How Gay Talese misplaced Frank Sinatra’s cold

Gay Talese is one of the great reporters and non-fiction authors of our time.

His reportage distinguished the New York Times for years before becoming a bestselling author of books such as The Kingdom and the Power, Honor Thy Father, and Thy Neighbor’s Wife.

He – along with Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe – is considered one of the fathers of the New Journalism that emerged during the 1960’s. New Journalism has been defined as reporting that is rigorously faithful to the facts while being presented with the kind of vivid narrative that had previously been the domain of novelists.

With all that and much more to his credit, far be it from me to cross swords with the redoubtable Gay Talese. But I’ll do it anyway – even though he’s one of my favorite journalists and an unofficial mentor.

That notwithstanding, I’m challenging no less a piece of work than his legendary 1966 Esquire magazine profile of Frank Sinatra.

Yes, I’m talking about a profile that is considered one of the greatest magazine stories ever written. Just one problem. Early in the story Talese makes a major tactical mistake regarding the division of paragraphs.

The power of the paragraph is never more evident than when used to isolate and emphasize a key word, phrase or sentence. And that’s the problem near the start of Mr. Talese’s profile on Sinatra.

Put your own literary chops to work on this one. Here are the first three paragraphs of the profile. There should be a very short fourth graph. The copy already exists within this excerpt; all you need do is identify the copy that should be offset as its own graph.

So take a look and find the missing graph.

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.

Did you find it? It’s actually pretty obvious because Talese’s writing builds suspense for the delivery of the telltale sentence.

Below is the exact same content with one change that is structurally minor but significant in its impact. It’s the addition of a fourth paragraph. Check it out.

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.

Such is the power of the brief, well-placed paragraph to deliver a payload.

By isolating the telling statement, Frank Sinatra had a cold, it brings the situation into full relief. It explains his aforementioned behavior, as well as the behavior of the people around him – and it does so with far more power than when the sentence is lumped into the large block of text in paragraph two.

The building drama finds resolution with that paragraph, which is why it deserves its own space.

My point is that writers should always be aware and take advantage of the paragraph’s ability to isolate and augment key passages. It’s easily overlooked, even by the likes of Gay Talese.

Then again, before throwing one of my journalistic heroes under the bus, I’ll give full consideration to the distinct possibility it was the editors at Esquire who committed this faux pas.

This much I know for sure: Esquire editors screwed up big-time on the profile’s headline, which reads: Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. Yes, that’s right, the editors stole the author’s thunder by taking the key sentence from the profile and turning it into the headline. I would assume Talese lambasted the editors responsible for this amateurish move. (Odd that the headline was written in present tense, has a cold, while Talese writes in past tense, had a cold, in the body of the profile.)

Esquire was one of America’s greatest magazines at the time, and even its team of skilled editors made mistakes that should have been obvious upon review.

But we don’t have to make the same mistakes. Be aware of and pay deference to the power of the paragraph. It will punctuate your writing and infuse it with additional power.

A master reporter and wordsmith like Gay Talese would be proud.

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