Gay Talese ist von der schreibenden Moralpolizei bereits mit Eimern scheinheiliger Scheiße übergossen worden, da hat Michel Houellebecq noch nicht mal seine erste Zigarette geraucht. Talese gehört zu dem Kreis großartiger Autoren, die in den 1950er und -60er Jahren den Journalismus auf ein neues Niveau hoben, in dem sie ihn mit literarischen Elementen von seinem Stenotypen-Joch befreiten. Die Geburt des New Journalism, oder auch literarischen Journalismus, sah bekanntere Namen als Talese's - Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson oder Truman Capote zum Beispiel - aber keiner hatte es sich so sehr zur Berufung gemacht, Non-Fiction als Kunstform zu vermitteln. 

Für viele Reportagen hat Talese jahrelang recherchiert, oft mit den Protagonisten zusammengelebt, und wurde dafür als "unethisch" bezeichnet. Mit Mördern und "Perversen" habe man nicht so viel Zeit zu verbringen. 

Mittlerweile 84 Jahre alt, sah sich Talese kürzlich für seine Reportage über einen Voyeur erneut im Mittelpunkt eines scheinheiligen Shitstorms. Aus diesem Grund empfehle ich die Lektüre seiner wohl bekanntesten und stilprägendsten Reportage "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" und das Interview, das Talese 2009 der Paris Review gab. Dort erklärt er u.a. die Genese des Textes:

"Harold Hayes, my editor at Esquire, said, I have your next piece: Sinatra. I told him I didn’t want to do it. Sinatra had been done to death. I mean, Christ, another piece on Sinatra? But Hayes is a strong person with a polite manner who got his way. So I go to the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles and I call Sinatra’s press agent, Jim Mahoney. He says Frank’s not feeling well. He has a cold. Mahoney is also not happy about other things. He’s unhappy about this rumor that Sinatra is friends with organized crime figures. Mahoney says, We may want you to sign an agreement saying we can see the piece first. I say, I can’t do that. He says, Then we might not have a deal. At the end of the week, I’m still in the hotel room, and Mahoney calls to ask me what I’m doing. I say, I’m waiting for you to call me. How’s Frank feeling? Well, he’s not very good. I say, He still has a cold? He says, Yes, he still has a cold. He brings up the agreement issue again, and again I say that’s a problem. He says, I understand you’ve been seeing people. Yes, I’ve been seeing people. You’ve been seeing some of Frank’s friends? I say, I don’t know if they’re Frank’s friends, but I’ve been seeing people. He asks me, How long are you going to be doing this? I don’t know, I say, and then he hangs up.

(…)

(Sinatra) didn’t talk to me. I wasn’t asking him for any favors but I was interviewing a lot of so-called minor characters. I specialize in minor characters. When I finally got back to New York I looked up Jilly Rizzo, a saloon owner who was close to Sinatra. He took me to see Sinatra’s parents in New Jersey. That was a great opportunity for me, because Sinatra’s mother was friendly and she told me about his relationship with Ava Gardner. I have to believe that Sinatra gave her permission to speak with me, because otherwise I doubt she would have seen me. Both Sinatra and I were cooperating with each other without acknowledging it. In other words, I was not asking for an interview, and he wasn’t saying, Don’t write about me. It was a funny little dance.

I turned in the piece at roughly a hundred pages. They didn’t change a word. When it came out it wasn’t like, Oh, this is one of the great pieces of all time. It was just another piece."