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THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR: While The New Journalism Sought Celebrity, Gay Talese Made a Study of It
 JACOB WEINSTEIN
April 2004
The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits & Encounters, by Gay Talese. New York: Walker & Company, 2003
The Kingdom and the Power, by Gay Talese. New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1969
In the spring of 1963, Esquire magazine published a curious article with a curious title. Called "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm). . . . ," the piece gave the magazine's readers an unadulterated view of the custom car world in a suburb of Los Angeles: "This was a wild place to be taking a look at art objects—eventually, I should say, you have to reach the conclusion that these customized cars are art objects, at least if you use the standards applied in a civilized society. But I will get to that in a moment." There was no attempt to cover up the fact that this was a writer scribbling down exactly what he saw and what he thought; the article has a slapdash quality that conveys a sense of immediacy.
That's because after reporting the story, the author, Tom Wolfe, returned to New York with a nasty case of writer's block. "I had a lot of trouble," Wolfe later recounted, "analyzing exactly what I had on my hands." Facing a tough deadline, Esquire's managing editor, Byron Dobell, instructed Wolfe to write out his notes as a memorandum, which would be turned into an article by an Esquire ghost writer. Wolfe started with "Dear Byron" at 8 p.m. and typed "like a maniac" through the night to the strains of rock music on the radio. After handing in his notes the next morning, Wolfe received a call from Dobell. The notes themselves would be published in the magazine, with just one editorial change: the line "Dear Byron" would be snipped out. The back story has become famous, but the funny thing is, hardly anyone can remember the article.
Wolfe's piece exemplified what would soon become known as the New Journalism. It's difficult to define New Journalism, which rose to national prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, because it was an amorphous movement—if it can even be called a "movement." (As Wolfe once pointed out, "there were no manifestos, clubs, salons, cliques.") Roughly speaking, New Journalism combined the stylistic elements of fiction with the reporter's subjective interpretations of events. The New Journalists sought to overcome the seeming deficiencies of traditional journalism, which often relied on an objective viewpoint and a "just the facts, ma'am" attitude. Instead, they employed the techniques previously reserved for fiction writers and playwrights—scene construction, presentation of dialogues and interior monologues, shifting point of view, symbolic details—to bring the reader closer to the people and places in their pieces.The style of New Journalism lent itself well to longer narratives, and the formative years of the "movement" gave rise to several outstanding books. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966), an examination of two murderers in Kansas, which Capote called a "nonfiction novel," is a landmark of American literature. Norman Mailer's stunning work of nonfiction, The Armies of the Night (1968), a first-person account of the anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon in October 1967, went on to win both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), a report on the author's own drug- drug-filled journey in the Nevada desert, gained widespread notoriety for its obsessive and comic first-person voice. But New Journalism's impresario—its most vociferous champion and most avid practitioner—was Tom Wolfe. Starting with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), a compilation of essays, Wolfe set out to capture American popular culture in his distinctive kinetic (bordering on hyperbolic) prose. Often, especially in the case of Wolfe and Thompson, the personalities of the authors dominated the story.
In a spirited (and uproarious) assault on Tom Wolfe's literary reputation in The New York Review of Books in 1965, the critic Dwight Macdonald lumped Gay Talese in with the New Journalism coterie. So dismissive was Macdonald of New Journalism that he labeled what Wolfe and his ilk were doing as "parajournalism," although he allowed that Talese practiced this "bastard form" of journalism "in a more dignified way." But Talese, who started out as a reporter at The New York Times in the 1950s and eventually moved to Esquire, has often gone out of his way to distance himself from the New Journalists. In his 1997 essay "Origins of a Nonfiction Writer," which is collected along with the best of his Esquire articles in The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits & Encounters, Talese recounts Wolfe's public praise for his profile of the boxer Joe Louis in 1962, which Wolfe later championed as an example of New Journalism. "I think his complimenting me was undeserved," Talese observes dryly, "for I had not written then, or since then, anything I consider stylistically ‘new.'"
As Michael J. Arlen pointed out in a 1972 Atlantic Monthly essay largely critical of New Journalism, a "vein of personal journalism" had been around in the world of English and American letters long before New Journalism burst on the scene. As examples, Arlen cited the English novelist Daniel Defoe, who employed an autobiographical narrative technique in A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, and the legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, who introduced a composite character, Mr. Flood, in a slew of articles about a New York fish market in the early 1940s. Arlen likened New Journalism to what he termed the "New Carelessness" arising out of an era of failed relationships, sloppily conducted wars, and easy access to drugs.
Arlen, though, fingered Talese as a journalist "remarkably meticulous to detail" in an otherwise careless age. Born in 1932 to an immigrant father from Italy and an Italian-American mother from Brooklyn, Talese grew up in Ocean City, a small town in southern New Jersey. His parents ran a custom tailoring and dry cleaning business, where Talese eavesdropped on his mother's conversations with customers and picked up the art of the interview. Talese was shy and insecure, a lackluster student (except in typing class); he hardly participated in activities, preferring the sidelines. But he often contributed accounts of high school games and social dances to the town's weekly newspaper, which published 311 of his articles by the time he left for college. It was on the margins of high school society where Talese developed a sense of distance and honed his powers of observation. Talese took these skills to the University of Alabama where he majored in journalism. He was, again, a middling student, principally because he resisted the formulaic coverage of news that the university preached. Instead of embracing the inverted pyramid structure, where the most salient facts are presented at the beginning of a story in a succinct manner, Talese was influenced by the fiction writers he enjoyed reading in high school such as Irwin Shaw and John O'Hara.
In 1953, Talese squired a job at The New York Times as a copyboy, impressing the personnel department director with his quick fingers at the typewriter and sharply tailored suit. He turned out to be industrious and resourceful, using his lunch hour to report stories on a freelance basis. (He once phoned eighty hotels in four days in an attempt to locate a silent-screen actress, and got through in the end.) Soon enough, after a stint in the army, Talese returned to the newsroom as a full-time writer in 1956.
According to former Times managing editor Arthur Gelb's memoir, City Room, Talese quickly established himself as a gifted reporter and stylish writer. And he knew he was that good, too. After being assigned to the Albany bureau, Talese chafed at the bureau's insufficient recognition of his talent, and was recalled to New York. While covering local news in the city, he demanded a hefty raise—from $225 to $300 a week, a bold request for a general-assignment reporter who could usually expect raises of only $10 to $15. (He got it.) After working at the Times for a decade, Talese went on to produce a series of remarkable profiles for Esquire throughout the 1960s, and then became the best-selling author of such books as The Kingdom and the Power (1969), Honor Thy Father (1971), and Thy Neighbor's Wife (1980).Amongst his peers, Talese was unsurpassed as a reporter, as an accurate and faithful collector of facts. His astounding reportorial method is on full display in his most celebrated Esquire profile, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Talese had scheduled an interview with the singer, but was turned down when he arrived because Sinatra had caught the common cold. Instead of going home empty-handed, Talese decided to stick around, and Sinatra's reason for canceling the interview became the profile's central premise:
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 … 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 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.
Talese witnessed this scene, at a private club in Beverly Hills, and all the others like it, from afar—hanging back, measuring every movement, and taking scrupulous notes. Talese followed Sinatra to a studio in Los Angeles, where he was taping an hour-long television special for NBC. A cranky and impatient Sinatra—still suffering from his cold—castigates the director, who sits safely in the control booth ("‘Why don't we tape this mother? … ‘What the hell are you doing up there, Dwight?' … ‘Got a party or something going on up there, Dwight?'"). Sinatra fails to hide his weariness ("‘Excuse me,' he said, adding, ‘Boy I need a drink.'"), and ultimately decides to scrap the entire day's work ("‘Forget it, just forget it. You're wasting your time. What you got there,' Sinatra said, nodding to the singing image of himself on the television screen, ‘is a man with a cold.'").
There are none of the direct interview quotes one would expect in a celebrity profile of this sort, but Talese was able to infer far more about Sinatra's character and motivations simply by observation. Talking to the people surrounding Sinatra and watching their interactions with him, Talese uncovers a sort of subculture within Sinatra's inner circle, one with shades of Sicily. Sinatra controls his entourage by showing kindness through gifts and personal attention, and by responding to mistakes with explosions of anger. The result is absolute loyalty: As a close friend confesses to Talese, "‘I'd kill for him.'" Talese put Sinatra under a microscope, with particular attention to the star's relationship to the large group around him, as if Talese wanted to study the eye of a hurricane by looking at the storm's effect. "For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence," he writes, "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 has a gift for inhabiting a subject's mind, forcing the reader to see the world through the subject's eyes. Talese achieves this effect through his superior reportorial skills: he can tell you what happened, but he also tells you how his subject felt when it did. The stereotypical New Journalist, on the other hand, might not get past his own feelings. When Talese writes about A.M. Rosenthal in The Kingdom and the Power, his inside look at his former employer, The New York Times, he seems to burrow into Rosenthal's mind. Rosenthal had returned from a choice post in Tokyo as a correspondent to edit the city section (he would later become the paper's executive editor), and Talese sets the scene in the newsroom in 1965, two years after Rosenthal arrived in New York: "Seated behind his big desk in the middle of the newsroom, Rosenthal momentarily looked up from the stories that he was reading and gazed around the room at the distant rows of desks, the reporters typing, talking among themselves, sometimes looking at him in a way he suspected was hostile—they must despise me, he thought, being both irritated and saddened by the possibility, they must really hate my guts."
