The nineteen sixties were times of innovation in American magazines. “New Journalism” was flourishing; Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson were writing their most famous essays in Esquires, Playboys, and Rolling Stones that only slightly resemble their homologues today.

Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is a famous example, and one I hadn’t read until just recently. It was originally published in Esquire in April 1966.

I’m young enough that I never experienced the Frank Sinatra “mystique.” I think I get it now.