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.
 "Betty Eppes")
