Peter Manso

Peter Manso (December 22, 1940 – April 7, 2021) was an American writer and journalist known for definitive biographies on Jackie Stewart, Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando.

He gained particular notoriety as an interviewer.

In 1951, the family purchased a home at 592 Commercial Street, which painter Marsden Hartley and journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant had once lived.

At age 16, Manso graduated from New York's High School of Music and Art, later obtaining a bachelor's degree at Antioch College and a Masters at Johns Hopkins University.

He also taught English Literature at Rutgers University and University of California, Berkeley.

Mailer, running with Jimmy Breslin, called for the City to become the 51st state, a ban on private cars and a World Series for stickball.” The papers became his first book, Running Against the Machine: A Grass Roots Race for the New York Mayoralty.

Peter was raised in New York City and summered in Provincetown, where his parents became intimately involved in the art community, his mother opening an arts store and his father running a summer workshop from 1958 to 1976 in collaboration with New York University.

Manso long considered Mailer a mentor having met the already celebrity author in 1959 while a junior at Antioch and, ten years later, working on his mayoral campaign.

He also served as godfather to Mailer's son Michael Mailer.

In 1969, Manso wrote position papers for Mailer's campaign for New York City Mayor.

Stewart had won the Formula One World Championship in 1969 and 1971 but 1970 was one of his most difficult years, losing two friends to car crashes.

Both books proved popular in racing circles.

His 1970 book ''Vroom!!

conversations with the Grand Prix champions'' was composed entirely from transcripts of his talks with ten Formula One drivers.

He later had interviews published regularly in Penthouse Magazine as well as Playboy (and its subsidiary Oui), Car and Driver, Premiere and The Guardian.

Subjects included Arnold Schwarzenegger, Leonard Peltier, Al Unser Jr.., Roy Cohn, Ed Koch, Oliver Stone, Sam Donaldson, Mark Fuhrman, Roger Penske and Peter O’Toole.

Schwarzenegger's admission of group sex and drugs resurfaced when he ran for governor of California.

Koch's comments that suburbs were “sterile” and rural America “a joke” is attributed to having cost him the New York governor race.

Manso also wrote articles for Vanity Fair, Boston Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Sunday Times, Los Angeles Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and Politico.

Many were translated into French for Paris Match.

Peter Bloch, editor of Penthouse, wrote, “In truth, there were no others like him.

He not only was the best interviewer in the business but he was a vivid and evocative prose stylist and an intrepid and dogged researcher (I remember his joy at tracking down Marlon Brando's fourth-grade teacher).”

His penchant for interviews and research shaped later books he wrote.

His 765-page Mailer, His Life and Times was pieced together from manuscripts of more than 200 interviews.

He conducted 750 for the 1,160-page Brando: The Biography.

Manso was born in Manhattan, the son of Leo Manso, a book illustrator and abstract painter, and Blanche (Rosenberg) Manso, an art dealer.

Leo designed book covers for releases by Dashiell Hammett, Ian Fleming, John Steinbeck and Agatha Christie.

Robert Motherwell called him “one of collage's masters.” His work is in permanent collections at the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

Blanche collected Indian and Nepalese art, her own collections exhibited in New York and California.

In 1970, the same year Vroom!! was released, Manso began working with Stewart on ''Faster!

A Racer's Diary''.

In 1974, he was writer for the film One by One, which documented the dangers of Formula One racing.

It was re-released in 1978 as The Quick and the Dead and again as Champions Forever: The Formula One Drivers.

Manso, whose personal driving preference was Porsches, also wrote about autos for Penthouse.

In 2021, he was honored by the Motorsport Hall of Fame “for being a superb motorsport journalist.”

In 1983, Manso and Mailer bought a house in Provincetown with collateral from Roy Cohn, who also lived on the property.

For two summers, Manso and his partner Ellen Hawkes, Mailer and his wife Norris Church and Mailer's children lived together while Manso worked on the biography.

Instead of narrating it himself, he edited clips from 141 people he listed as contributors to tell Mailer's story.

In 2008, Autoweek listed them among the best car books of the past 50 years.

He said he did this partly to “avoid any problems with my housemate-subject.” He would add his own narration in an afterword when the book was re-released in 2008.