Peter Manso, the journalist and author who wrote biographies of Marlon Brando and Norman Mailer and had key interviews with Edward I. Koch and Arnold Schwarzenegger, died last Wednesday at his home in Truro, Mass., the New York Times reported. He was 80 years old.
Manso wrote massive, painstakingly researched biographies of Brando and Mailer, both of which made extensive use of transcribed interviews. He worked for six years on Mailer: His Life and Times, which was published in 1985 and totaled 768 pages. It began as an authorized biography, with Manso and Mailer even sharing a house for a time on Cape Cod, but after the book's release they publicly sparred over Manso's portrayal of Mailer.
He spent eight years writing and researching Brando: The Biography, which was more than 1,000 pages long and was released in 1994. Manso's other books included Ptown: Art, Sex and Money on the Outer Cape, as well as Reasonable Doubt: The Fashion Writer, Cape Cod, and the Trial of Chris McCowen. The latter, about the murder of fashion writer Christa Worthington and the conviction of a man with a low IQ named Chris McCowen, got such a negative review in the Times that Manso wrote a 700-word letter in response and complained about it in interviews.
Manso wrote frequently for magazines, and his interviews with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Edward I. Koch had ramifications on their political careers. In a 1982 interview conducted by Manso that appeared in Playboy, Koch belittled suburban life and called rural America "a joke," comments that played a part in Koch losing the Democratic nomination for governor to Mario M. Cuomo.
In 1977, Manso published an interview with Schwarzenegger in Oui magazine, in which Schwarzenegger discussed drug use and group sex. While that interview resurfaced in 2003 and caused some embarrassment, it did not stop Schwarzenegger from becoming governor of California.