March 8, 2020 • 63 mins
Actor Sam Waterston doesn't do many of these. In fact, this is his first podcast. To mark the special occasion the stage and screen performer reflects on his 60-year career, from his days at Yale in Waiting for Godot to breaking into Hollywood with the The Great Gatsby. But what most fascinates Waterston is reflecting on his life behind the camera, off-stage, as a husband and father. For years Waterston was reluctant to publicly give voice to his thoughts. Now that he's approaching 80, he's starting to feel different. “I just want to know what I think,” he says, “and I don’t know how much more time there is to find that out.”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I think my life would be greatly impoverished if
it weren't for the wonderful time with Shakespeare from college
until today, pretty close to being enough to get to
perform it, to have something of the sensation of what
(00:38):
it's like to be able to see into the world
the way Hamlet does. It's a beneficial feedback loop into
your whole nature. His way of understanding the world, built
into the language opposition. All of these things held in
wonderful narrative. They have no bottom. That was Sam Waterston.
(01:02):
I'm San Fracoso and this is Talk Easy. Welcome to
the show. Hey everyone, I'm Samford Girl. So this is
(01:34):
Talk Easy. Today on the show is Sam Waterston, and
this is an episode I've been wanting to do for
a long time now. He's an actor. I think you
probably know that he's been doing it for over fifty years.
And because of that fact, I'm not going to do
(01:56):
a formal introduction. Instead, I'd like to point out why
this episode is especially unusual and unique to this show.
For one, fifteen minutes before the podcast, I got a
call from Katherine Waterston, who is Sam's daughter. Keep in
mind that right before I do these I'm frantic, I
(02:19):
have to go to the bathroom. I'm anxious. I don't
know what the hell I'm talking about or asking. And
she calls, and she did not know we were going
to do this. I told her at the last minute.
And the first thing she says is, well, have you
done your research? Which is a great thing to hear
(02:40):
right before you do a podcast for an hour. That
was unusual, And in that conversation, Katherine gave me good
pointers and things to talk about that I would have
not had if not for her. So, first off, we've
been doing this show for four years and we've never
had someone's daughter call in to give assistance. But I'm
(03:02):
very thankful that she called. The second thing is that
when Sam arrives, he arrives with his wife of forty
four years. That is definitely a first on this show.
We've never had a partner come in and sit in
the control room. It was a real Waterston family affair,
is what I'm trying to say. And the last thing
(03:22):
is that you may have noticed that Sam Waterston comes
from a generation of actors that are often very reluctant
to give interviews. I don't know what it is I
have some idea, but I don't exactly know. But for Sam,
this is a highly unusual setting. He has not sat
(03:43):
for a long form interview of any kind except for
perhaps a couple of occasions in his life with Charlie Rose.
But aside from that, he hasn't exactly felt comfortable sharing
and airing his thoughts publicly. But he happens to be
at a new place in his life where the kind
(04:04):
of dialogue we try to have on this show each
week is something he was open to. So this was
truly a special episode for so many reasons, as you're
about to hear. And I have to say, without hyperbole
that taping this podcast was truly an honor of a lifetime.
(04:25):
And I feel in this moment distinctly blessed to be
doing this show for you wherever you are listening. Boy,
I love doing this and I love sitting with Sam,
So I have a feeling you may feel the same
after this episode. Without further ado, here is the one
(04:49):
and only Sam Waterston. Sam Waterston, Yes, how are we doing?
I'm fine? How are you so? About twenty minutes before
this podcast, your daughter calls me kind of frantically and
(05:14):
she says, oh, my god, you're gonna do this with
my dad. Here are some things I think you should
talk about. Al really, we'll save those for later. She
did mention, and it's maybe the place to start that
you are in a moment of perhaps more self reflection
than usual. Maybe that's just the nature of getting older.
(05:36):
Does that seem accurate? Yeah, I think it is. The
way I would describe it. I guess is that I've
been entertaining an awful lot of questions for an awful
long time, and now it feels like if I'm ever
going to get down to cases, i'd better do it soon.
(05:59):
I was talking to Martin Sheen about this, and I
said that I've always wanted to figure out everything and
understand everything, and now it feels like I'm running out
of time, so I better get on the job. Well,
there are a bunch of things we can try to
find the answer too. Oh good, you can help me.
I'm going to try to help you, please. I also
(06:20):
hope you can help me. I don't know. Let's start
with this on the nature of reflecting on the past.
In nineteen thirty nine, your mother is performing in a play.
I believe it's Anthony and Cleopatra, she's pregnant with you.
She would later go on to say that this is
(06:41):
one of the reasons you decided to become an actor.
She also painted the sets for that right, and the
set to her picasso Esque, and we still have these
two twenty foot by four or five foot wide figures
that she painted for that show. What do you make
(07:01):
of the sort of genetic nature of that question? Could
it possibly be passed on? It feels like we're making
things up? But it's okay. I mean, they're perfectly good
things to make up. That's always sounds like shed made
that up too, And the way I experienced it with
her when she was alive was friendly, complimentary, loving. So
(07:27):
it's a nice story. I I like it. Story Narrative
is an unrecognized fundamental appetite. I think we can't do without.
So if there's not some fact based story to tell,
then we make one up. But even fact based stories
are embroidered into a narrative so that the facts make
(07:49):
a kind of sense. At six, your father cast you
in a play. He did you describe that time as
a joyous time because it meant that you could stay
up with him late, Yeah, and have undivided attention, which
is what every child in a crowded family wants. Yeah,
what are the memories that come into your head? The
(08:12):
real part, the nugget that I remember is sitting in
that dark theater next to my father while the play
that he was directing was in the bright lights up
at the end of the room. And that's what I remember.
How did your parents describe you as a child as
(08:33):
you grew up. I think I was disobedient. I think
I was. This is not things that they accused me of.
But I was the third child. I got away with
a lot of stuff that my older siblings didn't, and
I like that a lot. I still to this day
(08:54):
on a terrible shirker of dishwashing. But they used to
have charts and stuff in my family for whose turn
it was every week? And I somehow I would be
absent on their key day. And it just happened to this.
I don't know, ill, we really don't know where he went,
but he had he had a meeting. I think it
was the teenage meeting. It seems like a very structured,
(09:20):
put together home. Not at all, not at all. No,
that was about the only piece of real serious organization
we had. My father was an academic, a really cultured
and brilliant guy, and multi lingual, and my mother was
a painter and you know, profoundly eccentric. So now that
(09:45):
there was a precious little there was some order. My
father was English, he had some of the habits of
he brought from England to America, of being together. Would
you describe yourself that way? I don't know how interesting
it is, Oh, I would describe myself. I'm curious to
(10:06):
know how other people perceived me. But curious, I mean,
I guess I really want them to like me, or
I wouldn't be in this business. But how would I
describe myself? See, that's a big question a seeker. I
guess we'll find the answer at the end of this. Okay, good,
because I think so what did your parents say about
(10:31):
you in high school? Thinking about wanting to act or
wanting to make something? They were both really tempted by
the life of being artists, and they almost did it.
My father was a very elegant writer and wanted to
(10:52):
make writing his life, and my mother was a very
gifted painter, and a lot of her friends made a
life around their artistic pursuit. But the way my parents
tell it is that they went upstate to would Stock,
for mont not Woodstock, New York, but there was an
artist community there and they were absolutely shocked and appalled
(11:20):
at all the little progeny of artists running around unsupervised.
And they decided that they wanted family, and they wanted
to do it right and not with their left hand
like it seemed all these people in this community were
(11:41):
doing so, so they they decided not to Did that
story ever deter you in the beginning from venturing into
this field, I think I think it was more like
it was the path not taken. So they were kind
of curious what it would be like if you actually
did it right, so before you do it. In September
(12:01):
of nineteen fifty seven, you were attending Groton, a Massachusetts
prep school. At the time President Eisenhower dispatch federal troops
to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
In your class there was a student named Tom from
(12:22):
North Carolina. Do you remember this person? You said that
he favored equal rights and integration, but if those soldiers
had entered his town, he would have risen in protest,
walked me through what it was like to be a
active high school seventeen year old person in nineteen fifty
(12:45):
seven as the country was going through these pretty massive
systemic changes. Well, first, I should say that that's what
I remember Tom saying, But that's not what Tom remembers.
I've told this story before, and I guess he heard it.
He objected. Until I was out of college, until I
(13:08):
was in New York, I didn't have any feelings about
race really except for what we read in the newspapers,
and so that conversation rose out of what we read
in the newspapers. As far as interaction with African Americans
or people of different skin color or even from a
(13:31):
different background, it was really very limited. I lad what
you might call a sheltered life, but that wasn't its
only characteristic. It was it was an enormous respectful learning.
There were in the abstract principles of inclusion and open
(13:55):
mindedness and tolerance and all of that stuff were very
much in the forefront of how I was brought up
and taught to think. But that was really the first
time that the wider world intruded about race in my life.
And my father was one of these people who led
a quiet and reserved life, and he, like me, saw
(14:21):
the many I mean I got it from him, I think,
looking at all the many sides of a question, and
always walking around the statue, not settling on one point
of view. But in big moments, he didn't have any
(14:41):
trouble at all rising to the occasion. And sometimes he's
told this against himself. It was wrong, but he acted.
So when World War two came, he was still a
British subject. He didn't have to go to the war,
and he volunteered because he he heard the call. And
(15:05):
when the freedom writers were writing in their buses in
the South, and the New York Times was printing articles
about Martin Luther King's association with communists and stuff, he
went down there and wrote on a bus. So Broughton
was a boarding school. One of my classmates was the
(15:27):
first African American who had been admitted to school, and
it caused a gigantic uproar. Some people were very upset,
and another classmate of mine, his father, wrote a letter
to Time magazine which was published. So this is how
I gradually came to understand that there were these gigantic
(15:49):
injustices going on in the world. But it wasn't really
until I was out of college that I began living
in an integrated society. Before we move on into what
happens in your career, I think it's important to understand,
for people who don't know you, including me, what kind
of conversations did you have with your parents about the
(16:12):
kind of person you ought to be in the world.
Both my wife and I have lived operating under the
assumption that to be a good parent, the only thing
you can do is try to become as decent a
person as you possibly can, and then let your children
see it, and then they will take from that whatever
(16:34):
is useful to them. But then I realized that you
know Kate, and she would also be saying and you
also talked a blue streak about what you thought we
ought to do. So I think we as a family
talked freely. I think the part of society that we
(16:58):
all occupied wasn't necessarily you know, laying it all on
the table and talking about everything and getting everything out
there and sorting it for the out and digging into
the hidden things and what did you really mean? And
all that stuff that was not at all the world
that we grew up and my mother grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts,
(17:22):
and Boston was a very buttoned up society against which
she and her wonderful aunt Caroline Atkinson, who was also
a painter, rebelled in their prospective generations, but not by
burning their bros or anything, but just by not living
(17:44):
that way. So I think we spoke freely, but we
didn't talk about everything, and we didn't air everything. Did
you feel like you could talk freely? When you leave home,
you go to university at Yale, you seem to find
your footing or calling if it's meant to be a
calling and waiting for Godot. Yeah, you're on stage and
(18:08):
there is this moment you've described that I'm going to
just let you describe because I'll just watch it. It
was so cool. I was playing Lucky and waiting for Yodoho.
The director was summoned put from me, but really very
largely all his own made a map for the Lucky speech,
which is a very long monologue. You know it will
(18:32):
I can't perform it for you, but no, I can
do the first sentence. Probably you're welcome to Given the
existence as uttered fourth in the public works of Puncher
and Watman of a personal God and qua qua qua
Quaw with white Beard qua Quake Wah outside died beyond extension,
who from the heights of Divine Ampa Divine Aphasil loves
(18:52):
this dearly for reasons unknown, but time will tell. And
it goes on like that. I could, I couldn't fact
check you. I think that was close. It sounds pretty
good to me. So it was split into two halves,
and the idea was that for the first half half,
Lucky who is presented in the play and who has
(19:13):
a tremendous amount of education and airy edition and is
now Patso's slave, and Patso every once in a while
orders him to, you know, make a show of his
airy edition. So Lucky starts the speech with an enormous
amount of confidence that it's going to turn into a
(19:34):
sentence and makes some sense. And then, according to the
way it was laid out, about halfway through, he loses
that confidence and it becomes a kind of race to
try to at least make a sentence, and it's kind
of panic and horror that it's not working out. So
(19:57):
we did this. We only did about five performance. As
the first performance, the Yale Daily News, which is the
newspaper of the University came and Sow wrote reviews saying
that I was too smart for the part. I didn't
know what that meant, because you weren't smart enough to
know what I mean? Yeah, I guess not. Yeah, probably anyway,
(20:24):
I couldn't. I couldn't fathom it. He just sent me
right up for it. And so every performance thereafter I
was coming up to the speech and wondering what the
heck it could be that was making me the actor
smarter than the character I was playing, And I couldn't
figure I couldn't figure out. On the last night, I
(20:49):
was coming up to and I'm Lucky's on stage carrying
bags around, doing what he's told to do for quite
a long time. So there's a long long time to
think this over. And I did a lot of thinking.
And then just before Patso says speak Pig, the thought
went through my head, I'm never going to figure this out,
(21:12):
and I'm never going to get to do this again,
and if I don't get it tonight, that's it. He said,
speak Pigan. I thought, I'm never going to get to
speak again. And it informed the speech and the audience
thought the first half was hilarious, and then I paused
(21:34):
for breath, and they burst into applause. I inhaled, they
shut up as one person, and then I went into
this panic thing and you could have heard a pin drop.
And then he took my hat off or whatever it
(21:54):
was that made me shut up, and I fell to
the ground, and there was another long pause, and the
crowd went wild, and I thought, I want to do this.
It's such a wonderful thing. And it every once in
a while it happens where you and the audience are
(22:14):
of one mind. That's a really great feeling. Did you
know at the time that it was a special moment. Well,
it's it's so much now a part of my myth,
my narrative that yeah, I can't really say, but I
(22:36):
do know that it that it hit me hard enough
that I thought, I I thought to get away from
this if I could, Because even in school there were
teachers who saw that I was attracted to acting and
warned me against the the Babylonian sin pot that right,
(22:56):
the show business wasn't and also it's tremendous uncertainty. It
was your parents going to Woodstock, Yeah, And so I
went to France with the idea that I would I
took my junior abroad, and I went difference with the
idea that I would never act again, or at least
I would take a year off, and it lasted a
few weeks. You know, maybe the better question is not
(23:20):
about whether you knew it was a special moment, but rather,
are you someone who's capable of recognizing a good thing
when it's a good thing. Are you grateful moment to
moment for the things that happened to you that have
happened to you? Yes, I think so insufficiently grateful? Surely?
(23:42):
Why insufficient because I was going to get really corny,
but I mean, life is an extraordinary gift, blessing, and
I feel like my life has been just a cornucopia
of good fortune and blessings and the whole thing. There's
(24:05):
a series of years, from an outside perspective, worth things
in your career start to happen. Nineteen seventy two through
about nineteen seventy four seemed to me to be the
kind of years if you were to ever write a memoir,
that you would dedicate many chapters too. For a whole
bunch of reasons. In seventy two, you're playing Benedict in
(24:27):
the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of Much Ado About Nothing.
Shortly thereafter, Kathy Hepburn watches this performance, and you have
a blind date with the woman who like, oh, I
thought you were to leave at the most important thing. No, no,
I just I don't bury the lead. I save it
for the end when it matters. I believe it's the
(24:50):
woman who's sitting in the control room. Yes, over there.
I like the smile on your face. It makes me happy.
Let me too. It's a reflection of how happy it
makes me. So we'll break this up in two parts. Okay,
walk me through the Katherine Hepburn asking you to talk
(25:11):
about the Glass Menagerie with her after seeing your performance
in this production. So she summoned me to her house
in Turtle Bay in New York to meet her. Summoned
is a good word. Yeah, she seems like that's what
she does. She doesn't have friends, She summons her friends over. Yeah,
(25:31):
I mean that's from the outsider's point of view. Yes,
I'm sure she just thought, let's have some friends over.
But but you know, there's a kind of commanding presence there.
So I felt summoned, and I went and her assistant
and guardian and protector and loyal friend answered the door
(25:55):
and ushered me into the living room, which was a
very tall ceiling living room with big French windows looking
out on the garden, which was a shared garden amongst
a whole bunch of brownstone, similar brownstone. You remember the house.
I remember the front door being very unprepossessing and small,
(26:16):
and then this terrific living room, and I remember the
windows and what was out there. And I was asked
to be seated and to wait, and then there was
a pause, you know where you could have heard clock sticking,
but I don't remember if there were. Are you anxious?
(26:36):
Are you nervous here? Of course? Yes? And then I
heard is he there yet? And she was coming downstairs?
And then you know, the rest is a blank. Actually
I don't remember what happened after that, but it must
have been okay because she said it was all right
(26:58):
for me to do the part. Did it make sense
to you that this was happening to you? There are
innumerable actors trying to perform, to make a living out
of this craft. Did it makes sense that Katherine Appern said,
you know what, I think he is interesting? He is
(27:20):
actually who should be doing this with. That's a really
good question. And I and I wonder now, looking back,
where I got the gaul or the arrogance or whatever
it was to think I deserved absolutely all the best
parts in all the best plays all the time, I
(27:41):
thought something must have gone terribly wrong when I didn't
get the parts there I wanted. I mean, anybody who's
any ever been anywhere near show business knows that you
get an advanced degree in rejection. It just comes with it.
(28:01):
But I always thought, I don't know where, I don't
know why. What was I Who was I to feel
like there was some kind of injustice going on when
I didn't get the parts that I want? But you
don't strike me as someone who's arrogant. You use the
term I wouldn't have thought that of myself either, But
(28:23):
looking back, I do remember clearly the feeling of something
terribly wrong, but when it was really just the standard
thing that happens to all of us. I don't know why.
Maybe it's the third child thing. This is you know
that if you complain enough about the injustice, things will
(28:45):
be righted someway, you'll get your way. Yeah, how do
you too describe that first date. Lynn was a model
at the time, a friend of hers how to dinner party,
who I knew already because we were in a movie together.
And she had pretty much been telling both of us
(29:06):
that we needed to meet each other and that the
ground had been laid. And then she invited us to
dinner and we didn't talk much. Those are awkward situations. Well,
there were a lot of other people at the dinner party,
but I registered her immediately and I think, I mean,
(29:30):
this is my memories that we had our backs to
each other, but we were pretty close together, maybe on
the floor or one of us on a sofa, on
one of us on the floor near the fireplace. And
then then we walked for a long time after we
left the dinner party. And then after we'd walked a
(29:57):
very long way, we got in a cab and I
rolled down the window and I shouted, thank you God.
And Lynde didn't think, who is incredible, weird, strange person?
