dylan’s recently written song called “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which would go on to be the first song of “Freewheelin’ ”

NYC PAPERS OUT. Social media use restricted to low res file max 184 x 128 pixels and 72 dpi

’61 REVISITED The block that Dylan and Rotolo immortalized on the cover of “Freewheelin‘ ” is leafier than when the photo was shot, though it remains relatively unchanged. (ROBERT SABO/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)

Dylan pined for her so immediately she found his first letter waiting at her Paris hotel when she arrived. Over the next months, he sent her Byron’s poetry and tender, sulky love letters. They made $100 phone calls to each other. She read the book about Picasso by his lover Francoise Gilot and immediately recognized Dylan as Picasso’s twin. But it was a cautionary tale: You could get sucked into a genius’ orbit, but art would always win the genius’ ardor.

His letters reflected that conflict. When he addressed her in text, he was passionate, revealing and honest, but that person lived in the ink. “I tried to figure out this guy who was calling me to come home to him, writing letters full of love,” she wrote in her memoir, “yet when I was with him, he seemed to take my presence for granted.”

In late October, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he spent a night drinking at one of their favorite Village hangouts, the now-closed Figaro Cafe. “If the world did end that nite, all I wanted was to be with you,” he wrote to her. “And it was impossible cause you’re so far away — And that was why it seemed so hopeless.”

***

When the “Freewheelin’ ” photo session occurred on that February 1963 day, the couple had only been reunited for a few weeks. Robert Zimmerman was gone. A man officially named Bob Dylan had greeted her (carrying with him a new draft card to prove it). His first album had been popular, but this next album — due for release in May — would change everything. Early on, Dylan only sang other people’s folk songs. But Rotolo had introduced him to the poetry of Rimbaud, as well as Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s song “Pirate Jenny,” which Dylan “unzipped” for inspiration. In his feverish creativity, he had brought forth to her “Don’t Think Twice,” and for future albums, “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.”

VILLAGE PEOPLE Dylan and Rotolo in September 1961, about a month after they met.

VILLAGE PEOPLE Dylan and Rotolo in September 1961, about a month after they met. (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES)

As a photographer, Hunstein would prove to be the perfect man for the moment. He preferred a documentary style and had already created stunning images of such luminaries as Johnny Cash, Igor Stravinsky, Barbra Streisand and Miles Davis. He talked to his subjects, drew them out, isolated an essential quality about them. “I was merely a living witness,” he told a journalist in the introduction to his “Keeping Time: The Photographs of Don Hunstein.” “What does any good journalist do?…Observe the artist and their expressions, then leap in.”

The group started in Dylan and Rotolo’s apartment, which Hunstein termed “bleak.” But the sparseness, including Dylan’s furniture, much of which he had built on the premises, didn’t seem particularly unusual to Billy James, the publicist. “Everyone had modest places back then,” he says.

Hunstein initially took a few shots of the image-conscious Dylan in his street-salvaged armchair. Then the photographer suggested Rotolo join. Reluctantly, she hung over the back of the chair while Dylan strummed his guitar. As the shutter clicked, the charisma between the two became apparent. Hunstein had isolated something essential about Dylan.

The light was fading so Hunstein suggested they go outside. Rotolo wrote in her memoir that she was already wearing a heavy sweater in the freezing apartment but pulled on an overcoat, making her feel like an Italian sausage. Dylan cared more about appearance and chose a favorite jacket.

The first outdoor shots focused on Dylan at the bottom of the front stoop and then the couple in the same place, her head leaning on his shoulder. Eventually Hunstein sent them against traffic on quiet one-way Jones Street and instructed them to walk back toward him. He had shot only one color roll and a few in black and white when the light failed.

Not Released (NR)

HE WAS THERE Dylan perfoming at The Bitter End, another famed Village mainstay, in 1961. (SIGMUND GOODE/GETTY IMAGES)

In the photo, they look happy, united in their closeness, which is how observers of the time considered them. “When the ‘Jones Street’ cover came out, it was totally appropriate to everyone,” says folksinger Carolyn Hester, who helped Dylan get discovered by inviting him to play harmonica on her own Columbia album. Rotolo’s anonymity quickly vanished. “People definitely recognized Suze on the street because of the cover.”

“I thought it was a lovely photograph,” says guitarist Barry Kornfeld, a friend of Dylan’s then, and a lifelong friend of Rotolo’s. “I thought it was unusual to have your girlfriend on your album cover. Somebody who was not involved in the album.” But maybe the deeper message was: She had contributed.

***

Love got more complicated as Dylan’s fame accrued. In 1963, Dylan felt the power of Joan Baez’s reflective light when they performed together at the Newport Folk Festival in July, and later during the March on Washington in August. Rumors began. “I think he was very much in love with Suze,” Tyson says. “I think the Joan Baez thing took her entirely by surprise.”

That same month Rotolo moved into her sister’s apartment on Avenue B, and soon realized she was pregnant. Dylan and Rotolo considered the option of keeping the baby, but decided it couldn’t work, and went, both of them terrified, to a New York City doctor for an illegal abortion.

LOCAL HERO Dylan frequently performed at Gerdes, a legendary folk venue at W. Fourth and Mercer Streets. This poster is dated September 1961.

