A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  I thanked Bobby Ochs for this information. Privately, however, since hearing that he was unrelated to the Times’s ownership, I was no longer so interested in his personal story nor the fate of Peaches restaurant. I did attend the opening-night party in late September 1998, and I dined there occasionally after that, but on those occasions I never once saw Marla Maples on the premises. There was a large portrait of her by LeRoy Neiman hanging on the wall near the entrance, but she herself was either out of town—a New York Post columnist wrote that she was working on a television pilot in Los Angeles—or she was, as I also read in the papers, preoccupied in New York with matters regarding her marital breakup with Donald Trump or her litigation involving a man who had formerly served as her publicist and had allegedly stolen seventy pairs of her shoes and also some of her lingerie and panty hose.

  In her absence, Bobby Ochs ran Peaches cheerfully and without apparent effort each night, and, from what I was able to observe as an occasional customer (once dining there with J. Z. Morris), the restaurant was doing well enough, although my judgment was, as usual, untrustworthy. In early May 1999, as I was passing 206 East 63rd during my usual midday stroll, I saw Bobby Ochs alone in the dining room and decided to pay him a visit.

  “Sorry,” he said as I entered, “but we’re closed.”

  “Closed for the afternoon?” I asked.

  “No, closed for good,” he said.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said; “you seemed to be doing fine.”

  “No we weren’t,” he said, “but I still don’t know what I could have done differently around here. The food was good; the prices were right.…”

  He invited me to join him at one of the empty tables, and for the next hour or so he tried to analyze what had caused the downfall of Peaches. As he delivered what was essentially a monologue, his voice sometimes almost inaudible and markedly morose, I sat across from him taking notes; and, after returning home, I sent the following message by fax to J. Z. Morris in Sarasota:

  Friday, May 7, 1999

  Dear J.Z.—

  I was just with Bobby Ochs in his now-defunct Peaches restaurant listening to him discussing the reasons—the how many reasons?—that led to his having to close the place after barely seven months of operation. I think that in a mental sense he is almost shell-shocked at this time. I felt so sorry for him as he unburdened himself in this abandoned dining room that was buzzing with flies—a forlorn atmosphere interrupted occasionally by a ringing telephone dialed by people wanting a dinner reservation, or by the door knockings of a mailman who wanted to know how much longer he should be delivering mail to Peaches at this address? There was also a visit from a young woman who had been a customer and she inquired as to the whereabouts of a man she’d often met in the bar in the upstairs lounge weeks before (she’d been smitten by him, but lost his phone number); and there also arrived at the door a now out-of-work waitress asking Bobby Ochs when she’d be receiving her promised pay? He promised that she’d receive her money on Friday evening.

  Once or twice during my stay with him he received visits from rental agents wanting to see the place. So far as I could tell, Ochs has no takers; but he has not lost hope. As depressed as I think he is, he tries hard not to show it … although the clouds did seem to be very heavy and dark in this vacant restaurant today. The plants situated above the banquettes had not been watered in days, and their leaves were turning brown, and in the kitchen the garbage cans were filled with refuse. I watered the plants, and warned Bobby that rats would be visiting soon if he did not get the kitchen cleaned up. He agreed to do it. He is very agreeable and likeable. But he still wonders why he failed to make a success of this business. All he could do was list his possible shortcomings and errors in judgment; and he is not reluctant to take all the blame. Maybe, he suggests, it was wrong to have moved the bar upstairs. Maybe if the downstairs dining room had been furnished with a bar and had people gathered around it waiting for tables, the potential customers looking in from the sidewalk would have found the place more inviting and desirable. There were several other things that were mentioned—but what did it matter now? Approximately $750,000 was invested in improving this place beyond what the Tucci owners had done; and the results were nil.…

  A few months later, J. Z. Morris told me that yet another restaurant, a kosher Italian dining establishment named Il Patrizio, would open at 206 East 63rd Street. This would be the eleventh partnership to take a risk at this address. This time, however, I was determined to stay away. What was the point of returning? What could I find there that I had not already found, and that my editor had not already told me he did not want me writing about? Still, I had to write something. I had signed a book contract in 1992, and now seven years had elapsed, and how could I justify this expenditure in time?

