Authors Night in the Hamptons and Guest at Lovely Dinner to Talk about Masters of Sex

Hamptons Magazine photo of paperback writer

The 10th annual Authors Night celebration was held Saturday Aug 9 -- the birthday of my dear wife Joyce -- and I was invited as an honored guest to a lovely dinner at the home of Hampton Magazine's Michael Braverman. Here's some photos of the day and the excerpt from the magazine:

Novelist Alice McDermott and our boy

Hard as it is to believe, Thomas Maier says that being the author of the 2009 best seller Masters of Sex: The Life & Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love, which details the explosive but sad lives of sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson and is the basis for the Emmy-nominated TV series on Showtime that began its second season in mid-July, hasn’t changed his life much. He’s still an investigative reporter—now in his 31st year at Newsday—and proud of it. He admits to one material change in circumstances: Instead of writing his books in his unheated basement in East Northport, he now works in a heated bedroom upstairs.

Masters of Sex grew out of the profile he was drafted to write for Newsday the day William Masters retired. Both researchers were very secretive at the time, but when Masters died in 2001, he went back to Johnson and “won her confidence,” partly by sending her a copy of his 1998 book, Dr. Spock: An American Life. “She knew Jane Spock,” Maier says, adding “once she started talking, she was a chatterbox.”

Every Sunday night at 10 this summer

Pleased as he is with the TV show—whose pilot was partially filmed on Long Island, including the mansion in Sands Point Preserve once owned by industrialist Daniel Guggenheim—Maier is on to new things. He says that Sony bought the rights to his 1994 book, Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power & Glory of America’s Richest Media Empire and the Secretive Man Behind It, and he hopes that will become a scripted TV series, too. And his next book, When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys, an examination of the deep personal and public links between the two families, is set to be published in October. “There will be real news in that,” Maier says, refusing to provide even a clue now. “There are 1,700 footnotes.”

Read more at http://hamptons-magazine.com/personalities/articles/hamptons-writers-celebrate-authors-night-to-benefit-east-hampton-library#bkBmirR3iRqIqGAo.99