I once asked my brother-in-law, who is a very well-known journalist (and who teaches journalism at Yale on Thursdays...) what his own particular favorite work of the craft was. Without hesitating, he said a 1965 celebrity profile which appeared in “Esquire Magazine” by Gay Talese’s entitled, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”. I was rather surprised, since my brother-in-law is as abject a political junkie as one could imagine, and who generally has nothing but contempt for celebrity anything.
But, it turns out that bro’-in-law’s opinion might be the general consensus, at least among people in the biz. There is, in fact, a separate Wikipedia article about it:
"Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is a profile of Frank Sinatra written by Gay Talese for the April 1966 issue of Esquire.[1] The article is one of the most famous pieces of magazine journalism ever written and is often considered not only the greatest profile of Frank Sinatra[2] but one of the greatest celebrity profiles ever written.[3][4][5] The profile is one of the seminal works of New Journalism and is still widely read, discussed and studied.[6][7] In the 70th anniversary issue of Esquire in October 2003, the editors declared the piece the "Best Story Esquire Ever Published."[1][8] Vanity Fair called it "the greatest literary-nonfiction story of the 20th century."
And, here’s Esquire’s own intro:
In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself.
So, in case you’d like to see for yourself, here it be: