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13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘Sucker Punch': Scaachi Koul's writings are unable to move beyond the trappings of ‘internet essays'
There are many essayists, but no group with a style as recognisable as that of BuzzFeed essayists. The New Journalism practitioners were discernible too, but only because they make the journalistic novelistic. Even then, where Tom Wolfe is flamboyant, Joan Didion is stone cold, precise like a surgeon. They followed no cult of regularised style. They were not siblings at the same dinner table. They were not canvassers on the Internet. A child of the internet 'I picked a career that's preternaturally suited to getting into arguments on the internet,' writes Scaachi Koul in her latest offering, Sucker Punch, a collection of essays about, of all things, fighting. Not pugilism in the ring as much as the banal sparring with yourself, your parents, your partner, your friends, and your fans. Koul owes her present reputation to her stint as a culture writer at Buzzfeed Canada, where she wrote essays with titles like ' I Went To A Summer Camp For Adults And It Was Weird ', ' There's No Recipe For Growing Up ', and ' Can TV Make Us Not Hate Ourselves? ' It's a background that places them squarely within a certain type of online writing, that of the BuzzFeed essayist. The standard BuzzFeed essayist is a child of the internet. They have known no other home. Only their devices, a reliable data plan, and a penchant for living a narratable life keep them company. To them, the journalistic is the memoiristic. In BuzzFeed, it hardly matters where you come from. Just one caveat. You can never shed the skin of the BuzzFeed essayist. With a beast of an internet to feed, what else will the BuzzFeed essayist write about if not themselves? While recognisability as an essayist is desirable, being recognisable as a specific type of essayist is perhaps not. An essayist is only as good as their personality. When in history have good writers ever wanted to sound like regular ones? Ever since the internet, apparently. 'I know how to write these stories because they're all the same,' writes Koul about writing profiles that follow women falling from the grace of their television producers, '…but the readership rarely tires of them and neither do I.' The readership rarely seems to tire of the internet essay, either. Although not to be confused with the personal essay, the internet essay owes much to its compatriot. It shares its vanity, vapidity, virility, verity, and variety, not to mention vitriol. Even fiction has been the target of rants against the personal essay, as this piece points out. Where the personal essay seeks to enlighten, the internet essay entertains. 'The internet made the personal essay worse, as it does for most things,' writes essayist Jia Tolentino in her 2017 New Yorker article, 'The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over'. Tolentino narrates the noiseless abandonment of personal essays in favour of good old reporting; one of the missteps of our time was to confuse the two. What is the internet essay, though? Like the personal essay, it is where the writer fidgets with the question of whether they have something to say. Except, the writer (as well as the editor) shelves the question immediately. It's too demanding. Content begs quick production (cumbersome questions get in the way like a pestering co-worker). Where the internet essay breaks away from the personal essay is when it becomes conversational, digressive, and sometimes fragmented. It is a work-in-progress impersonating a completed draft, strewn with hackneyed cultural criticism and memes, often structured for skimming. Mobile-optimised. I could've read Sucker Punch on my phone, and it wouldn't have made a difference. As a Brown writer in America, Koul can't not talk about race, but she goes the extra mile and whisks in religion. Even her index follows the pattern of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth in Hinduism. She writes, 'It was boring to talk about God,' before slinging out an extended metaphor comparing herself to Parvati: 'Parvati wanted to marry Shiva; her parents, however, didn't approve.' Koul married an older white man, which seems inevitable, considering how even the deities have 'white skin'. '(Why were they always white?)' she asks in parentheses. There are many other such considerations relegated to these brackets: '(I'm sure there's a joke in here somewhere about the white man in my life getting his visa during a Trump administration in about five minutes while mine took more than a year, but I'm too tired from living through that administration in real time to mine for the punchline. Later, when Trump becomes our cyborg king, I'm sure I'll be able to make sense of those heady early years).' That titbit is from an essay titled 'Lolita, Later,' which is perhaps the most vulnerable of the lot, which questions the trouble of embodying the character of Lolita the way Humbert Humbert intended, as a girl who has agency. In the essay, Koul struggles to reach a point, bringing together morsels from her age-gap marriage that ended in divorce, the experience of dating an emotionally unavailable man after the fact, and her reasonable distrust of men. The Trump joke has no room unless Koul wants to stick to narrating her deliberations at a cocktail party. Perhaps that's what she desires. As millennials like her might say, she's too 'lit' to write a book, y'all. A Brown woman in America The tedious digressions are inescapable in the internet essay, a form that desires a clear political leaning. No ambiguity allowed. Depending on the country you're from, there is a checklist of things you must have an opinion on to be worthy of writing on the Internet. In America, it's trans issues, Trump, and vaccination. In India, it's Modi, minorities and Hindutva. A self-diagnosis is also mandatory, obliged by an internet nibbling on the scraps of psychoanalytic theory: Falling in love with someone older, protective, and angry was a response to him assaulting me. Running away from Toronto was another attempt to avoid reckoning with the kind of girl who would 'let something like this happen' to herself. And, ironically, kick-starting some gupshup with Jeff during lockdown was my own way of avoiding the more urgent fight happening inside my marriage. In this essay, squarely titled A Close Read, Koul examines her fraught relationship with a man named Jeff, who sexually assaulted her when they were at university. Before his passing, she had contacted him; their conversations were lukewarm, inviting no apology and only derision from her husband when he found out. Going by these pieces, nothing in Koul's life appears to exist independently of everything else, and life imitates the structure of the book, where its claim to being a collection of essays seems propelled by a desire to stand out in an American market buffeted with divorce books. Perhaps the difference, to labour my point as Koul often does, is that hers is a Brown woman's perspective. If I had to think prototypically, internet essays by 'a Brown woman in America' can produce prattling platitudes on identity, belonging, cultural duality, generational conflict, burdening expectations, and defiant joy – to name just a few – and Sucker Punch delivers. In the soliloquy on her relationship with her body, 'Chocolate, Lime Juice, Ice Cream', Koul chatters about her lifelong struggle with body image and self-esteem, the cradle of which she, as you might guess, owes to her mother ('I was at my thinnest at that wedding; I knew, because my mom told me I was. She was proud. I was hungry.'). Somewhere along her essay, Koul writes: 'It's rote for a woman to blame her issues with food on her mother, but clichés exist for a reason.' After her divorce from an ex-husband who 'was always feeding' her, Koul's mother had a persistent question: 'Did you eat?' ('Did you eat?' she'd say. 'You have to eat. Eat everything. Eat whatever you want. Eat now.') The essay paddles the same ideas that float in its sisters: Koul loved her husband, forgot for a whole hot minute that she was a complete person in her own right, left him, and is now discovering herself, recuperating all the while. Since she's a writer, a book is a part of that process. The internet essayist has to get to a point. She doesn't have the privilege of mere deliberations, even if the process of self-discovery guarantees simply that. Here's how Koul arrives at hers: But I don't need to hide from myself, or hide myself from other people. Besides, I cannot hide because no one will let me. Even if I try to slink away to an invisible place, someone will come and get me. It's nice in the light if you can stand in it long enough to feel the warmth. Looking at my body with my own gaze is a light unto itself. I try to stay there as much as I possibly can. My mother told me to eat, and so I did. On arriving here, Koul sounds like anyone else. I won't deny that she's a good writer, but in Sucker Punch, Koul becomes the quintessential internet essayist, best read to escape the sludge of perpetually streaming 'content' but close enough to it that there are no withdrawal symptoms.
Times
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
My father, Tom Wolfe: I wonder what he would think now
T here are giants of the written word, and there are giants. Tom Wolfe was the man in the white suit who bestrode journalism and fiction, and qualified as a colossus in both. Not only did he revolutionise magazine writing, he established the term 'New Journalism' to define a movement in his own image. As for his novels, a young Margaret Atwood once drily remarked: 'It looks as if Tom Wolfe said to the other male American novelists: 'Mine is bigger than yours.'' And it was, not least in the guise of 1987's 700-page, zeitgeist-defining The Bonfire of the Vanities, anatomising the New York he had made home. But no one is a legend to their offspring. Wolfe's daughter, the writer Alexandra Wolfe, 44, recalls: 'As a child I just remember thinking it was magical that he worked from home. Everybody else's fathers went to work in a suit but mine worked from home in his. I knew that I wasn't supposed to go into his office when I heard the typewriter. He would write ten pages a day, triple-spaced. And when he was done with the ten pages, he would go about his day. But often he was writing after dinner too. So it wasn't like he finished by noon and then went golfing.'
Los Angeles Times
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Joan Didion was famously reserved. But she openly adored John Wayne and Old Hollywood
If Joan Didion had an overarching preoccupation as a journalist and novelist, it was to find interstices where truth and myth blend into each other. In many of the essays that were collected in the books 'Slouching Toward Bethlehem' and 'The White Album,' Didion, in contrast to her New Journalism contemporaries, keenly debunked the prevailing myth of the '60s counterculture as some new utopian portal, instead revealing in her essays a country that was coming undone by its own unchecked permissiveness, inward-looking narcissism and spiritual anomie. Curiously, she had a blind spot when it came to the most efficient mythmaking machinery of the 20th century: Hollywood movies. In her new book, 'We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine,' Alissa Wilkinson paints the famously reserved author as an unabashed fan of Hollywood, especially the foursquare genre pictures churned out by studios in the 1940s and 1950s. As a green writer, Didion wrote movie reviews for William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review, among other outlets, celebrating entertainment for its own sake and ignoring the incipient art-film movement of Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes and Michelangelo Antonioni. 'She liked to be entertained by Hollywood stories,' says Wilkinson. As a child of the West, she was especially drawn to the films of John Wayne — that self-reliant man of action, Hollywood's figurehead of Manifest Destiny. Didion, who spent a short time during her childhood on Army bases with her enlisted father, watched movies to fend off her restlessness. It was during one such languorous afternoon that, according to Wilkinson, 'Joan first encountered the love of her life.' It was Wayne — America's biggest movie star, the self-reliant enforcer, the loping lawman who set the world to rights by virtue of his unbending fortitude. For Didion, Wayne was the embodiment of individual will, quiet strength and indomitable can-do-ism. 'John Wayne was one of the guiding lights of her life,' says Wilkinson. 'He represented safety and security for her, this kind of independent spirit. He was the personification of this image she had of The West, of doing the work necessary to settle the new land. He was crucial to her personal mythology.' Didion would write fulsomely about Wayne in her early magazine stories. 'Saw the walk, heard the voice,' Didion wrote of Wayne in an article for the Saturday Evening Post. 'Heard him tell the girl in the picture called 'War of the Wildcats' that he would build her a house 'at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.'' Didion wanted to be that girl. Of course, Wayne was a walking myth. The actor, who was synonymous with heroism and bravery for millions of Americans, did not enlist in the Army when his country entered World War II, and he never saw combat or used live ammunition to defend himself. Instead, Wilkinson writes in her book, Wayne 'became the man we imagined him to be.' This suited Didion; she would later write of the necessity of constructive myths and origin stories that Americans cling to as articles of faith, stories that served as signposts to a way forward, as opposed to the empty '60s myths that she believed led to entropy. Even when Didion moved away from film reviews to become one of the preeminent essayists of her generation, she clung to Wayne as an avatar. Wilkinson points out that Didion was an outlier among her generation, a conservative both in her aesthetic taste and her politics. And she was drawn to politicians who projected what she had admired in John Wayne: that no-nonsense, plainspoken approach to problem-solving. When Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, a compassionate conservative who championed civil rights and environmental protections, announced his intention to run against John F. Kennedy in the 1964 election, Didion embraced his candidacy. 'Goldwater was a commanding presence who projected a straight-forward approach towards issues,' observes Wilkinson. 'Didion saw some of Wayne in him.' In contrast, she was wary of Kennedy — too smooth, too willing to alter his backstory to curry favor. (Goldwater would lose to Lyndon B. Johnson.) To Didion, Kennedy represented something insidious in the American character: the desire for voters to admire politicians like movie stars, and the pandering of American politicians to provide heroes made of clay. This, for her, was the start of the new 'star system' that was to infect American politics all the way up to Bill Clinton, a new misdirection that avoided the hard questions in favor of feel-good glad-handing, the glittery spin of politics in the age of TV that created a false consensus. What rankled Didion about this turn was that it reduced the complexity of all issues to tidy bromides. 'She hated the idea of that Hollywood enchantment crossing over into political discourse,' explains Wilkinson. 