LOCAL HERO Dylan frequently performed at Gerdes, a legendary folk venue at W. Fourth and Mercer Streets. This poster is dated September 1961. (BLANK ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES)

Rotolo wrote that Dylan’s darkness and intensity could overwhelm her own mood. There was “something death-like”, she once said. For a depressive person, 1963 provided a lot of reasons for bleak thoughts: Medgar Evers was murdered in June; the Birmingham church bombings happened in September. A month after Dylan’s Carnegie Hall premiere in October (with massive blowups of the “Freewheelin’ ” cover outside on 57th Street), President Kennedy was shot.

To Rotolo, Dylan’s written words continued to be more loving than his actions. That same troubled year, Dylan composed his “11 Outlined Epitaphs” — poems later published in the liner notes of his third album, “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” — and called Rotolo “the true fortuneteller of my soul / perhaps the only one.”

Dylan tried to juggle her and she didn’t want to be juggled. They spent Christmas together with her family (she had met his parents that same year), but Rotolo considered the relationship ended before Dylan published an open letter to his friends in Broadside magazine in January 1964. It included these lines:

when the day comes when I can love everything

that breathes the way I love sue then

I will truly be a Jesus Christ ha ha

(but I dont wanna be a Jesus Christ ha ha)

In March, there was a last denouement. “(Rotolo’s sister) Carla called me one night and she was frothing at the mouth,” Kornfeld says. Carla had come to distrust Dylan entirely. “(Folksinger) Paul Clayton was staying with me and we grabbed a cab to get over there. Suze looked like she was in a state of shock. Carla and Bobby were going at it.”

That fight offered no return, although Dylan still tried. Through his manager Albert Grossman, he kept pulling Rotolo back into his orbit. When in 1965 Grossman called to see if he could get her passport to bring her along for that year’s U.K. tour, she knew that meant Dylan was asking her to go with him, but she said no. By then, he was associated with multiple women. On the tour’s U.S. leg later in the year, he secretly married Sara Lownds.

Dylan wrote “Ballad in Plain D” about the March 1964 fight but regretted later having recorded it because of its harshness to Rotolo’s sister. He addresses Rotolo herself in the song’s last lines:

The words to say I’m sorry, I haven’t found yet.

I think of her often and hope whoever she’s met

Will be fully aware of how precious she is.

That person would ultimately be Enzo Bartoccioli, an Italian film editor she met on her 1962 trip to Perugia, whom she married in 1967. They remained together 44 years until death did them part. When NPR’s Terry Gross asked Rotolo in 2008 if Bartoccioli had been her boyfriend in 1962, she replied somewhat evasively, “I knew him then. That’s when I first met him.”

Times change. The “Freewheelin’ ” image is one of the last artifacts of Dylan before fame overtook him. With it, celebrity came to the neighborhood: Flush record deals tainted the Village folk scene camaraderie. “With bigger money, there are a lot of people dependent on you for their livings,” Tyson says. “And they make demands.” It was no longer a neighborhood affair.

FOURTH ESTATE Bob Dylan paid $60 per month to live in this building at 161 W. Fourth Street, which sold for $6 million in 2015.

FOURTH ESTATE Bob Dylan paid $60 per month to live in this building at 161 W. Fourth Street, which sold for $6 million in 2015. (ROBERT SABO/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)

But with Dylan and Rotolo, a bond continued, even in absentia. “She was very protective of Dylan, as he was of her,” Tyson says. “Even years later. I think she was the great regret of his life.” She laughs. “And it was all his damn fault.”

The rowhouses along the photo’s Jones Street block remain relatively untouched, and so too the building where Dylan once lived for $60 a month, which sold in 2015 for $6 million. It sits empty, the bottom floors seeking business rental at $25,000 a month. Chris Coffey, a consultant at Icon Realty Management who handles the property, says they have no plans to change the apartment layouts, and they would prefer a tenant who would somehow honor the history of the neighborhood. “We would be happy to work with Mr. Dylan or anyone from his team on how best to pay tribute to his legacy,” he explains. “That along with a respectful renovation should make the building stay forever young.”

The cover image has vanished. According to Hunstein’s wife, DeeAnne, the original photo negative disappeared from the Columbia files. And what of the eyewitnesses to that February day? Only one person remains who will speak: The former Columbia publicist Billy James. Suze Rotolo died of lung cancer in 2011. Photographer Don Hunstein suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. And Dylan? He’s not talking.

Gay Talese is under fire for his controversial new book on a sleazy Peeping Tom. With his prized reputation on the line, the literary legend tells his side of the sordid tale.
[WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE]

Gay Talese never met an interview subject he didn’t like. Or at least never one he couldn’t sympathize with. He hunts down losers, outcasts, criminals. He etches them into elegantly written books and articles that seem to normalize almost any possible human behavior. “I don’t find anything so unusual,” he says. “If you ask me, What shocks you? I can’t think of anything. I am not judgmental.” He seems almost repentant when admitting his lack of interest in reform, like an adult confiding that he can’t read. It’s a quality that makes him seem either hopelessly behind the times or far ahead of them.

Nevertheless, over the past few months critics have sought to reform Talese. In April, he trended on Twitter when he failed to cite more than one female nonfiction writer who inspired him as a youth. He irritated a New York Times magazine staff writer when he asked her how she got her job, and if she would be headed to a nail salon after a symposium. At 84, he should be enjoying his status as a long-time bestselling author and architect of such journalistic classics as “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” collecting honors as a national treasure. But Talese has always set off firebombs. Now, he’s in a mess with an unreliable voyeur.

