A Writer's Life (65 page)
Authors: Gay Talese
The two of us coexisted with recurring feelings of resignation for the rest of the week in the Eternal City, waiting to be contacted by the office of the registrar, where we had applied for a marriage license and had given the chief clerk a fifty-dollar gratuity in the interest of expediency. The clerk himself delivered the license to us at our hotel on June 8, five days after Nan's arrival, and he also gave us directions to the municipal hall, where we were to appear two days later for the official ceremony.
On the eve of our wedding, Nan and I went to dinner at the Hostaria dell'Orso and ordered a bottle of champagne. Before we had received it, I excused myself from our table to greet one of my favorite authors, Irwin Shaw, who was standing at the bar chatting with a few other men. Shaw, a broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced, gregarious individual in his mid-forties, had played football for Brooklyn College but had achieved fame and fortune as a writer of short stories (I had practically memorized the opening paragraphs of “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” and “The Eighty-Yard Run”) and such best-selling novels as
The Young Lions
, which later became a movie starring Marlon Brando. I had recently read in a news
column that Shaw's latest novel, which was set in Rome and was called
Two Weeks in Another Town
, had just been optioned by Hollywood.
After I had approached him and had congratulated him on his latest accomplishment, I was pleased to hear that he remembered meeting me years before in Paris, where he kept an apartment and was friendly with a
Times
colleague of mine, who had introduced us.
“What brings you to Rome?” he asked.
“I came to write about the Via Veneto for the Sunday
Times Magazine,”
I said, “but a few days ago my girlfriend arrived from New York
with my birth certificate!
We've been dating for two years, and she thinks it's time we made it official.”
“Who
is
this woman?” he asked.
“Her name is Nan Ahearn, and she works at Random House,” I said.
“Random House! They're the best. They're my publishers.⦔
We walked over to my table, and I introduced Nan to Irwin Shaw. Her large green eyes widened, and with a smile and gracious handshake, she complimented him on his work.
“This woman's got good taste,” he whispered into my ear. “You're lucky to be marrying her. Who's the best man?”
“I don't have one,” I replied.
“Yes, you do,” he said. “You have me.”
The next morning, in front of an ornate building overlooking the Piazza del Campidoglio, which had been designed by Michelangelo, Nan and I were met by Irwin Shaw and two of his closest friends in Italyâa courtly and personable gentleman named Pilade Levi, who was the Rome representative of a Hollywood studio, and Levi's attractive and equally engaging companion, Carol Guadagni, who headed the Rome office of the William Morris Agency. Shaw had undoubtedly sensed that Nan and I were uneasy about what we were about to do, and so he brought along his friends to lend their support and encouragementâwhich they did. But in actual fact, once the ceremony had begun, I ceased to think about what had concerned me earlier (that is, the good life would soon be over) and concentrated instead on how amazing it was that Nan would travel so far to be with me, and that the two of us would now be standing together in a huge and magnificent hall, hearing our marital vows being intoned in Italian by a handsome magistrate whose chest was crossed with a tricolored sash and who stood before a high-backed damask chair behind a table draped with a velvet cloth that displayed an emblazoned seal in gold lettering:
S.P.Q.R
. (the Senate and People of Rome).
After the ceremony, Shaw gave Nan and me a wedding party in a ballroom across the street from the American embassy on the Via Veneto. It
was a festive occasion, attended by many people who were then active in the filming of
La Dolce Vita
, including Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianniâwhich brightened my spirits for about twenty-four hours, or until the following day, when our bridal suite was sizzling with an angry phone call from my bride's mother in New York.
“But
Mummy
 ⦔ I heard Nan trying to explain, “but
Mummy
 ⦔
From the drift of their conversation and from what I found out later, my wife's mother became furious when she learned from the wedding story in that morning's
Times
that we had been married by a civil official rather than a priest. It had been a tiny story buried near the bottom of the social page, and I was surprised that Nan's mother had even noticed it.
