In a world where people like Larry King, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Charlie Rose and Ted Koppel are the ones most associated with interviewing the rich, powerful and famous, Lawrence Grobel's name doesn't loom quite so large.
Grobel finagled an interview with Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner for Newsday to get freelance assignments for the men's magazine. His first assignment, the difficult-to-get Barbra Streisand, helped lead to the coup of his career: the previously impossible-to-get Marlon Brando. Through his work for Playboy and Movieline magazines -- as well as interview books with Marlon Brando, John Huston and his family, James A. Michener, and Truman Capote -- Grobel has built a reputation that inspired writer and former subject Joyce Carol Oates to dub him the "Mozart of interviewers." Playboy dubbed him "the interviewer's interviewer."
For a man who does a brilliant job of staying out of the way of his interviews and getting subjects to speak freely -- "I'm there to get you to tell me what you think" -- Grobel is himself a chatty subject.
You began interviewing for Playboy in 1977. What was the breakthrough interview or experience that made you realize, "Hey, I could make a living at this"? Or was it a pretty gradual evolution over time?
It was gradual. I'd been working for Newsday and I was doing something along the lines of that. I wanted to take the form to another level and I started to think, what would it be like to spend one day or two days with these people? That's when I decided if I could do this for Playboy ... it's the only place I could take this to an extreme depth. I'd been very impressed with two interviews in particular, Albert Speer and Tennessee Williams. I always remember Tennessee Williams being extraordinarily honest with his life. Tennessee Williams never had time to hem and haw, so to speak. If you asked him about his sexuality, he told you about it. Issues that were important to all of us, he would answer all of them. There's something I love about that kind of honesty.
But how do you get into Playboy? I asked Newsday, how about if I interview Hugh Hefner? So I went for it, and Hefner was not easy to get to, but eventually I was able to get to him and when I did I was really, really prepared for it. I wasn't going to do a puff piece. I wanted to do a tough interview that was fair.
Your 1985 book, Conservations With Capote, was a revelation. You interviewed him at the very end of his life. Were you concerned going in about how sharp he'd be?
He was extremely sharp. Everybody says Capote is a big liar. I've read the big biographies of him, and they all talk about how he fabricates these things. I look at the things he said to me and I don't see a lot of lying in the book. ... I thought his comments were always hysterically funny and very right on or sharp.
But did you worry about his health going in?
I didn't, because I didn't know his condition until after we started. But I was intimidated by him before I met him. I wanted to feel up for it, I wanted to feel prepared for it. I had the same feeling when I met Norman Mailer or Saul Bellow. I had these guys in a pretty high place.
I wasn't worried about his health, but as I spoke to him sometimes on the phone, he would tell me he wasn't well. His death came as a big surprise to me. He was only 59 when he died. The book was only the beginning of what I thought I was into. I thought I was going to keep talking to him for the next 10 to 15 years and write a magnum opus. What is lacking in the book on him you'll find in the Michener book. He talked until I was done.
[Capote] was outrageous, gossipy, sometimes extremely funny. I wanted to get more into the craft of writing, the depth, his thoughts about Baudelaire, about Proust. I would've wanted to dig deeper and deeper. It was only cut off because he died. That was my first book, and it became a No. 1 bestseller.
Was Capote's arrogance off-putting?
Capote was not at all off-putting. Capote was so refreshingly honest. He was like Tennessee Williams in that regard. The lawyers wouldn't let a lot of what he said about Gore Vidal into the book. Vidal's lawyer said, "Whatever he says about Vidal we're going to sue you." Gore Vidal lived in fear of what Capote was going to say. I said, "This is what Capote said, let Gore Vidal have his say." That is why I appreciate Capote. He'd talk of (mimicking Capote) "that perennial princess Lee Radziwill." I mean, who talks like that? I never considered him arrogant. I just considered this man a wonderful writer who wrote some of the great sentences in the English language.
Yes, but a lot of things he said about himself were very arrogant.
Show me a great writer who didn't have a great opinion of himself. I asked (artist) Henry Moore, "Do you compare yourself to Picasso, to Matisse?" He said, "I look at myself more along the lines of Rembrandt." Artists are just in general full of themselves.
Who's more difficult to interview, a Robert Evans, who talks too much, or a Harrison Ford, who is too reticent?
Harrison Ford by far is a more difficult interview to do because he just doesn't feel like he wants to give a good interview. He's too big a star so he doesn't give a shit to worry about what he has to say. ... The difficulty with Robert Evans is getting some kind of fresh material. You read our interview and his book, and there's whole passages of the same material. He says the same thing.
What dead movie figure would you most have wanted to interview? What would be the first question you'd ask?
Garbo would be the one. Because she never talked. "Why? Why haven't you talked? Do you have such insecurities that you would rather maintain your mystery?"
Jackie Onassis would've been another one I would've loved to interview. I wish I could've interviewed Picasso and Matisse. The interview of this century would be Adolph Hitler. To try to get into that mind would've been so incredibly interesting. And scary. Churchill would've been fascinating. And the great writers, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Joseph Conrad.
One last question. If you had done this interview, how would you have done it differently?
I would've probably had sent you a hundred-dollar bill in the mail to soften you up, and the first thing I would've said, I would've said, "When you come to New Orleans, I'm going to take you out to some of the best restaurants and see some of the best jazz in the city, with you and your wife, and my paper's going to pick up the tab." That's how I would've done it.
But that's me.