The uproar centers on “The Voyeur’s Motel,” set to come out July 12. The book examines the decades-long activities of Gerald Foos, a motor-lodge owner in Aurora, Col., who rigged the attic of his Manor House Motel for the express purpose of spying on the social and sex lives of his guests. Foos, untrained as a sociologist or behavioral scientist, kept detailed journals of his surreptitious discoveries. Fashioning himself a latter-day Alfred Kinsey, he considered his records more illuminating than those of the pioneering sex researcher because he observed his subjects’ sexual behavior in a more pure environment: They didn’t know they were being watched.

Talese warns several times in the book that his subject can not be trusted entirely, and “The Voyeur’s Motel” was never going to be inspirational fare. But the trouble began in April after a pre-publication excerpt appeared in the New Yorker. In one passage, Foos reports that in 1977 he witnessed a murder from his secret aerie, and not only did he fail to interrupt the crime, he inadvertently instigated it by disposing of a drug stash that caused the dispute. Talese, in the excerpt, weighed turning in Foos to the police, but decided that, since the alleged murder happened six years before he read the account, he wouldn’t aid justice with his intervention. In another passage, Talese describes visiting the motel attic himself and watching a couple engaged in oral sex. Reaction to the excerpt was swift, as critics accused Talese of negligence and unethical conduct.

“I don’t think there is a whole lot of difference between the voyeur and me. Good journalists are really voyeurs.”

Then, two weeks before the book’s publication, the controversy intensified when Talese announced he would “disavow” the book after factual discrepancies about the years Foos owned the motel were pointed out to him by reporters. “How dare I promote it when its credibility is down the toilet?” Talese said in an article on June 30 in the Washington Post.

The very next day, however, Talese did an about-face. Both he and the book’s publisher, Grove/Atlantic, issued a statement saying they stood by “The Voyeur’s Motel” and would carry out scheduled promotional activities, perhaps appending a new author’s note and making any necessary corrections on future editions. Talese’s overnight rationale was that while some material he writes about may have occurred when Foos didn’t own the motel, the bulk of the story held true: Foos had spied on his guests for a long period of time and kept copious notes.

Talese had sat for a lengthy interview with me before the news story broke, but in a July 5 email he wrote that when he confronted Foos, the only error Foos admitted to covering up was the eight-year gap in his 26-year ownership in the motel. He cited no other errors of which Talese should be aware. The voyeur expressed “a mixture of remorse and confusion because he said he did not ‘intentionally’ leave these details out. But,” Talese adds, “remember he is unreliable.” Over the three-plus decades they had been corresponding, Talese noticed no shift in tone during the years that Foos didn’t own the motel, a period in which Foos now says he had been raising horses and dabbling in real estate.

Talese was left to handle the fallout. In our initial interview, Talese had spoken about his reverence for his profession: “We are like judges. We are pure, we don’t sell out, we are presumably not corruptible people. If journalists are corrupt, they are exposed and drummed out by journalists. It wasn’t that the Supreme Court said get rid of Jayson Blair (a New York Times reporter who resigned in 2003 over accusations of plagiarism and fabrications). Journalists said get rid of Blair.” Talese likely feared he would suffer the same fate.

But Talese had set himself up for trouble when he chose to write about such a slippery character. The voyeur in effect lied every time he handed a room key to a privacy-seeking guest, and Talese chose to tell the story of that liar. Steven Spielberg liked the tale well enough to buy the film rights, with Sam Mendes slated to direct. Talese identified with his subject’s curiosity. “I don’t think there is a whole lot of difference between the voyeur and me,” he says. “Good journalists are really voyeurs.”

“I am beginning to believe that portions of Mr. Talese’s publication is sheer fabrication,” says Aurora, Col., Det. Steve Conner, “or at least a departure from fact.”

Talese has always been a highly invested reporter, one who creates his work by doing whatever is required to get the story — spending more than a month following Frank Sinatra or ten years dallying in the hot center of the sexual revolution for “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.” Could it be that Talese identified so much with Foos that he blindly trusted the voyeur’s reporting as his own? “I’ve always had a second sense of self,” Talese says. “No matter what I am doing, whether I am an altar boy or going to an orgy. Like when I went to my first massage parlor (for research on “Thy Neighbor’s Wife”) — yes, I am enjoying this woman, but I’m also [asking her], ‘How did you get from there to here?’ What’s her story? What’s her secret life?”

Talese mentions an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, about a man looking up at a window at night and seeing himself looking. “You’re there but aware of being there. I’ve had that trailing me at all times: ‘Is there a story there? Is there a story there?’ That’s a sickness. But it’s also a living, you know.”

When Gaetano Talese was 11 or 12 years old, he recalls an evening seated on a chair in his family’s vast living room in their unusual house, the former offices of the Ocean City Ledger, in Ocean City, N.J. His elegant parents were giving him their full attention, a treat since they tended toward a clique of two. But a waltz wafted up from the radio and, meeting each other’s gazes, they rose and began dancing the full length of the room. They continued for 10 or 15 minutes without once looking toward their son. As the song ended, they strolled to the light switch and suggested that he go off to bed (in his room which was the former linotype room). Then they moved on to their bedroom, presumably to consummate the emotion. “It was a very sad moment,” Talese says, and he included the scene in his 2006 memoir, “A Writer’s Life.”

