INTERVIEWERHow does your writing day begin?
TALESEUsually I wake up in bed with my wife. I don’t want to have breakfast with anyone. So I go from the third floor, which is our bedroom, to the fourth floor, where I keep my clothes. I get dressed as if I’m going to an office. I wear a tie.
INTERVIEWERCuff links?
TALESEYes. I dress as if I’m going to an office in midtown or on Wall Street or at a law firm, even though what I am really doing is going downstairs to my bunker. In the bunker there’s a little refrigerator, and I have orange juice and muffins and coffee. Then I change my clothes.
INTERVIEWERAgain?
TALESEThat’s right. I have an ascot and sweaters. I have a scarf.
INTERVIEWERDo you like that the bunker doesn’t have windows?
TALESEYes. There are no doors, no time. It used to be a wine cellar.
INTERVIEWERHow do you write?
TALESELonghand at first. Then I use the typewriter.
INTERVIEWERYou never write directly onto the computer?
TALESEOh no, I couldn’t do that. I want to be forced to work slowly because I don’t want to get too much on paper. By the end of the morning I might have a page, which I will pin up above my desk. After lunch, around five o’clock, I’ll go back to work for another hour or so.
INTERVIEWERSurely there must be some days in the middle of a project, when you’re really going, that you write more than a single page.
TALESENo, there aren’t.
INTERVIEWERBut your books are so long.
TALESEI take a long time. I have published relatively little given how long I have been working. Over fifty-five years I’ve only written five long books, two short ones, and four collections. It’s not that many.
INTERVIEWERIs that because you spend a lot of time editing?
TALESENot really. I type and I retype. When I think I’m getting close, that’s when I put it on the computer. Once it’s on the screen I make very few changes. It’s the reporting that takes so much time.
INTERVIEWERDo you use notebooks when you are reporting?
TALESEI don’t use notebooks. I use shirt boards.
INTERVIEWERYou mean the cardboard from dry-cleaned shirts?
TALESEExactly. I cut the shirt board into four parts and I cut the corners into round edges, so that they can fit in my pocket. I also use full shirt boards when I’m writing my outlines. I’ve been doing this since the fifties.
INTERVIEWERSo all day long you’re writing your observations on shirt boards?
TALESEYes, and at night I type out my notes. It is a kind of journal. But not only my notes—also my observations.
INTERVIEWERWhat do you mean by observations?
TALESEI mean my personal observations, what I myself was thinking and feeling during the day when I was meeting people and seeing things and making notes on shirt boards. When I’m typing at night, on ordinary pieces of typing paper, I’m not only dealing with my daily research, but also with what I’ve seen and felt that day. What I’m doing as a researching writer is always mixed up with what I’m feeling while doing it, and I keep a record of this. I’m always part of the assignment. This will be evident to anyone who reads my typed notes.
I uncovered a good example of this recently when I was looking through some old files from the sixties. I had just gotten to the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles to begin researching my piece on Frank Sinatra. I hear a knock on the door. It’s the night chambermaid. She comes in to turn down the bed and to place a piece of chocolate on the pillow. And this chambermaid is gorgeous. She’s a strong, lean woman from Guatemala, about twenty-two years old, who speaks English with a heavy accent and wears a wonderful striped skirt. I have a conversation with her. Then I find myself writing about these women who work for the Beverly Wilshire, many of them quite beautiful, and most of them from faraway places, who each day are immersed in the luxurious and privileged lifestyles of the hotel’s guests. So here I’m supposed to be working on Frank Sinatra, but this whole drama about hotel rooms and chambermaids, that’s in there too.
INTERVIEWERAre you equally interested in everyone you meet?
TALESEOne of the key facts of my life is that I was raised not in the home, but in a store. My father had been an apprentice to his cousin, a famous tailor in Paris who had movie stars and leading politicians as clients. My father left Paris in 1920 on a ship to Philadelphia. He hated Philadelphia and developed a respiratory problem, and someone suggested he move to the seashore. In Ocean City, New Jersey, he bought an old store on Asbury Avenue, the main business street, and he opened the Talese Town Shop. On one side of the store he set up a tailor shop. On the other side my mother, who had grown up in an Italian American neighborhood in Park Slope, Brooklyn, opened a dress shop. Above the store my parents had an apartment.
