Gay Talese
Impressions of the man, the myth, the legend as he’s interviewed at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA
May 15, 2006
A wet blanket described by some as a “hundred year rain” had covered New England for ten days. The promise of a famous author making a local appearance was a ray of sunshine.
There, in his tailored light gray suit, burgundy handkerchief jutting like a crocus from the pocket, vest, pale yellow cravat, black shoes tied with red laces, pale taupe knee length stockings exposing no flesh as he sat on the Brattle Theater stage with interviewer Robert H. Giles, curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, was Gay Talese.
As far as Talese seemed to be concerned, Giles was another accessory to his outfit, an accessory who lobbed questions that the author measured and swung into with the grace of a DiMaggio. Talese was the show.
Some of the packed assembly had read all the man’s work; others, like me, had not but wanted some insight into an author who writes books destined to bask on bestseller lists for months at a time.
You can find background information about Gay Talese on any search engine. The man inhabiting the hand-stitched suit is far more elusive. As complete as his answers were, Talese seemed to be embodying his professional habit of remaining detached - an objectivity he said he learned while working for the New York Times editor A.M. Rosenthal, whose mantra was, “Get the facts, tell the truth, let the story go where it goes.”
As the interview progressed, it was clear that this was a tamped-down Talese. No chance he’d loosen the knot on that silk cravat and become confessional. I was going to have to follow Rosenthal’s advice myself - listen for the facts and find out where the author’s story was going.
Talese’s attire seemed like a suit of armor. Sitting regally erect, legs crossed, elegant long fingered hands draped over his knee, he could have been posing for a portrait. He often recast questions asked him to suit the way he wanted to respond. Was he composed or coiled?
Talese takes years to write his stories. He may have been the only writer in the world who asked the question, “What ever happened to the one woman out of five on the Chinese soccer team who missed a goal in the 1999 Women’s World Cup championship shoot-out, allowing the USA to win? I must meet this woman.” Then spent five months in China finding the story, undaunted that he didn’t speak the language, had no clue how to find the woman (remember how large China is?) or even have a solid prospect for selling the story. Typical of Talese, this isn’t a profile of one person. By the time he finished, he wanted to meet the woman’s mother, and her grandmother, “to get a view of China from pre Mao, to China after 1949, to post Mao - from bound feet to cleats!” Assuming you watched live or reruns of that 1999 soccer contest, is that what was on your mind when you watched the dramatic shootout?
His non-fiction, journalistic style, steeped in research and verifiable facts, paints a huge canvas with a very small brush. Tom Wolfe dubbed it “the New Journalism”. Talese bristles at the term. There’s nothing new about having your feet on the ground and sniffing out the story, he says. It’s old-fashioned hard work.
Book lovers and writers came to hear nuggets from the author. They heard stories, yes, but nothing revealing what makes him tick. He spoke a few sentences about his wife, a few about his Sicilian immigrant parents. He answered stories about how he goes about his business with surgical precision, sphinx-like detachment. Intensity was present in force. Passion was absent. Talese managed the interview like one would imagine Frank Sinatra, another enigmatic Italian he wrote about, might have done. On his terms.
His methods? By talking to secondary characters, people who’ve been on the margins of the story, Talese consumes details, fills note cards, types his notes every night, and lets the story come to him. His guiding principle: what’s the story inside these stories?
Sensing he needed to throw some crumbs to admirers interested in “how”, Talese said in specific words what he’d been saying through stories for the previous 45 minutes: “Don’t be smothered by your knowledge, Your artistic ambition is to write in story form, like fiction, but write verifiably accurate reality. You want a large cast of characters tell you about time and place then you want to capture time and place in words, embed it in fact.”
“It takes months of patience, persistence, perseverance, and then very careful writing. It’s hard work and I don’t use a tape recorder.”
In response to a question in the Q and A, he threw a whole loaf to the faithful. “After all my legwork and research, I begin to organize. I review all the daily notes from the journals I’ve been making for the story and summarize them. I pin the summaries to a large Styrofoam board and make a storyboard. To me, it becomes a visual medium. I see the story like a filmmaker. I write scenically. I write like a choreographer.”
Nothing explains this better than his 1966 Esquire magazine story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Sinatra’s handlers never let the writer interview him because Sinatra had a cold. Undeterred, Talese hung out in Sinatra’s hot spots. He watched, asked questions, and listened. He talked up valets, third trombone players, minor actors in movies Sinatra starred in, and others on the margins of singer’s life. Then he gorgeously nailed the sense of time and place of Sinatra’s “almost operatic” life. The piece launched a trend that became known as “the New Journalism.”
By the time you’re finished reading it, you can smell the cigarette smoke on Sinatra’s tailored suits, hear the ice tinkling in his high ball glass, feel the astonishing power he wielded over men and women, and through Talese’s nuanced observations, sense a fragility in the man who had it all. I know this because when I returned home, I found an online copy of “Frank Sinatra has a cold” and stayed up till midnight reading it. Summary: Incandescent. Intense. Influential. New journalism, old journalism, who knows. This non-fiction was riveting.
If I had to guess, I’d say his ability to create intensely vivid stories from the information he digs up creates a doppelganger effect, casting some of the power of the subject of the writing upon the writer himself.
I really don’t need to know more about what makes Gay Talese tick. I do want to read more of his “operas”, ones about publishing industry (The Kingdom and The Power), the rise and fall of a crime family (Honor thy Father), the changing sex lives of Americans (Thy Neighbor’s Wife), and the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (The Bridge). And I’m going to reread “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” about once a month.
The man is the center of a giant vortex of style and substance. Judging by this interview, I would not want to get in his way when he’s on the hunt.
To read Frank Sinatra Has a Cold:
Click this link, disregard the signin, click OK
http://www.dalekeiger.com/wp-content/FrankSinatraHasaCold.pdf
For a second, reality does not compute. Cell phones, as any idiot knows, don’t belong under water so it can’t be a cell phone. My mind refuses the data. But it IS a cell phone. MY cell phone. 