  I spent the spring and early summer of 1999 going through my research files, rereading my notes, and rewriting some of the sections of various works that I had labored over but had never come close to finishing. There was the fifty-four-and-a-half-page section dealing with Frederick J. Schillinger and the origins of the “Willy Loman Building.” There was a forty-page introduction to my memoir, beginning with my arrival in 1949 at the University of Alabama. There were sixty pages of a travel book that described my first visit to Calabria in 1955. There was a book outline and ninety typed pages of notes concerning the financial struggles of the Chrysler automobile company, a subject that I had first pursued in 1982, conducting many interviews with Chrysler officials in Detroit and their Mitsubishi partners in Tokyo.

  I had put aside this material in 1983, and had more or less forgotten about it while concentrating on the research and writing of Unto the Sons. Reviewing the Chrysler material now, in 1999, I considered the possibility of using some of it in an updated story about Chrysler’s onetime leader, Lee Iacocca, an interesting man, whom I had remained in touch with since his retirement from the auto company and his relocation to Los Angeles, where he was now hoping to launch a company that manufactured electric bicycles. On reflection, however, I decided that an updated story about Iacocca probably belonged in a magazine, perhaps as a profile in The New Yorker.

  There was also in my filing cabinet a few folders labeled “The Bobbitts—a work in progress (1993-1994).” I would have probably discarded this long before had it not been for the advice of The New Yorker’s editor, Tina Brown, who suggested that it might someday be worthy of a short book. In the years since then, as tidbits of new information about the Bobbitt couple appeared occasionally in the press, I would collect it and insert it into my folders. There was a paragraph in 1995 announcing that the couple had finalized their divorce. It was also reported that Lorena Bobbitt, after having been forgiven by the jury for removing her husband’s penis, had resumed her career as a nail sculptress at a shopping mall in northern Virginia. There were many tabloid references to John Bobbitt at various times between 1995 and 1997 as he resided in Las Vegas and elsewhere in Nevada and also in Southern California, working sporadically as a tow-truck operator, a lumper, a bartender, a pizza deliverer, and a performer in pornographic films (although his penis was unable to achieve the full tumescence it had known prior to its last encounter with Lorena). In addition, John Bobbitt made a few nightclub appearances as a stand-up comic, and in one routine he made reference to his ex-wife: “The last thing I told her was that I wanted a separation, and she took it literally.”

  Included in the Bobbitt folders were a few paragraphs that I myself had written:

  While John Bobbitt received no credit from the nation’s lexicographers, his mishap is singularly responsible for the P-word entering the English language as it is now commonly spoken by men and women in the everyday world and is being published unhesitatingly in the headlines of family newspapers. Had John Bobbitt received a penny every time “penis” had appeared in newsprint and been articulated on television and radio broadcasts since he unwittingly removed the fig leaf from the word, he would now be extremely rich. He did earn ab
out $400,000 for his guest appearances as a curiosity on talk shows and for his half-erect debut as a porno stud, but most of this money was retained by his media adviser and his attorneys as compensation for his legal bills and other operating expenses during and after the trials.

  The Hollywood agent for Lorena Bobbitt, Alan Hauge, has failed so far to sell her story to a movie studio but he said that he had earned her considerable sums of money from her appearances on foreign and domestic television shows and the interviews she gave to magazines overseas. These funds, Hauge said, enabled her to put a down payment on a new home in Virginia, and to arrange for her parents and her younger sister and brother in Venezuela to emigrate to the U.S.A. and stay with her.…

  In early December 1997, after I had returned to New York from a sojourn in Alabama—where I spent time with Selma’s sixty-seven-year-old mayor Joseph T. Smitherman, who had served nine terms in office but would lose the next election to a youthful black candidate named James Perkins—I was more than surprised to find on my answering machine a message from Lorena Bobbitt. Her recorded voice was soft, timid, but urgent. “Please call me back as soon as you can,” she said; “I’m in trouble.” On the tape she explained that she had been arrested by the Virginia police in the aftermath of a noisy domestic dispute with her mother, and now Lorena had a favor to ask: Would I be willing to testify in her behalf as a “character witness”?

