If I’m in someone’s presence and attempting to conduct an interview, I am wishing I were with Kafka on the ceiling. I’d much rather watch people do what they do than talk to them across a desk. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in the passenger seats of their pickups, often far from pavement, bouncing from scribble to scribble. Under a backpack, and hiking behind the environmentalist David Brower, I walked across the North Cascades, up and down the switchbacks, writing in a notebook. Even across a desk, an interviewee will sometimes talk so fast it’s impossible to keep up—like Alan Hume, M.D., a surgeon in Waterville, Maine. Nothing was unforthcoming about Dr. Hume. He talked clearly, rapidly, volubly, and technically. Writing notes, I did my best to stay with him, but when he breezed into the biochemistry of the blood gases I was totally lost and turned him over to a Japanese machine.
Suppose you are in Vermont on a field trip with the world’s ten or fifteen most knowledgeable Appalachian geologists. They gather around an outcrop, and soon an argument heats up about delaminated basements, welding batholiths, and controversial aspects of tectonostratigraphy. You are on the low side of the learning curve and don’t even know terrain from terrane. What to do? Put a tape recorder on the outcrop.
“It has no fossil control!”
“It’s a distal part of North America!”
You can read up later on what this means.
In the way that a documentary-film crew can, by its very presence, alter a scene it is filming, a tape recorder can affect the milieu of an interview. Some interviewees will shift their gaze and talk to the recorder rather than to you. Moreover, you may find yourself not listening to the answer to a question you have asked. Use a tape recorder, yes, but maybe not as a first choice—more like a relief pitcher.
Whatever you do, don’t rely on memory. Don’t even imagine that you will be able to remember verbatim in the evening what people said during the day. And don’t squirrel notes in a bathroom—that is, run off to the john and write surreptitiously what someone said back there with the cocktails. From the start, make clear what you are doing and who will publish what you write. Display your notebook as if it were a fishing license. While the interview continues, the notebook may serve other purposes, surpassing the talents of a tape recorder. As you scribble away, the interviewee is, of course, watching you. Now, unaccountably, you slow down, and even stop writing, while the interviewee goes on talking. The interviewee becomes nervous, tries harder, and spills out the secrets of a secret life, or maybe just a clearer and more quotable version of what was said before. Conversely, if the interviewee is saying nothing of interest, you can pretend to be writing, just to keep the enterprise moving forward.
If doing nothing can produce a useful reaction, so can the appearance of being dumb. You can develop a distinct advantage by waxing slow of wit. Evidently, you need help. Who is there to help you but the person who is answering your questions? The result is the opposite of the total shutdown that might have occurred if you had come on glib and omniscient. If you don’t seem to get something, the subject will probably help you get it. If you are listening to speech and at the same time envisioning it in print, you can ask your question again, and again, until the repeated reply will be clear in print. Who is going to care if you seem dumber than a cardboard box? Reporters call that creative bumbling.
As a beginning reporter, I developed such behaviors while interviewing show-business people for Time. Some of these assigned subjects were a great deal more difficult to manage than others, none simpler or more agreeable than Woody Allen. Odd as it seems now, fifty years later, he came to Time, and up to my cubicle in Rockefeller Center. He was twenty-seven years old, and volunteered that he was a “latent heterosexual.” He said he strongly wished to return to the womb—“anybody’s.” I described him in the piece as “a flatheaded, redheaded lemur with closely bitten fingernails and a sports jacket.” He spoke of people who “perspire audibly.” He said his father had been a factory worker but was replaced by a small gadget. His mother bought one. At the time of the interview, Woody Allen was working standup in a Greenwich Village night club. As a writer for TV comedians, he said, he had written twenty-five thousand gags in two years. The fact that he was telling some of them to me did not concern either of us.
