Tears from heaven

JAMES Baldwin made at least one woman cry. Baldwin, whose writing is highlighted in the documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” once got into a screaming match with the late New York Times reporter/columnist Tom Wicker that had Wicker’s then-wife, Neva, weeping.

Gay Talese (inset), who worked with Baldwin at Esquire, told Eye for Film writer

Anne-Katrin Titze that the Wickers, both Southerners, had come to dinner with Baldwin at the Talese’s Upper East Side townhouse in 1964.

“Like many people in New York who are Southerners, they did everything they could to show how unracist they were,” Talese said.

Baldwin said something derogatory about the South, and Wicker, a proud son of North Carolina, took exception. “One thing led to another, and whatever decorum had prevailed . . . at this particular dinner party erupted with the wife of Tom Wicker, saying ‘Don’t talk to Tom like that!’

“And then she burst into tears and Tom said: ‘This is my wife. Now, she is not part of this.’ And Mrs. Wicker runs over there to the living room, buries herself in the curtains ... and was weeping uncontrollably.”

Talese himself has been known to make women angry. Last year he ignited a firestorm on Twitter after he said no female journalists had inspired him. He later said he’d misunderstood the question, believing it to be only about which journalists inspired him as a boy, when most of his heroes were sportswriters. He said in his youth he enjoyed the work of female writers such as novelist Carson McCullers.