I was about to start writing my big book on Don Juan, the world’s most tireless lover, when the interviews with Gay Talese began appearing. Talese had just finished a magnum opus of his own, a book called Thy Neighbor’s Wife, all about America’s sex life, and in the interviews he said he had immersed himself so thoroughly in the subject that he had actually forced himself to experience many of the activities he was writing about.
This seemed like carrying things a bit far. If he did a book about somebody getting lynched, would Talese insist on being strung up from a cottonwood tree? Possibly so, for I know him to be the most conscientious of writers. This is probably why he has never done a book about a lynchee.
Well, a few days after the first Talese interviews, the publisher of my Don Juan book phoned and asked when I was going to Spain.
“Not going to Spain,” I said.
“Do you want to be big time and make millions like Talese, or are you a mouse who’s satisfied to write a dinky little worst-seller?”
“Erma Bombeck is making millions, and she never leaves her kitchen in Arizona,” I said.
“That’s because Erma is writing about burning up the skillet and finding her kids’ tennis shoes in the salad bowl,” said the publisher. “Go to Spain. Immerse yourself in the Don Juan experience.”
I had done enough research already to know what he was getting at. According to Mozart’s excellent study of Don Juan, the Don had treated Spain like a motel on the outskirts of town. According to his faithful servant Leporello, he had seduced 1,003 women in Old Castile. Country damsels, waiting-maids, city ladies, countesses, duchesses, baronesses, viscountesses, fat girls in winter, thin girls in summer, women of every condition.
My doctor was not encouraging. “This seems to be a very demanding book,” he said. “Can’t you write something about knitting?”
I was miffed to think he considered me not up to Talese’s standards of research.
“One thousand and three,” he mused. “In your condition that would be like smoking three packs of cigarettes an hour.”
He agreed, however, it would make a great book.
“Isn’t there another country where Don Juan took life a little easier?” he wondered.
We consulted the Mozart libretto and studied Leporello’s statistics. In Italy the Don had seduced only 640.
“But you’d be gorging on pasta between engagements,” said the doctor. “Devastating to your blood pressure.”
In Germany, 231. “More like it,” said the doctor, “but in Germany you’d be tempted to cool off with the beer, and we know about your liver, don’t we?”
“Aha!” I cried. “France! Leporello says in France, only 100.”
“Be realistic,” said the doctor. “Think of the cost of buying dinner for 100 women in Paris.”
Eventually, I chose Turkey. Don Juan’s triumphs there numbered a mere 91. What’s more, since I didn’t speak any Turkish, there would be no need to spend a lot of money taking the ladies to movies and nightclubs so we could get to know each other better.
I bought a hookah and a fez and was all packed for Istanbul when my publisher phoned again. He wanted me to come by his office and pick up a false goatee. He said I would come closer to experiencing the real Don Juan with a goatee on my chin, but the beauty part was, it had a small recording device built into the whiskers.
“That way,” he said, “everything will be on record just as it happens.”
“Why do we want that? I thought this was a book, not a transcribed recording,” I said.
“How are you going to write a book after the statue comes to dinner?” he replied.
He was referring to the end of the Don Juan story, in which the Don invites a statue to dinner, and the statue shows up, and the Don and the statue sing at each other, and then the statue takes the Don down to hell.
“It would be great if you could write a terrific inside book about conditions in hell,” said the publisher, “but frankly, once you get down there, I’m not sure we can count on your getting the manuscript out. Just leave the goatee behind when the statue grabs you, and we can have all the tapes transcribed into a book right here in the office.”
I told him I wasn’t going to have the statue to dinner. He said I wasn’t fit to touch the shift key on Talese’s typewriter. My new book is about a guy who sleeps until ten every morning. The research is terrific.