  Absurd, ridiculous, laughable—these were the words that came to my mind as I replayed the tape. I was to be a character witness for a woman who, after cutting off her husband’s penis, had been arrested following an altercation with her mother?

  And, I reminded myself, Lorena had been no help to me whatsoever when I had needed her during my assignment for The New Yorker. If I had then gotten Lorena’s cooperation in the form of an interview, Tina Brown would have surely published my article, or so I preferred to believe. Why didn’t Lorena rely upon the magazine writer from Vanity Fair and the correspondent from 20/20, both of whom she had favored with interviews, to be her character witnesses?

  Still, I returned her call. And when she heard my voice, she began to cry. She pleaded with me to attend her trial. She was being charged with assault and battery. The case would be heard in early April 1998. It would take place in the same courthouse where, four years earlier, she had given her ingenue performance as the abused wife of John Bobbitt. I was actually too curious to miss her forthcoming appearance in court, and so on the phone I promised that I would be there. The occasion would also provide me with my first opportunity to see her mother as well as her father and her younger sister and brother, and this might help me to decide whether or not I wished to continue with my research on the Bobbitt saga as part of my vaguely defined book, which might be called Down and Out in America.

  On the eve of the court date, I flew from New York to Washington’s Dulles Airport and was met near the baggage-claim section by Lorena, who hastened toward me with her arms extended, smiled, and kissed me on the cheeks. At twenty-nine, she was as slender, pretty, and carefully groomed and attired as she had been on the day the jury had exonerated her in the penis case. After thanking me for coming, she turned to introduce me to her new boyfriend, who followed a few paces behind her. He was a gangling, heavyset, casually dressed, dark-haired individual in his thirties named David Bellinger. He bent down slightly as we shook hands—he was six-four (Lorena was five-two). The couple seemed to be very comfortable in each other’s presence and Bellinger was at once cordial and accommodating toward me, taking the initiative to carry my luggage out of the airport to the parking lot, where his red sports car awaited us. Bellinger ran an auto accessories business in Woodbridge, Virginia, and his car was replete with such paraphernalia.

  As we drove toward my motel—Lorena insisted on sitting in the back—he told me that he and Lorena had started dating during the past year, having first met after they had begun taking night courses at Northern Virginia Community College. He said that even before meeting her in person he had been attracted to her from seeing her on television and in news photos during the media blitz of 1993-1994, and he would sometimes drive past the courthouse while the trials were in progress. He imagined her sitting in the crowded courtroom facing the jury, and at such times he was always sympathetic to her cause and very optimistic that she would win her freedom.

  There were questions I wanted to ask David Bellinger, but I resisted. This was neither the time nor the place to pose such questions, certainly not with Lorena in the car. Still I wondered, Did he and Lorena, whom I assumed to be lovers, ever get into arguments? Did he ever think that he was in a precarious position as Lorena’s bedmate? Did he sleep on his stomach? I recalled the advice given in 1993 by the maimed John Bobbitt to an investigating police officer in the hospital: “Be careful who you date.”

  After registering at my motel, I had a drink in the lobby with David and Lorena and learned a bit more about her quarrel with her mother. Lorena, who following her divorce from John Bobbitt had resumed using her maiden name, Gallo, told me that she and her mother had often argued about money and other matters since the elder Gallos had moved from Venezuela into her home in 1994. Lorena had hoped that her parents would adjust to a new way of life, but instead they held to their old Latin American traditions and measured her by their expectations. They made little effort to understand English, tuned in almost exclusively to Spanish-language radio stations, and tended to treat her as if she were a naïve and dependent daughter, whereas it was they who were dependent on her. They lived rent-free, relied upon her to drive them around, and, when shopping or otherwise engaged with people unable to communicate in Spanish, expected her to serve as their interpreter. Eventually she helped them to find work outside the home, menial tasks that did not demand fluency in English, and at the same time she saw to it that her teenage brother, Fabrizio, was enrolled in school and that her sister, Vanessa, four years her junior, was hired as a trainee at her nail salon.

