GAY TALESE ON A WRITER’S LIFE:
An unrelenting winter and circumstance dictated a most uncustomary form of interview with Gay Talese: a phone call. Another ice storm in New York kept Talese in his Upper East Side townhouse, where he first occupied a bachelor pad as a New York Times reporter at 26 and then bought the whole property with his wife, Nan, by 1973, when he was a writer – and subject – at Esquire. On a January late afternoon, when the call arrived, Talese was pushing 95, and I was in Pennsylvania, laid up on crutches and recovering from a knee injury. There was no time for a serendipiter’s journey.
“When I was younger and working in the field, I always felt you have to be there in person,” said Talese, who in 1999, following a post-anniversary European sojourn with Nan, and in a fit of inspiration and determination, suspended his plans to return home and instead flew to China to pursue a story about the soccer player whose kick cost her team the World Cup. He didn’t return to New York for five months. “You observe so much in person that you don’t get over the phone,” said Talese. “But that’s what the limitations are like today. I can’t meet you. I’m 94, and I can’t go outside. It’s snowing outside.”
In his writing life, Talese has accumulated untold flyer miles, sources, and carefully cut shirt boards – his preference for notetaking, as the son of a Calabrese tailor. There was never a smartphone or recorder, nor even email, until The New Yorker requested that he start submitting his stories online. Today, “people have a narcissistic relationship with their phone,” said Talese. “I never had a phone.”
Indeed, Talese is among the last writers to have lived a life free of pixels, texts, and scrolls. Instead, he pursued his subjects, either befriending them or observing them if they were averse, and then wrote about them with detachment, fairness, and meticulous care. Stories germinated from chance encounters, late-night dinner conversations, and periods of waiting. Drafts and rewrites were composed on yellow legal pads and the typewriter.
It was how Talese could produce his most famous profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” published 60 years ago this month in Esquire, and write how “New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed,” at 28 for the magazine. “The problem in New York today: most people don’t see anything. They’re looking down in their fucking phones,” said Talese. “They’re walking the streets and everybody’s looking down, not up. I was always looking up … wondering what goes on up there.” But now the influencers abound. “No one gives a shit about what’s going on anywhere except in their fucking phone.”
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