Making People Talk

by Barry M Farber

  “Defensive” listening is essential.

  Comic Henny Youngman taught that concept in much less time than it takes to read this chapter.

  The matron, gushy and giddy, seemed confused by a reference in the conversation to World War Two,

  “World … War … Two,” said Henny pointedly. “You’ve heard of World War Two. It was in all the papers.”

  The first

  Assume the Burden

  step in Making People Talk is to bring yourself to accept the awesome obligation of getting things started. In starting people talking, the expected, the ordinary, the cliched, the automatic—that which comes naturally—is poor material.

  Your host lives in a penthouse with a magnificent view of the park. She shows you to the big living room window. It’s dusk. The park looks like a Christmas card that hasn’t been taken down off the mantelpiece even though it’s mid-April. It’s too beautiful. It’s your turn to say something.

  Nobody expects you to be as brilliant as that legendary guest who, standing in precisely such a place watching two-way traffic at the onset of darkness and seeing the cars down below with their white headlights approaching and red tail-lights receding, remarked, “Ahh, diamonds going up. Rubies going down.”

  You can, however, with preparation, do a little better than merely, "Gee, great view.” You don’t have to do much better—anything better is much better!

  How about, for example “What’s the longest anybody ever just stood here and stared?” ‘‘forgive me for a minute. I’m trying to decide if I’ve ever seen a view before to match this one.” ‘‘I’ll bet you get a lot of inspiration-just standing, here and gaping.” “The ophthalmologists’ association ought to pay to put this view on television, just to make people appreciate their eyesight a little more.” “A magazine should interview you to try to find out what effect having a view like this has on the rest of your life.” “You know, in a way you own everything down there.” “Forgive me, please. I’ve just had an overpowering urge to go write a poem!”

  “Great view” is the minimum requirement. In the military they call it a salute. Something a little more imaginative can turn that perfunctory salute into a back-and-neck massage. It’s a lot easier to forget your saluters than your masseurs.

  Any of those suggested alternative remarks gives you the chance-lo keep on going. “How do most people react to a scene like this one?” “What’s your favorite time of day to look out that window?” “Do you ever catch your friends turning away from whatever’s going on and just keep on looking out the window?” “Do you ever see little dramas playing themselves out in the park—joggers, lovers, that sort of thing?’ ’ — Make it a deliberate mission to get that host tn start talking about that view.

  Isn’t it old hat to him? At what point in his tenancy of that apartment will he get tired of hearing how great that view is? The answers are, respectively, no and never!

  He’s proud of that view. Pick something you’re proud of— your face, your chili sauce, your stretch limo, your new slimness, your wine collection, your Scottish burr when you tell ethnic jokes. Do you ever get tired of compliments, particularly good compliments you wish you could collect signed and notarized? Do you ever get tired of being asked good provocative questions about things you’re proud of? Chances are you get about as tired talking about your “attractions” as the underdog candidate gets being interviewed about his stunning upset victory on the Today show.

  Oh, it’s easy enough to get tired of ordinary people saying,-“Nice view.” Some people manage to bore you while they’re praising you. It’s hard to get bored, though, when another person who’s proven his worth by handing you a nice, original compliment seems genuinely interested in knowing more.

  People who wouldn’t do things for the proverbial love or money frequently do them for a third, less celebrated, but equally potent persuader: attention.

  We don’t all have love. We don’t all have money. But we all have equal reserves of attention and the ability to accord it whenever and to whomever we select. Too bad most people roll along utterly oblivious to the power this ability to confer attention can bring. They’re akin to Stone Age natives in the Sepik River Valley of New Guinea, at home with rocks and stones and grunts and groans but totally unaware of the value of the petroleum deposits splashing around a few yards beneath their feet.

  Those “resources” are too valuable to waste. They’re precious fuel for the ever-hungry furnaces of conversation.

  Probably the first, and definitely the worst, joke about psychiatrists deals with the young psychiatrist who asks the old one how he always manages to look so up and fresh and chipper after listening to all those unfortunate people’s problems all day. The older psychiatrist shrugs and says, “Who listens?” <

  That’s bad, because a joke owes us a sparkling little kernel of truth cunningly revealed. That joke is a lie.

  Pretending to listen, and trying to figure out how to make this deadly dud of a couldn’t-care-less relationship between you two suddenly sizzle and shoot skyward, takes a lot more out of you than actually listening.

  One of the greatest conversations I ever had was the one with Edna. Herb called me the morning of his party about an hour and a half up-country and asked, since I was driving, if I’d mind bringing Edna.

  I can honestly say I hated Herb for a full half minute after that outrageous request. He sounded so casual. Would I just as casually and say, “Herb, would you mind climbing up on to one of those torture racks and letting them twist you for an hour and a half’?

  That’s how the thought of driving Edna struck me.

  The actual drive with Edna, however, was quite different. Edna was an artist, a subject in which I have no knowledge, no ^interest, and no patience. I knew that Edna, on the other hand, was hard to move off the subject of art and painting. I further knew that my attitude was wrong and ridiculous; the whole civilized world would have voted with Herb; and it was, therefore, my problem.

