Try dressing like that one time. Try picking your wardrobe blindfolded. Or let a monkey do it for you.
You can do better. Get some material together. You don’t need joke writers. (Although one good line that makes them laugh is worth a thousand shrewd observations on curious shifts in the Romanian Politburo!) Start with a newspaper. What’s going on, not just in the world, but most especially in the worlds of those you're likely to be meeting. Talk to yourself. What are your instinctive first comments? Are thev standard, flat-footed, obvious, dull?
Improve them. Don’t push over your desk now and storm out of the classroom complaining that if you could improve them, you’d be down at the newspaper office writing the columns for dullards like you to read before they start putting people to sleep at parties.
Don’t give up so fast.
There’s a “journalism course” you can take immediately that I feel is superior to that offered at some of our so-called major universities!
This course does not take four years.
It takes three words.
They are, Penetrate the Ostensible.
That’s so much fun that it seems more a toy than a teaching. Play with it.
Whatever the news is, decide what those putting forth the story want us to believe. That’s the ostensible story.
Now then, like hungry raccoons, push over the garbage can and nose around to see what’s good inside.
Ostensibly, one night in Pakistan in the early 1970’s, Henry Kissinger got a stomachache and went to bed early. Actually, he faked the stomachache so he could slip away to the airport and take a plane to Peking for the breathtakingly historic meeting with Mao Tse-tung.
That’s admittedly a pretty tightly wrapped can, and no shame accrues to whosoever saw Henry leave that party and failed to conclude, “Ostensibly lie’s ill, but I think he’s really planning a history-making night flight.’’
Other ostensibles, however, are easier to penetrate. A congressman suddenly lashes out against slumlords. Did slumlords just start? Did he just learn of their activities? Are those activities so exceptionally nefarious at this particular time that, despite his four terms of silence on the matter, his conscience compels him to lash out without further delay?
Possibly. Quite possibly. On another hand, however, his anti-slumlord assault may be early cannon in a Senate race he and he alone knows he’s just started waging. Or he may have just learned that the real estate interests have met (ostensibly socially) and decided to back his opponent in the primary. Or he may have been advised that those real estate moguls have come up with something damaging against him, and he wanted to hit first so their forthcoming disclosures could more convincingly be dismissed as “political backbiting” when they come flying.
Maybe this. Maybe that. Maybe yes. Maybe no. Regardless, the cause of conversation, at least, is much better served than with a bland helping of “Hey, how about what that congressman said about those slumlords!”
Ostensibly the black militant leader and the black moderate leader are ready, judging from their comments, to cross-lacerate one another on sight.
Perhaps, perhaps. But couldn’t it also be that they’re working closely together, a well-orchestrated trapeze act designed to let the black moderate say to the white power structure, “Look, if you don’t give me something to better my people’s lot and make me look successful, our embattled masses will shove me aside, and then you’ll have to deal with him, the unpredictable and uncontrollable militant extremist.”
“On the other hand,” “Looking at it another way, however,”. “Turn the page and pretend for a minute that.” “Have you considered another possibility instead?” Many a conversation has been saved and stimulated and even sent soaring by on-the-other-handing: someone shifting the conversational spotlight to more interesting parts of the stage. You don’t need much grasp of things, either. Just Penetrate the Ostensible.
That lesson pays off, not just in conversations but all over life itself. Does your tour driver tell you the beach at Ashdod is just like the beach in Tel Aviv because it’s true, or because he fears you’d want to take a walk in the Ashdod surf if you saw how nice it was and he’ll make no extra money for the wait?
Had that fourth-rate screenwriter in Hollywood been closer to a third-rate screenwriter, he might have penetrated the ostensible that memorable night and not felt falsely flattered all those years. Alas, he never caught on.
At two-thirty one morning his doorbell rang. He opened the door to find, to his unbridled astonishment, a famous film producer, who said, “Look, don’t cry out. I had to do it this way to get around company spies. Let me get right to the point. I’ve thought for a long time that you’re one of the most underrated writing talents in this town, and I want you to head up the writing team for a film I’m planning for the fall.
“Top dollar. Strictest confidence. Don’t even tell your wife.
“Congratulations! And, by the way, please forgive my unorthodox manner of approach.”
Hollywood’s seen a lot of different kinds of people, but so far they haven’t yet seen a fourth-rate writer who doesn’t agree with a producer who says he’s the most underrated talent in town.
What the poor guy never found out was that the producer was never looking for him in the first place. He was going to meet his actress mistress late that night, and he accidentally went to the wrong house. He recognized his mistake the instant the writer opened the door and quickly invented all that business about the admiration and the spies and the new film just to keep the secrecy of his affair intact. Now this producer is a philandering rogue for whom we hold no brief. But in this case he was better at manufacturing instant ostensibles than the writer was at conspiratorial penetration!
It’s fun. It’s fulfilling. Never leave an ostensible unpenetrated.
