November 3, 2020 • 62 mins
Today, Alec announces that Here’s The Thing is moving from WNYC to iHeartRadio. For nearly a decade, Alec has spoken with some of the greatest artists, musicians, actors, writers, thinkers, public policy makers, and sports figures of our time. The final two programs on WNYC highlight a compilation of some of Alec’s favorite interviews. This penultimate WNYC episode features clips from interviews with Barbra Streisand, Joe Dallesandro, Elaine Stritch, David Crosby, and William Friedkin. Join Alec as he celebrates his accomplished guests and the Here’s The Thing catalog.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
My podcast Here's the Thing is moving from public Radio
w n y C, in particular to I Heart Radio,
so please keep your eyes and ears open for a
formal announcement as to our exact launch date on My Heart.
(00:25):
The show will still be called Here's the Thing. For
our final two programs on w n y C, we've
cut together a compilation of some of my favorite interviews
from the past several years. But before we get to that,
I would like to take a moment to thank Emily
Boutine and Adam tie Schultz, my producers for the past
(00:46):
several seasons, as well as everyone at w n y
C for the opportunity to explore my curiosity with you
and speak to some of the greatest artists, musicians, actors, writers, thinkers,
public policymakers, sports figures, you name it. Our roster of
guests is really quite something, and I encourage you to
(01:09):
visit our archives and download some of our older shows.
And of course a special thanks to you the listeners
for joining me. This has been the experience of a lifetime,
and thank you. They say that casting is everything, and
that is no doubt true for an interview show, and
(01:30):
we've been quite lucky on Here's the Thing, sitting down
with some rather accomplished guests. My first clip is from
my interview with the legendary Barbra Streisand who talks here
about how she wanted control of her films in a
way that may not have been available to an actress,
even one of her stature, so she decided to direct.
(01:52):
It was something that happened during the way we were
where two scenes were cut out that were intrinsic to
the value of the story. And it made me so
crazy that they couldn't see that that that propelled me
into it. I couldn't understand it. And it's hard to
(02:14):
quarrel with a you know, a hit movie. I don't
know if it was a hit at the time. Tell
you the truth, it's grown to me say it was.
Warren Beatty said to me once, is it. Until you
take ultimate responsibility and you're willing to direct the movie,
you're gonna be constantly frustrated. And he said, you must
consider that if it was so delicious, And it's like,
(02:36):
you know, when you finally have the power to control
your work, you you get very humble in a sense,
it's like I wanted to give power away to other
people as well. You know, I would say to my standing,
you run that course with the cameraman, this is the shot,
(02:58):
but I want you to be able to tell on
me where to stand. In other words, it's a feeling
of such gratitude where you you never have to raise
your voice because everybody's finally listening. You don't have to
get angry about anything they weren't listening before. Sometimes well,
(03:19):
sometimes when I would say things as just an actress,
like this is what I'm telling you, this story the
way we were it went on deaf ears. You know,
they didn't agree with me whatever, But when you see
something so clearly, um, that's wrong to me or what
could be right? Or see. I had such a great
(03:41):
time directing Yental because I did it in England and
in Czechoslovakia. In England they're not afraid of women, powerful women,
strong women, because they had a queen. They have a
queen and at the time they had the Prime Minister
who was Margaret sure So I was shocked at the
(04:04):
respect that I had as a first time director. I
couldn't believe it. Um and the crew was so kind
and just. It was the most wonderful experience, I must say.
And even the Czechoslovakian government was wonderful to me because
(04:25):
I needed Jews to be in the synagogue and pray
and so for then you know, it was during communist times,
and they went to the Jewish community, thank God, and
had them come so I didn't have to teach them
how to be Jewish, you know, how did some real
Jews Jews was an Italian dressed as Jews, like in
(04:46):
New York where they have to say, well how do
you stand in a synagogue and how do you pray?
And it was it was wonderful. And also well you
know when you have extras in Czechoslovakia, then they didn't
give them lunch. So the people would come with like
bags of their lunch, which broke my heart. So I would,
(05:08):
you know, give them our food, which we never had vegetables.
We had a cent to London or France or Italy
to get vegetables, because you know, their food diet was
like hot chalk. I loved it, of course, bread and
butter and hot chocolate in the morning with whipped creamers,
and I was on heaven and I wanted to be thinner,
but well, and every day I would not every day,
(05:31):
but every few days I would bring in pasties, you know,
with that delicious dough in the meat inside, and I
we'd always have the most delicious teas that I'd bring
in those cream like doughnuts shaped like a hot dog
from Whimpis and you know, eat this delicious cream with
the doughnuts. Oh my god, it was so good, and
(05:53):
they it was very sweet. Because the whole crew wrote
a letter that's one of my prized possession, I must say.
And they wrote this letter to the newspapers and it
said that you know, Ms try said something like Mrs
try Sand never raises her voice and has a smile
for us every day. And it's like not the stories
(06:16):
we've heard about her, and no newspaper would publish it,
but it figures it's like Hillary Clinton, as you said,
the upside of that experience where the yentle was working
in a culture where the power of women was just accepted.
And I'm crestfall and to say the least about what
happened here, not just because this guy won, but I
(06:36):
really do think misogyny and well before I did get
some sort of Award from Women in film directing yental
And a lot of my speech was about women against women,
because the reviews of Yentel from women were vicious, you know,
(07:01):
in other words, they didn't even talk about this celebration
of womanhood, that a woman could not only you know,
make dinner and have babies, but she could have an intellect,
she could want to study, be something more do do it?
Men do? Just equality, you know. So to read a
(07:25):
review that said her she wore a design in the
New York Times, she wore a designer yamaka. Now everything,
every piece of clothing in that movie was authentic. That
same year there was the film directed Buying Mark Bergmann
Fanny and Alexander. They wore the same yamica, but nobody
attacked that film. I love detail, so I would, you know,
(07:50):
for years, I would do research about Polish Jews, about
these Jews, that Jews everything, the Evil Institute in New
York um talking to scholars studying Talmud, just to bring that,
because I do believe that when you study like that
and do the research, you don't have to act that
(08:12):
It's like the camera picks up the truth, even just
behind your eyes. In the sound of your voice, whatever
it is mine. You know. I had this wonderful shot,
I thought, as it cuts from a chicken coop to
me sitting behind the bars up separated from the men
in the shool. And that shot was attacked by this
(08:35):
woman critic, Janet Maslin. Her name was now she could
attack my lips incer. That's true. I'm a terrible lip sinker.
I can't do it because when I did movies like
Funny Girl or Hello Dolly, you know, they record the
soundtrack three months before you shoot, and I have to
be in the moment as an actor. I don't know
(08:57):
how I'm going to feel when I actually perform it.
So that's why when I did the movie Star Is Born,
it's all real, it's all um I had. I did
not want. I needed to be free, to be in
the moment, So we recorded on the spot. What do
you call that live? It was all live. And then
what I would do is um because I had final
(09:20):
cut on that movie, I could control those things. UM.
We would shoot the close ups first, so where the
performance really counted, and then I would just choose it
right on the spot, okay, I think, And I would
do about one to four takes. You know, all these
stories about me like I do millions of takes, most
of them are false. And so let's say I would
(09:42):
take take three, you know, and then move the cameras
back to do the wider shot because you didn't have
to see me close, you know, not doing the lip sync. Good.
I did a documentary film about can It's ostensibly about
Ken and Ryan got thing. We corner him at an hotel. Yeah,
I think I saw it. Jimmy Toback and I did
(10:04):
this thing called Seduced and Abandoned and we get Gosling
at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the bel Air Hotel.
I should say, any long story short is he has
this beautiful explication of how agonizing it is to shoot films,
and just in that kind of Arthur Murray by numbers way,
we have to shoot a match to this and to this.
It can't be fresh and it's painful. No, And that's
(10:26):
why I love long takes, because I think I'm from
the theater and we had to do a whole show, right,
So I don't like pieces. I mean, you I the
fun of directing to me is designing the shot, the
camera accommodating the actors. So the actors. There's a lot
of scenes in Yentle that you can see like this.
(10:46):
They're all in one move practically. In other words, we
come in through a door and I'm in the foreground,
let's say. But he who's following me, the my leader
who was Mandy Patinkin at the time, and he still
is but um, you know, we see him standing there,
(11:08):
and then he comes forward and I sit down. He
becomes he's standing up, but the camera never moved, but
you see everything. Then the camera moves as we're together,
but it doesn't cut. And then he has you know,
when when he leaves me, you see him go out
the door. He slams the door and the camera moves
in a little bit. As I'm thinking about it, that's
(11:31):
the scene. But it's what's fun about that is that
we're all on our toes. You can't make a mistake.
And most of these shots that I do that there's
no coverage. That the greatest on the very little coverage
the actors played the scene in the frame. That's right
(11:52):
now now, in the time that you made films, the
many years you've made films, the success for acting and
not directing, successful as a director and producer and all
those things. Were there are people that you wanted to
work with, whether people you sat there as a guy,
I'd love to make a film with that person because
you've been in such a privileged place and I had
(12:14):
all these people available to Was there a director that
you dreamed of working with you didn't get to work with? Well,
I Mark Bergman is a person that contacted me to
do a remake of The Merry Widow and I was
so excited, you know, and I came to um Sweden
and we embraced and it was this wonderful embrace, you know.
(12:37):
I mean he I can't explain what that what that's like.
It's was just he sort of understood me, and I
understood him without any words. And the first act of
that screenplay was fantastic, I mean, very body uh kind
(12:58):
of shocking. I loved it, you know. So then and
when I have letters now, I forget things until I
have to go into my archives and look at this stuff,
letters from him and notes that I wrote back to
him talking about this film. What happened the second act?
(13:21):
You know, he says we're going to be collaborators, and
the second act was not very good. I thought it
was like like Jevas Amadeus. I'm sure the first act
was extraordinary to me in the movie, and the second
act was I don't know, just somehow repetitious. It It
(13:46):
didn't go far enough in the story, you know. And
that's the way I felt about this. And all of
a sudden it was gone. The collaboration was over. We
never made the film, and I couldn't quite believe it.
I mean, the fact that I didn't like certain things
(14:06):
in the second act did he liked? Well, he never
defended it. It was like, you know, I think that's
right and so. But I would have loved to work
with Berto Lucci and Schris you know what I did.
I realized this now and looking back at my life.
I turned down Alice doesn't live here anymore. I turned
(14:27):
down a lot of films actually because I was lazy.
I'm basically I'm a dichotomy here, a dichotomy lazy and um,
I don't know what the word is, restless, restless maybe? Yeah,
like wanting to create about you, it would be called
(14:49):
the lazy and the restless. Oh no, that's a very
good time. Yeah, exactly, exactly I love to take a
vacation and do nothing. I like to have no appointments.
And I think that's a condition in my mind of
(15:10):
people who have tremendous not so much financial success, but
creative success. I mean, there's a famous actress who I
won't name you. Wait, you know what? Do you want
to take a sip of soup on your Do you
want soup to I'll have a soup. I mean we
kind of say no. Well, I mean this is a
I'm irish. It's bad luck to say no to soup?
(15:31):
Is that in Ireland? I just made that up. Oh
just put that over here? Oh see, I just brought
this table from the back and we need another table
maybe over here because this is me so soup, don't
I mean? In other words, people know we eat, right,
so if they hear it's okay, good, good, good good,
(15:54):
because I always like to eat. Oh really know you
know you won't mm hmm. That is delicious, isn't it.
That was my interview with Barbara Streisand sometimes the task
is to convince some of our iconic guests to sit
(16:15):
down with me. Other times the task is simply to
find them. In the case of my next clip. Joe
Delessandro proved to be more than a little elusive, but
once we got the star of many of Warhol's early
films and photography to join us, he was gracious, forthcoming
and funny, like when he talked here about his early
(16:38):
days as a male model. The criminal guy who's the
modeling agency. How did that play out? Well? He introduces
me to this version at once that does these, uh,
these photographs, and they said, you know, look, Joe rubbed
his oil on you. And it starts out real, you know,
(16:58):
really easy. You know, it's nothing, nothing that's too frightening
to a person that's you know, being first introduced to it.
It's just, you know, take your clothes off and stand
over there and nude. Yeah, and for you, did you
feel it in that world you want to nose for
people you could trust and not trust. Yeah, So the
guy says, oil up and stand over there naked. You
(17:19):
knew you were cool? Yeah, nothing, nothing was gonna happen there. Yeah.
Did you find it weird? Yeah? I thought it was
real weird, But I was gonna get fifty dollars, a
whole fifty dollars. That was a lot of money back then.
You know, and I thought, wow, fifty dollars was standing,
So yeah, Joe making put them up like like you're
(17:41):
making a muscle Joe, you know. And shortly after that,
I have a fight with the guy that introduced me
to this modeling people because he had this scam that
he wanted to do. He wanted to blackmail somebody. You
wanted me to do something and I ain't doing that.
And also it's a stupid ship, you know. So I
(18:01):
got angry and he got he got violent. He was
an ex con that was, you know, gonna show his toughness,
not to me. Anyway. He broke a bottle to come
at me, and I knocked the bottle out of his
hand and went on the ground and broke and uh
(18:21):
he uh he did a little dance with him. Yeah.
He fell on the glass and got all cut up.
You know. Well actually I threw him on the glass
and he got all cut up. No, No, he fell
on the glass. Yeah, and we hold him down. You
were trying to help him. He tried to press charges
against you. Yeah, he tried to do all listen on sense. Anyway,
we went to court and they reached my father and say,
(18:44):
you know your your son's out here, and oh, you
need to send them back, you know, put him on
a plane and I'll send you the money. Where'd you
live them? And he got to New York. I stayed
with him for a week and then went out on
my own again. There was the plan when you were
back in New York, Well, the modeling thing again? Did
you think this is good money? I never thought about it,
(19:06):
about the modeling thing, you know, it wasn't something that
I knew anybody. I had a couple of friends in
New York that introduced me to other people. And and
then one day one of these friends, uh said, Hey,
I know this person that's uh making these Campbell soup
can you know makes the Cambell soup? And I was
(19:27):
thinking we were going to eat some soup, which I
was all for. You're gonna go to the Campbell soup factory? Yeah, whatever, Pennsylvania.
I had no idea where it was. You could take
a picture of you oiled up, said there's somebody sitting
behind a camera reading a newspaper, so I couldn't see
who it was or what it was, you know, but
(19:47):
they wanted to introduce me that this Campbell soup. Andy
Warho guy that I had. You know, I didn't know
who Andy Warho was or you know, before I met them.
Mine I had married, uh young lady, my first my
first wife. Ah No, I had to be eighteen then.
(20:09):
So but it was why did you get married when
you're right there? Freedom is a premium for you? Why
did you get married? My father was dating her mother,
and my father wanted to she got herself pregnant. My
father said, you know, you should take we should take
this person and he should own up to his responsibility
(20:31):
of his kids. Were father. I was also got pregnant
with somebody else. My father said, we'll take him to court,
you know. And and I kept telling my father, you
shouldn't do that, and you shouldn't push you to do that,
because he's gonna come in with a bunch. This is Brooklyn,
you know, he can come a bunch of guys saying
we all slept with her and nothing's going to ever
(20:52):
come from which one of us is the father. Yeah,
that's back before DNA and all that other ship. Thank
god for yet. Yeah, anyway, so you decided to marry her.
I decided to marry her and give the kid my name,
you know, what kind of work did you do? Then?
I was a book binder, I went to Actually I
(21:15):
was assembly line. I didn't do anything except in the city,
yea Manhattan. Who wouldn't know why that job? Because my
uncle ran the ran the show was his business. Yeah,
well I don't know if it was his business, but
he ran the shop. So was there a part of
you when you're in Jersey and your book binding and
(21:36):
you got a sixteen year old bride has got a kid,
and we're not quite sure who in the Brooklyn gang
is really the father? Do you sit there and go
I missed standing They're oiled up in a room naked
getting the fifty bucks from these guys. I don't know,
did you miss that? Yeah? And then you and then
you go meet the guy who's behind the newspaper, who
makes the soup, who's gonna make you soup for lunch?
What happened there? He drops the newspaper. What happens? Obviously
(21:58):
he became very fond of you, very quickly. Well, it
wasn't him. It was the guy that was standing to
the side of the camera and giving all the instructions
to everybody, And that was Paul Marcy. So He's the
one that suggested that I'd be in the film because
he ow, he was this character that asked everything about
(22:19):
your life and I had told him, you know, in
junior high had played on the wrestling team. He says, Oh,
that's a good idea. We'll have you do that with Undine.
You'll you teach him wrestling, so let film that. We'll
film that. What do you described? Morrissey then Marcy real smart,
real educated he had. He was a Fordham graduate. He
(22:45):
was a social worker before in New York City where
he really saw these uh strange people that he had,
you know, work with. Uh. So he had plenty of
great stories and he shot. Uh these films that was shot.
(23:06):
There were silent films I saw. I watched a couple
of them. They were pretty good films. Uh you're a
movie goer them, you're like, yeah, I was. I loved
the movies. I didn't want to be in them. I
just liked watching them. But when you watch the movies
at Morrissey and or warhol Man, they weren't like movies
you saw in the theater when I yeah, I thought
they were a joke. I thought that. Well, when we
(23:29):
were shooting this one thing the soup day they were shifting.
They asked me to be in the thing, and I
shot this most scene and they came over to me
after we were done, and uh, they asked me to
sign a release. I said, you're not gonna this is
just for fun. Nobody's gonna ever see this. This is
(23:49):
it's just I thought, just like a whole movie. I
didn't think they were gonna, you know, ever show this anywhere,
and thought it was a joke because what was happening
there was you know, pretty silly. You know, wasn't you know,
anything I ever saw in the theater. It was unfamiliar. Yeah, really,
I signed the release thinking it would never be released.
(24:09):
And and then later on they called me and asked
if I would them to photograph me for the advertising
of this film that they you know, they shot with
me first before this movie that was supposed to be
a twenty four hour movie that turned into Loves of Undine.
They cut it into a smoom. That was your first movie,
(24:33):
and that was my first movie with him. But before
that was ever released, they had called me up and
he did to ask me to be in another movie.
And then he put Paul on the phone who told me, Yeah, Joe,
we're going out to Arizona to shoot a Western. Would
you like to be in the West end? I said, sure,
(24:55):
that'd be great, but you gotta pay me what I
would I make at the book binding place, as I
can't take off. I'm married now, I gotta take care
of my all his bullshit, Yeah about what I was making.
They paid you exactly what you made. The probably they
were cheap. They were always cheap. They didn't want to
(25:16):
pay somebody too much, and then somebody else asked for
the same thing. You know, is it amazing you sit
in a room back in nineteen sixty seven with a
bunch of people who later on the soup can guy
would sell his paintings for tens of millions of dollars. Yeah,
he becomes one of the richest artists in history. Did
(25:37):
you have an artistic sensibility but you thought that these
guys were or you? Just as you said, it was
just unfamiliar and silly. Well in the beginning, and you
know it all, it wasn't for me and and Andy's art.
You know, we all participated in making the Andy art.
They had said, you know, after we had shot the
Cowboy movie and we came back. I thought that was it.
(26:00):
Go back to book binding. And you know, I called
Paul ask him about the Western and he had told
me that he had a job for me at the
factory and I said, okay, you know, and he happy
to give up what I was doing, you know, doing
something there, and I went down to the factory and
(26:22):
that was the day. Then Andy was shot when I
showed up to the factory to work there. Sometimes at
the onset, I wonder where the conversation might go, and
by the end I realized I could have talked with
my guest for hours. Such is the case with Joe Delessandro.
Thank you, Joe. My next clip is from my interview
(26:52):
with Elaine Stretch. Elaine had quite a career. Towards the
end of it, she played my mother, Colleen Donaghye, on
the television series thirty Rock. When the show was over,
Elaine announced she was leaving New York and we were
lucky enough to catch up with her before she relocated
home to Michigan. And if you know Elaine, it comes
as no surprise that the interview could just stop at
(27:15):
any given moment. Where is my black bag? Alec Hunter?
I need. I need orange juice. Hunter, come in plays?
Can we send Hunter in here? Plays with the provisions? Hunter.
Ryan Herdlika, who accompanied Elaine to the studio, came through
the door juice in hand. I need some orange juice.
(27:37):
Beanies is kicking up, Hunter, my good man, hunters right
with the world. Okay, we'll how about a glass. Yes,
that's a clean water. We'll get him a clean we'll go,
we'll go get her clean. All right, it's all right
if you just empty that glass, it's heaven. I need
(27:58):
some orange juice. You know that I'm diabetic, Yes, of course,
I mean the world knows by now, the world. It's okay.
You know what I quoted the other day, the line
of my father's that really is so naughty and just
so much fun. Here's looking up your old address. Isn't
(28:19):
that a great line? And he said it with no
he used that was it. That's right? All right, I'm
gonna drink this and bring the orangese now so we
don't have some event here. That's cool. Alright. So now
that you've had your orange juice and your brain freezes over,
Kirk Douglas, what was the show? Do you remember now? Woman?
(28:40):
Bites dog. That orange juice. It's a miracle. Elcksir. I
want to be a case of that orange juice dog,
woman bites dog. What do you play in that? If
you girlfriend? He lived with I didn't even know what
that phrase meant. You were a floozy? Well no, I wasn't.
(29:02):
I just but I lived with him and I wasn't
married to him. I didn't know what that meant. What
do you remember about Kirk Douglas. Oh my god, I
loved him. Oh god, I loved him. And what an
actor he was. And he's one of the few men
who was as great an actor as he was a star.
He was a great actor. He was a great actor.
(29:24):
He was a great actor. I loved him, and he
loved me. He flipped over me. I've known him for years,
and he took me halfway away for the weekend, and
then I discovered that I shouldn't go. He took you
half way away to Palm Springs, and then I said
I shouldn't be going. So what did do you hit? Like?
(29:44):
What helds? I do know? We were halfway to Palm Beach,
Palm Springs things. So you're driving east. We were driving
for the weekend and you decided you didn't want to. Well,
I said, I'm getting nervous, because what do you want
me to do when we get up here? Oh, Elaine,
(30:07):
you knew I was a virgin, so he was dealing
with that. So what was the first leading role you
had on Broadway? Big roll? Take more horors, you see
you can remember of the big part, big big part
(30:27):
I had was Angel and the Wings, which was a review,
hardest thing in the world to do a review, and
the kind of review like New Faces, was like Leonard
Sulman's sketches. And I was the big busted you know,
girl in the in the bedroom. I was the I
(30:48):
was the piece on the side. Yeah, where are you?
Isn't amazing? You were this virginal You went to suck
or cur and you went to finishing school and I
played as soon as you're out, God is just tempting you.
He's taking Marlon Brando on one side of you, and
Kirk Douglas has reving up the convertible to take you
to Palm Springs, and you're the fluzi here and you're
(31:10):
the piece on the side, the bust defend fatalel But
what I was really doing is learning my lines to
the play or to the television or to the I
was really loving acting. I loved it. I loved pretending.
(31:31):
I just loved it. Was being somebody other than I
was was my idea of a good time? Was part
of that process for you? Learning from people you work with,
it you admire. Did you look at other people and say,
because I've had that. I mean, I'm not going to
say I had it well like Merman? When you worked
with Merman? Did you learn from Merman? Did you did
you know you didn't? I did her part right. I
(31:55):
did her There's no question, so she would not. Some
loved her, everybody loved everybody. But I know how to
do that. And I was so frightened and so terrified,
and I was so good in it. Did you feel
that she was of that type where just Mermin as Mermaid,
she goes out into study. She made, you know, so long.
(32:18):
She'd say goodbye to me from the wings on my
opening night and then go sit in the first row.
She scared me to death when I got to the
end of call Me Madam, it was mine? You felt
that way? When do you think you became you? The
moment I started to rehearse Mermaid's part. I was doing
(32:42):
the New Mermaid, the New Everything. That's when you became you. Yeah,
So doing the piece doing call Me Madam is when
you felt things changed for you. You felt you were
were not necessarily now everything I did, everything I did
was you know. But when you do a show Elaine
(33:06):
Stretch at Liberty, when you do a show that is
a memoir of your career, oh yeah, and it is
enormously successful, when did you think in your life? When
did you reach a point in your life that you
felt you were someone who could write a memoir about
your life, that you thought it was interesting enough. When
did you cross the line and say, yeah, I was
(33:28):
convinced by this producer who said, who saw me perform
at a Judy Garland special at Carnegie Hall? And what
I did was tells Judy Garland stories And I told
her it was a tribute to Judy. She's gone by this, yeah,
and oh boy, I really did know her very well.
(33:51):
From where did your first meet her? Party? At a
party someplace I don't know. And I loved her. So
when I tried out one of my stories on Judy Garland,
I mean she tried out one of hers. I said, Judy,
I've got an idea, and I sincerely did. I said,
I've got a great idea. Why don't we tour Maime?
(34:18):
I said to Judy Garan And she says divine. She
said that sounds great. I said, but here's the good idea, Judy.
When I do Mame, I go to bed early, and
when you do me, you go to bed early. And
(34:39):
then the other one does vera she want a switch
on and off. Yeah, she bought you. She's listening now
and she's saying okay, okay, okay, and she's counting up
the songs. What songs she has? What? And after this
(35:02):
long pause, she looks at me and says, what about Matene's?
And I thought it was one of the funniest things
I've ever heard in my whole life, that Judy Garland
wanted to know what about Mattenees. That's how she carefully.
She wanted her her career planned so she could be
(35:23):
able to get loaded when she wanted to. And you know,
it was her way of treating a very serious discussion.
So you did a tribute thing where you told stories
about her, and that's when someone pitched the idea to
you of doing a memoir of your career. That's right.
What vaguely and said, you tell a story to an
audience the like of which I have never heard. That's true.
(35:46):
I was that the opening night at the Public, when
that Liberty opened at the Public, and everyone who was
had a pulse in New York. Everyone who was alive
that night came to that opening at the Public. Everybody
in the theater came. They went crazy, They went crazy.
It's lovely, God, it's lovely. Success is lovely. It's so hard,
and it's such hard work, but it's so gratifying. What's
(36:08):
the hardest thing about it for you? What's been the
hardest thing? Do you find it hard? To have? The
fear of what that you won't be able to perform,
the fear that I'm just going to forget, and I'm
going to not not so much forget, but it's the fear.
It's the fear. And that was when I was not
drinking at all, and I didn't drink anything to get
(36:31):
my talent on, but all my life I had. Have
you ever done a show? I'm sure you've done countless shows.
You ever done a show where you're sitting backstage thinking
what am I doing here? How did I get myself
into this? Or? Were you always engaged by what you
were doing? I was always engaged with always. You never
took I was leading up to it or coming down,
(36:52):
you know, I I was trying to get it behind.
You never regretted doing anything? Never? No, that's incredible. No,
I never never regretted doing anything on the stage. Never.
How was that possible because I just one every time
I walked out there. You know that old expression about
(37:15):
I own the stage. That was from my interview with
the incomparable Elaine Stretch. Some of the musicians I've interviewed
have had tough lives, during which they created some of
the greatest music the world has ever heard. The next
(37:37):
clip is from my interview with David Crosby, the self
described mischievous kid who started singing folk songs at age
six on his way to his remarkable career. And you
go to boarding school? I did, Yeah, Kate? What was
that block? What were you like? Were you always mischievous?
(37:58):
And it get load of trouble Why I don't know,
but it's definitely true. I got thrown out of almost
every school I was ever in, including Kate, What was
music in your life? Then? Music came early, and well, uh,
my mom sang in choirs. My dad liked music. He
(38:19):
could play a mantle in. My brother played guitar. We
used to Here's an interesting thing when when we were
growing up in the fifties, when TV started to really happen,
we didn't have a TV, so we sang folk songs
out of the fireside Book of Folks Songs, and that
was where it started. Did anybody tell you then you
(38:39):
could sing that? They say you're a good singer. They
did notice that I was singing harmony when I was six,
And huh, what's the first instrument you played? Guitar? My
brother turned me onto guitar when you were how old?
I guess maybe can what's the best time you think that.
My son is two and a half years, so it's
gonna be three in June. He's obsessed with simulating playing
(39:01):
the guitar. He actually has a band with my wife.
He calls her Trista, and he's Mr Pants. Mr Pants.
He'll turn to my wife a little I've got it
on video. He'll turn to my wife and Trista, what
are we gonna play now? He's two and a half.
Don't let him be a musician. We wanted to. It's
terrible idea. He'll never have a job. Actually let him.
(39:21):
Do you think that if you didn't? But when you
say that, do you think if you hadn't made it
as big as you made it, you wouldn't have stuck
with it, or you would have stayed with it because
you loved it. I would because I love it. I
love it so much, like I can't tell you I
love seeing it. I'm good at it. But that's not
really it. It's there's a joy to singing in and
of itself, and it's it's an elevating thing. It's totally
(39:45):
freaking wonderful. It's very tough for me now, man, because
I'm really old and getting on the road exhausting. Yeah,
well it beats the crap out of me. Yeah, because
you'll never get more than four hours sleep in a row.
And then in the middle of that, you had an
expansion joint and playing. You're away again and you know,
and you're eating terrible food and restaurants. When when did
(40:06):
you when you left home, you didn't go to college. No,
I went one year and you went to uh City
College in Santa Barbara, which is now, oddly enough, the
highest rated city college in the country. It was interesting
and good, and I had one really good teacher hooked
me up about some really interesting things about semantics and
the language. And no, you weren't sending music then, then, no,
(40:30):
not yet. I was. I was bussing tables at the
local coffeehouse because as a bus boy they would let
me sing harmony with the guy who was being paid
to sing. And what was the first band you were in?
Less Baxter's Balladeers. Let's Baxter, you know, a band leader guy.
He had seen the Christie Mittrels, which that guy who
(40:54):
sparks were he was he had I think he had
three of them out their bands like that in your
old name the same you know. It just it was
a commercial operation and was really lame. But we was
put food on the table. My brother and I were
in that. And then I ran into Roger mcgwinn and
Gean Clark and where a tributor bar it's a tributary
(41:16):
and they were singing and it was good and these
songs were you know, James pretty good writer. And so
when those two haven't they had an act called they
have an act, we're just playing. They were just in
the bar. You know, Roger has been a musician for
a while and successful and played with other bands, Lime Letters,
Chad Mitchell Three, a bunch of different people, so he
(41:37):
knew what he was doing when he knew that Jean
was talented and that this stuff had value because it
sounded a lot like Beatles songs, and uh, so I
started singing harmony to them. They said, what's your name?
And uh that worked out really well. It was a
good band, simple good. Roger's extremely Good had taken Bob
(41:59):
Dylan so and turning them into pop records. And you
covered Tambourine Man. Yeah, that was our first hit. Well,
what did you learn about bands in your first band?
What that experienced like? I learned that that I had
a lot to learn. I was just a young punk
and I really had no idea how to actually work
with the people and accomplished the aim that I wanted to.
(42:22):
I had an experience early on when I was young.
My mom took me to see a symphony orchestra in
a park free show there in that way, and they
tuned up and they got ready, and then he started
the piece and it was this huge, beautiful wave that
hit me. I didn't know anything was like that. You know,
symphony orchestra a hugely powerful thing. And it freaked me out.
(42:43):
And the thing I've realized even as a kid, the
power came from they were alding me together. I can't
believe you just said that. It's the truth, and it
really and it penetrated. So I've always wanted to be
in a band always. I love cooperative effort. Competitive effort
winds up at war, cooperative effort winds up. I'm I'm
(43:04):
watching Tom Petty's band playing a benefit, and Offend was
with me. I turned him and I said, do you
see what I'm seeing? Reference said what? And I said,
they're all doing the same thing at the same time.
I said, they're all in service to and feeding. You know,
in my business, not everybody's doing the same thing that
they're kind of doing their own thing, kind of jerking
off in the corner there, you know, Patty's band was
(43:25):
doing the same thing. Yeah, it was really really, very
very cool. Do you find in a band does somebody
always need to be in charge? Does somebody need to
be the boss? It can go both ways, and the
birds Roger was definitely the leader of the band, and
that worked well. Yeah, he knew a lot more than
we did. And he's also an extremely talented guy and
a good singer. And uh so it wouldn't you know,
(43:47):
I challenged it at every turn, but he was the
leader of the band, uh c s And why none
of us was willing to admit anybody else was the leader.
Where it was and probably still is one of the
most competitive situations in the history. Uh And he goes
really just that simple, And in spite of all the
(44:10):
incredible success you've had. I mean, who's when you think
of people, when you think of men harmonizing in a group,
the first people that come to mind of the three
of you, why do you think that that didn't bring
them any comforts? I don't think that's what they went
in for. And I don't think they realized exactly how
good it was. We did really like each other when
(44:31):
we started, and we were thrilled, you know, by each
other's songs. So you leave the birds and and and
and Stills leaves Buffalo Springfield and they bring you with
them Springfield Sorrow fell Apart Left, which is kind of
his m O. Uh Stephen was very appealing guitar player
and singer. I mean, it's really good. Remember how well
(44:53):
he played acoustic guitar back down beautiful, pretty stunning, And
so I started hanging out with him, and then Cass
introduced mut the Ground. But when Nash leaves the Hollies,
the Hollies are doing very well, aren't they very successful?
Why does he leave? The Hollies told him you did.
