Interviews
by Janet Berliner
Used to be, once-upon-a-time, that interviews were exciting to give, take, and read.
“Hey, look, Ma. I’m important. They’re interviewing me for the Bazooka Times.” “Hey, look, Pa, they’re doing a piece about when you taught me to fish and you got mad at me and tried to drown me.” “Hey, look, Dumbo. If you’d hooked up with me instead of that gorgeous Übermodel, you could sit on the (rented) leather sofa with me and share the spotlight.”
I remember the first interview I did for the raw fear it evoked in me. I was eighteen, an intern for a weekly newspaper–the pride and joy of my mentor who was the Editor-in-Chief and did everything short of beating me with a Mighty Sjambok to keep me in line. This was in South Africa, where there were no personal tape recorders yet, no television at all because of its potential to corrupt the masses into believing that all people were created equal. There were no computers or word processors, even in America. Hell, there weren’t even ball-point pens. We used what were quaintly known as fountain pens with blue-black ink, the stains on our fingers badges of survival. My pen was a Waterman, given to me by my grandfather. I still have it, use it, treasure it.
I was an intern who rarely did more than make coffee and set type (by hand, with calipers), so being sent out to do an interview was a major coup which required multiple hours of instruction. When I was deemed ready, I made an appointment, got permission to take photographs, guaranteed that the person I was interviewiewing–a radio personality by the name of Morkel Van Tonder–would be given veto rights before publication. The interview was to be done as a Q & A and to include what is currently called FAQs, i.e., frequently asked questions.
There wasn’t a thing previously in print about Morkel that I didn’t read as prep for the interview, not just once, but over and over again. Among other things, he ran an audience participation quiz show where someone was chosen to pick a ticket from a large bowl for a small prize. I took my mother to see that and was invited to pull out the ticket.
I selected hers. Yes, it was honest, and not the only time I’ve done that. No, I have no explanation.
That was 1960. Fast forward thirty plus years to 1993. I was living in America and had been at both ends of a lot of interviews. We had television, tape recorders, computers–personal and otherwise. There were radio interviews, but not yet online interviews like the fabulous ones our own DNW has been doing in his journal. For television and print, make up artists airbrushed pretty people to look prettier; on television, prompters and cue cards destroyed spontaneity. Hey, even I was being interviewed on live television and conducting interviews with the rich and famous.
For the most part, I no longer did Q & A. Profiles were more my style. They were fun to write and to read and they enabled me to take advantage of opportunistic happenings like meeting and talking to Evel Kneivel in the middle of a Las Vegas casino, meeting Steve Lawrence (a delight) and Eydie Gormé (less of one) in the Green Room after a performance honoring lounge lizard extraordinaire, Buddy Grecco. Meeting them turned into stories, stories turned into profiles.
Yet, and here’s is the real reason I’m writing about this, there were two rules I’d never broken and have not broken in the years since then:
1) I still always offer the subject the opportunity to check my facts and insist that I be afforded the same courtesy when I’m interviewed.
2) With a prearranged interview, I always do my homework. A case in point: For a weeklong interview with Michael Crichton, I read six million of his words, including twelve versions of Jurassic Park and his Master’s Thesis in anthropology. I even watched the movie in several languages. Did he tell me to do these things? No. Was I glad I did them? Yes, particularly since he grilled me about everything.
So do your homework, check your facts, try to find a new angle (like my piece on Judith Krantz about “typewriter turn-on,” or my long interview with Ray Bradbury over what he claimed to be his first ever Chinese dinner), and be grateful as hell to any interviewer who obeys those rules when you’re in the hot seat. I’ve had more than one reviewer use jacket copy as the basis of a review of my work. That’s bad enough. But when they take hours of my time, then write a profile based on never having read a word I’ve written, it’s downright insulting.
