GAY TALESE...

...Jersey Boy.

I noted a few weeks back that I was rereading some of Calvin Trillin’s NEW YORKER material from the 1980s, and that this reading brought Gay Talese to mind. I love both men’s work, and I might very well do a post about Trillin down the line, but, for today, it’s Talese we’re here to talk about, and to think about.

Talese is a product of Ocean City, New Jersey, who found his voice in High School, as a sports reporter. I’m on record as not giving a fuck at all about sports of any kind; that said, I’ve read some of Talese’s sports writing—not the High School stuff, to be sure—and his prose is the sort of language that can break down any barrier, my own lifelong uninterest in sports included.

My first experience with Talese was accidental. I was at a friends house, for reasons I don’t recall, bored out of my mind, and I started leafing through a copy of ESQUIRE, hoping it shared an affinity for nudity with PLAYBOY. It did not, to my disappointment. In my leafing, I hit an illustration, which I would later come, in retrospect, to identify as the work of Ed Sorel, an artist I admire deeply, despite his personally stated anathema for comics.

The title intrigued me; as a regular reader of the show business columns in the DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK MIRROR, and NEW YORK POST, I was a regular audience for gossipy dirt. This is what I expected from the piece.

So, I came to read “FRANK SINATRA HAS A COLD.” And it blew my fourteen year old mind. I had never, and I mean, never, read anything like it.

I asked my maiden aunt/Godmother, the most culturally attuned member of my family, who introduced me to live theater, among other things which remain a part of my life, whether she knew of this guy.

For some reason, she deflected, whether purposefully or with an unconscious intuition, and got me a copy of BLOODHOUNDS OF BROADWAY, the collection of short Collier’s magazine pieces by Damon Runyon. I didn’t quite get it, but, hey, I was fourteen. She pointed out that these stories were the inspiration for GUYS & DOLLS, a musical I’d never seen back then but many times since. I knew the original cast album backwards and forwards, and dug it in a big way.

And, for quite some time, in regard to Talese anyway, that was that.

In my twenties and my thirties, I would occasionally see and scan pieces by Talese, along with those of Tom Wolfe, Molly Ivins, Calvin Trillin, Joan Didion—her, just a little, to be honest—Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill—that panoply of New Journalists applying the techniques of fiction to nonfiction. Not to sound disingenuous, or twee, for that matter, but it was an exciting fucking time, and I was living in New York City, having survived the desperate delights of the 1970s, and made it into the solipsism of the 1980s.

In 1991 Jimmy Breslin published a biography of Damon Runyon, which reinvigorated my interest in that fool’s golden era of Broadway’s cross pollination of crime and show business. To digress a moment, a favorite anecdote in that book relates the story of Runyon’s first job on arriving in New York City in the early aughts of the twentieth century.

He was assigned to babysit the legendary Bat Masterson, hired to write for the sports pages of the New York Herald. Breslin dismisses Masterson as a drunken fraud, more likely to stumble behind a water trough in a gunfight.

That drunkenness leads to Runyon ghostwriting Masterson’s sports page column, and a career is born.

Now, I’d reread “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” a number of times over the years. I’d also read THY NEIGHBOR’S WIFE,” arguably the best book about mid twentieth century American sexuality ever written, as well as “HONOR THY FATHER,” “UNTO THE SONS,” and several others of his larger projects, but I had missed a lot of his earlier magazine pieces.

Somehow, in the early days of social media group chat, I found myself in a several day long spirited discussion with someone—forgive an old man, I don’t remember who—who insisted that “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” was simperingly hagiography, idol worship of a certainly subtle but still sycophantic sort.

I reread the piece immediately, to bring myself up to current speed. To be clear, I categorically disagreed with that summation. Rather, it seemed to me that Talese had surgically skewered everything about the experience, performing a masterful dissection of his subject, deflecting anything resembling worshipful sycophantry as effectively as Cyrano De Bergerac deflated a blowhard opponent in his pausing to end his refrain.

