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| Gay Talese with Anne-Katrin Titze following the DOC NYC World Premiere of Dorenna Newton’s Watching Frank (with Gay on his Esquire article Frank Sinatra Has A Cold) Photo: Catherine Talese |
The first time I met Gay Talese was in 2013, when we were invited along with the B-52s Fred Schneider and Killer Films' Christine Vachon to be on the inaugural First Time Fest jury by co-founders Johanna Bennett (Tony Bennett’s daughter) and her partner Mandy Ward. Over the years Gay and I have had conversations on Andrew Bolton and Wong Kar Wai’s China: Through The Looking Glass (at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute); at Lotus Club with Morgan Neville (the Oscar-winning director of 20 Feet From Stardom) on The Music Of Strangers (featuring Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble); an evening with Gay on Ava DuVernay's Selma; recollections of James Baldwin and Raoul Peck’s astute I Am Not Your Negro; Josh Koury and Myles Kane’s Voyeur (based on Gay’s book The Voyeur’s Motel), plus his longtime friendship with Martin Scorsese and a remembrance in honour of Albert Maysles.
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| Gay Talese with Christine Vachon, Anne-Katrin Titze and Fred Schneider on the First Time Fest red carpet Photo: Ed Bahlman |
Following the Watching Frank screening (a highlight of the 15th edition of DOC NYC) at the Village East by Angelika, Gay, his daughter Catherine, and I hopped into a waiting limousine to take us uptown to discuss his latest book, A Town Without Time (Harper/Collins, December 3, 2024).
Anne-Katrin Titze: You just saw the film. It’s amazing how this one Esquire article, “Frank Sinatra has a Cold”, with those two elements, Sinatra and the cold, has haunted you!
Gay Talese: That’s true!
AKT: You have written about so many different topics, but this is the one!
GT: Even though I did not want to write this piece, as is documented in this current example, the short at the [DOC NYC] festival, it is a good story. I didn’t want to write something about a very famous person.
AKT: Who didn’t want to be interviewed!
GT: Oh yes!
AKT: A no meets a no!
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| Gay Talese at home inscribing A Town Without Time to Anne-Katrin Titze Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
GT: Also, the story is well-written. Scenes are well-described.
AKT: Very much so! It is a masterpiece.
GT: Opening scene, Sinatra, the lonely man at the bar, drinking. His girlfriend is not around, Mia Farrow’s not there. Also, Sinatra is a singularly extraordinary person. He’s been up and down, up and down, up and down. And his voice was so wonderful. His voice continues, it still lives.
AKT: The voice made people forget about other things.
GT: I’m not saying that I’m not pleased that the story keeps being republished.
AKT: You point out in the film how Sinatra was already famous in 1940. You throughout give us pointers to that history. From the perspective of your present perceptions around him, you illuminate his past, which is really beautiful.
GT: I was the perfect person for that piece, even though I didn’t want to do it. My background’s perfect. I was born in the Sinatra era, I grew up with Sinatra songs. When I was 11 years old, he sang in the Hit Parade on the radio. I’m from New Jersey. I’m the son of an immigrant. Sinatra is the son of a Sicilian immigrant. My father is from Southern Italy, not far from Sicily, Calabria. My problem as a boy with an Italian name and an Italian father and an Italian American mother in the 1940s with Mussolini against the US with Hitler and Italy a fascist nation and my father’s two brothers, my uncles, in the Italian Army, made me feel I didn’t know where I belonged in the American universe.
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| A Town Without Time by Gay Talese (Harper/Collins, December 3, 2024) Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
In the 1940s during the war years, that’s when Sinatra started to become a national figure. And an assimilated figure. And he really opened a path for people like me to feel American because he was accepted. Most Italians were not accepted in those days. They were gangsters or they were baseball players. They were like [Joe] DiMaggio who didn’t say anything, who didn’t reach out to anybody. Singular hero DiMaggio.
Sinatra was outgoing and opened up to the larger America. He was accepted as the first assimilated person from Italian background. Sinatra paved the way for me, in a way to be more sure who I was and more confident about what I could do in my own work. I wasn’t a singer, I was a writer. There weren’t many Italian-American writers in those days for sure. There aren’t many now.
AKT: You, Don DeLillo …
GT: Don DeLillo, period. So Sinatra - I was born for that story. A lot of other things too, I would like to believe. But why that? Because I had insight into his character. I didn’t need to talk to Sinatra. He could talk to me and he’d probably learn something about Italian Americans. I knew more than he did, because I researched and I felt it more than he did. He was lost in his own fame when he was 26 years old. He was on the radio all the time. And then in bands, too. Around 27 years old he was the big featured vocalist in Harry James’s band and the [Tommy] Dorsey Orchestra as well later. I was right for that piece.
AKT: There’s a wonderful moment in the film about Nancy Sinatra. You were at the recording and say: ”This was her one big hit!”
GT: That’s right!
AKT: These Boots Are Made For Walking, and you were there.
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| Gay Talese in the bunker at his home Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
GT: Yes!
AKT: The film ties in nicely your friendship with the owners of the boutique who created the famous Jax pants.
GT: Jack and Sally Hanson.
AKT: I liked how the film includes them. She, of course, is more prominent in some of your other books.
GT: In Bartleby [Bartleby & Me] it’s all written down. You read that book?
AKT: Yes, I did. You gave it to me. That’s how I knew she is mentioned not just because of the pants, worn by Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe and others. It’s interesting that the two films on you are this one and the one on The Voyeur.
GT: Oh yes, that was much nicer. That was a better film, really done well. They really produced that film.
