A deeply haunted soul capable of brilliance or dreck, novelist Jerzy Kosinski was a world literary figure who, like a lot of people who move to New York City to remake themselves, was a confusing blend of fact and fiction. He was such an inveterate observer–voyeur, really–that even he must have lost track of what was his own real experience and what was not. A 1979 People magazine piece by Andrea Chambers profiled the writer while he was still a formidable public figure, a dozen years before he committed suicide. An excerpt:

“His current novel, Passion Play, his seventh, is about a middle-aged loner who, like Kosinski, is a polo fanatic. ‘The character, Fabian, is at the mercy of his aging and his sexual obsession,’ he says. ‘It’s my calling card. I’m 46. I’m like Fabian.’

Fabian is not likely to win the hearts of critics. They routinely attack Kosinski’s work as dirty and violent, and Passion Play has scenes of suicide, sadism and transsexualism. ‘The violence is never gratuitous,’ he says. ‘I write about what I see in society.’

To enlarge that vision, Kosinski collects bizarre experiences as methodically as more timorous authors do library research. At night he prowls the streets of Manhattan. ‘I have always been fascinated by sexual experiences,’ he says. ‘I stop women on the street, introduce myself and say, ‘I like you. I want to photograph you.” Usually they assent. At other moments he studies ‘how man refashions nature’ by watching various kinds of surgery (though an operation turning a man into a woman frightened him: ‘There’s no return’). He also stops at hospitals to read to patients suffering from terminal illnesses. 

Sometimes Kosinski takes odd jobs like selling used cars or driving a limousine under the name José. ‘Short of murder, I have an intimate knowledge of everything I write about,’ he says. To know, he is quick to point out, does not necessarily mean to practice.’I have no chains under my bed,’ he smiles. ‘Only writing paper.’

It is actually a roll of adding machine paper he carries on his ramblings and uses for first drafts. A gypsy by nature, Kosinski shuttles between apartments in New York and Switzerland, with frequent detours to polo fields. Wherever he is, Kosinski has access to lethal chemicals. ‘I’m not a suicide freak, but I want to be free,’ he says. ‘If I ever have an accident or a terminal disease that would affect my mind or my body, I will end it.'”