The reporter as artist, setting the scene

The term “New Journalism” has fallen into disrepute in recent years, not least because the kind of writing it describes was at times indulgent, occasionally made up and most certainly not new. Yet whatever we choose to call it, something undeniably different and compelling was beginning to emerge in the 1960s in the world of nonfiction prose. That “something” is often connected with Tom Wolfe’s early pyrotechnics or Hunter Thompson’s mad flamboyance or the nonfiction-novel experiments of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. It might be more accurate to consider Gay Talese as the field’s leading light. This stellar anthology reminds us that his early work in Esquire raised the magazine article to the level of an art form. “The Gay Talese Reader” reacquaints us with a masterful New Journalism pioneer -- one who, unlike many of his peers, insisted on remaining the invisible if ever-present observer.

Among the “Portraits and Encounters” advertised in the subtitle are Talese’s incomparable profiles of Frank Sinatra (“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”) and Joe DiMaggio (“The Silent Season of a Hero”), his hauntingly poignant visits with Floyd Patterson (“The Loser”), his dryly hilarious look at the New York Times obituary writer Alden Whitman (“Mr. Bad News”) and his portraits of Peter O’Toole, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali with Fidel Castro and George Plimpton with the Paris Review crowd. Each is marked by Talese’s elegant style, exhaustive research, skilled use of dialogue, scene-by-scene construction and, above all, his unerring eye for the telling detail. What Talese does better than just about anyone is hang out, observe and listen.

Over his shoulder we see Frank Sinatra unhappily nursing a cold and a bourbon in the dark corner of a Beverly Hills bar, “out of range,” heedless of the stereo playing “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” -- until a “preened and polished” blond pulls out a Kent (not just “a cigarette,” a Kent) and Sinatra quickly cups his hands and places his gold lighter under it, his fingers “nubby and raw,” his pinkies protruding, stiff with arthritis.

We see a flight instructor urging Floyd Patterson to keep their small plane on course while Patterson muses on the return bout he just lost to Sonny Liston: “How could the same thing happen twice? How? ... Was I fooling these people all these years? ... Was I ever the champion?” We see Patterson, “with a quick right hand,” swatting at -- and missing -- a buzzing fly in the cockpit.

We see Joe DiMaggio at home in the kitchen having breakfast with his sister, his gray hair uncombed, a blue wool bathrobe over his pajamas. We see DiMaggio on a bar stool -- Talese likes these moments -- ordering a vodka, his hand unsteady as he strikes a match for a young blond. He asks, “Is that me that’s shaking?” She says, “It must be. I’m calm.”

We see Alden Whitman slipping out of bed each morning, sitting in his study with a pipe and a pot of tea, “scanning the newspapers, his eyebrows raising slightly whenever he reads that a dictator is missing, a statesman is ill.” We learn that “[d]eath is on Whitman’s mind” as he rides the subway to work, for “Henry Wallace is not well” and “Billy Graham has visited the Mayo Clinic.” We watch as Whitman contemplates the audience at a Carnegie Hall concert, searching for those “about whom he might be particularly curious someday soon.”

Talese, here and elsewhere, makes plain his intent. He came of age at a time when there wasn’t much nonfiction to use as a model. He instead patterned himself after fiction writers -- such masters of the short story as F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, Irwin Shaw and Ernest Hemingway. The world of journalism dealt primarily with public lives, while those fiction writers dealt with what most interested Talese -- private lives. Yet he wanted to write true stories. He wanted to bring to nonfiction the sense of inner life that his models were providing in their short stories and novels. As he puts it, he saw nonfiction as “a creative form of telling the story of your time.”

In a piece titled “Origins of a Nonfiction Writer,” Talese explains that his interests and instincts and methods took form while he was still a boy, eavesdropping in his parents’ dress shop in Ocean City, N.J. “The shop was a kind of talk show that flowed around the engaging manner and well-timed questions of my mother.... I learned to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt even when people were having great difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting and imprecise moments ... people often are very revealing.... I also overheard many people discussing candidly with my mother what they had earlier avoided -- a reaction that I think had less to do with her inquiring nature or sensitively posed questions than with their gradual acceptance of her as a trustworthy individual.... My mother’s best customers were women less in need of new dresses than the need to communicate.”

Besides learning there to listen and observe, he learned to inquire occasionally. What were you thinking when you did such-and-such, his mother would ask, and so would he, eventually, collecting just what he needed for his innovative use of interior monologue. As he looked back decades later, it occurred to Talese that “many of the social and political questions that have been debated in America in the second half of the twentieth century -- the role of religion in the bedroom, racial equality, women’s rights ... all were discussed in my mother’s boutique as I grew up during the war and postwar years of the 1940s.” He discovered there that “large events influence small communities in ways that are uniquely illuminating.” He wanted to write about ordinary people, “the overlooked,” those not usually the center of attention.

This last may sound contradictory, for many of Talese’s best articles are about celebrities. Yet these are celebrities seen in a distinctive way. These are stories about famous people’s private lives -- lives caught often in moments of struggle or decline, lives never mythologized. These are also stories in which Talese never formally interviews the subject. Nowhere does this work to better effect than in “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

The genesis of this legendary profile is itself the stuff of legend. In the winter of 1965, Esquire sent Talese to Los Angeles to interview Sinatra, but the night he arrived he learned that Sinatra, suffering from a head cold and upset by new allegations about Mafia connections, wouldn’t see him. So instead Talese spent weeks interviewing all the people who surrounded Sinatra. He rarely removed a pen and pad from his pocket and never used a tape recorder, for he was after inner thoughts, not direct quotes. Soon he came to realize that all these people had something in common -- their pressing awareness of Frank Sinatra’s cold. One night in his hotel room, writing his daily chronicle, Talese found his story: “Sinatra was ill. He was a victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold. Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel -- only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice ... and it not only affects his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability.” Talese never did get the chance to sit down and talk alone to Sinatra; instead, he watched Sinatra in assorted settings, many of them stressful or private. “What could he or would he have said,” Talese later mused, “that would have revealed him better than an observing writer watching him in action ... listening and lingering along the sidelines of his life?”

This method of collecting scenes that reveal character, so much a part of the New Journalism, depends of course on the dogged, tireless legwork of the Old Journalism. Talese is too modest, though -- or disingenuous -- when he contends that he was essentially pounding the streets, wearing out shoe leather. He is a reporter, true enough, but one with the eyes and ears of an artist. This anthology puts the gloss back on the term “New Journalism.” *