Talese’s whole career might be considered an effort to get a glimpse into that bedroom. He never understood how his parents could be so “closely married” their whole lives that, for 60 years, they would never be out of each other’s gazes, how they could make no place for him in that love. It was the unreportable story because he had no access. No amount of staring, no exhaustion of fact-finding would allow it. But it probably motivated him to conjure a fascinating facsimile of intimate emotion. He could delve into a person’s life and give away the secrets.

Courtesy Grove/Atlantic

SEE YOU LATER Manor House owner Gerald Foos, who spied on his guests for decades, fashioned himself a latter-day Alfred Kinsey, the pioneering sex researcher. His exploits are recounted in Talese’s new book.

“When I was a kid in the store at my mother’s dress shop, I was a reporter,” he says. “I am eavesdropping, I am snooping around, I’m watching customers.”

Talese’s curiosity about those secrets crops up everywhere in his work, perhaps never more so than in “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.” In 1971, as he neared 40, Talese already had six books behind him, including bestsellers about the New York Times, “The Power and the Glory”; and the Bonanno crime family, “Honor Thy Father.” He was very much a respected reporter living a charmed existence with his wife, Nan, a well-regarded book editor, and two young daughters.

Coming home from dinner one night with Nan, he noticed a neon sign on a building flashing LIVE NUDE MODELS — a curiosity which Nan declined to investigate, but welcomed her husband to pursue. “Massage parlors were all over New York,” Talese says. “And they weren’t quite understood for what they were.” Most people assumed they offered therapeutic massage. “What they really were was mercenary sexual prostitution — women were jerking guys off and getting $25 for one come.”

“I was writing about adultery, including my own. The reader has to know who the hell I am writing about, including me. How did I get this information? Well, I’m in the middle of an orgy.”

Talese was no sexual adventurer. He was raised in a highly religious Italian-American household, trained to sleep in the chaste Catholic pose, flat on his back with arms crossed over his chest to clamp his wayward hands to his shoulders. But he entered and tested the services, while simultaneously interviewing the masseuse. He started returning and, after subsequent visits, convinced a proprietor to allow him to manage one of these businesses for no pay. “I wanted the girls to take notes for me,” he says. “I turned the masseuses into researchers and I paid them for it.”

It’s worth noting that Talese’s impulse was not to investigate the operation and legality of these massage parlors. Nor was it to expose how much revenue flowed into the pockets of the owners. He turned the masseuses into de facto reporters, much as he accepted the reporting of Gerald Foos through his journals. He did not retreat as illicit aspects of the work were uncovered. Quite the opposite.

Ultimately, Talese couldn’t get his masseuse-reporters to go on the record so he moved on, broadening his inquiry to include Hugh Hefner, Supreme Court obscenity battles and Sandstone Retreat, the free-love colony in California. What got him in trouble then was not his failing to delve too deeply in his material, but for getting too close. His research temporarily damaged his marriage, which Talese decided to address in the book. “I was writing about adultery, including my own,” he says. “The reader has to know who the hell I am writing about, including me. How did I get this information? Well, I’m in the middle of an orgy.”

Eight years before the book’s publication, Talese had allowed a former Esquire editor, Aaron Latham, to trail him for an article in New York magazine. No one could have guessed from the article’s ribald scenes that Talese’s embedded account from the front lines of the sexual revolution would result in a serious 568-page book, exploring the ecstasies and pathos of flawed Americans trying to navigate a complex terrain. While by no means puritanical, the book is not a romp either.

“So now I am not only a perverted, lecherous creep with two innocent daughters and a wife, but now I am rich. This is too much!”

“I blithely report that I’m naïve,” Talese says of allowing Latham in. “This pretension I had of being a serious reporter — I still have that pretension — went down the tubes with that piece. Because here’s a middle-age guy married with two daughters frolicking and saying it’s research. ‘Bullshit, this guy is getting out his jollies and putting it on his expense account.’

“That New York magazine article put a mark on the book yet to be published,” Talese continues. “And even when it was published, that queered it. To make it even worse, six weeks before the book came out, United Artists got an advanced copy and paid $2.5 million dollars to Gay Talese. So now I am not only a perverted, lecherous creep with two innocent daughters and a wife, but now I am rich.” Talese laughs, sympathizing with his detractors. “This is too much. This is too fucking much!”

Richard Corkery

Daniella Zalcsman

Richard Corkery

Harry Hamburg

IT’S A LIVING Talese has hobnobbed with people from all walks during his 62-year career. (Clockwise from top left) Talese rubs elbows with (from left) Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal; with Pete Hamill; in Ocean City, N.J., his birthplace; showing support for striking hotel and restaurant workers outside Cipriani 42nd St.

Despite Talese’s tendency to pursue controversial topics, he seems constantly surprised by the lack of regard for his adventurousness. “I felt pretty disgraced,” he says. “I so naively thought I was doing serious research in the dark world of human nature. I felt similarly with this book now, with this voyeur. But when (“Thy Neighbor’s Wife”) came out, everyone reviewed it and reviewed me and pretty much decided I was perverted and felt sorry for Nan. Nan never got any publicity before. And now she was an infamous editor because of me.”

Talese’s participatory research on that 1981 book, and his experience with the public scolding, might have made him more open than others would be to Foos’ transgressions. When asked what Foos might have hoped for from the book, Talese edges into his reply. “You know, Kinsey, he was vilified,” he says. “In the 1940s, he was (considered) a dirty old man. And when I went to Sandstone in 1971, I met a lot of psychologists and sexual therapists who were frolicking around in nudeland and were loving themselves, enjoying themselves, but they still had the credentials. Men and women of science were just frolicking swingers. This guy (Foos) thinks, Hell, maybe I don’t have the credentials, the doctorate degree, but I have as much in the way of experience as Kinsey — and even more — because I didn’t have these staged. And I am not sure he’s not right.”

Talese received his first letter from the man who would go on to describe himself as “the world’s greatest voyeur” in January 1980. Over the years, Talese has received a lot of unsolicited mailings. If the letters are handwritten Talese generally assumes them to be the work of a prisoner. “The guy’s got a novel,” he says, “or he wants you to save him because he’s been unjustly accused of murder.” He casts an eye over these and found Foos’ letter to be relatively well written, albeit less well-written than the writer himself seemed to think. “He has a grand sense of himself,” Talese says recalling that first introduction. “Norman Mailer was modest compared to this guy! I mean this guy thinks he’s goddamn Chaucer.”

At the time of Foos’ letter, pre-publication press on “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” had stirred up an unusual audience for his work. In the letter, Foos described in calm detail how he had bought the Manor House Motel in the 1960s, had constructed a peeping room in the attic and kept meticulous records of everything he saw as well as the demographics of the participants. “I did this purely out of my unlimited curiosity about people and not as just a deranged voyeur,” Foos wrote. “This was done for the past 15 years, and I have logged an accurate record of the majority of the individuals that I watched.” Foos wished to offer Talese his cache of sexual research.

Most people would have kept a wary distance from such a correspondent. Not Talese. “I read this letter and (thought), Jesus!” Talese recalls. “I was curious. Is this guy telling me the truth?” He immediately arranged a stop in Aurora to meet Foos on an upcoming trip.

“Foos has a grand sense of himself. Norman Mailer was modest compared to this guy! I mean this guy thinks he’s god***n Chaucer.”

In “The Voyeur’s Motel,” Talese describes the very normal first meeting with the very ordinary Foos at the luggage claim of the Denver airport. Foos drove Talese to the motel, introduced him to his friendly nurse wife, Donna, and showed him his carefully rigged observation station. Talese went on to spend three days with Foos and interviewed him. But Foos refused to be identified in any reporting — a deal-breaker for Talese, who won’t publish stories without his subjects’ true names.

Back in New York, Talese began receiving regular packets from Foos, including copied sections of his journals. Talese was fascinated by the meticulousness of the voyeur’s notes, and the content that included such previously undercovered stories as the agony of war veterans, patients of the hospital across the street, trying to re-establish their erotic lives after being maimed in battle. The correspondence ebbed and flowed, growing more sparse in recent decades, until 2013, when Foos told Talese he had checked with a lawyer about the statute of limitations on voyeurism and thought he was now safe. He was ready to go on the record. Talese flew to Aurora and met with Foos again, this time meeting Foos’ second wife, Anita, whom he had married after he and Donna divorced in 1984.

James Keivom/New York Daily News

Richard Corkery

TRUE ROMANCE Talese has begun writing a book on a topic he’s been researching since 1957: his marriage to book editor Nan.

Talese appears to have had no desire to enlist long in the voyeur’s world. In general, he seeks reporting for its escapism into the life of another person. He describes sex similarly. Maybe standard motel voyeurism was just too tedious. “Except for the blow job, I did not see much sex at all,” Talese says. “People smoking, watching television, and it’s so boring. I mean it’s not the movies. It’s real life.”

Talese allowed Foos’ records to speak for themselves. But before the New Yorker published its excerpt of “The Voyeur’s Motel,” Talese says Foos began getting cold feet. Despite his lawyer’s assurance that he was in the clear, Foos worried about being sent to jail for his voyeurism or for the 1977 murder he claimed to have witnessed, and asked Talese to leave that incident out. Talese refused.

For his part, Talese had looked into the crime and could find no police- or newspaper records and, therefore, didn’t really know what to make of it. Talese said he told Foos he could not promise that the legal advice on statute of limitations was correct. Maybe Foos would go to jail, maybe not. But he told Foos that, whatever happened, he could pin the problems brought up by the book on Talese. “Blame me,” Talese says he told Foos. “The deal is: You trust me to be a fair reporter; I am not going to lie. But if law-enforcement authorities say that something in this book harms you, you say, ‘That guy stabbed me in the back.’ The deal was you don’t see it until the publisher publishes it. So blame me. And he should. [I told him:] ‘You made a mistake. You shouldn’t have trusted me, Gerald. You shouldn’t have trusted me.’ ”

“I did not see much sex at all. People smoking, watching television, and it’s so boring. I mean it’s not the movies. It’s real life.”

Maybe the better question is, Should Talese have trusted Foos? Talese has made his career by living among his subjects, reporting firsthand, and crafting that material into mellifluous prose. He doesn’t create composite characters or use pseudonyms. “I am a storyteller,” Talese says. “I thought the story was really, really, really unusual. All I care about (is) is it real? As long as I don’t imagine anything, as long as I don’t embellish anything.… The reason I want names, addresses, phone numbers, is I want verification.” With a real name, the source must answer to what is said and other reporters or legal authorities can follow up with anything they wish to check. Which, ironically, is how the kerfuffle over the book’s factual and narrative inconsistencies came to light.

In the book, Talese describes how he almost revealed himself on the first day he joined Foos in the attic when, while peering down through the specially engineered air-vent slats, the tail of his necktie slipped through. After the New Yorker excerpt appeared, some readers suggested the errant tie was too ludicrous to be true. “No, that happened!” Talese insists, sounding surprised when I inform him of that doubt. “And if I had been caught it would have been terrible for both of us.”