Talese uses Rosenthal's inner turmoil as a way of signaling the tensions then afflicting the Times, where drastic changes were underway. As Talese sees it, the unexpected death of publisher Orvil Dryfoos in 1963 ushered in a "quiet revolution" that, among other things, led to a shift in power from the Washington bureau to the newspaper's headquarters in New York. In part, that's because the influence of the Washington bureau chief, James Reston, who had enjoyed a close relationship with Dryfoos, would wane slightly. Reston also eventually became executive editor, and was one of the last authentic newspaper stars who acquired nationwide fame through nothing other than his journalistic brilliance. Despite his formidable reputation, however, without the backing of Dryfoos, he would be locked in battle for years with editors in New York, who sought more control over the paper's coverage of the nation's capital.
This ongoing skirmish was part of a larger development at the Times. The overseas bureau chiefs, whose bureaus had once resembled fiefdoms, saw their autonomy and stature reduced by the editors in New York. The paper's leadership hoped to consolidate more power within its hands so that it could respond more swiftly to the quickening pace of life in the 1960s. The leading editors were reacting to the rise of television, which could deliver news faster than newspapers. More in-depth reporting, interpretation, and analysis would be required. The New York editors also called for brighter writing, which would hold the reader's interest. (This was probably why Talese enjoyed a $75 raise when he was still at the Times.)
One of the first serious examinations of the inside of a news organization, The Kingdom and the Power, it could be said, inaugurated a new subgenre of nonfiction: the journalism of journalism. Unlike his taut magazine profiles, however, it is difficult at first to get a handle on The Kingdom and the Power. The book is sprawling, a whirlwind of details; there's seemingly no overarching narrative force, no organizing thematic principle, except to catalogue the myriad of anecdotes emanating from the newsroom. Initially, the narrative seems to center on the dapper and sharp-minded managing editor, Clifton Daniel, whom Talese originally had profiled for Esquire. But the story careens from Daniel to Adolph Ochs (who purchased the newspaper in 1896), then spills into rivulets of mini-profiles of various reporters, editors, business executives, and the descendants of the Ochs family, who would continue to own the paper. The narrative travels forward and backward in time, upwards to the executive suites, downwards to the newsroom, and across continents in bureaus around the world. One realizes, though, that the book mirrors the character of the institution. Talese shows us just how vast and chaotic and complex and confusing the Times can be, with its offices scattered throughout the globe and all its strong personalities tangling with each other. To read The Kingdom and the Power is, in a way, to experience the Times. But line by line, chapter after chapter, almost through accretion, it becomes clear by the last chapter that The Kingdom and the Power is really about one thing: well-intentioned and ambitious men attempting to change an institution steeped in tradition and resistant to change. It is hard not to sympathize with the newspaper's leaders, who are charged with controlling this massive and unwieldy operation.
***
In contrast to the dazzling linguistic gymnastics and grammatical pyrotechnics that infected the writing of some of his contemporaries, Talese writes with a smooth, readable style; his prose is clean, elegant, and simple. And the flow of his stories, the casual transitions from paragraph to paragraph, the seamlessness of it all belie the hustle and legwork that went into reporting his stories, especially in a piece like the Frank Sinatra profile.
