Reporting: Goring the Egotists

Oriana Fallaci likes to be disliked.

The more hostility between her and her subject, she feels, the better the interview. In waging this belligerent kind of journalism, her weapons are a tape recorder, an eye-catching figure and a vulnerable glint in her wide blue eyes. She roams the world in search of people who are not simpatico but antipatico, and she has bagged dozens—Norman Mailer, Federico Fellini, Michael Caine, Dean Martin, El Cordobes, Hugh

Hefner and the Duchess of Alba, to name a few. The results have made Oriana, at 37, Italy's leading...