After a few glasses of midday white wine in the lounge of the Brook Club, The Observer walked into the third floor dining room and found ourselves seated next to Gay Talese. We had seen him on a few lucky occasions over the past 12 months—the last night of Elaine’s, the Norman Read More
“You see? Even when I was a reporter covering Harry Truman I’m wearing a suit,” says Gay Talese. “I’m wearing a suit with Eisenhower; I’m wearing a suit with Joe DiMaggio.” He goes and looks for another photo. “Playboy cover; with Martin Luther King on the march in Alabama… See? I always dress up for Read More
While you were at the beach this weekend, Gay and Nan Talese moved out of their summer house in Ocean City, New Jersey to join Graydon Carter in Roxbury, Connecticut.
More from Publisher’s Weekly on Robert Weil’s new imprint at Norton, Liveright & Company (see our article from last week, Read More
In a back nook of Elaine’s someone had placed a blown-up old cover of Quest magazine featuring the chiseled features of Chuck Pfeiffer. “CHUCK,” the headline read, “MYTHICAL MADMAN WARRIOR.”
“Seventy, it’s an odd age,” Mr. Pfeiffer told The Observer, staring at the younger version of himself, a decoration for his birthday party last Read More
After years of patronage at Elaine Kaufman’s famed eponymous Upper East Side restaurant, Gay Talese has become, in the weeks since Elaine’s death, one of the primary writers associated with the beloved salon. Any obituary worth its salt reached out to Talese for a comment – it wouldn’t be complete without a Read More
MarketWatch media columnist Jon Friedman hasn’t been able to get an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric, so he penned what is basically a the media-about-media version of Gay Talese’s landmark 1966 essay “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
Friedman’s column, titled “Why Won’t Katie Couric Talk To Me?,” is a Read More
Gay Talese came to New York in 1956, when he was 24 years old. He spent the next nine years as a reporter at The New York Times, having worked his way up from copy boy. All the while, as he made a home for himself among the literary circles of mid-century Manhattan, Talese and Read More
When the 2009 Pulitzer Prizewinners were announced at on Monday at Columbia University, Jon Meacham was far from New York at another institute for higher learning. The Newsweek editor and Andrew Jackson biographer was at a board meeting at Sewanee: The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, when his Read More
The Oscars are like dividend statements from Bernie Madoff. You know they’re coming, you expect the worst, but you open the envelopes anyway, with your fingers crossed, hoping this year will be better. It never is, but despite rock-bottom ratings, and dwindling interest in too many nominees nobody ever heard of, too many categories nobody Read More
At the Taleses’ annual Christmas Eve dinner party tomorrow night, Nan Talese will be serving her favorite: Francis Ford Coppola’s Sauvignon Blanc and Merlot to complement the white-wine-and-lemon chicken and tender filet mignon.
Until 2001, the couple attended an annual holiday party on East 64th Street thrown by their dear friend, Serpico author Peter Read More
