“Frank Sinatra Has A Cold”
1] Gay Talese doesn’t really explain what makes Frank Sinatra interesting, he more shows it, like with our personal narrative pieces. Frank Sinatra is a very interesting person, and a lot of people would be interested in discovering another side of him that they haven’t seen before.
2]Talese describes Sinatra as a three dimensional person, not just the celebrity or the work. He inserts lyrics to songs at points that help explain Sinatra as a person through certain times in his life, and shows how back and forth, up and down of a personality Sinatra has.
3] As a writer, Talese helps us to understand Sinatra’s motivation through his story, without shoving it down our throats, as “Sinatra is motivated by blah blah.” I couldn’t put a finger on the exact motivation, but I came away from the piece knowing what motivated the great Frank Sinatra.
4]Gay Talese uses everything at his disposal to paint a complete portrait of Frank Sinatra, from family, to friends, bartenders, etc, and even his own observations just by being in the same room as him.
5] From what I got of the piece, the writer wanted to portray Frank Sinatra as just a regular kind of guy, ups and downs, good days and bad days, just that he has other reasons for the goods and bads than people who aren’t famous.
Interviewing the Interviewer – Reflection on Gay Talese’s interview
After reading Gay Talese’s profile and knowing he was the idolized interviewer, it was interesting to see him interviewed. To me it felt like he wanted to help those he was talking to spoon-feed a great piece to the interviewers, like the pieces he constructs about people. He gave a lot of background, including specific stories about his childhood that were particularly strong and interesting, especially those about World War II. He definitely had control of the situation, I personally felt like the “interviewers” didn’t have control of the situation at all; the wanted it to be a little more Q&A structured, but Talese’s made a point while talking about tape recorders that structure doesn’t work very well at all.
He spent a lot of time talking about what influenced him and how his upbringing affected the kind of pieces he did, and how he could related to the people he wrote about. As he watched his mother build the salon-style trust people nowadays give their stylists, he wanted that sort of insight into people’s lives that came from hearing stories “straight from the horses mouth.” I personally think that’s what makes “Frank Sinatra has a Cold” such a classic piece, is because its not the usual Q&A piece, but I also don’t think I’ll have that much of a problem with many of the people I interview for my own investigative report. I definitely want to do a piece on Penn State and our drinking reputation, and as long as students know they won’t get in trouble, they usually don’t have a problem with being honest about what they chose to do on the weekends.
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