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Gay abandon Talese on taking risks
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’, Gay Talese’s 15,000-word study of the singer at the height of his fame, which was published in Esquire magazine in April 1966, is perhaps the most famous magazine story in American journalism, and there is some irony in the fact that Talese had no great desire to write it.
When Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquire, approached him to do the piece, his frst thought was, ‘Oh, no...’
‘ Look and Life, every major magazine had done a cover story on Sinatra,’ he says. ‘I thought, what’s left to say?’
But an interview with Sinatra had been arranged. And Talese had a contract to fulfl. So it was that, in November 1965, he few to Los Angeles, checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and contacted Sinatra’s press agent to fnd out when the interview would be taking place. It wouldn’t be, he was told. Frank Sinatra had a cold.
‘A cold? So I’ll wait a couple of days until it passes...’ There was another problem. CBS television had scheduled a programme about Sinatra, rumoured to be dwelling in an unfortunate way on his connections to organised crime. Sinatra was in no mood to talk to anyone. Talese contacted Hayes and prepared to leave. Hayes told him to stay.
And so it began. Talese picked up the telephone, started phoning around, and embarked on what he calls ‘the art of hanging out’. One night he was sitting in the Daisy, a private-members’ club on Rodeo Drive, when Sinatra
walked past and into the pool room. Talese followed him and watched as Sinatra picked on a screenwriter who was playing pool and to whom Sinatra had taken sudden and inexplicable exception. He tracked Sinatra to a recording for a TV show, and to a sound stage where he was flming Assault on a Queen. When he heard that Sinatra was going to Las Vegas, he took a plane and followed him wherever he went. He lurked in the shadows, eavesdropping on conversations, hastening to the men’s room to jot them down before they slipped from his memory. He ran up extravagant expenses buying drinks and dinner for everyone from Sinatra’s body-double – a man named Johnny Delgado – to the inconspicuous, little grey-haired lady charged with looking after the singer’s toupées and who followed him everywhere ‘holding his hair in a tiny satchel’, to the man that Sinatra had tried to pick a fght with in the Daisy – Talese had the presence of mind to sidle over and make note of his telephone number after Sinatra had left the room. He returned to New York and, through his friend Jilly Rizzo, who owned a bar favoured by Sinatra, secured an introduction to Sinatra’s mother, Dolly. He interviewed the singer’s son, Frank Jr, whose place in the clan seemed somewhat tenuous. In short, he did whatever was necessary to complete the story, wrote it, handed it in, and moved on to something else without giving it a second thought. He never did meet Sinatra.
‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’ was a masterful study of Sinatra in all his glory, and all his terror – the sentimentality and the cruelty, the extreme largesse and the arbitrary nastiness, the abject fear he instilled in those around him, and the way that ‘a part of Sinatra, no matter where he is, is never there. There is always a part of him, though sometimes a small part, that remains Il Padrone.’
The felicity of phrase, the pungency of the observation – it is a piece that compellingly, brilliantly, puts you there. And so it entered legend, the most famous magazine story in American journalism. Now it is being published again, this time in a luxury cofee-table book with photographs of Sinatra from the period taken by Phil Stern, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Sinatra’s birth – a limited edition of 5,000 copies each signed by Talese, priced at £150.
‘I am,’ Talese says, ‘amazed.’
It is Saturday afternoon at the brownstone in midtown Manhattan where Talese lives with his wife, Nan, who for 50 years has been one of the most important literary editors in New York. The air is of understated luxury and good taste: interesting art on the walls; bookshelves extending to the ceiling. On the tables are photographs of Talese with three American presidents: Carter, Reagan and Clinton. The writer as a major cultural fgure.
Talese’s father was a tailor, from a family of tailors, his mother ran a dress shop, and he has always been exacting in his appearance. It has been his habit for many years to start each morning by dressing formally for work: a three-piece suit, handmade in Paris by his Italian cousins; a crisp shirt, usually striped, with a contrasting white collar, handmade by Addison On Madison; a silk tie. Thus attired, he will make the journey down four fights of stairs, out of the front door, down the wroughtiron staircase to the pavement, and down a further fight of steps to his basement ofce – he calls it
From top Gay Talese’s outline for ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’; Talese in the ‘bunker’ at
his New York home, 2015 ‘the bunker’ – where he will spend the day writing.