The tailor business never really worked out. The craftsmen were fine, but there weren’t quite enough people in Ocean City who wanted to pay for handmade suits. So my mother became the wage earner. All the money we made was because of my mother selling dresses. She was successful because she had a way of getting women to talk about themselves. Her customers were, for the most part, large women, women who did not go to the beach in the summertime. My mother would give them clothes to try on that made them look better than they thought they had any right to look. She wasn’t a hustler. She made her sales because they trusted her and liked her, and she liked them back. I was there a lot—folding the dress boxes, dusting the counters, doing chores—and I learned a lot about the town by eavesdropping. These women, telling my mother their private stories, gave me an idea of a larger world.
INTERVIEWERDid you write as a child?
TALESEThere was a weekly newspaper in Ocean City, the Sentinel-Ledger, and its editor, Lorin Angevine, occasionally visited my father’s store. As a freshman in high school I decided I wanted to write stories, and my father suggested that I go see him. Mr. Angevine said that I could write a column called “High School Highlights,” so long as I could find enough news about school activities to fill it out.
I didn’t fit in at high school. I didn’t look like the other students and I certainly didn’t dress like them, in their mackinaw jackets. My father made my clothes, and I was overly well dressed. But the column gave me an excuse to talk to others. It was not unlike my mother talking with the wealthy women in her dress shop. Doing journalism made me feel that, even if I wasn’t part of their group, I had a right to be there.
INTERVIEWERDid you read much as a child?
TALESEI read what my parish priest would call trashy fiction. The wonderful and risqué Frank Yerby—a black writer from Georgia who lived in Spain. I was reading some New Yorker writers when I was in college. That’s when I came across William Faulkner, Irwin Shaw, John O’Hara, and John Cheever.
INTERVIEWERHow did you end up going to college in Alabama?
TALESEIt was a school that I could get into. I had bad grades in high school. I was turned down by every college in the region, and before I knew it, it was late summer. One of my father’s customers was a physician, Aldrich Crowe, who had been born in Birmingham and graduated from the University of Alabama medical school. He made a call on my behalf, and a few weeks later I received an acceptance letter.
I enjoyed my time there and I passed. I was worried about keeping my grades up. If I flunked I would have lost my student deferment. I would’ve been sent to Korea.
INTERVIEWERWhy did you choose journalism as a major?
TALESEThe main reason was that it seemed like the easiest thing to do. But my big journalistic break happened when I befriended a guy named Jimmy Pinkston. Close to graduation, Jimmy said to me, If you ever go to New York you ought to look up my cousin, Turner Catledge, he’s the managing editor of The New York Times. So when I graduated in the summer of 1953, the first thing I did was take a bus to New York. I walked into the New York Times building. The receptionist there said, What can I do for you, young man? I said, I’d like to say hello to Mr. Turner Catledge. Do you have an appointment? No. He said, Well, Mr. Catledge is very busy. Why are you here? I said, I know his cousin.
The receptionist looked at me like I was some kind of lunatic, but I was dressed very well—in clothes made by my father—so at least I was a well-dressed lunatic. After six hours, I got in to see Mr. Catledge. He asked, What brings you to New York? I said, Well, I’m a friend of your cousin. He said, And who might that be, if you don’t mind my asking? I said, James Pinkston. Catledge looked at me and there was no expression on his face. I thought, That Jimmy Pinkston was so distantly related that Catledge never even knew he was his cousin. But he hired me anyway, as a copy boy. So that’s how I began: getting people coffee and sandwiches, running errands. And after a week and a half my first piece was published in the paper.
INTERVIEWERWhat was the piece?
