Woman with only recording of J D Salinger will take tape to grave

Betty Eppes has refused to sell the tape out of guilt over how she went about getting it

On June 13, 1980, Betty Eppes got the interview of a lifetime. The 40-year-old reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate had just completed treatment for breast cancer and returned to the newsroom determined to do “something that I thought was significant”, she told me from her home in Mississippi.
 
So she talked to her editor and made a list of the people she believed to be the most difficult in the world to interview: Ugandan President Idi Amin and authors Thomas Pynchon and J D Salinger. She quickly landed on The Catcher in the Rye author, who hadn’t published anything since 1965 and had given his last interview in 1953.

 
Eppes flew to Boston, rented a sky-blue Pinto, and drove into the Green Mountains in search of the recluse at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire. She got his phone number from a local grocer and then, on the recommendation of Salinger’s housekeeper, gave a note to the clerk at the Windsor post office where he received his mail.
 

In a letter to him, she des­cribed herself as not a journalist but a novelist who had no intention of “usurping any of your privacy”. What she didn’t tell Salinger was that she also had a Sony recorder stu­f­fed down the sleeve of her blouse.

 
The author’s memorabilia has proved to be a profitable market: In 1999 author Joyce Maynard sold 14 letters Salinger wrote to the software entrepreneur Peter Norton for $156,500; five years later, 41 letters Salinger had signed sold at Christie’s for $185,000.
 
But Eppes has refused to sell the tape out of guilt over how she went about getting it.