On the difficulty scale, Jackie Gleason was at the other extreme. In 1961, his film “The Hustler,” with Paul Newman, came along, and seemed to mark a significant rejuvenation of Gleason’s career, which had run a long course on television. When he agreed to be interviewed for a cover story, he was making another movie—“Requiem for a Heavyweight,” with Mickey Rooney and others, including the young Muhammad Ali, who was still Cassius Clay. When I attended the filming, in December, on Randalls Island, in the East River, the cast was huddled under the stadium in a cold, fog-shot, tubercular setting. Gleason’s dressing room was a small house trailer. When he stepped aboard, it squished down half a foot and nearly capsized. Each day, for a couple of days, he invited me in and responded readily and patiently to questions. A day soon came, though, when—in a complete reversal of attitude—he threw me out. He said I worked for assassins. He said I was going to assassinate him. He nonetheless addressed me as Pal.
“Pal, it’s all over.”
When Gleason was not on Randalls Island, he went often to Jack & Charlie’s “21,” on West Fifty-second Street, with his other pals. At the time, these included Ralph Nelson, who was directing “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” David Susskind, who was producing it, and Mickey Rooney. These were the parties who described Time as a tower of assassins. How do I know that? Gleason told me so. And he believed them—believed that he was being set up to be satirically cut down. He had a boozy reputation. One of the pals had said to him, “Jackie, they’re going to make you look like a drunk fucking son of a bitch.”
But they weren’t. It would make no sense.
He was six years beyond “The Honeymooners,” his apex of stardom as a situation comedian on CBS. A comedy hour called “The Jackie Gleason Show”—on which he did skits as Reginald Van Gleason III, Fenwick Babbitt, and Rum Dum—had not brought comparisons with Laurence Olivier. But now, amazingly, he had risen anew as a first-rate actor in a Hollywood film. What we intended to say was something like this:
On the telephone, I tried to suggest to Gleason that the vector of my assignment was aimed in that direction, to which he said, “So long, pal.”
Two or three days later, he called and said he had been thinking it over and I could return to the trailer on Randalls Island. The resumed interviews went well there until he kicked me out again. What had Mickey Rooney said this time? I didn’t need a transcript.
The on-again, out-again, off-again interview continued in that way but actually made progress. Gleason was companionable and funny, and generally worked hard to give the most complete and thoughtful reply he could to every question. Then he called one morning, told me to stay away, and said it was really over this time—done, finished.
A freelance cover artist—Russell Hoban—had been commissioned by Time to do an acrylic portrait of the subject. Ralph Nelson, David Susskind, and Mickey Rooney had persuaded Hoban to bring the painting to “21.” Hoban unwrapped it there in front of Gleason and his advisory panel. True, the painting did not seem destined for a Hallmark card, would not have been mistaken for the work of Norman Rockwell. An unkind observer could construe it to resemble the wax on a bottle in a Calabrian restaurant. Words came forth in a virtual chorus. “You see, Jackie? You see it now? They want to make you a drunk fucking son of a bitch.”
A day later, making one last try, I called him. He was back at “21,” and his pals were not there. I said I had not seen the painting, had nothing to do with it, and as a writer meant to celebrate him, purely and simply. There was no point in doing anything else.
He said, “You’re just a flunky, pal. You can tell me all that but it doesn’t mean anything. You don’t run Time magazine.”
I told him he had that one right.
He said, “Who does run Time magazine?”
I said, “Otto Fuerbringer.”
“Who is he?”
“The managing editor. Would you like to meet him?”
“Why not?”
“I’ll ask him.”
I went down a couple of corridors to a far corner of Time’s editorial floor. Fuerbringer was in his office. After I told him the situation, he got up and walked with me to the elevator bank. From the Time & Life Building, we walked two blocks north to Fifty-second, and east to “21.”
Gleason: “Who is in charge of Time magazine?”
Fuerbringer: “I am.”
Gleason: “Who has the last word at Time?”
Fuerbringer: “I do.”
Fuerbringer did not have a name like that because he was Caspar Milquetoast. He had a deceptively soft voice and a ready smile, but nothing made him flinch. Slowly, firmly, he cleared away the scent of Ralph Nelson, David Susskind, and Mickey Rooney. The cover painting and the cover story ran in the issue of December 29, 1961.
