Making People Talk

by Barry M Farber

  I remember thinking when I first met Elie Wiesel, “Now I realize this man is the voice and conscience of the Holocaust— like a gladiola is a gladiola.”

  One time, Wiesel was in a ballroom audience saluting two hundred veterans of the Danish underground who’d been flown over to America by Tuborg Beer to be honored and thanked for their role in rescuing the Jews of Denmark from the Nazis in 1943. (Why don’t more beer companies do things like that?)

  I was emcee, and I repeated everything I said in Danish.

  That’s far from the most breathtaking linguistic feat ever attempted, but I’ll be the first to admit it’s not bad for somebody raised in North Carolina with no Danish connection and a life’s total of fewer than five days in Denmark.

  One and only one person at that banquet asked me where I had learned Danish—Elie Wiesel. I had to admit it wasn’t really Danish. I’d once worked in the Norwegian Merchant Marine, and my Norwegian was so bad it sounded like Danish!

  Wiesel didn’t merely ask me a polite question and let it go. He didn’t ask me a polite sincere question and let it go. Focusing that famous inner intensity upon me, he proceeded to “interview” me.

  He gave me the impression that whatever best-seller he happened to be working on would be jerked out of his typewriter the minute he got home so he could sit down and bat out a detailed diary entry of my adventure with the Danish language.

  There is only one Nobel Peace Prize awarded every year.

  There are Wiesel Prizes awarded every time Elie decides to Make Someone Talk!

  You can’t win them all, no matter how good the concepts or how faithfully they’re followed.

  Before my interview with Ayn Rand, I’d been warned she was a tough cookie. That’s like being warned that the Grand Canyon is a nasty pothole.

  The cult-figure author of Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead was touring the land appearing on TV and radio to drum up interest in her philosophy of objectivism. Her critics derided it as a doctrine of selfishness—do everything for yourself, never think about others, ‘ ‘hoist in the gangplank, Jack. I’m aboard. ’ ’

  That happens to be a criminal oversimplification of objectivism, but it’s what everybody except Rand’s immediate followers thought, and I figured it might draw her out and give her something to talk about if I unfurled that provocation at the top of the show and let her reshape it her way.

  “Miss Rand,” I began, “let’s pretend I’m a student of objectivism and you’re the teacher, and it’s my turn to tell the class what objectivism is and you’re going to grade me, okay?”

  “No,” said Rand.

  I actually thought I’d misheard.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said.

  “I said no,” she repeated.

  I then thought she must have misunderstood my setup.

  “Miss Rand,” I said, on the air in front of everybody, “I have proposed an innocent little device that I believe would get us started correctly. I will state the mass popular conception of what your philosophy of objectivism is all about, and you may then come in and attack the misconceptions head-on.”

  Again, “no,” said Rand, angrier this time. “Nobody shall talk about my philosophy except me when I’m present.”

  She then walked off the show.

  They talk about blood being thicker than water. Personal feelings are stronger than politics. All of my admiration for Ms. Rand’s gutsy stands against Communist tyranny melted away under the pressure of her breathtaking arrogance.

  A great writer, yes. A great philosopher, perhaps. But as for personality, Ayn Rand made Bella Abzug seem like Miss Congeniality.

  If I were a psychiatrist, the first thing I’d do, even before verifying the patient’s medical payment plan, is have him read a list of maybe a thousand stock sayings, mottoes, proverbs, homilies, aphorisms, and cliches and check off the ones he likes. That I think would tell me more about him than his own halting recollections on a couch of the problems he had with the way his immigrant grandmother chopped oregano.

  One of the sayings that would make my list is the one that goes, “The game of life is not winning, but playing a poor hand well.” Its intelligence and practicality make up for its lack of that old Vince Lombardi “winning is the only thing” macho.

  When you go through life trying to play a poor hand well, you become conscious of those who are playing their poor hands poorly, their poor hands well, their good hands poorly, and their good hands well.

  The winner of the Playing the Best Hand Best award goes to Jane Fonda. Physically, mentally, energetically, and charismatically gifted, Fonda goes up from there. She knows instinctively it’s not enough to have magic, you have to use it. Ask any male interviewer who ever had her as a guest. He’ll agree that even when her husband, Tom Hayden, is in the control room, she knows, with eyes, chuckles, questions, and comments, how to make you feel the radio studio is a desert island and you’re the only man alive.

  What Jane Fonda gets out of it all is a de facto censorship of the interview any President would envy. In fact, if a President were to try to “manage the news” the way Fonda manages the subject matter of an interview, Fonda would spearhead a campaign to impeach him!

  It’s not exactly arrogance. It’s unembarrassability.

  I was talking with a talk host in Atlanta in the late seventies and wound up by asking who he was having on the air that night.

  When he told me Jane Fonda was his guest, I suggested he whip out a pen and pad so I could give him four or five questions calculated to exploit certain of her political vulnerabilities and leave nothing but a smoking crater where her feet shortly before stood.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “She’ll only talk about her exercise cassette.”

  “And are you going to put up with that?” I asked him in journalist-to-journalist indignation.

  His silence told me that not only was he going to put up with it, but he was looking forward to it and would probably ask her just before airtime if she had any other preferences, whims, injunctions, and taboos to which he might cater!

  Tibetan shepherds don’t say no to the Dalai Lama. They’re thrilled to be on the same mountain.

  That’s not a bad spell to learn how to cast. That’s better than Making People Talk. That’s making them grateful to be within talking distance of you.

  If you don’t have Tibetan Buddhism as the force working for you, try to get some of what Jane Fonda’s got—and use it as well as she does!

  What, Is That It?

  The celebrated Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was coming to my radio-station to tape a broadcast.

  We were getting tape and commercials ready in the studio when the receptionist buzzed and said, “There’s a Mr. Armstrong out here, and he wants to know if Mr. Yevtushenko has arrived yet.”

  “The State Department strikes again!” I figured, assuming Mr. Armstrong was a functionary assigned to keep up with Soviet dignitaries, show concern, discourage interviewers from hostile questioning, change plane reservations from the phone in the control room, and have a cab waiting downstairs after the show.

  As a courtesy to my government, I went out to meet Mr. Armstrong and, upon shaking his hand, congratulated myself on prediagnosing his identity and role. He didn’t wear a State Department badge, but he looked exactly like one of their official hand-holders.

  I explained that Yevtushenko would be along shortly and invited him to wait in the studio, where he’d be more comfortable.

  He accepted, refused coffee, and blended silently into the interior decoration of the radio studio to await Yevgeny’s arrival.

  When Yevtushenko entered the studio, he brushed right on by me, grabbed Mr. Armstrong by the shoulders, then hugged him and shouted, “Neil!”

  Mr. Armstrong was not, it turned out, a diaper pinner-upper for the State Department. He was Neil Armstrong, the first man in all history to walk on the moon!

  Would Mr. Armstrong be willing to pull up a chair and join Yevtushenko and me
on the air?

  No way!

  Could I at least regale my audience with my doltishness by relating the story of mistaken identity and letting them know that the first man to walk on the moon was in our live studio audience?

  Again, “No.”

  I could have, if I hadn’t been polite enough to ask. I could have anyhow, even though Armstrong asked me not to, if I’d valued that little shot of glory juice more than respecting the wishes of the first man to walk on the moon. Neil Armstrong’s presence and my failure to recognize him was, after all, factual and fair for a reporter to report. However, I respected his wishes.

  It felt funny trying to impress my audience with Yevgeny Yevtushenko for a whole hour while Neil Armstrong sat silently on the side where the public relations people, the flunkies, the aides, and the spear-carriers usually sit.

  You are not in the real world at the age of thirteen in Jewish tradition, the more conventional eighteen, or the even more conventional twenty-one.

  You’re in the real world when you begin to realize the football players are younger than you.

  You’re financially successful when you can live off your interest without invading principal.

  You’re a celebrity when an inmate of an institution for the mentally ill thinks he’s you!

  And you’re getting a little too smug when you meet the first two men to walk on the moon and ten more years go by before it ever occurs to you that that’s anything special!

  If you pretended your life were a silent movie, could you pinpoint your ten favorite scenes? Among mine would surely be standing on New York’s Avenue of the Americas in Greenwich Village with Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong’s lunar module-mate and the second man on the moon, in a midnight drizzle looking for a cab.

  Cab after cab with their protective “off-duty” signs lit slowed down to look us over, then resumed normal speed when we struck them as insufficiently compelling to occasion their stopping to pick us up.

  Nuclear radiation works on you whether you know it’s there or not. Celebrity status doesn’t. I could only stand there wet and wonder what percentage of those off-duty cabs would have stopped if the drivers had known they were abreast of one of the first two men to walk on the moon! In the democracy of New York midnight, Buzz Aldrin and I were equals: two men with turned-up raincoat collars who couldn’t get a cab.

  Aldrin and his smashingly good-looking date were my guests for dinner that night at D Boccocino, the kind of interesting, intimate Italian restaurant astronauts thank you for helping them discover.

  Sometimes, when making famous people talk, it’s good to go beyond the obvious territory occupied by the “automatic” people with smiles frozen in pasty-faced reverence. Sometimes it pays to go beyond the signs marked “Safe,” so long as you do it gingerly and intelligently.

  I would never challenge Buzz Aldrin with the coarse question, “How do you feel about being only the second man on the moon?” or the coarser, “How come you weren’t first?”

  However, there is a way to ask it. First, you wait for enough layers of newness to flake off from just having met. You track the meters and dials of inner space, just like NASA tracks them for outer space, until that magnificent sense of instinct tells you that acquaintanceship has given way to ease, followed by positive signs of warmth on a healthy trajectory toward friendship.

  Anything as important as a NASA launch has to wait for a “gate,” a moment when conditions on earth and in the heavens are right for that launch. Anything as important as a sensitive question to a famous person has to wait for that “gate,” too.

  Mine came. I felt it well after the antipasto, somewhere between the vitello and the zabaglione.

  “Buzz,” I said. “In getting into that capsule to blast off for the moon in 1969, you and Neil Armstrong were undertaking an unprecedented mission—to me a very frightening mission—not just on behalf of your country, but for science and all mankind.