I went to work, I went to London. I told
me she quit? And how did you do that? We
(45:13):
dil you quit? Why? Because he could join us? He
was at a very crux point with the Hollies. They
wanted to do an album of Dylan covers. Now there
are bands that should do Dylan covers and there are
bands that should not do Dylon covers. That was one
of the bands that should not do Dealing covers. And
they were ignoring his songs. He had already written a
(45:34):
Lady at the Island and they didn't get it, beautiful song.
He had already been right between the eyes. They didn't
get it. He he was already outgrowing them. So I
walked in and I said, hm, hmm, this is pretty ordinary.
And I was funnier than they were, and I knew
(45:55):
more than they did, and I did it on purpose,
and they'll probably never forgive me. But it made a
great sound. We the three of us, when we heard
each other saying it was it was spectacular. But bands
get together and you're in love with each other and
so wonderful and exciting, and then it devolves and forty
years later it's turned on a small machine and play
(46:16):
your heads and you don't even like each other. You
don't write the same bus, you do not hang out,
and you are competing with the other guys. So it's
easier to do the touring and get on stage and
get that on and get that of what than it
is to be. You don't go into a studio anymore
because that's more intimate that died quicker. Yeah, the money
is so good on the road in a band like that,
(46:38):
you know that you you won't stay there. It means
big crowds, big places, big deal you can get. Yeah,
but it got to pomer is no fun? Is it
about when it starts to crack, when it starts to shift?
Is it because of songwriting? No one's getting that too.
Wants to see my songs. I want my songs on
that album. Who's the decider? Did you guys acquiesced to producers? No? Uh,
(47:01):
we always produced our records and uh and are we
had what we call the reality rule. You come into
the room, you know, just us, nobody else and seeing
each other song and they either liked it didn't and uh,
if they liked it, you know, then we start figuring
out how to sing it. And these are hugely talented guys. Man,
(47:21):
they came with a lot of stuff. So before it
was the four of you, the three of you was
basically pretty good. Yeah, it was okay, you know. Uh.
Neil's nickname is sometimes it's CSN sometimes why you know, uh,
and when it would be C. S and Y, it
was a lot bigger that You've got to know that
that's the reason to see us and has always Neil's decision,
(47:44):
because if there's twenty thousand people in the stadium, Neil
put ten of them there. That's the truth. And so
he's he's the one that's that's said, that's it's done.
He doesn't want to do that anymore. And I don't
think he needs to to see us someone. I don't
think you'll ever see it again. When you say he's
sometimes and he comes and goes. Is that his nature
in all things? He just has to tough time committing
(48:06):
to anything. No, he's on his own path and he
does not relinquish that ever, under any circumstances. And uh,
he does not want to be dependent on anybody else
and probably doesn't want to explain the money. I don't know.
I've never asked him, but I know he I think
(48:29):
you know I had to come to this decision. It's
a very hard decision, man, This is a very hard
time for us. I don't know if you know this,
but streaming pretty much destroyed our earning power. It took half,
at least half of our earning power away from us
because they folks, they don't pay us for records anymore.
And that's really sad. Uh, they got that deal passes
(48:50):
and they it's sort of this if you worked your
job and they paid you a nickel for every two weeks.
It's the proportion is drastically tiny. So with Neil gone
and cs N still earning but really frozen in place
and really unpleasant I mean incidents that I will not
(49:14):
tell you about, but violently bad, carefully chosen more my
(49:40):
thanks again to David Crosby. We presented several of our
shows live, and one of my favorites was with director
William Freakin. Thank you very much, good evening, recorded at
the Turner Classic Movie Film Festival. Freakin is one of
the most entertaining storytellers I've ever sat down with. Here
he is following a screening of The French Connection. We
(50:03):
then sent it to Jane Fonda, who sent us all
the same telegram that said, why would I want to
be in a piece of capitalist rip off bullshit like this?
Now I've seen her since and she doesn't remember having
sent that, but I haven't. That was her response, that
(50:27):
I don't know how she really felt, but that was
her response. He was honest. Yeah. Meanwhile, Ellen Burston was
hockeing me all the time. I had seen the Last
Picture Show, but I didn't know Ellen Burston from Claris Leachman.
I didn't know which was which. But Ellen said to me,
(50:49):
do you believe in destiny? Has anyone ever asked you
that before? Uh? No, Well, she was the only one
who ever asked me that. And I said, well, I
guess I believe, And she said, I'm destined to play
this part. I said, look, with the studio wants Jane
Fonda and Bancroft or Audrey Hepburn. This was all going on.
(51:12):
She said, I don't care. I'm destined to play this part.
And it came about that she was the last person standing,
and so we cast her against the wishes of the studio.
They did not They wanted a big star for that um.
Then we cast Stacy Keach to play Father Carris. He
(51:37):
was a great is a great actor. He was the
go to Eugene O'Neill actor on Broadway. And what happened.
I went to New York and maybe it was that no,
but no, we cast her. I went to New York
and I saw the opening night of a play call
(52:00):
that Championship Season, and it was written by a man
named Jason Miller. Never heard of him. Uh. I thought
the play was great. It was it really reeked of
lapsed Catholicism. It was a play about a group of
high school guys who won a championship under their coach,
(52:22):
but cheated to win and they were suffering this guilt
and the stage was just filled with Catholic guild. I felt. So,
I I said to my casting director, who was this
guy that wrote this. I'd love to talk to him,
just to talk to him. It turned out that he
(52:42):
had studied for the Priesthood three years at Catholic University
in Georgetown. He came up to meet me in in
I was staying at the Sherry Netherlands Hotel and I
had the flu and I had a lot of pills.
He thought I was a pill freak, and uh, I
thought he was a drunk. And he didn't know what
(53:04):
the hell he was doing up there. And I asked
him a lot of questions about studying for the Priesthood
and stuff, and it was a horrible meeting. And I
went back to Los Angeles and about two weeks later,
as we're starting to prepare the picture, he called me
at Warner Brothers and he said, hey, you know that
(53:25):
that book you were telling me about that You're going
to film that Exorcist? He said, I said yeah. He said,
I am that guy. He said, I am that character.
I said, well, you're not Stacy Keach is that he's
going to play the part. He said, I'm telling you, man,
I am this guy. And he said, have you ever
(53:47):
done anything like a screen test? And I said no,
I've never shot a screen test. And what's the point.
I told you, we've cast this. He had never made
a film, never been in a movie, only play a
very small acting roles in a road road companies. He
was delivering milk in Flushing, New York when he wrote
(54:10):
Championship Season, and so he said, you gotta test me.
You have to give me a screen test. I said, why,
what a waste of time? He said, Man, I'm telling
you so. I had great respect for him as a writer.
I said, you want to shoot a screen test? Okay,
you come out here on your own. You get out here.
(54:33):
It was like, let's say it was a Tuesday. I
said him, get out here by Thursday, and I'll shoot
a screen test with you, and i'll take it out
of the camera and give it to you so you
can show it to your kids. And uh, he said, oh,
I can't get out there Thursday. I said, what do
(54:53):
you mean. He said, I don't fly. He said, I'll
take the train. I'll be out there in a week,
all right. So I set up an empty stage with
a great cinematographer named Bill Freaker, and I had cast
Burston and I said, look, we're gonna do a test
(55:17):
to this guy, and let's do the scene where you
first meet him in a little park in Georgetown and
you tell him that you think your daughter is possessed.
And she said, what, why are we doing this? You've
got a great actor. I said, I don't know why
we're doing this. And I swear to God, I didn't
(55:37):
We shoot the test, no sets, just Bill Freaker lighting
in an empty studio, and they did that scene one take.
And then I had Ellen Uh interview Jason with the
camera over her shoulder on him, where she just asked
him questions about his life, who he was, what his
(56:01):
background was, his family, everything, And then I shot a
very tight close up of him saying the Mass, but
not saying it the way you used to hear it.
Maybe you still do in church where the priest just
rattles that off, you know, the name of the Fathers
a little book. I said, I would say the words
(56:23):
of the Mass as though you really mean them, and well,
you mean every word, and and say it, Uh with
as much conviction as you can, and take your time,
and I shot that in the close up, and we
did that and I wasn't sure about anything, but Burston
(56:43):
came over to me and said, you're not going to
hire this guy, are you? And I said, well why not?
She said he can't act. He said he's not an actor,
he can't act. And she said, when I tell father
there caress this story about my daughter, I have to
break down and collapse in his arms, and I need
(57:07):
a big strong man to do that. It happened that
she had was going with a big strong man at
that time who was an actor that she wanted me
to consider. But uh, she said, this guy is about
five six. I said, you're probably right. And the next
morning I saw the dailies and the camera just loved
(57:30):
this guy. The camera just loved him. He looked great,
he was real. And I went to Warner Brothers and
I said, we're gonna pay off Stacy Keach and hire
this guy. And they said, you're out of your mind.
What is wrong with you? You're crazy, but you're possessed, Yes,
(57:52):
something like that. I didn't want to do it, the
writer didn't want to do it. Uh, nobody wanted to
do it. But I said, this is what we're gonna do,
and that's what we did. And he was brilliant, incredible.
You said that, Nichols said, no twelve year old could
carry that film. How did you solve that problem? You
yourself with Linda Blair. H Nichols was wrong because he
(58:18):
had not met Linda Blair. We we had cat We
had auditioned several thousand girls. They were put on tape
from all across the country by casting directors, and I
must have looked at five hundred of them myself, just
a minute or two and then out, and it appeared
(58:39):
that there was nobody who could play this part who
was twelve years old. And I had reached a point
where I felt like that we couldn't make the picture.
You could not find a twelve year old girl who
a would understand all this stuff or be not be
scarred by it, maybe for the rest of her life.
(59:01):
And I didn't see that possibility in any of the
audition tapes. We started to look at sixteen year olds
who looked younger, and fifteen year olds, and one day
my assistant in New York said, there's a woman out
here who has brought her daughter. Her name is Eleanor Blair,
(59:23):
and she doesn't have an appointment. Would you see her?
And I said, okay, why not? Because we were striking
out all over the place. In came this little girl
with her mother. She was twelve, and I knew immediately
that she was the girl instantly she sat down. She
(59:44):
had never acted. She had done those things that you
see like in the New York Daily News, in these
newspapers with girls model coats and little dresses or shoes
or something. She had done that, but no acting. So
she sat down with her mother and I am she
was a straight A student in Westport, Connecticut, and she
(01:00:08):
was had one blue ribbons showing horses at Madison Square Garden.
But had never acted. But I said to her, Linda,
do you know anything about this story? Do you know
anything about the the Exorcist story? And she said, oh yes,
I read the book as she did. She said yes,
and I looked at her mother. Mother nodded, and I said,
(01:00:31):
what what is it about? And she said, well, it's
about a little girl who gets possessed by a devil
and she does a whole bunch of bad things. I said, well,
like what and she said, well, she hits her mother
across the face, and she pushes a man out of
her bedroom window, and she masturbates with a crucifix. And
(01:00:54):
I said, uh. I looked at her. Mother was smiling
and I said, you know what that means. She said
what I said to to to masturbate? And she said
it was like jerking off, isn't it? And I said yes.
Mother was still smiling, and I said to her, have
(01:01:16):
you ever done that? Have you ever done what you
just said? She said, sure, haven't you? And so I
hired her. My thanks again to William Friedkin. I think
you can understand why that's one of my favorite shows.
