What most people fail to understand upon reading this piece now is: 1. Sinatra was a multipantheonic god and accustomed to general metaphoric fellating, journalistic and otherwise. 2. Nobody had ever dared such witness-bearing, appraisal, and ostensibly objective opining after being privy to the man himself.
Gay fuckin’ Talese. Still kickin’, too.
Ubiquitous in journalism, the celebrity profile is at its worst nothing more than fluffy words surrounding glossy photographs. But the best celebrity profiles are some of the most celebrated magazine articles in the non-fiction canon. And masters of the genre are able to work within its constraints to deliver keen insights into compelling personalities.
Gay Talese is generally considered to have written the classic celebrity profile. “‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’ ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published,” Esquire later wrote, “a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism — a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction.”
Elizabeth Kaye is one of the masters. A longtime contributor to Esquire, she’s written about people as varied as basketball players, screen actors, and royalty. In Sleeping with Famous Men, her new Byliner Original, excerpted here, Kaye recounts 40 years of love affairs, some of them conducted with profile subjects, and the effect that they had on her often tumultuous inner life.
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