Gay talese frank sinatra has a cold
Peter Bart: Gay Talese&#;s Famed &#;Frank Sinatra Has A Cold&#; Becomes Hot Film Project
It is every journalist’s dream: Publish an article and movie producers commence chasing the motion picture rights. That’s the situation Gay Talese finds himself in, but there’s a twist: He wrote the article for Esquireover 50 years ago. It was called “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” – not a very promising title, but the piece acquired its retain mythology, becoming a model for a breakout genre called “The New Journalism.”
I came upon the Talese-Sinatra deal saga (details later) in a conversation with Talese last week about the sorry state of the news business. Reporters today, Talese believes, are locked to their lap tops and cell phones, chasing web traffic. The mantra is to hunt for &#;gotcha&#; stories rather than taking the time to pursue in-depth news and trends. “I could never survive as a reporter today,” says Talese, &#;because I’ve always wanted to get out of the office, to meet people and learn from them. I wanted to hang out with s
50 Years Later, Gay Talese Revisits ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’
Owing to period and (lack of) try, my intention to get notes on last night’s Gay Talese event at the Strand on a series of tailor’s shirt boards — the Recent Journalism pioneer’s preferred observation medium while on assignment — but alas, I stuck with my iPhone’s notebook. It was firm not to wonder, in those instances when Talese seemed to be looking straight at me (at one point or another, he seemed to be looking straight at everyone in the audience), whether I appeared to be playing video games or texting or whatever.
Looking unbent at people, of course, is what Talese does — from the sidelines, in the case of his most celebrated piece, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which he reported in and Esquire ran in April Last night’s soirée — complete with a spread of fruit, cheese, bread, and alabaster wine as handsome as the son-of-a-tailor author’s impeccable outfits — was a celebration of art-book publisher Taschen’s brand-new coffee-table edition of the story. It retails for $ Perhaps we’ll soon celebrate its publicatio
Gay Talese made his identify as a leader of the “New Journalism” movement, in which the boundaries of traditional reporting were broken with vivid, novelistic accounts of the reporters’ subjects.
One of the most acclaimed examples of this style was Talese’s April Esquire article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” a deeply-revealing profile of the singer, made even more remarkable in that Sinatra would not grant Talese an interview.
Instead, the writer sought out dozens of people who knew the superstar optimal , making for a exposing and artfully-written portrait of a cultural icon.
What follows is an excerpt from “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” just one of the pieces poised in a new anthology, “High Notes: Selected Writings of Gay Talese,” published by Bloomsbury Press.
- Don’t miss Rita Braver’s interview with Gay Talese on CBS’ “Sunday Morning” February 19!
Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
In the winter of , writer Lgbtq+ Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The finding, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April and became one of the most acknowledged magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful evidence enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply prosperous portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself.
Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark