Lecture: Gay Talese
Gay Talese speaking at NYU. Photo by Geoff Smith.
One summer morning in 1953, Gay Talese, then 21, hopped a bus from Atlantic City to Manhattan. On arriving in midtown, he headed straight for the offices of The New York Times. He appeared unannounced and informed a receptionist that he’d like to see Turner Catledge, the paper’s managing editor. Catledge was the elder cousin of a college acquaintance, and Talese was banking on this vague connection being enough to secure him an audience. His gamble paid off. After waiting several hours, Talese was ushered into an office the size of a “basketball court.” Catledge, immaculately dressed in a crisp, blue, pin-stripped suit, sat behind his desk at the far end of the room, eyeing the young writer.
“So, what would you like to do?” the editor asked.
“I’d like to bring good writing to The New York Times,” replied Talese.
One month later, he began work as a copy boy.
Talese, now 74, recounted the story of his audacious start at the Times for a group of NYU journalism students and faculty members on September 14, 2006. While it may not have been the glorious beginning he’d envisioned, Talese made the most of his position as copy boy. During his free time, he explored the city on foot, searching for stories that would allow him to gain a foothold in the editorial department. In The Gay Talese Reader (2003), Talese describes how telling the tales of the “old men who rang the bells during boxing matches in Madison Square Garden, the river captains of the Staten Island ferries, [and] the window designers of Fifth Avenue boutiques,” helped him establish a reputation as the common man’s biographer.
His new memoir, A Writer’s Life (Knopf 2006), describes the years of scrupulous reporting and meticulous writing that produced celebrated magazine articles portraying cultural icons like Frank Sinatra and Muhammad Ali in the twilight of their fame, for publications ranging from Esquire, to Harper’s and The New Yorker. It also describes the genesis of books like The Kingdom and the Power (1969), a history of The New York Times; Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1980), a look into the American sex industry; and Unto the Sons (1992), the story of Talese’s Italian, immigrant family.
A Writer’s Life provides a window into the mind of a man whose life is inextricably linked with his work: pursuing, planning and tailoring narratives. “The biggest criticism of this book is that it’s not really a memoir,” Talese told this reporter in a September 18, 2006 phone interview. “I had always defined myself through my work, which was always about other people,” he explains in A Writer’s Life. Thus, the book is less an autobiography than a story about telling stories. As Trevor Butterworth described in his 2006 review of the book for The Washington Post: “It is as if behind Talese’s dapper, tailored suits there lies a heart of ravenous sponge, soaking up the world and squeezing it back out, slowly, reluctantly, across the years.”
At NYU, Talese spoke about the “excavation” style of reporting that enables him to “write from the inside out,” taking time to know his subjects well enough to capture their perspectives and convey their motivations. This style allows him to mold “factual dramas” out of everyday life.
Born in the winter of 1932, Talese grew up in the resort town of Ocean City, NJ. His father was a tailor from Southern Italy who found few clients in America to appreciate his often entirely hand-sewn suits. Consequently, the family relied mainly on the profits from his mother’s dress shop, which they lived above.
At Ocean City High School, Talese focused more on the articles he wrote for the school paper and the Atlantic City daily, than on his classes. He was “a shy and uncertain teenager,” according to A Writer’s Life, and his grades were unremarkable. Chemistry and Mathematics failed to interest him, he said, but he found everyone around him endlessly fascinating. “I was interested in people other than myself and interested in what it was that made them what they were,” he told the audience.
In 1949, Talese began attending the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Over the next four years, his grades continued along a middling trajectory, but his writing developed into the style that would become his hallmark. Talese crafted portraits of “grass-cutters, tree-trimmers, locker room attendants and the football team.” He didn’t settle for the conventional Q&A interview model, preferring instead to spend time “hanging out” with his subjects, absorbing the nuance and detail of their lives. He found his writerly voice in these “short stories with real names,” he said.
