Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. I wanted to quickly preview some of the conversations we'll be having here on All Of It over the next couple of days. Tomorrow, we will speak with former Shark Tank producer Johnathan Walton. After losing nearly $100,000 to a serial fraudster, he pivoted to making an investigative podcast called Queen of the Con. Now, he's published his first book, Anatomy of a Con Artist: The 14 Red Flags to Spot Scammers, Grifters, and Thieves. He joins us to discuss.

We'll speak with award-winning filmmaker Sterlin Harjo. You may know him as the creator of the TV series Reservation Dogs. Now, he has a new series. On Friday, he will join us to discuss The Lowdown. It stars Ethan Hawke as an amateur sleuth who becomes obsessed with getting to the bottom of a mysterious death in Tulsa. That's in the future. Now, let's get this hour started with the final chapter in this month's Full Bio conversation.

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Alison Stewart: Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Nicholas Boggs has written a 700-page biography of one of literature's giants, James Baldwin. It's called Baldwin: A Love Story. The book is full of detail from Baldwin's upbringing in New York City to his finding a home in Paris to finding a place to write in Turkey, all while holding different people close to his heart, his family, Beauford Delaney, Lucien Happersberger, Engin Cezzar, and Yoran Cazac.

As I said, the book is about 700 pages long, so we're just touching on a few highlights. Today, we meet James Baldwin, the celebrity and the activist. Hollywood came calling for Baldwin, as did TV. He appeared on talk shows, famously showed up for William F. Buckley in a debate and had a long interview with Nikki Giovanni that showed his intellect and his generational leanings. Baldwin became a civil rights advocate. His writing about the South in the late '50s and early '60s painted a disturbing picture. Here he is on Fresh Air explaining a bit about how it started.

James Baldwin: Long before that when I first got South, because I went as a reporter, and I tried to get the story published. The first few times, the first few magazines when I came back did not want to publish the reports because they accused me of fomenting violence. Now, I was ascribing violence, which is not a violence which I was no way responsible. I thought that people should know what is going on and why it's going on.

In the battle to do this, I became notorious. In any case, the battle I was fighting, it seemed to me, was not simply about Black people, but also my position that concerns white America was, it's your country, too. It's your responsibility, too. The Fire Next Time is probably the culmination of all those years. It was when I was being called the "angry young man" on the white side of town and being called "Uncle Tom" on the Black side of town.

Alison Stewart: He met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and the FBI kept the file on him. For more, let's get into our Full Bio conversation with Nicholas Boggs, author of Baldwin: A Love Story.

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Alison Stewart: About his time in Turkey, James Baldwin said, "Turkey saved my life." How so?

Nicholas Boggs: Well, Turkey saved his life because this was a moment when he was once again really, really down, really feeling like his love life was a mess. He was really struggling to write Another Country. I mean, really struggling. He had gone actually to Israel for a trip and decided to go to Turkey to follow his friend, Engin Cezzar. Engin Cezzar had played the role of Giovanni in an Actor's Studio rendition of the play a couple of years earlier. This is 1961. He arrives there.

There's just a party full of Turkish intellectuals and artists. They make their own vodka. They're artists. They're singing Turkish work songs, then he sings Negro spirituals. He falls asleep on the lap of some famous Turkish actress, and he just feels reborn. Within a couple of weeks, he has written the end of Another Country. That's when he actually meets David Leeming at that party. Again, as he would say, from another place, you can see America more clearly. That's what he used it for. That is where he wrote The Fire Next Time.

He was going back and forth. As scary and exhausting and exhilarating as the civil rights movement was, throughout that decade, he would return to Istanbul. He really considered it his home. In the end, he ended up directing a play there in the late '60s starring Engin, collaborating with this great friend of his we called his blood brother. He really wanted to do more in the theater. He had just come back from Hollywood, where he tried to make Malcolm X do that-- That's a whole other crazy story.

Alison Stewart: Well, that's what my next question was. Hollywood came calling for James Baldwin. How did he react? How did he think about possibly writing a script about Malcolm X?

Nicholas Boggs: Well, he was devastated by Malcolm X's murder. He was very interested in writing for the film. [chuckles] He had all kinds of dreams that hadn't come to fruition already around that. His brother, David, did say, "Don't go out there. They'll kill you." That's what he said to him. Out Baldwin went, and he was working on it with Columbia Pictures, but he was also ping-ponging back and forth to do political events with Martin Luther King. This was a very heady time. Then when he was working on it, he was very close with Billy Dee Williams. He had a big crush on him. He wanted him to play Malcolm X, but Columbia wanted, unbelievably, Charlton Heston to play Malcolm X, and so this was, yes-- [laughs]

Alison Stewart: I'm sorry. I'm making a terrible face. Everybody at home listening, this is making that same face.

Nicholas Boggs: [laughs] Yes, it's unbelievable, and then not. Then you realize, actually, this is what was going on out there. It makes sense, but Baldwin wasn't going to let that happen. He ended up so up distraught that he swallowed some sleeping pills. He also got news of the murder of Martin Luther King while he was there. A lot was going on. He did attempt suicide.

Fortunately, he was able to have his stomach pumped, and then he said, "I split to save my life." That's when he went back to Turkey. All that pent-up, frustrated energy from the screenplay, he poured into directing Fortune and Men's Eyes with Engin and this troupe. It was a transformative experience for him and for Turkish theater. It was John Herbert's play about penitentiary.

It's a very complicated, I keep saying "complicated," but it was, play about homosexuality and prisons and children and how boys are mismanaged by the state systems and all of that. He did it. It was a humongous hit in this very socially conservative country. It was a smash hit. I think it was one of the best experiences of his life. After that, it's almost like it had run its course. It was like his love affair with Istanbul had been consummated. It left him empty, wondering, "Well, what's next?"

Alison Stewart: He was a leading voice in the civil rights movement. What did he see as his role in the civil rights movement? Was he a communicator? What was it?

Nicholas Boggs: I would say, at least in the beginning, he was reluctant. He really saw himself as an artist. That's why he went to France. He wanted to write novels and plays. After that visit in South, he just understood that he had a responsibility. Sterling Brown told him this and others that he had a unique position, and to not take advantage of that would be a loss for his people.

He saw himself, though, not as a spokesman, but as a witness. That's what he called himself. His job was to be a witness. He went on the marches. He said he didn't like marches, but he went in the marches. Really, it was writing these speeches. He wasn't like Bayard Rustin, who was a brilliant grassroots organizer. That wasn't exactly what Baldwin did, although Baldwin did do some grassroots organizing himself when his play Blues for Mister Charlie got canceled.

Alison Stewart: Oh, we got to talk about that. All right, Blues for Mister Charlie. It was on Broadway. The producers at first asked him to soften it a bit.

Nicholas Boggs: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: What did they want changed?

Nicholas Boggs: Well, they thought that it was called Blues for Mister Charlie. "Mister Charlie" is the name for a racist white man. Just colloquially. It was a play that was divided into Blacktown and Whitetown. Baldwin was doing some really-- he was influenced by Genet. He was doing some really interesting courtroom drama where he was implicating the white audience members as members of a jury. He was breaking that fourth wall. They didn't like that. They didn't think that people would come out and watch it.

They also thought that Baldwin had his hand way too much in the production. In a sense, they had a point there. He wasn't the director. However, he knew that they wouldn't be able to do justice to the political content. That was a very difficult chapter in his career and in his life. I think he was drinking a lot, and maybe taking some other stuff to get through. He was also going through a breakup with Lucien-

Alison Stewart: Again?

Nicholas Boggs: -who was having an affair, ended up marrying Diana Sands. This was a hard, hard period.

Alison Stewart: He fought back. He had this fundraiser because they were going to close the play.

