The Voyeur’s Motel, book review: 'Spare yourself the trouble of reading this seedy little book'

By Gay Talese, Grove Press, £14.99

Max Liu
Thursday 21 July 2016

In 1980, Gay Talese was contacted by an anonymous motel owner who claimed to have been spying on his guests for over a decade. At the time, Talese was finishing his best-selling study of sexual morality, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, but he was intrigued by this self-described man of “unlimited curiosity about people” so he travelled to Colorado to meet him.

Talese excels at subtle characterisation and, when they meet at Denver airport, he tells us that the motelier, whose name is Gerald Foos, insists on carrying his luggage. Talese compliments Foos’ “highly polished black Cadillac sedan” and Foos responds by listing his other cars. These details might sound trivial but they establish Foos as a man who’s a little too eager to impress, a smooth-talker with an edge of insecurity.

At the Manor House Motel, Talese meets Foos’ wife Donna, who knows about his spying, and hears about the couple’s two children who know nothing about it. Foos shows Talese the rooms where he’s installed custom-made vents which allow him to peer down from his “observation platform” in the attic. The pair watch a couple having sex but the game is almost up when Talese’s tie dangles through the vent. The book would have benefited from more of this kind of drama. Talese fails to persuade Foos to talk on the record but, for the next couple of decades, Foos sends him photocopies of his “Voyeur’s Diary”.

In 2013, Foos, who is, like Talese, in his 80s, finally agreed to go public with his story and Talese went to work on this book. A few weeks ago, however, Washington Post reporters claimed they’d discovered information that undermined Foos’ version of events. Initially, Talese said his book’s credibility was “down the toilet” but later retracted, deciding to stand by his, and Foos’, story. Talese admits Foos is a “master of deception” but, unfortunately, the prepublication controversy is the most interesting thing about The Voyeur’s Motel.

Foos’ diary entries are as banal as they are lurid. His descriptions of Vietnam War veterans’ private agonies capture an important aspect of America in the 1970s but, on the whole, the diary reads like an extended fantasy which raises doubts about its veracity and the value of Talese’s book. Talese wonders: “Had I become complicit in this strange and distasteful project?” The question is particularly pertinent when he reads Foos’ account of witnessing a murder at the motel in 1977 and failing to intervene. But Talese merely dabbles in the self-scrutiny that could have given his book depth.

According to Talese, Foos sees himself not as a peeping tom but as “a pioneering researcher whose efforts were comparable to those of the renowned sexologists at the Kinsey Institute.” This is, obviously, laughable, not least because Foos’ main conclusion, from invading thousands of guests’ privacy, is that people behave differently in private to how they behave in public. It’s difficult to believe that anybody doesn’t know this already, so spare yourself the trouble of reading this seedy little book.

THE INDEPENDENT

The Voyeur's Motel by Gay Talese – digested read

‘Gerald and I looked through the vents and saw a male having intercourse. I noted that Gerald ejaculated at 7.51pm’



John Crace

Sunday 24 July 2016 17.00 BST

I know a married man with two children who bought a 21-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. I first became aware of this individual in 1980 when my valet handed me a letter that had been sent to my $5m home in New York.

Dear Mr Talese, as the author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, the brilliantly written exploration of American sexual mores that has now been in the bestseller lists for over six months, I thought you might like to know about my adventures as a Peeping Tom. Yours, Anonymous.

For several days, I left this letter to one side as I had more important matters to attend to, namely designing the monogram for my blazer. Since my correspondent refused to be named, I felt there was little to be gained from meeting him as my deservedly award-winning non-fiction had always been predicated on full disclosure. And yet I had to concede that his letter was not without merit as it did acknowledge me as the finest living writer of my generation. So I replied, using my Montblanc fountain pen, that I would meet him at baggage reclaim 4 at Phoenix airport, at some point in the future when I had finished my nationwide tour promoting yet another of my brilliant books.

He was sat on a pale tangerine banquette near baggage reclaim 5 when I arrived in Phoenix shortly after four in the afternoon of 23rd January. After I rebuked him for his impertinence in waiting in the wrong place, thereby delaying me for at least 12 seconds, he lead me out to his highly polished black Cadillac sedan. “Good day,” he said, as the sun beat down from what I recall was a deep-azure sky. “My name is Gerald Foos.”

Gerald, as he preferred to be called, introduced me to his wife Donna, whom he assured me was highly approving of his voyeurism, which he insisted was an important social history of the sexual activities of his motel guests. Gerald and Donna took me up to the secret attic from which they could spy on their guests though the vents. “Look down there,” he said. I leant forward to observe a white male of about 195lb having intercourse with a slight woman of Spanish descent with thick black pubic hair. As I leant further forward, my silk Ralph Lauren tie slipped through the vent: Gerald pulled me back, lest our voyeurism became public, before continuing to masturbate. I made a note that Gerald had ejaculated at precisely 7.51pm.

