The Rolling Stone interviews

by edited by Jann S. Wenner

  Have you ever been in analysis?

  You mean have I ever been to a psychiatrist? No [laughs]. They’re all real interested in me, though. They always ask a lot of questions when I’m around them.

  What do they ask?

  Well, I had some seizures. They used to ask me a lot of questions about how I felt, stuff like that. I told them all the thoughts I have and the images I see if I, you know, faint or fall down or something. That’s not real important, though.

  Do you still have seizures?

  Yeah, I still do. I wish I didn’t. I thought I had it licked.

  Is it a physical or mental . . .

  I don’t know. Epilepsy is something nobody knows much about. It’s just part of me. Part of my head, part of what’s happening in there. Sometimes something in my brain triggers it off. Sometimes when I get really high, it’s a very psychedelic experience to have a seizure. You slip into some other world. Your body’s flapping around and you’re biting your tongue and batting your head on the ground, but your mind is off somewhere else. The only scary thing about it is not going or being there; it’s realizing you’re totally comfortable in this . . . void. And that shocks you back into reality. It’s a very disorienting experience. It’s difficult to get a grip on yourself. The last time it happened, it took about an hour and a half of just walking around the ranch with two of my friends to get it together.

  Has it ever happened onstage?

  No. Never has. I felt like it was a couple times, and I’ve always left the stage. I get too high or something. It’s just pressure from around, you know. That’s why I don’t like crowds too much.

  Why did you leave the ranch? [He had moved from Northern California to Malibu.]

  It just got to be too big of a trip. There was too much going on the last couple of years. None of it had anything to do with music. I just had too many fucking people hanging around who don’t really know me. They were parasites, whether they intended to be or not. They lived off me, used my money to buy things, used my telephone to make their calls. General leeching. It hurt my feelings a lot when I reached that realization. I didn’t want to believe I was being taken advantage of. I didn’t like having to be boss, and I don’t like having to say, “Get the fuck out.” That’s why I have different houses now. When people gather around me, I just split now. I mean, my ranch is more beautiful and lasting than ever. It’s strong without me. I just don’t feel like it’s the only place I can be and be safe anymore. I feel much stronger now.

  Have you got a name for the new album?

  I think I’ll call it My Old Neighborhood. Either that or Ride My Llama. It’s weird, I’ve got all these songs about Peru, the Aztecs and the Incas. Time travel stuff. We’ve got one song called “Marlon Brando, John Ehrlichman, Pocahontas and Me.” I’m playing a lot of electric guitar, and that’s what I like best. Two guitars, bass and drums. And it’s really flying off the ground, too. Fucking unbelievable. I’ve got a bet with Elliot that it’ll be out before the end of September. After that we’ll probably go out on a fall tour of 3,000 seaters. Me and Crazy Horse again. I couldn’t be happier. That, combined with the bachelor life . . . I feel magnificent. Now is the first time I can remember coming out of a relationship, definitely not wanting to get into another one. I’m just not looking. I’m so happy with the space I’m in right now. It’s like spring [laughs]. I’ll sell you two bottles of it for a dollar fifty.

  ORIANA FALLACI

  by Jonathan Cott

  June 17, 1976

  It wasn’t so long ago that advice-to-the-lovelorn columnists and love advocates in Hollywood movies used to suggest that all a woman had to do to get a man interested in her was to cajole him into talking about himself all evening, thereby flattering him and bolstering his sense of self-importance. In your interviews you seem, almost unconsciously, to have taken this piece of folk wisdom and pushed it very far down the line, using it in order to expose your grandiloquent subjects for what they really are.

  I’ve never thought of that. Neither in my private nor my public life have I ever thought in terms of “seducing” somebody, using what are called the “feminine arts”—it makes me vomit just to think of it. Ever since I was a child—and way before the recent feminist resurgence—I’ve never conceived of . . . I’m very surprised by what you say. There might be some truth here, but you’ve really caught me by surprise.

  What you’re talking about implies a kind of psychological violence which I never commit when I interview someone. I never force a person to talk to me. If he doesn’t want to talk, or if he talks without pleasure, I just walk out; I’ve done that many times. There’s no courting or seducing involved. The main secret of my interviews lies in the fact that there’s no trick whatsoever. None.

  You know there are many students who write about my interviews—in Italy, France and America, too. And they always ask me how I go about it and if I could teach them to do it. But it’s impossible, for these interviews are what they are, good or bad, because they’re made by me, with this face, with this voice. They have to do with my personality, and I bring too much of myself into them to teach them.

  I was struck by a moving moment during your interview with Mrs. Gandhi where you talked about “the solitude that oppresses women intent on defending their own destinies.” You mention that Mrs. Gandhi, like Golda Meir, had to sacrifice her marriage for her career. And I got the feeling that here you were somehow also talking about your sense of yourself.

  The first difference between me and them is that I never give up. Marriage is an expression that to me suggests “giving up,” an expression of sacrifice and regret. I never wanted to get married, so I didn’t make that sacrifice—it was a victory for me. The solitude I was referring to wasn’t a physical solitude. Nor was it, for instance, for Indira Gandhi, because everybody knows that at the time I interviewed her she wasn’t alone at all. She likes men, thank God, and she makes use of that. It was an internal solitude that comes about from the fact of being a woman—and a woman with responsibilities in a world of men.

  That kind of solitude is a victory for me, and I’ve been searching for it. Today, you are interviewing me in 1976. If you had interviewed me in ’74 or ’73 or ’65, I would probably have answered a little differently—but not too much. Like a photograph, an interview has to crystallize the moment in which it takes place. Today, I need that kind of solitude so much—since it is what moves me, intellectually speaking—that sometimes I feel the need to be physically alone. When I’m with my companion, there are moments when we are two too many. I never get bored when I’m alone, and I get easily bored when I’m with others. And women who, like Indira and like Golda, have had the guts to accept that solitude are the women who have achieved something.

  You must also consider that, in terms of the kind of solitude we’ve been talking about, women like Golda and Indira are more representative because they are old. A person of my generation and, even more so, a woman younger than myself, really wants that solitude. Golda and Indira were victimized by it, since they belonged to a generation in which people didn’t think as we do today. They were probably hurt, and I don’t know how much they pitied themselves. Golda cried at a certain moment during the interview. When she spoke of her husband, she was regretting something.

  As far as myself, in the past I felt less happy about this subject. It was still something to fight about inside myself, trying to understand it better. But today I’m completely free of it, the problem doesn’t exist anymore. And I don’t even gloat over the fact that what could have been considered a sacrifice yesterday is today an achievement. We must thank the feminists for this, because they’ve helped not only me but everybody, all women. And young people, both men and women, understand this very much.

  Golda spoke of having lost the family as a great sacrifice—she was crying then. But to me, the worst curse that could happen to a person is to have a family.

  That’s not a very Italian attitude, is it?

&
nbsp; You’d be surprised. We know about marriage Italian-style. But people in Italy today are getting married less and less. We have an unbelievable tax law that makes two persons who are married and who both work pay more taxes than they would if they were single. So they get separated or divorced. And there’s nothing “romantic” or “Italian” about this. No, the family, at least morally and psychologically, is disappearing in Italy, as well as all over Europe.

  What should exist in its place?

  Free individuals.

  But no community.

  You ask me too much. If I could answer you I would have resolved the problem. If you said to me: “All right, socialism as it’s been applied until now hasn’t worked. Capitalism doesn’t work. What should we do?” I’d have to respond: “My dear, if I could answer these questions, I’d be the philosopher of my time.”

  In the introduction to your interview with Golda Meir, you comment on the resemblances you noticed between Meir and your own mother, writing: “My mother too has the same gray curly hair, that tired and wrinkled face, that heavy body supported on swollen, unsteady, leaden legs. My mother too has that sweet and energetic look about her, the look of a housewife obsessed with cleanliness. They are a breed of women, you see, that has gone out of style and whose wealth consists in a disarming simplicity, an irritating modesty, a wisdom that comes from having toiled all their lives in the pain, discomfort and trouble that leave no time for the superfluous.”

  And in the introduction to your interview with Henry Kissinger, you tell how you were immediately reminded of an old teacher of yours “who enjoyed frightening me by staring at me ironically from behind his spectacles. Kissinger even had the same baritone, or rather guttural, voice as this teacher, and the same way of leaning back in the armchair with his right arm outstretched, the gesture of crossing his legs, while his jacket was so tight over his stomach that it looked as though the buttons might pop.” It’s at special moments like these in your book that I get the sense of a little girl looking at the world so clearly because she remembers so much—a sense one usually finds in the best literature and films, but also never in interviews.

  Do you understand now why I can’t teach someone how to make these interviews? Do you understand now why they are what they are because I do them? Kissinger was sitting on this raised armchair, having asked me to sit down on the sofa. So he was up there and I was down here, and it was like seeing . . . Manchinelli was his name, that professor of physics and mathematics. He was a real bastard who used to sit up high and mighty at his podium like God, judging us instead of teaching us, and from there cursing and reproaching us, making us suffer. He made me suffer particularly because I was the only one who answered him back. Oh, I was terrible in school. Poor people, poor professors, I made them suffer so much. Because I was very clever, I was always the first of my class, but I was terrible. Because if they said something wrong, I didn’t keep my mouth shut. Anyway, when I saw Kissinger sitting like that—poor man, he wasn’t aware of it, of course, and he didn’t do it on purpose; he is what he is and was showing what he is—I said: “Oh, God. Here we go with this Manchinelli again.”

  I associated the two things, and I always do. I always go back to childhood. But do you know why I make these comparisons? Not only because they come spontaneously to me but because I like to be simple when I write, I want to be understood, as I used to say, by my mother when I write about politics. How can my mother understand me? And my audience is made up mostly of people who have not been to university. So in order to simplify things, I use everyday facts, “human” facts—that word is overused, but I’ll use it here again. So you associate Kissinger with a nasty old professor, or Golda with your mother, the same wrinkles, the same irritating modesty. And then people understand. My use of associations is a result both of spontaneity and tactics.

  I didn’t start writing about politics until fairly recently—until Vietnam, in fact. But I’ve always been a very politicized person because of the family I was born into—I’ll come back to this in a minute—and because of my experiences. I was a little girl during the Resistance—and a member of the Liberal Socialist party—and I spoke in public the first time when I was fifteen at a political rally. I’ll always remember—I had pigtails and was trembling: “People of Florence . . . a young comrade speaks to you . . .”

  And I kept saying to my editors: “I want to write about politics, I want to interview politicians in the same way that I interview actors. Because it’s boring when we read politics, it must be done in another way.” But they didn’t let me do it because I was a woman. (There we go again.) And only when I demonstrated that I could be a good war correspondent in Vietnam did they allow me to do interviews with politicians in the same way that I’d done them with astronauts, soldiers and actors.

  Do you think that your forceful way of doing interviews was in any way determined by the humiliation and contemptuousness you might have felt being a girl growing up in a world of political men?

  Absolutely not. I can’t complain too much about men because, number one, I had the luck to be born into a feminist family—they didn’t know it, but indeed they were. To begin with: my father. He always believed in women. He had three daughters, and when he adopted the fourth child, he chose a girl—my youngest sister—because . . . he trusts women. And my parents educated me with the attitude of: you must do it because you are a woman. It was, for sure, a challenge, which implies the recognition of a certain reality. But they never thought that I couldn’t do it.

  In the beginning I wanted to become either a surgeon or a journalist. And the only reason why I didn’t choose medicine was because we were too poor to afford six years of medical school. So then it seemed obvious for me to get a job as a reporter when I was sixteen. I gave up medicine because I was poor, not because I was a woman. What I never forget is that I was poor. And this is probably at the roots of my moralistic attitude that we were speaking about before. Not the fact that I was a woman.

  I noticed that you dedicated your book to your mother. Was she a strong influence on you?

  She pushed me. She pushed all of us. But my father did, too. I dedicated it to her more than to him because she’s dying from cancer, but I should have dedicated it to both of them, because the person who gave me my political ideas was my father. I’ve changed my mind about many things, but not about my belief in freedom, social justice and socialism—that came from him. And when we get to this point, it doesn’t matter whether one is a man or a woman.

  We were speaking before of Golda and Indira. The feminists are wrong to say: “Ha-ha! Indira behaves the way she does because she lives in a society of men.” No, sir. She does it simply because she’s a person of power who wanted more power. She wasn’t ready to give it up and she acted as a man would have acted. At that point, it was the moment of truth—el momento de la verdad, as the Spanish call it. She could have said goodbye, sir, thank you very much. That means democracy to me. But instead she became a dictator, she demonstrated that being a woman makes no difference, she was no better because she was a woman . . .

  I want to return to something I spoke to you about earlier—about my obsession with the fascist problem and how it relates to my family experiences. I’ve just said that I come from an antifascist family, and this was important for me because, to me, being fascistic means making antipolitics, not politics. The fascist—as I once told an interviewer—is someone who resigns, who obeys, who doesn’t talk or who imposes himself with violence and avoids the problematic. The antifascist, on the contrary, is a naturally political person. Because being antifascist means to fight though a problem by means of a discussion that involves everybody in civil disobedience. And this atmosphere of disobedience . . . I’ve breathed it since I was a little girl. My mother’s father was an anarchist—one of those who wore a black ribbon and the big hat. He was a deserter in World War I, and I remember my mother proudly saying: “My father was a deserter in the Great War”—as if he had won som
e kind of medal. In fact, he was condemned to death because he was a deserter, but they couldn’t catch him. And my father’s father was a Republican follower of Mazzini, when being that meant one was an extreme leftist. And my father was a leader in the Resistance. It’s really in the family.

  What you’re saying reaffirms what I find most inspiring in your work—the fact that you stand on the side of those who have been abused and humiliated. As you state it so movingly in the introduction to your book: “I have always looked on disobedience toward the overbearing as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.”

  That’s socialism, Jonathan. Being a socialist, or wanting socialism, doesn’t mean just the distribution of wealth. It should work, but it doesn’t in the so-called socialist countries. And for sure not in the capitalistic regimes. Socialism means much more to me. One of the great victories has been what we call the spirit of socialism with its sense of equality. When I was a little girl, the reality of hierarchy was so strong—the teacher above the pupil, the rich above the less rich, the bourgeoisie above the proletariat. In Europe we had it, we still have it, but we have it much less. And this was brought about by socialists and is why, for me, socialism is synonymous with freedom.