Location shooting had moved on from Randalls Island to Jack Dempsey’s restaurant, on Broadway. Handed a copy of the magazine, Gleason asked for time out, sat alone at the bar, and slowly turned the pages. Greg Morrison, the film company’s publicist, told me this a day later. Gleason spent at least half an hour turning pages and looking expressionlessly at what he was reading.
Gleason got up from the bar and went to Jack Dempsey’s telephone booth.
My phone rang. “Hello.”
“Pal, I feel like two cents.”
There were those who thought of him as a potential source of a great deal more money than that. In 1962 or 1963—I forget when—a man walked into the Gleason offices on West Fifty-seventh Street, identified himself as “John McPhee,” and asked for a cash loan. Gleason was in Florida at a golf club. A staff member telephoned him and told him what was happening. Gleason said to her, “Describe him.”
She said, “Well, for one thing, he’s very tall.”
Gleason said, “Call the police.”
The interviews with Jackie Gleason were not recorded. With my basic technology—a pencil and a lined four-by-six notebook—I could keep up. He spoke at a clear and thoughtful pace. Besides, like most people, he was not invariably interesting. Writing is selection. When you are making notes, you are forever selecting. I left out more than I put down.
Students have always asked what I do to prepare for interviews. Candidly, not much. At minimum, though, I think you should do enough preparation to be polite. You wouldn’t want to ask Stephen Harper what he does for a living. Before, during, and after an interview, or a series of interviews, do as much reading as the situation impels you to do. In the course of writing, you really find out what you don’t know, and you read in an attempt to get it right. Nonetheless, you get it wrong, especially if you are an innumerate English major and you are writing about science. After an interview with Robert Hargraves, a Princeton geologist who grew up in South Africa, I attempted a description of maar-diatreme volcanoes, which bring carbon up from the mantle with such velocity that carbon in its densest form freezes as diamonds in the volcanic neck. It is journalistic custom—essentially, a rule—that you don’t show a manuscript to the subject. In many situations, ego is too likely to spoil the transaction, not to mention a subject’s attempts to massage the text. But science, for me, is the exception that probes the rule. I have never published anything on a science that has not been vetted by the scientists involved. Robert Hargraves read about the maar-diatreme volcano and said I had it half right. A couple of days later, I returned to him with a fresh version, which he said was three-quarters right. A few days after that, I asked him to look again. This time, he said, “I don’t see anything wrong here.” I felt as if he had awarded me a Ph.D., the “D,” perhaps, for the synonym for subpar intelligence.
Not everybody is as detached as Robert Hargraves or as savvy as Jackie Gleason. Plenty of people who are willing to talk are not at the same time sensing what the effect of the eventual piece will be. The presence of the open notebook, and the formality of being advised about what is going to happen and where, is not enough. It is true that some people I have written about—Thomas P. F. Hoving, of the Metropolitan Museum, comes readily to mind—are so cognizant of the piece of writing taking shape that they all but supply the commas. Hoving is at one end of a spectrum, and the other end is populous. So the writer has responsibility to be fair to the subject, who trustingly and perhaps unwittingly delivers words and story into the writer’s control. Some people are so balanced, self-possessed, and confident that they couldn’t care less what some ragmaker says about them, but they are in a minority among people who put their lives in your hands.
Of all the dimensions of the interview relationship, the most significant, for me, has been time. The daily journalist has to go out, get the story, and write it in one day, a feat that leaves me breathless and beggars all comparison with the time involved in my projects—four months in the New York City Greenmarkets, three weeks with a flying game warden, two weeks with a Nevada brand inspector, months at a time across three years of trips to Alaska. I have no technique for asking questions. I just stay there and fade away as I watch people do what they do.
In a question-and-answer piece in the Times Book Review for January 16, 1966, George Plimpton quoted Truman Capote claiming that he had trained himself to recall dialogue with such accuracy that he could interview people without a notebook or a tape recorder and then, hours later, write down verbatim what was said, his accuracy exceeding ninety per cent.
In 1991, when James Atlas was an editor at the Times Magazine, he wrote an article about—among other things—quotation marks and what is inside them. How much is quoter, how much quotee? By way of example, Atlas quotes Boswell quoting Johnson at a dinner party. Johnson, between bites: “It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation are hardly sufficient to keep them together.” Atlas: “That’s quite a mouthful, even for a speaker with Johnson’s verbal gifts.” In fairness to Boswell, Atlas went on to say, “Boswell was an assiduous note-taker; he would scribble a few lines, abridging words—his ‘portable soup,’ he called it: ‘a hint, such as this, brings to my mind all that passed, though it would be barren to anybody but myself.’ ” Anybody but Truman Capote, apparently, who didn’t even need a soupspoon.
Once captured, words have to be dealt with. You have to trim and straighten them to make them transliterate from the fuzziness of speech to the clarity of print. Speech and print are not the same, and a slavish presentation of recorded speech may not be as representative of a speaker as dialogue that has been trimmed and straightened. Please understand: you trim and straighten but you do not make it up.
Henri Vaillancourt—who makes bark canoes without metal components of any kind, sewing them together with the split roots of black spruce and other evergreens—was the subject of a book of mine published in 1975. It described a trip I made with him and three others in bark canoes in the Allagash region of the North Maine Woods. Henri liked the word “bummer.” At least fourteen hours a day, I was making notes, and Henri was saying “bummer” at least sixty times an hour, or so it seemed. In any case, my notes were nearly saturated with “bummer”s. Writing the piece, I consciously removed two-thirds of them. After the piece was published, I heard from strangers and friends alike that no real-life human being would ever say “bummer” that often.
And, while we are on this subject, please let me indulge in a parenthetical peeve, which has to do with the way in which pronouns can infect sentences that contain interior quotes—the pronouns apparently changing horses in midstream. To give just one random example: “He arrived at the pier, where he learned that ‘my ship had come in.’ ” Whose ship? The author’s ship? Try reading something like that before an audience or on an audio CD. It is factual and correctly punctuated, yes, but it is no less awkward. I have attempted for forty years to get writing students to avoid such constructions, an endeavor that has resulted in serial failure.
It is possible in managing a quote—not to say manipulating a quote—to present something that is both verbatim and false. In a book published in 1977, I said, “Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans.” In a July, 2009, piece on Sarah Palin, Time quoted the book, saying, “Alaska is a foreign country.” And think what could happen to the following. It comes from public radio, and this is the quote in its entirety: “Republican Congressman* Darrell Issa wants the heads of the panel to be forthcoming about their sources of information.” A shorter sentence would still be a verbatim quote if someone were to stop at “panel.”
Indirect discourse is an excellent way to say what someone said and avoid the matter of verbatim quoting altogether. It is hard to be uncomfortable with indirect discourse. If a quote is something like “I’ll be there prepared for anything at the first hint of dawn,” and you think, for any reason, that it might not be in the verbatim zone, get rid of the quotation marks and state it in indirect discourse (improving the logic while you’re at it):
Is it wrong to assemble dialogue collected in three or four places and ultimately present it as having been spoken in a fifth location? I think so. Do you? I have gone back to people asking them to correct and sometimes amplify what they told me, and I have corrected and amplified the quotes but have never changed the original venue. Would you call that impermissible? I wouldn’t. Is it wrong to alter a fact in order to improve the rhythm of your prose? I know so, and so do you. If you do that, you are by definition not writing nonfiction.