  Lorena’s difficulties with her parents worsened after she had met David Bellinger and the latter began offering her advice on how she might more effectively manage her finances. It was he who encouraged her to take into strict account the monthly expenses incurred by her and her family and to expect the others to contribute to the payments. There was not much expressed disagreement about this from Lorena’s family, but when Bellinger, who was quick with numbers and adept with his computer, printed out the bills with suggestions of appropriate apportionment, Lorena’s parents did feel resentment. He was an outsider, they reminded her when he was not around, and he was now meddling in their personal affairs. But Lorena, who had experienced bankruptcy during her years as Mrs. Bobbitt, welcomed having David as a buffer, as a responsible and reliable friend who was not only interested in her solvency but in reaffirming her independence within the complicated closeness of her not yet fully assimilated Latin American family. Even though she and David were not living together, he was an imposing presence in her household. She also had a key to his apartment, and it was to him she had fled following the confrontation with her mother and the arrival of the police.

  Lorena told me she was confident that the judge would rule in her favor. It was her mother, forty-nine-year-old Elvia Gallo, who had provoked the argument and had struck first, although in the ensuing scuffle Elvia had gotten the worst of it. She had scratches on her neck, facial bruises, and a speck of blood in the corner of her left eye; it was while in this condition that Elvia ran outside the house to complain to a neighbor, a Puerto Rican woman, who in turn telephoned the police and repeated Elvia’s assertion that she had been beaten up by her daughter.

  When meeting with the police, however, Elvia changed her story, insisting that it was she who was at fault. It had perhaps belatedly occurred to her that the interests of the Gallo family would not be well served if Lorena went to jail. The police listened noncommittally as Elvia made her statement through an interpreter, and they also took several photographs of her scratched neck an
d bruised face. A warrant was immediately issued for Lorena’s arrest. Soon the county prosecutor’s office released a statement advocating that the case against Lorena be brought before a judge.

  On the morning of the court date—April 2, 1998—I sat in the courtroom a few rows behind Lorena and her attorney, listening as her mother took the stand and repeated what she had told the police—she had been the attacker, not her daughter. Elvia Gallo’s testimony was refuted, however, when her neighbor was on the stand and recalled that on the day of the incident Elvia had come tearfully to her door, beaten and battered, and had described how Lorena had just attacked her with her fists. At the conclusion of the neighbor’s testimony, Judge James B. Robeson said that he, too, believed that Elvia had been brutalized by Lorena.

  “If you ask me if I think she is guilty, I’d say yes,” the judge admitted. But still, he went on to say, “I have reasonable doubt … so I’ll find her not guilty.”

  Lorena showed no reaction to Judge Robeson’s verdict; she simply reached over and shook hands with her defense attorney, William Boyce, and whispered, “Thank you.” Then she turned around and thanked me, although I had not been called to testify. Later in the corridor, she embraced her mother and father and then introduced me to them. Elvia and Carlos Gallo were both lean and short, and after forcing a smile and shaking hands with me, they quickly backed away, seeming to be intimidated by the advancing presence of members of the media.

  “My mother and I love each other very much,” Lorena declared, stepping forward to face three newspaper reporters, two photographers, and a television camera crew—a tiny fraction of the press coverage she had drawn years earlier. “We live together; we work together,” Lorena said, and, nodding toward her mother, she continued: “… Blood is thicker than water.” Boyce told the press that Lorena was “very happy to have this episode behind her, and she’d like to resume a normal life free of publicity.” He added, “Hope springs eternal.”