When Katherine Clark began interviewing Eugene Walter (1921-98) in 1991 for an oral biography of this Mobile, Alabama, legend"s picaresque life, friends asked her, "Do you think he will tell you the truth?" "I certainly hope not!" she replied. Clark, herself a Southerner, understood that the charm of Walter"s conversation came from his brilliantly polished stories, in which "at a certain point the actual gives way to the apocryphal." So readers shouldn"t ask if Tallulah Bankhead really gave Walter three pubic hairs or if Anna Magnani actually asked the mayor of Rome to help find Walter"s lost cat: that"s not the point. These anecdotes express Walter"s appreciation of people he likes, and although the narrative is stuffed with famous names from Truman Capote to Leontyne Price, the exuberant protagonist finds less celebrated folks just as fascinating. His loving evocation of Mobile in the 1920s, when the front porch was the center of all social life, is just as detailed as his portraits of sojourns in more glamorous enclaves: Greenwich Village after World War II ("where I could sit in the evenings and hear Jane and Paul Bowles quarreling in their nearby apartment"); Paris in the early 1950s (his short story "Troubador" appeared in the first issue of Paris Review); and Rome during its La Dolce Vita years. Walter refused Fellini"s plea that he perform with his marionettes in that particular movie, but he played an American journalist in 8 1/2 and "must have been in over a hundred of those crazy Italian films" before returning to Mobile in 1979. ("Sooner or later all Southerners come home, not to die, but to eat gumbo.") Clark, who captured an Alabama midwife"s wisdom in Motherwit, gets out of her subject"s way and lets his words create an enchanting world in this marvelously entertaining reminiscence. --Wendy Smith