J. Anthony Lukas, in his Author’s Note before “Common Ground,” wrote, “This is a work of non-fiction. All its characters are real. . . . Where I have used dialogue, it is based on the recollection of at least one participant.” At least one participant? Bob Woodward, in a Note to the Reader before “The Commanders,” said, “Thoughts, beliefs, and conclusions attributed to a participant come from that individual or from a source who gained knowledge of them directly from that person.” In this manner, the rumble of conscientiousness makes its way through time. I remember overhearing a feverishly principled great journalist responding on the phone to an editor or checker, and insisting that not one syllable in a piece be changed for clarity or any other purpose. If, in the field of conscientiousness, it is possible to go the extra mile, this was the extra mile. “That is the quote!” the writer shouted. And again, “That is the quote.” As it happened, the quote had been translated from Russian.
Norman Maclean called “A River Runs Through It” fiction, and the word “fiction” appeared in the book’s front matter. “A River Runs Through It” was autobiographical fact in nearly all aspects but one. For private reasons, the author had shifted the site of his brother’s murder and, being Norman Maclean, considered that change and others quite enough fabrication to disqualify the text as nonfiction.
Minders are watchdogs in coats and ties whose presence is a condition for an interview. Corporations and federal agencies deploy them. They are not exactly catalytic in the interview process. Distractingly, they sometimes make notes. They will even answer an interviewer’s questions although their role is supposedly limited to observing and monitoring what is being said. Some have been described as “Saddam-style minders.” I have been very lucky with minders, in large measure because for more than half a century I have successfully avoided them, with two innocuous exceptions. In 2004, I began a piece on the Sort—the vast, robotic, multilevel maze in Louisville, Kentucky, where UPS absorbs, shuffles, and redirects a million packages a day. To circumambulate the building would be a five-mile hike, and no one is going to do that, even with a minder. Numerous large brown-tailed airplanes nose up to the western side. The runways of Louisville’s international airport are right there. Never would I have been permitted to drive around those bays and taxiways without a minder, let alone wander among the zipping packages on the endless conveyors inside, the drug-sniffing dogs. I actually spent a couple of weeks with my minder, who was unobtrusively present at nearly all the interviews I did there, involving many dozens of workers. His name was Travis Spalding. He grew up in West Point, Kentucky, on the Ohio River near Fort Knox. In no sense did he seem to think that I was trying to steal anybody’s gold. On the weekend, when my time was my own, I went to Churchill Downs with him, his wife, his mother, and his father.
The other minder was provided in Omaha, in 1995, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Through the agency’s Materials Analysis Unit, about half of whose work is in geology, I had arranged to interview Special Agent Ronald Rawalt, a mineralogist and paleontologist who had performed a feat of geological espionage in Mexico that had essentially solved the murder of an American drug agent there. Rawalt’s home and office were in North Platte, Nebraska. So, logically, fly to Denver and drive to North Platte. Right? Not so fast. Rawalt was instructed to meet me at 9 A.M. on January 24th in a room in the Federal Building in Omaha—two hundred and eighty miles from his home. When I went into the room, the minder was there. He was there for eight or nine hours, but, as it happened, not for the entire interview. Rawalt was talking petrology, mineralogy, crystallography, the solubility of quartz, and the exoscopic study of sands. I never learned the minder’s name. It probably would not be fair to say that he went to sleep. He was quiet, though, and as evening settled in he departed. Rawalt talked on, and was still talking twelve hours after we had begun.
I had used a tape recorder throughout. Back home, as I was transcribing his narrative, I discovered that among the cassettes one had failed. Stunned, I called Rawalt, who asked what he had been saying at the end of the previous cassette and what he had said at the start of the one that followed. With a machine of his own, on his kitchen table, in North Platte, he narrated anew an indispensable part of the story. Rawalt paid for the postage, you did not.
One very foggy morning five years later, I was in my office on the Princeton campus, the phone rang, and the Council of the Humanities informed me that an F.B.I. agent had come in asking for me and had gone out again; his name was Rawalt and he was waiting in the fog. I bolted down several flights of stairs and out the door. Rawalt said he was working on a white-collar crime “in the vicinity.” In the vicinity was as close as he was going to come to G.P.S. coördinates. A helicopter was required for this assignment, and the helicopter was grounded by the fog. He said he just wanted to say hello.