Nicholas Boggs: They were going to close the play. Somebody said this to me. I won't name her, but she's somebody who blurred my book. She said that that was one of the funniest parts of the book to her, because here Baldwin was acting like the closing of the play was the march on Washington, right? He got a pamphlet going, and he got all his famous friends involved.

It is kind of funny, although the truth is Broadway was racist. He knew what he's contending with. Eventually, it did keep going. Some rich patrons gave some money, and it kept going. Then he went to Istanbul and they closed it behind his back. He got the last word because he ended up lampooning Strasberg and the other folks involved in that in his next novel, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Nicholas Boggs. The name of his book is Baldwin: A Love Story, is our choice for Full Bio. I want to talk about the meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This famous/infamous meeting where Baldwin, along with Lena Horne, Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, they met with Kennedy to discuss race relations. It's like they were speaking different languages, quite honestly. What was it that Baldwin wanted Kennedy to understand?

Nicholas Boggs: In Baldwin's words, he wanted Kennedy to take moral responsibility for the conduct of the country towards Black Americans. That was the word, "moral." They refused to say that. He wanted him to walk into Birmingham with a little girl when they got spat upon, know what that felt like, see what that was like up close. Was he being a little bit rhetorical there? Of course.

Now, this episode has been written about a lot, but what I tried to do by looking more closely-- and again, it has mythological proportions at this point, so it's hard to know what really happened. There are differing accounts by Kennedy, differing accounts by Baldwin, by Kenneth Clark, who was there. Baldwin had met that same day with Lewis Funke at The New York Times about Blues for Mister Charlie. He'd snuck in to the end of the conversation that he was going to have this secret meeting with Kennedy.

Funke said, "Oh, that's a big news story. Can I tell somebody in The New York Times?" He ended up telling someone named Layhmond Robinson, who was one of the few Black reporters at The Times. The way that Baldwin, I think, very smartly-- I don't know this for sure, but this is my feeling that there was something very strategic about getting these big-name people like Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte and leaking the fact that this was happening. He wasn't going to have some secret meeting with them and tell them how to handle what they were calling "the Negro problem," right?

He had other ideas. He was going to deal with the white problem, and he was going to bring his people to help do that. It became a huge media circus, which is what he wanted, because, eventually, I think that really did help lead to the Civil Rights Act. The President started using the word "moral." Not that long after that, they started hiring more African Americans in the government. This was an example. It's not the same as what he did with the pamphlets for Blues for Mister Charlie. When you say he was a witness, he was a witness, but he was also, I think, a very canny and strategic organizer in his own way.

Alison Stewart: The FBI was following him. Was he aware?

Nicholas Boggs: Oh, yes, he was aware. He would joke about it on the phone. He'd say, "Well, give my regards to J. Edgar when you try to reach me." He was aware. It was a terrible thing, obviously. As a biographer, there were good things about it, which is that Baldwin lived this crazy, peripatetic, transatlantic life, and it'd be hard to keep track of where he was. The FBI knew exactly where he was, so the files, I know when the plane landed, on what date.

Alison Stewart: That's so interesting.

Nicholas Boggs: Yes, they got a lot of things wrong about him. They thought he was married to his sister for a while. They got the titles of novels incorrect. They thought he was way more aligned with Elijah Muhammad than, in fact, he was. Most things, they got wrong. In fact, all they got right were plain logistics, but those were helpful for me.

Alison Stewart: J. Edgar Hoover was likely queer.

Nicholas Boggs: Right.

Alison Stewart: How did that shape the way the FBI files read to you?

Nicholas Boggs: Well, there are many scholars who've written about it really productively. William J. Maxwell, he also compiled them into an edition. Maurice Wallace has written about it.

Alison Stewart: Beverly Gage, we interviewed her for this.

Nicholas Boggs: Beverly Gage, although she doesn't really write.

Alison Stewart: I know much.

Nicholas Boggs: Yes, she doesn't really, and that was interesting to me because I think everybody has a point, but I think what she was saying was that he wouldn't have focused too much on Baldwin's sexuality because he wouldn't want it to come blow back on him.

Alison Stewart: Ah, interesting.