Starting things going conversationally takes work. Standing there and letting one lap over you is easy. Why should you have to work? Why should you have to assume the burden of making the conversation happen? Why should you have to arrange the fireworks display?
Fair questions.
Another fair question is why you’re there in the first place. What is your “mission” at that party? Are you there to kill ninety minutes or so, acquire some celery, some peanuts, six to eight canapes laced with cheese, anchovies, caviar, and red pepper, and two and a half glasses of white wine? Or are you there to gather some new allies—maybe four or five on a good night—in your ongoing battle for supremacy; allies who will accept your phone calls cheerfully and give you whatever help you reasonably request?
If the former, you needn’t bestir yourself. If the latter, however, your assuming the burden, taking the initiative, actually accepting responsibility for getting some good conversation crackling instantly separates you from the res of mankind and lets one and all know you’re a good reliable social soldier.
Try to find out what field someone’s in without asking directly. (Remember, the direct question, “What do you do?” robs the moment of the spin-weaving that brightens tapestries and nourishes friendships. At worst, the person may be insulted—or think you’re stupid—if you don’t already know.)
Drop early on what field you’re in. Don’t do it kerplunk, like a bowling ball at the feet that challenges him or her to tell you what field he or she is in or be exposed as a sorehead. Dance it through.
“I’m in raw cotton and, you know, those intrigues like the one between the governor and that deputy commissioner make me feel right at home.”
The Italians have perfected a feel-good trick that’s so effective it’s amazing the rest of the world didn’t steal it along with pizza. No matter who you are, no matter that they don’t know you, no matter that the odds dictate they’ll never see you again, Italian waiters nonetheless instinctively promote you. Take a seat in any restaurant in Italy and watch. The waiter will address you as Dottore (doctor), Commendatore (commandant), or some other insanity that says, “You may not possess precisely the l
ofty title I just awarded you, but your entire manner, bearing, demeanor, and persona bespeak a special kind of magnificence, and I dare not address you with any lesser title than the one I just invented.”
That’s why the shabbiest bum in the place will be at least Capitano (captain)!
You don’t have to come flat out and say to someone you’ve just met, “You know, you’re impressive. You strike me as a major industrialist.” There are other ways to play the “Italian” game to flush out his livelihood and get some good talk going without asking directly, “What do you do?”
“Look, you obviously have to make a lot of decisions for a living. How do you feel about the Senate bill?”
“With a schedule like you must have, how do you manage to get in all your required business reading?”
“I’m always curious to learn if successful people sought their present businesses, or stumbled into them.”
“You probably have to travel a lot more than most of us. ” If, for example, the person shows genuine glimmers of higher intelligence, particularly on those issues that excite politicians, watch the temperature needle in his eyes elevate when you ask, “I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve been asked this, but have you ever considered seeking elective office?” Assuming the obligation to get a conversation going is more than half the challenge. It’s fully three fourths.
The rest is developing a sense of effortlessness. The pianist’s hands, the dancer’s feet, the golfer’s swing, the ball player’s catch all achieve a higher nobility when they appear instinctive, automatic, doing-what-comes-naturally, effortless.
The man who calls his loving wife from the office to plan dinner seems a lot more effortless in that mission than the adolescent who sits four seats behind the head cheerleader in algebra class asking her for a date Saturday night. The difference is confidence, certainty of acceptance and success.
Starting and sustaining relationship-nourishing conversations need not be improvisational theater. It can be a hit you thought out well, even scripted.
Avoid any phrase, gesture, mannerism, utterance that blows its whistle, alerts the room, and reveals you as really saying, “Lookahere, folks. I’m trying to start a conversation!”
Let it all be natural, organic, effortless.
The dynamite opening and the smooth intro aren’t all that important. A sort of natural amnesty allows us all ten or twelve seconds of awkwardness getting started. From that point forward, you’ve got ways to make sure the dice are loaded on your side.
At a party one Saturday night celebrating the retirement of a famous TV-radio personality, his producer rose, raised his glass, and said, “This one’s to me. At last tomorrow morning, for the first time in ten years, I can read the Sunday papers for fun!”
All laughed knowingly. As many times as there are huddles in a football game, there are at least that many conferences inside the production offices of every TV and radio talk show on the air. The question is always the same: What are they interested in now?
The most meaningful scolding I ever received from a boss in broadcasting came from Jeanne Straus, who at the time was program director of YMCA and less than half my age.
“When I listen to your program,” she said, “I can always tell when you’re tired. That’s when you talk about anticommunist uprisings and freedom fighters in eastern Europe.”
Bull’s-eye.
Boxers get tired and let their arms droop in mid-ring. When talk show hosts get tired, they tend to forget what might interest the public and curl right up into that which interests them. I wasn’t the only one on Jeanne’s list. She regaled me with complaints about my brother broadcasters and how she could tell when they were tired. One, according to Jeanne, talked only about golf when he was tired, another only about extramarital relations, and a third only about the scandalous care given the horses that pull the carriages full of tourists through New York’s Central Park.
Bull’s-eyes all around.
You may cringe from the awesomeness of it all, but you are a broadcasting station. Everything you say is your “talk show." It may keep people interested, or put their feet to sleep up to the hips within thirty-five seconds. Your show has a “rating.” You can make it higher the very same way the pros do.
Pick up your newspaper and magazines, books, encyclopedias—all the excitement mines mentioned earlier—and go into a kind of production meeting with yourself. This time, don’t read for “fun.” Don’t skim and skip only to what interests you. Grasshopper around all the possibilities of what interests them—others, the world, your audience, your targets.
Old-style navigation called for compensation—knowing, according to the longitude of your position, how much deviation your compass suffered between true north and magnetic north. Try to develop the knack of knowing the degree of likelihood that what interests you will also interest them. That’s hard. Our instinct when people yawn at our most treasured tales is to denounce them inwardly as a tribe of dolts and go look for new, brighter, and more attentive people.
Professionals put all that disappointment and ego-rattling behind a cadmium shield and coolly continue looking for ‘ ‘what works.” You win in so far as you get a good idea of the size and shape of the gulf between what interests you and what interests them.
If your “act” isn’t making it with the ones you talk to, at least develop the sense to notice it, the grace to quit, and the determination to develop a new act. If you don’t strike oil rather promptly, quit boring. Rework the act.
No man in history ever yawned, looked at his watch, or let his eye wander when the woman he craved confronted him eye to eye and confessed undying love.
She had certain advantages going in. You can build your advantages by gathering “material” and devising ways to spice up conversations through deft injections of the right shtick at the right time.
Remember show-and-tell, a standing feature of every school in every democracy from kindergarten through grade four, in which the children are encouraged to stand up before the class and “report”—express themselves, tell about their trip to an uncle’s farm over the weekend, a movie they saw, a book their mother brought them from Baltimore, an argument about the President around last night’s dinner table—anything that might engross the other kids, hold their interest, make them want more.
(In dictatorships there’s no show-and-tell. There’s no encouragement to ‘ ‘Stand up and express yourself, ’ ’ but rather to “Shut up, listen closely, and repeat after me.”)
The shame of show-and-tell is, the kids who were good at it loved it and got better and became cheerleaders, editors of the school newspaper, and class presidents; and the ones who were bad at it sat there assuming that at the age of eight they had found their rightful place—the audience.
And they’re still sitting there. They’re sitting there feeling shy, inarticulate, lucky to be granted at least a nonspeaking role in the group. They smile as they tell you, “I’m not good at speaking.”
You’re allowed another shot, you know. You can recover from your show-and-tell failure of even fifty years ago by seizing upon something interesting they’ll want to hear and learning how to belt it out.
Try it tomorrow. Or tonight. Or five minutes from now; or whenever your audience gathers.
Your material will have little in common with what you tried on them in the second grade. One thing will be identical, though: A good performance would have made you more popular then, and a good performance will make you more popular now.
Conversationally, right now, what works best may be found in the subjects chosen by the talk shows and the print press. A lot of people are paid well not to make mistakes in diagnosing what grabs the public at the moment. Put those well-paid diagnosticians to work for you, at no cost. Notice what they, the pros, think we, the people, want to know, hear, discuss, debate, explore, and learn more about today.
Careful—they’re far from always right. That’s why producers and editors get f
ired so often, shows with low ratings go off the air, and publications with poor readership get purchased or merged. Their collective guesswork remains, however, a pretty good guide. Be aware that the “responsible” newspaper is going to carry a major page one story on a shakeup in the Togo cabinet though they’re perfectly aware nobody will read it. Meanwhile, the screaming-meemies tabloid will headline a divorce lawyer caught sleeping with his secretary even if the 1.2 million Chinese troops that just crossed the Ussuri River and invaded the Soviet Union have to be bumped over to page 5.
Jake notes. Keep files. The “funniest thine in the world” has happened to you thirty-five times in the past year. How many can you remember? Remembering them ten seconds after they would have lent an explosive lift to a conversation doesn’t count. How then can you retrieve the good stuff when you need it? Simply add those little notes to your daily required reading. We long ago made machines stronger than the human arm, but it’ll be a while yet before we devise a computer sharper than the human brain. The situation itself will draw the right anecdote from your mental treasury if you’ve reviewed your collection often enough.
Nothing feels less natural than that first golf swing with the teacher standing there and his eighteen “vital” things to do and not do ricocheting half remembered through your head.
We’ll return to that first golf lesson soon for a lesson that has nothing to do with golf.
Forget everything for the moment, except the name of this chapter.
Go into your next audience bearing in mind only that this time you are going to try to start the conversation and keep it going.
Get in there and Assume the Burden.
You’ll be pleased and surprised at your success.
The good talker who’s also good at making others talk is a likelier candidate for success than the good talker. He’s a much better candidate than the noncontributory onlooker who’d sooner start a fight than a conversation.
Making People Talk Page 5