'Movie logic was everywhere,' she writes, as political conventions were now expressly staged for TV audiences. At the same time, as Wilkinson points out, movies could be an inflection of the national mood, even if they were misinterpreted by the politicians who cited them. When Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, President Johnson cited Arthur Penn's film 'Bonnie and Clyde' as a potential cause of national violence, rather than a reflection of the national mood. Movies only suited politicians when their prevailing myths lined up with campaign rhetoric. Despite her creeping cynicism toward politics and its appropriation of movie style, Didion hadn't lost her ardor for film. In 1964, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, moved from New York to Los Angeles, determined to break into the industry. They soon found success in Hollywood — their first film, 'The Panic in Needle Park,' screened at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival — but by that time, Didion, who had been hosting legendary 'industry' parties at her house on Franklin Avenue, sensed a vacuity that she described in 'Play It As It Lays,' her 1970 novel. Hollywoodland, as it turned out, was also a myth. 'She was both inside and outside Hollywood when she wrote that novel,' says Wilkinson. 'You can see her noticing this all over Southern California, this lack of a moral center, and people for whom a moral center is a laughable invention.' According to Didion, that moral hollowness found its ideal spokesman in Ronald Reagan, a minor Hollywood actor who leveraged his position as a Screen Actors Guild leader to be elected California's governor in 1966. In 1968, while on assignment for the Saturday Evening Post, Didion visited Nancy Reagan at the governor's mansion and observed a TV news crew as they tried to get a perfect shot of Reagan cutting flowers from her garden. Nothing of substance was even broached. The photo-op had supplanted policy as the sine qua non of political discourse. Hollywood had hijacked politics and there was no turning back. Didion continued to explore this subject in a series of essays for the New York Review of Books in the '80s and '90s, the best of which were collected in a book aptly titled 'Political Fictions.' In her essay 'Insider Baseball,' Didion decried the trivial nature of two-party politics in the age of media saturation. Watching then-President Reagan addressing the delegates at the 1988 GOP convention, Didion witnessed a speech 'rhetorically pitched not to a live audience but to the more intimate demands of the camera.' In Didion's view, viewers now processed politics like TV dramas, with their own heroes and villains, subplots and twists. Didion, who died in late 2021, lived long enough to witness the slow decline of traditional media and the creeping hegemony of social media, with policy positions laid out in 140-word missives and the raging hailstorm of online political discourse. Even the movies aren't really movies anymore, just raw material for the streaming maw. One thing is for certain: They are the stories we now tell ourselves in order to live.
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A Town Without Time by Gay Talese review – New York by an old master
The critics have never quite called off the search for the great American novel; meanwhile, the hunt goes on for the only slightly less prized great American article. It's a piece of journalism that captures the spirit and meaning of the republic. Hardboiled but with a soft centre, in the US feature-writing tradition, it might be set in New York, the most American of places. Indeed, you can still catch staffers at the New Yorker magazine having a crack at it, though they'd never admit it. Their copy might include a zigzagging fire escape, or a genie of steam escaping from a sidewalk, or perhaps a yellow cab hopscotching over potholes. But never all these motifs together! That would risk unfavourable comparison with the cherished chroniclers of the city's past: EB White, AJ Liebling, Dorothy Parker and others. But one veteran who has a good chance of joining the pantheon on journalism's Mount Rushmore is Gay Talese, 93, who has written for the New York Times and Esquire and published 16 books. He remains the man to beat for his classic 1966 piece of reportage rather uninvitingly called Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. Vanity Fair hailed it as 'the greatest literary nonfiction story of the 20th century'. It's included in a terrific new collection of Talese's stories about New York, A Town Without Time, a title that echoes Sinatra's serenading of 'the city that never sleeps'. Talese finds Old Blue Eyes pushing 50, extricating himself from a run of ill-advised novelty records and one of his marriages. The writer doesn't overreach himself, as others might, to explain Sinatra's quiddity; he does it with some dispatch: Sinatra seemed to be 'the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has money, the energy, and no apparent guilt'. Talese's piece is an eyewitness account from inside the singer's magnificent entourage. Sinatra has a valet on the payroll as well as a 'haberdasher' and a toupee-wrangler who holds his hair in 'a tiny satchel'. He is the Sun King, with the rookeries of Versailles replaced by the sunless lounges of Sands casino and Jilly's saloon in New York. What impressed Talese's first readers was his discursive storytelling and insider take. For this he was credited by Tom Wolfe with inventing the New Journalism, a first-person narrative technique later adopted by Norman Mailer, Hunter S Thompson, Joan Didion and Wolfe himself, among others. We have this self-referential formula to thank for the columns that fill the papers now, roaring confessionals about throuples and wild swimming. But today's readers, and particularly other journalists, will be astonished by the access Talese had, not to mention freedom from nixing PRs. This was also true of his encounters with politicians and criminals. There's a grippingly good piece about the kidnapping of mafia don Joe Bonanno. As his leaderless gang lay low to avoid rival goombahs and the feds, it's as if Talese is filing his pages from one of their apartments. The famous prison cookery scene in Goodfellas, in which Paul Cicero slices garlic to a thou of an inch, has nothing on Talese's account of these hideouts redolent of sweat and red-sauce meals. 'The men had complained that the spaghetti had a metallic taste – they later learned that the cook had knocked his pistol out of his chest holster into the pot.' You can't tell where his intrepid research ends and other sources begin, including, perhaps, inspired guesswork. Talese doesn't show his working: for a New Journalist, this is self-effacing to the point of invisibility. In another story, 1961's New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed, he puts this civic inattention to rights, noting, among other things, Gotham's 1,364 messenger boys, 650 doormen in their 'heavily festooned' uniforms and the 10 fleapit cinemas that open their doors at 8am. This charming miscellany is the perfect antidote to the listicles of celebrities' favourite things that clutter newspapers now. It's a wonderful nonfiction rendering of New York – in fact, a piece of New Journalism to relish at a time when the fourth estate increasingly seems to favour No Journalism instead. A Town Without Time: Gay Talese's New York by Gay Talese is published by Mariner Books Classics (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
New Journalism legend Gay Talese: ‘Trump gets things done. It's unpredictable – I love that'
Gay Talese, the author who in the 1960s pioneered what came to be known as the New Journalism, and who is widely regarded as the peerless non-fiction writer of his generation, begins each day as he has for more than 50 years. Forsaking breakfast, Talese, who is now 93, climbs the stairs from his bedroom to his changing room at the top of the elegant brownstone where he lives on New York's Upper East Side. He selects a three-piece suit from the 100 or so that he owns, most of them handmade in Paris by his Italian cousins – a sports jacket on the weekends. His shirts are handmade by Addison on Madison, worn with a stiff white collar and a silk tie; today he is wearing one from Kiton of Naples. He selects one of his 15 or so pairs of suede-and-leather co-respondent shoes in different colours (today, black and crimson) made by Vincent & Edgar of Lexington Avenue. 'They're very, very expensive,' he says. On any other day, Talese would have followed his customary practice by walking downstairs, through the front door and down another flight of steps to his basement, which he calls 'the bunker', where he works on an antiquated word processor, surrounded by the accumulated files, diaries, photographs, calendars and correspondence that record his lifetime's work. For the past few years he has been working on a book about his marriage of 65 years to his wife Nan, a former book editor with a career that includes publishing Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood and Thomas Keneally among many others. Talese has been paid an advance for the book, 'but I'm putting it off'. There has been no work today. His close friend Louis Nelson, who designed the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, and the husband for 28 years of the folk singer Judy Collins, died recently, and Talese has been paying his respects at the viewing of Nelson's body in a funeral parlour uptown. Now we are seated on leather buttoned sofas in the lounge of his home, bookshelves climbing to the ceiling, art on the walls, framed photographs on decorative tables – Talese with three US presidents, Carter, Reagan and Clinton, and with Muhammad Ali in Havana in 1966. Talese ('Ta-leez') is tall and lean, with greying hair, sharp eyes, sunken cheeks and a prominent nose. He gesticulates as he talks, peppering his language with expletives – a mixture of the tough and the smooth. He is in good health, but Nan is no longer able to walk, and they have carers round the clock, four women, all from Tbilisi. 'I'm an authority on the affairs of Georgia versus Putin,' Talese tells me. He has dressed for the viewing, a Brioni suit, probably 50 years old – he hasn't put on much weight over the years, he says. His style is timeless and he never throws clothes away. 'Normally, I wouldn't wear this suit. You know why? It's a double-breasted suit. And you can't sit well in a double-breasted suit. I want to be at my best.' He grew up in Ocean City, New Jersey – 'a flag-waving town, for sure'; white, Protestant, and deeply conservative, there was even a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. 'There were white sheets on the beach.' His was the only Italian family in the neighbourhood, and at school he would be picked on and insulted. He was born Gaetano, abbreviated by his mother to Gay because that sounded more American. His father was a tailor, and his mother ran a dress shop. There are pictures of Talese at 11, wearing a suit. 'I had to dress well because I was a tailor's son, and I was a billboard for the shop. Also, when you're a foreigner, you want to be assimilated, you want to be accepted, appearances matter too.' From his mother he inherited his curiosity in people and the art of listening. 'Her customers were prominent people. The surgeon's wife, the Cadillac dealer's wife,' he says. 