While other New Journalists seemed intent on bending stories to their will, stamping their unique imprints on each piece, Talese instinctively arranged his sentences so that they were put in the service of the story, rather than the other way around. In "The Loser," Talese set out to acquaint the reader with Floyd Patterson, a former heavyweight champion who couldn't shake the feeling of losing in the ring despite the material rewards and suburban comfort he reaped from the sport for himself and his family. The best method to accomplish this—to provide a sense of intimacy between the reader and the subject—was to allow the piece to be dominated by Patterson's voice. "The Loser" seems to feature one monologue after another; in some sections, the piece reads like a barely edited interview transcript:
"It is not a bad feeling when you're knocked out," he said. "It's a good feeling, actually. It's not painful, just a sharp grogginess. You don't see angels or stars; you're on a pleasant cloud. After [Sonny] Liston hit me in Nevada, I felt, for about four or five seconds, that everybody in the arena was actually in the ring with me, circled around me like a family, and you feel warmth toward all the people in the arena after you're knocked out ...
"But then," Patterson went on, still pacing, "this good feeling leaves you. You realize where you are, and what you're doing there, and what has just happened to you. And what follows is a hurt, a confused hurt—not a physical hurt—it's a hurt combined with anger; it's a what-will-people-think hurt; it's an ashamed-of-my-own-ability hurt … and all you want then is a hatch door in the middle of the ring—a hatch door that will open and let you fall through and land in your dressing room instead of having to get out of the ring and face those people. The worst thing about losing is having to walk out of the ring and face those people."
Talese notes later on that Patterson once donned a disguise—fake beard, fake mustache, glasses, and hat—and fled to Madrid after losing a fight to Liston. In another self-reflective monologue, Patterson coughs up and then repeats the key phrase in the piece: "‘I am a coward.'" Talese captures Patterson's shame by letting the boxer speak for himself.
Armed with the professional reporter's tenacity and detail, and the serious writer's sensitivity to form and style, Talese's work was sometimes capable of profound insight. In The Kingdom and the Power, Talese detects the sway that The New York Times held over the men who worked there: employment at the Times meant that "doors open elsewhere, favors are for the asking, important people are available, the world seems easier." And these perks were all the more attractive to those reporters who came from lower middle class backgrounds, which meant most of them. The sons of Scottish immigrants, of the rural South, or of Jews arriving from Europe could establish a better life: "In one generation, if their by-lines become well-known, they may rise from the simplicity and obscurity of their childhood existences to the inner circles of the exclusive." Conversely, men who came from a wealthy and privileged lineage hardly ever became excellent reporters. They did not hunger for bylines, already holding established family names in their possession. Also, hunting down facts and asking personal questions of strangers were activities that were "undignified, too alien to a refined upbringing." All the same, Talese records the central burden that many Timesmen felt at working at such a distinguished, large, and enduring "fact factory": They knew they were replaceable.
Talese, on the whole, admires these men for their commitment to the craft of journalism as they toiled in relative obscurity. Part of the purpose of The Kingdom and the Power is to raise their profiles, to take them out of the shade of anonymity that an institution sometimes provides (or imposes). He devotes pages to the journalistic feats of, among others, Washington bureau chief Tom Wicker, James Reston's protégé and successor who, during his reporting days, delivered a first-class and comprehensive account of the Kennedy assassination under extreme deadline pressure; New York reporter McCandlish Phillips, a deeply religious man whose drive and calm nerve produced an amazing story about a member of the American Nazi Party and local leader of the Ku Klux Klan who was actually Jewish—a secret held so tightly that when the story hit the newsstands the man shot himself dead; and assistant managing editor Harrison Salisbury, who gained access to North Vietnam in late 1966, saw the immense harm to Vietnamese civilians by American bombs, and filed dispatches that were remarkable for their clear-sightedness and controversial for their dispute of the U.S. government's official storyline.
Talese does strike a distant pose in covering his former workplace, but his affection, toward Timesmen and journalists in general, is evident. "Most journalists," he begins the book,
are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places. The sane scene that is much of life, the great portion of the planet unmarked by madness, does not lure them like riots and raids, crumbling countries and sinking ships, bankers banished to Rio and burning Buddhist nuns—gloom is their game, the spectacle their passion, normality their nemesis.
Talese's sharp eye cut both ways, however; he could be as scathing as he was generous. "Looking for Hemingway," his profile of George Plimpton and The Paris Review crowd in the 1950s and 1960s, is a touch less reverential than the overly saccharine encomiums that followed Plimpton's death last year. To be sure, Plimpton, the editor of the venerable literary journal founded in Paris and a successful author in his own right, contributed vastly to the world of American letters. But Talese, ever cognizant of issues relating to class and background, saw Plimpton and his gang for who they really were, "witty, irreverent sons of a conquering nation ... [T]hough they came mostly from wealthy parents and had been graduated from Harvard or Yale, they seemed endlessly delighted in posing as paupers and dodging the bill collectors."