Let me out of here. It's a bold move. And yeah,
(30:21):
I like to say that I knew she was crazy
about me from the first minute that she saw me,
and she likes to laugh at me about that. But
I think we both recognized that we've found our meat,
and we just started having a really good time from
the beginning. This is essential. I've been told, I've heard, Yeah,
(30:48):
you want to have a good time. Yeah, you want
to be having a good time. It's not always easy
to have a good time. No, I guess that's why
it's so helpful to be powerfully attracted to one another
and to be having a good time. Were you someone
who believed that you could be with someone to the
(31:11):
end of this whole ride? I had no idea, And
I think you know that was another thing that kind
of helped us both. We'd both come out of really
disappointing and wounding relationships, and we didn't want to get
serious about it anything. We were both relationship shy, and
(31:36):
I don't think that's a bad way to start at all. Okay,
we're together, we seem to really like each other. This
is all fine, but let's not make any long term plans.
Let's not you know, it turns out that that can
last a long time. Well, while you guys were just
(31:57):
having fun, you're in a film called The Great Gatsby.
I don't know if you remember this, but I remember
it vaguely. Kind of a big deal. I want to
watch something together if you don't mind on what it's
right behind you? Nick? Is it really you? It is? Oh,
(32:23):
my dear last love. I'm paralyzed with happiness. Hey, Jordan,
this is my second cousin, once removed. Nick Carraways, does
that mean we kiss when we greet? Or no? I
hope it means we do. M Tom says, you've just
(32:45):
come from Chicago. Tell me everything? Do they miss me?
The whole town is desolate. Oh gorgeous. All the cars
have their left rear wheel painted black as a morning beast,
and there's a persistent whale all night. Let's go back tomorrow, Tom,
I love a persistent whale. Well, I love a drink.
(33:10):
Come on, let's all have a drink. I've been lying
on that sofa for as long as I can remember.
You live across the sound in West d I know
somebody there. I don't know a single person. You mus
know Gatsby? Oh he's my neighbor. Gatsby? What Gatsby? How
(33:33):
do you like that? How did you like that? Well?
I don't think i've seen that, and I don't know
how old is that movie? Nineteen seventy four Yeah, that's
a long time ago. What happens when you watch that,
I don't know. I was curious and it was a pleasure.
We were all a lot younger, I remember, you know,
(33:56):
the stakes were very, very high. I remember my friend
Scott Wilson, who I became friends with on that film,
and we were friends all our lives from that movie
until he passed away last year. So I remember that.
Is it strange watching all of you in that setting,
(34:18):
remembering what you were like in your thirties trying to
make it work? Well, it didn't strike me as immediately strange,
but I suppose if I were to sit on that
memory for a while, stuff would come along. But more
than just about that scene, it would be about the
whole experience. My mother was an extra on that, As
(34:42):
I told you, she was a painter. She said that
the director was the first man that she had ever
met who had like coming out of his eyes. The
way that film looks seems like there's light coming out
of everyone's eyes. I think that was very much part
of the idea. Yeah, the rich are not like the
(35:04):
rest of us is a line from a book, and
I think you were supposed to see that and think
that all that glitters is not gold. But yeah, it
was a great experience, a wonderful experience for me. The
character Nick Carraway is very much an observer of the story.
(35:27):
In some ways, he is the surrogate member of the
audience in the film. Does that seem like the kind
of person that you may be in alignment with in
an off screen Well, I think it's something that I
might have accused myself of until recently. But how do
you mean, Well, before I came to talk to you, Okay,
(35:51):
I was at a fire Drill Friday demonstration, one of
these fire drill Fridays that Jane Fonda has organized starting
in DC during the last hiatus with Grace and Frankie,
and I went there to participate in them. And I
really I'm forever grateful to Jane for making me ask
(36:19):
myself the question if if I really thought the things
that I thought, I wasn't I saying them? And why
I wasn't I saying them as loudly as I could
think of to say them? And why was I saying
them from the comfort basically of my own home, you know,
saying this is wrong and that shouldn't be and all
(36:39):
that stuff, but not really leaving the comfort of my
own private orbit. And so I went to a couple
in DC, and I got myself arrested for the first
time for any kind of political protest, for the first
(37:00):
time in my whole life. I mean, it's part of
the reason I'm here talking to you is because this
is not what I think I would have normally done
before this year, Because it's a real question. What is
there of interest that I might be able to say
that other people might want to listen to. Is that's
(37:21):
a real question. There's plenty of things. Well, I'm glad
to hear you say it. This is something actually Catherine mentioned,
which is that you are at this place in your
life right now, at the tender age of seventy nine,
where you are more vocal about the things you believe in,
(37:41):
about the things you want to see in the world.
Before you arrived at this place, do you think you
were quiet or reluctant to speak publicly out of shyness
or out of fear. Well, no, not out of fear,
I don't think, but being dubious that I had anything,
(38:10):
and being critical of a lot of people shooting their
mouths off, and being critical of the whole world of
blah blah blah is my opinion, talking heads and all
the whole society that we live in and thinking that
keeping your peace might be a really good thing. And
I still, I still do appreciate people that don't blab
(38:36):
away like I am now. So I guess for the
sake of the world is what I thought there would
be a good idea to shut up. But now I
just want to know what I think, and I don't
know how much more time there is to find that out,
and I don't And what this whole fired real Friday's
(38:58):
thing made vivid was that you can't really know what
you think unless you say it, because otherwise it just
rattles around in your head and it changes the way
we were talking earlier about memories changing. It just meanders around.
It doesn't have a structure. It's fascinating to me that
(39:20):
you've arrived at this idea or this question of what
the hell do I think? At seventy nine. I was
having little epiphanies before that. But this is different. Yeah,
what feels different about it? Well, I'm talking to you,
for example, Are you more comfortable? Yes? Because I don't
(39:44):
think and this is funny, but I don't really mind
if it turns out that I'm talking like an idiot.
If that's the case, I'd rather know it. I haven't
found you to be an idiot. Well it's nice. There's
still time. Yeah. And also when you listen to the
tape stuff that could come to a different conclusion. There
(40:06):
is something topical that I'm reluct to talk about, but
I feel I must because I, like many people, was
first introduced to your work by way of Woody Allen
and Interiors Hana and her sisters, especially crimes and misdemeanors.
We had Alison Pillon last week and she was wonderful
(40:29):
at midnight in Paris, and it's something we talked about
and I want to ask you about it because you've
seen the cycles of behavior in this strange town. My
question is, how do you think we can talk about
the work when the work is tethered to a tarnished legacy. Well,
(40:52):
I'm not sure. I think that's a terribly important question
to answer her in any immediate way, because if if
the work is good, it will History tells us that
it will probably survive whatever scandal is attached to the
(41:16):
creator's name. People will say, well, well, they'll say whatever
they say, but they'll say that's a great movie. The
thing that's challenging for people who want to make stuff
like myself, or people who love film, plays, television, any
kind of art, is that they believe, in the current
(41:37):
climate where we're at, that they have to do some
kind of erasure and zige their heads, that they have
to get rid of all these things because one person
involved or the creator of this one thing did something bad.
That's a different, a really much harder question, I think,
which is what do we do now right about now?
(42:00):
This might be dodging the question, but I think you know,
you want to be a little careful about what you
really know? What do you really know? Or what do
you really know? Maybe the emphasis should be on that.
At the same time, that question has given such a
(42:21):
past to so many powerful, mostly men, that it's not
an adequate answer. It's alive quandary. We're going through just
an enormous transition. It seems like it's daily life, but
it's really huge and in the long run, and maybe
(42:42):
even in the very short run, one of the great things,
apart from hope about the future, is surprise. This could
all crystallize in some new way that we haven't imagined
tomorrow or even this afternoon, or you know, we don't
know what's coming. And these are all things that need
(43:05):
to be addressed and dealt with at the people, the
classes of people that have been taking it on the
chinne all these years. Rise Up is a really good
name from the movement. It's astonishing there hasn't been a
revolt before this. It's in dialogue with what we're talking about.
(43:26):
But your father said that success is like smoking. Did
you laugh when he said that? He wrote it? It
was in a letter? When did you write it? When
I was doing the Great Guessbie. We were in England
and he wrote me this letter saying that he was
delighted with the success that I seemed to be having.
(43:48):
And then he said, I've always thought that the success
was a bit like smoking. Probably wouldn't do any harm,
or much harm, as long as you didn't inhale. Its
just words to live by. Did you believe him? I
think I laughed first. I think that's was my first reaction,
(44:09):
but laugh like, oh that's right on the money. Yeah,
I believe him. I believed him then, and I believe him,
you know, and it's part of the reason for not
doing interviews like this and things like that. It's very
easy to think, well, I must mean something about what
(44:35):
it seems you have a real good handle on how
to not let ego infect you. I don't think it's
possible to have a really good handle on not having
your ego infect you. I think I love when I
say things and then you're like, absolutely not. I'm sorry.
(44:55):
But I think John Houston said that about sex. You
know that it's when you're younger. It's it's like riding
trying to ride a wild horse, and it pretty much
does what it wants and it never really goes away.
But it's easier as you go older. You write it
(45:16):
and it doesn't write you. And you would hope that
that would be true of these other things like ego
that sees you. But I'm not at all confident. There
is a question Catherine had I'm going to ask for
her since she's far away. She said, what has a
(45:40):
lifelong relationship with Shakespeare taught you about acting and about yourself?
It's a great question. I think my life would be
greatly impoverished if it weren't for the wonderful opportunity to
spend time with Shakespeare throughout my career, from when I
(46:05):
was in college until today. You know, people used to
go around with the Bible and Shakespeare. Pioneers went out
west with just those two books. I think they're pretty
close to being enough. Shakespeare is just so enormously rich,
and then to get to perform it, to have something
(46:29):
of the sensation of what it's like to be able
to see into the world the way Hamlet does, because
after all, your mouth is moving and it's saying these words.
You know, it's it's a beneficial feedlap back loop into
your whole nature, into your brain, into your body. I
(46:50):
think it gets into your body and it's it does
you a world of good. This is his way of
understanding the world, which is in the language, built into
the language, opposition and contradiction and metaphor association and all
(47:12):
of these things in the held in wonderful narrative and bottomless.
My son James came back from doing The Mid Summer
Night's Dream one year and said that his favorite line
in Shakespeare were bottoms, lines that ended in him saying,
(47:36):
for it hath no bottom. And I think that's true.
Of Shakespeare's characters, they have no bottom. And here's the
really curious thing. It turns out that in the history
of his writing, as people have looked into it, that
are an awful lot of the plays that we attributed
(47:56):
attribute to him. And I'm not going to be able
to give you the list of which ones, but many
of them were done in collaboration, almost like writing for
the writer's room of a sitcom. You write this scene,
all write that scene, you do the other one. This
is basically the narrative. And so these characters have contradictions
(48:18):
in them because of who wrote the scenes that make
them deeper than the kind of tidy characters that come
out when it's all from one man's pen. Isn't that
just glorious? It is? I had heard that, But I
love you saying that because so much of your life
(48:40):
kind of begins and ends with Shakespeare, and in your
performance in New York and your ongoing pursuit of trying
to get to the bottom of it. We have to
go soon, so we have to answer some big questions,
or at least we have to ask them. Go ahead,
what does your faith mean to you? Right now? At
(49:01):
seventy nine? It means a lot to me. It's one
of the one of the questions that has been in
the air for me for a long time. And I
wouldn't say that it was entirely not in the air now,
but I feel sure that God is and that christis
(49:27):
his son, and then I don't know anything else, not anything.
And one of the things that I think is a
trap for a religion is that there are so many
questions in the world, so many unanswerable and unknowable things,
(49:50):
and we are all so fragile and vulnerable that one
of the attractions of religion is the promise of making
you feel okay in that circumstance. And what I think
it does often is it slides over into saying, no,
you're not in an uncertain world. You know positively what's
(50:11):
going to happen. Everything is settled. Just do the things
in this list and you're done. And instead, I think
what religion has in it and can give you is
feeling comfortable in your nearly perfect ignorance. Are you comfortable? Yes?
(50:34):
And I think I am a little more comfortable for
having said it out allowed to you, So I think
this is doing me good. What are the new questions
you've been batting around. I think the most obvious one
is climate and the climate emergency, which you and I
(50:54):
have both been reading about it. It's been as long
as you've been alive, longer than you've been alive, twice
as long as you've been alive, maybe even more than that,
maybe half a century. People have seen this emergency coming,
warned about it, talked about it. And I've been reading
all that stuff, and I've done this and that, and
(51:17):
I've gotten gradually a little louder. It's not like I
was absolutely silent until the day before yesterday. Now all
of a sudden, I'm talking. But the dramatic change came
with fire real Fridays and getting kicked off the field
at halftime at the Harvard Dale game this past year
(51:41):
because the students there. We're trying to get the university
to divest from fossil fuel investments. This is a thing
that needs to be done, that action needs to be
taken on right now, immediately yesterday the day before. It's
(52:01):
been a long standing problem and we've all worried it
and watched it and all that stuff, and that won't
do anymore. You're talking about future generations in many ways,
and how they're going to be able to live the
kind of life you led and that I hope to lead. Yes,
it's certainly something I'm thinking about. In terms of whether
(52:23):
to have children. Well, I go back to the things
I said before. There's a hope. If having children represents
hope to you, then willy nilly, even if you're headed
for the end of the world, I think having children
is a good idea because we live on hope, and
(52:45):
there are way too many children in the world. We're
eating up way too much of the Earth's resources. But
maybe just one, you know, for the hope. And then
the other thing is, and this backs up hope, is
that you can be absolutely certain that you're going to
(53:06):
be surprised tomorrow, next day, and by the whole outcome
of this whole thing. It's not going to be the
way you think it's gonna be. So, I mean, Lennon
and I made children without any reason to believe that
we were ever going to be able to pay for
them or any of that. But they really are very
(53:28):
powerful motivators. They'll get you out of bed every morning.
I recommend them. I was wondering that you did three
hundred and ninety episodes of Law and Order. I was like,
that pays for a whole life, certainly, Well, I've paid
for a lot of college. You know, people listening are
gonna be like, now you mentioned Law and Order at
the end of this goddamn thing. Where the hell was
(53:49):
it the whole time? We have a couple more things.
I actually can I ask you about this on a
practical level, you have done theater, which is inherently impractical. Monetarily,
there is not a lot of money. Even at the
highest level. There is some, but there's no guarantee. Right
(54:09):
film and television obviously there is more. Law and Order
is basically I assume lifetime set. But you don't strike
me as someone who has ever made a decision based
on dollars and cents. I don't think that's entirely true.
(54:34):
You got to make a living, right, and if you
have children, they depend on you for their living for
a very long time. So yes, of course you do
things in order to make money. My arrogance, the thing
we were talking about earlier, was to think that I
should be able to be an artist, and that there
(54:56):
would be an injustice if I wasn't able to make
a living right and be an artist. I don't know
whether I feel that purely now, but I think it
was a very beneficial thing to think when I was
starting out. I think it's a real powerful animator, and
it gives you a sort of place to stand to
(55:21):
make your case. You gotta give me this job because
I'm an artist. You know. It gives you a kind
of argument. I have something for us on the subject
of hope. You're part of a scene that I believe
to be one of the most hopeful pieces of writing
committed to film in the Forum's history, so I wanted
(55:44):
to watch it for a second before we left. We
are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices.
Some are on a grand scale. Most of these choices
(56:09):
are lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices
we have made. We are, in fact this sum total
of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly. Human
(56:29):
happiness does not seem to have been included in the
design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity
to love, that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And
yet most human beings seem to have the ability to
(56:51):
keep trying and even to find joy from simple things
like their family, their work, and from the hope that
future generations might understand more. Thank you for showing me that.
(57:18):
If I'm honest, I am not generally capable of watching
that and not crying. Again, complicated because I have to
publicly recognize that the person who wrote those words represents
a great deal of pain for some people listening. Whether
what he did happened or not, it doesn't really matter
(57:41):
because people are in pain. But boy, you can't tell
me that that isn't it? Right there? I agree? So
my question to you is a moral choices, some on
a grand scale, most of these are on lesser points.
(58:01):
You're turning eighty this year, I imagine you're thinking about
the decisions, the choices, grand and small. How do you
think you've done well? The very last thing I heard
my father say before he died, he was in a
(58:21):
hospital in Connecticut, and a medication was giving him hallucinations
and bad dreams, and and then he would have these
moments of clarity. And he had Parkinson's, so he had
a shake. So he had just come out of a
(58:45):
troubled sleep. And I had my face near his mouth
so I could hear what he was saying, and the
last thing I heard him say was the young people
must not be given the wrong idea, which probably has
(59:15):
more meaning for me because it was my father talking.
But I I'm going to need a lot of forgiveness,
and thank God there is forgiveness in the world. I
don't think that sets me apart from the great run
(59:39):
of humanity. I think we all are pretty big disappointments.
But when you ask me how I think I've done,
my mind immediately goes to the enormous good fortune that
I've enjoyed. So, you know, if the question is how
to go, it's been going great and long may it continue.
(01:00:07):
But if you're asking me what the sum of my
life is and how it ought to be judged, I
hope the judge is really nice and very understanding. Otherwise
we're all out of luck. Well, I can't promise you
who that judge is going to be. I thought I
was going to be you. I was kind of I
(01:00:27):
thought you said that at the beginning, that you were
going to sort this all out for me. You don't
need me as your judge. I'm very I'm very disappointed now.
I came all this way, you know, I know this
is not just around the corner. I know you came
a long way. I did a long way, and I'm
truly thankful that you did come this long way and
(01:00:49):
stay with me. I'm grateful that this turned out to
be you. Thank you very much. Anytime. Sam Waterson thought
you soon, thought to you soon. And that's our show
(01:01:22):
special thanks this week to Katherine Waterston. To learn more
about her father, Sam Waterston. You can visit our website
at www dot talk easypod dot com. There you'll find
a back catalog of episodes with a whole bunch of
actors I think you may like, including Philip Baker Hall,
Robert Forrester, Alan Alda, Laura Dern, Edward Norton, Tracy Let's,
(01:01:45):
Kenneth Brana, and many many more. If you haven't done
so already, be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify,
Apple Music, Stitcher, SoundCloud, wherever you get your podcasts. You
can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at talk easypod,
and if you'd like to write us an email about
this episode, or any episode, or hell about anything, feel
(01:02:09):
free to do so at talk easypod at gmail dot com.
As always, this show is made possible by our incredible team.
Our executive producer is Janick Sa Bravo. Our editor is
Andrea Lynn. Illustrations by Krishna Chenoe, design by Ian Jones.
Our music is by Dylan Peck and Jin Sang. Our
(01:02:30):
engineer is Tim Moore, and we tape out of your
recording here in Los Angeles, California. Our associate producer is
Nicky Spina, and the show is produced each week by
Caroline Reebok. It was, by the way, Caroline's birthday yesterday,
so happy birthday to Caroline. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you
(01:02:52):
for listening to Talk Easy. We'll be back here next
Sunday with Juliette Louis. Until then, have a good week everyone.
(01:03:12):
Choo choo boosts shoo
Pushkin. I think my life would be greatly impoverished if
it weren't for the wonderful time with Shakespeare from college
until today, pretty close to being enough to get to
perform it, to have something of the sensation of what
(00:38):
it's like to be able to see into the world
the way Hamlet does. It's a beneficial feedback loop into
your whole nature. His way of understanding the world, built
into the language opposition. All of these things held in
wonderful narrative. They have no bottom. That was Sam Waterston.
(01:02):
I'm San Fracoso and this is Talk Easy. Welcome to
the show. Hey everyone, I'm Samford Girl. So this is
(01:34):
Talk Easy. Today on the show is Sam Waterston, and
this is an episode I've been wanting to do for
a long time now. He's an actor. I think you
probably know that he's been doing it for over fifty years.
And because of that fact, I'm not going to do
(01:56):
a formal introduction. Instead, I'd like to point out why
this episode is especially unusual and unique to this show.
For one, fifteen minutes before the podcast, I got a
call from Katherine Waterston, who is Sam's daughter. Keep in
mind that right before I do these I'm frantic, I
(02:19):
have to go to the bathroom. I'm anxious. I don't
know what the hell I'm talking about or asking. And
she calls, and she did not know we were going
to do this. I told her at the last minute.
And the first thing she says is, well, have you
done your research? Which is a great thing to hear
(02:40):
right before you do a podcast for an hour. That
was unusual, And in that conversation, Katherine gave me good
pointers and things to talk about that I would have
not had if not for her. So, first off, we've
been doing this show for four years and we've never
had someone's daughter call in to give assistance. But I'm
(03:02):
very thankful that she called. The second thing is that
when Sam arrives, he arrives with his wife of forty
four years. That is definitely a first on this show.
We've never had a partner come in and sit in
the control room. It was a real Waterston family affair,
is what I'm trying to say. And the last thing
(03:22):
is that you may have noticed that Sam Waterston comes
from a generation of actors that are often very reluctant
to give interviews. I don't know what it is I
have some idea, but I don't exactly know. But for Sam,
this is a highly unusual setting. He has not sat
(03:43):
for a long form interview of any kind except for
perhaps a couple of occasions in his life with Charlie Rose.
But aside from that, he hasn't exactly felt comfortable sharing
and airing his thoughts publicly. But he happens to be
at a new place in his life where the kind
(04:04):
of dialogue we try to have on this show each
week is something he was open to. So this was
truly a special episode for so many reasons, as you're
about to hear. And I have to say, without hyperbole
that taping this podcast was truly an honor of a lifetime.
(04:25):
And I feel in this moment distinctly blessed to be
doing this show for you wherever you are listening. Boy,
I love doing this and I love sitting with Sam,
So I have a feeling you may feel the same
after this episode. Without further ado, here is the one
(04:49):
and only Sam Waterston. Sam Waterston, Yes, how are we doing?
I'm fine? How are you so? About twenty minutes before
this podcast, your daughter calls me kind of frantically and
(05:14):
she says, oh, my god, you're gonna do this with
my dad. Here are some things I think you should
talk about. Al really, we'll save those for later. She
did mention, and it's maybe the place to start that
you are in a moment of perhaps more self reflection
than usual. Maybe that's just the nature of getting older.
(05:36):
Does that seem accurate? Yeah, I think it is. The
way I would describe it. I guess is that I've
been entertaining an awful lot of questions for an awful
long time, and now it feels like if I'm ever
going to get down to cases, i'd better do it soon.
(05:59):
I was talking to Martin Sheen about this, and I
said that I've always wanted to figure out everything and
understand everything, and now it feels like I'm running out
of time, so I better get on the job. Well,
there are a bunch of things we can try to
find the answer too. Oh good, you can help me.
I'm going to try to help you, please. I also
(06:20):
hope you can help me. I don't know. Let's start
with this on the nature of reflecting on the past.
In nineteen thirty nine, your mother is performing in a play.
I believe it's Anthony and Cleopatra, she's pregnant with you.
She would later go on to say that this is
(06:41):
one of the reasons you decided to become an actor.
She also painted the sets for that right, and the
set to her picasso Esque, and we still have these
two twenty foot by four or five foot wide figures
that she painted for that show. What do you make
(07:01):
of the sort of genetic nature of that question? Could
it possibly be passed on? It feels like we're making
things up? But it's okay. I mean, they're perfectly good
things to make up. That's always sounds like shed made
that up too, And the way I experienced it with
her when she was alive was friendly, complimentary, loving. So
(07:27):
it's a nice story. I I like it. Story Narrative
is an unrecognized fundamental appetite. I think we can't do without.
So if there's not some fact based story to tell,
then we make one up. But even fact based stories
are embroidered into a narrative so that the facts make
(07:49):
a kind of sense. At six, your father cast you
in a play. He did you describe that time as
a joyous time because it meant that you could stay
up with him late, Yeah, and have undivided attention, which
is what every child in a crowded family wants. Yeah,
what are the memories that come into your head? The
(08:12):
real part, the nugget that I remember is sitting in
that dark theater next to my father while the play
that he was directing was in the bright lights up
at the end of the room. And that's what I remember.
How did your parents describe you as a child as
(08:33):
you grew up. I think I was disobedient. I think
I was. This is not things that they accused me of.
But I was the third child. I got away with
a lot of stuff that my older siblings didn't, and
I like that a lot. I still to this day
(08:54):
on a terrible shirker of dishwashing. But they used to
have charts and stuff in my family for whose turn
it was every week? And I somehow I would be
absent on their key day. And it just happened to this.
I don't know, ill, we really don't know where he went,
but he had he had a meeting. I think it
was the teenage meeting. It seems like a very structured,
(09:20):
put together home. Not at all, not at all. No,
that was about the only piece of real serious organization
we had. My father was an academic, a really cultured
and brilliant guy, and multi lingual, and my mother was
a painter and you know, profoundly eccentric. So now that
(09:45):
there was a precious little there was some order. My
father was English, he had some of the habits of
he brought from England to America, of being together. Would
you describe yourself that way? I don't know how interesting
it is, Oh, I would describe myself. I'm curious to
(10:06):
know how other people perceived me. But curious, I mean,
I guess I really want them to like me, or
I wouldn't be in this business. But how would I
describe myself? See, that's a big question a seeker. I
guess we'll find the answer at the end of this. Okay, good,
because I think so what did your parents say about
(10:31):
you in high school? Thinking about wanting to act or
wanting to make something? They were both really tempted by
the life of being artists, and they almost did it.
My father was a very elegant writer and wanted to
(10:52):
make writing his life, and my mother was a very
gifted painter, and a lot of her friends made a
life around their artistic pursuit. But the way my parents
tell it is that they went upstate to would Stock,
for mont not Woodstock, New York, but there was an
artist community there and they were absolutely shocked and appalled
(11:20):
at all the little progeny of artists running around unsupervised.
And they decided that they wanted family, and they wanted
to do it right and not with their left hand
like it seemed all these people in this community were
(11:41):
doing so, so they they decided not to Did that
story ever deter you in the beginning from venturing into
this field, I think I think it was more like
it was the path not taken. So they were kind
of curious what it would be like if you actually
did it right, so before you do it. In September
(12:01):
of nineteen fifty seven, you were attending Groton, a Massachusetts
prep school. At the time President Eisenhower dispatch federal troops
to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
In your class there was a student named Tom from
(12:22):
North Carolina. Do you remember this person? You said that
he favored equal rights and integration, but if those soldiers
had entered his town, he would have risen in protest,
walked me through what it was like to be a
active high school seventeen year old person in nineteen fifty
(12:45):
seven as the country was going through these pretty massive
systemic changes. Well, first, I should say that that's what
I remember Tom saying, But that's not what Tom remembers.
I've told this story before, and I guess he heard it.
He objected. Until I was out of college, until I
(13:08):
was in New York, I didn't have any feelings about
race really except for what we read in the newspapers,
and so that conversation rose out of what we read
in the newspapers. As far as interaction with African Americans
or people of different skin color or even from a
(13:31):
different background, it was really very limited. I lad what
you might call a sheltered life, but that wasn't its
only characteristic. It was it was an enormous respectful learning.
There were in the abstract principles of inclusion and open
(13:55):
mindedness and tolerance and all of that stuff were very
much in the forefront of how I was brought up
and taught to think. But that was really the first
time that the wider world intruded about race in my life.
And my father was one of these people who led
a quiet and reserved life, and he, like me, saw
(14:21):
the many I mean I got it from him, I think,
looking at all the many sides of a question, and
always walking around the statue, not settling on one point
of view. But in big moments, he didn't have any
(14:41):
trouble at all rising to the occasion. And sometimes he's
told this against himself. It was wrong, but he acted.
So when World War two came, he was still a
British subject. He didn't have to go to the war,
and he volunteered because he he heard the call. And
(15:05):
when the freedom writers were writing in their buses in
the South, and the New York Times was printing articles
about Martin Luther King's association with communists and stuff, he
went down there and wrote on a bus. So Broughton
was a boarding school. One of my classmates was the
(15:27):
first African American who had been admitted to school, and
it caused a gigantic uproar. Some people were very upset,
and another classmate of mine, his father, wrote a letter
to Time magazine which was published. So this is how
I gradually came to understand that there were these gigantic
(15:49):
injustices going on in the world. But it wasn't really
until I was out of college that I began living
in an integrated society. Before we move on into what
happens in your career, I think it's important to understand,
for people who don't know you, including me, what kind
of conversations did you have with your parents about the
(16:12):
kind of person you ought to be in the world.