Today being Saturday, he has opted for less formal attire: a shirt and tie, of course, but worn with a brown herringbone tweed jacket by Brioni of Beverly Hills that he purchased in 1972, the life of which he has since prolonged by refashioning the jacket with velvet piping on the cufs and lapels (he hates throwing clothes away); a suede waistcoat; tan-coloured slacks; jacquard-pattern long socks; and brown leather and suede correspondent shoes with button fastenings made by Vincent & Edgar. These things matter. ‘Well they do to me...’
Talese, who at 83 is tall and still lean, is a cultured and erudite man, but you can hear in his drawl, and in the occasional profanity that explodes in his conversation like a grenade, the echoes of the New Jersey waterfront where he grew up and the sports desk of The New York Times where he once worked.
‘That was my little
private battle, to elevate journalism, because we were the underclass… I wanted to be like the
immigrant who rises above his lowly
status’
Since we are talking of Sinatra, he says, the place the singer holds in his own upbringing should be understood. As the son of Italian immigrants, Talese was burdened by the feeling of being a ‘fractional American – or not even American at all.’ ItalianAmericans were for the most part labourers, paisans, unsung, ‘downtrodden people who when they died never had an obituary’. If they were depicted in popular culture at all, it was as gangsters. Sinatra was a beacon of hope: a singer who had come out of the ghetto and been embraced by a mainstream audience; a flm star who didn’t play gangsters but leading roles, who got the blonde, blue-eyed allAmerican girl. He was the man all women wanted, and who all men wanted to be. ‘So here was I, a marginal American, with the echoing of Sinatra’s voice giving me encouragement that it was possible to be a revered citizen in this republic if you are talented and do your work well.’
In an essay, ‘Origins of a Nonfction Writer’, Talese recounts how as a boy he would sit with his mother in her dress shop, eavesdropping on the chitter-chatter of customers. It imbued him with a curiosity about ordinary lives, and what he regards as a cardinal requisite for a journalist – to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt even when people are having great difculty in explaining themselves, for ‘what they hesitate to talk about can tell much about them’.
He studied journalism at a college in Alabama, and through a college friend wangled an introduction to The New York Times, where he began as a copy boy. One day he sought out the man who operated the electronic sign in Times Square that broadcast the news headlines, and asked if he might interview him. The man agreed: nobody had ever asked him that before. The piece ran without a byline, but Talese was on his way. He graduated to the sports pages, then began writing magazine pieces.
His models were not journalists but short-story writers: F Scott Fitzgerald, Irwin Shaw, John O’Hara. His ambition was to write non-fction about ordinary people, to be ‘a short-story writer of real names, based on an intimate connection with the people you were writing about’. ‘The literature of reality,’ as he puts it. His first book, New York: A Serendipiter’s
Journey, published in 1961, was a voyage through the city’s neighbourhoods and anonymous characters. His second, The Bridge, published in 1964, explored the lives of the workers constructing the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge, which links Brooklyn to Staten Island.
Talese was working towards a technique that would come to be known as ‘the New Journalism’, in which all of the devices of fction – reported speech, scene-setting, intimate personal details and the use of interior monologue – are turned to the service of factual reporting. It was a term that Talese himself was oblivious to until Tom Wolfe hailed his profle of the boxer Joe Louis, published in Esquire in 1962, as the defning example of the genre, a genre that would come to embrace such writers as Truman Capote, Hunter S Thompson and Wolfe himself.
Wolfe’s hyperbolic pop-art prose now seems like a period artefact. Thompson’s ‘gonzo journalism’, driven by a determination to always put himself at the centre of the story, eventually descended into self-parody. Talese’s prose was more formal,
When Talese heard that Sinatra was going
to Las Vegas, he took a plane and
followed him wherever he went. He lurked in the shadows,
eavesdropping
understated and elegant – rigorous in its adherence to the traditional journalistic criteria of meticulous research and factual accuracy, the frst-person pronoun notable by its absence.
From early on, Talese developed an idiosyncratic way of working. Most writers use notebooks. Talese uses the cardboard stifeners from shirts, cut into rectangles and rounded at the corners to ft into his inside jacket pocket. (A method he employs to this day; as we talk he pulls a ‘pad’ from his pocket to make a note to himself.) The notes would be turned into a story by a laborious process of typing, correcting, retyping, correcting…
Talese keeps all his notes and drafts stored in ‘the bunker’, a comfortable cave furnished with sofas and chairs, photos of Talese and Nan hanging on the wall. There are cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling, labelled and covered in collages of photographs.
He reaches for the box labelled frank sinatra has a cold and pulls out a sheaf of notes.
Every day – every hour – spent on the story is recorded, from the day of his arrival in LA: November 3, 1965. The drinks, the lunches, the conversations. The footwork. The hanging out. Talese estimates that he spoke to almost 100 people in the course of his research – for a 15,000-word article.
From his typed notes Talese would draw a storyboard, ordering his thoughts and observations in a series of scenes, executed in diferent coloured inks. A work of art in itself. ‘Scene IV – The Fight’, written in balloon script and dated November 22, outlines the scene in Las Vegas where Sinatra has fown to unwind by watching a prizefght: ‘p5 – ‘Joey Bishop can’t sit next to FS! The whores gather (Frank stays up all night not to let them down!)’. His notes show the story took 32 days to research.
This meticulous record-keeping extends to every aspect of his life. Letters, clippings, photographs, calendars, all labelled and fled. When the time comes to write Talese’s biography, whoever is assigned the task will fnd that their subject has done most of the spadework for them.
Talese returns the box to its place on the shelf. He expresses bemusement that this, of all his pieces, should be so celebrated. He does not regard it as his fnest article (that is ‘Mr Bad News’, his study of The
New York Times obituarist Alden Whitman, published in Esquire in 1966: ‘After having written a fne advance obituary his pride of authorship is such that he can barely wait for that person to drop dead so that he may see his masterpiece in print.’)
But few people now, of course, know of Alden Whitman. Talese’s profle of Sinatra has been carried in the slipstream of the singer’s enduring legend, become almost a part of it.
He has no idea if Sinatra liked the piece – no idea if he even read it – but among the Sinatra clan it seems to have been accepted as the defning written testament to the singer’s life.
In June Talese was invited by Sinatra’s granddaughter Amanda Erlinger to take part in a discussion at Yale University, marking the Sinatra centenary. A month later Sinatra’s daughter Nancy invited him to join her for a similar event at the Paley Center in New York.
Did Talese like the Sinatra he wrote about? He can honestly say he didn’t give it much thought. ‘I wanted to have a portrait that would be interesting to read, well reported, precise in the gathering of its facts and the detail – the fact that even the soles of his shoes were shined. I’m an observer. A voyeur. Most journalists are.’
So, with Sinatra, Joe Louis, Alden Whitman – all his subjects – what preoccupied him was not the liking or the not liking, but the work itself.
‘I was motivated at how could a non-fction writer, a reality writer, push the subject to break through and achieve status in a world dominated by fction. People would say, “Oh, write the great American novel.” F**k the great American novel! I wanted to write the great non-fction work. I wanted to achieve a place for myself in the written word that was worthy of respect, and didn’t have to measure up against these foppish f**king fction writers that got all the glory. That was my little private battle: to elevate journalism, because we were the underclass. And I’m one of them. Underclass
‘I tell you, long marriages…’ Talese pauses. ‘In order to
continue long marriages you have to
have a lack of imagination. And I have imagination’ by birth, and underclass by my choice of occupation. I wanted to be like the immigrant who rises above his lowly status.’
