By Helen Dudar Writers Bloc April 1984 Picture this: your dinner guest is Thomas Pynchon, the writer much of scholarly America considers our best living novelist. He is also a tantalizingly shadowy figure; a generation of fervent readers has fantasized meeting him,...
By Brad Darrach People July 24, 1989 An old man died in his sleep one day last week, and it was as if a continent had sunk into the sea. A wave of feeling rose and moved outward, and when it was gone the world seemed different and smaller than it had been before....
By Ron Rosenbaum Manhattan Inc. May, 1987 The scene: an informal dinner party on the rooftop of a brownstone in the East Seventies. The people (with one exception): congenial, civilized, charming. The conversation: charming, civilized, congenial. Until … until someone...
By David Bradley Goodlife August, 1985 Not long ago I crossed the Great Divide to attend a conference of writers and other literary types. The theme of the conference was “Literature and The Land”, which is hardly obscure. I mean, while a lot of people in America...
By Marilyn Johnson New York Woman September 1987 For all I know, people have been slipping out of this world in occupational clusters for years. Four journalists, I noticed, passed on one day last year, and their obituaries filled a whole corner of the newspaper. What...
By Ron Rosenbaum Esquire October 1985 Let’s get sad. Let’s get very, very sad. Let’s get profoundly sad. Let’s talk about the saddest songs ever sung. In fact, let’s not just talk about them. Let’s get inside them. Let’s crawl inside the very chord structure of...
By Nicholas Pileggi New York Magazine August 26, 1985 Shortly before nine in the morning last March 5, Detective Richard “Bo” Dietl walked into the shield room at Police Headquarters and turned his gold badge over to a young policewoman. She casually tossed it into a...
By Joan Juliet Buck Vanity Fair April, 1988 Charlotte Rampling is the only star who currently belongs to both the world of cinema and the world of of chic. In a famous photograph by Helmut Newton, she sits naked on a table in Arles, glowering. The picture is...
By James Kaplan The New York Times Magazine March 27, 1988 In a dim room high above the controlled chaos of Times Square, Jonathan Demme is watching a movie. To be more precise, the director is looking over the shoulder of his film editor, Craig McKay, at an editing...
By Ron Rosenbaum New West November, 1980 …terrible apprehensions were among the people. —Daniel Defoe A Journal of the Plague Year The captain rapped on the door of my hotel room promptly at 6 a.m. He was eager to get this expedition under way. He had a decision to...
By Bruce Buschel GQ June 1988 It is World Series weather in Indianapolis. Thirty-five degrees. Charlie Sheen is dancing around center field, trying to warm up. He is worried about his arm tightening up before the big throw. He worries whenever he can. He worries about...
By Ron Rosenbaum Manhattan Inc. November, 1984 “That’s Barbara Walters over there,” Roy Cohn tells me, pointing helpfully to the other corner table along the front wall of Le Cirque. The second-best corner table. Roy’s got the best, the one with the wide-angle view of...
