Tom Junod Would Like to Tell You About His Father
A star writer from the heyday of magazines reveals the family secret behind his award-winning stories.
He has been writing this story for decades.
His profile of Frank Sinatra Jr., published in GQ in 1994, about a sensitive son living in the shadow of a domineering patriarch, was autobiography by proxy. His 1996 profile of Tony Curtis, also for GQ, was an attempt to understand a familiar type of vain man who in old age remained “virtuosic” in pursuit of his own desires.
And his celebrated profile of Fred Rogers, which ran in Esquire in 1998 and was later adapted for the 2019 film “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” starring Tom Hanks, was, he admits now, a way of seeking an alternate male role model.
For as long as he has written profiles like the one you are reading now — with openings that coyly withhold the subject’s name; with rolling sentences delivered in a hyped-up voice that once made him, in his words, “the hot guy, when there could be a hot guy in the magazine business” — Tom Junod has been writing about his father, and not quite nailing it.
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