On my return to my New York home that had appreciated in value by $145 in my absence, Gerald began to send me weekly instalments from his meticulously observed notes.

“A short fat man urinates in the sink while his wife is out. On her return, she performs fellatio on his below-average-size penis. He then mounts her in the male superior position and thrusts forcefully for about five minutes before climaxing. The woman does not appear to climax. Conclusion: this couple have a serviceable, if not particularly joyful, union. The rather small amount of semen the man ejaculates suggests he is a frequent masturbator.”

To my surprise, I sense there is some nobility in Gerald’s enterprise and I recall a book written by a professor who is not quite so brilliant as me, in which Victorian sexual activity was explored through the prism of voyeurism. I ask Gerald to send further extracts of his diary.

“There is no moral problem with voyeurism because the people being watched don’t know they are being watched so they can’t be hurt. I find this immensely reassuring when some of my own semen slips through the vent on to the face of a well-built brunette woman who has just swallowed the semen of a slight Caucasian man of about 157lb. I also observe a man strangling a woman and feel a bit guilty about not reporting it, though am aware that doing so would compromise my objectivity.”

At some point, it becomes clear to me that Gerald’s diary actually begins three years before he bought the motel, but I am inclined to treat this as an administrational error on Gerald’s part. In 2013, Gerald, who is now in his 80s, rings up to say that the motel has been knocked down and he is now happy for me to publish a book about him using his real name.

I agree, though the extract about the killing still bothers me. I ring up the Denver police department, who inform me they have no record of any homicide at the motel. The incompetence of the Denver police, in not responding to a crime that definitely took place, is breathtaking. At some point I might write an award-winning book about them. For now, though, satisfied that my own extensive research is complete, I decide to publish the most important work of non-fictional fictional bollocks ever in the history of non-fictional fictional bollocks.

Digested read, digested: Foos’ gold.

THE GUARDIAN

Gay Talese / The Voyeur´s Motel

THE VOYEUR’S MOTEL

By Gay Talese

Gerald Foos bought a motel in order to watch his guests having sex. He saw a lot more than that.

AMERICAN CHRONICLES 

APRIL 11, 2016 ISSUE

I know a married man and father of two who bought a twenty-one-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring six by fourteen inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvred aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grilles but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades, while keeping an exhaustive written record of what he saw and heard. Never once, during all those years, was he caught.

Steven Spielberg to Produce ‘Voyeur’s Motel,’ Sam Mendes Directing

Dave McNary
April 14 2016

Steven Spielberg is producing a movie version of Gay Talese’s upcoming novel “The Voyeur’s Motel” for DreamWorks with Sam Mendes directing.

Mendes will produce through his Neal Street Productions company. Mendes, who directed the James Bond movies “Skyfall” and “Spectre,” has directed a trio of titles for DreamWorks — his debut on “American Beauty,” “The Road to Perdition” and “Revolutionary Road.”

DreamWorks won an auction for the rights to Talese’s novel. CAA brokered the auction.

The story centers on Colorado resident Gerald Foos, who opened a hotel so he could watch guests having sex. Foos had reached out to Talese in 1980 with the following note:

“Dear Mr. Talese: Since learning of your long awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America, which will be included in your soon to be published book, ‘Thy Neighbor’s Wife,’ I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book.”

An excerpt of “The Voyeur’s Motel” ran in the April 11 issue of the New Yorker. The novel will be published July 12 by Grove Press.

CAA brokered the deal on behalf of Mendes and Talese. Mendes is also represented by attorney Melanie Cook of Ziffren Brittenham. Talese is represented for publishing by Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit.

The news was first reported by Deadline Hollywood.

VARIETY

DE OTROS MUNDOS

Gay Talese / Sinatra está resfriado

Gay Talese / Vida de un escritor
Gay Talese / Honrarás al periodismo
Así fue para Gay Talese escribir sobre Sinatra
El indiscreto Gay Talese
Gay Talese / El ruido de Twitter apaga el reportaje del año
Gay Talese se enreda con la veracidad de su último libro

DRAGON

Gay Talese / The Art of Nonfiction

Gay Talese / Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

Gay Talese Defends ‘The Voyeur’s Motel’ After Source Is Undercut

Author Gay Talese disavows his latest book amid credibility questions

Gay Talese’s Other Problem

Gay Talese / The Voyeur´s Motel
Steven Spielberg to Produce ‘Voyeur’s Motel,’ Sam Mendes Directing 

Gay Talese / The murder the New Yorker never mentioned

Gay Talese
Ocean City,New Jersey
Photo by CHRISTOPHER FELVER

The murder the New Yorker never mentioned

Paul Farhi

April 13 2016

In November 1977, a young woman named Irene Cruz was murdered in a Denver hotel room. Her body was discovered by a maid. Police said she had been strangled. To this day, no one has been charged with the crime.

