(Page 52 of the book. About his friendship with fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. Note: Both Lagerfeld and Talley are now deceased.)
EXCERPT: While I was in Paris, we only became closer. We spoke early in the morning, before he left the house, almost every day. He loved socializing by telephone. We'd see each other at lunch, or dinner, or at a party, then go home and talk on the phone for two or three hours before going to bed and starting the whole thing over again in the morning. It was like being with my best friend in college. It wasn't labored; we weren't having deep, boring, conversations. It was effortless. Karl always treated me as an equal.
When we weren't on the phone together, Karl and I sent elaborate handwritten letters to each other, often delivered by hand across town in Paris. Just the way people did centuries before. Karl loved stationary, and his paper was designed and made just for him.. In his rue de l'Universite apartment, there was a storage room solely for reams of letter-writing papers and envelopes of various sizes (another storage room housed his massive collection of Goyard hard cases for travel). Out of these large envelopes, pages and pages came in his very baroque handwriting, which I learned early on how to decipher. Writing by hand to a friend was luxury to him. For years, we communicated by either fax or marathon telephone calls.
....
People thought I was Karl Lagerfeld's lover. I was not. Nor was I ever. Nor was I Diana Vreeland's, as some people gossiped. There is always the thought that as I am a black man, it can only be my genitals that people respond to....
