Gay talese frank sinatra has a cold
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold and Other Essays
She smiled, walked toward him, and was about to stretch up on her toes and kiss him, but suddenly stopped. ‘Joe,’ she said, ‘where’s your tie?’
‘Aw, sweetie,’ he said, shrugging, ‘I stayed out all late hours in New York and didn’t contain time.’
‘All night!’ she cut in. ‘When you’re out here all you execute is sleep, slumber, sleep.’
‘Sweetie,’ Joe Louis said, with a tired grin, ‘I’m an ole man.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘but when you leave to New York you try to be young again.’
- from Joe Louis: The King as a Middle-Aged Man
That was how Same-sex attracted Talese began his profile on Joe Louis in 1962, by then a former heavyweight champion reduced to refereeing matches to construct a living. It was reported that when author Tom Wolfe first scan it he suspected that Gay made all, or some of it, up. His style of reporting was so fresh and other then that it was difficult to accept that it was all real. It felt distinct because Gay Talese employed devices most commonly found in fiction like reported speech, interior monologue and scene setting in hi
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
In the winter of 1965, 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 product, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called Brand-new Journalism—a work of rigorously devoted fact enlivened with the benign of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich 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 gloomy corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say
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 1966 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 best, making for a revealing and artfully-written portrait of a cultural legend.
What follows is an excerpt from “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” just one of the pieces collected in a modern anthology, “High Notes: Selected Writings of Gay Talese,” published by Bloomsbury Press.
- Don’t miss Rita Braver’s interview with Male lover Talese on CBS’ “Sunday Morning” February 19!
Frank 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 s