A few days later, a Denver-area motel owner named Gerald Foos recorded a remarkably similar event in one of his journals. While spying on his guests from a secret attic in his motel, Foos said he witnessed the murder of a young woman by her boyfriend. She was strangled, Foos wrote. The next day, Foos said a maid discovered her body, and Foos reported the crime to police without mentioning what he had seen. To this day, no one has been charged.

The murder Foos claims he saw is a key element of “The Voyeur’s Motel,” a forthcoming book by acclaimed journalist Gay Talese about Foos’s lifelong voyeurism obsession. Talese’s account of this crime is also the centerpiece of a 13,000-word excerpt from the book published by the New Yorker magazine last week.

The excerpt never mentions Cruz’s death or the similarities between it and what Foos said he saw at his motel, the Manor House in suburban Aurora, Colo., located about 10 miles from where Irene Cruz died. But the nearly identical circumstances, the timing of the two events and their location raise questions about Foos’s claims.

The most important questions: Did the murder Foos described actually occur? And if it didn’t, what other journal contents that he provided to Talese might be judged dubious?

Talese investigated Foos’s assertion about the murder and found nothing to corroborate it. Police officials in Aurora said they have nothing in their files about such a crime. He also couldn’t find a coroner’s report, a death certificate or any news accounts. Nor could he ascertain the alleged victim’s name.

But in the New Yorker excerpt, Talese attributes the absence of documentation to bureaucratic error. “In subsequent phone calls,” he writes, “two former officers said that it would not be impossible for there to be no remaining police records in a ‘Jane Doe’ case such as the one I described: the identity of the victim was unknown, after all, and the crime took place before police departments kept electronic records.”

Yet the Cruz murder is listed on the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s cold-case website, which spells out the time, place and circumstances of her death. It occurred on Nov. 3, 1977 — eight days before Foos says he witnessed the Manor House murder.

Talese also raises the possibility that Foos “made an error in his recordkeeping, or transcribed the date of the [Manor House] murder inaccurately, as he copied the original journal entry into a different format.”

The author doesn’t raise another possibility in the New Yorker article: That Foos made the story up.

That notion has occurred to Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove Atlantic, which will publish Talese’s book in July.

“My personal belief is that [the book] is substantially true, the majority of it, and part of it is fantasy,” he said. “This is a man of very strange beliefs and inclinations and behavior. I do feel he exaggerates and fantasizes. I don’t know whether that murder [at Foos’s motel] occurred. But the facts that Gay is reporting, I believe, are facts.”

He said Talese verified as much of Foos’s story as he could, including at one point sitting with Foos in the secret attic as they watched a couple engaged in a sex act.

The details of Cruz’s death, however, were uncovered not by Talese but by Jamison Stoltz, Grove Atlantic’s senior editor. In reading Talese’s manuscript, Stoltz said he became curious about the alleged Manor House crime; he scoured the Internet and found the reference to Cruz on the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s website. It will be mentioned in the book, he said.

The two murders could have been a “coincidence,” Stoltz said in an interview on Tuesday. Or Foos could have “conflated it” with his own story. “You can’t be too sure.”

Foos’s journals purport to document hundreds of sex acts that Foos witnessed among the guests at his motel over several decades. His journal comprises about a third of Talese’s book.

But Stoltz acknowledges that it’s “unknowable” whether the journals’ contents are credible because Foos is the sole source. (Foos received an undisclosed fee from Grove Atlantic for the use of his journals.)

Despite these reservations, neither Entrekin nor Stoltz is concerned about marketing “The Voyeur’s Motel” as nonfiction.

They said Talese was careful to suggest to the reader that Foos is not an entirely trustworthy source.

Early in the New Yorker excerpt, for example, Talese speculates that Foos may be “a simple fabulist. . . . I cannot vouch for every detail that he recounts” in his journals. He also writes, “Over the years, as I burrowed deeper in Foos’ story, I found various inconsistencies — mostly about dates — that called his reliability into question.”

New Yorker Editor David Remnick saidTuesday that the magazine was aware of the Cruz murder but did not include it in its excerpt because “it was at an entirely different location from the motel referenced in our piece.”