Talese says the most interesting man he has ever met, and certainly the most amusing, was the actor Peter O’Toole. In 1963 Talese few to London to interview O’Toole for Esquire. No sooner had he arrived than O’Toole announced he had to leave for Dublin, on family business. Talese asked, can I come too? Over the next four days, much talking and drinking took place. O’Toole introduced Talese to John Huston and Peter Finch, themselves no slouches at either of those things. He didn’t want the assignment to end. Talese and Nan had married in 1959, but they had no children. O’Toole asked, why not? Talese explained that he couldn’t aford to have children. ‘And O’Toole said,
“Oh come on – you sound very conservative to me. You’re not much of a risk-taker are you?” Because he’d always been a risk-taker. I was bewildered.’
O’Toole was returning to London and suggested that Nan fy over from New York so the couple could stay in the guest room of his Hampstead home. It was there that the Taleses’ frst daughter, Pamela, was conceived. (Pamela is a painter; a second daughter, Catherine, a photographer, was born three years later.)
Was Talese a risk-taker? It is a question that came to preoccupy him over the years. He is a man of fxed and orderly habits, conservative in many ways. He and Nan have been married for 56 years; they have lived in the same house for 43 years. He refurbishes his clothes, for Chrissakes. And yet, and yet… By 1972, Talese had risen triumphantly beyond his ‘lowly status’. Two books – The Kingdom and the
Power, a study of The New York Times, published in 1969; and Honor Thy Father, a portrait of the Bonanno Mafa family, published two years later – had elevated him to the position of the most successful and most lauded non-fction writer in America. He was now in search of another subject.
One night, walking down Lexington Avenue with Nan on their way home from dinner at PJ Clarke’s, Talese noticed a sign in an upstairs window, saying live nude models. Talese suggested they take a look. Nan told him to go ahead; she was going home. Talese went upstairs. The premises were actually a massage parlour, where you could also take photographs of nude women. Talese opted for a massage and lay down on a table where a girl named Sandra asked if he wanted oil or talcum powder.
‘I said, is there a shower here? No? I’ll take talcum powder. As she was jerking me of I said, where are you from, Sandra? “I’m from Bessemer, Alabama.” Alabama! I used to go to school in Alabama – Tuscaloosa. She couldn’t give less of a shit. But I was trying to fgure out, what was a girl from Alabama doing here in New York jerking me of, while I was trying to interview her? I mean, that was interesting to me.’
So began Talese’s tour d’horizon of the sexual revolution that was gripping America, a tour that would occupy him for the next 10 years and almost destroy his career and his marriage.
Talese researched the subject with characteristic rigour; indeed, it might be argued he was a little too rigorous. For a while he managed a massage parlour himself – ‘I was really a pimp…’ He disported himself on nudist beaches. He visited Sandstone, a community in California where married couples were practising ‘consensual adultery’ in an experiment, as he puts it, ‘to eliminate sexual jealousy. I was fascinated by that.’
Was there a point at which he was enjoying this rather too much?
‘Well there was a point where my wife was saying, I think I need some time away from this marriage. But honestly, I wasn’t. What I was thinking was, what’s the story here? Who are the characters? And how do I get permission to use these people’s names, meaning that someone will say one thing at night in the middle of an orgy, but at breakfast next day, when they’re working for some insurance company in the San Fernando Valley, they’ll say, “You can’t write about that! I have two kids in school. Jesus!’’’
When he strolled into the studio the musicians all picked up their instruments and stiffened in their seats. Sinatra cleared his throat a few times and then, after rehearsing a few ballads with the orchestra, he sang Don’t Worry About Me to his satisfaction and, being uncertain of how long his voice could last, suddenly became impatient.
‘Why don’t we tape this mother?’ he called out, looking up toward the glass booth where the director, Dwight Hemion, and his staff were sitting. Their heads seemed to be down, focusing on the control board.
‘Why don’t we tape this mother?’ Sinatra repeated.
The production stage manager, who stands near the camera wearing a headset, repeated Sinatra’s words exactly into his line to the control room: ‘Why don’t we tape this mother?’
Hemion did not answer. Possibly his switch was off. It was hard to know because of the obscuring refections the lights made against the glass booth.
‘Why don’t we put on a coat and tie,’ said Sinatra, then wearing a high-necked yellow pullover, ‘and tape this…’
Suddenly Hemion’s voice came over the sound amplifer, very calmly: ‘OK, Frank, would you mind going back over…’
‘Yes, I would mind going back,’ Sinatra snapped.
