Individuals, like nations, have major holidays (births,’ graduations, getting out of the army, wedding anniversaries), territory (where they were bom, raised, educated, stationed, commute from, spend weekends, and choose to vacation), culture (what they read, watch, disdain, wait in line to buy tickets for), politics (whom they campaign for at parties, argue about, deride, denounce) and cuisine (was it a crab house on the Maryland shore, a barbecue pit in the Carolinas, or a fish stew wharf in the Greek islands they made you swear you’d never pass within one hundred fifty miles of without trying?).
Individuals also have their own heroes and villains, as vivid to them personally as Nathan Hale and Benedict Arnold are to Americans nationally. Everyone’s life is peppered with historical highlights—winning Miss Arizona, getting a better job after getting fired, having gallstones removed, ambushing Wall Street by engineering a merger that made the evening news and the front cover of Barron’s, running for the gamewinning touchdown as a freshman, successfully taking the butcher to small claims court, etc.
Insignificant to the world at large. Unimportant to the rest of us in the room. But very big deal indeed to the ones who live them.
The wizard who pulled off the merger will likely be prouder of that fresh achievement than he is of having run for the touchdown thirty years ago. But a man who never did anything greater than run for a touchdown thirty years ago will be just as proud of that as the wizard is of his merger.
You think it’s ridiculous that somebody can get ego juice out of a thirty-year-old touchdown? So what? You may also think Chile has a ridiculous shape and Iceland a ridiculous climate. Don’t waste an erg or an instant ridiculing. Deal with it. Use it. Turn it all to your gain.
National holidays and anniversaries are regularly observed by the population. Our individual festivities have, obviously, a smaller following.
Except for those of topmost celebrities, individual big deals are rarely even known, much less celebrated, praised, or even mentioned by those outside our tight little circle of family, friends, and associates.
Much good fiction pinwheels around computer freaks breaking into other people’s computer systems and playing hob with competitors, banks, the Pentagon, even NORAD’s headquarters, where, at least in fiction, a smart computer gamesman could make America think it was under attack by enemy missiles.
Listening—not just hearing, but deliberate, clinical, opportunistic listening—is tapping into other people’s “computer” systems. If you wind up in possession of someone else’s secret love letters, his income tax down to the penny, or the five-letter code on his cash withdrawal card, he would, upon confrontation with that information by you, quite likely be astonished that you knew. He keeps that kind of information carefully guarded.
He’ll be just as astonished, though, when you show yourself to be in possession of the fact that the new country club wasn’t quite sure it wanted to admit him until he beat the tennis pro in straight sets. He’ll still want to know how you knew, even though he himself bragged about it to all who would listen at the trade show the year before last!
That’s how unaccustomed we are to being listened to.
Ordinary listening is the most flattering kind of espionage. Rare and rich is the joy of having our most triumphant “secrets” ferreted out and broadcast by “brilliant conversationalists” like you willing to speak up and let all present know of our hidden glories.
Amplifying the triumphs of others is undeniably one way to win their favor. But is it an acceptable way to win their favor? Every language has words of contempt for those who win their way forward by kissing the anatomical opposite of faces. We somehow feel favor should be won by being the fairest, the fleetest, the fittest—that kind of thing.
Baloney.
There’s a difference between drip irrigation and a flood. Dumping manure is not the same as fertilizing soil with the most sophisticated methods.
He who listens, spots “entries,” remembers them, catalogues them, retrieves them before the next likely encounter, and zings them appropriately into the conversation with zest and wit deserves all the goodwill that flows unto him. __
Don’t worry that your campaign of making an indelible impression was so utterly calculated. There are major religions that would honor you for what you did.
“I don’t know what it is that she’s got,” the man said about the woman everybody was trying to meet, “but whenever she enters a room, it comes right in with her.”
We all know what he’s talking about. But what is it? What is that it?
Is it just sex appeal? No. Too many women and men have more sex appeal than nature should allow to concentrate in one clump, but still don’t have it. And we all know men and women who exude it without being sexually appealing at all.
Is it the energy, charisma, charm, niceness, strength, confidence, magnetism, posture, bearing, success, or attitude of the person possessing it? We’ve passed clear through what we’re looking for without finding the exact address, and we’re still lost. And we’re going to stay that way, because the elusive it is the result of just the right dash of spice from every jar in that rack, and more, combined in a kind of molecular harmony within a person that allows it to be communicated effortlessly to others.
Does the it make people stars, or do stars—after then-aerobics, morning yogurt, and daily talk with their investments manager—retire to the den and work on their it?
The failures—rather, the “presuccessful”—among us get annoyed when celebrities are praised for being so “nice,” for being so “easy to talk to” and “acting just like ordinary people.” They look skyward and say, “Make me successful, and I swear I’ll be nice, easy to talk to, and act just like an ordinary person, too.”
The plea comes true more often than the promise. The ability to make a roomful of people think they hear heavenly music and feel a ripple of volcanic warmth merely by entering that room is an attribute possessed by very few of even our most major celebrities.
It was the kind of party young men and women throw before they learn it’s not quite enough: booze, pretzels, a hastily arrayed cake brought by one of the guests, coats on the bed. I was the host. When I invited my doctor, he asked if he might have a friend of his meet him at my party because the two of them had to go someplace together later on.
The friend got there first.
“How do you do?” he said when I opened the door. “I’m Frank.”
He gave me his last name, too, but it was lost in the crowd noise. Or it was before I recognized the absolute necessity of getting names and getting them right. Or both.
Anyhow, I invited him in, offered him a drink, and proceeded to try to make him comfortable.
“What do you do, Frank?” I asked.
“I play football,” he said.
“I do, too,” I said. “I mean what do you do for a living?”
He repeated that same answer. He played football—for the New York Giants!
His last name, the name I fumbled, was of course Gifford.
You don’t have to be a losing football team to know what it feels like to get scored on. Here was the most popular player in America of my far and away favorite sport, a man on everybody’s list of the ten most known and beloved Americans. Here was Frank Gifford in my apartment—and I didn’t even know who he was!
If they indicted people for offenses like that, sure, I could put up a fair to middling defense. I wasn’t expecting Frank Gifford at my front door. My doctor only told me his “friend” would come by; he never mentioned his friend’s name. I didn’t catch his last name at the door. He didn’t look like Frank Gifford. His face did, but I’d always thought Frank Gifford had to be bigger. You’ve seen football players lying on the ground fist-pounding the Astroturf in shame and rage at missing a pass. That’s what I did.
I should have known from that big hot cloud of it in the doorway that he had to be somebody like Frank Gifford.
What happened next was pure Sup
er Bowl play. Some celebrities have to be rushed to the intensive care unit of an ego clinic when they’re merely addressed by a slightly wrong name, mistaken for someone else, or insufficiently greeted. And here Frank Gifford had just gone totally unrecognized!
Gifford spent the next half hour making sure I was okay!
He laughed away my explanations and apologies and said he wished that kind of thing would happen more often. He asked where I was from, and then talked the football of my region, asking me questions about my opinions of coaches and players in my territory.
As word filtered through the party that Frank Gifford was there, all the guests gravitated into a circle around him, and he graciously held a “press conference,’’ answering everybody’s questions and chuckling at everybody’s comments.
Travel agency owner Gabriel Reiner once had to spend twenty minutes trying to convince a rural telegraph office clerk in a tiny village in western Russia that, regardless of her never having heard of it, there nonetheless was a place called New York City!
I know how I feel about that telegraph lady.
I can only guess what Frank Gifford thought of me.
But that’s not important.
What’s important is that Gifford’s it-propulsion made me feel better about myself. He made me talk.
It takes a champion to make the speechless talk!
Malcolm X and I were friends.
The likelihood of any fraternal linkup over the racial, ideological, philosophical, and religious chasms that separated us may have seemed slim, but Malcolm and I many times laughed our way over all that.
The Black Muslims were introduced to white America in a 1960 article in Esquire magazine by black journalist William Worthy. We read what seemed like incredible tales of blacks in poor neighborhoods and prisons who had embraced Islam as one (and only one) act of rebellion against the Christian descendants of their white slave masters.
The Black Muslims wanted their own black nation on the continent of North America. They referred to the white man as the Devil and the Two-Legged Rattlesnake. Elijah Muhammad, their founder, issued his mandates from Black Muslim headquarters in Chicago. Their spokesman was Malcolm X. I invited him on my show.
At the time I was broadcasting from Mamma Leone’s Restaurant on West Forty-eighth Street in New York. Malcolm X arrived behind a phalanx of tall, strong, impeccably groomed bodyguards known as the FOI (Fruit of Islam). Their buffed fingernails gleamed in the subdued lighting. They called all white men “sir” and made a show of deferring to them, not with a shuffle but with a kind of military snap and precision.
Even though his face was not yet well known, it was easy to tell which one was Malcolm. He radiated enough charisma to bum Kleenex, wilt flowers, and melt plastic.
I’d been what I always thought was a racial “liberal.” As a senior at the University of North Carolina, I’d led the fight among the athletes to desegregate Kenan Stadium so black students (the university had just admitted its first four) could sit in the student section of home football games. Martin Luther King might have appreciated that, but not Malcolm X. As far as he was concerned, there was very little difference between me and the Orange County coordinator of the Ku Klux Klan.
If you weren’t ready to grant blacks their own nation somewhere on American territory and compensate them financially for all the years of slavery, you were just another Two-Legged Rattlesnake.
In early 1965 Malcolm told the world a hit squad was out to get him. I joined the white reporters who wondered if Malcolm were just posturing to hit back at the Elijah Muhammad faction that had thanked him for making them famous by ejecting him from the movement.
In December 1969, after Malcolm was murdered, I traded jobs for a week with talk host Bill Smith of station WKAT in Miami Beach, which covered the major population centers of south Florida. He did a call-in program, and I asked the listeners, as the decade was ending, which of the leaders assassinated during those 1960’s would be most missed in years to come: John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X.
To my amazement—in south Florida, mind you—the winner was Malcolm X by quite a wide margin. And far from all his votes came from black listeners.
Malcolm’s autobiography mentioned me as one of only two white reporters he trusted. Over the years more and more people (not fewer and fewer, as you might expect) have come up to me and congratulated me on that distinction. One businesswoman, an unamended white Woodstock veteran of the radical counterculture, flat out gave me a better deal than I asked for because, despite my conservative reputation, “Malcolm said you were okay”!
Malcolm has grown in literature and’legend and hardened into a lustrous and mellowed permanence.
How did I earn that piggyback ride into history inside Malcolm’s autobiography?
It wasn’t just by Making Him Talk.
Making Malcolm X talk was no problem. I trace his deciding I was “okay” to one of our phone conversations in which I literally silenced him—shut him up completely—and then made him talk about something he never intended talking about to anybody.
I got a postcard from Malcolm one day from Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where he’d been invited by Arabs incredulous at reports of mass conversions of American blacks to their Islamic religion. When the headlines told me he was back in New York, I gave him a call.
“Who’s calling?” his secretary asked.
“Tell him it’s the Two-Legged Rattlesnake,” I said.
Malcolm came on the line and returned my jape with more of his racial jargon. We bantered back and forth, the way we usually did as a warmup, and then I fired the question that stunned him.
“Malcolm,” I asked, “did you take any pictures while you were in Mecca?”
That may not seem like such a conversation stopper, until you realize it’s a little like asking a rabbi if he had any good pork chops in Jerusalem. Mecca is the Holy City. You don’t aim cameras and click in Mecca the way you do in other cities, including other holy cities.
Malcolm didn’t say a word for a while.
Finally he responded. “Interesting you should ask me that. Muslims, you know, are forbidden to take pictures in Mecca. When I arrived, the top spiritual people greeted me and said that because I was one of the most unusual Muslims ever to visit Mecca—a black convert from America—they wanted to grant me dispensation. They said I was free to take my camera and photograph anything I liked.
“And you know,” he continued, “I was so overcome with emotion that I didn’t take one single picture the whole time I was there!”
I spent most of my time with Malcolm being outraged by his rhetoric. I couldn’t believe he actually said, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, “The chickens are coming home to roost.”
For that one instant on the phone, however, I felt he and I were like that French soldier and German soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front, hugging and sobbing together in a foxhole between the opposing trenches in no-man’s-land.
My show was on radio, not television. It was local, not network. Yet from that moment forward, Malcolm cooperated with me, came to the show even on short notice, as though I were a star on prime-time network TV. Or the imam of his personal mosque.
I cried when they shot him down.
* * *
Eleanor Roosevelt was “it-radiant.” Whom was she like?
Some may suppose Eleanor Roosevelt achieved that special First Lady luster because of the overwhelming popularity of her four-term husband, her widely syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” the fact that she was First Lady during the war, or the tendency of the media of her time to be overweeningly kind to the Mighty.
Almost everybody assumed all that about Mrs. Roosevelt— until they met her. After that, nobody did!
I felt that power just walking across a room with her. That may be all 1 did with that legendary lady, but I did at least that.
My mission as producer of the “Tex and Jinx” radio show in 1958 was to
meet Eleanor Roosevelt at the elevator and escort her across the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria to the Peacock Alley lounge where the show originated.
A student of it once wrote, “Nobility will shine through a hole in the elbow.”
I agree. If we had flown in someone who’d never heard of Eleanor Roosevelt (maybe that telegraph lady from the Russian village), she’d have known instinctively that Eleanor Roosevelt was no ordinary elderly woman headed for a cocktail lounge in a New York hotel.
Mrs. Roosevelt projected an authenticity, tough but nice. She was more than the sum total of all you’d read about her. Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t need FDR’s magic. She rolled her own. I don’t remember what she said to me, or if she said anything. She didn’t have to.
Geiger counters can detect radiation.
If the Waldorf hasn’t changed the rug, I could show them where to find the traces of it for at least five feet on both sides of where Eleanor Roosevelt walked.
Not enough study has been done about The Top. All we know is we’re constantly told there’s always plenty of room there. As one whose work entitles him to a non expirable visitor’s visa to The Top and those who’ve made it there, let me toss in a few scraps of Topology for those who might want to formalize that fledgling science.
People at the top are likely to discard the trappings that people fighting their way to the top think are necessary. For instance, people at the top are more likely to answer their own telephones.
I once placed a call to Admiral Hyman Rickover, expecting to leave a never-to-be-returned message with an aide.
Rickover answered himself. He may not have been affable. He may have been curt. But he was Rickover, there on the line, personally, himself.
People at the top are more likely to have an “easement”— a sense of “Enough about me already. What should I know about you?”
Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel will never be confused with Buddy Hackett no matter how crowded the room. Wiesel, the voice and conscience of the Holocaust, is about as lowjkey as you can get and still show signs of a pulse. Yet long before the Nobel committee made him an official world-class celebrity, those who came into his company knew even before the initial handshake that here was a man with an inner fire constantly raging in his inner fireplace. You felt that fire, even though the only outward signs were an almost supernatural gentleness and a constant pleasant, unforced smile.
Making People Talk Page 21