“Nevertheless,” he said, “we make abundantly clear to the reader that Foos’s journals are his work alone, and that he may be unreliable. . . . To the extent Foos’s journal is less than a factual record of events, readers are fully appraised of that possibility.”

Talese, 84, declined to answer questions about “The Voyeur’s Motel,” but in an exchange of emails earlier this week, he wrote, “This voyeur story is over with me. I did my best as a reporter; I wrote as well as I could in telling the story.”

Reached by phone, Foos at first declined to speak to a reporter. He said he was “under contract” with his book publisher and therefore was unable to talk about his journals or Talese’s account of them.

But when pressed about the similarities between the Cruz murder and the one he said he saw at the Manor House, he offered this: “We know about that murder [Cruz’s]. We checked with the police on that. It has nothing to do” with what he said he saw.

Foos implied that it was merely a coincidence that strangulation deaths of two young women had occurred within eight days of each other and 10 miles apart.

“Those things happen,” he said of the similarities. He then said that he could no longer talk and ended the conversation.

Paul Farhi is The Washington Post's media reporter.

THE WASHINGTON POST

Author Gay Talese disavows his latest book amid credibility questions

Author Gay Talese disavows his latest book amid credibility questions

Paul Farhi
June 30, 2016

In his forthcoming book, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” acclaimed journalist and nonfiction author Gay Talese chronicles the bizarre story of Gerald Foos, who allegedly spied on guests at his Colorado motel from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s.

But Talese overlooked a key fact in his book: Foos sold the motel, located in Aurora, Colo., in 1980 and didn’t reacquire it until eight years later, according to local property records. His absence from the motel raises doubt about some of the things Foos told Talese he saw — enough that the author himself now has deep reservations about the truth of some material he presents.

“I should not have believed a word he said,” the 84-year-old author said after The Washington Post informed him of property records that showed Foos did not own the motel from 1980 to 1988.

“I’m not going to promote this book,” the writer said. “How dare I promote it when its credibility is down the toilet?”

The book, which will be published July 12, was excerpted in the New Yorker magazine in April. The story attracted widespread media attention and led producer-director Steven Spielberg to buy the movie rights to the book. Spielberg has lined up Sam Mendes, who won an Academy Award for directing “American Beauty,” to create a film of Talese’s and Foos’s story.

Talese has long been hailed as a master of the New Journalism, a form that emerged in the 1960s marrying shoe-leather reporting with the techniques of fiction writing. His 14 books include “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” a chronicle of the sexual revolution of the 1970s, and “The Kingdom and the Power,” an inside look at the New York Times. He is the author of one of the classic magazine profiles of the 20th century, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

“The Voyeur’s Motel” is largely based on journals kept by Foos, now 82, who built a hidden walkway above some of the rooms at his motel, the Manor House, in suburban Denver. The journals describe a variety of intimate encounters among his guests, who were unaware that Foos was watching them from above through specially fitted louvered vents.

While the vast majority of events described in the book occurred in the 1970s, Talese does refer to incidents that allegedly occurred in the 1980s. Talese writes, for example, that Foos’s second wife “sometimes joined him in the attic” to watch guests during the mid-1980s. But Foos didn’t own the motel then and said he had quit his Peeping Tom ways by the time he took the motel back in 1988.

Talese does note in “The Voyeur’s Motel” that he found discrepancies in Foos’s accounts. Foos’s earliest journal entries, for example, were dated 1966. But the author subsequently learned from county property records that Foos didn’t buy the Manor House Motel until 1969 — three years after he said he started watching his guests from the catwalk. “I cannot vouch for every detail that he recounts in his manuscript,” Talese writes in the book.

But property records also show a series of sales and purchases of the motel from 1980 to 1988, none of which Talese said he knew about. In a series of interviews, he expressed surprise, disappointment and anger to learn about the transactions. He said he had not been aware of them until a reporter asked him about it on Wednesday.

“The source of my book, Gerald Foos, is certifiably unreliable,” Talese said. “He’s a dishonorable man, totally dishonorable. . . . I know that. . . . I did the best I could on this book, but maybe it wasn’t good enough.”

Foos vouches for his own veracity. “I can swear to this, and I can say this unequivocally and without recourse, that I have never purposely told a lie,” he said. “Everything I said in that book is the truth.”

Some of the book’s timeline of events has already been called into question, particularly an incident that Foos said he witnessed at the motel in 1977. While secreted in the attic, he said he saw a man strangle a woman to death in the room below. He said he later reported this to police, without revealing he was an eyewitness. But Talese was unable to find any official documentation of this crime, and in the book and New Yorker excerpt, he dismisses this discrepancy as a record-keeping error by authorities.