Both my wife and I have lived operating under the
assumption that to be a good parent, the only thing
you can do is try to become as decent a
person as you possibly can, and then let your children
see it, and then they will take from that whatever
(16:34):
is useful to them. But then I realized that you
know Kate, and she would also be saying and you
also talked a blue streak about what you thought we
ought to do. So I think we as a family
talked freely. I think the part of society that we
(16:58):
all occupied wasn't necessarily you know, laying it all on
the table and talking about everything and getting everything out
there and sorting it for the out and digging into
the hidden things and what did you really mean? And
all that stuff that was not at all the world
that we grew up and my mother grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts,
(17:22):
and Boston was a very buttoned up society against which
she and her wonderful aunt Caroline Atkinson, who was also
a painter, rebelled in their prospective generations, but not by
burning their bros or anything, but just by not living
(17:44):
that way. So I think we spoke freely, but we
didn't talk about everything, and we didn't air everything. Did
you feel like you could talk freely? When you leave home,
you go to university at Yale, you seem to find
your footing or calling if it's meant to be a
calling and waiting for Godot. Yeah, you're on stage and
(18:08):
there is this moment you've described that I'm going to
just let you describe because I'll just watch it. It
was so cool. I was playing Lucky and waiting for Yodoho.
The director was summoned put from me, but really very
largely all his own made a map for the Lucky speech,
which is a very long monologue. You know it will
(18:32):
I can't perform it for you, but no, I can
do the first sentence. Probably you're welcome to Given the
existence as uttered fourth in the public works of Puncher
and Watman of a personal God and qua qua qua
Quaw with white Beard qua Quake Wah outside died beyond extension,
who from the heights of Divine Ampa Divine Aphasil loves
(18:52):
this dearly for reasons unknown, but time will tell. And
it goes on like that. I could, I couldn't fact
check you. I think that was close. It sounds pretty
good to me. So it was split into two halves,
and the idea was that for the first half half,
Lucky who is presented in the play and who has
(19:13):
a tremendous amount of education and airy edition and is
now Patso's slave, and Patso every once in a while
orders him to, you know, make a show of his
airy edition. So Lucky starts the speech with an enormous
amount of confidence that it's going to turn into a
(19:34):
sentence and makes some sense. And then, according to the
way it was laid out, about halfway through, he loses
that confidence and it becomes a kind of race to
try to at least make a sentence, and it's kind
of panic and horror that it's not working out. So
(19:57):
we did this. We only did about five performance. As
the first performance, the Yale Daily News, which is the
newspaper of the University came and Sow wrote reviews saying
that I was too smart for the part. I didn't
know what that meant, because you weren't smart enough to
know what I mean? Yeah, I guess not. Yeah, probably anyway,
(20:24):
I couldn't. I couldn't fathom it. He just sent me
right up for it. And so every performance thereafter I
was coming up to the speech and wondering what the
heck it could be that was making me the actor
smarter than the character I was playing, And I couldn't
figure I couldn't figure out. On the last night, I
(20:49):
was coming up to and I'm Lucky's on stage carrying
bags around, doing what he's told to do for quite
a long time. So there's a long long time to
think this over. And I did a lot of thinking.
And then just before Patso says speak Pig, the thought
went through my head, I'm never going to figure this out,
(21:12):
and I'm never going to get to do this again,
and if I don't get it tonight, that's it. He said,
speak Pigan. I thought, I'm never going to get to
speak again. And it informed the speech and the audience
thought the first half was hilarious, and then I paused
(21:34):
for breath, and they burst into applause. I inhaled, they
shut up as one person, and then I went into
this panic thing and you could have heard a pin drop.
And then he took my hat off or whatever it
(21:54):
was that made me shut up, and I fell to
the ground, and there was another long pause, and the
crowd went wild, and I thought, I want to do this.
It's such a wonderful thing. And it every once in
a while it happens where you and the audience are
(22:14):
of one mind. That's a really great feeling. Did you
know at the time that it was a special moment. Well,
it's it's so much now a part of my myth,
my narrative that yeah, I can't really say, but I
(22:36):
do know that it that it hit me hard enough
that I thought, I I thought to get away from
this if I could, Because even in school there were
teachers who saw that I was attracted to acting and
warned me against the the Babylonian sin pot that right,
(22:56):
the show business wasn't and also it's tremendous uncertainty. It
was your parents going to Woodstock, Yeah, And so I
went to France with the idea that I would I
took my junior abroad, and I went difference with the
idea that I would never act again, or at least
I would take a year off, and it lasted a
few weeks. You know, maybe the better question is not
(23:20):
about whether you knew it was a special moment, but rather,
are you someone who's capable of recognizing a good thing
when it's a good thing. Are you grateful moment to
moment for the things that happened to you that have
happened to you? Yes, I think so insufficiently grateful? Surely?
(23:42):
Why insufficient because I was going to get really corny,
but I mean, life is an extraordinary gift, blessing, and
I feel like my life has been just a cornucopia
of good fortune and blessings and the whole thing. There's
(24:05):
a series of years, from an outside perspective, worth things
in your career start to happen. Nineteen seventy two through
about nineteen seventy four seemed to me to be the
kind of years if you were to ever write a memoir,
that you would dedicate many chapters too. For a whole
bunch of reasons. In seventy two, you're playing Benedict in
(24:27):
the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of Much Ado About Nothing.
Shortly thereafter, Kathy Hepburn watches this performance, and you have
a blind date with the woman who like, oh, I
thought you were to leave at the most important thing. No, no,
I just I don't bury the lead. I save it
for the end when it matters. I believe it's the
(24:50):
woman who's sitting in the control room. Yes, over there.
I like the smile on your face. It makes me happy.
Let me too. It's a reflection of how happy it
makes me. So we'll break this up in two parts. Okay,
walk me through the Katherine Hepburn asking you to talk
(25:11):
about the Glass Menagerie with her after seeing your performance
in this production. So she summoned me to her house
in Turtle Bay in New York to meet her. Summoned
is a good word. Yeah, she seems like that's what
she does. She doesn't have friends, She summons her friends over. Yeah,
(25:31):
I mean that's from the outsider's point of view. Yes,
I'm sure she just thought, let's have some friends over.
But but you know, there's a kind of commanding presence there.
So I felt summoned, and I went and her assistant
and guardian and protector and loyal friend answered the door
(25:55):
and ushered me into the living room, which was a
very tall ceiling living room with big French windows looking
out on the garden, which was a shared garden amongst
a whole bunch of brownstone, similar brownstone. You remember the house.
I remember the front door being very unprepossessing and small,
(26:16):
and then this terrific living room, and I remember the
windows and what was out there. And I was asked
to be seated and to wait, and then there was
a pause, you know where you could have heard clock sticking,
but I don't remember if there were. Are you anxious?
(26:36):
Are you nervous here? Of course? Yes? And then I
heard is he there yet? And she was coming downstairs?
And then you know, the rest is a blank. Actually
I don't remember what happened after that, but it must
have been okay because she said it was all right
(26:58):
for me to do the part. Did it make sense
to you that this was happening to you? There are
innumerable actors trying to perform, to make a living out
of this craft. Did it makes sense that Katherine Appern said,
you know what, I think he is interesting? He is
(27:20):
actually who should be doing this with. That's a really
good question. And I and I wonder now, looking back,
where I got the gaul or the arrogance or whatever
it was to think I deserved absolutely all the best
parts in all the best plays all the time, I
(27:41):
thought something must have gone terribly wrong when I didn't
get the parts there I wanted. I mean, anybody who's
any ever been anywhere near show business knows that you
get an advanced degree in rejection. It just comes with it.
(28:01):
But I always thought, I don't know where, I don't
know why. What was I Who was I to feel
like there was some kind of injustice going on when
I didn't get the parts that I want? But you
don't strike me as someone who's arrogant. You use the
term I wouldn't have thought that of myself either, But
(28:23):
looking back, I do remember clearly the feeling of something
terribly wrong, but when it was really just the standard
thing that happens to all of us. I don't know why.
Maybe it's the third child thing. This is you know
that if you complain enough about the injustice, things will
(28:45):
be righted someway, you'll get your way. Yeah, how do
you too describe that first date. Lynn was a model
at the time, a friend of hers how to dinner party,
who I knew already because we were in a movie together.
And she had pretty much been telling both of us
(29:06):
that we needed to meet each other and that the
ground had been laid. And then she invited us to
dinner and we didn't talk much. Those are awkward situations. Well,
there were a lot of other people at the dinner party,
but I registered her immediately and I think, I mean,
(29:30):
this is my memories that we had our backs to
each other, but we were pretty close together, maybe on
the floor or one of us on a sofa, on
one of us on the floor near the fireplace. And
then then we walked for a long time after we
left the dinner party. And then after we'd walked a
(29:57):
very long way, we got in a cab and I
rolled down the window and I shouted, thank you God.
And Lynde didn't think, who is incredible, weird, strange person?
Let me out of here. It's a bold move. And yeah,
(30:21):
I like to say that I knew she was crazy
about me from the first minute that she saw me,
and she likes to laugh at me about that. But
I think we both recognized that we've found our meat,
and we just started having a really good time from
the beginning. This is essential. I've been told, I've heard, Yeah,
(30:48):
you want to have a good time. Yeah, you want
to be having a good time. It's not always easy
to have a good time. No, I guess that's why
it's so helpful to be powerfully attracted to one another
and to be having a good time. Were you someone
who believed that you could be with someone to the
(31:11):
end of this whole ride? I had no idea, And
I think you know that was another thing that kind
of helped us both. We'd both come out of really
disappointing and wounding relationships, and we didn't want to get
serious about it anything. We were both relationship shy, and
(31:36):
I don't think that's a bad way to start at all. Okay,
we're together, we seem to really like each other. This
is all fine, but let's not make any long term plans.
Let's not you know, it turns out that that can
last a long time. Well, while you guys were just
(31:57):
having fun, you're in a film called The Great Gatsby.
I don't know if you remember this, but I remember
it vaguely. Kind of a big deal. I want to
watch something together if you don't mind on what it's
right behind you? Nick? Is it really you? It is? Oh,
(32:23):
my dear last love. I'm paralyzed with happiness. Hey, Jordan,
this is my second cousin, once removed. Nick Carraways, does
that mean we kiss when we greet? Or no? I
hope it means we do. M Tom says, you've just
(32:45):
come from Chicago. Tell me everything? Do they miss me?
The whole town is desolate. Oh gorgeous. All the cars
have their left rear wheel painted black as a morning beast,
and there's a persistent whale all night. Let's go back tomorrow, Tom,
I love a persistent whale. Well, I love a drink.
(33:10):
Come on, let's all have a drink. I've been lying
on that sofa for as long as I can remember.
You live across the sound in West d I know
somebody there. I don't know a single person. You mus
know Gatsby? Oh he's my neighbor. Gatsby? What Gatsby? How
(33:33):
do you like that? How did you like that? Well?
I don't think i've seen that, and I don't know
how old is that movie? Nineteen seventy four Yeah, that's
a long time ago. What happens when you watch that,
I don't know. I was curious and it was a pleasure.
We were all a lot younger, I remember, you know,
(33:56):
the stakes were very, very high. I remember my friend
Scott Wilson, who I became friends with on that film,
and we were friends all our lives from that movie
until he passed away last year. So I remember that.
Is it strange watching all of you in that setting,
(34:18):
remembering what you were like in your thirties trying to
make it work? Well, it didn't strike me as immediately strange,
but I suppose if I were to sit on that
memory for a while, stuff would come along. But more
than just about that scene, it would be about the
whole experience. My mother was an extra on that, As
(34:42):
I told you, she was a painter. She said that
the director was the first man that she had ever
met who had like coming out of his eyes. The
way that film looks seems like there's light coming out
of everyone's eyes. I think that was very much part
of the idea. Yeah, the rich are not like the
(35:04):
rest of us is a line from a book, and
I think you were supposed to see that and think
that all that glitters is not gold. But yeah, it
was a great experience, a wonderful experience for me. The
character Nick Carraway is very much an observer of the story.
(35:27):
In some ways, he is the surrogate member of the
audience in the film. Does that seem like the kind
of person that you may be in alignment with in
an off screen Well, I think it's something that I
might have accused myself of until recently. But how do
you mean, Well, before I came to talk to you, Okay,
(35:51):
I was at a fire Drill Friday demonstration, one of
these fire drill Fridays that Jane Fonda has organized starting
in DC during the last hiatus with Grace and Frankie,
and I went there to participate in them. And I
really I'm forever grateful to Jane for making me ask
(36:19):
myself the question if if I really thought the things
that I thought, I wasn't I saying them? And why
I wasn't I saying them as loudly as I could
think of to say them? And why was I saying
them from the comfort basically of my own home, you know,
saying this is wrong and that shouldn't be and all
(36:39):
that stuff, but not really leaving the comfort of my
own private orbit. And so I went to a couple
in DC, and I got myself arrested for the first
time for any kind of political protest, for the first
(37:00):
time in my whole life. I mean, it's part of
the reason I'm here talking to you is because this
is not what I think I would have normally done
before this year, Because it's a real question. What is
there of interest that I might be able to say
that other people might want to listen to. Is that's
(37:21):
a real question. There's plenty of things. Well, I'm glad
to hear you say it. This is something actually Catherine mentioned,
which is that you are at this place in your
life right now, at the tender age of seventy nine,
where you are more vocal about the things you believe in,
(37:41):
about the things you want to see in the world.
Before you arrived at this place, do you think you
were quiet or reluctant to speak publicly out of shyness
or out of fear. Well, no, not out of fear,
I don't think, but being dubious that I had anything,
(38:10):
and being critical of a lot of people shooting their
mouths off, and being critical of the whole world of
blah blah blah is my opinion, talking heads and all
the whole society that we live in and thinking that
keeping your peace might be a really good thing. And
I still, I still do appreciate people that don't blab
(38:36):
away like I am now. So I guess for the
sake of the world is what I thought there would
be a good idea to shut up. But now I
just want to know what I think, and I don't
know how much more time there is to find that out,
and I don't And what this whole fired real Friday's
(38:58):
thing made vivid was that you can't really know what
you think unless you say it, because otherwise it just
rattles around in your head and it changes the way
we were talking earlier about memories changing. It just meanders around.
It doesn't have a structure. It's fascinating to me that
(39:20):
you've arrived at this idea or this question of what
the hell do I think? At seventy nine. I was
having little epiphanies before that. But this is different. Yeah,
what feels different about it? Well, I'm talking to you,
for example, Are you more comfortable? Yes? Because I don't
(39:44):
think and this is funny, but I don't really mind
if it turns out that I'm talking like an idiot.
If that's the case, I'd rather know it. I haven't
found you to be an idiot. Well it's nice. There's
still time. Yeah. And also when you listen to the
tape stuff that could come to a different conclusion. There
(40:06):
is something topical that I'm reluct to talk about, but
I feel I must because I, like many people, was
first introduced to your work by way of Woody Allen
and Interiors Hana and her sisters, especially crimes and misdemeanors.
We had Alison Pillon last week and she was wonderful
(40:29):
at midnight in Paris, and it's something we talked about
and I want to ask you about it because you've
seen the cycles of behavior in this strange town. My
question is, how do you think we can talk about
the work when the work is tethered to a tarnished legacy. Well,
(40:52):
I'm not sure. I think that's a terribly important question
to answer her in any immediate way, because if if
the work is good, it will History tells us that
it will probably survive whatever scandal is attached to the
(41:16):
creator's name. People will say, well, well, they'll say whatever
they say, but they'll say that's a great movie. The
thing that's challenging for people who want to make stuff
like myself, or people who love film, plays, television, any
kind of art, is that they believe, in the current
(41:37):
climate where we're at, that they have to do some
kind of erasure and zige their heads, that they have
to get rid of all these things because one person
involved or the creator of this one thing did something bad.
That's a different, a really much harder question, I think,
which is what do we do now right about now?
(42:00):
This might be dodging the question, but I think you know,
you want to be a little careful about what you
really know? What do you really know? Or what do
you really know? Maybe the emphasis should be on that.
At the same time, that question has given such a
(42:21):
past to so many powerful, mostly men, that it's not
an adequate answer. It's alive quandary. We're going through just
an enormous transition. It seems like it's daily life, but
it's really huge and in the long run, and maybe
(42:42):
even in the very short run, one of the great things,
apart from hope about the future, is surprise. This could
all crystallize in some new way that we haven't imagined
tomorrow or even this afternoon, or you know, we don't
know what's coming. And these are all things that need
(43:05):
to be addressed and dealt with at the people, the
classes of people that have been taking it on the
chinne all these years. Rise Up is a really good
name from the movement. It's astonishing there hasn't been a
revolt before this. It's in dialogue with what we're talking about.
(43:26):
But your father said that success is like smoking. Did
you laugh when he said that? He wrote it? It
was in a letter? When did you write it? When
I was doing the Great Guessbie. We were in England
and he wrote me this letter saying that he was
delighted with the success that I seemed to be having.
(43:48):
And then he said, I've always thought that the success
was a bit like smoking. Probably wouldn't do any harm,
or much harm, as long as you didn't inhale. Its
just words to live by. Did you believe him? I
think I laughed first. I think that's was my first reaction,
(44:09):
but laugh like, oh that's right on the money. Yeah,
I believe him. I believed him then, and I believe him,
you know, and it's part of the reason for not
doing interviews like this and things like that. It's very
easy to think, well, I must mean something about what
(44:35):
it seems you have a real good handle on how
to not let ego infect you. I don't think it's
possible to have a really good handle on not having
your ego infect you. I think I love when I
say things and then you're like, absolutely not. I'm sorry.
(44:55):
But I think John Houston said that about sex. You
know that it's when you're younger. It's it's like riding
trying to ride a wild horse, and it pretty much
does what it wants and it never really goes away.
But it's easier as you go older. You write it
(45:16):
and it doesn't write you. And you would hope that
that would be true of these other things like ego
that sees you. But I'm not at all confident. There
is a question Catherine had I'm going to ask for
her since she's far away. She said, what has a
(45:40):
lifelong relationship with Shakespeare taught you about acting and about yourself?
It's a great question. I think my life would be
greatly impoverished if it weren't for the wonderful opportunity to
spend time with Shakespeare throughout my career, from when I
(46:05):
was in college until today. You know, people used to
go around with the Bible and Shakespeare. Pioneers went out
west with just those two books. I think they're pretty
close to being enough. Shakespeare is just so enormously rich,
and then to get to perform it, to have something
(46:29):
of the sensation of what it's like to be able
to see into the world the way Hamlet does, because
after all, your mouth is moving and it's saying these words.