AKT: It’s astonishing, though, that the films are on these two stories, considering all your other books. One could imagine a bigger film being made about your family history, described in Unto The Sons.
GT: In a New York Times book review two weeks ago, Stanley Tucci was being interviewed. And he was asked the question, what book would he like to make into a movie. And he said: “Unto The Sons!” He said it two weeks ago.
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| Gay Talese in front of the Dr. Bartha house location Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: Oh, I thought I had that idea first!
GT: He was thinking of doing it. He couldn’t get the money. He had an option with HBO. They payed for one year but they couldn’t get it together. But Unto the Sons would be it. Anyway, so much of my story is told in Bartleby. My personal story is pretty much there. Between there and some things in this [he points to the copy of A Town Without Time he just inscribed for me]!
AKT: The new one? A Town Without Time is a good title.
GT: Don’t you think it’s a nice book? I mean the paper?
AKT: It’s a beautiful book and it’s your New York book. I remember very well when you walked me over to the house the guy, Dr. Bartha, blew up and you were writing feverishly on his story.
GT: Did I walk over there with you?
AKT: Yes! I have photos of you in front of it. This story is in the new book as well, isn’t it?
GT: It is somewhere in there. It’s a good introduction this guy did, this fellow Alex Vadukul. When you read it, you’ll see.
AKT: When the book arrived yesterday, I head time to read “Vogueland.” It’s a great description of the Vogue offices in 1961. As much as you point out the snobbishness, it really made me want to be there. Can you tell me a bit more about “Vogueland”?
GT: You know, my wife [Nan Talese] helped me a little bit, telling me things. She worked there.
AKT: I didn’t know that!
GT: Not that much before, she had been there for a while. She couldn’t stand it. She wanted to be a writer and she wanted to be an editor but she didn’t want to deal with gloves and hats and clothes. But she was there for a while and she knew many of the people and told me stories. I did research too, but she was very useful. She worked for about six months there, maybe more. Then quit and went to Random House as an editor. As a junior editor, very low on the rung. I like all those pieces, they were selected by the editor and he did a wonderful job. I didn’t put those together.
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| Gay Talese with Anne-Katrin Titze at China: Through the Looking Glass at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: In “Vogueland” you describe a visit to Horst P Horst’s studio!
GT: Horst P. Horst! Pink, pink, pink! And the model! She said, if you take this ring off - some curious thing. If you take the ring off, you still feel the weight of the ring.
AKT: It’s wonderful how you let her statement just sit there to sink in, so we wonder, is she a genius or maybe not? What about the story “Looking for Hemingway”?
GT: You read that before, didn’t you?
AKT: Yes, please give me some background!
GT: George Plimpton! I was married to Nan in 1959. She got a job at Random House and one of her editor friends, a senior editor when she was a junior editor, was named Joe Fox. Later on there was a movie by Nora Ephron about a man who owns a bookstore and his name is Joe Fox. Because Nora Ephron had an affair with this guy. He was my wife’s mentor. And Joe Fox knew George Plimpton and many of those people. I met them all through Joe Fox. And I interviewed them all, including James Baldwin.
As you know from that expense account there [printed in the book], how little it cost for lunch or dinner in those days. Knowing Baldwin, he was so … he really had a point of view that I picked up on. They are looking for Hemingway, not realising it was long gone. These little bit pretentious young Americans in Paris in 1952. They’re all privileged kids, they’re all playing paupers, living abroad and having fun. But it was a joyous piece, I think, on the The Paris Review, a funny piece. They took themselves very seriously, but Baldwin didn’t take it very seriously. That’s his title, “Looking for Hemingway.”
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| Gay Talese at Players Club during First Time Fest Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: New York has always been your city?
GT: When I moved here, I lived in the Village, went to the West Side, then I got married and moved here. ’57, I got married in ’59. I’ve lived in the same building since 1957! The block hasn’t changed. It’s a changing city? No, no, no, no. This block hasn’t changed at all. And I haven’t changed much either. I still don’t have a cell phone. I started writing in the 1950s and I write the same way as I did in the 1950s. Even though it’s like 70 years later, I haven’t changed much. I haven’t changed the wife, I haven’t changed the building.
AKT: You haven’t changed your style of clothes! Still elegant as always. In the film there is a funny moment about the sketch in your notes, how you have everything drawn up. It’s almost like a painting. I have been downstairs in your bunker and seen your clippings and collages. How important is the visual preparation for your writing?
GT: Very important! I want to be a visual writer. I write scenes. Every article I wrote begins with a scene. It’s people and people’s situations. People moving, people in situations. I describe the atmosphere of Sinatra at the bar with two blondes and he’s drinking, the music is playing. Then it shifts to recording his own music and he doesn’t hear it, you can see he’s not hearing it. I observe. I do observe. I see a scene. I knew that that was going to be the way the piece is going to begin. I knew it.
AKT: Very cinematic. Your mind works in cinema.
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| Gay Talese with the American flag painting in the bunker at home Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
GT: I think if I had had a different start I could have been in the film business somehow. Maybe a director. Someone told me once, Bruce Jay Friedman, who’s a writer who wrote some screenplays, he told me I write like a dramatist. He wrote A Mother’s Kisses and scripts for the movies. He told me once at Elaine’s: “You write like a dramatist.” Playwriting or scene writing. I really try to write short stories. I take fiction without fictionalising it. I write stories that have scenes, dialogue, interior monologue, character development, and description.
AKT: You can see everything while you’re reading it. With some writers you can hear it more than you can see it, but with you it’s always visual. You give us cinema on the page.
GT: Thank you so much!
Watching Frank is available for online streaming starting today through Monday, December 2.
A Town Without Time will be available in the US on Tuesday, December 3.