The book makes only fleeting reference to a murder that did occur at the Manor House: the unsolved 1984 homicide of a man named James Craig Broughman, apparently by an intruder.

The various sales of the motel in the 1980s came to light in April after media organizations, including The Post, asked about the 1984 murder and other police records on the Manor House. An Aurora homicide detective, Stephen W. Conner, conducted the property record search and found that Foos and his wife Donna sold the Manor House in October 1980 to Earl and Pamela Ballard, a local couple Gerald Foos knew. The Ballards, in turn, sold it in 1983 to Kyong C. LeFebre.

Foos and his second wife re-acquired it from LeFebre in July 1988. The Fooses then sold it for the last time in 1995, the records indicate. Foos confirmed the general sequence of events in an interview with The Post.

Conner, who spoke briefly with Foos in April, told The Post that Foos didn’t have access to the Manor House in 1984 because he no longer owned it. “I have no doubt that Mr. Foos may have been involved in some nefarious activity while he owned the Manor House. I just do not think it arose to the magnitude described by Mr. Talese,” the detective said in an email to The Post.

Talese said it was his understanding that Foos and his family lived in the motel even after he sold it “to a Korean family” (in fact, the initial buyer, the Ballards, are not Korean), and after it was sold a second time to LeFebre. “He lived in the goddamn place,” Talese said at one point.

In fact, he did not, according to both Ballard and Foos. Still, Foos said in an interview that he had access to the annex, which he called his “sexual researcher’s station,” during the three years the Ballards owned the place.

Ballard disputes this. After buying the motel in 1980, Ballard said he locked the annex and closed off the ceiling vents that Foos had installed to facilitate his voyeurism.

Ballard, who knew Foos for years before buying the motel, confirmed that Foos had spied on guests for many years in the 1970s. “He was pretty open about that,” Ballard said. “At least he was to me.”

During the 1970s, Ballard said, Foos sometimes invited Ballard as well as another man to join him in the annex to look in on guests. Ballard said he went multiple times but added: “I never liked Gerald. He certainly was a pervert.”

For his part, Foos called Ballard “as big a voyeur as I was.”

Foos said he was locked out of the motel altogether when LeFebre took over ownership of the motel from Ballard in 1984. At that point, he said, “I decided to get out of the voyeurism business.”

Foos said he accepted a promissory note from Ballard when he sold the motel to him and Ballard passed it on to LeFebre. Foos reacquired the motel in 1988 by forgiving the note.

He said he never mentioned any of these property transactions to Talese while he was researching the book because “I didn’t think it would be interesting to people to see two voyeurs fighting over the same turf.”

Talese visited Foos at the Manor House just once, for three days in 1980, apparently a few months before the motel was sold to the Ballards.

“The Voyeur’s Motel” makes no reference to the motel’s ownership until Foos tells him in a letter in late 1996 that he sold the lodging in August of that year to “Korean-born residents of Denver.” This appears to be in error, too: County records indicate that the Fooses actually sold the motel in August of 1995 to a man named Bruno G. Previtali.

Talese said he relied on Foos to describe a remarkable coincidence: That Foos’s son, Mark, rented the same apartment later occupied by James Holmes, the gunman who killed 12 people in an Aurora movie theater in 2012.

He writes: “Bizarrely, [Foos] told me that he had once been inside the gunman’s apartment: Foos’ son had been an earlier tenant. ‘After I moved my son to another neighborhood,’ he said, ‘this guy apparently replaced him, although we don’t ever recall running into this guy whose picture is now all over the news.’ ”

According to the Nexis database and police records, Holmes and Mark Foos lived in Aurora at approximately the same time but occupied different buildings. Thus, Holmes couldn’t “replace” Mark Foos, nor could Foos’s son be “an earlier tenant.”

Morgan Entrekin, chief executive of Talese’s publisher, Grove/Atlantic books, said the majority of events described in “The Voyeur’s Motel” occurred before Foos sold the motel in 1980. But he said the company would consider appending an author’s note or footnotes in subsequent printings to account for errors or missing information.

New Yorker editor David Remnick said he hadn’t had time to review the magazine’s vetting of the excerpt it published in April but would look into it.

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Paul Farhi is The Washington Post's media reporter.