You know, it's it's a beneficial feedlap back loop into
your whole nature, into your brain, into your body. I
(46:50):
think it gets into your body and it's it does
you a world of good. This is his way of
understanding the world, which is in the language, built into
the language, opposition and contradiction and metaphor association and all
(47:12):
of these things in the held in wonderful narrative and bottomless.
My son James came back from doing The Mid Summer
Night's Dream one year and said that his favorite line
in Shakespeare were bottoms, lines that ended in him saying,
(47:36):
for it hath no bottom. And I think that's true.
Of Shakespeare's characters, they have no bottom. And here's the
really curious thing. It turns out that in the history
of his writing, as people have looked into it, that
are an awful lot of the plays that we attributed
(47:56):
attribute to him. And I'm not going to be able
to give you the list of which ones, but many
of them were done in collaboration, almost like writing for
the writer's room of a sitcom. You write this scene,
all write that scene, you do the other one. This
is basically the narrative. And so these characters have contradictions
(48:18):
in them because of who wrote the scenes that make
them deeper than the kind of tidy characters that come
out when it's all from one man's pen. Isn't that
just glorious? It is? I had heard that, But I
love you saying that because so much of your life
(48:40):
kind of begins and ends with Shakespeare, and in your
performance in New York and your ongoing pursuit of trying
to get to the bottom of it. We have to
go soon, so we have to answer some big questions,
or at least we have to ask them. Go ahead,
what does your faith mean to you? Right now? At
(49:01):
seventy nine? It means a lot to me. It's one
of the one of the questions that has been in
the air for me for a long time. And I
wouldn't say that it was entirely not in the air now,
but I feel sure that God is and that christis
(49:27):
his son, and then I don't know anything else, not anything.
And one of the things that I think is a
trap for a religion is that there are so many
questions in the world, so many unanswerable and unknowable things,
(49:50):
and we are all so fragile and vulnerable that one
of the attractions of religion is the promise of making
you feel okay in that circumstance. And what I think
it does often is it slides over into saying, no,
you're not in an uncertain world. You know positively what's
(50:11):
going to happen. Everything is settled. Just do the things
in this list and you're done. And instead, I think
what religion has in it and can give you is
feeling comfortable in your nearly perfect ignorance. Are you comfortable? Yes?
(50:34):
And I think I am a little more comfortable for
having said it out allowed to you, So I think
this is doing me good. What are the new questions
you've been batting around. I think the most obvious one
is climate and the climate emergency, which you and I
(50:54):
have both been reading about it. It's been as long
as you've been alive, longer than you've been alive, twice
as long as you've been alive, maybe even more than that,
maybe half a century. People have seen this emergency coming,
warned about it, talked about it. And I've been reading
all that stuff, and I've done this and that, and
(51:17):
I've gotten gradually a little louder. It's not like I
was absolutely silent until the day before yesterday. Now all
of a sudden, I'm talking. But the dramatic change came
with fire real Fridays and getting kicked off the field
at halftime at the Harvard Dale game this past year
(51:41):
because the students there. We're trying to get the university
to divest from fossil fuel investments. This is a thing
that needs to be done, that action needs to be
taken on right now, immediately yesterday the day before. It's
(52:01):
been a long standing problem and we've all worried it
and watched it and all that stuff, and that won't
do anymore. You're talking about future generations in many ways,
and how they're going to be able to live the
kind of life you led and that I hope to lead. Yes,
it's certainly something I'm thinking about. In terms of whether
(52:23):
to have children. Well, I go back to the things
I said before. There's a hope. If having children represents
hope to you, then willy nilly, even if you're headed
for the end of the world, I think having children
is a good idea because we live on hope, and
(52:45):
there are way too many children in the world. We're
eating up way too much of the Earth's resources. But
maybe just one, you know, for the hope. And then
the other thing is, and this backs up hope, is
that you can be absolutely certain that you're going to
(53:06):
be surprised tomorrow, next day, and by the whole outcome
of this whole thing. It's not going to be the
way you think it's gonna be. So, I mean, Lennon
and I made children without any reason to believe that
we were ever going to be able to pay for
them or any of that. But they really are very
(53:28):
powerful motivators. They'll get you out of bed every morning.
I recommend them. I was wondering that you did three
hundred and ninety episodes of Law and Order. I was like,
that pays for a whole life, certainly, Well, I've paid
for a lot of college. You know, people listening are
gonna be like, now you mentioned Law and Order at
the end of this goddamn thing. Where the hell was
(53:49):
it the whole time? We have a couple more things.
I actually can I ask you about this on a
practical level, you have done theater, which is inherently impractical. Monetarily,
there is not a lot of money. Even at the
highest level. There is some, but there's no guarantee. Right
(54:09):
film and television obviously there is more. Law and Order
is basically I assume lifetime set. But you don't strike
me as someone who has ever made a decision based
on dollars and cents. I don't think that's entirely true.
(54:34):
You got to make a living, right, and if you
have children, they depend on you for their living for
a very long time. So yes, of course you do
things in order to make money. My arrogance, the thing
we were talking about earlier, was to think that I
should be able to be an artist, and that there
(54:56):
would be an injustice if I wasn't able to make
a living right and be an artist. I don't know
whether I feel that purely now, but I think it
was a very beneficial thing to think when I was
starting out. I think it's a real powerful animator, and
it gives you a sort of place to stand to
(55:21):
make your case. You gotta give me this job because
I'm an artist. You know. It gives you a kind
of argument. I have something for us on the subject
of hope. You're part of a scene that I believe
to be one of the most hopeful pieces of writing
committed to film in the Forum's history, so I wanted
(55:44):
to watch it for a second before we left. We
are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices.
Some are on a grand scale. Most of these choices
(56:09):
are lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices
we have made. We are, in fact this sum total
of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly. Human
(56:29):
happiness does not seem to have been included in the
design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity
to love, that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And
yet most human beings seem to have the ability to
(56:51):
keep trying and even to find joy from simple things
like their family, their work, and from the hope that
future generations might understand more. Thank you for showing me that.
(57:18):
If I'm honest, I am not generally capable of watching
that and not crying. Again, complicated because I have to
publicly recognize that the person who wrote those words represents
a great deal of pain for some people listening. Whether
what he did happened or not, it doesn't really matter
(57:41):
because people are in pain. But boy, you can't tell
me that that isn't it? Right there? I agree? So
my question to you is a moral choices, some on
a grand scale, most of these are on lesser points.
(58:01):
You're turning eighty this year, I imagine you're thinking about
the decisions, the choices, grand and small. How do you
think you've done well? The very last thing I heard
my father say before he died, he was in a
(58:21):
hospital in Connecticut, and a medication was giving him hallucinations
and bad dreams, and and then he would have these
moments of clarity. And he had Parkinson's, so he had
a shake. So he had just come out of a
(58:45):
troubled sleep. And I had my face near his mouth
so I could hear what he was saying, and the
last thing I heard him say was the young people
must not be given the wrong idea, which probably has
(59:15):
more meaning for me because it was my father talking.
But I I'm going to need a lot of forgiveness,
and thank God there is forgiveness in the world. I
don't think that sets me apart from the great run
(59:39):
of humanity. I think we all are pretty big disappointments.
But when you ask me how I think I've done,
my mind immediately goes to the enormous good fortune that
I've enjoyed. So, you know, if the question is how
to go, it's been going great and long may it continue.
(01:00:07):
But if you're asking me what the sum of my
life is and how it ought to be judged, I
hope the judge is really nice and very understanding. Otherwise
we're all out of luck. Well, I can't promise you
who that judge is going to be. I thought I
was going to be you. I was kind of I
(01:00:27):
thought you said that at the beginning, that you were
going to sort this all out for me. You don't
need me as your judge. I'm very I'm very disappointed now.
I came all this way, you know, I know this
is not just around the corner. I know you came
a long way. I did a long way, and I'm
truly thankful that you did come this long way and
(01:00:49):
stay with me. I'm grateful that this turned out to
be you. Thank you very much. Anytime. Sam Waterson thought
you soon, thought to you soon. And that's our show
(01:01:22):
special thanks this week to Katherine Waterston. To learn more
about her father, Sam Waterston. You can visit our website
at www dot talk easypod dot com. There you'll find
a back catalog of episodes with a whole bunch of
actors I think you may like, including Philip Baker Hall,
Robert Forrester, Alan Alda, Laura Dern, Edward Norton, Tracy Let's,
(01:01:45):
Kenneth Brana, and many many more. If you haven't done
so already, be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify,
Apple Music, Stitcher, SoundCloud, wherever you get your podcasts. You
can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at talk easypod,
and if you'd like to write us an email about
this episode, or any episode, or hell about anything, feel
(01:02:09):
free to do so at talk easypod at gmail dot com.
As always, this show is made possible by our incredible team.
Our executive producer is Janick Sa Bravo. Our editor is
Andrea Lynn. Illustrations by Krishna Chenoe, design by Ian Jones.
Our music is by Dylan Peck and Jin Sang. Our
(01:02:30):
engineer is Tim Moore, and we tape out of your
recording here in Los Angeles, California. Our associate producer is
Nicky Spina, and the show is produced each week by
Caroline Reebok. It was, by the way, Caroline's birthday yesterday,
so happy birthday to Caroline. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you
(01:02:52):
for listening to Talk Easy. We'll be back here next
Sunday with Juliette Louis. Until then, have a good week everyone.
(01:03:12):
Choo choo boosts shoo
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