Frank Sinatra Had A Cold
Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel -- only worse. But we all are, aren’t we?
I have a cold.
With a cold, I am as miserable as winter in Fargo. I have arrived at what we now call “midlife” without the rigor required on D-Day or the discipline of a generation that put a man on the moon. I want no such irritations in my life. I am bewildered that in an era where we have rapidly developed mRNA treatments for COVID, I am laid low by the simplest of viruses.
Frank Sinatra had a cold at least once, too. One particular time, a nearly fifty-year-old Sinatra had a cold in the Winter of 1965, while in Los Angeles. Around this time, the writer, Gay (nee - Gaetano) Talese was hired to interview Mr. Sinatra for Esquire Magazine. Mr. Sinatra, irritated with his cold, had no interest in being interviewed. The result was perhaps the greatest piece of magazine journalism ever published. You should read it, but today I don’t care if you do or not. I have a cold.
Readers of this weekly missive know my fanship for Joan Didion. Mr. Talese and Ms. Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Norman Mailer created a new style of writing called “New Journalism”. Fairly on the nose if you asked me, but you did not.
New Journalism threw out the conventions of objectivity and fact-based reporting, in favor of fiction-style writing. Writers were no longer invisible flies on the wall but at the center of their stories.
This is what Gay Talese did so brilliantly in the Esquire piece. Talese follows Sinatra around Hollywood, pursuing his target, only to be rebuffed repeatedly by “flunkies” (a pejorative my late father was fond of) who hung around Sinatra throughout his career.
Talese was forced to imagine the interview and all the repercussions that a star with a cold might have.
“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 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 welfare and stability.
The article is a brilliant mediation on fame, human fallibility, and our shared mortality. There is a decent chance that any cold you may catch this winter shares much in common with Frank’s.
I am no Frank Sinatra. My cold and the irritability that followed it affected only a tiny nucleus of people. Not being Sinatra, perhaps I have no right to such bitchiness. I should overcome this human failing of immunity, T-Swift the shite out of it and shake it off.
All of these things are true.
But I don’t want to and I am going back to bed.
