JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

Let’s talk about The New Journalism.

No, goddamnit, I’m not talking about the shift from print to the Internet.

I’m talking about the “new journalism” as founded and honed by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Hunter Thompson — writers who, in the 1960s and 1970s broke out of the “who, what, when, where and why” box and began writing long, powerful nonfiction stories that examined a subject inside and out and had spines consisting of scene-by-scene construction.

Wolfe, one of New Journalism’s trailblazers, died Monday in Manhattan at age 88.

Among other things, he wrote “The Right Stuff,” about the first American astronauts, and “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” a portrait of greed and vanity in New York in the 1980s.

My favorite piece of New Journalism writing, however, was Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which appeared in the April 1966 issue of Esquire magazine.

The story forever intertwined the two men, even though they lived on opposite sides of the country and had very little in common.

(Talese is 86 and living in New York City; Sinatra died 20 years ago yesterday at age 82 in Los Angeles.

Gay Talese at his typewriter, many years ago

When I first read “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” perhaps in my 20s, I was spellbound by it. I always loved Sinatra’s singing and found him to be a fascinating but repulsive person. I was also in the early phase of my writing career and was hungry to read a wide variety of writing styles.

What Talese managed to do in that story was open a window to Sinatra’s life and perch the reader outside the window and let him (her) sit and watch parts of Sinatra’s life and personality unfold.

Today, I want to give you a taste of that story. (If you haven’t read it, here’s the link. Take your time and enjoy it.) Fifty-two years after it was written, it still pulsates with energy and thrives on Sinatra’s prickly personality. Wikipedia describes the story as “one of the most famous pieces of magazine journalism ever written.”

The Lead…

“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 sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra’s four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.

“Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra—A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the 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, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only 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. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.”

Sinatra’s temper and his entourage’s desire to please him…

“(W)hen one of his men brought him a frankfurter with catsup on it, which Sinatra apparently abhors, he angrily threw the bottle at the man, splattering catsup all over him. Most of the men who work around Sinatra are big. But this never seems to intimidate Sinatra nor curb his impetuous behavior with them when he is mad. They will never take a swing back at him. He is Il Padrone.

“At other times, aiming to please, his men will overreact to his desires: when he casually observed that his big orange desert jeep in Palm Springs seemed in need of a new painting, the word was swiftly passed down through the channels, becoming ever more urgent as it went, until finally it was a command that the jeep be painted now, immediately, yesterday. To accomplish this would require the hiring of a special crew of painters to work all night, at overtime rates; which, in turn, meant that the order had to be bucked back up the line for further approval. When it finally got back to Sinatra’s desk, he did not know what it was all about; after he had figured it out he confessed, with a tired look on his face, that he did not care when the hell they painted the jeep.”

**

Friends fawning over him and scrambling to be in his orbit…

(This scene took place at The Sands hotel and casino before the November 1965, Cassius Clay-Floyd Patterson boxing match, which Sinatra was going to watch from Row One.)

“Shortly before seven p.m., Jack Entratter, a big grey-haired man who operates The Sands, walked into the gambling room to tell some men around the blackjack table that Sinatra was getting dressed. He also said that he’d been unable to get front-row seats for everybody, and so some of the men—including Leo Durocher, who had a date, and Joey Bishop, who was accompanied by his wife—would not be able to fit in Frank Sinatra’s row but would have to take seats in the third row. When Entratter walked over to tell this to Joey Bishop, Bishop’s face fell. He did not seem angry; he merely looked at Entratter with an empty silence, seeming somewhat stunned.

” ‘Joey, I’m sorry,’ Entratter said when the silence persisted, ‘but we couldn’t get more than six together in the front row.’

“Bishop still said nothing. But when they all appeared at the fight, Joey Bishop was in the front row, his wife in the third.”

The Kicker…

“Frank Sinatra stopped his car. The light was red. Pedestrians passed quickly across his windshield but, as usual, one did not. It was a girl in her twenties. She remained at the curb staring at him. Through the corner of his left eye he could see her, and he knew, because it happens almost every day, that she was thinking, It looks like him, but is it?

“Just before the light turned green, Sinatra turned toward her, looked directly into her eyes waiting for the reaction he knew would come. It came and he smiled. She smiled and he was gone.”