And five years after that I found myself in near-catastrophic frustration while I was trying to complete a book, the final part of which was planned to involve a journey in a Union Pacific coal train. Over many months, I had prepared for the event, and the railroad had encouraged me, but now the railroad was doing the Jackie Gleason. I called a couple of times a day—day after day after day—and the calls were not returned, by company people in Omaha who had earlier given me a week of invaluable orientation, including visits to the Union Pacific rail yard in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and to “the bunker,” an impregnable building in Omaha where dispatchers control everything that is happening on nineteen thousand miles of track. And now, a couple of months later, I was back home calling Omaha, listening to a machine, and leaving messages. My book was dead in the water, and my wits seemed to have come to an end. A light turned on. I called Ron Rawalt. Maybe he could help. The rail yard in North Platte is the largest in the world. Rawalt said, “Fly to Denver and drive to North Platte.” A day and a half later, I was having breakfast with the local secretary-treasurer of the United Transportation Union, the local chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, and Rawalt. The morning after that, I was out on the Triple Track Main, rolling for Kansas, in the cab of a Union Pacific coal train seven thousand four hundred and eighty-five feet long.
For most of the cover stories I worked on in the early nineteen-sixties at Time, other people did all or most of the reporting, and I did the writing. This ecumenical format, known as group journalism, was created by Henry Luce, whose most formative years were spent in the China Inland Mission School in Chefoo. Today, his creation would be called cloud journalism, a form of utopian commune. Reports known as files came to writers and editors in New York from the magazine’s bureaus around the country and the world. As a would-be wordsmith, I wanted to be the writer of every sentence in my pieces large and small, so (like most of the other writers in the “back of the book”) I used the reporters’ files as references and sources of quotes but did not cobble pieces together from this chunk and that chunk of other people’s words. No pieces were signed.
I wrote a cover story on Sophia Loren.
But she was in Italy and I was in New York practicing missionary journalism. I never met her (I think I would remember if I had). I never met Joan Baez or Mort Sahl. I did a lot of the reporting on a Jean Kerr cover and a bit on Barbra Streisand, who had an apartment on the Upper West Side. Week by week, writing the short takeouts and news pieces in the Show Business section, I got to do a percentage of the reporting as well as all of the writing, better experience than I ever would have had in sections like Foreign News or National Affairs. Anomalously, I was assigned to do essentially a hundred per cent of the reporting as well as the writing not only for the Gleason story but also for a 1963 cover story on Richard Burton.
Now and again, across two years after I met Burton in Toronto, where he was opening in “Camelot,” I proposed a Burton cover to Otto Fuerbringer. I had gone to Toronto assigned to write about Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, the lyricist and the composer of “Camelot,” whose previous collaboration had been “My Fair Lady.” The foci of that visit were Lerner and Loewe, not Burton, so I had come to know him casually and not in a formal way. I thought he was about as great an actor as an actor could be. And, as it happened, I remembered his début season as Hamlet at the Old Vic, during which I had seen him twice while I was a student in England. Eventually, I would write:
In the “Camelot” company’s hotel in Toronto, Burton would retreat after dinner to his room with other actors, grips, stagehands, and whatnot. Talk would go on until three in the morning. As whatnot, I was entranced. So back in New York I proposed a cover on him, but Fuerbringer repeatedly turned me down until Burton checked into the Dorchester in London with Elizabeth Taylor and was being described as one of the two most famous people in the world. Fuerbringer called me into his office and said that what Time had long needed was a cover story on Richard Burton. Yes, I said, and I hope I can describe him as an actor. Responding to a query not from me but from the magazine, Burton said he would coöperate if I were the interviewer as well as the writer.
