Gay Talese does L.A.

When Gay Talese reported his famous 1966 Esquire story "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," his Beverly Hills hotel and restaurant tabs became legendary. Things have changed some. This week he's staying at the Radisson on South Figueroa so he can walk across the street to lead classes in the USC professional writing program. He hasn't sold a magazine piece in ages. And Sunday's Los Angeles Times ran a profile—pegged to his new book, Gay Talese: A Writer's Life—that calls Talese "a man deeply in need of reassurance."

His latest book, due in 1995, was delivered 10 years late. During the last 13 years, he grew despondent that his work had no focus, lacked a compelling voice. He fretted that he had faded from view and would be forgotten"...

"Gay was depressed for much of the time during the writing of this book," said his wife, publisher Nan Talese, during an interview in her office at Doubleday..."I've never seen him so troubled, so worried that he might have lost his way."

But the book got done, and on Sunday night Talese was feted like "the most important nonfiction writer of his generation," as David Halberstam called him. He held forth for most of an hour at the L.A. salon known as the Moron Society, at the home of journalist Amy Wilentz and Nick Goldberg, op-ed editor of the Los Angeles Times. Prompted by questions from Steve Oney of Los Angeles Magazine and Lawrence O'Donnell, executive producer of NBC's "West Wing," Talese derided most of what runs in magazines other than the New Yorker and blamed the tape recorder for elevating glorified transcriptionists into cover story writers. For the Sinatra piece, he famously never spoke to Sinatra—reporting the story by lurking for months among the people who surrounded the singer. That approach cost him years later when Tina Brown killed his New Yorker piece on John Bobbitt because he didn't talk to penis-whacker Lorena Bobbitt. As he told that story Sunday night, there was an uncomfortable moment when he realized that Kim Masters was in the room. Masters did get to Lorena for a 1993 piece that did run—in Vanity Fair.

Talese will be in town through this weekend's Times Festival of Books, where he speaks on Sunday. On May 2 he lectures at UC Irvine for the School of Humanities and the Literary Journalism Program.