Gay Talese Marries Miss Nan I. Ahearn
Miss Nan Irene Ahearn, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Ahearn, Jr., of Rye, N.Y., was married Wednesday in Rome to Gay Talese. He is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph F. Talese of Ocean City, N.J. The ceremony was performed in City Hall on Capitol Hill by City Councilor Renato Ambrosi de Magistris.
Mrs. Talese, a former student at the Rye Country Day School, was graduated from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Greenwich, Conn., and in 1955 from Manhattanville College. She was presented in 1951 at the Westchester Cotillion. She is with Random House publishers in New York. The bridegroom, a member of the staff of the New York Times, was graduated from the University of Alabama in 1953.
In the interest of reportorial fairness and perhaps the continuation of my marriage, I do not think it is prudent of me to reveal any more information about my private relationship with Nan and her family. And yet since it was I who introduced the subject of my marriage and the irritation that it caused my mother-in-law in particular, I believe that readers are entitled to more of an explanation than I am comfortable about disclosingâaccepting as I do my wife's prerogative to edit and amend whatever I might wish to publish about our marriage, the circumstances that preceded it, and the reactions that it provoked.
My own parents, to be sure, did not reveal what they thought about the marriage. Whatever misgivings they might have had about Nan as their
daughter-in-law or about not being invited to the wedding, they kept to themselves. Italian-American couples of their generation were customarily reticent about discussing personal matters that caused them pain or discomfort, no doubt being influenced to some degree by the traditional southern Italian code of silence, known as
omertÃ
. Nan's family, however, being more securely ensconced in the American mainstreamâNan's banker father was three generations removed from Irish soil, and her mother's forebears first arrived from England in 1631âwere more forthright in expressing their views on just about everything that interested them; and yet this does not provide
me
with much leeway when it comes to writing about
them
or my marriage to their daughter. Such topics are tacitly “off the record.” After all, what I know about my in-laws and my wife came to me through circumstances quite different from how I operate as a fact-gathering writer, pursuing people for interviews with the understanding that the information is for public consumption.
If I were a practitioner of fiction, a creator of novels, plays, or short stories, I would have the option of doing what these writers can do whenever they feel compelled to write intimately about themselves and/or individuals whom they are close toâthey can change everybody's names and otherwise falsify the facts in ways that they hope will protect their works from lawsuits or other forms of redress arising from so-called injured parties. And thus what is most truthfully and tellingly conveyed about private life in public literature and other means of communication is categorized and conveyed as “fiction.” But as I have already tried to explain, since I am a fastidious exponent of
non
fictionâa reportorial writer who does not want to change names, who avoids using composite characters in narratives, and who makes every effort to adhere to factual accuracyâI am in a quandary here because I suspect that there exists a conflict of interest between my role as a writer and myself as a subject in this section of my story. Therefore I must recuse myself and defer to another writer, Arthur Lubow, who separately interviewed Nan and me on several occasions in 1991 for a
Vanity Fair
magazine piece that he was researching and that was pegged to the publication in early 1992 of my book
Unto the Sons
.
In Mr. Lubow's article, which appeared in the February 1992 issue of
Vanity Fair
, he wrote:
Talese had never wanted to get married. In 1957, when he was a
Times
sportswriter, he was introduced to Nan Ahearn, a recent graduate of Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. Like many well-bred girls in the fifties, she was working at respectable jobs until she found a husband.
In Gay she saw a handsome young man with a passion for books and a single-minded ambition to be a writer. He had little in common with the boys who had escorted her to Princeton games and to the Stork Club and to the Westchester Cotillion, at which she made her debut. Those boys would be lawyers and bankers like her father, a handsome man who wore three-piece suits and consoled himself with alcohol. Her father paid attention only when she talked to him of philosophy or literature. She had majored in those subjects at Manhattanville.
For Gay, this dark-haired young woman with enormous green eyes might have been Judy Jones in F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Winter Dreams,” a short story he loved so much that he had typed it out to see how it was constructed. Fitzgerald's protagonist was, like Gay, a tradesman's son in a summer resort, for whom the cultured, classy, glamorous Judy Jones was the incarnation of every youthful dream. So for Gay was Nan Ahearn. After an initial date at Toots Shor, during which Nan concluded he was more full of himself than anyone she had ever met, they hit it off.â¦
In May 1959, the
New York Times Magazine
dispatched Talese to Rome to write about the Via Veneto. Back in New York, Nan wrote him moony letters until he cabled her to come join him. With great animation, Nan, at fifty-eight still a beautiful, wide-eyed postdeb, tells me what happened next.
“On the way to lunch I went to Alitalia and booked the ticket for the next day,” she remembers. “I called Mummy and Daddy and said, âCan I have dinner with you tonight?' Which was a strange thing to ask. Of course, they said yes. I was just doing it one step at a time. I told them that I had received a cable from Gay asking me to marry him. It was totally untrue, a bald-faced lie. Mummy said, âNo, you have to be married here with the family.' I think I wept and carried on. I know I did. My mother said, âYou don't know what it's like to live with a writer. You weren't brought up for it.' But my father said, âGo cable Gay.'
“The next morning I called Gay's parents very early and asked would they please send Gay's baptismal certificate.⦠That afternoon my mother came in and during lunch we went shopping for my trousseau. There was so much logistics involved that there wasn't time for reflection. On the plane that night, the man next to me, just making conversation, said, âWhere are you going?' I said to Rome. He said, âWhy?' I said, âTo get married.' And for the first time, I thought, Holy good nightâwhat have I done?' ”
When she got off the plane, she saw Gay in the lounge, his dark head buried in his sleeve, the image of dejection. He sensed what was about to happen.â¦
A civil wedding was arranged by one of Talese's heroes, Irwin Shaw.â¦
For a young writer who traced his lineage from Fitzgerald through Shaw, the auguries seemed right. A telephone call from Nan's mother in Rye to their Rome hotel was the initial upset. Suzanne Ahearn had learned from a
Times
wedding notice about the civil ceremony. Outraged, she told Nan that a wedding outside the church was invalid. Nan began to cry. Gay grabbed the phone and told his mother-in-law not to interfere.â¦
The newlyweds did have the Ahearns over to dinner in their shabby apartment (a third-floor room in the house that Gay and Nan would acquire in 1974 for $175,000). But that was the last time Gay would see them. “I think I felt challenged in a serious way,” he says.⦠When their daughters were born, Nan visited Rye with them by herself.â¦
Nan and I celebrated our fortieth wedding anniversary on June 10, 1999. We dined alone at our summer place in Ocean City, and, after opening a special bottle of wine, exchanged gifts. I gave Nan a long strand of pearls and she presented me with two pairs of hand-crafted shoes she had ordered from a bootmaker on Lexington Avenue. During the evening, we received congratulatory calls from our daughters in New YorkâPamela, thirty-five, a painter, and Catherine, thirty-two, the photo editor of
Quest
magazine. They both lived with boyfriends in apartments not far from our Manhattan residence, and, as we usually did every week, we made plans to meet for dinner.
Throughout our marriage, Nan continued to work full-time in the book business. After thirteen years as an editor at Random House, she moved to Simon & Schuster for seven years, and then in 1981 joined the Boston-based Houghton Mifflin company as the editorial director of the New York office. Eventually she became Houghton Mifflin's editor in chief and publisher, spending a few days each week in Boston. But in 1988, after explaining to her colleagues that she was “resigning from the Boston shuttle,” she left Houghton Mifflin to become a senior vice president in New York with Doubleday & Co., and in 1990 began issuing her writers' works under her own imprint: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.
In April 1999, together with the actress Meryl Streep and NBC's Katie Couric, Nan received the Matrix Award, given annually to women for
their contributions toward the enhancement of communication. A month later, at a banquet sponsored by the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York, Nan was again an honoree.