The silence from Hemion’s end, which lasted a second or two, was then again interrupted by Sinatra saying, ‘When we stop doing things around here the way we did them in 1950, maybe we…’ and Sinatra continued to tear into Hemion, condemning as well the lack of modern techniques in putting such shows together; then, possibly not wanting to use his voice unnecessarily, he stopped. And Dwight Hemion, very patient, so patient and calm that one would assume he had not heard anything that Sinatra had just said, outlined the opening part of the show. And Sinatra a few minutes later was reading his opening remarks, words that would follow Without a Song, off the large idiot-cards being held near the camera. Then, this done, he prepared to do the same thing on camera.
‘ Frank Sinatra Show, act one, page 10, take one,’ called a man with a clapboard, jumping in front of the camera – clap – then jumping away again.
‘Did you ever stop to think,’ Sinatra began, ‘what the world would be like without a song?... It would be a pretty dreary place.... Gives you something to think about, doesn’t it?...’ Sinatra stopped. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, adding, ‘Boy, I need a drink.’ Excerpt from ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’, published in Esquire magazine, April 1966
It took him four years to persuade a married couple to let him use their names. In all his writing, Talese had made a point of keeping himself out of the story. But when he came to write this book he had no choice but to admit that all he had written about he had participated in himself. How else would the reader believe every word was true? ‘I had to tell where I got my sources, and to name my sources. And if they were prepared to be named, then so should I be.’
The book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, went to the top of the bestseller lists. But the critical opprobrium rained down from on high. ‘It was, this dirty old man with his wife, a big fgure in publishing, and his two daughters at prep school in Manhattan, and making all this money and enjoying himself. I was a joke.’
In a bid to rehabilitate himself, he set out to write a book about Lee Iaccocca – another Italian American – who had turned around the fortunes of the Chrysler Corporation. He abandoned it after a year. Nan’s career was fourishing, his was falling apart, and their marriage was now in serious trouble. He left America for Italy, to research a book tracing his family origins, Unto the Sons.
He employed an interpreter named Kristin Jarratt, and embarked on an afair that would last fve years. ‘I didn’t want a divorce because the children were still young. And I didn’t want to marry the girl I was having an afair with. I didn’t want to marry anyone to tell you the truth. I was messed up.’ When this afair came to an end, he had another, with the daughter of America’s ambassador to Rome. Then he came home, and Nan took him back.
‘I tell you, long marriages…’ Talese pauses. ‘In order to continue long marriages you have to have a lack of imagination. And I have imagination. I wonder what it’s like to be with someone else. I did it. So O’Toole, who was a bit of a rascal and a roué, he said I’m not a risk-taker. But probably in a way I was more of a risk-taker than he was.’ This is said with no trace of satisfaction, nor regret; rather, as a simple statement of fact.
What has kept his marriage together, he believes, is that Nan has always had her own career. ‘She’s never been dependent on me for her well-being. In fact she makes more money than I do now.’
For years she had talked of buying a house in the country, and he had balked at the idea. One day, six years ago, she said she had something to tell him. She had bought a house in the country. ‘I said, shit man, let’s get a divorce, I told you I didn’t want the responsibility. I’m too old and you’re too old, and now we own this shit, and the roof falls of, and all this insurance… So now we get to the end of our lives and she’s buying a house behind my back. And what it shows is that people change. I was going to get out of this marriage, and now I’m embarrassed and infuriated that she’s buying another house, which both of us are responsible for.’
But you were never going to give her what she wanted, so she did it herself.
‘That’s right! Other people might have become a drunk. She buys a house…’
Talese thinks about this. ‘It’s in Roxbury, Connecticut. It’s a nice town. William Styron lived there.’ It is, he says, ‘a literary town...’ Frank Sinatra Has a Cold (Taschen, £150) is available for £120 from Telegraph Bookshop (0844-871 1514; books.telegraph.co.uk)
Gay Talese witnesses the tensions surrounding the taping of a Frank Sinatra television show…