Nicholas Boggs: The fact of the matter is the files themselves reflect something quite different. He says all the time, "Is he a pervert?" He's this, that third. Baldwin called Hoover the 20th century's greatest voyeur, something like that. I think Hoover and others think that Hoover was titillated by Baldwin in a certain sense.

Alison Stewart: Baldwin had such a great vocabulary. The pull out of voyeur as a way to describe J. Edgar Hoover. It was beautiful listening to him talk.

Nicholas Boggs: Yes, indeed.

Alison Stewart: Part four of your book is a bit of a discovery for you. You entered the book a little bit. It's beautiful. On the desk in front of me, you have a copy of Little Man Little Man, which was described as a child story for adults, written by James Baldwin. Tell us the story of this. I don't even know what the question is to ask because there's so much that could be asked. Initially, tell me the origin of the book, and then how you got involved.

Nicholas Boggs: The origin of Little Man Little Man?

Alison Stewart: First, start with that, yes.

Nicholas Boggs: Sure, so Little Man Little Man was a children's book that he worked on with an obscure French painter named Yoran Cazac. The subject of the fourth part of the book in the early 1970s. It was written in Black English. Baldwin called it children's book for adults. It was really just very subversive for its time. Baldwin wrote that important essay, If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? This was putting that into practice for children.

This was well before the era of Ebonics and the kinds of arguments that came up later. It talks about the pleasures and the joys and the resiliences of these kids in Harlem, but also the dangers, drug addiction, police surveillance. People didn't know what to do with it. Reputation was going on the decline. It went out of print, and it was totally forgotten until I was in college at Yale. I was taking a class on James Baldwin. We read everything he'd written, except this children's book.

David Leeming's biography had just come out in 1994. He had a couple of paragraphs about it and about Yoran Cazac. Unclear if they were friends or lovers. The second email I ever wrote in my life was to David Leeming. He wrote back. This is 1996. He wrote back very nicely. I never met Yoran Cazac. I don't know anybody alive who did. I believe he's dead as well. The trail went cold until seven years later, I'd moved to New York to get my PhD. I was completely broke.

I decided to send more emails to art historians in Paris saying, "Do you know anything about this obscure, deceased French painter?" No answer, but I left my phone number. There are no cell phones yet. Weeks later, the phone rings in my studio apartment, "This is Yoran Cazac calling from Paris. I'm alive. I have many stories to tell you about Jimmy." This was 2003.

I signed up for my third credit card. I used all my dissertation funding. My dissertation never became a book. It became, I guess, this book. I went over to Paris, and I interviewed him. Thank goodness, because he died just two years later of cancer, but I spent a whole summer interviewing him, his wife Beatrice. He was an incredible man. Yes, that was the origins of this book, actually.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting to think about-- all these great biographies were written so long ago. Before the internet, before we could have communication with one another, it almost seems like everybody's biography should be written again.

Nicholas Boggs: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Do you know what I mean? They thought he was dead.

Nicholas Boggs: Yes, I don't know how they did it. David Leeming's biography is a gift to--

Alison Stewart: It's a beautiful book. That's not serious. That's a big issue.

Nicholas Boggs: It is. He knew him personally, though, so that helps, right?

Alison Stewart: True.

Nicholas Boggs: We can only know virtually through the internet.

Alison Stewart: We're getting towards the end of James Baldwin's life. It appeared that James Baldwin, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that he wrote about HIV and AIDS just once?

Nicholas Boggs: He only really wrote about it once. He spoke about it a couple of more times.

Alison Stewart: I'm wondering, early in our conversation, we talked about generational differences. Do you think that was part of it?

Nicholas Boggs: I do. Although, again, thanks to David Leeming, who shared with me an unpublished interview that one of Baldwin's last love interests, a younger Black man named Shawn Henderson, interviewed him extensively. He asked him some questions about AIDS. That's in the book. There was an earlier interview with Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice, where Baldwin said that he didn't really know much about AIDS.

