Fifty years ago this month, Esquire magazine dispatched the writer

Fifty years ago this
month, Esquire
magazine dispatched
the writer Gay Talese
to Los Angeles
to interview Frank
Sinatra at his peak.
The singer cancelled
but, undeterred,
Talese produced
an epic article that
has come to
define the genre
known as New
Journalism. Mick
Brown met him in
New York.
© phil stern estate. courtesy of the fahe y/ k lein g allery, los angeles
F
rank 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 first 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 fulfil. So it was that, in November
1965, he flew to Los Angeles, checked into the Beverly
Wilshire Hotel, and contacted Sinatra’s press agent to find
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
The actor and television personality Milton Berle (right) watches Frank Sinatra dress in white
tie and tails on the evening of John F Kennedy’s inauguration, January 20, 1961
34 t e l e g r a p h
m a g a z i n e
t e l e g r a p h
m a g a z i n e
35
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 filming 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 fight 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
coffee-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.’
© 2015 and courtesy of g ay talese. jeremiah wilson
I
t 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 figure.
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 flights
of stairs, out of the front door, down the wroughtiron staircase to the pavement, and down a further
flight of steps to his basement office – he calls it
‘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’
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 cuffs 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.
t e l e g r a p h
m a g a z i n e
37
© 2015 and courtesy of g ay talese. © phil stern estate. courtesy of the fahe y/ k lein g allery, los angeles
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 film 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 Nonfiction 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 difficulty 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-fiction
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 fiction – 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
profile of the boxer Joe Louis, published in Esquire
in 1962, as the defining 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
From top more of the outline for
‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’;
Sinatra breaks for lunch while filming Guys
and Dolls in 1955
understated and elegant – rigorous in its adherence
to the traditional journalistic criteria of meticulous
research and factual accuracy, the first-person pronoun notable by its absence.
From early on, Talese developed an idiosyncratic
way of working. Most writers use notebooks. Talese
uses the cardboard stiffeners from shirts, cut into
rectangles and rounded at the corners to fit 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.
t e l e g r a p h
m a g a z i n e
39
© 2015 and courtesy of g ay talese. © phil stern estate. courtesy of the fahe y/ k lein g allery, los angeles
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 different 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 flown
to unwind by watching a prizefight: ‘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 filed. When the time
comes to write Talese’s biography, whoever is
assigned the task will find 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
finest 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 fine
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 profile 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 defining 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-fiction
writer, a reality writer, push the subject to break
through and achieve status in a world dominated by
fiction. People would say, “Oh, write the great
American novel.” F**k the great American novel!
I wanted to write the great non-fiction 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 fiction
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’
From top Talese’s first draft of
his Sinatra article; Sinatra
rehearsing for JFK’s pre-inaugural gala,
in Washington, DC, 1961
by birth, and underclass by my choice of occupation. I wanted to be like the immigrant who rises
above his lowly status.’
T
alese says the most interesting man he has
ever met, and certainly the most amusing,
was the actor Peter O’Toole. In 1963 Talese
flew 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 afford to have children. ‘And O’Toole said,
t e l e g r a p h
m a g a z i n e
41
“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 fly over from New York so the couple
could stay in the guest room of his Hampstead
home. It was there that the Taleses’ first 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
fixed 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 Mafia family, published two years later –
had elevated him to the position of the most successful and most lauded non-fiction 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 off 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 figure out, what was a girl
from Alabama doing here in New York jerking me
off, 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!’’’
Gay Talese witnesses the
tensions surrounding the
taping of a Frank Sinatra
television show…
W
hen 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
reflections 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 amplifier, 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 figure 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 flourishing, 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 affair that would last five 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 affair with. I didn’t want to marry anyone
to tell you the truth. I was messed up.’ When this
affair 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 off, 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)