'After school, I'd go and help out in the dress shop, and this is during the war, I'd listen to these women who were complaining they couldn't buy this or that, food rationing, gas rationing. Their husbands and their sons were somewhere in the war, and I got to hear about that from the woman's point of view, and that was interesting to me.' He wanted to be a journalist, and after college, he got a job as a copy boy at The New York Times. Without anybody commissioning him, he wrote his first piece, about the man who operated the electronic sign outside the Times building that broadcast the news headlines, encouraged by a senior writer on the paper, Meyer Berger. 'That's B-E-R-G-E-R,' he says – an old journalist's reflex kicking in. He didn't get a byline, but it was a beginning, and he went on to work on the sports desk, and as a general reporter. Over the years, Talese would write about sportsmen and celebrities – Frank Sinatra (more on this later), the boxer Joe Louis when he was past his prime, reduced to eking out a living from public relations work and refereeing wrestling matches. But he was always more interested in writing about ordinary people; the kind of people that he would overhear talking in his mother's dress shop. 'I always thought the stories were interesting, but they weren't news, they weren't heard, they didn't get an obituary when they died. I wanted to be a discoverer of people who didn't have a chance to be written about. I wanted to interview people who had never been interviewed before.' Some of the greatest fiction, Talese points out, is about 'nobodies'. 'Willy Loman is a nobody, a lousy salesman for Christ's sake,' he says, 'but Arthur Miller's play has been seen all over the world. 'The fiction writer's imagination could take a nobody and make them somebody,' he goes on. 'I wanted to be a journalist making a nobody into somebody. In other words, everybody has a story.' His first book, New York: A Serendipiter's Journey, published in 1961, was a celebration of the city's outsiders and eccentrics. His second, The Bridge (1964) told the stories of the construction workers who built the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which links Brooklyn to Staten Island. Talese was working towards a different way of storytelling, using the devices of fiction – scene-setting, highly descriptive, the use of reported speech and interior monologue. He hadn't considered it as 'new journalism' until he read a piece by Tom Wolfe using the term, and hailing Talese as the forerunner of a new 'literature of reality' that included writers such as Truman Capote, Hunter S Thompson and Wolfe himself. 'I was shy about it,' Talese says. 'I mean, I wasn't making claims of being the first of anything. I didn't think of myself as being prominent. And as for being part of a movement, it was Tom Wolfe who said that.' There is no finer, nor more acclaimed, example of Talese's technique than the story he wrote for Esquire in 1966, 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold'. Talese had been sent to interview Sinatra in Los Angeles, but on arrival was told the interview would not be happening. Sinatra had a cold. Rather than fly back to New York, Talese spent six weeks shadowing the singer to a recording studio, to Las Vegas, a private members' club on Rodeo Drive, observing, eavesdropping, accumulating every detail to write a 15,000-word piece that stands as the definitive portrait of Sinatra. Six weeks in the Beverly Hills Hotel? 'I was paid about $3,500 in expenses [around $34,000 in today's money] and not to even get the interview.' Talese whistles under his breath. Those were the days. 'And I didn't even think it was a good story.' History says otherwise. Acclaimed as one of the finest magazine articles ever written, 10 years ago it was republished by Taschen in a luxurious, illustrated hardback edition at a cost of £150. Talese says he was 'amazed'. 'When I die, which may be tomorrow, I swear to Christ, the second paragraph in my obituary is going to be Frank Sinatra. But better that than nothing.' Ironically, it is not even his favourite magazine piece. That is the profile of another 'nobody', The New York Times obituaries editor Alden Whitman, published in 1966. 'Because that is a short story. It was only publishable because it's written well.' ('Furthermore,' Talese wrote, 'he admits that, after having written a fine advance obituary, his pride of authorship is such that he can barely wait for that person to drop dead so that he may see his masterpiece in print.') Both stories are included in Talese's latest book, A Town Without Time: Gay Talese's New York, an anthology of his writings related to the city. There is a lengthy extract from The Bridge; an account from 1961 of life at Vogue magazine – 'Each weekday morning, a group of suave and wrinkle-proof women who call each other 'dear' and 'dahling', and can speak in italics and curse in French, move into Manhattan's Graybar Building, elevate to the 19th floor. Then slip behind their desks at Vogue …'; a strange story about a man who, faced with a crippling divorce settlement, blew up his own home: and an account from his book Honor Thy Father (1971), about the life of the Bonanno Mafia family, and the constant dangers and evasions of being a gangster in a town of 'tall shadows, sharp angles and crooked people from top to bottom'. It's a town that Talese loves. 'I love the international flavour. There's 11 languages you can hear on the damn subway car. I don't understand any of them, and if you're shopping, it's a little difficult.' He pauses. 'People are really nice to old people,' he observes. 