Monday, Jun. 28, 1993

Tale of A Storyteller

By William Tynan

SHOW: ARMISTEAD MAUPIN IS A MAN I DREAMT UP

THE BOTTOM LINE: A documentary wryly profiles San Francisco's best-known chronicler.

A former colleague recalls Armistead Maupin's arrival at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976: "He would sort of come in about two hours after he was supposed to, plop down on his desk and go, 'God, did I have a night last night.' We would all gather around him and be regaled with stories of all the rich and famous people he'd been partying with all night . . . What used to really kill us is that then he would turn to his desk and effortlessly, in about half an hour, type out these incredibly funny columns."

These funny columns, titled Tales of the City, soon captivated San Francisco and eventually led to a series of six books. So titillating was his amalgam of fiction and reality that a number of locals at first suspected that Armistead Maupin must be the pseudonym of some social insider (thus part of the show's title, "is a man I dreamt up," is an anagram).

A PBS profile proves the contrary. As intelligent and unpretentious as its subject, the program touches variously on Tales, Maupin's Southern conservative background and his homosexuality. Most tantalizing are the segments that juxtapose book excerpts with interviews of Maupin's prototypes. Pam Delaney, for instance, doesn't feel she's really like heroine Mary Ann Singleton. "She showed up a lot more naive than I did," says Delaney, her open-faced smile a sweet self-refutation. Such moments whet the appetite for the six-hour adaptation of Tales coming to PBS this winter.