  “You’re a professional, and this question may be an insult, but after all, nobody remembers who came up the beach right behind Columbus; and I can’t help but think about the ‘fielder’s choice’ that made Armstrong number one while you, just as qualified and right there with him, followed him and became, for all time, number two to walk on the moon. Does that thought ever rankle you?”

  Aldrin, I think, forgave the length of the question for its redeeming sensitivity. (The technique is known as Hiding the Razor Blades in Vaseline!)

  “You know,” he replied, “you have that all wrong. Neil Armstrong may indeed have been the first man to walk on the moon, but don’t forget, it was a round trip.

  ‘ ‘When we splashed down back here on earth and the ships with helicopters came out to retrieve us, I climbed out of that capsule first!

  “I, therefore,” concluded lunar astronaut Buzz Aldrin, “became the first person in the history of the world ever to return to earth from someplace else!”

  The Hall of Fame

  You don’t have to win at Wimbledon to gain great joy from tennis. The better you play, though, the more fun it is to watch the great ones. Your words alone may never cause the world to build a Hall of Fame around you, but the more adept you become at pulling off the bon mot yourself—the more you shape and sharpen your own conversational skills— the more appreciative you should become of those who won their way into that Hall of Fame, sometimes with but a single quip.

  We obviously lack videotaped confirmation or courtroom proof that every great remark and riposte was actually uttered by the person who became a legend from that remark. Or that it was uttered in precisely the manner the legend tells. (Leo Durocher was decent enough to confess that he never said, “Nice guys finish last,” although that line is continually attributed to him by people who couldn’t cite a single score or statistic from Durocher’s baseball career, or who aren’t even sure the sport he was associated with was baseball! The original, says Durocher, was somewhere in the same vein, but much less punchy.)

  So what? Who can say every country should have precisely the borders it has presently, every millionaire should have every single dollar he happens to own, or every hero deserves every single accolade? Some things should be allowed to lie where they fall. If a great remark falls to the credit of some great person, then in some metaphysical way he or she deserves it, not the anonymous bootblack in one of his armies who actually thought it up and uttered it to the delight of an attentive scribe.

  Too many good stories are ruined by over verification. Not, however, the one about Alfred Hitchcock and me. It proves that occasionally, the best way to make somebody talk is to find yourself suddenly impaled on his wit, take it well, and harvest the rewards of his guilt forevermore!

  Alfred Hitchcock is not among those likely to lose his reputation for wit of diabolical intensity if truth breaks out. Hitchcock will inhabit that Hall of Fame forever, in my estimation, on the strength of one crack, the authenticity of which can never be challenged, because he made it to me. I was the victim, and I have it preserved on tape.

  As a junior radio interviewer, I couldn’t get Hitchcock to come to my late-night show live even though he was in town plugging a new movie, but he did agree to let me come to his suite in New York’s St. Regis Hotel for a taping. He opened the door himself, and when he saw me and WINS engineer Frankie Caplin, he put the kind of look on his face I would want an actor to perfect if I were a director and we wanted to convey an attitude of “When am I going to learn to quit being so damned available?”

  I stepped in and straightaway tripped over a rug, caromed into a table, and knocked it over, launching a vase that took to the air like a glass torpedo, flying across the room and distributing water and flowers all over his living room rug.

  That didn’t improve Hitchcock’s look any. After apologies, I tried to repay him by abandoning all small talk and getting down to business. Suddenly Frankie, the engineer, developed a look worse than Hitchcock’s. The St. Regis Hotel, it seemed, was the only New York hotel st
ill using direct current. Our recording equipment worked only on alternating current. I didn’t have the guts to turn my head and check out Hitchcock’s look at that juncture.

  Frankie called the house engineer, who told him of a single alternating current outlet way down the hall and an extension cord he was welcome to use if they could find it in the basement. That would take a little time to arrange. Could Mr. Hitchcock be a sport and go along? That, oddly enough, improved Hitchcock’s look.

  I think I understand. Once it was established beyond a reasonable doubt that his morning was being bled white by a buffoon, he could, with honor, relax and wait to see what would come next.

  What came next was an interview by a breathless boy interviewer who thought he had a pretty cunning opening question up his sleeve for Alfred Hitchcock.

  “Mr. Hitchcock,” I began, “I want to give you an assignment and let you direct it. The scene is a radio interview in a luxurious hotel suite. The guest is a famous motion picture director, and he’s going to be murdered. How would you stage it?”

  “Nothing to it,” replied Hitchcock without requiring an instant of thought. “Given the proper interviewer, he could be bored to death.”

  Hubris had not yet entered my ego chamber, and I enjoyed that remark of Hitchcock’s every bit as much as if I’d made it myself about some archrival. He knew it was overkill; and that, plus my leaving that line, my own annihilation, in the tape when it would have been so easy to cut out, won me his okay. Every time Hitchcock came to New York to make media appearances, he insisted my show be on his schedule. I’m sure it was because I had behaved like the buttercup, shedding fragrance upon the heel that crushes it.