The authorities would certainly have cracked down on the man who had spent more than a decade watching people in their deepest intimacy. But, remember, there were two of them in that attic: Foos and Talese.

Talese looks a bit thin in his 84th year. He has the face of a Roman senator, like an ancient bust on a shelf in the Vatican. He once asked classmates at a high-school reunion to describe his youthful self. They offered aloof, complicated, vague, smug, quirky, in another world. His famously elegant taste in apparel can perhaps mark him as aloof, although that is more the consequence of his upbringing as the son of a tailor. One sign of his quirkiness is that, in the course of an interview, he spells the name of any non-famous person he mentions just after he says it. Thoroughly a reporter, he provides this service reflexively to spare others the task of requesting the proper spelling later. He is speaking for the record.

When he works, he enters “another world,” both by embodying the lives of his subjects and by disappearing into his basement office to write. It’s a bunker decorated like an old-world couture salon, an upholstered, soundless world of cream on cream, all accented in cherry red. Here, Talese stores shelves of file boxes collaged with a funhouse of words and images. By reading the labels you can see the subjects he has felled over the decades: Frank Sinatra, the Mafia, sports heroes, the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

One box says: A NONFICTION MARRIAGE. When Foos finally gave Talese authorization to use his story on record in 2013, he interrupted Talese’s work on another book that he began researching as far back as 1957: He has been taking notes on his relationship with Nan since two years before they wed. “This is stuff of me saying the wrong thing — which is frequent — usually being chided by the editor-wife I have, and me being the third person, the chronicler. I am the stenographer of this court case that is never in court.”

Talese has taken great care to be accurate with this marriage book — which he has been writing for seven years — not only referring to his copious notes, but hiring two reporters to interview his wife. But he is worried about the literal deadline. “You can’t get 50-plus years of marriage in one book. But on the other hand, I am 84 years old and I don’t want to die with this thing undone.” He has considered swift ways to structure the book, but rejected them as too “gimmicky.” This would be Talese’s ultimate work of participatory journalism, the closest he would get to solving the mystery his parents embodied: how two people could stay close for six decades.

“You can’t get 50-plus years of marriage in one book. But on the other hand, I am 84 years old and I don’t want to die with this thing undone.”

But he decided to let the voyeur project intervene, and he did not choose as trustworthy a subject. His on-the-ground reporting would be little match for a man who would lie about such things as ownership gaps. He is not agile with the tools that other reporters or his critics now wield. When he wants me to watch a clip from a short film that was made about Gerald Foos, we sit in front of his large-screen Mac as if we are the first post-apocalyptic apes to discover the remnants of the digital age. “How do you get into this?” he asks.

“Do you mean online?”

“There’s stuff hidden here,” he says mysteriously.

“Maybe in downloads?” I’m hesitant to take over the controls, so as not to inadvertently open any private files.

“Click something.”

I open the downloads folder and the screen populates with row upon row of friendly snapshots, documents, PDFs. We are both daunted by the magnitude.

“I tell you what,” he says. “Do you have a little cell phone?”

James Keivom/New York Daily NewsBODY OF EVIDENCE Talese’s home office is a virtual museum to his life’s work (clockwise from top left): Research for articles he’s written over the years; his outline for the groundbreaking “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold;” collages of his best-selling books and magazine clips.

Talese doesn’t pore over internet searches or Excel data when conducting research, because he wasn’t raised in that era. He still conducts his reporting on foot, in person, with his self-constructed shirtboard cards stored in his breast pocket for taking notes. He has always immersed himself in the cultures he writes about, for however long it takes. In the case of Foos, he checked the validity of the voyeur’s claims then, satisfied with their accuracy, left the attic, allowing Foos to serve as his proxy. Other than the masseuses that Talese paid to take notes for him in the 1970s, Foos has been Talese’s only surrogate.

One reason Talese might have left the reporting to Foos was because he found Foos’ world too distasteful to inhabit himself. In his journals, Foos reveals he would sometimes walk or drive around the Denver area, peering in windows. He on occasion trailed trysting targets from the motel to their homes and spied on their domestic life, noting in at least one instance a name and in another, watching family members. One unfaithful woman returned to her house, children’s tricycles on the front lawn, and later she greeted her husband with a kiss. When I bring up the inherent creepiness of Foos’ stalking, Talese points out the scene’s raw poignancy, suggesting that it justifies his actions. Earlier he had said: “When he followed people around, that curiosity — I can identify with that.”

As a child, Foos kept a large collection of personally culled muskrat tails, and as an adult, a gun collection. He believes he can control subjects — particularly female ones — with his own thoughts. He admits to experiencing disassociation after selling both the Manor House Motel and a second property he had acquired, The Riviera, with its own spying stations, in the mid-’90s. “Now the voyeur and Gerald are separate entities,” Foos wrote, “completely disconnected since their tenure in the observation platform has ended.”

The public has good reason to be alarmed by voyeurs. While not all voyeurs are violent, Vernon J. Geberth, a retired New York lieutenant-commander, who in his career reviewed over 8,000 murders, wrote in “Sex-Related Homicide and Death Investigation: Practical and Clinical Perspectives,” “The fact is that, investigatively speaking, complaints about voyeurism must be treated as very serious offenses. The author cannot state that all voyeurs will become rapists or lust murderers; however I can emphatically state that in all lust murders that I have investigated and/or consulted on, the offender had a history of voyeurism activities.”

