Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel - only worse. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra - A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. I interviewed minor characters excessively, but I didn’t see them as anything but atmosphere. As far as I was concerned, they were just decoration. I didn’t know who they were and I still don’t know who they were. This suggests that they knew him more than cursorily. I’m curious about how the blondes “knew” not to force Sinatra to talk. The story closes with one woman and opens with two. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra’s four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday. But he said nothing he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo.
Why did this piece strike a chord with people?įRANK SINATRA, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. Bad News” comes closest to what I aspire to do, which is to write nonfiction about ordinary people. Where does this fall in your hierarchy of Gay Talese pieces? Do you like it? I said, “Do you think he liked it?” She said, “You know, he would never tell you, but I think he did.” She said, “I like that piece you did on my father.” I said, “You did?” Because I had never heard from anybody. Quincy Jones was there and Tina Sinatra, Frank’s daughter. The only thing I know is that, after he was dead, I was invited to Queens College to be on a panel of a Frank Sinatra event. Then after that, you can do what you want to do.”ĭid Sinatra like the story? Did he read it? His press agent, Jim Mahoney, will give you access to him. What can you say about Sinatra that hasn’t already been said?” “Look, Gay,” said Hayes, “it’s all set up. “ Life magazine just did a piece on Sinatra. He’d gone to Hanoi and was writing what the Pentagon didn’t want him to write.
Then I told Hayes I wanted to write about this great New York Times correspondent, Harrison Salisbury. It may be the most gratifying piece I ever did. It was about an obituary writer named Alden Whitman. Scott Fitzgerald - was to tell short stories. Hayes said, “You can do pieces you want, and you can do pieces we want.” What I wanted to do, in imitation of the writers I used to devour - Irwin Shaw, John Cheever, John O’Hara, F.
Six pieces didn’t seem like a lot, but it was. I was making $15,000, which was good money in those days. Gay Talese: Harold Hayes, Esquire‘s editor, gave me a one-year contract to do six pieces. Talese, in September, with one of his famous shirt-board outlines. Storyboard: What was the genesis for this piece? Why did you want to write about Sinatra, and why in 1965? My comments and questions are in blue his are in red. For a guy who famously takes years on a story - he’s finishing up a New Yorker piece that’s been gestating for three decades - a month didn’t seem like much time to gather material for the greatest profile ever written. I told him I was surprised that he spent only 31 days researching the Sinatra piece. The second time we talked, we went downstairs, to his cellar-turned-bunker, where he works dressed like a natty banker. When we met there recently to talk about his iconic Esquire profile “ Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” we chatted in a room that, in a house of such grandeur, one would have to call the parlor. Gay Talese lives on the East Side of Manhattan, in a four-story brownstone he moved into in 1958, at age 26.
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