Thoughts on the talent of Gay Talese

As I read Gay Talese’s collection of “Portraits and Encounters,” I found myself asking just what it was about his writing that is so appealing. It would be tiresome to point to his attention to telling details, like Frank Sinatra’s toupee or the mambo kings, salsa dancers and copper-colored prostitutes that bring to life a “breezy, palm-flapping winter evening in Havana.” This kind of craftsmanship seems almost a prerequisite of Talese’s genre. It would be equally cliché to point to his interest in nobodies and losers; it would also be false, as he is just as happy to write about celebrities and champions at the top of their game. What I picked up from returning to Talese this time is that at the heart of his talent is a kind of simple wisdom: the faith of a storyteller, namely, that all he has to do, by virtue of his curiosity, is find his way to the story, notebook in hand. Then he just follows the story along as it tells itself.

Gay Talese doesn’t so much tell stories as look at and listen to them. Late at night, he stares through shop windows at the “strange fairyland of gangling goddesses, all frozen in the act of dashing to a party, diving into a swimming pool or sashaying skyward in billowy blue negligee,” and he wonders who makes the mannequins that way. He sees the stray cats under cars or by the waterfront, and he asks if indeed there are different clusters of cat culture. A random afternoon in a pool hall, an evening in a TV studio and a day at a movie set, is each itself a tale, and at the same time each a slice of the sometimes lonely, other times tense and often sweet life of Frank Sinatra. Talese shows up at boxer Floyd Patterson’s clubhouse in upstate New York, and within a day he is off to witness the one-time knockout king lose in a standoff with a group of tweens. He hears of how Patterson slinks off from his defeated bouts in a fake moustache and dark glasses, afraid to face the crowd.

What Talese brings to each of these stories is interest in the variety and richness of life, his thoughtfulness, and his wide open eyes and ears.