Talese follows the group's pranks, parties, and privileged poverty in Paris, and then its collective refusal to grow up in New York a decade later. There was the managing editor, John P.C. Train, who once displayed a sign that read: "Please Do Not Put Anything In The Managing Editor's Box." There was Harold Humes, the magazine's co-founder, who left Paris and, angered over his demotion on the masthead of the inaugural issue, corralled thousands of copies at the docks in New York, and stamped his name in every issue in large, red letters. And, of course, there was Plimpton, the ringmaster of the clique, whose energy and organization kept the journal alive. Plimpton also ensured that the spirit of Paris wouldn't die years later in New York by hosting famously grand parties at his apartment. But to Talese, Plimpton was emblematic of the group's main afflictions—their misguided romanticism and lack of originality. "They are obsessed, so many of them," Talese writes, "by the wish to know how the other half lives."
Talese does give credit where it's due. He commends the journal for publishing the work of young talents such as Philip Roth, and running in-depth interviews with established literary titans such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. "But as much as anything else," Talese notes, "the Paris Review survived because it had money." Praise in this piece always comes wrapped in a conditional clause. "Looking for Hemingway" is a takedown piece, but it's imbued with clarity and artful technique. Layers of detail are unfolded slowly and methodically like a prosecutor's brief until, toward the very end, Talese unleashes the harshest indictment, in the words of a former member of the circle who recalls her time in Paris: "The whole life seemed after a while to be utterly meaningless."
You hardly sense such nuance and craftsmanship in most of today's feature journalism. We're inundated with celebrity profiles, most of them orchestrated by savvy public relations agencies. What we get are writers who cop the superficial aspects of New Journalism, describing the marble floor of the London hotel lobby where they meet Julia Roberts, say, or obsessing over the flavor of the cappuccinos they share with Ben Affleck in a chic basement café in Boston—all recounted in a perky, self-conscious first-person timbre. Now compare that with some of Talese's Esquire pieces, which are a kind of investigation into America's fascination with celebrity. Throughout, Talese explores questions like: What pressures and burdens does fame impose on individuals from ordinary backgrounds? What effect does fame have on family and friends and associates? How do ordinary people react to famous people? Essentially, what is the magic behind celebrity? In "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," Talese recounts an instance in which Sinatra was sitting at a bar in New York one summer evening, and dozens of people, "some of them casual friends of Sinatra's, some mere acquaintances, some neither," showed up. "This is all they really wanted; they wanted to see him. And for a few moments they gazed in silence through the smoke, and they stared. Then they turned, fought their way out of the bar, went home."
Some of the New Journalists became bona fide nationwide celebrities themselves. The New Heroes had arrived: stylish writers were now "in," boring reporters with stature and authority were "out." Capote had his masked balls, Mailer had his women, Thompson had his drugs, and Wolfe had his white suits. They weren't just covering the new celebrity culture fueled by the voracious consumerist tendencies of the American public after World War II; they partook in it, and along the way, turned into crude caricatures of themselves. This development isn't so surprising considering that many of the New Journalists put themselves at the center of their stories. In the end, however, celebrity is usually fleeting, and Talese was aiming for something more, something less short-term. To be fair, Talese was interested in celebrities, too—he profiled Peter O'Toole and Joe DiMaggio, among others. But he was also fascinated by anonymous people; during his early years at the Times and at Esquire, he wrote about the editors at Vogue, the head obituary writer at the Times, and stray cats in New York City. And he wrote about them in such a way that placed a premium on the craft of storytelling, and that deemphasized his own role in the story. Talese was indeed one of the first nonfiction writers to have successfully used stylistic fiction techniques to make his stories more compelling to read, as Tom Wolfe pointed out, but unlike some of his New Journalist colleagues, he realized—at least during the early phase of his career—that his subjects and the way in which he presented them were more important than the insertion of himself into their stories. Talese writes in his autobiographical essay, "Origins of a Nonfiction Writer":
My curiosity lures me…toward private figures, unknown individuals to whom I usually represent their first experience in being interviewed. I could write about them today, or tomorrow, or next year, and it will make no difference in the sense of their topicality. These people are dateless. They can live as long as the language used to describe them lives, if the language is blessed with lasting qualities.
One suspects that Talese's work will enjoy lasting life precisely because he preferred the front-row seat to the stage.
William S. Lin resides in Brooklyn, New York.
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