Online "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" - Gay Talese ... 1966
From such people I collected an assortment of facts and comments, but what I gained at first from these interviews was no particular insight or eloquent summation of Sinatra’s stature; it was rather the awareness that so many of these people, who lived and worked in so many separate places, were united in the knowledge that Frank Sinatra had a cold. When I would allude to this in conversations, citing it as the reason my interview with him was being postponed, they would nod and say yes, they were aware of his cold, and they also knew from their contacts within Sinatra’s inner circle that he was a most difficult man to be around when his throat was sore and his nose was running. Some of the musicians and studio technicians were delayed from working in his recording studio because of the cold, while others among his personal staff of 75 were not only sensitive to the effects of his ailment but they revealed examples of how volatile and short-tempered he had been all week because he was unable to meet his singing standards. And one evening in my hotel, I wrote in the chronicle:
…it is a few nights before Sinatra’s recording session, but his voice is weak, sore and uncertain. Sinatra is ill. He is a victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra has a cold. Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability.
A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy…
The next morning I received a call from Frank Sinatra’s public relations director.
“I hear you’re all over town seeing Frank’s friends, taking Frank’s friends to dinner,” he began, almost accusingly.
“I’m working,” I said. “How’s Frank’s cold?” (We were suddenly on a familiar basis.)
“Much better, but he still won’t talk to you. But you can come with me tomorrow afternoon to a television taping if you’d like. Frank’s going to try to tape part of his NBC special… Be outside your hotel at three. I’ll pick you up.”
I suspected that Sinatra’s publicist wanted to keep a closer eye on me, but I was nonetheless pleased to be invited to the taping of the first segment of the one-hour special that NBC-TV was scheduled to air in two weeks, entitled “Sinatra—The Man and His Music.”
On the following afternoon, promptly and politely, I was picked up in a Mercedes convertible driven by Sinatra’s dapper publicist, a square-jawed man with reddish hair and a deep tan who wore a three-piece gabardine suit that I favorably commented upon soon after getting into the car—prompting him to acknowledge, with a certain satisfaction, that he had obtained it at a special price from Frank’s favorite haberdasher. As we drove, our conversation remained amiably centered around such subjects as clothes, sports, and the weather until we arrived at the NBC building and pulled into a white concrete parking lot in which there were about 30 other Mercedes convertibles as well as a number of limousines in which were slumped black-capped drivers trying to sleep.
Entering the building, I followed the publicist through a corridor into an enormous studio dominated by a white stage and white walls and dozens of lamps and lights dangling everywhere I looked. The place resembled a gigantic operating room. Gathered in one corner of the room behind the stage, awaiting the appearance of Sinatra, were about one hundred people—camera crews, technical advisers, Budweiser admen, attractive young women, Sinatra’s bodyguards and hangers-on, and also the director of the show, a sandy-haired, cordial man named Dwight Hemion, whom I had known from New York because we had daughters who were preschool playmates. As I stood chatting with Hemion, and overhearing conversations all around me, and listening to the 43 musicians, sitting in tuxedos on the bandstand, warming up their instruments, my mind was racing with ideas and impressions; and I would have liked to have taken out my notepad for a second or two. But I knew better.
And yet after two hours in the studio—during which time Sinatra’s publicist never left my side, even when I went to the bathroom—I was able to recall later that night precise details about what I had seen and heard at the taping; and in my hotel I wrote in the chronicle:
Frank finally arrived on stage, wearing a high-necked yellow pullover, and even from my distant vantage point his face looked pale, his eyes seemed watery. He cleared his throat a few times.
Then the musicians, who had been sitting stiffly and silently in their seats ever since Frank had joined them on the platform, began to play the opening song, “Don’t Worry about Me.” Then Frank sang through the whole song—a rehearsal prior to taping—and his voice sounded fine to me, and it apparently sounded fine to him, too, because after the rehearsal he suddenly wanted to get it on tape.
He looked up toward the director, Dwight Hemion, who sat in the glass-enclosed control booth overlooking the stage, and he yelled: “Why don’t we tape this mother?”
Some people laughed in the background, and Frank stood there tapping a foot, waiting for some response from Hemion.
“Why don’t we tape this mother?” Sinatra repeated, louder, but Hemion just sat up there with his headset around his ears, flanked by other men also wearing headsets, staring down at a table of knobs or something. Frank stood fidgeting on the white stage, glaring up at the booth, and finally the production stage manager—a man who stood to the left of Sinatra, and also wore a headset—repeated Frank’s words exactly into his line to the control room: “Why don’t we tape this mother?”
Maybe Hemion’s switch was off up there, I don’t know, and it was hard to see Hemion’s face because of the obscuring reflections the lights made against the glass booth. But by this time Sinatra is clutching and stretching his yellow pullover out of shape and screaming up at Hemion: “Why don’t we put on a coat and tie, and tape this… ”
“Okay, Frank,” Hemion cut in calmly, having apparently not been plugged into Sinatra’s tantrum, “would you mind going back over … ”
“Yes I would mind going back!” Sinatra snapped. “When we stop doing things around here the way we did them in 1950 maybe we…”
…Although Dwight Hemion later managed to calm Sinatra down, and in time to successfully tape the first song and a few others, Sinatra’s voice became increasingly raspy as the show progressed—and on two occasions it cracked completely, causing Sinatra such anguish that in a fitful moment he decided to scrub the whole day’s session. “Forget it, just forget it!” he told Hemion. “You’re wasting your time. What you got there,” he continued, nodding to the singing image of himself on the TV monitor, “is a man with a cold.”
There was hardly a sound heard in the studio for a moment or two, except for the clacking heels of Sinatra as he left the stage and disappeared. Then the musicians put aside their instruments, and everybody else slowly turned toward the exit… In the car, coming back to the hotel, Frank’s publicist said they’d try to retape the show within the week, he’d let me know when. He also said that in a few weeks he was going to Las Vegas for the Patterson–Clay heavyweight fight (Frank & friends would be there to watch it), and if I wanted to go he’d book me a room at the Sands and we could fly together. Sure, I said… but to myself I’m thinking: how long will Esquire continue to pay my expenses? By the end of this week, I’ll have spent more than $3,000, have not yet talked to Sinatra, and, at the rate we’re going, it’s possible I never will…
Before going to bed that night, I telephoned Harold Hayes in New York, briefed him on all that was happening and not happening, and expressed concern about the expenses.
“Don’t worry about the expenses as long as you’re getting something out there,” he said. “Are you getting something?”
“I’m getting something,” I said, “but I don’t exactly know what it is.”
“Then stay out there until you find out.”
I stayed another three weeks, ran up expenses close to $5,000, returned to New York, and then took another six weeks to organize and write a 55-page article that was largely drawn from a 200-page chronicle that represented interviews with more than 100 people and described Sinatra in such places as a bar in Beverly Hills (where he got into a fight), a casino in Las Vegas (where he lost a small fortune at blackjack), and the NBC studio in Burbank (where, after recovering from the cold, he retaped the show and sang beautifully).
As time-consuming and financially costly as it was, it was this research that marked my Sinatra piece and dozens of other magazine articles that I published during the 1960s.
The Esquire editors titled the piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” and it appeared in the April 1966 issue. It remains in print today in a Dell paperback collection of mine called Fame and Obscurity. While I was never given the opportunity to sit down and speak alone with Frank Sinatra, this fact is perhaps one of the strengths of the article. What could he or would he have said (being among the most guarded of public figures) that would have revealed him better than an observing writer watching him in action, seeing him in stressful situations, listening and lingering along the sidelines of his life?
This method of lingering and careful listening and describing scenes that offer insight into the individual’s character and personality—a method that a generation ago came to be called the New Journalism—was, at its best, really fortified by the “Old Journalism’s” principles of tireless legwork and fidelity to factual accuracy. As time-consuming and financially costly as it was, it was this research that marked my Sinatra piece and dozens of other magazine articles that I published during the 1960s—and there were other writers during this period who were doing even more research than I was, particularly at The New Yorker, one of the few publications that could afford, and today still chooses to afford, the high cost of sending writers out on the road and allowing them whatever time it takes to write with depth and understanding about people and places. Among the writers of my generation at The New Yorker who personify this dedication to roadwork are Calvin Trillin and the aforementioned John McPhee; and the most recent example of it at Esquire was the piece about the former baseball star Ted Williams, written by Richard Ben Cramer, an old-fashioned legman of 36 whose keen capacity to listen has obviously not been dulled or otherwise corrupted by the plastic ear of a tape recorder.
Gay Talese
December 2021