A lot of the interviewing was accomplished inside a Rolls-Royce. A Silver Cloud, it was parked each morning outside 53 Park Lane, waiting for Burton and Taylor, each of whom was married to someone else, to come down from their penthouse suite and depart for work. They were making a movie called “The V.I.P.s” at a studio close to Heathrow, and the trip each way took an hour. The director, Anthony Asquith, whose father had been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the First World War, liked shooting at sunrise, so the Rolls left the Dorchester as early as 5 and no later than 6 A.M. I was staying up the street, in Grosvenor House, at 86 Park Lane, and for more than a week was in the car waiting when Taylor and Burton appeared.
She was never sleepy. In Burton’s case, it was hard to tell. At least once, he had been in Hampstead talking with his wife, Sybil, until three or four in the morning, returning to the Dorchester in time for little more than a drink or two before descending to the Silver Cloud. Sybil told me this, and much else, on the telephone. She said he had consumed an entire bottle of cognac in the hours he was with her. Rémy Martin. I failed to ask what size. No matter what his blood-alcohol level might be, Burton the actor never missed a director’s call. He claimed so at the time, and that was his reputation as well. On those mornings at 5 A.M., I surely had reason to believe him.
At the studio, he was prepared for action from the first minute, and when he was not shooting a scene, which was most of the time, he was talking to other actors, grips, stagehands, and whatnot. He related to everybody. He talked football endlessly, and, most impressively, he listened. Drawing someone out about Manchester United or the Tottenham Hotspurs, he listened with evident interest and occasional comment. He asked me about my three children in New Jersey. Three daughters! Splendid. He had only two.
Also in the studio was Maggie Smith, a young beauty still in her twenties, with her large eyes, her incisive face, her auburn hair. She was playing a small role as a quiet secretary secretly in love with her employer. When Maggie Smith was not acting, she sat reading, oblivious of the tabloid whirl around her. Take note of her, Burton said; she has more talent than anyone else in the building. After doing a scene with her, he said he had been overshadowed and outacted. Written by the playwright Terence Rattigan, the film, set at Heathrow, was about a rich man’s wife running off with her lover, but Heathrow is fogged in, and her husband shows up to plead with her. Other passengers, also star-crossed, are analogously inconvenienced. Rattigan said the germ of the story came from Vivien Leigh (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”), who was married to Laurence Olivier but fell in love with another actor and was fogged in at Heathrow trying to run off with him.
Burton was even easier to interview than Woody Allen, because he interviewed himself. You just listened, and wrote down what he said. At the studio, most of that happened in Elizabeth Taylor’s dressing room, which was not a cramped space. There was a couch, a coffee table, plenty of room for walking around. She feigned irritation that I was all but completely concentrating on Burton. I’m sure she understood what I was doing and did not seriously care. But she kept interrupting us. She was having fun. And so was I, for sure. In comparison with a great many of the actresses I had met in my years of writing about show business, she was not even half full of herself. She seemed curious, sophisticated, and unpretentious, and compared with people I had known in universities she seemed to have been particularly well educated. From childhood forward, she was tutored in the cafeteria at M-G-M.
One day, she interrupted us with the news that a pair of British journalists were about to arrive for a scheduled interview with her and Burton. It was all right if I wanted to stay and listen, but my own interview had to be suspended. Sure. Thanks. This would be interesting. Both were men. Both were tall and, as I remember, oddly diffident. Sitting side by side on the couch, they asked chatty questions and made occasional chatty comments. They recorded nothing and made no notes. Taylor gave them tea. The teacups rested on their knees—easy to maintain, since the writers were not writing. On the following day, their update on the world’s preëminent scandal appeared on the front page of their newspaper. The piece was full of quotes—long quotes, short quotes, hyposensational quotes. But the writers seemed to lack the mnemonic skills of Truman Capote. At any rate, I couldn’t recall hearing Taylor or Burton say any of the skeins of words attributed to them within quotation marks. This was seven years before Rupert Murdoch bought News of the World.
When the British journalists were gone and I got back to the broken lance I was carrying, Burton returned to his story about 1953 at the Old Vic:
They got that boy from the Old Vic. ♦
*An earlier version of this article misstated Darrell Issa’s title.
