Portfolio at NYU

Gay Talese, Fame and Obscurity
Profiler par excellence _ his articles on Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra are now legendary enough to be taught in journalism school _ Gay Talese was one of the founding fathers of the 1960s New Journalism, an epithet with which he was never particularly comfortable. He always insisted that his "stories with real names" represented not a reformist crusade, but rather his response to the world as he saw it as an Italian-American outsider.

Born to an immigrant Italian couple in the island town of Ocean City (he said his mother, a boutique owner, was an inspiration to his reporting in the way she could listen to people, gain their trust and most private confidences), Talese was always a set of contradictions. He was "a year-round resident of a summer resort; an Italian kid in an Irish town; a New Jersey kid at the University of Alabama, smart with bad marks; a chronicler of the rules who couldn't play by them," according to Henry Allen of the Washington Post.

After graduating the University of Alabama in the bottom half of his journalism class, Talese got a job as a copy boy for the New York Times, from which he slowly moved up the ranks to sports reporter and correspondent. It was at the Times that Talese crafted his cool, smooth prose. It is this style, with its extended interior monologues, that set him apart from the other flashier New Journalists who were experimenting with writing.

Already at the Times, Talese had garnered a reputation for writing "unreportable" stories, and for his exhaustive research. According to Talese, his inspirations were the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and John O'Hara.

Talese moved from the Times to Esquire in 1963, basically after becoming disillusioned with the editorial process and lack of creative freedom at the former publication. He signed a contract with Esquire for $15,000 to write six articles, which appear in Fame and Obscurity. "Once I started at Esquire," said Talese, "I knew that was where I belonged." His first article for the magazine, which now appears in Fame and Obscurity, was, ironically enough, about the New York Times. He profiled "Mr. Bad News," otherwise known as Alden Whitman, the newspaper's obituary writer.

The other subjects of the articles that comprise Fame and Obscurity are those we don't know but wished we did: Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Floyd Patterson, Manhattan mobsters, Bowery bums, pushcart makers, the chauffeur with a chauffeur, and the head barber at the United Nations. With the more famous names, Talese made his articles stand out by showing the reader how ordinary these celebrities were: he described Joe DiMaggio at loose ends, and Frank Sinatra during a lull in his career. The legendary DiMaggio article begins with a quotation from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and includes the exchange between Marilyn Monroe and DiMaggio: "'It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering.' 'Yes I have,' he said."

Talese returned again and again to his subjects: he wrote 38 articles on boxing heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson alone. Talese insisted that it was this persistence that allowed him to know his subjects well enough to be able to write long interior monologues. He was able to gather information over time, to observe change, enough that he could describe their thoughts and feelings with confidence. By the time Talese penned his celebrated article "The Loser" for Esquire (now in Fame), he had lived with Patterson at his training camp and had jogged beside him. "I had become almost an interior figure in his life," Talese recalled. "I was his second skin." It is this reporting, perhaps, that is the greatest lesson we can take from Talese as journalists. It is relentless, exhaustive "saturation" or "immersion" journalism. The results speak for themselves.

To this end, Talese racked up $5,000 of Esquire's money "hanging out" with Sinatra's inner circle, trying to arrange an interview with Ol' Blue Eyes. Despite his tenacity, he never got to speak to Sinatra. His eventual piece, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is more remarkable and memorable precisely because of the lack of this one important voice. Talese admitted that it actually became an odd virtue of the piece. Another valuable lesson: setbacks will happen, so be innovative.

Other Reviews:

Charles Poore of the New York Times Book Review (1965): Talese "not only knows the right questions to ask but also the revealing reactions and byplays to observe."