This was in the '80s, mid-80s. He didn't know much about or how it was transmitted or anything like that, but then this interview with Shawn, which I think happened in '86, a year before Baldwin died, or maybe even '87, the year that he died. He asked again, and Baldwin had more to say. At this time, Baldwin had also been incorporating the historical reality of AIDS into his play, The Welcome Table. I think it was very much actually on his mind at this point.

What he said was really interesting because he said, "All this hysteria around AIDS," as he put it, he said, "Obviously, it's something that we have to deal with." It also is another opportunity for scapegoating of African Americans, scapegoating of gay people. He was saying, "This is another opportunity." White America, basically dominant culture, thinks that this is never going to come for straight people. As he put it, gay people only have sex with gay people. Africans only have sex with Africans. Asians only have sex with Asians.

This idea, this ridiculous, again, innocence that America has to disabuse himself of. What he said, he said it's going to be a chance where we're going to have to do what he always said. It's going to test love. It's going to require love. Of course, love is exactly what did not happen in the early AIDS era with Reagan and others. There was hatred. There was scapegoating. He was very, I think, prescient and very right about what was happening. The psychological and the psychopolitical dimensions of how HIV and AIDS was mobilized against communities of color and queer communities during that time period.

Alison Stewart: He died of stomach cancer. I read several obituaries. They didn't seem like enough at the time. How do you think his obituaries would be written today? What would be different about them?

Nicholas Boggs: What a great question. I've never had that question before. Who would write them? One of my first jobs out of college was at the Washington Blade, and I wrote obituaries.

Alison Stewart: Oh, really?

Nicholas Boggs: Yes, so I'm not saying I should write it. Definitely not. Toni Morrison has such a beautiful eulogy for Baldwin that I almost feel like that should be his obituary. I feel like a writer. Obituaries can be so dry. Much like biographies can sometimes be too dry. I think if we thought of an obituary in a broader sense, in a bigger sense, and in an artistic sense, what would it look like to think of Toni Morrison as her memorial being the obituary? In terms of assessing his legacy, I believe it would be completely different now. I don't remember what his obituary said, but it was prominent, but it wasn't--

Alison Stewart: I was like, "Wah, wah, wah."

Nicholas Boggs: I think now, it's fully understood in this country and across the world that he is one of, if not the most important writer of the 20th century. I hope that that would be expressed fully in an obituary today.

Alison Stewart: Is there anything I haven't asked you that you wanted to talk about?

Nicholas Boggs: Oh, gosh. When did you first encounter Baldwin?

Alison Stewart: In college. In college.

Nicholas Boggs: Children's book. You found the children's book, too. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: I know, right? No, in college, I was an English and American lit major at Brown. You were able to create your own concentrations, and so I did African American literature. I did go pick up Giovanni's Room in reading this because I read it so long ago. I think I'll have a different reading of it once I get around to reading it, but it's sitting on my desk right now.

Nicholas Boggs: Terrific.

Alison Stewart: What has the response been to the book so far?

Nicholas Boggs: Overwhelming. Really, I worked on it for so long, and I didn't know-- I did it. It really is a labor of love. I worked on it for so long. There are other projects that I put aside and debts I've gone into. [laughs] It's such an honor to be able to write about him and to talk to all the people that I've met. Maureen Freely, who knew him there. The Leemings have been so generous. Baldwin family members like Aisha and Tejan, who spoke to me about Little Man Little Man years ago. Anybody who met him and knew him, you could just tell that there was this deep love. It really felt right for it to be a love story. It really has been a love fest since it came out, and I can't complain.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Baldwin: A Love Story. It is by Nicholas Boggs. It was our choice for Full Bio. Thank you for spending so much time with us.

Nicholas Boggs: Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: That was Nicholas Boggs, the author of Baldwin: A Love Story. Nicholas will be on a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 21st at 5:00 PM. Full Bio was engineered by Matt Mirando, post-production by Jordan Lauf, and written by me. The full Full Bio will be on our website this weekend.