TALESEThe copy boys had to go at night to Times Square to wait for the arrival of the late-evening tabloids, which we’d deliver to the editors so that they could see what the other newspapers were reporting. While I was waiting in Times Square one night I became transfixed by that electronic news ticker scrolling around three of the sides of the old New York Timesbuilding. Fifteen thousand lightbulbs spelling out that day’s headlines, in five-foot-high letters. I wondered, How do they do that? After I delivered the papers I had some free time, so I went back to the old Times building and I climbed the stairs until I found a door open on the fourth floor. Behind it was a man standing on a ladder, holding what looked like an accordion. I said, Excuse me, I’m a copy boy, and I was just wondering, what are you doing? He said, I’m doing the headlines. I asked him how he did it. He said, They call me and read me the headlines, and I type them into this device here, and it makes the bulbs light up in the right way. He said he’d been working there for twenty-five years. I asked him what his first big headline was, and he said, Oh, election night, 1928. HERBERT HOOVER BEATS AL SMITH. I asked him if I could come back with a notepad and interview him about his career and some of the famous headlines he’d written, and he agreed.
One of the good things about being a copy boy was that you got to know a lot of people on the staff. Especially if you were polite. I had good manners, thanks to growing up in the store—a reverential attitude toward the customer. So I approached Meyer Berger, one of the famous reporters on the paper at the time and a wonderful, generous man. He said I could write up the piece on his typewriter and show it to him. I did, and he liked it. He showed it to his editor, and soon it was published, without a byline, on the editorial page.
INTERVIEWERThat took a lot of confidence.
TALESEWell I didn’t have great confidence in myself because I had nobody, really, who had confidence in me. I always think of John Updike, who had tremendous confidence in himself because his mother said, You’re the greatest little shit in the world. You’re so wonderful, wonderful, wonderful—and he believed it. David Halberstam too—his mother told him he was the greatest shit in the world and he believed it. He had a tremendous sense of self. In his mind he was Charles de Gaulle. My mother never told me I was the greatest, my father never did either. They were very critical. I felt that I had to prove something to them. Neither they nor anyone else gave me the sense that I was gifted.
INTERVIEWERWhen did you realize that you had talent?
TALESENever. All I have is intense curiosity. I have a great deal of interest in other people and, just as importantly, I have the patience to be around them.
INTERVIEWERWhat happened after you were promoted to become a regular reporter at the Times?
TALESEMy first job was on the sports desk, but I didn’t want to write about sporting events. I wanted to write about people. I wrote about a losing boxer, a horse trainer, and the guy in the boxing ring who rang the bell between rounds. I was interested in fiction. I wanted to write like Fitzgerald. I collected his work—his short stories and journals. “Winter Dreams” is my favorite story of all time. The good nonfiction writers were writing about famous people, or topical people, or public people. No one was writing about unknown people. I knew I did not want to be on the front page. On the front page you’re stuck with the news. The news dominates you. I wanted to dominate the story. I wanted to pick subjects that were not the ordinary assignment editor’s idea of a story. My idea was to use some of the techniques of a fiction writer: scene setting, dialogue, and even interior monologue, if you knew your people well enough. I was writing short stories, and there were not many people on the Times who were doing that. Once, at an NYU baseball game, I overheard a conversation between a young couple who were having a lovers’ quarrel. I wrote the dialogue and I told the story of the game through what they were watching and what they were saying. At the St. Patrick’s Day parade, I wrote about the last person in the procession, a little guy who was carrying a tuba, and behind him came the sanitation trucks. I followed the parade from the vantage point of this tuba player.
INTERVIEWERWhat was the reaction to your work from the editors or the other writers? These were obviously uncommon stories in The New York Times of that period.
TALESEFirst of all they thought I was faking. They’d say I was writing fiction. I’d say, I’m not writing fiction. I was very careful to be accurate. In the ten years that I worked as a newspaper reporter I never made a mistake that warranted a correction. Sometimes I’d get in the paper, sometimes my pieces got killed. But I wanted to write, not report.
INTERVIEWERDid you write as slowly and carefully then as you do now?