  I thought of a way out. In the Old West, when the frontier doctor had to operate without anesthesia, they called it ‘‘biting the bullet.”

  When I picked Edna up, I had an inexpensive cassette recorder in the front seat with me and a smile drat was actually more than halfway meant. The bullet, when bitten, proved not all that untasty.

  “Edna,” I said, “I hope you don’t mind if I use you as an information mine. I’m tired of knowing so little about art while all my better friends seem to be getting so much pleasure out of it. I want to start from the bottom, and let’s see how much you can teach me between here and Herb’s, okay?”

  I flipped on the recorder and handed Edna the microphone. “Give me a short overall history of art,” I began, “from the caveman drawings through the earliest known painters clear up to the modem trends of today.”

  Edna did it, with some bewilderment at first, but with brio. I then asked her to name the first ten famous painters whose names flashed across her mental windshield and “introduce” >me to them. Next, I asked her about all the common art terminology, my ignorance of which is precisely what kept me from being interested in art all these years: cubism, realism, impressionism, dadaism.

  I recorded Edna’s answers and exuberated with the attitude of a student who’d found a way to filch a whole course and save a thousand dollars in tuition.

  By the time we’d gotten to Picasso’s blue period, Dali’s melting watch, and Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can, I was sorry Herb’s driveway was just ahead. I felt I’d scored both a long- and a short-term gain. Long—I was neither totally uninformed nor totally uninterested in art anymore. Short—the “torture rack” became a pleasure trip.

  That’s not a bad attitude to bring to your next conversation, whenever it breaks out. Maybe you won’t have a tape recorder, but maybe you also won’t be in action for a whole hour and a half. When doctors promise an injection will only hurt for a second, they mean it. The promise here is that one good burst of effort to st
art a good conversation will send you on a flying motorcycle crashing through the brittle glass of boredom. It’s a good feeling when you break that other kind of “sound barrier.”

  That’s the only hard part, summoning up the moral reserves to say to yourself, “This party is going to be my entire life for the next ninety minutes. I can be bored or boring, interested or interesting. I can reach out and try to break that glassware that separates people, or I can stay here within my own glass cage and sulk.

  “Whether I wind up making a contact here that will help me fulfill a life goal, or merely exchanging better than usual talk with someone else, this time I’m going to make the effort.”

  If, in the middle of that party, you think you’ve got a poem in you that will transform mankind, then by all means sneak into a quiet room and write it. If you think you’ve got a screenplay in you that will earn you megatons of dollars and fame, ask the host for some blank paper, slip away, and start writing.

  Chances are, however, that there’s nothing better you can do for yourself in those particular ninety minutes than turn some of those strangers present into allies through conversation.

  Who, now, do you haul off and befriend? Only conscience and clergy can counsel you as to whether you should go for the important people, the “nice” people, the sexy people, the interesting people, the ones able to do you the most favors, or those most in need of whatever it is you might offer. The same techniques of Making People Talk will work on all of them.

  A famous and feared New York critic was physically dominating the middle of the floor at a publisher’s cocktail party at the Four Seasons, apparently in deep conversation with an attractive woman whom I happened to know. Later, after he left, she came over to me and said, “Strangest thing. He grabbed me the instant I entered and said, ‘Please, stand with me here and pretend we’re having an interesting conversation. I don’t happen to know anybody here, and I don’t want to be seen standing alone!’ ”

  Let’s call that Condition Zero, and see if we can move upward from there. That critic, a celebrity, feared being exposed as an unloved celebrity, so he bullied his way into a phony show of “being okay,” conversing in the middle of the heady swirl with a beautiful woman. If he had marched over to anybody in that room, thrust forth his hand, smiled, announced his name, and started a conversation, whomever he targeted would have been dazzled, flattered, uplifted, enriched. And he himself might have learned something, gotten or given a laugh, acquired a useful name on a business card that could get him a difficult reservation if he ever wanted to get out of Hong Kong over a holiday or buy discount linen in Eden, North Carolina. At least he might have had—or given—a good time.

  Not this man.

  He might have had the world’s most unerring eye for flaws and virtues in the performances of actors, singers, and dancers, but he deliberately tore up his free tickets to the higher drama of the human mind.

  We’ve got phrasemakers and word choosers, and blessed is the talker skilled enough to know which to be at a given time. “Intercoursing” is, in this case, a chosen word. Conversation can acquire thrill power of near-erotic magnitude! And it may be plunged into and enjoyed by anyone in the proximity of another person at almost any time without disrobing, breaking a vow, or getting yourself all out of breath— or slapped, or shot, or arrested, or diseased.

  What if the starter at some great race fired his gun—and nobody ran?

  Yes, that executive could indeed make room for you in his Paris public relations department if he took a liking to you. Yes, that editor could indeed buy your story and, who knows, discuss your taking a whack at a few more. Yes, the investment banker at the party could indeed fund your scheme, the coach could advise your son, the director could audition your niece, the city councilman could put a tree outside your house, and the delightful lady or gentleman could enthrall you by agreeing to meet you for drinks after work the next day.

  Those are, however, all obvious targets of opportunity, diamonds blinding even the unskilled naked eye as they lie idly atop the surface.

