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When Gay Talese couldn't land an\xa0interview with Frank Sinatra, he\xa0wrote the\xa0profile instead\xa0by talking to\xa0Sinatra's tailor, stylist, valet, and other secondary characters in the pop star's world.\xa0The resulting piece for Esquire magazine, "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold," is a\xa0classic of New Journalism, which Talese helped pioneer.

"I wanted to be a storyteller," he tells host Alec Baldwin. "I used my imagination to penetrate the personalities, the private lives, of other people."

For more than six decades, those people\xa0have included mafia crime bosses, civil activists, literati, prizefighters\u2014and innumerable "normal" characters, with their own secret desires, triumphs, and failings.

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