TALESEAll the other reporters of my generation would come back from an assignment and be done with their piece in a half hour. For the rest of the afternoon they’d be reading books or playing cards or drinking coffee in the cafeteria, and I was always very much alone. I didn’t carry on conversations during those hours. I just wanted to make my article perfect, or as good as I could get it. So I rewrote and rewrote, feeling that I needed every minute of the working day to improve my work. I did this because I didn’t believe that it was just journalism, thrown away the next day with the trash. I always had a sense of tomorrow. I never turned in anything more than two minutes before deadline. It was never easy, I felt I had only one chance. I was working for the paper of record, and I believed that what I was doing was going to be part of a permanent history.
It had better be good too, because my name was on it. I’ve always thought that. I think this came from watching my father work on suits. I was impressed by how carefully he would sew, and he never made much money, but I thought he was the real thing. His name was on those suits—the buttons couldn’t fall off tomorrow. They had to look great, had to fit well, and had to last. His business wasn’t profitable, but from him I learned that I wanted to be a craftsman.
INTERVIEWERWhy did you leave the Times to write for Esquire?
TALESEI could not contain myself within the twelve-hundred-word limit of daily journalism. Wherever I was, I thought that there were stories that other people weren’t telling. When I was going into professional athletes’ locker rooms, for instance, I would just listen to the chatter and look at the bodies of these men who had been in locker rooms with other men since they were little boys. There’d be other sports writers there, and they’d be asking the athletes questions about their performance in that night’s game, but I thought, No, there’s a different story here. These men are fascinating not as performers but in the way in which they mingle together. They’re freer with each other than homosexual men in a bathhouse. These other reporters didn’t even see the story, they just saw their job. Yet because it was a daily newspaper I was always being pulled away from these stories. I couldn’t do them at any real depth. That was really why I couldn’t do the job anymore.
At the same time, in the mid-sixties, Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin were having fun at theHerald Tribune. They were able to write what they wanted to write and I wished I had that kind of freedom. I was getting a lot of freedom by the standards of the Times, but not compared to them. I wanted more room and I wanted to go anywhere I wanted.
INTERVIEWERWhat did you think of those other writers?
TALESEThe man I greatly admire is Tom Wolfe. I knew him pretty early on, when he was at theHerald Tribune and I was at the Times. We were friends and he often came to dinner. Stylistically, Wolfe is incomparable. He’s a unique person, a great reporter, and a wonderful writer.
I don’t put Breslin or Hunter S. Thompson at that level. I never felt competitive with Breslin. I thought he was unnecessarily rude. He’s turned that rudeness into a kind of marketable manifestation of his mentality. Thompson was out there. He was playing music that a lot of people understood, but I didn’t get it. I liked some of his work and I read some of his books. I met him maybe twice and I have no ill feeling toward him. I was watching a recent documentary about Thompson and a friend pointed out to me that he had a copy of The Kingdom and the Power on his bookshelf. So I decided that I should have thought more highly of Hunter S. Thompson.
INTERVIEWERDid you think of yourself as part of the movement commonly called New Journalism?
TALESEWolfe in his book on New Journalism honors me by calling me one of the founders. But I never gave any thought to New Journalism. I never felt that I was part of a category of new people doing new things. I wanted to write like Fitzgerald.
INTERVIEWERDo you feel competitive with novelists?
TALESEYes, I do. Journalism is not given much respect. Journalists themselves, particularly in my generation, didn’t take their jobs very seriously. I take it very seriously. This is a craft. This is an art form. I’m writing stories, just like fiction writers, only I use real names. If you chopped my books into single chapters, each one could be a stand-alone short story. You could take the chapter about McCandlish Phillips in The Kingdom and the Power, Garibaldi in Unto the Sons, and Harold Rubin in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and they would work together as a short-story collection.
Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can’t quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
INTERVIEWERDid you ever try to write fiction?
TALESEI wrote one short story and it was published in 1967 by Mademoiselle. I have a nice letter from the fiction editor about it. But I never wrote another piece of fiction. I thought nonfiction was one area where I could do things that others were not doing. There are so many great short-story writers and playwrights and novelists, but there were not many really wonderful nonfiction writers. I thought I’d rather be one of those.