(01:01:38):
Tune in next time for part two of my farewell
compilation show. Again, my thanks to Barbara Streisan, Joe Delessandro,
Elaine Stretch, David Crosby and William Friedkin join us next time.
Thank you,
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
My podcast Here's the Thing is moving from public Radio
w n y C, in particular to I Heart Radio,
so please keep your eyes and ears open for a
formal announcement as to our exact launch date on My Heart.
(00:25):
The show will still be called Here's the Thing. For
our final two programs on w n y C, we've
cut together a compilation of some of my favorite interviews
from the past several years. But before we get to that,
I would like to take a moment to thank Emily
Boutine and Adam tie Schultz, my producers for the past
(00:46):
several seasons, as well as everyone at w n y
C for the opportunity to explore my curiosity with you
and speak to some of the greatest artists, musicians, actors, writers, thinkers,
public policymakers, sports figures, you name it. Our roster of
guests is really quite something, and I encourage you to
(01:09):
visit our archives and download some of our older shows.
And of course a special thanks to you the listeners
for joining me. This has been the experience of a lifetime,
and thank you. They say that casting is everything, and
that is no doubt true for an interview show, and
(01:30):
we've been quite lucky on Here's the Thing, sitting down
with some rather accomplished guests. My first clip is from
my interview with the legendary Barbra Streisand who talks here
about how she wanted control of her films in a
way that may not have been available to an actress,
even one of her stature, so she decided to direct.
(01:52):
It was something that happened during the way we were
where two scenes were cut out that were intrinsic to
the value of the story. And it made me so
crazy that they couldn't see that that that propelled me
into it. I couldn't understand it. And it's hard to
(02:14):
quarrel with a you know, a hit movie. I don't
know if it was a hit at the time. Tell
you the truth, it's grown to me say it was.
Warren Beatty said to me once, is it. Until you
take ultimate responsibility and you're willing to direct the movie,
you're gonna be constantly frustrated. And he said, you must
consider that if it was so delicious, And it's like,
(02:36):
you know, when you finally have the power to control
your work, you you get very humble in a sense,
it's like I wanted to give power away to other
people as well. You know, I would say to my standing,
you run that course with the cameraman, this is the shot,
(02:58):
but I want you to be able to tell on
me where to stand. In other words, it's a feeling
of such gratitude where you you never have to raise
your voice because everybody's finally listening. You don't have to
get angry about anything they weren't listening before. Sometimes well,
(03:19):
sometimes when I would say things as just an actress,
like this is what I'm telling you, this story the
way we were it went on deaf ears. You know,
they didn't agree with me whatever, But when you see
something so clearly, um, that's wrong to me or what
could be right? Or see. I had such a great
(03:41):
time directing Yental because I did it in England and
in Czechoslovakia. In England they're not afraid of women, powerful women,
strong women, because they had a queen. They have a
queen and at the time they had the Prime Minister
who was Margaret sure So I was shocked at the
(04:04):
respect that I had as a first time director. I
couldn't believe it. Um and the crew was so kind
and just. It was the most wonderful experience, I must say.
And even the Czechoslovakian government was wonderful to me because
(04:25):
I needed Jews to be in the synagogue and pray
and so for then you know, it was during communist times,
and they went to the Jewish community, thank God, and
had them come so I didn't have to teach them
how to be Jewish, you know, how did some real
Jews Jews was an Italian dressed as Jews, like in
(04:46):
New York where they have to say, well how do
you stand in a synagogue and how do you pray?
And it was it was wonderful. And also well you
know when you have extras in Czechoslovakia, then they didn't
give them lunch. So the people would come with like
bags of their lunch, which broke my heart. So I would,
(05:08):
you know, give them our food, which we never had vegetables.
We had a cent to London or France or Italy
to get vegetables, because you know, their food diet was
like hot chalk. I loved it, of course, bread and
butter and hot chocolate in the morning with whipped creamers,
and I was on heaven and I wanted to be thinner,
but well, and every day I would not every day,
(05:31):
but every few days I would bring in pasties, you know,
with that delicious dough in the meat inside, and I
we'd always have the most delicious teas that I'd bring
in those cream like doughnuts shaped like a hot dog
from Whimpis and you know, eat this delicious cream with
the doughnuts. Oh my god, it was so good, and
(05:53):
they it was very sweet. Because the whole crew wrote
a letter that's one of my prized possession, I must say.
And they wrote this letter to the newspapers and it
said that you know, Ms try said something like Mrs
try Sand never raises her voice and has a smile
for us every day. And it's like not the stories
(06:16):
we've heard about her, and no newspaper would publish it,
but it figures it's like Hillary Clinton, as you said,
the upside of that experience where the yentle was working
in a culture where the power of women was just accepted.
And I'm crestfall and to say the least about what
happened here, not just because this guy won, but I
(06:36):
really do think misogyny and well before I did get
some sort of Award from Women in film directing yental
And a lot of my speech was about women against women,
because the reviews of Yentel from women were vicious, you know,
(07:01):
in other words, they didn't even talk about this celebration
of womanhood, that a woman could not only you know,
make dinner and have babies, but she could have an intellect,
she could want to study, be something more do do it?
Men do? Just equality, you know. So to read a
(07:25):
review that said her she wore a design in the
New York Times, she wore a designer yamaka. Now everything,
every piece of clothing in that movie was authentic. That
same year there was the film directed Buying Mark Bergmann
Fanny and Alexander. They wore the same yamica, but nobody
attacked that film. I love detail, so I would, you know,
(07:50):
for years, I would do research about Polish Jews, about
these Jews, that Jews everything, the Evil Institute in New
York um talking to scholars studying Talmud, just to bring that,
because I do believe that when you study like that
and do the research, you don't have to act that
(08:12):
It's like the camera picks up the truth, even just
behind your eyes. In the sound of your voice, whatever
it is mine. You know. I had this wonderful shot,
I thought, as it cuts from a chicken coop to
me sitting behind the bars up separated from the men
in the shool. And that shot was attacked by this
(08:35):
woman critic, Janet Maslin. Her name was now she could
attack my lips incer. That's true. I'm a terrible lip sinker.
I can't do it because when I did movies like
Funny Girl or Hello Dolly, you know, they record the
soundtrack three months before you shoot, and I have to
be in the moment as an actor. I don't know
(08:57):
how I'm going to feel when I actually perform it.
So that's why when I did the movie Star Is Born,
it's all real, it's all um I had. I did
not want. I needed to be free, to be in
the moment, So we recorded on the spot. What do
you call that live? It was all live. And then
what I would do is um because I had final
(09:20):
cut on that movie, I could control those things. UM.
We would shoot the close ups first, so where the
performance really counted, and then I would just choose it
right on the spot, okay, I think, And I would
do about one to four takes. You know, all these
stories about me like I do millions of takes, most
of them are false. And so let's say I would
(09:42):
take take three, you know, and then move the cameras
back to do the wider shot because you didn't have
to see me close, you know, not doing the lip sync. Good.
I did a documentary film about can It's ostensibly about
Ken and Ryan got thing. We corner him at an hotel. Yeah,
I think I saw it. Jimmy Toback and I did
(10:04):
this thing called Seduced and Abandoned and we get Gosling
at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the bel Air Hotel.
I should say, any long story short is he has
this beautiful explication of how agonizing it is to shoot films,
and just in that kind of Arthur Murray by numbers way,
we have to shoot a match to this and to this.
It can't be fresh and it's painful. No, And that's
(10:26):
why I love long takes, because I think I'm from
the theater and we had to do a whole show, right,
So I don't like pieces. I mean, you I the
fun of directing to me is designing the shot, the
camera accommodating the actors. So the actors. There's a lot
of scenes in Yentle that you can see like this.
(10:46):
They're all in one move practically. In other words, we
come in through a door and I'm in the foreground,
let's say. But he who's following me, the my leader
who was Mandy Patinkin at the time, and he still
is but um, you know, we see him standing there,
(11:08):
and then he comes forward and I sit down. He
becomes he's standing up, but the camera never moved, but
you see everything. Then the camera moves as we're together,
but it doesn't cut. And then he has you know,
when when he leaves me, you see him go out
the door. He slams the door and the camera moves
in a little bit. As I'm thinking about it, that's
(11:31):
the scene. But it's what's fun about that is that
we're all on our toes. You can't make a mistake.
And most of these shots that I do that there's
no coverage. That the greatest on the very little coverage
the actors played the scene in the frame. That's right
(11:52):
now now, in the time that you made films, the
many years you've made films, the success for acting and
not directing, successful as a director and producer and all
those things. Were there are people that you wanted to
work with, whether people you sat there as a guy,
I'd love to make a film with that person because
you've been in such a privileged place and I had
(12:14):
all these people available to Was there a director that
you dreamed of working with you didn't get to work with? Well,
I Mark Bergman is a person that contacted me to
do a remake of The Merry Widow and I was
so excited, you know, and I came to um Sweden
and we embraced and it was this wonderful embrace, you know.
(12:37):
I mean he I can't explain what that what that's like.
It's was just he sort of understood me, and I
understood him without any words. And the first act of
that screenplay was fantastic, I mean, very body uh kind
(12:58):
of shocking. I loved it, you know. So then and
when I have letters now, I forget things until I
have to go into my archives and look at this stuff,
letters from him and notes that I wrote back to
him talking about this film. What happened the second act?
(13:21):
You know, he says we're going to be collaborators, and
the second act was not very good. I thought it
was like like Jevas Amadeus. I'm sure the first act
was extraordinary to me in the movie, and the second
act was I don't know, just somehow repetitious. It It
(13:46):
didn't go far enough in the story, you know. And
that's the way I felt about this. And all of
a sudden it was gone. The collaboration was over. We
never made the film, and I couldn't quite believe it.
I mean, the fact that I didn't like certain things
(14:06):
in the second act did he liked? Well, he never
defended it. It was like, you know, I think that's
right and so. But I would have loved to work
with Berto Lucci and Schris you know what I did.
I realized this now and looking back at my life.
I turned down Alice doesn't live here anymore. I turned
(14:27):
down a lot of films actually because I was lazy.
I'm basically I'm a dichotomy here, a dichotomy lazy and um,
I don't know what the word is, restless, restless maybe? Yeah,
like wanting to create about you, it would be called
(14:49):
the lazy and the restless. Oh no, that's a very
good time. Yeah, exactly, exactly I love to take a
vacation and do nothing. I like to have no appointments.
And I think that's a condition in my mind of
(15:10):
people who have tremendous not so much financial success, but
creative success. I mean, there's a famous actress who I
won't name you. Wait, you know what? Do you want
to take a sip of soup on your Do you
want soup to I'll have a soup. I mean we
kind of say no. Well, I mean this is a
I'm irish. It's bad luck to say no to soup?
(15:31):
Is that in Ireland? I just made that up. Oh
just put that over here? Oh see, I just brought
this table from the back and we need another table
maybe over here because this is me so soup, don't
I mean? In other words, people know we eat, right,
so if they hear it's okay, good, good, good good,
(15:54):
because I always like to eat. Oh really know you
know you won't mm hmm. That is delicious, isn't it.
That was my interview with Barbara Streisand sometimes the task
is to convince some of our iconic guests to sit
(16:15):
down with me. Other times the task is simply to
find them. In the case of my next clip. Joe
Delessandro proved to be more than a little elusive, but
once we got the star of many of Warhol's early
films and photography to join us, he was gracious, forthcoming
and funny, like when he talked here about his early
(16:38):
days as a male model. The criminal guy who's the
modeling agency. How did that play out? Well? He introduces
me to this version at once that does these, uh,
these photographs, and they said, you know, look, Joe rubbed
his oil on you. And it starts out real, you know,
(16:58):
really easy. You know, it's nothing, nothing that's too frightening
to a person that's you know, being first introduced to it.
It's just, you know, take your clothes off and stand
over there and nude. Yeah, and for you, did you
feel it in that world you want to nose for
people you could trust and not trust. Yeah, So the
guy says, oil up and stand over there naked. You
(17:19):
knew you were cool? Yeah, nothing, nothing was gonna happen there. Yeah.
Did you find it weird? Yeah? I thought it was
real weird, But I was gonna get fifty dollars, a
whole fifty dollars. That was a lot of money back then.
You know, and I thought, wow, fifty dollars was standing,
So yeah, Joe making put them up like like you're
(17:41):
making a muscle Joe, you know. And shortly after that,
I have a fight with the guy that introduced me
to this modeling people because he had this scam that
he wanted to do. He wanted to blackmail somebody. You
wanted me to do something and I ain't doing that.
And also it's a stupid ship, you know. So I
(18:01):
got angry and he got he got violent. He was
an ex con that was, you know, gonna show his toughness,
not to me. Anyway. He broke a bottle to come
at me, and I knocked the bottle out of his
hand and went on the ground and broke and uh
(18:21):
he uh he did a little dance with him. Yeah.
He fell on the glass and got all cut up.
You know. Well actually I threw him on the glass
and he got all cut up. No, No, he fell
on the glass. Yeah, and we hold him down. You
were trying to help him. He tried to press charges
against you. Yeah, he tried to do all listen on sense. Anyway,
we went to court and they reached my father and say,
(18:44):
you know your your son's out here, and oh, you
need to send them back, you know, put him on
a plane and I'll send you the money. Where'd you
live them? And he got to New York. I stayed
with him for a week and then went out on
my own again. There was the plan when you were
back in New York, Well, the modeling thing again? Did
you think this is good money? I never thought about it,
(19:06):
about the modeling thing, you know, it wasn't something that
I knew anybody. I had a couple of friends in
New York that introduced me to other people. And and
then one day one of these friends, uh said, Hey,
I know this person that's uh making these Campbell soup
can you know makes the Cambell soup? And I was
(19:27):
thinking we were going to eat some soup, which I
was all for. You're gonna go to the Campbell soup factory? Yeah, whatever, Pennsylvania.
I had no idea where it was. You could take
a picture of you oiled up, said there's somebody sitting
behind a camera reading a newspaper, so I couldn't see
who it was or what it was, you know, but
(19:47):
they wanted to introduce me that this Campbell soup. Andy
Warho guy that I had. You know, I didn't know
who Andy Warho was or you know, before I met them.
Mine I had married, uh young lady, my first my
first wife. Ah No, I had to be eighteen then.
(20:09):
So but it was why did you get married when
you're right there? Freedom is a premium for you? Why
did you get married? My father was dating her mother,
and my father wanted to she got herself pregnant. My
father said, you know, you should take we should take
this person and he should own up to his responsibility
(20:31):
of his kids. Were father. I was also got pregnant
with somebody else. My father said, we'll take him to court,
you know. And and I kept telling my father, you
shouldn't do that, and you shouldn't push you to do that,
because he's gonna come in with a bunch. This is Brooklyn,
you know, he can come a bunch of guys saying
we all slept with her and nothing's going to ever
(20:52):
come from which one of us is the father. Yeah,
that's back before DNA and all that other ship. Thank
god for yet. Yeah, anyway, so you decided to marry her.
I decided to marry her and give the kid my name,
you know, what kind of work did you do? Then?
I was a book binder, I went to Actually I
(21:15):
was assembly line. I didn't do anything except in the city,
yea Manhattan. Who wouldn't know why that job? Because my
uncle ran the ran the show was his business. Yeah,
well I don't know if it was his business, but
he ran the shop. So was there a part of
you when you're in Jersey and your book binding and
(21:36):
you got a sixteen year old bride has got a kid,
and we're not quite sure who in the Brooklyn gang
is really the father? Do you sit there and go
I missed standing They're oiled up in a room naked
getting the fifty bucks from these guys. I don't know,
did you miss that? Yeah? And then you and then
you go meet the guy who's behind the newspaper, who
makes the soup, who's gonna make you soup for lunch?
What happened there? He drops the newspaper. What happens? Obviously
(21:58):
he became very fond of you, very quickly. Well, it
wasn't him. It was the guy that was standing to
the side of the camera and giving all the instructions
to everybody, And that was Paul Marcy. So He's the
one that suggested that I'd be in the film because
he ow, he was this character that asked everything about
(22:19):
your life and I had told him, you know, in
junior high had played on the wrestling team. He says, Oh,
that's a good idea. We'll have you do that with Undine.
You'll you teach him wrestling, so let film that. We'll
film that. What do you described? Morrissey then Marcy real smart,
real educated he had. He was a Fordham graduate. He
(22:45):
was a social worker before in New York City where
he really saw these uh strange people that he had,
you know, work with. Uh. So he had plenty of
great stories and he shot. Uh these films that was shot.
(23:06):
There were silent films I saw. I watched a couple
of them. They were pretty good films. Uh you're a
movie goer them, you're like, yeah, I was. I loved
the movies. I didn't want to be in them. I
just liked watching them. But when you watch the movies
at Morrissey and or warhol Man, they weren't like movies
you saw in the theater when I yeah, I thought
they were a joke. I thought that. Well, when we
(23:29):
were shooting this one thing the soup day they were shifting.
They asked me to be in the thing, and I
shot this most scene and they came over to me
after we were done, and uh, they asked me to
sign a release. I said, you're not gonna this is
just for fun. Nobody's gonna ever see this. This is
(23:49):
it's just I thought, just like a whole movie. I
didn't think they were gonna, you know, ever show this anywhere,
and thought it was a joke because what was happening
there was you know, pretty silly. You know, wasn't you know,
anything I ever saw in the theater. It was unfamiliar. Yeah, really,
I signed the release thinking it would never be released.
(24:09):
And and then later on they called me and asked
if I would them to photograph me for the advertising
of this film that they you know, they shot with
me first before this movie that was supposed to be
a twenty four hour movie that turned into Loves of Undine.
They cut it into a smoom. That was your first movie,
(24:33):
and that was my first movie with him. But before
that was ever released, they had called me up and
he did to ask me to be in another movie.
And then he put Paul on the phone who told me, Yeah, Joe,
we're going out to Arizona to shoot a Western. Would
you like to be in the West end? I said, sure,
(24:55):
that'd be great, but you gotta pay me what I
would I make at the book binding place, as I
can't take off. I'm married now, I gotta take care
of my all his bullshit, Yeah about what I was making.
They paid you exactly what you made. The probably they
were cheap. They were always cheap. They didn't want to
(25:16):
pay somebody too much, and then somebody else asked for
the same thing. You know, is it amazing you sit
in a room back in nineteen sixty seven with a
bunch of people who later on the soup can guy
would sell his paintings for tens of millions of dollars. Yeah,
he becomes one of the richest artists in history. Did
(25:37):
you have an artistic sensibility but you thought that these
guys were or you? Just as you said, it was
just unfamiliar and silly. Well in the beginning, and you
know it all, it wasn't for me and and Andy's art.
You know, we all participated in making the Andy art.
They had said, you know, after we had shot the
Cowboy movie and we came back. I thought that was it.
(26:00):
Go back to book binding. And you know, I called
Paul ask him about the Western and he had told
me that he had a job for me at the
factory and I said, okay, you know, and he happy
to give up what I was doing, you know, doing
something there, and I went down to the factory and
(26:22):
that was the day. Then Andy was shot when I
showed up to the factory to work there. Sometimes at
the onset, I wonder where the conversation might go, and
by the end I realized I could have talked with
my guest for hours. Such is the case with Joe Delessandro.
Thank you, Joe. My next clip is from my interview
(26:52):
with Elaine Stretch. Elaine had quite a career. Towards the
end of it, she played my mother, Colleen Donaghye, on
the television series thirty Rock. When the show was over,
Elaine announced she was leaving New York and we were
lucky enough to catch up with her before she relocated
home to Michigan. And if you know Elaine, it comes
as no surprise that the interview could just stop at
(27:15):
any given moment. Where is my black bag? Alec Hunter?
I need. I need orange juice. Hunter, come in plays?
Can we send Hunter in here? Plays with the provisions? Hunter.
Ryan Herdlika, who accompanied Elaine to the studio, came through
the door juice in hand. I need some orange juice.
(27:37):
Beanies is kicking up, Hunter, my good man, hunters right
with the world. Okay, we'll how about a glass. Yes,
that's a clean water. We'll get him a clean we'll go,
we'll go get her clean. All right, it's all right
if you just empty that glass, it's heaven. I need
(27:58):
some orange juice. You know that I'm diabetic, Yes, of course,
I mean the world knows by now, the world. It's okay.
You know what I quoted the other day, the line
of my father's that really is so naughty and just
so much fun. Here's looking up your old address. Isn't
(28:19):
that a great line? And he said it with no
he used that was it. That's right? All right, I'm
gonna drink this and bring the orangese now so we
don't have some event here. That's cool. Alright. So now
that you've had your orange juice and your brain freezes over,
Kirk Douglas, what was the show? Do you remember now? Woman?
(28:40):
Bites dog. That orange juice. It's a miracle. Elcksir. I
want to be a case of that orange juice dog,
woman bites dog. What do you play in that? If
you girlfriend? He lived with I didn't even know what
that phrase meant. You were a floozy? Well no, I wasn't.
(29:02):
I just but I lived with him and I wasn't
married to him. I didn't know what that meant. What
do you remember about Kirk Douglas. Oh my god, I
loved him. Oh god, I loved him. And what an
actor he was. And he's one of the few men
who was as great an actor as he was a star.
He was a great actor. He was a great actor.
(29:24):
He was a great actor. I loved him, and he
loved me. He flipped over me. I've known him for years,
and he took me halfway away for the weekend, and
then I discovered that I shouldn't go. He took you
half way away to Palm Springs, and then I said
I shouldn't be going. So what did do you hit? Like?
(29:44):
What helds? I do know? We were halfway to Palm Beach,
Palm Springs things. So you're driving east. We were driving
for the weekend and you decided you didn't want to. Well,
I said, I'm getting nervous, because what do you want
me to do when we get up here? Oh, Elaine,
(30:07):
you knew I was a virgin, so he was dealing
with that. So what was the first leading role you
had on Broadway? Big roll? Take more horors, you see
you can remember of the big part, big big part
(30:27):
I had was Angel and the Wings, which was a review,
hardest thing in the world to do a review, and
the kind of review like New Faces, was like Leonard
Sulman's sketches. And I was the big busted you know,
girl in the in the bedroom. I was the I
(30:48):
was the piece on the side. Yeah, where are you?
Isn't amazing? You were this virginal You went to suck
or cur and you went to finishing school and I
played as soon as you're out, God is just tempting you.
He's taking Marlon Brando on one side of you, and
Kirk Douglas has reving up the convertible to take you
to Palm Springs, and you're the fluzi here and you're
(31:10):
the piece on the side, the bust defend fatalel But
what I was really doing is learning my lines to
the play or to the television or to the I
was really loving acting. I loved it. I loved pretending.
(31:31):
I just loved it. Was being somebody other than I
was was my idea of a good time? Was part
of that process for you? Learning from people you work with,
it you admire. Did you look at other people and say,
because I've had that. I mean, I'm not going to
say I had it well like Merman? When you worked
with Merman? Did you learn from Merman? Did you did
you know you didn't? I did her part right. I
(31:55):
did her There's no question, so she would not. Some
loved her, everybody loved everybody. But I know how to
do that. And I was so frightened and so terrified,
and I was so good in it. Did you feel
that she was of that type where just Mermin as Mermaid,
she goes out into study. She made, you know, so long.
(32:18):
She'd say goodbye to me from the wings on my
opening night and then go sit in the first row.
She scared me to death when I got to the
end of call Me Madam, it was mine? You felt
that way? When do you think you became you? The
moment I started to rehearse Mermaid's part. I was doing
(32:42):
the New Mermaid, the New Everything. That's when you became you. Yeah,
So doing the piece doing call Me Madam is when
you felt things changed for you. You felt you were
were not necessarily now everything I did, everything I did
was you know. But when you do a show Elaine
(33:06):
Stretch at Liberty, when you do a show that is
a memoir of your career, oh yeah, and it is
enormously successful, when did you think in your life? When
did you reach a point in your life that you
felt you were someone who could write a memoir about
your life, that you thought it was interesting enough. When
did you cross the line and say, yeah, I was
(33:28):
convinced by this producer who said, who saw me perform
at a Judy Garland special at Carnegie Hall? And what
I did was tells Judy Garland stories And I told
her it was a tribute to Judy. She's gone by this, yeah,
and oh boy, I really did know her very well.
(33:51):
From where did your first meet her? Party? At a
party someplace I don't know. And I loved her. So
when I tried out one of my stories on Judy Garland,
I mean she tried out one of hers. I said, Judy,
I've got an idea, and I sincerely did. I said,
I've got a great idea. Why don't we tour Maime?
(34:18):
I said to Judy Garan And she says divine. She
said that sounds great. I said, but here's the good idea, Judy.
When I do Mame, I go to bed early, and
when you do me, you go to bed early. And
(34:39):
then the other one does vera she want a switch
on and off. Yeah, she bought you. She's listening now
and she's saying okay, okay, okay, and she's counting up
the songs. What songs she has? What? And after this
(35:02):
long pause, she looks at me and says, what about Matene's?
And I thought it was one of the funniest things
I've ever heard in my whole life, that Judy Garland
wanted to know what about Mattenees. That's how she carefully.
She wanted her her career planned so she could be
(35:23):
able to get loaded when she wanted to. And you know,
it was her way of treating a very serious discussion.
So you did a tribute thing where you told stories
about her, and that's when someone pitched the idea to
you of doing a memoir of your career. That's right.
What vaguely and said, you tell a story to an
audience the like of which I have never heard. That's true.
(35:46):
I was that the opening night at the Public, when
that Liberty opened at the Public, and everyone who was
had a pulse in New York. Everyone who was alive
that night came to that opening at the Public. Everybody
in the theater came. They went crazy, They went crazy.
It's lovely, God, it's lovely. Success is lovely. It's so hard,
and it's such hard work, but it's so gratifying. What's
(36:08):
the hardest thing about it for you? What's been the
hardest thing? Do you find it hard? To have? The
fear of what that you won't be able to perform,
the fear that I'm just going to forget, and I'm
going to not not so much forget, but it's the fear.
It's the fear. And that was when I was not
drinking at all, and I didn't drink anything to get
(36:31):
my talent on, but all my life I had. Have
you ever done a show? I'm sure you've done countless shows.
You ever done a show where you're sitting backstage thinking
what am I doing here? How did I get myself
into this? Or? Were you always engaged by what you
were doing? I was always engaged with always. You never
took I was leading up to it or coming down,
(36:52):
you know, I I was trying to get it behind.
You never regretted doing anything? Never? No, that's incredible. No,
I never never regretted doing anything on the stage. Never.
How was that possible because I just one every time
I walked out there. You know that old expression about
(37:15):
I own the stage. That was from my interview with
the incomparable Elaine Stretch. Some of the musicians I've interviewed
have had tough lives, during which they created some of
the greatest music the world has ever heard. The next
(37:37):
clip is from my interview with David Crosby, the self
described mischievous kid who started singing folk songs at age
six on his way to his remarkable career. And you
go to boarding school? I did, Yeah, Kate? What was
that block? What were you like? Were you always mischievous?
(37:58):
And it get load of trouble Why I don't know,
but it's definitely true. I got thrown out of almost
every school I was ever in, including Kate, What was
music in your life? Then? Music came early, and well, uh,
my mom sang in choirs. My dad liked music. He
(38:19):
could play a mantle in. My brother played guitar. We
used to Here's an interesting thing when when we were
growing up in the fifties, when TV started to really happen,
we didn't have a TV, so we sang folk songs
out of the fireside Book of Folks Songs, and that
was where it started. Did anybody tell you then you
(38:39):
could sing that? They say you're a good singer. They
did notice that I was singing harmony when I was six,
And huh, what's the first instrument you played? Guitar? My
brother turned me onto guitar when you were how old?
I guess maybe can what's the best time you think that.
My son is two and a half years, so it's
gonna be three in June. He's obsessed with simulating playing
(39:01):
the guitar. He actually has a band with my wife.
He calls her Trista, and he's Mr Pants. Mr Pants.
He'll turn to my wife a little I've got it
on video. He'll turn to my wife and Trista, what
are we gonna play now? He's two and a half.
Don't let him be a musician. We wanted to. It's
terrible idea. He'll never have a job. Actually let him.
(39:21):
Do you think that if you didn't? But when you
say that, do you think if you hadn't made it
as big as you made it, you wouldn't have stuck
with it, or you would have stayed with it because
you loved it. I would because I love it. I
love it so much, like I can't tell you I
love seeing it. I'm good at it. But that's not
really it. It's there's a joy to singing in and
of itself, and it's it's an elevating thing. It's totally
(39:45):
freaking wonderful. It's very tough for me now, man, because
I'm really old and getting on the road exhausting. Yeah,
well it beats the crap out of me. Yeah, because
you'll never get more than four hours sleep in a row.
And then in the middle of that, you had an
expansion joint and playing. You're away again and you know,
and you're eating terrible food and restaurants. When when did
(40:06):
you when you left home, you didn't go to college. No,
I went one year and you went to uh City
College in Santa Barbara, which is now, oddly enough, the
highest rated city college in the country. It was interesting
and good, and I had one really good teacher hooked
me up about some really interesting things about semantics and
the language. And no, you weren't sending music then, then, no,
(40:30):
not yet. I was. I was bussing tables at the
local coffeehouse because as a bus boy they would let
me sing harmony with the guy who was being paid
to sing. And what was the first band you were in?
Less Baxter's Balladeers. Let's Baxter, you know, a band leader guy.
He had seen the Christie Mittrels, which that guy who
(40:54):
sparks were he was he had I think he had
three of them out their bands like that in your
old name the same you know. It just it was
a commercial operation and was really lame. But we was
put food on the table. My brother and I were
in that. And then I ran into Roger mcgwinn and
Gean Clark and where a tributor bar it's a tributary
(41:16):
and they were singing and it was good and these
songs were you know, James pretty good writer. And so
when those two haven't they had an act called they
have an act, we're just playing. They were just in
the bar. You know, Roger has been a musician for
a while and successful and played with other bands, Lime Letters,
Chad Mitchell Three, a bunch of different people, so he
(41:37):
knew what he was doing when he knew that Jean
was talented and that this stuff had value because it
sounded a lot like Beatles songs, and uh, so I
started singing harmony to them. They said, what's your name?
And uh that worked out really well. It was a
good band, simple good. Roger's extremely Good had taken Bob
(41:59):
Dylan so and turning them into pop records. And you
covered Tambourine Man. Yeah, that was our first hit. Well,
what did you learn about bands in your first band?
What that experienced like? I learned that that I had
a lot to learn. I was just a young punk
and I really had no idea how to actually work
with the people and accomplished the aim that I wanted to.
(42:22):
I had an experience early on when I was young.
My mom took me to see a symphony orchestra in
a park free show there in that way, and they
tuned up and they got ready, and then he started
the piece and it was this huge, beautiful wave that
hit me. I didn't know anything was like that. You know,
symphony orchestra a hugely powerful thing. And it freaked me out.
(42:43):
And the thing I've realized even as a kid, the
power came from they were alding me together. I can't
believe you just said that. It's the truth, and it
really and it penetrated. So I've always wanted to be
in a band always. I love cooperative effort. Competitive effort
winds up at war, cooperative effort winds up. I'm I'm
(43:04):
watching Tom Petty's band playing a benefit, and Offend was
with me. I turned him and I said, do you
see what I'm seeing? Reference said what? And I said,
they're all doing the same thing at the same time.
I said, they're all in service to and feeding. You know,
in my business, not everybody's doing the same thing that
they're kind of doing their own thing, kind of jerking
off in the corner there, you know, Patty's band was
(43:25):
doing the same thing. Yeah, it was really really, very
very cool. Do you find in a band does somebody
always need to be in charge? Does somebody need to
be the boss? It can go both ways, and the
birds Roger was definitely the leader of the band, and
that worked well. Yeah, he knew a lot more than
we did. And he's also an extremely talented guy and
a good singer. And uh so it wouldn't you know,
(43:47):
I challenged it at every turn, but he was the
leader of the band, uh c s And why none
of us was willing to admit anybody else was the leader.
Where it was and probably still is one of the
most competitive situations in the history. Uh And he goes
really just that simple, And in spite of all the
(44:10):
incredible success you've had. I mean, who's when you think
of people, when you think of men harmonizing in a group,
the first people that come to mind of the three
of you, why do you think that that didn't bring
them any comforts? I don't think that's what they went
in for. And I don't think they realized exactly how
good it was. We did really like each other when
(44:31):
we started, and we were thrilled, you know, by each
other's songs. So you leave the birds and and and
and Stills leaves Buffalo Springfield and they bring you with
them Springfield Sorrow fell Apart Left, which is kind of
his m O. Uh Stephen was very appealing guitar player
and singer. I mean, it's really good. Remember how well
(44:53):
he played acoustic guitar back down beautiful, pretty stunning, And
so I started hanging out with him, and then Cass
introduced mut the Ground. But when Nash leaves the Hollies,
the Hollies are doing very well, aren't they very successful?
Why does he leave? The Hollies told him you did.
I went to work, I went to London. I told
me she quit? And how did you do that? We
(45:13):
dil you quit? Why? Because he could join us? He
was at a very crux point with the Hollies. They
wanted to do an album of Dylan covers. Now there
are bands that should do Dylan covers and there are
bands that should not do Dylon covers. That was one
of the bands that should not do Dealing covers. And
they were ignoring his songs. He had already written a
(45:34):
Lady at the Island and they didn't get it, beautiful song.
