Talese House Ocean City

 

Gay Talese, Famed Ocean City Writer, Has Packed Up and Left the Island
By Kevin C. Shelly

His wife's purchase of a country home led to his decision to sell the century-old Ocean City house they’d owned since 1967, when they bought it for $37,000. It sold for $1.6 million.

http://oceancity.patch.com/articles/gay-talese-famed-ocean-city-writer-has-packed-up-and-left-the-island?ncid=M255

Gay Talese reluctantly but resignedly left the island that spawned him Friday.

Accompanying moving trucks, the famed 79-year-old writer and his wife, noted publisher Nan A. Talese, 77, are headed to a country home in Connecticut -- a home she bought without his knowledge.

After the purchase, she waited a month to tell him.

As he said of his wife earlier in the week, “she has her will,” reminding me that Nan had forced the issue of marriage on him at the start of their long relationship.

His eldest daughter, painter Pamela Talese, laughed when I mentioned her father’s comment to her Friday.

“There is no movement, no accommodation from Gay Talese. He hasn’t changed direction for as long as I’ve known him,” said Pamela, who spent summers in Ocean City. Her mother had wanted to move for years, she said, and the buy forced the issue.

Pamela says each summer she was watched over by a nanny while her father worked a set schedule writing in a sequestered third floor office in the Ocean City home and her mother worked during the week in New York publishing houses, coming to Ocean City for weekends.

Unable to justify maintaining three homes -- the couple has lived in a brownstone on the Upper East Side since they married more than 50 years ago -- Talese struggled for months to come to terms with his wife’s decision.

Nan's purchase of a country home set in motion his decision to sell the century-old Ocean City house they’d owned since 1967, when they bought it for $37,000.

Eventually, he listed his Ocean City home for sale, but wanted no sign, no open house, no special marketing effort. Even with his home for sale, he was not quite ready to cut ties to the city that shaped him as a journalist and safe-harbored him as a writer.

I’ve know Gay for 29 years, but I learned of the sale second-hand. So I wrote him
-- the surest way of engaging him, though he has begun using email.

Several notes came to me last winter, including a trademark post card he’d fashioned from a shirt cardboard. The letters discussed his emotional struggle with going through with the sale. He didn’t want to have a story written about the possible sale until the home sold because he simply was not ready.

On April 13, I called Gay and informed him that the buyers he’d selected -- he chose the buyer’s he’d verbally committed to first, not the highest offer -- had agreed to buy the house.

The couple buying the home, with a long family history in Ocean City, paid $1.6 million, $200,000 under the asking price. They plan to rehabilitate the home and move into it, a process they think could take a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A closing is set for June 10, though the agreement could come sooner, according to the buyers, who have asked not to be identified until the sale is complete.

Gay was still clearly conflicted by the sale when I spoke to him at the E. Atlantic Boulevard residence Thursday amid packing and preparing to have dinner with the buyers.
He talked of how crowded Ocean City is now, how bad the parking has become, the wear on his wife caused by traveling to and from Manhattan on the jammed Garden State Parkway and the mess caused by reconstruction on the Route 52 causeway.

But he also spoke of how his career as a writer of books -- he’d begun as a journalist, writing about sports and features, first for the Ocean City Sentinel Ledger and The Press of Atlantic City before college, eventually taking a job at the New York Times -- had taken shape here.

He also spoke of the pleasure he’d gotten from spending summers at the shore with daughters Pamela and Catherine, and spending time with his late mother, Catherine Talese. His mother's home was a few minutes away, also in the Gardens section of the city.

We also talked of the the book he is at work on: his relationship with his wife.
Nan, who usually absents herself when Gay is interviewed, mixed in more than usual Thursday. She rolled her eyes and smiled when I asked about the topic of the planned book.

“I married a writer, and I trust his writing. But he knows nothing about marriage. I’ll be surprised when I read it,” she said.

As we spoke, neighbors stopped by to ask if it was true that the house was sold, to recall old times, to ask about the Talese’s grown daughters.

As the talk wound down, Gay handed me a signed copy of Unto the Sons, a book set largely in Ocean City.

He gave me the book, in part, because he was working on the galley proofs for the book when I first met him.

But he also gave it to me because it was one fewer thing that he needed to worry about taking with him -- or leaving behind.

A full account of my interview with Gay Talese will appear in the July edition of New Jersey Monthly.

For more information on Talese: randomhouse.com/kvpa/talese/