'I have a cane. When I walk out with a cane, and I try to maybe get into a cab, people help you. You fall in the street, people pick you up. I'm just an old guy with a cane. Better dressed than most old guys with a cane, yes indeed. But not that much. When you have a cane, even more help comes your way. A cane makes a difference. When you're old, you don't want to be in the country. You don't want to have to drive 10 miles to a hospital, or maybe 20 miles if you're in Connecticut. 'And people get along here,' he continues. 'You can be anything and be mayor of New York. I think people are basically good. Jews, Russians, Arabs or whatever. It's the f—king governments that separate us. Left alone, we can get along. We don't need the United Nations.' It's a city where a property speculator turned reality TV host can even become president. Talese knew Donald Trump well in the 1980s, when Trump was a ubiquitous figure in New York. Talese was friends with a man named George Steinbrenner, who owned the New York Yankees baseball team. Talese is a Yankees fan himself, and Steinbrenner would sometimes invite him to watch games from the VIP box, which would be filled with New York's movers and shakers, including Trump, who would give Talese a lift home in his limousine. Trump had casinos in Atlantic City, close to where Talese grew up, and when Talese returned home he would sometimes visit Trump at one of his casinos. Talese says he has never been particularly political. He is an outsider, he says, who always likes to see the other person's point of view, and his disdain for politicians in general is clear in his conversation. But he always harboured a sneaking admiration for Trump. 'He's not the New York liberals' idea of a man, he was rough, but I liked him. But they were rough in that group. Steinbrenner was older than Trump, and he was rough. He fired managers, fired everybody. The tabloids called him the Boss. Trump was influenced by Steinbrenner. I believe that's true. When he became president he started running the government that way. And I sort of like that. 'He gets things done, like talking to North Korea,' he adds. 'People say, no, hold on, why are you talking to them? It's unconventional, unpredictable. I love that.' He married Nan in Rome in 1959, when he was on assignment. He had agonised over the decision. 'I was afraid to marry her because I couldn't afford it, but I didn't want anybody else to marry her either.' They have two daughters – and he has the actor Peter O'Toole to thank for that, he says. In 1963 O'Toole had recently completed Lawrence of Arabia, and Talese was sent by Esquire to London to interview him. O'Toole had to suddenly leave for Ireland, but suggested that Talese should come along too. 'Then he asked me, do you have any children? I said, no. He said, why? I said, well, my wife works as an editor at Random House and we don't have any money. I can't afford to have a child.' O'Toole chided him for not being a risk-taker. 'He said, I'm an actor and I have a three-year-old daughter.' Reflecting on this, Talese concluded that O'Toole was right. He had always been risk-averse. 'He said, why don't you have your wife come over when we get back to London and you can stay in our house for a couple of days. So Nan came over and we got pregnant the first night she was there, in Peter O'Toole's guest room.' His first daughter, Pamela, a painter, was born in 1964. His second daughter, Catherine, a photographer, was born in 1967. 'Peter O'Toole saying I was not a risk-taker, made me a risk-taker. It made me feel, yes, I can afford a child. I'll make more money. It opened me up.' Talese was growing frustrated at The New York Times, unable to write the stories he wanted to write, but feeling scared to give up his job because he needed the money. 'They wanted me to write about somebodies. And I was the king of the nobodies.' Taking O'Toole's advice about being a risk-taker to heart, he quit his job and went freelance. In 1969 he published The Kingdom and the Power, followed by Honor Thy Father. 'That's two bestsellers. All that came from O'Toole's advice. 'I loved that guy. He changed my life.' Talese's marriage has had its rocky periods. In the late 1970s he embarked on what would become his most controversial project, Thy Neighbor's Wife – a tour d'horizon of sexual life in the US, which included vivid accounts of Talese's on-the-ground research, including running a massage parlour (and, of necessity, he says, auditioning the masseuses), as well as joining a nudist and swinging community in California – an experiment, he says, to see if they could conquer sexual jealousy. 'I was seduced by the wife of the man who ran the nudist community that I was a part of for six months. I mean, the tailor's son was wearing no clothes for a long time.' Talese says it was always his practice not to anonymise any of his subjects. His work has been a pact of trust between him and whoever he is writing about. 'I've always said, I'm not going to make it up. I want to be as truthful as I can, but I want your point of view. And I can't know your point of view unless you tell me. And I'll promise you I will not violate your confidence. I will not make you look bad, because I don't do hatchet jobs. If I'm invading your privacy, I want to invade your privacy with your partnership. And I'm a trustworthy person. 