He had already been right between the eyes. They didn't
get it. He he was already outgrowing them. So I
walked in and I said, hm, hmm, this is pretty ordinary.
And I was funnier than they were, and I knew
(45:55):
more than they did, and I did it on purpose,
and they'll probably never forgive me. But it made a
great sound. We the three of us, when we heard
each other saying it was it was spectacular. But bands
get together and you're in love with each other and
so wonderful and exciting, and then it devolves and forty
years later it's turned on a small machine and play
(46:16):
your heads and you don't even like each other. You
don't write the same bus, you do not hang out,
and you are competing with the other guys. So it's
easier to do the touring and get on stage and
get that on and get that of what than it
is to be. You don't go into a studio anymore
because that's more intimate that died quicker. Yeah, the money
is so good on the road in a band like that,
(46:38):
you know that you you won't stay there. It means
big crowds, big places, big deal you can get. Yeah,
but it got to pomer is no fun? Is it
about when it starts to crack, when it starts to shift?
Is it because of songwriting? No one's getting that too.
Wants to see my songs. I want my songs on
that album. Who's the decider? Did you guys acquiesced to producers? No? Uh,
(47:01):
we always produced our records and uh and are we
had what we call the reality rule. You come into
the room, you know, just us, nobody else and seeing
each other song and they either liked it didn't and uh,
if they liked it, you know, then we start figuring
out how to sing it. And these are hugely talented guys. Man,
(47:21):
they came with a lot of stuff. So before it
was the four of you, the three of you was
basically pretty good. Yeah, it was okay, you know. Uh.
Neil's nickname is sometimes it's CSN sometimes why you know, uh,
and when it would be C. S and Y, it
was a lot bigger that You've got to know that
that's the reason to see us and has always Neil's decision,
(47:44):
because if there's twenty thousand people in the stadium, Neil
put ten of them there. That's the truth. And so
he's he's the one that's that's said, that's it's done.
He doesn't want to do that anymore. And I don't
think he needs to to see us someone. I don't
think you'll ever see it again. When you say he's
sometimes and he comes and goes. Is that his nature
in all things? He just has to tough time committing
(48:06):
to anything. No, he's on his own path and he
does not relinquish that ever, under any circumstances. And uh,
he does not want to be dependent on anybody else
and probably doesn't want to explain the money. I don't know.
I've never asked him, but I know he I think
(48:29):
you know I had to come to this decision. It's
a very hard decision, man, This is a very hard
time for us. I don't know if you know this,
but streaming pretty much destroyed our earning power. It took half,
at least half of our earning power away from us
because they folks, they don't pay us for records anymore.
And that's really sad. Uh, they got that deal passes
(48:50):
and they it's sort of this if you worked your
job and they paid you a nickel for every two weeks.
It's the proportion is drastically tiny. So with Neil gone
and cs N still earning but really frozen in place
and really unpleasant I mean incidents that I will not
(49:14):
tell you about, but violently bad, carefully chosen more my
(49:40):
thanks again to David Crosby. We presented several of our
shows live, and one of my favorites was with director
William Freakin. Thank you very much, good evening, recorded at
the Turner Classic Movie Film Festival. Freakin is one of
the most entertaining storytellers I've ever sat down with. Here
he is following a screening of The French Connection. We
(50:03):
then sent it to Jane Fonda, who sent us all
the same telegram that said, why would I want to
be in a piece of capitalist rip off bullshit like this?
Now I've seen her since and she doesn't remember having
sent that, but I haven't. That was her response, that
(50:27):
I don't know how she really felt, but that was
her response. He was honest. Yeah. Meanwhile, Ellen Burston was
hockeing me all the time. I had seen the Last
Picture Show, but I didn't know Ellen Burston from Claris Leachman.
I didn't know which was which. But Ellen said to me,
(50:49):
do you believe in destiny? Has anyone ever asked you
that before? Uh? No, Well, she was the only one
who ever asked me that. And I said, well, I
guess I believe, And she said, I'm destined to play
this part. I said, look, with the studio wants Jane
Fonda and Bancroft or Audrey Hepburn. This was all going on.
(51:12):
She said, I don't care. I'm destined to play this part.
And it came about that she was the last person standing,
and so we cast her against the wishes of the studio.
They did not They wanted a big star for that um.
Then we cast Stacy Keach to play Father Carris. He
(51:37):
was a great is a great actor. He was the
go to Eugene O'Neill actor on Broadway. And what happened.
I went to New York and maybe it was that no,
but no, we cast her. I went to New York
and I saw the opening night of a play call
(52:00):
that Championship Season, and it was written by a man
named Jason Miller. Never heard of him. Uh. I thought
the play was great. It was it really reeked of
lapsed Catholicism. It was a play about a group of
high school guys who won a championship under their coach,
(52:22):
but cheated to win and they were suffering this guilt
and the stage was just filled with Catholic guild. I felt. So,
I I said to my casting director, who was this
guy that wrote this. I'd love to talk to him,
just to talk to him. It turned out that he
(52:42):
had studied for the Priesthood three years at Catholic University
in Georgetown. He came up to meet me in in
I was staying at the Sherry Netherlands Hotel and I
had the flu and I had a lot of pills.
He thought I was a pill freak, and uh, I
thought he was a drunk. And he didn't know what
(53:04):
the hell he was doing up there. And I asked
him a lot of questions about studying for the Priesthood
and stuff, and it was a horrible meeting. And I
went back to Los Angeles and about two weeks later,
as we're starting to prepare the picture, he called me
at Warner Brothers and he said, hey, you know that
(53:25):
that book you were telling me about that You're going
to film that Exorcist? He said, I said yeah. He said,
I am that guy. He said, I am that character.
I said, well, you're not Stacy Keach is that he's
going to play the part. He said, I'm telling you, man,
I am this guy. And he said, have you ever
(53:47):
done anything like a screen test? And I said no,
I've never shot a screen test. And what's the point.
I told you, we've cast this. He had never made
a film, never been in a movie, only play a
very small acting roles in a road road companies. He
was delivering milk in Flushing, New York when he wrote
(54:10):
Championship Season, and so he said, you gotta test me.
You have to give me a screen test. I said, why,
what a waste of time? He said, Man, I'm telling
you so. I had great respect for him as a writer.
I said, you want to shoot a screen test? Okay,
you come out here on your own. You get out here.
(54:33):
It was like, let's say it was a Tuesday. I
said him, get out here by Thursday, and I'll shoot
a screen test with you, and i'll take it out
of the camera and give it to you so you
can show it to your kids. And uh, he said, oh,
I can't get out there Thursday. I said, what do
(54:53):
you mean. He said, I don't fly. He said, I'll
take the train. I'll be out there in a week,
all right. So I set up an empty stage with
a great cinematographer named Bill Freaker, and I had cast
Burston and I said, look, we're gonna do a test
(55:17):
to this guy, and let's do the scene where you
first meet him in a little park in Georgetown and
you tell him that you think your daughter is possessed.
And she said, what, why are we doing this? You've
got a great actor. I said, I don't know why
we're doing this. And I swear to God, I didn't
(55:37):
We shoot the test, no sets, just Bill Freaker lighting
in an empty studio, and they did that scene one take.
And then I had Ellen Uh interview Jason with the
camera over her shoulder on him, where she just asked
him questions about his life, who he was, what his
(56:01):
background was, his family, everything, And then I shot a
very tight close up of him saying the Mass, but
not saying it the way you used to hear it.
Maybe you still do in church where the priest just
rattles that off, you know, the name of the Fathers
a little book. I said, I would say the words
(56:23):
of the Mass as though you really mean them, and well,
you mean every word, and and say it, Uh with
as much conviction as you can, and take your time,
and I shot that in the close up, and we
did that and I wasn't sure about anything, but Burston
(56:43):
came over to me and said, you're not going to
hire this guy, are you? And I said, well why not?
She said he can't act. He said he's not an actor,
he can't act. And she said, when I tell father
there caress this story about my daughter, I have to
break down and collapse in his arms, and I need
(57:07):
a big strong man to do that. It happened that
she had was going with a big strong man at
that time who was an actor that she wanted me
to consider. But uh, she said, this guy is about
five six. I said, you're probably right. And the next
morning I saw the dailies and the camera just loved
(57:30):
this guy. The camera just loved him. He looked great,
he was real. And I went to Warner Brothers and
I said, we're gonna pay off Stacy Keach and hire
this guy. And they said, you're out of your mind.
What is wrong with you? You're crazy, but you're possessed, Yes,
(57:52):
something like that. I didn't want to do it, the
writer didn't want to do it. Uh, nobody wanted to
do it. But I said, this is what we're gonna do,
and that's what we did. And he was brilliant, incredible.
You said that, Nichols said, no twelve year old could
carry that film. How did you solve that problem? You
yourself with Linda Blair. H Nichols was wrong because he
(58:18):
had not met Linda Blair. We we had cat We
had auditioned several thousand girls. They were put on tape
from all across the country by casting directors, and I
must have looked at five hundred of them myself, just
a minute or two and then out, and it appeared
(58:39):
that there was nobody who could play this part who
was twelve years old. And I had reached a point
where I felt like that we couldn't make the picture.
You could not find a twelve year old girl who
a would understand all this stuff or be not be
scarred by it, maybe for the rest of her life.
(59:01):
And I didn't see that possibility in any of the
audition tapes. We started to look at sixteen year olds
who looked younger, and fifteen year olds, and one day
my assistant in New York said, there's a woman out
here who has brought her daughter. Her name is Eleanor Blair,
(59:23):
and she doesn't have an appointment. Would you see her?
And I said, okay, why not? Because we were striking
out all over the place. In came this little girl
with her mother. She was twelve, and I knew immediately
that she was the girl instantly she sat down. She
(59:44):
had never acted. She had done those things that you
see like in the New York Daily News, in these
newspapers with girls model coats and little dresses or shoes
or something. She had done that, but no acting. So
she sat down with her mother and I am she
was a straight A student in Westport, Connecticut, and she
(01:00:08):
was had one blue ribbons showing horses at Madison Square Garden.
But had never acted. But I said to her, Linda,
do you know anything about this story? Do you know
anything about the the Exorcist story? And she said, oh yes,
I read the book as she did. She said yes,
and I looked at her mother. Mother nodded, and I said,
(01:00:31):
what what is it about? And she said, well, it's
about a little girl who gets possessed by a devil
and she does a whole bunch of bad things. I said, well,
like what and she said, well, she hits her mother
across the face, and she pushes a man out of
her bedroom window, and she masturbates with a crucifix. And
(01:00:54):
I said, uh. I looked at her. Mother was smiling
and I said, you know what that means. She said
what I said to to to masturbate? And she said
it was like jerking off, isn't it? And I said yes.
Mother was still smiling, and I said to her, have
(01:01:16):
you ever done that? Have you ever done what you
just said? She said, sure, haven't you? And so I
hired her. My thanks again to William Friedkin. I think
you can understand why that's one of my favorite shows.
(01:01:38):
Tune in next time for part two of my farewell
compilation show. Again, my thanks to Barbara Streisan, Joe Delessandro,
Elaine Stretch, David Crosby and William Friedkin join us next time.
Thank you,
Host
Alec Baldwin
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