Sometimes it feels as if being a journalist consists mostly of waiting for return phone calls from people who are never going to call you back.
The other day I called Kathleen Weiner, the chief of communications at Outer Cape Health Services, to find out whether a report that they were losing a gender-affirming care provider was true. She said she didn’t know but promised to find out and call me right back. No call came.
Jack Riemer, a member of the Truro Planning Board, sent us a letter to the editor about the removal of Tim Hickey’s select board campaign signs by the town, calling it a “targeted attack on free speech.” It was a juicy letter with acid accusations but no evidence, so I asked Riemer to call me and answer a few questions. He never did.
We’ve been having trouble with our Verizon internet service at home, where we work the final deadline cycle every week. We called for help and were promised a call back. Crickets.
And then there’s Bernard McEneaney, the former financial adviser to the late Napi Van Dereck, whose management of Napi’s properties has been the subject of numerous stories in this newspaper — including two this week. Every time we write about him, we call and try to get McEneaney’s side of the story. He hasn’t returned our calls since August 2021.
All this was putting me in a pretty bad mood until I read the chapter about Gay Talese in Adam Moss’s new book, The Work of Art. Moss interviewed more than 40 supremely talented people and tells the hidden stories of how they created great works of art — “how something comes from nothing.” The chapter on Talese is about his famous Esquire article called “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” a preeminent example, writes Moss, of what was then known as the New Journalism, practiced by reporters “who set out to prove that journalism in the right hands could be literature…. Fundamentally, the medium they were forging was to try to take fact and fuse it with imagination, but without compromising the fact.”
Talese had been assigned to profile Sinatra for a cover story and went to Los Angeles to interview him. He called the star’s press agent and asked, “When will I see Mr. Sinatra?”
“Well, Frank isn’t feeling well,” came the answer. “He has a cold.”
Talese ended up spending three months in L.A. trying to get the interview. Sinatra never did talk to him. But the writer persevered, and his 14,000-word piece about all the people surrounding and protecting Sinatra was the magazine’s April 1966 cover story — and is still widely read.
“I don’t need Sinatra,” Talese told his editor. “There are a lot of minor characters in this story. Everyone is a minor character — and here’s the story: When Frank Sinatra has a cold, everyone has a cold.”
Maybe everyone on the Outer Cape has a cold this week. It doesn’t matter. We’re going to keep calling.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this column, published in print on June 13, incorrectly stated that Bernard McEneaney has “never once talked to us.” McEneaney did, in fact, once respond to a reporter’s phone call in August 2021, when he said that seven Jamaican employees of Napi’s restaurant who had been fired by manager Dan Sabuda had all quit and had not been let go. McEneaney has not responded to phone messages since then.
