Hob-Nobbing with the Celebs

Michael J. Fox Took my Tape Recorder!

It was a dark and stormy day. We were in a sumptuous suite in a five-star Midtown Manhattan hotel, on a top floor. The noon sky was almost black, as violent thundershowers pelted the city. Outside, a delicate creature was struggling against the wind and the relentless droplets. “Look, there’s a butterfly out there flying in the rain,” said Charles Bronson.

Sometime in the early 1980s, my employer, Reuters, noticed that celebrity news was getting very popular, and decided they wanted a piece of that action. Reuters is a rock-solid source of news, and if they report it, you can believe it. But there was also a tendency for them to try something new only after every other organization in the world had already paved the way. Reuters didn’t get into news photos until the 1980s, and the staff joke at the time was that we had finally admitted photography wasn’t just a passing fad.

When they gave me my marching orders to start going after celebrity interviews, I marched off in exactly the wrong direction. My view was that there were some pretty big celebs who hadn’t been heard from recently, so I should fill that void. “Hello, I’d like an interview with Whoopi Goldberg.” Click.

It turned out, the reason we hadn’t heard much about her was that she had nothing she was promoting. No new movie, no book, no fragrance, no line of kitchen spatulas. It had never even occurred to me that celebrities only made themselves available when they had something to sell.

I was shocked and offended by that realization. I bristled and huffed and puffed up into full Holden Caulfield mode. “Hey, this is phony and they’re trying to use us,” I complained.

What I failed to realize was that everyone was in on it. The newspapers that paid good money to get Reuters stories didn’t mind being a part of that publicity machinery, because they wanted to run articles about new movies and books and fragrances and kitchen spatulas, so their readers could feel in the know. It seemed not a single reader wanted to feel in the know about some celebrity who hadn’t done much lately.

The good news for me was that Reuters had a high enough profile around the world that we could slot right in and command interviews with big names. We didn’t need to fight for scraps and settle for sidekicks. Once I understood that, I connected with a New York-based company that served as a connection between celebs coming to town to promote stuff, and media interested in playing the game.

Having caved in, sold out and climbed down off of my high horse, I requested an interview with Charles Bronson’s people. He was promoting “Death Wish II.” Celebs are amazingly available to promote movies with Roman numerals in the title, since movie-goers are often skeptical about sequels. Unfortunately, my first question was what was the movie about? He gave the longest sigh you can imagine. It went on and on, and I didn’t know lungs could hold that much air. It was the mother of all sighs. It was the Bridge of Sighs, in Venice.

Bronson looked over at his peeps. No, nobody had offered me a screening of the movie, or, even a press packet, and I hadn’t thought to ask. When the long sigh ended, Bronson began relating a plot that sounded quite a lot like the original “Death Wish.” Part of the way through, he noticed the butterfly and interrupted himself. Naturally I was going to lead my story with a consummate he-man eye-candy hunk noticing a butterfly, no matter what else he said. And I did.

My new life of hob-nobbing with the stars was off and running. This was going to be pretty sweet. I show up, I try to ask questions that aren’t totally predictable or lame. I write an inviting story, newspapers around the world use it with my byline, and my editor loves me. I could get used to this.

I have always been suspicious of technology. I don’t mean space shuttles or artificial hearts or lasers or technology like that, I mean tape recorders. I relied on them to keep the conversation moving, instead of getting bogged down with ponderous notetaking. When you’re doing an interview, you want to move quickly, to be able to pivot wherever a surprise answer takes you. There are interviewers who don’t actually listen to answers. They just move on to the next question on their list. Big mistake, since the follow-up question is often the story. So, I always took two cassette recorders with me, and put them in different parts of the room, for safety’s sake.

This takes me back to the past, to 1985 and the release of “Back to the Future.” Michael J. Fox was eagerly promoting it because he did not want to be the first person to star in a Stephen Spielberg movie that flopped. He told me so. I went to his hotel suite, I planted my two tape recorders and started the interview. It went okay. He was a polite Canadian kid, I followed some promising threads and got what I needed. “The Washington Post” used my story and gave me a byline, which is what reporters live for.

On my way to the elevators, I realized I had only packed up one of my two recorders. The other presumably was still whirring away, on the mantel of the fireplace in his suite, recording whatever was being said between Michael and his assistant.

Oh, crap. I wheeled around, headed back to the suite, and knocked. Michael opened the door, and he was holding my recorder. He had run the cassette back a couple of minutes and was recording over whatever he said after I left.

