THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605200210
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
Perhaps the crucial emblem of our era is a person plugged into cyberspace, wearing a Walkman and packing a cellular phone. The phone rings; it is a recorded solicitation. But the person picking up has nothing of interest to say, either.
In a talk-show time that still celebrates idle discourse - it burbled drearily away on the tube for decades before it infected the Internet - how revealing it is that we turn to books for transcriptions of really interesting conversation. This, curiously, saves time. No dead air, no commercials, no waiting for a monosyllablic, smiley-face meditation laboriously pounded out on some anonymous chat-room keyboard.
So now let us praise The Norton Book of Interviews: An Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day, edited by British journalist Christopher Silvester (W.W. Norton, 626 pp., $30).
Here, at least, is certain diversion and likely illumination. Insights into subjects and their examiners. Listen up to the adept departed.
Mae West talking to Charlotte Chandler, 1984: ``I had my tricks for handling the censors. I'd write some lines I knew they would take out so the others could stay in. You had to let them earn their money.''
Alfred Hitchcock talking to Pete Martin, 1957: ``It's a mistake to think that if you put a villain on the screen, he must sneer nastily, stroke his black mustache or kick a dog in the stomach.
``Some of the most famous murderers in criminology - men for whom arsenic was so disgustingly gentle that they did women in with blunt instruments - had to be charmers to get acquainted with the females they murdered.
``The really frightening thing about villains is their surface likableness.''
Greta Garbo talking to Mordaunt Hall, 1929: ``If they want me to talk, I'll talk. I'd love to act in a talking picture when they are better, but the ones I have seen are awful. It's no fun to look at a shadow and somewhere out of the theater a voice is coming.''
But it is. And even better somewhere out of a book. A successfully shared interview is overheard history, a snapshot of somebody's soul.
Silvester provides an inspired introduction to the volume, noting that the interview as a form was invented only 130 years ago, when English and American newspaperfolk first struck gold mining celebrities.
This exchange between two individuals can be, even when rendered accurately, by turns sycophantic, prejudicial and propagandistic.
It is based upon the often misplaced faith that an encounter between strangers can produce candor.
``The interview,'' notes Silvester, ``is an uneasy and ambiguous ingredient in the self-mythologizing process that all public personalities engage in at one time or another.''
Ironies abound. After the murder of Chicago Tribune journalist Jake Lingle, Irish reporter Claud Cockburn was assigned by the London Times to interview gangster Al Capone. The unscrupulous arch-hood wound up lecturing the outsider on New World values.
``This American system of ours,'' Capone shouted, ``call it Americanism, call it Capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us an opportunity, if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it!''
We seem to have heard variations on this theme from scoundrels of even more recent vintage.
The news beat goes on.
And, as long as journalists hold up the mirror, figures public and private will crane their necks to look into it.
When magazine journalist Milt Machlin tracked Ernest Hemingway to his Havana hideaway in 1953 and knocked, there came an aggrieved voice from inside:
``What the hell do you want?''
Machlin wanted an interview, of course.
``What in hell do you think I moved out here for?'' Hemingway asked him. Then the famous author audibly answered his own question. ``To get away from bastards like you!''
But he opened the door. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB