Sincerely yours,
c/o Box Holder
Box 31450
Aurora, Colorado
80041
After receiving this letter, I put it aside for a few days, undecided on how, or even if, I should respond. I was deeply unsettled by the way he had violated his customers’ trust and invaded their privacy. And as a nonfiction writer who insists on using real names in articles and books, I knew at once that I would not accept his condition on anonymity, even though, as suggested in his letter, he had little choice. To avoid prison time, in addition to the probable lawsuits that might bankrupt him, he had to reserve for himself the privacy he denied his guests. Could such a man be a reliable source?
Still, as I reread certain of his handwritten sentences—“I did this purely out of my unlimited curiosity about people and not as just a deranged voyeur” and “I have logged an accurate record of the majority of the individuals that I watched”—I conceded that his research methods and motives were similar to my own in Thy Neighbor’s Wife. I had, for example, privately kept notes while managing massage parlors in New York and while mingling with swingers at the nudist commune, Sandstone Retreat, in Los Angeles; and in my 1969 book about the New York Times, The Kingdom and the Power, my opening line was: “Most journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places.” But the people I observed and reported on had given me their consent.
When I received this letter in 1980, it was six months before the publication of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, but there had already been lots of publicity about it. The New York Times had a story in its edition of October 9, 1979, that the film company United Artists had just bought the film rights to the book for $2.5 million, exceeding the sum previously paid for the highest book-for-film deal: Jaws, which sold for $2.15 million.
Thy Neighbor’s Wife had been excerpted in Esquire earlier in the ’70s, and later written about in dozens of magazines and newspapers. It was my researching method that had attracted journalistic attention—managing massage parlors in New York, gauging the sex trade business in small and large towns throughout the Midwest, Southwest, and Deep South, and also experiencing firsthand the fact-gathering I obtained while living as a nudist for months at the Sandstone Retreat for swingers at Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles. The book, once released, shot up to the Times bestseller list; it remained No.1 for nine straight weeks, and sold millions of copies in the U.S. and overseas.
As to whether my correspondent in Colorado was, in his own words, “a deranged voyeur”—evocative of the Bates Motel proprietor in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho; or the murderous photographer in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom; or was, instead, a harmless man of “unlimited curiosity” as represented by Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound photojournalist in Hitchcock’s Rear Window or even a simple fabulist—I could know only if I accepted the Colorado man’s invitation to become personally acquainted.
Since I was planning to be in Phoenix later in the month, I decided to send him a note, with my phone number, volunteering to stop over at the Denver airport on my way back to New York, proposing that we meet at baggage claim at 4:00 p.m. on January 23. He left a message on my answering machine a few days later saying that he would be there—and he was, emerging from a crowd of waiting people and catching up with me as I approached the luggage carousel.
“Welcome to Denver,” he said, smiling, while holding aloft in his left hand the note I had mailed him. “My name is Gerald Foos.”
My first impression was that this amiable stranger resembled at least half of the men I had flown with in business class. Probably in his midforties, Gerald Foos was fair skinned, hazel eyed, maybe six feet tall, and slightly overweight. He wore an unbuttoned tan wool jacket and an open-collared dress shirt that seemed a size too small for his thick and heavily muscled neck. Clean-shaven, he had a full head of neatly trimmed dark hair, parted to one side; and, behind the thick frames of his horn-rimmed glasses, he projected an unvaryingly friendly expression worthy of an innkeeper.
After we had shaken hands, and had exchanged courtesies while awaiting my luggage, I accepted his invitation to be a guest at his motel for a few days.
“We’ll put you in one of the rooms that doesn’t provide me with viewing privileges,” he said, with a lighthearted grin.