THE WASHINGTON POST

DRAGON
Gay Talese / The Art of Nonfiction

Gay Talese / Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

Gay Talese Defends ‘The Voyeur’s Motel’ After Source Is Undercut

Author Gay Talese disavows his latest book amid credibility questions

Gay Talese’s Other Problem

Gay Talese

Gay Talese Defends ‘The Voyeur’s Motel’ After Source Is Undercut

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

JULY 1, 2016

In Gay Talese’s forthcoming book, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” about a Colorado motel owner who spied on his guests for years without their knowledge, Mr. Talese warns readers that his central character can be “an inaccurate and unreliable narrator.”

But Mr. Talese might have underestimated just how unreliable Gerald Foos, the owner, really is.

The book, which Grove Atlantic is to publish on July 12, follows the strange story of Mr. Foos, who used a hidden observation platform at his motel in Aurora, Colo., to spy on his customers for decades, and kept detailed notes on their behavior. The book was excerpted in The New Yorker in April, and film rights were optioned by Steven Spielberg.

Now Mr. Talese has acknowledged that Mr. Foos might have failed to share some key facts. An article published by The Washington Post on Thursday night revealed that Mr. Foos sold the motel in 1980 and did not repurchase it until 1988.

Informed of that by The Post, Mr. Talese, 84, told the publication that he regretted trusting Mr. Foos and did not plan to promote the book because “its credibility is down the toilet.” But on Friday he said that he stood by the book.

“I was surprised and upset about this business of the later ownership of the motel, in the ’80s,” Mr. Talese said in a statement provided by his publisher. “That occurred after the bulk of the events covered in my book, but I was upset and probably said some things I didn’t, and don’t, mean. Let me be clear: I am not disavowing the book, and neither is my publisher. If, down the line, there are details to correct in later editions, we’ll do that.”

While a majority of the narrative takes place before 1980, one scene of voyeurism occurs in the period when Mr. Foos was not the owner, casting doubt on some of his recollections.

Morgan Entrekin, the chief executive and publisher of Grove Atlantic, said the company would move forward with the publication and the promotion of the book, and might add a new author’s note.

“Gay is going to do all his planned promotion and publicity, and we’ll make any necessary corrections, as any publisher does,” Mr. Entrekin said in an interview on Friday. “Gay is an impassioned person and he takes what he does very seriously, and he’s frustrated dealing with this guy who isn’t completely reliable.”

Much of the narrative is based on journals that Mr. Foos kept, recording his observations of the motel guests’ behavior, including sexual encounters and crimes. Other sources confirmed that Mr. Foos spied on his guests, using a secret platform he built in the ceiling, with vents that provided views of the rooms. He claims to have spied from the late 1960s to the 1990s.

Mr. Talese was apparently unaware of the 1980 sale of the motel until a Washington Post reporter asked him about it this week. But he had his own doubts about Mr. Foos’s memories, and noted that the motel owner’s recollection of facts could be inconsistent.

“I cannot vouch for every detail that he recounts in his manuscript,” Mr. Talese wrote in the New Yorker excerpt.

Among the inconsistencies: Mr. Foos dated his first journal entries about the motel guests to 1966, but didn’t own the motel until 1969.

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said in an email message that the portrait of the motel owner in the magazine was not in dispute.

“The central fact of the piece, that Gerald Foos was, in the late ’60s and ’70s, a voyeur, spying on the guests in his motel, is not in doubt in the article,” Mr. Remnick wrote. “The fact that he could sometimes prove an unreliable and inaccurate narrator is also something that Gay Talese makes clear to the reader, repeatedly, and is part of the way Foos is characterized throughout the article.”

Mr. Talese first heard from Mr. Foos in 1980, after the motel owner learned of Mr. Talese’s book “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” about the sexual revolution in the 1970s. He told Mr. Talese he bought the motel to satisfy his voyeuristic impulses and invited the writer to visit. Mr. Foos did not want to be identified by name at the time, so Mr. Talese wrote nothing then.

Later, in the spring of 2013, Mr. Foos contacted Mr. Talese and said he wanted to go public with his story and share the years of observations he had recorded. (It is unclear whether Mr. Foos retained access to the attic after he sold the motel in 1980.)

After Mr. Talese’s book excerpt was published in The New Yorker in April, he was criticized for not revealing Mr. Foos’s unethical and illegal behavior sooner, and for being complicit in his voyeurism. “Was Talese ever concerned about what other dangerous and possibly illegal things Foos had done?” Isaac Chotiner wrote in Slate. “He appears uninterested in even wrestling with the question.”

In one particularly disturbing scene, Mr. Talese joins Mr. Foos in the attic and spies on a couple having oral sex. “Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a closer view,” Mr. Talese wrote in the article.