And that includes his charming and indifferent dismissal of the short writer of short science fiction, too.

My takeaway from this exchange was a renewed interest in Talese, which acted itself out as a deeper dive into the earlier work, including, as noted above, a few sports pieces, the Ray Robinson and Joe DiMaggio articles in particular…

…But most specifically, “NEW YORK IS A CITY OF THINGS UNNOTICED,” a lyric essay and love poem to the minor characters and nearly invisible moments that made the Manhattan of 1960 the great city it was, most if not all of which have vanished into the abyss of time, and decades ago, at that.

And bells began to ring.

In this beautiful piece of work, in his description of New York, forty some odd years earlier, he had captured the very essence of my own experience as a little boy, my hands in my aunt’s white kid gloved hand, under the neon umbrella of the night city, of the theater district, the smoking CAMEL cigarette billboard stretching for a full block, the EIGHT O’CLOCK COFFEE billboard, the animated signs; I recalled with fondness reading Ed Sullivan, Leonard Lyons, Earl Wilson and all the other tabloid hacks who filled my head with backstage dreams, all of which informed my TIME(SQUARED).

I have often described that comics trilogy as the synergistic marriage of Damon Runyon and Philip K. Dick, a ceremony performed by Frank Loesser. And then, I recalled that original cast recording of GUYS & DOLLS, and a song, “MY TIME OF DAY.”

The song is a character piece, not quite an “I want” song, but close enough, sung by Sky Masterson—no coincidence, that surname—one of Runyon’s archetypal Guys. To be clear, “MY TIME OF DAY” captures an ethereal essence similar to Talese’s piece, a decade earlier. Whether she knew it or not, my godmother, somehow connecting Talese with Runyon, was onto something.

Both men started as sports columnists, and both men found their voices in their own romanticism of the streets and characters of early to late twentieth century New York City.

Talese has had trouble in recent years, due to the cultural shift that has made any kind of detached yet personal singular expression often suspect. I gather he couldn’t begin to give a fuck about this.

And Runyon is lost to history, his memory sustained only by the occasional revivals of GUYS & DOLLS. And in that regard, Sky was portrayed in that original cast by Robert Alda, father of Alan, another tall and well dressed Italian guy from New York.

I say another, because Talese’s fashion style, his physical presentation, is inseparable from his prose. I challenge you to find a photograph of Talese—the son of an immigrant tailor, who took his father’s sartorial instructions very, very seriously—in which he is not dressed to the nines, an archetypal dandy.

Regretfully, by the time I became familiar with Talese’s astonishing personal style, I had become a Californian, my own nearly two decade long fashionism already fading as I went native, remaining, however, to this day, a New Yorker on permanent leave. That said, none of this stopped me from wistfully reconsidering a visit to a good bespoke tailor, whenever I saw a photograph of Talese in full regalia and kit, a visit I never paid.

Now that I’m a fat old man, I regret that, too.

And finally, and perhaps apropos of nothing, maybe even a digression of no consequence whatsoever, Frank Langella.

Bear with me.

Besides being another tall well dressed Italian New Yorker, Langella shares with Talese that Jersey boy origin story and upbringing. And whereas Talese has put those roots behind him with his seductively poetic prose, Langella has distanced himself from Bayonne with that nearly condescending nasality that smacks of the upper crust, despite the occasional lapse into New Jersey accented pugnacity; an aggression that finds its equal in Talese’s occasionally snide and dismissive side.

And once you see those photographs, and read Talese’s prose, you may come to share my belief that Frank Langella sounds like Gay Talese writes, and looks, as well. To this point, although I have never heard Langella read Talese, it’s his voice I hear when I read, and reread.

Not to mention that both Frank Langella and Gay Talese are, for me at least, the spitting image of Damon Runyon’s Sky Masterson.

Trust me on this.

As ever, I remain,

Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince.