Almost every morning of the year, an 88-year-old man in a felt hat and a smart Italian-made suit walks out of his mansion on New York’s posh Upper East Side and into a sort of shelter set up under his porch. There, amid a neatly ordered jumble of boxes filled with handwritten notes lit by a bedside lamp, he settles down at a long, varnished desk and begins typing on a computer that seems to have been dug up from the days when computing was still in its infancy. Gay Talese is a writer. He is also a legend, a name that is cited in many anthologies, columns, and speeches from editorial offices to university lecture halls.
Gay Talese is undoubtedly the one who brought to posterity the famous New Journalism, this literary genre where the journalistic story is infused with the tools of fiction. Whether it is books or articles, everything here is a matter of chiseled staging, colorful dialogues and descriptions teeming with details on the form of things and people.
“I can’t afford to be bland, ever. I’m an elegant man and I believe in elegance in all circumstances.”
After having shaped his style in the columns of the New York Times and Esquire magazine in the 60s, Gay Talese built up a thick bibliography. There is Honor Your Father (1971), where we embark on the wheel of a powerful baron of the Italian mafia of New York, as well as The Voyeur Motel (2016), which is the thrilling encounter of this owner of an inn in the American depths who enjoys observing the intimacy of his customers by means of a few ingenious stratagems. In “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”, a vast portrait of the most eminent American crooner, Gay Talese writes this: “Sinatra wore a charcoal suit of the Oxford model, cut quite conservatively on the outside, with the lapels made of flamboyant silk; his English shoes, however, were impeccably polished, right down to the soles.” A wealth of information that speaks of the author's obsession with good looks, in others as well as for himself. "I have to be perfectly dressed at all times. When I leave my house to have a sandwich at the end of the street, I dress well. Why? Because I'm going to be seen. I can't afford to be ordinary, ever. I'm an elegant man and I believe in elegance in all circumstances," Gay Talese announces in the latest issue of L'Etiquette magazine.
In fact, rags have always been a part of the author’s life. Gay Talese is the son of an Italian tailor in Ocean Beach, a mid-sized town stuck in the shadow of New York, and he spent his childhood and adolescence watching the local notables parade in front of his father’s mirror. While in Europe for his military service, the young Talese went to Paris, where his uncle Antonio was a renowned tailor in the Opera district. “I became a regular customer of my uncle’s suits,” he explains. “In the years that followed, I managed to earn enough money to become one of his customers.” Impeccably tailored pieces in cream or ocean blue costing $2,500 or $3,000, even with a discount for the family proximity.
Today, Gay Talese owns nearly a hundred suits designed by his uncle, but also by Brioni, Zegna, Battaglia and Melandri, the kings of Neapolitan tailoring. Some are double-breasted and embellished with a belt. All are at least twenty years old and are in the style of the 1930s, Gay Talese's favorite period. "They are timeless pieces that impose their own style," he says proudly. To be able to wear his period costumes, with their body-hugging cuts, it is important to keep the same physiognomy, Gay Talese points out. "Since I like to wear old clothes, it is important that I do not gain weight. I have managed to weigh the same for fifty years. I do exercises, and I do not eat ice cream." The ultimate advice for wearing your clothes for life?