  The interesting lesson is that every single person present at a gathering, if he were to go into a voluntary trance and meditate upon all the things he could do to make your ambitions congeal, could come up with a list of potential favors that would qualify him to wear a sign on his head that said, “I may not look like much, but believe me, pal, I’m well worth your getting to know!”

  Sure, we believe in equality of opportunity, brotherhood, and the ideals of the French Revolution and the Judeo-Christian ethic. But when your eye pans outward across the crowd, when you go to work taking the measurements of those in the room, you see a few “stars,” and a lot of extras, spear-carriers.

  I never learned how to turn boring parties into solid gold until I discovered the power of the spear-carriers.

  Believe it or not, those dull, balding, paunchy, coarse, unheard-of people own America and run the world! They’re the ones who can and will get you out of jail, into the navy, through customs, seats mid-orchestra on the aisle, high up on the fifty-yard line, backstage, ringside, off jury duty until after your vacation, into the secret buffet line with the thick roast beef, over to Europe first-class while others are begging on standby, in to see the pope with only three other businessmen and an Ecuadorian monsignor, into the geisha house in Kyoto that tourists never even know about, and close enough to touch the President whenever the tall ships sail.

  They’re the ones who control die complaint departments, waiting lists, security and credit checks, service, delivery, and invitation lists to fights and concerts their firms bought over a hundred tickets to before they got hot.

  They’re the ones who keep their business cards as ready as terrorists keep grenades. And they look at your card the next day, and occasionally remember which one you were.

  Make them talk, and you’re a richer person at party’s end, in one currency or another.

  No, you won’t get a personal loan from his new suburban bank if your credit record is a fright, no matter how engagingly you triggered his hilarious recollections of growing up in the Oklahoma panhandle during Prohibition. You will get only the jump, the edge, the benefit of the doubt. And that’s plenty.

  Wherever you swing your conversational pickax, there’s gold.

  And the less “likely”-looking they are, the more they appreciate someone reaching out, taking that painful initiative, breaking their crust, and Making Them Talk.

  There’s no art to initiating conversation. There’s an art to initiating meaningful conversation.

  The heat, the rain, the ball game, the President, the Dow, the hijacking, the big divorce, the big indictment, the big upset, the big merger, the big failure—those glibly trafficked sure things are excusable, in fact okay, as openers; but if you don’t move quickly into richer talk turf, you’ll have exposed yourself as a “nation” with no intellectual assets except a flagpole. Obvious topics, topics that could just as well be discussed by and with anybody who understands the language, have all the friend-making power of printed love letters.

  You think that comic who happens to be sitting ringside watching another comic is quick on his feet when the comic who’s performing introduces him and invites him to say a few words, whereupon he stands up, comes out of the crowd, and gets some of the biggest laughs of the evening? You’re not a fool. You’ve just been fooled, by a clever practitioner who knows that nothing needs more preparation and rehearsal than ad-libs.

  Should you do any less?

  Whenever two or more people get together, the group develops a kind of “collective mind.” What’s on it?

  The most baleful figure at the ball is the one who says, “I’ve heard so many great jokes lately, but I can’t remember a one. I’m going to start writing them down.” Let’s make him our champion negative role model as we build more and more towering collections of not just jokes, but facts, quotes, obscure news items off to one side of the media mainstream, zingers and stingers fr
om sources as varied as the inside pages of newspapers, filler blurbs in magazines, a talk show that boomed through your car radio from a station a thousand miles away, or a brilliant remark inadvertently overheard on the way to work.

  Whatever day it is, that day has news, that week has news, that place has news.

  Something is on that collective mind. What is it? Think now. All the obvious angles are obvious and therefore of low candlepower. Do you happen to have an original angle, is your slant a fresh, imaginative approach to whatever’s going on? If not, read the reaction stories in the newspapers and magazines. The men and women who put those publications together are your personal trained staff of writers and editors constantly on the lookout to hand you material to make you scintillate. And .they charge you only pennies a day.

  “Gee, wasn’t that royal wedding something!" is a remark that, like truck-stop broccoli has all the nutrients deliberately boiled out. That remark is incapable of impressing. “What did you think of the royal wedding?” is not much better.

  I was interested in that comment from an ordinary Londoner on TV who, right in the middle of all the pageantry around the royal wedding, said of Britain’s plight, “Well, it looks like the Japanese are good at manufacturing electronic equipment, and we’re good at staging ceremonies!”

  That’s nourishment.

  Everybody goes to the party totally in control of how he or she looks. Everybody goes to the party totally in control of how he or she acts. Almost nobody, though, ever goes to a party with any forethought about what he or she’s going to say.

  People have been known to stay home from parties, good ones, because “I haven’t got a thing to wear.”

  Did anybody ever yell from a dressing room, to a husband or wife pacing impatiently in the hallway, “Go ahead without me, dear. I haven’t got a thing to say”?

  Although that is a much better reason to stay home!

  Party-bound, everybody figures he or she will just mosey on in, have a drink, grab a toothpick with a cube of orange cheese on the end of it, see who’s there, shake a few hands, exchange a few names—and wait and see what comes up.