Gay Talese // Phil Stern // Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese set out for Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to write a major profile on Frank Sinatra. When he arrived, he found the singer and his vigilant entourage on the defensive: Sinatra was under the weather, not available, and not willing to be interviewed. Undeterred, Talese stayed on in L.A., believing Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and used the meantime to observe the star from a careful distance and to interview his friends, associates, family members, and hangers-on. Sinatra never did grant the one-on-one he had hoped for, but Talese’s tenacity paid off: his profile Frank Sinatra Has a Cold went down in history as a tour de force of literary nonfiction and the advent of the New Journalism.

First published in 1966, Gay Talese’s crystalline portrait of Frank Sinatra, combined faithful fact with vivid storytelling. Its incisive portrait of Sinatra in the recording studio, on location, out on the town, and with the eponymous cold, revealed as much about a singular star persona as it did about the Hollywood machine. In this Collector’s Edition, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold is published in traditional letterpress, with an introduction by Gay Talese and facsimile reproductions of manuscript pages, correspondence, and original storyboard revealing the making of the book.

To complete the Sinatra picture, the text and archival material is interwoven with photographs of Sinatra from the legendary lens of Phil Stern, the only photographer granted access to Sinatra over four decades, as well as other top photojournalists of the ’60s— including John Bryson, John Dominis, and Terry O’Neill. Reproduced in rich duotone, the photographs compliment Talese’s character study by documenting the many complex facets of Sinatra: the voice, the showman, the doting father, the Hollywood magnet, and the man with, in his own words, an “over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.”