The same week that the article was published, Mr. Talese was engulfed in another controversy over remarks he made at a writing conference at Boston University. When asked to name female writers who had inspired him, Mr. Talese mentioned Mary McCarthy but then said he couldn’t think of any from his own generation. The comment was met with outrage on social media, where Mr. Talese was condemned as sexist and out of touch. Many took to Twitter with the hashtag #womengaytaleseshouldread.

If more questions arise about “The Voyeur’s Motel,” it could leave a stain on Mr. Talese’s storied legacy. In a career that spans more than 60 years, he has written 14 books, including “The Kingdom and the Power,” about The New York Times, where he worked as a reporter for 12 years. He was a pioneer of New Journalism, a style of literary reportage that emerged in the 1960s. Among his most influential works were 1966 Esquire profiles of Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio.

Whether his new book will withstand further scrutiny remains to be seen. In his statement, Mr. Talese emphasized that the central premise of his story held true. “Gerald Foos, as no one calls into question, was an epic voyeur, and, as I say very clearly in the text, he could also at times be an unreliable teller of his own peculiar story,” he said.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

DRAGON
Gay Talese / The Art of Nonfiction

Gay Talese / Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

Gay Talese Defends ‘The Voyeur’s Motel’ After Source Is Undercut

Author Gay Talese disavows his latest book amid credibility questions

Gay Talese’s Other Problem

Gay Talese’s Other Problem

Gay Talese’s Other Problem

The writer’s latest New Yorker piece is far more troubling than his sexist comments.

By Isaac Chotiner

April 9 2016

G

ay Talese probably wishes he'd had a cold. Instead, the 84-year-old journalist ventured out to Boston University last week, and made a series of simultaneously inane and offensive comments about female writers. Since that time, Talese has been the unsurprising object of mockery and scorn on Twitter and elsewhere. But within the same week, to less fanfare, Talese revealed an even darker side of himself via a massively long piece in the current issue of the New Yorker, titled “The Voyeur’s Motel.” Although it has been on the magazine's “most read” list for days, it hasn't elicited a fraction of the commentary that his remarks did. But the article is a failure of journalistic ethics and a revealing window into Talese’s character.

Talese’s narrative is undeniably fascinating. The story is about a strange man named Gerald Foos, who owned and operated a motel in Colorado. With the help and knowledge of his wife, he modified many of the motel’s rooms in such a way that he could watch his guests from above the ceiling. Although he admits to being sexually aroused by his spying, he is also intellectually curious: He fastidiously records details about the occupants (especially about their sex lives), and believes himself to be gleaning a great deal of sociological insight into them. As the story moves from the 1960s through the 1990s, he witnesses and catalogs various societal changes, such as an increase in interracial couples, that are compelling but ultimately unsurprising and never revelatory. The real interest of Talese’s piece, in other words, is Foos himself.

Foos wrote to Talese in 1980, hoping someone would tell his story without revealing his name or blowing his cover. It’s here that things get murky. Talese traveled to Colorado to meet Foos and see the motel for himself. Immediately upon arrival in the state, the journalist also signed a document promising that, in his words, “I would not identify him by name, or publicly associate his motel with whatever information he shared with me, until he had granted me a waiver.” Talese claims that by this point he had already decided not to write about Foos because of the confidentiality restriction. It’s not really clear, however, what he told Foos about his motives; like much else in the story, Talese’s intentions are never properly delineated.

When Talese finally got to the motel, he made a fateful decision: He entered the attic with Foos and watched an unsuspecting couple have oral sex. Throughout his recounting, Talese is constantly noting his own ambivalence, but it’s impossible to know how much of this is sincere. (The absurdity and bathos of the scene—with Talese’s tie slipping through a slat and dangling over the bed, thus almost revealing him and Foos—is just one of the bizarrely compelling, borderline unbelievable bits in the piece.)

Several weeks later, Foos begins sending Talese his journal, which he started writing in 1966, and most of the piece is taken up with its insights, and Talese’s comments on them. As the journal progresses, however, the story takes a disturbing turn: Foos had a habit of going into his guests’ rooms and dispensing with any drugs they had; he had witnessed drug deals from the attic and disapproved. (His hypocrisy and moralism on certain issues—such as government spying, which he is against—is one of the things that make him such an interesting protagonist.) This time, a drug dealer notices his missing stash, and subsequently blames and murders his girlfriend, in view of Foos. (Foos watched the whole thing happen, and did nothing; once the drug dealer departed the room, he noticed that the victim was still breathing but decided not to help her.) As Talese writes, “Foos reasoned that he couldn’t do anything anyway, ‘because at this moment in time he was only an observer and not a reporter, and really didn’t exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned.’ ” Talese, one hopes, finds such reasoning disgusting, although it is hard to know, since he seems to be operating on similar principles. (The murder appears to have occurred in 1977—Foos is bad with dates—before Talese entered the picture. Foos did eventually call the police; there was, after all, a dead body in one of his motel rooms.)

