IN1966, THE American journalist Gay Talese wrote an article in Esquiremagazine that's getting more relevant by the day, a piece of work still pored over by tens of thousands of media studies graduates during shift changes at Starbucks.
"Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is a classic of that most enduring and frustrating genre: the celebrity profile. More specifically, it shows what can be done when the celeb in question isn't up for talking. A month away from his 50th birthday, Ol' Blue Eyes's health was just one of many reasons he was feeling grouchy: these included the rise of The Beatles (part of what he saw as a lack of deference to authority shown by young people); women (including his split from Ava Gardner and subsequent short-lived marriage to Mia Farrow); and a general disillusionment with his post- From Here to Eternityfilm career. In short, he wasn't up for a sit down with the man from Esquire.
Despite this unpromising scenario – there is not a direct quote from Sinatra among the article’s 12,000 words – Talese conjures a likeness of his subject that, it’s tempting to think, is far closer to the truth than a 1,000 quote-filled Sinatra puff piece.
As a form, the celebrity profile is the point at which the juggernauts of marketing and independent media collide – marketing’s message sent using media’s audience – and the story of the intervening 44 years is that marketing has won out.
Sinatra’s PR man, Jim Mahoney, was “a somewhat chunky young man with a square jaw and narrow eyes who would resemble a tough Irish plainclothesman, if it were not for the expensive continental suits he wears and his exquisite shoes, often adorned with polished buckles”.
Today, Mahoney has been replaced with teams of business school educated lawyers, each seeking copy approval, product mentions and cover deals. The result is that most celebrity profiles are mere advertising, with the journalist acting as a stenographer for the star’s PR department. Interviews are carried out in anonymous hotel lobbies, with lines of hacks waiting patiently to get the same quotes, before heading back to the office to write the same article, give or take the opening paragraph.
But despite the airbrushed nature of the coverage, the media is still resented by those who live on the other side of the divide.
“This is my problem with interviews, you know?” said Kanye West, rapper-cum-entertainment-brand, recently. “What if you did music and someone else could come in and change your words around and then release it to the radio? And you ain’t even get a chance to listen to it before they dropped it to radio? That’s how interviews are! You say what you say and then you get paraphrased,” he’s quoted as saying. “I wanna get approval.”
It’s a view Sinatra may have shared, were Talese able to ask him a question on the topic.
The rise of social media has been championed by many celebs as a route through to a promised land, where they can communicate directly to their fans without the inconvenience of speaking to a middleman. Given this sort of distributive power, what price the future of the celebrity profile?
Last month, another American journalist, Josh Weiner, gave us an update on that question. He doffed his hat to Talese with the title of his own article: “Kanye West Has a Goblet”, written for slate.com. Its subheading gives a hint as to what’s to come: an all-access, totally non-exclusive interview with the would-be king of hip-hop.
Like Sinatra before him, West did not grant the writer an interview and so Weiner, like Talese before him, chose to reinvent the genre, taking the quotes from West’s myriad public utterances on social media websites such as Twitter, Ustream and YouTube. These are then written up in the classic style of the in-the-room, all-access celebrity sit down.
The result is a brilliantly readable insight into Kanyeworld: “Fur pillows are hard to actually sleep on”, so “says” the rapper in the opening sentence (a remark taken directly from West’s own Twitter feed), before lamenting on the media’s tendency to judge him much too narrowly.
“When I think of competition it’s like I try to create against the past. I think about Michelangelo and Picasso, you know, the pyramids,” he “says”.
Stripped of any context or editorial process, the views of Kanye West are ridiculous. It’s enough to make him want to talk to a journalist.