Talese spent 10 years at The New York Times, but ultimately left to pursue a career in magazine writing, because he was hungry to delve more deeply into the lives of his subjects. “I felt that I did not want to write with the space limitations that were imposed on [writers] at a daily newspaper,” he told the audience. Newly married, with a one-year-old daughter, Talese signed a 1-year, 6-story contract with Esquire magazine. His first piece, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (1966), is arguably his most famous. After Sinatra refused to talk to him, Talese interviewed the crooner’s colleagues and fans, and used their recollections and impressions to craft an intimate portrait of the singer. “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” departed from typical magazine fare by using traditional literary devices like scenes, dialogue and third-person narrative. The effect was a piece that had both the elegance of good fiction and the dogged commitment to truth of good journalism. This singular approach spurred the growth of a new form of non-fiction writing, eventually dubbed New Journalism by Tom Wolfe in The New Journalism (1973).
While Talese is widely acknowledged to be the father of New Journalism, he rejects the label himself. As a writer, he prizes concision, simplicity and complete immersion, and bristles at the notion of being lumped in with Hunter S. Thompson and other New Journalists whose writing he finds “sloppy” and narcissistic. “Magazine writers like me, and like Tom Wolfe and David Halberstam, and even book writers like Norman Mailer, what we did was done with the intention of achieving remarkable things through reporting,” he told MediaBistro in an April 27, 2004 interview. “What some of these younger writers started doing was inserting more of an editorial voice into their own writing, filled with attitude which wasn’t supported by the required amount of legwork. They would spend the minimum amount of time on research and devote more effort to the style or shine or sheen which would get them noticed.”
Talese learned from an early age the value of evoking his subject rather than forcing himself into the spotlight. His mother was his first teacher in the art of listening. She taught him how to coax from people the most valuable details. Her core customers were the well-to-do women of Ocean City, “the wives of bankers and lawyers and the mayor,” who remained after the summer tourists had gone. As a child too small to see over the counter, Talese observed his mother patiently listening as her clients discussed their daily joys, cares and children off at war. “I thought they were evoking some of the spirit of the time, of the town and of the women themselves,” he said. These, he quickly realized, were the stories he wanted to tell: portraits of ordinary lives that offered insight into an era.
Novels, according to Talese, do this most successfully, but he was always drawn to non-fiction because of his interest in real people. Fiction writers are given license to open a character’s mind to the reader, and manipulate time and space. The non-fiction writer is forced to work within the confines of his own perspective. Talese sees this as a challenge that can only be overcome through tireless reporting. “If you go deeply enough into the matter of research, you can be very creative,” he told the audience. “You can create scenes; you can move back and forth in time; you can use interior monologue.”
This takes time, he says, and an enthusiasm for thorough reporting. “There’s no short-cutting,” Talese said. “It’s work you have to love, and what propels it is a hope that your prose style - the final effort - is going to be the embodiment of your best and a credit upon the people you write about.”
Perfect prose doesn’t just flow from a good writer, Talese cautioned, it takes tremendous effort. Good writers, according to Talese, are like good athletes; their simple, fluid movements conceal hours of laborious preparation. They make it look easy.
Talese doesn’t always tape his sources, or take exhaustive notes. Instead, he keeps strips cut from shirt boards from the dry-cleaners in the breast pocket of his blazer. He uses these to jot down observations, ideas, and turns of phrase throughout the course of an interview. Then, in the privacy of his home or a hotel room, he makes a meticulous record of the day’s reporting. “At night, very carefully, without fail, I go to my typewriter before I go to bed and type up what I saw that day,” he said. “I put the date and I start typing: who I saw, what I felt - my life as I’m pursuing someone else’s life.”
These notes are the embryo of a long and labored project; they are the rough beginning of what will eventually become a polished final product. “I start with a yellow lined pad and pencil,” he told Rob Boynton in an interview for The New New Journalism (2005). “The first thing I do is try to print a sentence. Note that I say try to print a sentence, and print, not write. I use big, block letters. Then I look it over, change it, rewrite, and try to do another. It sometimes takes me a couple of days before I have five to six sentences in large block letters. This is the beginning of my piece.” Printed pages eventually become type-written pages.
Talese’s exacting process demands patience. He spent ten years working on his first two books and close to a decade each on Thy Neighbor’s Wife and Unto the Sons. It took him almost 14 years to compile A Writer’s Life. It was time spent collecting and balancing mountains of information, mapping his thoughts, and tailoring his prose. To him, it seems like time well spent.
“I’ve always had standards about writing well,” he told the audience. “There is art in this business. There is potentially great art.”