Talese had an obligation as a citizen to reveal Foos’ creepy, dangerous, illegal behavior, and did not do so.

By 2013, Foos had sold the motel and wanted to “go public” with his story. The statute of limitations, he reasoned, would protect him from lawsuits and/or criminal charges. The confidentiality agreement Talese signed was voided by Foos; in addition to the New Yorkerarticle, which is an excerpt, Talese has written a book on the subject, which will be out later this year from Grove/Atlantic, which even paid Foos some money for his trouble. (Retrofitting the motel for optimal spying couldn’t have been cheap.) Morgan Entrekin, the president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, told me that because of the book’s reliance on “over 20,000 words of copyright material, we either have a choice of not using it, or paying the copyright owner a fee.” When I asked about Foos, Entrekin responded by saying, “Is the guy a particularly savory character? No.”

So, let’s review: Talese signs a confidentiality agreement that states he won’t reveal anything about Foos. He then goes and spies on two people having sex at Foos’ motel. Then, Foos, after enough time had elapsed that he could no longer get in trouble, sells his story, and Talese sells his book.

Was Talese planning to write about Foos all along? Although he says in the piece that he hoped to, on the condition that the confidentiality agreement would one day be voided, he also says that he originally went to Colorado “merely to meet this man and satisfy his curiosity.” If the latter is true, then it’s hard to know what the journalistic motive was in not revealing the goings-on at the motel to authorities. But, assuming that he was indeed planning to write about Foos, there is surely something objectionable about waiting until both men were out of legal danger before cashing in on the story. It’s true that any journalist who writes about war or crime or violence is in some sense “profiting” from bad behavior. (Entrekin mentioned to me that many wrongdoers throughout history, from the Watergate conspirators onward, made money off of their stories.) But this case is categorically different: Foos’ story is not a matter of great public interest; sticking with him in the hopes of one day blowing the lid off some institutional failure was never the point. Talese had an obligation as a citizen to reveal Foos’ creepy, dangerous, illegal behavior, and did not do so.

The most revolting part of the piece occurs after Talese learns of the murder, when he confesses to having spent “a few sleepless nights, asking myself whether I ought to turn Foos in. But I reasoned it was too late to save the drug dealer’s girlfriend … I felt worrisomely like a co-conspirator.” Talese’s “reasoning,” such as it is, would mean that no one should ever turn anyone else in for a crime that has already been committed.

I reached out to New Yorker editor David Remnick, who declined to comment beyond what he said to the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi: “While the scene is certainly disturbing (Talese writes that he was ‘shocked, and surprised’ to read the account in the journal), the New Yorker does not believe that Talese or it violated any legal or ethical boundaries in presenting Foos’s account of it to the reader.” Reading Talese’s story, it is impossible not to wonder what else Foos had been up to. In a creepy episode revealed in his journal, Foos followed one of his occupants home, and questioned a neighbor at her apartment complex. Was Talese ever concerned about what other dangerous and possibly illegal things Foos had done? He appears uninterested in even wrestling with the question.

I wrote Talese asking him several specific questions, including why he didn’t turn Foos in to authorities. Talese responded late Friday night, promising more detail in his forthcoming book, but noting that in the meantime he could not provide answers to my “serious and important questions.” He was writing from Denver; he had just arrived in the city, he said, and was “now worrying about the death threats to the voyeur my writing has just exposed. Many mean-sounding people here in Denver are warning him not to leave his house—and, for three days, he hasn’t. The police had been notified, they are patrolling the area around the clock.” He wrote that he planned to pay Foos a visit this weekend, before adding: “As he felt responsible for the death he did not prevent, I also feel responsible for communicating his very complicated and controversial relationship with his life-long compulsion to invade other people’s privacy. Now, with America a Voyeuristic Nation—so much of it in the name of security (which I explain in the magazine excerpt) it is almost pathetic to witness the petrified voyeur seeking privacy.”

It was a bizarre message (he doesn’t once mention Foos by name), both more contemptuous and pitying of Foos than anything in the actual piece. It’s good to know that Talese is finally feeling “responsible” for something, but the problem is that Foos’ behavior was able to continue undisturbed for so long, not that it is now finally public.

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Gay Talese / The Art of Nonfiction

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Gay Talese Defends ‘The Voyeur’s Motel’ After Source Is Undercut

Author Gay Talese disavows his latest book amid credibility questions

Gay Talese’s Other Problem