'All the hundreds and hundreds of articles that I've written I have never had someone say that I violated their confidence; I've never been sued or had somebody write me a bitchy letter or call their lawyer. I've never had anybody say that I betrayed them, because I haven't.' It was a principle put to its sternest test writing Thy Neighbor's Wife. It took him four years to persuade the married couple who ran the nudist community to let him use their names. In all his work, Talese had made a point of keeping himself out of the story, but for the credibility of this story, Talese had no choice but to admit he had participated himself. How else would the reader believe every word was true? Published in 1981, the book was a national scandal, lambasted by the critics. 'My daughters were in grade [primary] school,' says Talese. 'The parents of their fellow students knew about this dirty old man that was their father.' The syndicated cartoonist Doonesbury even published a series of strips lampooning Talese's sexual odyssey. 'All the critics that wrote about me thought I was having a hell of a good time. I wasn't having a good time. But I felt I had to do it. I took my clothes off. I participated. I wasn't going to hide behind my press pass.' Nan wanted nothing to do with any of it. On one occasion he had persuaded her to meet one of the masseuses, who came to dinner with her boyfriend, a doctor whom she had met at the massage parlour, and who attempted to make a move on Nan when she was preparing dinner in the kitchen. 'Jesus Christ,' Talese shudders at the memory. 'My wife got pissed off. And my story was being threatened by this crazy guy. I needed to have this girl in my book. After that evening, Nan said you do your f—king book, and leave me out of it.' The evening is closing in and Talese suggests it's time for dinner. We climb the stairs to the sitting room, where Nan is sitting at a dining table, elegant and smiling, a small dog playing at her ankles, and where a carer serves a meal of steak, mashed potatoes and green beans. 'Thank you, Sharina,' Talese says. 'All the way from Tbilisi to be here tonight.' After the 1971 publication of Honor Thy Father, Talese embarked on another book, about the Chrysler executive Lee Iacocca, but got nowhere with it. While Nan's career was flourishing, his was falling apart. The couple separated and he left for Italy to research a book about his family's origins, and had two affairs, one with the daughter of the US ambassador in Rome. Then he came home, and Nan took him back. I ask her, how did she think the marriage survived? 'I think the fact is, because we both loved each other, and even though Gay was sort of philandering at that time, we didn't break up.' She gives a sweet smile. 'I loved him.' We talk about Talese's working methods, how important he felt it was to always dress well when he was working on a story. 'I knock on the door. They open the door. What they see is important,' he says. 'If your parents are storekeepers, you learn good manners, how to treat customers with courtesy. I have always brought my good manners and my good tailoring to an assignment.' The other thing that was so important, he says, is detail – observe everything, note everything. It places the reader beside you, observing, noting. (To remain inconspicuous, Talese would hasten to the lavatory to scribble notes.) That meticulous attention to detail is there in the very first paragraph of 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold' – the brand of cigarettes (Kent) being smoked by one of the two blondes sitting with Sinatra in a bar, 'their matured bodies softly molded within tight dark suits'; Sinatra's fingers, 'nubby and raw, and the pinkies protruded, being so stiff from arthritis that he could barely bend them'; the cut of his Oxford-grey suit, and his shoes 'shined even on the bottom of the soles'. The dog has started agitating to be fed a piece of steak, and Talese gets up to move it out of the room. 'If I was you, writing this story,' he says, sitting back down, 'I would write that as we sat having dinner, Talese began telling me about how important attention to detail was. 'As an example,' he continues, 'he got up, put the dog in the bedroom and came back – that would be part of the story, the dog interrupting the conversation, getting rid of the dog.' Talese laughs. 'The dog has stopped making a noise now. I don't know what the dog is doing.' The matter of the masseuse's doctor boyfriend who hit on Nan is preying on his mind. 'His name was Ford - F-O-R-D', he says. 'He wanted to get laid with you,' he says to Nan. 'Isn't that funny!' she says. 'And he also later got drunk and threw up on the floor downstairs,' Talese goes on. 'We had to clean that up, and you said, no more of that bullshit, Gay Talese! Keep those people away from me.' And Nan laughs again. But whatever Talese did, the scandal, the embarrassment, the pain that followed – that is all in the past now. 'Nan's 92 and I'm 93,' he says, 'at this age, who cares? When you're that old, Mick, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference.' All the writers of his generation, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, have gone now. He was the first exponent of New Journalism, and he is the last. The conversations in his mother's dress shop, the man who operated the sign on The New York Times building, not meeting Frank Sinatra, the construction workers, the gangsters, the masseuses and the swingers and many, many more… 'I was always amazed,' says Talese, 'by how much information was obtained by me showing up, just by being there.' So has he led a good life? 'Yeah, I really have.' He ponders on this. 'I really feel I've lived a big life.'
