Gay Talese didn’t want to write about so public a figure as Frank Sinatra when his editors at Esquire assigned it to him, but he took it on with creative persistence and produced a masterful profile. Elon Green talked to him about it for Nieman Storyboard, so we now have the feature story with writerly annotations throughout.

Greens says at one point every story he has ever heard about Sinatra appears to have come from Talese’s profile, which is enormously detailed. Here’s an appealing bit:

I had seen something of this Sicilian side of Sinatra last summer at Jilly’s saloon in New York, which was the only other time I’d gotten a close view of him prior to this night in this California club…. That night dozens of people, some of them casual friends of Sinatra’s, some mere acquaintances, some neither, appeared outside of Jilly’s saloon. They approached it like a shrine. They had come to pay respect….

And they remembered when Sinatra was a failure and sang trash like “Mairzy Doats,” and they remembered his comeback and on this night they were all standing outside Jilly’s saloon, dozens of them, but they could not get in. So some of them left. But most of them stayed, hoping that soon they might be able to push or wedge their way into Jilly’s between the elbows and backsides of the men drinking three-deep at the bar, and they might be able to peek through and see him sitting back there. This is all they really wanted; they wanted to see him. And for a few moments they gazed in silence through the smoke and they stared. Then they turned, fought their way out of the bar, went home.

Some of Sinatra’s close friends, all of whom are known to the men guarding Jilly’s door, do manage to get an escort into the back room. But once they are there they, too, must fend for themselves. On the particular evening, Frank Gifford, the former football player, got only seven yards in three tries. Others who had somehow been close enough to shake Sinatra’s hand did not shake it; instead they just touched him on the shoulder or sleeve, or they merely stood close enough for him to see them and, after he’d given them a wink of recognition or a wave or a nod or called out their names (he had a fantastic memory for first names), they would then turn and leave. They had checked in. They had paid their respects. And as I watched this ritualistic scene, I got the impression that Frank Sinatra was dwelling simultaneously in two worlds that were not contemporary.

Green: Most writers tell us what the subject is doing. You tell us, here, what other people are doing to the subject. Using Sinatra’s fans as a prism through which to view him is illuminating. Do you strive to do this in all your work?

Talese: I do it in all my work. I write about fight fans when I deal with Floyd Patterson. I write about what the fans are like, all around him, when he gets knocked out. You feel lovable, he said. So I’m always aware of the recognition of fans, whether it’s at a boxing match or a concert. They’re part of the story. It’s the roving eye, the camera, as if I were a director. It’s the movie director’s sensibility of having people play their part.

Green: Do you have a director in mind?

Talese: No, I’m the director.

(The snapshot above is from Alan Light, taken March 1989.)