He’s not a big guy, and I figured I could take him, but did I really want to be known as that dude who beat up Michael J. Fox to get a tape recorder back? That could go on my permanent record. He had that impish grin, but his body language indicated we were just going to have to stand there patiently for another minute or so until what was on it was expunged.

An incident like that can really get inside your head. Was he saying something about how bad my questions were? Did this suit make my butt look big? Was there shrimp scampi on my breath? I would never know, but as surreal experiences go, that one moved pretty near the top of my list and has stayed there ever since.

These interviews are not designed to be fun for either party, but sometimes they can turn out that way. If you want an hour of nonstop enjoyment, I recommend you spend some time with Dolly Parton. I caught up with her at her surprisingly tasteful pied a terre on Fifth Avenue. I probably shouldn’t say it was surprisingly tasteful. Shame on me. What was I expecting, velvet toreador art on the walls?

She pointed to a sofa, I sat, and she flopped down right beside me. She giggled and flirted and fluttered her eyelashes and never once broke eye contact. At one point, I screwed up the courage to ask what she thought about all the attention people paid to her most prominent physical feature. That was how I put it. Dolly leaned in closer, smiled, and said, “You mean, my tits?” That was how she put it.

My effort to use that actual tits quote in my story went all the way up the Reuters ladder, but I lost. Reuters was having none of it. In fairness, there probably weren’t many newspapers in the U.S. that would have printed it, anyway. I did keep the tape of the interview for a long time, playing it when friends came over. She probably figured I would do that, the little vixen. I thought briefly about turning it into a greeting on my home answering machine, but I didn’t want Dolly to hear it in case she ever called me.

When you’re interviewing a celebrity, it’s considered poor form to ask for an autograph or a photo with them or anything like that, especially since we didn’t have selfies back then, but sometimes you just have to go renegade. I handed my camera to someone to take a photo of me standing between Sonny and Cher, in their dressing room. This predated my Reuters career, back when I was just a local reporter.

What I remember most was, their warm-up act was a pretty-boy singer named Glen Campbell. I had told my teenage sister I was going to be backstage at the concert, and she begged me to get Glen’s autograph for her. So, when I finished talking to Sonny and Cher, I went to the next dressing room and introduced myself. Glen was very nice about it and handed me back a folded piece of paper. After the concert, I read it: “Susie, you are gentle on my mind. – Glen Campbell.” Wait, what? Was this clown hitting on my sister? Susie had to explain to me that actually this was a quote from one of his songs.

My desire to keep things very professional doesn’t mean there weren’t some touching personal moments. In 1986, I interviewed Jim Henson on the release of his David Bowie film, “Labyrinth.” Henson was a genuinely, earnestly, nice guy. A nice guy’s nice guy. The interview was at the headquarters of Henson Associates, in a grand 1927 New York mansion, with “HA!” inlaid in the foyer, a conference room with a Gainsborough-style portrait of Kermit the Frog, and a bathroom decorated with Miss Piggy wallpaper. It was a nice departure from hotel suites.

Part-way though the interview, Henson asked if I had children, and I said my son was just turning two. He leaped from his chair, a man on a mission, motioned me to follow, and led me to a massive storage room. As I continued to ask questions, he scavenged from shelf to shelf, looking for appropriate “Muppets” fare, filling a HA! Bag with good stuff. He would be dead in just three years, and what a huge loss that was, for creative people and for nice guys.

The same year I talked with Henson, I was treated to another stellar interview. Children’s author Maurice Sendak had just designed the costumes and sets for a new, dark movie version of “The Nutcracker.” He was extravagantly quotable and spontaneous, and who could ask for anything more? Near the end of our time together I pulled our son’s well-worn copy of “Where the Wild Things Are” from my briefcase and asked if he would autograph it. He did better than that. He wrote, “To Christopher,” and then drew Max, just for my son.

People ask me about my most memorable moment. As a devout folkie during my teen years, I had an abiding admiration for folk patriarch Pete Seeger, and I was thrilled when I got an interview with the great man.

Pete liked doing his interviews early in the morning and asked me to come to his manager’s office at 8 a.m., in Manhattan’s legendary Art Deco Brill Building, home of the famed “Brill Building Sound.”

The place was deserted, but a security guard let me in and pointed to an ancient elevator. When I got to the right floor it creaked open to expose a long, lightless corridor. I looked left and right trying to figure out where the office would be, when suddenly I heard Pete’s mighty 12-string guitar, sounding for all the world like the organ in a Gothic cathedral, filling the hallway and echoing off walls.

I simply followed the sound of the chords. I walked in, Pete gave me his signature grin, nodded toward a chair, and just kept playing for his grateful audience of one…