INTERVIEWERYour piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is often singled out as the classic work of New Journalism. How did that assignment come about?
TALESEHarold Hayes, my editor at Esquire, said, I have your next piece: Sinatra. I told him I didn’t want to do it. Sinatra had been done to death. I mean, Christ, another piece on Sinatra? But Hayes is a strong person with a polite manner who got his way. So I go to the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles and I call Sinatra’s press agent, Jim Mahoney. He says Frank’s not feeling well. He has a cold. Mahoney is also not happy about other things. He’s unhappy about this rumor that Sinatra is friends with organized crime figures. Mahoney says, We may want you to sign an agreement saying we can see the piece first. I say, I can’t do that. He says, Then we might not have a deal. At the end of the week, I’m still in the hotel room, and Mahoney calls to ask me what I’m doing. I say, I’m waiting for you to call me. How’s Frank feeling? Well, he’s not very good. I say, He still has a cold? He says, Yes, he still has a cold. He brings up the agreement issue again, and again I say that’s a problem. He says, I understand you’ve been seeing people. Yes, I’ve been seeing people. You’ve been seeing some of Frank’s friends? I say, I don’t know if they’re Frank’s friends, but I’ve been seeing people. He asks me, How long are you going to be doing this? I don’t know, I say, and then he hangs up.
That night I’m sitting at a bar around ten o’clock, watching people, and sure enough I notice Frank Sinatra sitting down the corner of the bar with two blondes. Sinatra goes to play pool and I witness a scene between Sinatra and a guy named Harlan Ellison, and I write it down on a shirt board. But I don’t get it all, so I go up to Ellison and ask him if I can talk to him the next day. He gives me his phone number and address. When we speak in person I ask him not just what everyone said, but what he was thinking. I always ask people what was on their mind. Were you surprised by Sinatra? Had you met him before? Did you think he was going to hit you, or did you want to pop him? Then someone I knew had a secretary who had gone to school with Sinatra’s daughter Nancy. She told me this great story about how she went to this party at the Sinatras’ house. At the party she accidentally knocks off from the mantle an alabaster bird. And little Nancy says, Oh no, that’s my mother’s favorite. Then Frank Sinatra knocks the other one off.
I called Floyd Patterson, whom I’d written a piece about in Esquire, because I knew Sinatra was going to see him in a fight in Las Vegas. He got me tickets to the fight and I just followed Sinatra around. I was in touch with Floyd because when I finish a story, I don’t finish a story. I keep in touch with the people I write about. I did that even as a young sports writer just starting out, twenty-five years old. I keep in touch because I always think that there might be more. The stories go on.
So I was getting little things like that. I called Harold Hayes, my editor, almost every day. He asked me how it was going. I said, I’m out here getting things. Harold never asked me if I wanted to come home and I never thought of asking him if I could leave.
INTERVIEWERDid you ever make eye contact with Sinatra?
TALESEYes, I’m sure he knew who I was, but he didn’t talk to me. I wasn’t asking him for any favors but I was interviewing a lot of so-called minor characters. I specialize in minor characters. When I finally got back to New York I looked up Jilly Rizzo, a saloon owner who was close to Sinatra. He took me to see Sinatra’s parents in New Jersey. That was a great opportunity for me, because Sinatra’s mother was friendly and she told me about his relationship with Ava Gardner. I have to believe that Sinatra gave her permission to speak with me, because otherwise I doubt she would have seen me. Both Sinatra and I were cooperating with each other without acknowledging it. In other words, I was not asking for an interview, and he wasn’t saying, Don’t write about me. It was a funny little dance.
I turned in the piece at roughly a hundred pages. They didn’t change a word. When it came out it wasn’t like, Oh, this is one of the great pieces of all time. It was just another piece.
Click here to see Gay Talese’s outline for “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” To read the rest of the interview, click here to purchase this issue. |
Excellant material. Thanks.
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