Even Foos himself seems to understand that stalking often accompanies more sinister crimes. When a Denver Post reporter found Talese and Foos at a city-records office in 2013, Foos rambled to the reporter about serial killers: “You know, there are one hundred in Denver? But they’re just plotting right now. They’re not acting, but they’re thinking. Some of them are interested in guys. Some are interested in little children. Some are interested in school teachers, some are interested in high political guys or CEOs. Some are interested in nice-looking girls like you, OK?” he said, referring to the reporter. “They will follow you around in secret, take pictures of you, follow you home, take a picture of where you live, find out how many you live with.”

Foos never repented for following his subjects home. He harshly judged the guests he watched — “People are basically dishonest and unclean: they cheat and lie and are motivated by self-interest,” he wrote — but never himself. There was one exception: His role in the 1977 murder he claims he witnessed. Foos says he observed a motel guest and his girlfriend whose actions led him to believe they were drug dealers. Fiercely anti-drug, Foos entered the room when the two were out and disposed of the goods. But when the dealer and his girlfriend returned, Foos asserts the dealer accused his girlfriend of stealing the drugs and choked her, then bolted. According to his account, Foos watched the altercation from above, saw the woman on the ground, but noticed her chest was still moving. Believing she was still alive, he left the attic. When his wife, Donna, returned from her work at the hospital, he told her the story and she thought the woman would be fine. But the next morning, the chambermaid allegedly found the woman dead. Foos said he called the police but without revealing that he had witnessed the attack.

“Gerald, you could have hidden. But you wanted to stick your neck out of the foxhole and hope it doesn’t get blown off.”

The only time I felt (Foos) was remorseful was on the murder,” Talese says. “But I think that was preceded by fear of being accused of negligence. He didn’t go downstairs. He always likes to brag that as a football player he could throw guys against the wall. He might have been afraid that the guy would come back.” Foos could have reported he overheard the altercation without saying he was spying from above. “He could have said he was walking by, but he didn’t.”

Foos claims the police told him, after they investigated, that the guests had registered under fake names and the car was stolen; the perpetrator could not be tracked. But weirdest of all, Foos may have felt remorse for a murder that never happened.

It was a murder with no official account — not in police files, not in newspapers. Talese says he went to the Denver Post many times and they tried to help him locate even a small item relating to the murder of the drug dealer’s girlfriend but came up empty. He points out that from his own obituary-writing experience, the ink goes to the famous. “This wasn’t Claus von Bülow,” he says.

To this day Talese says he remains mystified about what really happened. He went over the story many times with Foos and came away convinced he was telling the truth. Only later did he consider the possibility that Foos had concocted the tale. “But why the fuck would someone make up that?” Later he says, “I mean, this guy is not St. Francis of Assisi. He’s a hustler. I believe he has made mistakes, but I do believe him. I believe he saw that murder [of the woman]. And he convinced me, and I am not the most naïve reporter.” At another point, he added, “I am not going to solve the fucking murder,” but welcomed other journalists to try.

When the New Yorker excerpt came out, I became intrigued by the murder and started looking into the matter in preparation for a hoped-for interview with Talese closer to his book’s publication. In searching for the 1977 crime, I came across a strange documented cold-case murder in 1984 at the Manor House Motel, involving a father of two, James Craig Broughman, the apparent subject of a burglary gone wrong. Since I had no access to the full book I didn’t know if Talese had reported on the crime, although it seemed strange that it would be left out of the excerpt. With Talese unavailable for interviews until closer to the book’s release, I contacted Steve Conner, the cold-case detective in Aurora, to inquire if Foos had been questioned. Had he witnessed this crime too?

Conner told me that Foos had not been interrogated according to the case documents, which struck me as an odd omission, given that he was the motel’s owner. I checked back just over a week later and learned that Conner had called Foos, who told him that he had sold the motel around 1984 and bought it back in 1987, and that he had no knowledge of the crime. That property transaction seemed odd too, and had not been mentioned in the excerpt; it also raised the question of whether he had sold the place before or after the murder. Conner then consulted Arapahoe County Records and confirmed the ownership gap — albeit beginning in 1980 and ending in 1988 — and provided the dates to me. “I am beginning to believe that portions of Mr. Talese’s publication is sheer fabrication, or at least a departure from fact,” Conner wrote me in an email. What was still uncertain was if Talese had reported on this gap in the full version of the book.

“Gerald Foos doesn’t believe he’s a slimy little pervert. And he is famous because of this book. When he dies, he is going to get an obituary.”

Just days before interviewing Talese I found a Denver Post story from 1984 in which Foos said he sold the property in 1982. Under the headline, “Motel Life Was Heartbreaker,” he describes many of the scenarios that make “The Voyeur’s Motel” more than just an unsavory account of voyeurism. He talks of GI amputees trying to put their lives back together and transient families looking for work, though he never reveals how he actually discovered this information.

I provided Talese with a copy of this article when I finally interviewed him on June 21. The book had included another revelation missing from the excerpt: Foos briefly described the 1984 Broughman murder that I had found in the cold-case records. I asked Talese how, given the ownership gap, did Foos come to know of it? Talese seemed confused by these discrepancies, as if learning about them for the first time, but then told me that even if Foos switched title on the property, Talese believed he had still been somehow involved in the motel, if not in ownership, then in its operation.

On June 24, Detective Conner unexpectedly forwarded his and my correspondence concerning the ownership gap to a Washington Post reporter who had inquired about police logs at the Manor House Motel from 1969 to 1995, and cc’d me. In an earlier email, the reporter had inquired about the 1984 murder at the motel, but received no reply. When the Post reported this development on June 30 it became breaking news: Talese had failed to note the ownership gap and any narrative discrepancies stemming from it in the book. He had gotten duped by his unreliable primary source.

As “The Voyeur’s Motel” neared publication, but before the news blew up, Talese said Foos had grown edgy. He claimed that he had been receiving death threats and people had thrown eggs at his house. “I talk to him on the phone and he’s antsy,” Talese says. “And this is often how we all are. We have done this thing and now there is this period of emptiness. We are not communicating anymore.” Foos expressed a desire to move — as much to spare his aging knees from his current house’s staircase as to escape the scrutiny that’s headed his way — but Talese advised him to stay near neighbors who know him. “If you move you are going to be in trouble because you will be treated like a child molester,” Talese says he told Foos. “Sooner or later someone’s going to catch up with you.”

Following the New Yorker excerpt in April, Foos said he would no longer do interviews. “After July 12, certain people with money in their pocket can talk to me,” he told a reporter for Westword, Denver’s alternative weekly newspaper. “It’s gonna be costly.” (He ended up speaking to the Washington Post reporter about the ownership timeline.)

James Keivom/New York Daily News

ONE-TRACK MIND Talese, in his office lair, cops to a feeling of constant disconnection from the world. “I am not a person,” he says. “I am really a total journalist.”

At the end of the day, Talese believes Foos has no one but himself to blame for what will unfold from here. He says he told Foos, prior to the revelations about the time gap, “Gerald, you could have hidden. No one would know you, and your material would have been buried with you. Everything would have been fine in hell, or wherever you’re going to go. But you wanted to stick your neck out of the foxhole and hope it doesn’t get blown off.”

Talese equates Foos’ authorizing the book to clues left by the Unabomber, or journalists Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” informer Mark Felt revealing himself late in life. “Woodward and Bernstein went out of their way to protect this goddamn Felt guy for many, many years and why does he blow it? Because he thought, I want to take a bow,” Talese says. “Gerald Foos believed that he was important. He doesn’t believe he’s a slimy little pervert. And you know, he is famous because of this book. When he dies, he is going to get an obituary.”

“God, I would (go to Damascus) in a minute. What can happen? ISIS is going to chop my neck? At my age, I don’t give a sh**.”

The obit, for Talese, whose heaven is column inches, is the equivalent of a presidential burial at Arlington, the symphony conductor’s requiem at Carnegie Hall, or a painter’s ashes mixed into pigment. Talese also promises his subjects the dignified ending, the velvet-lined casket. To get approval to tell Bill Bonanno’s story, to break omerta, Talese offered the mobster his rewrite. “I said, ‘Bill, the obituary you get will be told by the FBI to the New York Times. You’re going to be a thug. Which is what you are. But I am going to write that you’re a human being. You’re not all the time a mobster. You’re a father and a husband. You’re a big balance. And he went for it. I did the same thing with Bill Bonanno as I did with the voyeur Gerald Foos.”

When asked who else he would like to provide with such a nuanced portrait, Talese doesn’t hesitate: Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. “I would have liked to have been sitting in Damascus these last two years,” he says. “I’ll bet there is Pilates, somebody practicing their backhand. Mr. and Mrs. Assad probably have bridge night out.” He sympathizes with Assad’s decision not to step down, knowing he would likely lose his neck. “I like Assad because he says, ‘I am going to do it my way.’ ”

Damascus would intrigue Talese in a way the voyeur’s attic could not. For his best work, he needs to be his own watcher. I asked him if he ever sheds the observer self, when focused by pain, or even in sex, and he cops to a feeling of constant disconnection from the world. “Yeah, I’m sorry,” he says. “I am always looking around the room, I have an internal cinema. There’s in my head a picture of what is going on with me, what I am doing, who I am with. I can recall something that happened 25 years ago in a bedroom, and the light, and how she, this woman in bed, posed, how she moved. I can see it. Now this is sickness. But it’s also good journalism. I mean, I am not a person. I am really a total journalist. I don’t think Pulitzer Prizes are given to such journalists, but that’s why I never won a Pulitzer prize.”

He thinks again of Damascus. “God, I would do that story in a minute,” Talese says, energized by the idea of such a plum assignment. “What can happen? ISIS is going to chop my neck and I’m going to be on television? At my age, I don’t give a shit. I would get a perfect obit. I would be front page above the fold, or at least below the fold. Otherwise, you’ve got an ordinary page-39 obituary. I would rather be killed on a story than having some cranky nurse in assisted living not getting me a glass of water at 4 in the morning.”

Before the recent controversy over “The Voyeur’s Motel,” Talese would expect that his reputation for evenhandedness and accuracy would figure prominently in his own obituary. They are the two qualities he values most. “No one knows I have it,” he says, “but I have it: I have the prize that I never wrote about anyone who screamed that I abused them. Everybody I interviewed — hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. If they are still alive, I can call them, and they will still talk to me. And you can check this — you’ll probably find me wrong — I don’t think I have ever had a correction. Not that I haven’t made mistakes, but at 84, what did I do wrong?” He pauses, considering. “I can’t remember.”

Not long after our conversation, Gay Talese had something to correct.