Frank Sinatra Has a Cold: And Other Essays (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Concurrent with his father's early fame, Frank, Jr. said, was the creation of a "press-release Sinatra" designed to "set him apart from the common man, separate him from the realities: it was suddenly Sinatra, the electric magnate, Sinatra who is supernormal, not super human but super normal. And here," Frank, Jr. continued, "is the great fallacy, the great bullshit, for Frank Sinatra is normal, is the guy whom you'd meet on a street corner. But this other thing, the supernormal guise, has affected Frank Sinatra as much as anybody who watches one of his television shows, or reads a magazine article about him. . . .

When Mahoney put down the phone, quietly, he announced that Frank Sinatra had left in his private jet to spend the weekend at his home in Palm Springs, which is a sixteen-minute flight from his home in Los Angeles. Mahoney was now worried again. The Lear jet that Sinatra's pilot would be flying was identical, Mahoney said, to the one that had just crashed in another part of California. NOW SINATRA SAID A FEW words to the blondes. Then he turned from the bar and began to walk toward the poolroom. One of Sinatra's other men friends moved in to keep the girls company. Brad Dexter, who had been standing in the corner talking to some other people, now followed Sinatra. The cameras stopped, some people laughed, and Sinatra looked up from his position in the sand as if he had been unfairly interrupted.

Just One Hitch

IT WAS THE MORNING AFTER. IT was the beginning of another nervous day for Sinatra's press agent, Jim Mahoney. Mahoney had a headache, and he was worried but not over the Sinatra-Ellison incident of the night before. At the time Mahoney had been with his wife at a table in the other room, and possibly he had not even been aware of the little drama. The whole thing had lasted only about three minutes. And three minutes after it was over, Frank Sinatra had probably forgotten about it for the rest of his life--as Ellison will probably remember it for the rest of his life: he had had, as hundreds of others before him, at an unexpected moment between darkness and dawn, a scene with Sinatra. Talese viewed Sinatra as not only a sublime jazz singer, maestro of media attention and movie star, but also as a singular midcentury figure who personified two distinct, and opposing, masculine types: the jet-age swinger and the ancient Sicilian padrone – the village patriarch who commanded respect, settled scores, solved problems, righted wrongs. And yet the guy could be brought low by the most quotidian and human of infirmities. “Sinatra with a cold,” Talese wrote, “is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel.”

After Sinatra had kissed her on the cheek, he hurried to join his friends at the door. But before Nancy could leave the studio, one of Sinatra’s men, Al Silvani, a former prizefight manager, joined her. It is a lovely ballad that he first recorded ten years ago, and it now inspired many young couples who had been sitting, tired of twisting, to get up and move slowly around the dance floor, holding one another very close. Sinatra's intonation, precisely clipped, yet full and flowing, gave a deeper meaning to the simple lyrics--"In the wee small hours of the morning / while the whole wide world is fast asleep / you lie awake, and think about the girl. . . ."--it was like so many of his classics, a song that evoked loneliness and sensuality, and when blended with the dim light and the alcohol and nicotine and late-night needs, it became a kind of airy aphrodisiac. Undoubtedly the words from this song, and others like it, had put millions in the mood, it was music to make love by, and doubtless much love had been made by it all over America at night in cars, while the batteries burned down, in cottages by the lake, on beaches during balmy summer evenings, in secluded parks and exclusive penthouses and furnished rooms, in cabin cruisers and cabs and cabanas--in all places where Sinatra's songs could be heard were these words that warmed women, wooed and won them, snipped the final thread of inhibition and gratified the male egos of ungrateful lovers; two generations of men had been the beneficiaries of such ballads, for which they were eternally in his debt, for which they may eternally hate him. Nevertheless here he was, the man himself, in the early hours of the morning in Beverly Hills, out of range. Frank Sinatra, leaning against the stool, sniffling a bit from his cold, could not take his eyes off the Game Warden boots. Once, after gazing at them for a few moments, he turned away; but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in there watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, “The Oscar.” Don’t worry about the expenses as long as you’re getting something out there,” he said. “Are you getting something?” After Tom Wolfe popularized the term "New Journalism" in his 1973 anthology The New Journalism, Talese's piece became widely studied and imitated. [7]Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is a profile of Frank Sinatra written by Gay Talese for the April 1966 issue of Esquire. [1] The article is one of the most famous pieces of magazine journalism ever written and is often considered not only the greatest profile of Frank Sinatra [2] but one of the greatest celebrity profiles ever written. [3] [4] [5] The profile is one of the seminal works of New Journalism and is still widely read, discussed and studied. [6] [7] In the 70th anniversary issue of Esquire in October 2003, the editors declared the piece the "Best Story Esquire Ever Published". [1] [8] Vanity Fair called it "the greatest literary-nonfiction story of the 20th century". [4] Assignment [ edit ] Frank Sinatra singing in a concert in 1966