On writing well

In journalism school they teach you that Frank Sinatra Has a Cold is one of the best stories ever written. Why? Because it was written in spite of Frank Sinatra, he might say TO spite Frank Sinatra and the story of the story is, Gay Talese could not no how get an interview with Frankie. So he interviewed everyone else and wrote a story about Frank anyway, and it was more revealing than anything that Frank himself could or would have divulged.

Unauthorized biographies should be a lot like this and often are not. Magazine stories should be like this too but nowadays there's no celeb worth her fairy dust who would turn down an interview, so the need never arises.

Or does it?

Celebrity is a science now, for those who have that particular DNA. Having interviewed a few famous people myself I can say that they quickly develop a veneer of .... veneer, actually. It is virtually impossible to get beneath it. Celebrity culture is such, too, that the Faustian deal is never risked, not many writers would dare irritate the publicist (if not the celeb) who might provide the big "Get" later on and down the road.

So, we can only ever see what we are supposed to see.

Imagine then the delight of reading the profile of Madonna in the May issue of Vanity Fair. Madonna, we are given to understand, is a master controller. It's always all about her, with her you get what you get, she sets the agenda and the tone, she is the centre of the universe and the universe is a damn fine place to be...this is what we glean from the lifetime she has spent in front of us. In the fascinating film, Truth or Dare, the filmmaker asks her (as I remember it) if she'd like to do something or other off-camera. Her then boyfriend Warren Beatty, no slouch of a celeb himself, says "she doesn't want to LIVE off camera" -- and you'd have to say he'd know.

I've seen many interviews with Madonna and except for the strange chat with David Letterman where she giggled and cussed and appeared out of control (see the first video above...this is where we learned that if you pee in the shower, you can prevent athlete's foot -- an utterance that made prissy Letterman blanch) she puts the boring into bored so calculated is she. I suspect that she controls her own facade even with her husband and why not, I suppose -- reality can be so messy, and ordinary. In the current case, the VF writer, Rich Cohen, was clearly getting vintage Madonna, a full serving of banalities and key messages with not a hair or a breath out of place.

And so he wrote his own story. Cohen is not Talese, but this story is nonetheless a solid read and far more revealing that Madonna would have otherwise allowed.

And the pictures are amazing. She really is an image.